Mad Social Scientist

From a USAToday article (hey, I'm in a hotel).

The Bush administration is scaling back its proposal to promote democracy in what has been known as the ''Greater Middle East'' plan.

The first versions of the plan urged an aggressive campaign to foster democracy in the region from Morocco to Pakistan. But the latest draft of the proposal says ''change should not and cannot be imposed from the outside.''

Just don't know how to respond to that.

From the Onion, a publication that can hardly keep up with reality's lurch into the surreal:

"Look, if we start by holding one member of Bush's administration responsible for his actions, where's it all gonna end?"

A quick update. Still on the road, and can't bear to comment on the many new allegations of abuse swirling now, but some interesting pieces of flotsam:

A nice speech from the President in exile.

If this turns out to be even partially true, and if it survives through the news cycles, imagine this campaign line: Bush got played by the Iranians.

I thought Inhofe was a pathetic excuse for a Senator. But I forgot about Trent "Brutality" Lott. I guess Abu Ghraib reminds him of the good old days.

Plus, a little mad social science humor: in the (almost unimaginable) instance where Iraq gets statehood, how about these state names: Kurdsas, Sunnissippi, and Shiowa? 6 senators and 40 representatives...

Without another revelation of systematic misconduct in Iraq.

Not to mention that fighting continues to get worse.

Keep reading the last link to get Juan Cole's analysis (1 and 2) on the game played by Sadr and Sistani. I don't agree with all of it---not Khat I'm an expert on this. But I suspect much of Sadr's action lately has been aimed to make Sistani choose a side---e.g., saying he'll disarm if Sistani orders it---because either side Sistani chooses benefits Sadr. If Sistani sides with the Americans, Sadr's stature as the Shia cleric opposing occupation is sharpened. If Sistani chooses Sadr and resistance, wll, Sadr's been on that position long enough to be able to win a prominent position in a resistance that, with Sistani's help, would be hard to defeat. Sistani appears to know that ambiguity serves him best, since he has the stature to get away with playing both sides, at least for now.

I'll be gone for the next week.

A fun link, with various Escher prints redone in 3D (4D?) Look at the bottom of the page for four other Eschers...

Over-the-top censorship in a NM school.

Caught by Atrios: the 16-year old son of an Abu Ghraib prisoner was picked up by US forces, stripped naked, covered with mud, and presented to his father in an effort to persuade him to "talk".

First reaction: This abomination should never happen in America, and those responsible need to be dealt with, fast.

Second reaction: Gee, do the "rotten apples" at Abu Ghraib have rotten apple friends in the rest of the army to do their dirty work, without the knowledge or approval of higher ups?

Third reaction: If the government did this in America, or the US military did this in a white, Christian country, how outraged would the American public be?

It's not like there was a ticking bomb to be defused, so hold the hypotheticals.

Hastert joins the deranged list, and insults a war hero to boot

This mornings raid on Chalabi's home and office have me thinking. First, that when we don't like what someone in Iraq is doing---even a nominal member of the government, albeit our puppet government---we resort very quickly to force. There's no preliminary dialog, public debate, compromise---just raids, arrest, and our famous jails. That's a bit disturbing, because we are supposedly building a democracy (using the instant mix kit), and this doesn't seem to be a good foundation, unless we hope it will stir up some "founding fathers" in opposition.

I'm no friend to Chalabi. I did not trust him before the war, I was appalled we pushed him so hard against the wishes of the Iraqis, and I am mad he systematically manipulated our rube-in-chief and his Pentagon buddies. But the speed with which he has gone from stipend boy to (apparently) criminal suspect or enemy of the state is stunning. And the public silence from the administration is deafening. No discussion when he was feeding us evidence. No discussion of the findings, leaked to the press, that his evidence was bugus, even trumped up. No discussion of why we were funding and backing him, or why we have stopped.* Everything we know is from private, foreign, or leaked sources, as far as I can remember (though perhaps I'm missing a few examples).

It's just another example of the way in which the admin doesn't want Iraq policy debated in public (TPM had a nice post yesterday on how amazing this is). They don't want outside input. They don't want constructive criticism. They resist oversight that might help insure effective policy making and delegation. And then they have the gall to suggest that investigations of mistakes in Iraq distract from the war. Hello! That is the war! And the Bushies, not Congress or the Dems, are the ones who don't want to talk about it. All Bush and co want to do is run propaganda speeches and ads. But there is not discourse including them. Only a loudspeaker.

*I'm oversimplifying a bit, since one reason they don't talk about Chalabi is the key factions in the Bush admin are sharply divided about him. He's a DoD hero and State goat. But the fact that we can only really understand Us policy on Iraq by following the infighting in the Bush admin is just more evidence that we cannot understand where to take policy now without debating the way the Bush administration is run. Because these are guys who will implement---or mishandle, or sabotage, or subvert---any policy we discuss. And they have their own bureaucratic agendas.

Very nice post by TPM. He notes how crazy it is that Bush is still coy (and likely undecided) about what is actually going to happen on June 30 in Iraq (remember my post earlier today on how nice it would be if we really did talk more about what to do in Iraq?) He also points out the "stab in the back" argument is coming. This is what conservatives in Weimar Germany said in the 1920s; that Germany only lost WWI because the Social Democrats had "stabbed them in the back". Of course, its a lie, but it was an effective one. I've been waiting for a month and a half for it to appear. The R's have nothing else to throw at the Democrats, who have no power and have played no role in formulating or even debating Iraq policy.

But it disturbs me deeply that I instinctively reached for interwar Germany to predict the behavior of today's Republicans.

Some R's say we should focus less on abuse in prisons and more on "winning the war". I don't think there is necessarily a huge tradeoff, and there may be some complementarity. But either way, wouldn't focusing on the war entail discussing how it should be carried out? Cheney, Wolfy, Rummy, Condi, and co have proven ineffective, if not counter-productive (and in Dick's case, unhinged). If Congressmen want to focus on the war, they could have a real debate over what to do in Iraq, and who should do it. There are lots of ideas out there, but the admin doesn't even want to share much of its own plans.

The latest allegations here. I've been taking a break from this story, through exhaustion, but it won't go away, and keeps getting worse.

The lowlights:

Brutal interrogation techniques by U.S. military personnel are being investigated in connection with the deaths of at least five Iraqi prisoners in war-zone detention camps, Pentagon documents obtained by The Denver Post show.

The deaths include the killing in November of a high-level Iraqi general who was shoved into a sleeping bag and suffocated, according to the Pentagon report. The documents contradict an earlier Defense Department statement that said the general died "of natural causes" during an interrogation. Pentagon officials declined to comment on the new disclosure.

Another Iraqi military officer, records show, was asphyxiated after being gagged, his hands tied to the top of his cell door. Another detainee died "while undergoing stress technique interrogation," involving smothering and "chest compressions," according to the documents.

Details of the death investigations, involving at least four different detention facilities including the Abu Ghraib prison, provide the clearest view yet into war-zone interrogation rooms, where intelligence soldiers and other personnel have sometimes used lethal tactics to try to coax secrets from prisoners, including choking off detainees' airways.

...

The documents also show more than twice as many allegations of detainee abuse - 75 - are being investigated by the military than previously known.

A rough sketch of the torture situation:

1. Many Iraqis were abused or tortured, and some (perhaps as many as 27, and at least 8) were killed by American captors.

2. Warning were received very high up several month before this became public. Even when the news broke, the administration has continued to mislead us about the scope of the abuse it was already aware of.

3. Nothing was admitted and no policy changes made until whistleblowers released pictures to the media.

4. In a typical show of chutzpah, the Bush administration has claimed credit for acting on the scandal, saying that it is this openness that makes up for the torture. Even though we have brought our own brand of autocracy and torture to Iraq, we are still "better" than Saddam because we are an open, self-correcting democracy (never mind that it took a whistleblower). In direct contradiction to this argument, though, right wingers in Congress and on talk shows have attacked as "unpatriotic" and a "threat to the troops" the very people who exposed the abuse!

5. There is enough evidence that high-level peoplein the DoD ordered or condoned abusive treatment, in violation of the Geneva Conventions, to require a real and comprehensive investigation, all the way along the chain from Pres. Bush to Pfc. England. We don't know how such investigations will turn out. But there is the possibility that many will need to face criminal charges for violating Geneva, which is the law of the land, as Albert Gonzalez recognized early on.

6. Every few days, new revelations come to light, from soldiers, victims, and NGOs, showing the abuse was still more widespread, systematic, and brutal.

In light of these facts, it is appalling (though not shocking) that many affiliates of the Bush admin cry for an end to the scandal. Time to put it behind us, they say; a few rotten apples, they conclude. It is hard to reconcile these claims with any recent edition of a major newspaper. Instead, the right wing rhetoric is simply self-serving efforts to change the subject. But they do not serve the interests of justice or of the nation. Covering up the abuse will not undo the damage to America's reputation; we need to make real amends, dismiss those responsible at every level, and show the world we have changed our ways.

Remember that these were the people who set up a massive investigative apparatus and paralyzed the government for many months, just to investigate consensual presidential sex.

Now we have a real scandal, with real dead bodies, and real foreign policy implications. Spare us the comic relief. And in the future, spare us the moralizing over stained dresses. We know you are full of it.

I feel suddenly poorer. My beloved sandwich shop, Darwin's, has just raised all sandwich prices 50 cents. I ponder this as I wait in the line (which seems longer than usual for 2:30; no one's exiting). Is just inflation, perhaps spiked by the rise in oil prices? Or perhaps a relative price change, due to the dairy shortage that's supposedly going on up here in New England? Well, maybe, but a ~10% hike seems to be an annual occurrence here. Are Cambridge real estate prices picking up again? I doubt it.

No doubt the inelastic demand of anyone who has had a Darwin's sandwich (or soup, or dessert...) plays some role here. And hence I'm a little poorer, but not complaining. I'll save that for when I move away!

due to Daniel Dennett, and applied to one of the Columbine shooters.

Astromoner for astrology. Or just another case of Newtonian lead poisoning.

An account from the green zone.

It's unavoidably apparent that the shoddy planning, implementation, and funding of the post-war phase has played right into the hands of those who would resist a democratic Iraq. There was a chorus warning about this before the war, but we were ignored. Now, the problem is much deeper than before---it is harder to win friends after Abu Ghraib, after good Iraqis see innocents die, after we resort to bombing neighborhoods in Falluja and mosques in Karbala. And since our people are--reasonably--afraid to venture out among the people, I see little hope for changing the image of America at this late date.

Bush is torn between a messianic mission and anti-spending base. Taking big risks on a small budget---that's what a con/neo-con coalition has wrought.

Must-read missive from an ex-Army guy in Iraq on TPM. Offers evidence for one of my big worries about Bush's ellision of Iraq and al-Qaeda:

I told a Journalist the other day that these kids here are being told that they are chasing Al Qaeda in the War on Terrorism so they think everyone at Abu Ghuraib had something to do with 9/11. So they were encouraged to make them pay. These kids thought they were going to be honored for hunting terrorists.

But the most frightening part is this:

About the Army - Man, it hurts my heart to write this about an institution I dearly love but this army is completely dysfunctional, angry and is near losing its honor. We are back to the Army of 1968. I knew we were finished when I had a soldier point his Squad Automatic Weapons at me and my bodyguard detail for driving down the street when he decided he would cross the street in the middle of rush hour traffic (which was moving at about 70 MPH) ... He made it clear to any and all that he was preparing to shoot drivers who did not stop for his jaunt because speeding cars are "threats."

I also once had a soldier from a squad of Florida National Guard reservists raise weapons and kick the door panel of a clearly marked CPA security vehicle (big American flag in the windshield of a $150,000 armored Land Cruiser) because they wanted us to back away from them so they could change a tire ... as far as they were concerned WE (non-soldiers) were equally the enemy as any Iraqi.

Unlike the wars of the past 20 years where the Army encouraged (needed) soldiers, NGOs, allies and civil organizations to work together to resolve matters and return to normal society, the US Forces only trust themselves here and that means they set their own limits and tolerances. Abu Ghuraib are good examples of that limit.

who needs prosperity?

Once more, for the record: massive taxes cuts for the richest Americans is about the weakest imaginable Keynesian stimulus. It is not a "jobs" program, it is not fiscally responsible. It's just a transfer of the tax burden to those less able to pay, and the transfew of cash to those less likely to spend it.

Juan Cole has a grim roundup on Iraq. Besides the assasination, we're bombing Karbala, the Shia holy city, and we're laying the ground-work for a non-transfer of power.

Come July 1, I suspect we won't even have Chalabi to hold up as a toady.

But Hobbes sure landed a blow today.

Also, Zell Miller is a jerk, but we all knew that.

Powell publicly states what was surely conventional wisdom among most real experts back before the war started:

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said for the first time on Sunday that he now believes that the Central Intelligence Agency was deliberately misled about evidence that Saddam Hussein was developing unconventional weapons.

He also said, in his comments on the NBC News program "Meet the Press," that he regrets citing evidence that Iraq had mobile biological laboratories in his presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003.
...
"Basically, Powell now believes that the Iraqis had chemical weapons, and that was it,' said an official close to him. 'And he is out there publicly saying this now because he doesn't want a legacy as the man who made up stories to provide the president with cover to go to war.'"

He's just a year and half and several thousand lives late.

Macedonia Officials Suspected of Faking Terror Plot. Short version: the last Macedonian government lured unsuspecting Muslim immigrants to their country to be slaughtered by the police, so that their bodies could be used as evidence Macedonia was participating in the "war on terror".

Also worth noting: anyone following the debate on treatment of captured terrorist back in Fall 01 could see this coming (story here), and who knows what other dark holes exist in Iraq (see story here).

Remember when the Bush administration said it could be trusted with sole authority over "enemy combatants"---no need for judges, juries, or journalists? And to think there are still "libertarians" in the Bush camp...

For some time, the Iowa Electronic Markets have allowed people to trade futures based on election outcomes. For the 2004 presidential election, IEM offers a vote share market in which one can buy contracts for either Bush or Kerry that pay off at the vote share of that candidate times one dollar. The current price of a Kerry contract is about 48 cents; Bush is about 52 cents.

There are some big caveats. Participants in the market are limited to $500 dollars investment. So, if I think the VS market is off by a few cents (and I do), I could invest up to $500, and, by a quick bit a arithmatic, stand to profit a whopping $15 if I am right. The overall vote share market currently consists of a mere $11,377, a very shallow market indeed.

Markets are a great mechanism for aggregating information, but it seems to me that the strictures placed on IEM make "market" something of a misnomer. I realize the IEM would love to operate without these restrictions, so I'm not trying to criticize their methods. But they talk tough about how useful they are as a predicting mechanism, and I just don't see it.

IEM data may still be useful for a variety of research purposes (for an incomplete bibliography of work relying on IEM data, click here). It's a neat laboratory to study investor behavior, but with some big caveats. The chief among them is surely that with such small sums involved, the goals of investors need not be maximizing returns from futures, but shifting the price of the market itself. They may do this to change impressions of market participants (or, indeed, the public at large, since the IEM gets a fair bit of attention). They may do it as self-expression. In most markets, such people will be quickly parted of their money, and the price will govern as usual. But with a tiny market, tiny shares, and participants self-selected for their interest in politics, and I can imagine many scenarios in which investor preferences, beliefs, or strategies may shift the market price. Discipline, of course, will always settle in on payday (e.g., day before IEM data are about as good as polls). But that's not enough to make this a reliable predictive tool, or justify giving IEM attention months away from a close election.

I'll stick to survey data, thanks.

Sy Hersh on Face the Nation

Detailed and familiar torture allegations from Afghanistan

It's going to be painful listening to the court martials, if this is any indication.

Iraqi Says He Is Prisoner in Photo. Short version: innocent Iraq arrested, tortured, asked about al-Qaeda links, makes up al-Qaeda connection, interrogators realize he is lying, release him.

Sy Hersh, who's been right so far, says the order for torture came right from the top.

Fred Kaplan points out that Bush had many chances to kill Zarqawi, a highranking member of al-Qaeda and later murder of Nicholas Berg, but refused plans to do so because that would undermine the case for war with Iraq. As Brad DeLong notes, this is clear grounds for an impeachment charge, and the WH hasn't denied it.

Voters have figured out that Iraq is a problem and gay marriage isn't. Bush approval on Iraq at 35% (57% disapprove).

Juan Cole is all over it.

Just remember what happened when Ariel Sharon visited the Dome of the Rock. We don't want to go there.

I think Another Damned Medievalist hits it right on the head

Lately, however, I’ve found myself reading and commenting far too much. I have work I should be doing, yet I am drawn to my peers’ comments on the world around us. I have a review due next week. I have midterms to correct. I have a garden, dammit! I also have two new preps and, since a class was cancelled, an online course to develop by June. Oh – and a grant proposal, and two committees that actually require work. So what the hell am I doing? I want a TT job. I have the opportunity to move in that direction and pad my CV. Can blogging be bad for academics? Am I addicted?

And then it hit me. No. Most of us will have had conversations with colleagues over the last three years – and especially since talk began about invading Iraq – about reasons for low enrollments, students having trouble focusing, students missing class and being treated for depression. I’ve never had a problem believing the folks who claimed that much of it was due to the additional stress of our wartime world. I just never really thought about how it affected me.

These last couple of weeks have been especially awful. We all know it. Stories like this (don’t look if you are trying to avoid pictures) pushed me into a big ol’ morass of navel contemplation. So my blog reading has gone way up. No more just the mutual support of the “life in academia” blogs. Nope – it’s all Iraq and Bush, all the time. It seems to me that I’m not the only one to be doing this, either. Comments and trackbacks bloom in colorful and maddening profusion. Why this upswing? And then it hit me: because you’re an academic geek, doofus. Our students may just stop coping, but we have coping mechanisms. We have learned to argue our points with evidence! We know how to do research! We are used to taking information that might seem to be unrelated and make sense of it! We can do it! We have the technology! If we just do our homework, we can make sense out of this mess! So we read what the people we’ve come to trust and ‘know’ say about the subject, hoping to add to our own knowledge and perhaps validate our own conclusions. We add to the discussion. And finally, we realize that we’re using our training to cope in the only way we can, by trying to make reason out of the unreasonable. Or at least that’s my story.

One of the great things about being a trained historian is learning to recognize biases. I’d like to think it also helps us recognize when we’re spinning our wheels. I have recognized my coping mechanism, and I understand it. Now I can get back to work.

I hope I can follow her lead...

One of my interests is the visual display of quantitative information (in fact, I help teach a class on the topic).

WaPo has a beautiful and informative data graphic of Bush's funraising network from last election. Note the high percentage of future appointees among the Pioneer fundraisers.

Now imagine this one step further, since each node here has hidden links to hundreds of donors whose donations have been bundled by the Pioneers....

I don't think we'd need this if there were truly a liberal bias in the media. Some really intertaining ones in there; I like "Impeach Cheney First"...

Bush thinks isolating himself from alternative views is the key to understanding what's happening. (He also thinks his inner circle is the most objective source of news on the planet). I think he deserves the Saddam Hussein award for leaders with rose-colored sources of information. Though as Josh Marshall says, he can be his own yes man.

So let's be the opposite of Bush, and listen to some of what the other side is saying.

Rumsfield told troops in Iraq: "I'm a survivor", which I thought was a weird thing to say. TNR points out the audience---troops who spend their time dodging bullets, mortars, and IEDs, have a lot more right to the word "survivor". A friend of mine pointed out yesterday that Rumsfields often incoherent answers to questions smack of postmodernism. They often do radically deny the ability to know things, or just come so far out of left field you wonder if he's trying out for Waiting for Godot. So is it any surprise he would also use the language of self-help (all about being a "survivor") to dwell on his own misfortune? I just don't know what to make of this guy.

Warning: painful content ahead

I found this contest by MaxSpeak last night, to find the most offensive blog post to a blog linked from Instapundit. I don't think it's 100% fair to blame a linker for what goes up on blogs, since they update so often, but as an existence proof for some of the hate being spewed on the American right, the idea has merit. It's also painful and frightening to read the entries. A shocking large amount of genocidal rage against all Muslims. And a number of people who seem to be seriously discussing killing American leftwingers and Democrats. Not only do I think there is no parallel on the American left to this widespread hate, but I doubt many major political movements in the industrialized world have such a genocidal fringe. (The unironic use of terms like Nazi and fascist by these folks to describe their hypothetical victims is a sort of bonus, I guess.)

Let's hope its all talk. But even then, shouldn't the grownups on that side of spectrum be a bit worried?

Okay, that's it, I'm going to go take a shower, and try to wash the hate off.

A bit of anti-Bush humor, a bit of baseball history, and a bit of hope (albeit with a small sample size).

My grandmother, Beanie Adolph, has helped lead a crusade against the capricious taking of private homes---and extortion of excessive fees---by homeowners associations (HOAs). These quasi-public bodies often serve to maintain neighborhood standards and public goods, but in many cases, they are captured by management companies and attorneys who see the opportunity to extract thousands of dollars in fines from homeowners who fall behind on their dues---even by a few dollars---or who violate the often unwritten rules of the HOA. In Harris County (home of Houston, TX) Beanie, in collaboration with my father, uncle, and a little help from me, have found HOAs responsible for filing more than 15,000 suits for foreclosure against homeowners in a largely successful effort to extract rents from ordinary homeowners. It is difficult to imagine what positive service these groups serve that justify this behavior.

Last night, my grandmother appeared on the 10 o'clock news in Houston. It seems her research has galvinized residents in the most abused neighborhood, Sterling Green, to try to throw out the board of their HOA. It isn't going quietly. See the text of the story here, and streaming video here (I'm afraid you have to register for the latter).

Hooray for Beanie! I'm so proud of her. She's dedicated herself to this cause for years, not because she has ever suffered under an abusive HOA, but simply out of sympathy for the thousands who have seen their finances wrecked because their civic association saw the chance to make some money of its own residents. And she has pursued it with soophistication, building up a network of allies and an array of social science skills. Our family maintains a website with the results of our research, HOAdata. Take a look.

After the Sadr uprising and Abu Ghraib, it looks like there's a shift in the cutpoint among American pundits on the question: "Has the war been worth it?"

First, I'll crudely categorize the opinions into four clusters, based on intellectual cases for and against war (but not including any electoral calculations):

War Mongers: pro-war, to demonstrate American strength, get revenge against America's perceived enemies, and generally "kick-ass"

Pro-war idealists: pro-war, partially for the above reasons, but more to stop the spread of WMD and to bring democracy and a new order to the Middle East

Anti-war internationalists: mostly anti-war, though willing to consider it on security ground, but skeptical of the need for war, its successful prosecution and conclusion, and worried about the effect of unilateral war on international cooperation

Peaceniks & Isolationists: anti-war, period

So here's my read on the "War worth it question" (sorry about the ugliness of the graphics, but blogger deletes blank space, so the dots are just filler; the |'s mark cutpoints)

...........................War-..............Pro-war...............Anti-war.................Peaceniks &
...........................Mongers......Idealists......Internationalists..........Isolationists
Old cutpoint...............................................|............................................................
New cutpoint.......................|.................................................................................
<- pro-war................................................................................................antiwar ->

Note this is different from the cutpoint on the "Cut and run question":

...........................War-..............Pro-war...............Anti-war.................Peaceniks &
...........................Mongers......Idealists......Internationalists..........Isolationists
Cutpoint..............................................................................................|........................
<- stay in Iraq........................................................................................get out ->

fyi, I'm on the border of the third and fourth categories (call me a Peacenik Internationalist), and I'm still in favor of sticking around in Iraq, but gradually wavering towards a "find an acceptable strongman fast" position...

So what should we do about the murder of Nicholas Berg? The al-Qaeda group that committed the deed is obviously depraved. They have a beef with American foreign policy, and they took it out on an innocent who went to Iraq to try to make it a better place. That's not war or resistance, just malice and provocation.

We need to be very careful to distinguish al-Qaeda and its siblings from ordinary Muslims, from Iraqis, and from the various home-grown insurgents of Iraq. They are no more the same than all Westerners are the same. Many of the hawks (especially, it should be said, in the GOP) want to cloud the distinctions, to try to bolster support for their war. This is a deception, and what's more, a strategic mistake. It may help them in the election, but this kind of thinking will doom us in Iraq.

Let's say a brutal dictatorship took over in America, and then a foreign power (say, France) invaded and deposed it. Freedom-loving American patriots might dance in the streets for a few days. But if the French decided to stay for a year, deny Americans any real say in governance, round up random people and imprison them without due process, and generally act like they owned the place, many of those same patriots might become freedom fighting guerillas. They would be motivated, in all likelihood, by a mixture of nationalism and the desire for liberty. They might be heroes or misguided insurgents, depending on your view and your goals for America. But to lump them in with actual terrorists would be a mistake.

Iraq doesn't have a liberal tradition, but traditions of Baathist nationalism and Islam. So naturally, these are the values its own rebels espouse. They also want power---for themselves, for their religious or ethnic groups---and they are also a destabilizing influence that likely endangers Iraq's chances of becoming a prosperous democracy. But that is our goal for Iraq, imposed, with a mixture of good and selfish intentions. We may be right that it is "better" for Iraqis, but we should admit that the sort of hubris that leads one country to invade another and occupy it---even for "its own good"---risks just this sort of resistance when the natives feel their nation and values are being stepped on.

So the murderers of Berg are not the face of Iraq. Their actions do not justify a brutal crackdown on Iraqis. In some ways, Iraqis and Berg have something in common: they were innocent bystanders caught in the midst of a global struggle between America and al-Qaeda. Neither needed to be involved, or had anything to do with the struggle to start with. America and al-Qaeda chose to make Iraqis and Berg pawns in their war. Iraq weren't any more responsible for 9/11 than Iceland was. Berg wasn't anymore responsible for Abu Ghraib than the average American citizen.

It's time to ask whether our approach to fighting al-Qaeda makes any sense. al-Qaeda is an organization, a set of actors, but it is also at the head of a movement, and is always trying to grow its base of support. We need to wipe out the organization as thoroughly as possible, without helping it recreate itself from the rage our attacks engender, and without becoming as bad as al-Qaeda in the process. We need to chop off al-Qaeda's head, but it is a hydra we cannot kill with violence alone. We need to starve it, too. Take away the basis of its appeals for fanatics and funds. We withdrew from Saudi, and we should have tried to reduce our overall footprint in the Middle East, so that it would be harder for al-Qaeda to point to American meddling or atrocities against Muslims. Instead, we made it easier.

We have killed more Iraqis than al-Qaeda has ever killed Americans. We arguably had better intentions, but many in the Muslim world perceive that differently. We are sinking into a cycle of revenge in Iraq that looks more like the Israel-Palestine conflict every week. That's in no one's interest. al-Qaedas greatest skill is provoking us, and they live off our reprisals, the more indiscriminate the better.

We need to get much better at distinguishing our bitter enemies from people we have wronged. We need to stop acting like the Middle East is all the same, for if we do, we will always treat it as an enemy. If we can't learn this lesson, it would be better to annoint a strongman in Iraq and walk away from the entire region---Israel, the Gulf, Iraq; everything. Because we are playing a game with al-Qaeda that they want us to play, a game that will debase us and that we will never win.

Some good news from India, where Congress upset the BJP. Sonia Gandhi is likely to be the new PM; her party campaigned on doing more to spread the benefits of growth to the poor and on secularism. Let's hope this lowers the tension in the India/Pakistan stand-off, which remains the most likely nuclear-war scenario around.

Rumsfield:

Rumsfeld glumly listened as senators read despairing E-mails from U.S. troops in Iraq and he requested extra time at the end of the hearing to deliver a rambling statement ripping media coverage of the prison abuse scandal.

"I've kind of stopped reading the press, frankly," Rumsfeld said, his voice quavering at times. Instead, Rumsfeld said he was reading a book on Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's bloody drive on Richmond in the last year of the Civil War.

Let's hope he doesn't think he's fighting a conflict like that one. Because a total war against Iraq is not what we were advertized.

Though this editorial from the National Review shows the conservatives are working with a new set of priors on what this war is:

But nothing going on in Iraq is quite as alarming as the panic of our political class about it. We have been there a year, really no time at all.

How much time do we expect to be there, if a year is "no time at all"?
The same editorial has this to say:

Every effort must be made to crush the insurgency. Fallujah was a missed opportunity that cannot be repeated.

Sounds like the Empire from Star Wars to me ("the rebellion must be crushed"). Now why would I make that connection... Oh yeah! This op-ed from the Weekly Standard back in 2002 that said the Empire was really much better than the Alliance, after all. One guess which magazine was most pro-Iraq War.

Finally, Tony Blair may have run out of lives.

Heavy fighting in Karbala. Does anyone seriously think the current force can "pacify" Iraq? Or that destroying major Shia mosques could possibly help?

Powell is dropping a bomb on DoD and Bush. A few weeks ago, he starting letting his disdain for Rummy et al be known through his aides and friends, as documented in a well-circulated GQ article. Now, he's contradicting Rumsfield's testimony that news of Abu Ghraib abuse didn't reach the cabinet level, saying he and "other top officials" kept the president in the loop about the ICRC report, etc. So...any bets on whether Powell will resign before the election? Because the knives seem to be coming out.

More people are leaving the reservation. They lost Tucker Carlson. And Tom Friedman is slowly waking up to political reality.

And well they should, because it's going to keep getting worse. Ever wonder about the rest of the gulag---all those prisoners from Afghanistan and the rest of the war on terror? Like, where are they, what's being done to them, and will they ever see the light of day, or a courtroom? An important NYT story claims many are being tortured by the CIA:

At least one agency employee has been disciplined for threatening a detainee with a gun during questioning, they said.

In the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level detainee who is believed to have helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, C.I.A. interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as "water boarding," in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.

...

Counterrorism officials say detainees have also been sent to third countries, where they are convinced that they might be executed, or tricked into believing they were being sent to such places. Some have been hooded, roughed up, soaked with water and deprived of food, light and medications.

The article raises a terrifying thought:

Concerns are mounting among C.I.A. officers about the potential consequences of their actions. "Some people involved in this have been concerned for quite a while that eventually there would be a new president, or the mood in the country would change, and they would be held accountable," one intelligence source said. "Now that's happening faster than anybody expected."

Let's see. CIA agents in undisclosed locations, often in other countries, under little or no oversight, with secret prisoners, might face an investigation if their actions come to light. If Kerry wins in November, might some of these prisoners be disappeared? And how will we ever know?

Two years ago, maybe even two months or two weeks ago, this thought would seem a bit outrageous, even paranoid. But it's now clear that the old rules and norms don't apply. They've been systematically undermined---through the abandonment of international treaties and allies, the passage of the Patriot Act, the declaration that presidentially declared enemy combatants have no rights, and the establishment of lawless prisons and lawless occupied territories. We gotten so used to this that questions that might have leapt unbidden are unasked and forgotten (example of the day: under what authority is the DoD restricting Congressional access to photos from Abu Ghraib? How can a DoD official tell a Senator he may look but not keep copies of these documents---they aren't classified to my knowledge. But our meek Senators accept orders from the executive nowadays).

Institutions are living things, and we are watching ours be corrupted at a frightening rate.

Even before the Sadr uprising and before torture of prisoners came to light, 80% of Iraqis distrusted American and allied forces, according to a just leaked CPA survey. 63 percent say security is their biggest concern, and 67 percent of people from Basra and 45 percent of Baghdadis expressed support for Sadr.

US established institutions appear to have zero leogitimacy. "Only one-tenth of 1 percent said that the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council should name the government, which is supposed to run Iraq until elections are held next year. None said the occupation authority should."

Slate has a nifty slideshow on the MoMa exhibit on well-designed everyday objects.

A couple of pollsters (Zogby and Mark Mellman) speculate on Kerry's position, and consider it strong. I've been personally guessing Kerry's probability of winnning at about 65% for a month now. Brad DeLong evidently is also optimistic, and wonders what the R's can do to strengthen their position:

The time has passed for the grownup Republicans to play the inside game--to retire Cheney and fire Andrew Card and find Bush a new Prime Minister (Lugar? Domenici? Powell?) to run the government while Bush plays the Queen Elizabeth version of Head-of-State. The time has not yet passed for the grownup Republicans to play the outside game--to have the Republican Senate Caucus recommend that the Republican National Convention choose another candidate than George W. Bush to nominate. It would be good for the country. And it would, I think, probably be good for the Republican Party, for the Republicans I run into these days are almost as contemptuous of George W. Bush as the Democrats.

Admittedly, Brad's probably running into an unusually slice of Republicans, since he's a Berekeley economist. I can imagine any smart or libertarian Republicans have been hoping for a savior for years now. But a fair number of talking heads are off the reservation now (George Will, Andrew Sullivan), and the media strategy Republicans are pursuing now is rather high risk (and I think shot if the worse photos dribble out; if Iraq gets worse after June 30 and our troops keep dying; or if the economy is anything short of stellar through Nov). I can't imagine the heartland accepting the "betrayal" of their beloved cowboy, though, and Cheney would never go quietly. Nor is any groundwork laid for a strategic retreat of any kind on any issue. Every decision Bush ever makes is right, and every outcome is the best of all possible worlds.

In short, the macho posturing by the right, louder everyday, is surely a collective exercise to hide their growing nervousness. Would you want to keep that up for six months?

From the AP:

Lawmakers Are Shown New Photographs of Iraqi Abuse
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 4:54 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military personnel included torture, humiliation and forced sex beyond what has been seen in public, members of Congress said Wednesday after viewing fresh photos and videos in the scandal that has shaken the Bush administration.

``I don't know how the hell these people got into our army,'' said Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo., one of several members of Congress who emerged grim-faced from lawmakers-only screenings in the Capitol.

Lawmakers said they saw disturbing images that included military dogs snarling at cowering prisoners, Iraqi women commanded to expose their breasts and photos of sex acts, including forced homosexual sex.

In addition, lawmakers said there were images of hooded Iraqi prisoners being forced to masturbate while cameras captured the scene.

Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., said she saw a clothed man hurling himself against a wall as though trying to knock himself unconscious.

``It was yet another series of pictures depicting horrific acts, examples of torture and sexual abuse,'' said Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota.

The private screening marked the latest turn in a scandal that has prompted President Bush to apologize to the victims and Democrats to demand the dismissal of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

In this context, I don't think the Nuremberg defense cuts it:

Pfc. Lynndie England told KCNC-TV in Denver on Tuesday that her superiors gave her specific instructions on how to pose for the photos. Asked who gave the orders, she would say only, "Persons in my chain of command."

In photographs that have been shown worldwide, England, 21, is seen smiling, cigarette in her mouth, as she leans forward and points at the genitals of a naked, hooded Iraqi. Another photo taken at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison shows her holding a leash that encircles the neck of a naked Iraqi man lying on his side.

"I was instructed by persons in higher rank to 'stand there, hold this leash, look at the camera,' and they took picture for PsyOps (psychological operations)," she told the station.

"I didn't really, I mean, want to be in any pictures," she said. She also said she thought "it was kind of weird."

...

Asked whether worse things happened than those already seen on the photos, she said yes but declined to elaborate.

She said her superiors praised the photos and "just told us, 'Hey, you're doing great, keep it up.'"

I have long believed that guilt is "sub-additive"---there's not some fixed amount of guilt to be split up, 60% here, and 40% there. No, each person involved in a crime can be, in some sense, fully and separably responsible. So no, "I was just following orders" doesn't cut it.

Diebold president says it was "a mistake" to say in a fund-raising letter: "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year" when his company also provides electronic vote machines (which many claim are insecure and may facilitate electoral fraud). Oops. Forget I revealed the strength of my preferences, and pretend I'm impartial.

"Oh, relax, kids. I've got a gut feeling Uter's around here somewhere. After all, isn't there a little Uter in all of us? In fact, you might even say we just ate Uter and he's in our stomachs right now! Wait. Scratch that one."

Ever since reading Simon Singh's The Code Book, I've been fascinated with cryptography. Many of you are probably familiar with modern techniques (RSA, PGP, and all that jazz). But there are older codes from the pre-computer dark ages that still haven't been solved, because they offer tantalizingly little to go on. Here's an example from an English tomb. The surviving members of the famed WWII Bletchley Park code breakers (whose original numbers included such luminaries as Alan Turing) are trying to crack it.

I started this weblog a few months ago, intending to post infrequently---perhaps ever few weeks---humorous pieces on "mad social science". Although I'm a pretty ordinary (and sane!) social scientist myself, this was to be just a place to put interesting but weird ideas glimpsed on the internet or devised from my own daydreams. I thought I would also pass along the occasional interesting political or economic new story or working paper.

Instead, most of my time posting has been taken up with the insanity that is the Bush administration. Every week, I think I've seen it all, but there is always a new level of stupidity, greed, incompetence or depravity to reveal. If this were well understood and well covered by the mainstream media outlets, I'd leave them to it. But it seems that under Bush, it takes the effort of thousands of bloggers, pushing stories that otherwise might not make more than one news cycle, or get out of the wire round-up, into the public consciousness. Trent Lott's embrace of segregation is just the best example.

So I feel obliged to do my part, but only because the outrage is so palpable. Yet it irks me that so much of what needs to be told right now is black-and-white. It would be more fun to write of complex public issues, where I could get some serious value added out of my social science training. Instead, we've got burning "questions" like "torture, right or wrong?" or "ignoring al-Qaeda pre 9-11---mistake?".

I promise, once the mad men, imbeciles, and infants who currently run our country are sent back to the brush, oil patch, or corporate boardrooms they came from, I'll stop posting the outrage of the day, and write something a little more novel. Please let that be January 2005?

In the meantime, though, here's a critique of blogging that, although it mostly misses the point of the enterprise, has this useful warning:

The entries, sometimes updated hourly, are little spasms of assertion, usually too brief for an argument ever to stand a chance of developing layers of meaning or ramifying into qualification and complication. There's a constant sense that someone (almost always the blogger) is winning and someone else is losing. Everything that happens in the blogosphere — every point, rebuttal, gloat, jeer, or "fisk" (dismemberment of a piece of text with close analytical reading) — is a knockout punch. A curious thing about this rarefied world is that bloggers are almost unfailingly contemptuous toward everyone except one another.

On reflection, it does seem a bit dangerous to have a forum where you can rebut anyone you like, about any subset of his argument, without much fear of being called on any of your own mistakes.

So here's an idea: we should set up social institutions to try to check this problem, and keep bloggers honest and sharp. We could set up partnerships of blogs across ideological lines (or whatever divides argumentative blogs cross), in which a pair or more of blogs keep tabs on each other, and respectfully correct each other. The system won't work without a desire to understand each other better, but among writers who believe that competition makes for sharper analysis, this could do a world of good.

According to Juan Cole, it's because the US ordered them to deliver al-Sadr "dead or alive". They refused, knowing this would lead to an uprising, and considering the task well outside their role. Then they got out, to avoid the firestorm we brought on ourselves in April.

Dead or Alive. Someone thinks this is a Western.

The efforts to fudge the moral issue of torture in Iraq, or suggest it is time to move on (as Cheney did today) leave me stunned, if not surprised. The rhetoric from the right includes such blood boilers as this one, from the National Review's Kate O'Bierne (caught by TPM):

The most recent images of abuse concerning Iraqi detainees will inevitably fuel the anti-Americanism that endangers American lives — not at the hands of sadistic young misfits but at the hands of our elected representatives. Members of Congress elbowing their way into camera range to question, in the absence of any evidence whatsoever, whether abuses were widespread and senior commanders were implicated and accusing the military of engaging in some cover-up are abusing the Abu Ghraib scandal and recklessly putting our troops at risk.

Who is betraying America and endangering our troops? Not the torturers themselves, not the higher-ups that condoned or ignored it, but the people's representatives demanding an explanation and accountability. We should this what it is: fundamentally amoral and anti-democratic arguments from a member of the "party of morality" on a worldwide crusade to spread "democracy".

A Fox News editor chimes in

Without showing the charred bodies of Americans dangling in ignominy, or the lopped off-arms of justice Saddam-style, how can we judge the pictures we are now clucking over?

Was one worse than the other? Where was the outrage, after Fallujah, from members of Congress and other self-appointed mullahs of morality? Do we expect American soldiers to be morally superior to the people who are trying to kill them, and at the same time win a war in which there are no rules of conduct for one side? Does that somehow smack of ... racism?

See him eviscerated here. Also note that a.) Falluja was months after Abu Ghraib, and if you want to causally connect them (and I can't imagine why you would), the causal arrow would go the other way, b.) Everyone and his mother---in Congress, on the left, on the right---was outraged and horrified by Falluja; to suggest otherwise is to call critics inhuman. I could go on (if it is necessary in war to sink to the level of your adversaries, no matter how low, why ever choose to go to war? we had a choice) But it's beating a dead elephant.

Some American politicians make a big deal of morality. To me, respecting basic human life, rights, and dignity is the most important moral imperative, and thus our actions in Abu Ghraib the gravest moral failing. So what do we get from such supposed moral leading lights as Joe Lieberman?

Mr. Secretary, the behavior by Americans at the prison in Iraq is, as we all acknowledge, immoral, intolerable and un-American. It deserves the apology that you have given today and that have been given by others in high positions in our government and our military.

I cannot help but say, however, that those who were responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11th, 2001, never apologized. Those who have killed hundreds of Americans in uniform in Iraq working to liberate Iraq and protect our security have never apologized.

And those who murdered and burned and humiliated four Americans in Fallujah a while ago never received an apology from anybody.

A prisoner at Abu Ghraib must wonder what he has to do with Al-Qaeda, an organization with little or no roots in Iraq, or the Falluja uprising, which happened after the torture. If this ticks you off, read this rant, with the money line:

That's it for Joe, folks. I propose that the man doesn't have a shred of "moral" credibility left... Joe doesn't get any more chances. He's done. He's used up his last vial of Joe-mentum. You need never take him seriously again, on any question whatsoever. The next time he gets up and drones on about the soul-corroding aspects of Grand Theft Auto III, you can say, yes, Joe, tell it to the prisoners of Abu Ghraib. Or if you want to get meta-ironic with him, you can say in a lugubrious baritone, with deeply furrowed brow, "Grand Theft Auto III contains deeply disturbing images of violence, yes, but I cannot help but say that those who were responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11th, 2001, have never apologized for bringing their disturbing images of violence to our television screens."

As Paul Krugman explains:

When the world first learned about the abuse of prisoners, President Bush said that it "does not reflect the nature of the American people." He's right, of course: a great majority of Americans are decent and good. But so are a great majority of people everywhere. If America's record is better than that of most countries — and it is — it's because of our system: our tradition of openness, and checks and balances.

You know, the institutions Bush has undermined since November 2000? Brad DeLong seconds the sentiment, pointing out that by removing the state from the army (all those private soldiers, outside the chain of command and the rule of law), the Bush administration has weakened the ability of commanders to carry out the objectives of war.

Hmm. Two economists complaining that our leaders are paying to little attention to the state. It must be pretty bad! [One would think there would be legions of political scientists writing editorials on the same topic...]

On the lighter side, I've long been amused by the thought that Afghanistan is a country where rocket propelled grenades are so commonplace, they are used to fish. Turns out that in the US, the same holds for guns.

TPM meditates on who's reponsible for a war of choice gone wrong:

For myself, it's not so much the horror of what we're seeing itself. Certainly, history is littered with far greater outrages. But how exactly did we find ourselves on the doling out end of this stuff? Morally, how did it happen? And in simply pragmatic terms, since this was a grand gambit for hearts and minds in a region awash in anti-Americanism and autocracy, how exactly did we get here? More than anything, a self-inflicted wound of this magnitude just leaves you speechless.

Matthew Yglesias recalls these lines from Apocalypse Now:

Kurtz: "What did they tell you?"
Willard: "They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound."
Kurtz: "Are my methods unsound?"
Willard: "I don't see any method, at all, sir."

The International Committee of the Red Cross saw

U.S. troops keeping Iraqi prisoners naked for days in darkness at the Abu Ghraib jail in October, and was told by the intelligence officer in charge it was "part of the process", a leaked report reveals.

Note this was two months before those pictures were taken. So this had been going on for a long time.

Wondering if the Brits were abusing prisoners too?

The International Committee of the Red Cross also described British troops forcing Iraqi detainees to kneel and stomping on their necks in an incident in which one prisoner died.

Let's see how long Blair can take the heat now.

Most people I talk to are worried about torture and insurrection in Iraq. But from perusing right-wing publications now and then, I notice they have other priorities. Frankly, I think they are from another planet. So does Approximately perfect, in this lovely summary.

This has obvious mad social science applications...

Brad DeLong surveys what's coming out now. The post is complicated (with quotes of quotes). Here's a selection:

U.S. military officials told NBC News that the unreleased images showed U.S. soldiers severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi female prisoner and “acting inappropriately with a dead body.” The officials said there was also a videotape, apparently shot by U.S. personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys.

...

This article in tomorrow’s Guardian suggests that some of these sexual humiliation methods apparently practiced at Abu Ghraib are taught to various special forces and military intelligence troops in the US and the UK, both to use them and also to prepare themselves to withstand them.

First, we invaded Iraq to get Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Turns out there weren't any. Then, we were going to turn Iraq into a democracy and stabilizing force for the Middle East. That hasn't gone exactly as planned, now has it? Finally, we were told that at least we had ended Saddam's reign of torture. But guess what? Abu Ghraib is just under new management, and the rape rooms are still open for business. But now many of the rapists are Americans.

None of this has stopped Bush from incessantly bragging about stopping WMD, democractizing Iraq, and closing the rape rooms. Or implying that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 (still zero evidence of that, and we own every filing cabinet in Iraq, so I think the issue is settled). There is just no connection between what this man says and reality---perhaps no connection between what he knows and reality.

Of course Donald "Democracy is Messy" Rumsfeld should resign. The real question to ask when you see the rest of the torture footage is: Shouldn't President George "Rape Room" Bush go to?

According to two soldiers in Abu Ghraib, the torture of inmates was systematic and condone by military intelligence.

I have resisted this term all week, but it now looks hard to deny that the US is running a worldwide gulag, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib.* Prisoners are often picked up with no evidence at all of wrongdoing:

"A unit goes out on a raid and they have a target and the target is not available; they just grab anybody because that was their job," Mr Nelson said, referring to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq. "The troops are under a lot of stress and they don't know one guy from the next. They're not cultural experts. All they want is to count down the days and hopefully go home. They take it out on the nearest person they can't understand."

"I've read reports from capturing units where the capturing unit wrote, "the target was not at home. The neighbour came out to see what was going on and we grabbed him," he said.

According to Mr Nelson's account, the victims' very innocence made them more likely to be abused, because interrogators refused to believe they could have been picked up on such arbitrary grounds.

"Now, whether the detainees are put into the general intelligence holding area, where they rot for a few months until final release, or if they are placed in solitary confinement because their story seems unbelievable is completely in the hands of the interrogator's opinion," he said. "It is in solitary that the abuses can be committed. So, in theory it is in fact very possible that purely innocent Iraqis could be placed in an environment where they could be brutalised, abused, "softened up" or even killed."

Stalin used to give his secret policy quotas of arrest by town---e.g., arrest 5000 political opponents in Leningrad. It is deeply shameful and terrifying to be able to compare American policies to such capricious creulty. But what else can we say? Prisoners at Gitmo and Ghraib have no recourse to the law, no hope of outside defense, are often picked up on little or no evidence, often can't be released after their innocence is established because it would embarass the government, and can be abused with impunity because of the secrecy of the prisons and the intentional lawlessness of their locations that allows the guards to get away with murder. What a rejection of the Constitution, what a rejection of the liberal principals the US claims to fight for! And what has it gotten us? What is the use of torturing prisoners, when that merely makes them say whatever the interrogators want? What is the use of confining thousands of Arabic speakers for intelligence purposes when you have only a handful of interpreters? And how can the creation of a Muslim gulag archipelago aid us prevent future terrorist attacks? All we have done is create the perfect recruitment opportunity!

What can we do as citizens? The first thing is to demand an end to secret, lawless prisons. All prisoners of the US should have recourse to the courts, and the basic guarantees of the Constitution. The president is not a king, and should not be allowed to declare people---including American citizens---as without the basic right to a trial and a real legal defense. Bush will resist, because his secrecy fetish masks a great deal of incompetence (9/11), corruption (Cheney's energy task force), and wrongdoings (Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, etc.) That is all the more reason to deny him the cover of secrecy.

We have allies in many places, not least the military, where the grunts and the brass are furious about the trashing of their institutions. We will soon see if the Supreme Court will stand up for liberty, or cower before a wartime administration as it has often done.

* Sure, we can't match Stalin for quantity of victims, but you can't find the moral high ground with a policy that is only qualitatively similar to the Soviet prison system.

This quote from Sy Hersh has been on my mind for the last day (via TPM):

First of all, it's going to get much worse. This kind of stuff was much more widespread. I can tell you just from the phone calls I've had in the last 24 hours, even more, there are other photos out there. There are many more photos even inside that unit. There are videotapes of stuff that you wouldn't want to mention on national television that was done. There was a lot of problems.
There was a special women's section. There were young boys in there. There were things done to young boys that were videotaped. It's much worse. And the Maj. Gen. Taguba was very tough about it. He said this place was riddled with violent, awful actions against prisoners.

Now that Rumsfield has warned of (via NYT):

"Beyond abuse of prisoners, there are other photos that depict incidents of physical violence towards prisoners, acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "There are many more photographs and indeed some videos. Congress and the American people and the rest of the world need to know this."

I dread what is coming. (Remember a few days ago, when Rumsfield wasn't sure if we were talking about abuse or torture? Either he wasn't paying any attention until after he gave that press conference, or he's decided to change media strategies. In other words, he was either too aloof before, which should cost him his job, or the new line about America's openness setting it apart from Saddam is a sorry charade).

But release it already.

On Bush's brain: I'm not sure I agree with the analysis, but it's a good read.

One heartwrenching, on Iraq and 20/20 foresight. Amen, brother.

Another amusing, on tenure, a word that will occupy a lot of my brain for the next 6 years.

Plus, the perpetual humiliation of Colin Powell would be too much for anyone with the slightest bit of self-respect to bear. I'll be glad when he's shuffled off the public stage, not least because he wasn't cut out for politics, and will be happier outside of it. You're Secretary of State, Colin! If they are going to treat you like a tool, tell them to take the job and shove it!

I'm doing something I should have done long ago---signing up for every airline miles program in sight. (Why should I be on the losing side of the price discrimination?) Signing up for the United Airlines program, I noticed the little pull-down box for personal titles had more than the usual [Mr. Miss Mrs. Dr.] choice. A few dozen more choices in fact.

They've got you covered if you're a Duchess or a Baron. Insist on being refered to as Swami or Imam? No problem. But my favor is Fleet Admiral. How many of those can there be?

From the Nelson Report, via Josh Marshall:

We can contribute a second hand anecdote to newspaper stories on rising concern, last year, from Secretary of State Powell and Deputy Secretary Armitage about Administration attitudes and the risks they might entail: according to eye witnesses to debate at the highest levels of the Administration...the highest levels...whenever Powell or Armitage sought to question prisoner treatment issues, they were forced to endure what our source characterizes as "around the table, coarse, vulgar, frat-boy bully remarks about what these tough guys would do if THEY ever got their hands on prisoners...."
-- let's be clear: our source is not alleging "orders" from the White House. Our source is pointing out that, as we said in the Summary, a fish rots from its head. The atmosphere created by Rumsfeld's controversial decisions was apparently aided and abetted by his colleagues in their callous disregard for the implications of the then-developing situation, and by their ridicule of the only combat veterans at the top of this Administration.

He also links to this quote from Rush Limbaugh, who apparently considers killing prisoners, raping them, sodomizing them with broomsticks, and hooking them up to electrodes to be good old fashioned fun. I don't take Rush seriously, of course, but remember this the next time anyone speaks of him in any tone other than contempt.

Bush used the "s" word today, apologizing for the first time for the torture of Iraqi prisoners. And he hedged his bets a bit on Israel. I'm not sure what our policy is on settlements and right of return, though I suppose that's the point.

The Red Cross is steamed about being ignored when it gave early warnings on prisoner abuse.

It doesn't look like Bush can bear to ditch Rumsfield.

Adidas has made a running shoe with a microchip tied to a motor, ostensibly to adjust cushioning during use. This seems nuts to me.

Or perhaps just not crazy enough. If you're going to put a motor in a shoe, it should help the main mission of the shoe (moving you forwards), not just muck about with your comfort along the way. Yes, you guessed it. And the Russians have dared dream the dream: a gasoline-powered shoe. Now that's mad science.

At what point did making anti-American propaganda come true become official US policy? Because we are going to pay for our offenses for a long time:

U.S. soldiers who detained an elderly Iraqi woman last year placed a harness on her, made her crawl on all fours and rode her like a donkey, Prime Minister Tony Blair's personal human rights envoy to Iraq said Wednesday.

This is sort of adventure is supposed to prevent future terrorism?

I wonder what effect Bush's constant implication that Iraq had a hand in 9/11 has had on our troops. Are people more likely to look the other way during abuse and torture if they think Baathist prisoners are somehow implicated in terrorism? Just a thought.

Tom Friedman actually has a good op-ed today, in which he argues that Bush needs to fire Rumsfield, go to the UN and Arab leaders, and make a genuine effort to admit we've screwed up and need help. It might work, it might be too late, but is there any better option?

Of course, such gestures wouldn't play well with the UN-hating, strong-leader loving, never say you're sorry Republican base. But could Bush spinners claim that by changing course, he's a "big enough man" to admit when he's made mistakes, and wise enough to adapt to changing situations by listening to the best advice? (I guess that would still wreak havoc with the "call Kerry a flip-flopper" strategy, since it implicitly admits changing your opinion can be a smart thing to do. But since it is, isn't it time Bush did it?)

Update: Lots of people sound off on Bush's non-apology, while the letters to the NYT are full of wrenching sobs for the loss of our country's honor.

I get more sick to my stomach about the torture of Iraqis by American troops---and if you're not sick already, you will be after you read these highlights from the Taguba report (here's a hint---when you hide your prisoners from the Red Cross, it's safe to say you aren't among the good guys anymore). Now there are investigations into 14 deaths of prisoners in American camps, two of which the military has already decided are homicides. Sounds less and less like an isolated event, and more like a systematic and sadistic plan.

I'm also sickened by Bush's claim, on Arab television, that what makes this different from Saddam's regime is our openness to investigate the deaths. Until the media put pressure on the admin, they sure weren't being open or speedy in their investigations. And the Bush admin has been the most secretive in US history, so if openness is what separates them from Saddam (and not a reluctance to kill prisoners), there's uncomfortably little daylight between them, and it's entirely provided by opponents of the Bush admin applying pressure to find out the truth.

Plus, this great little exchange:

In the first of two planned interviews, the president did not specifically apologize for the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

But, he said, ``The actions of these few people do not reflect the hearts of the American people.''

Later, White House spokesman Scott McClellan used the word ``sorry'' a half-dozen times. ``The president is sorry for what occurred and the pain it has caused,'' he said.

Asked why Bush himself had not apologized, McClellan said: ``I'm saying it now for him.''

I'm sorry, but that doesn't count. Bush needs to say it himself. If he's going to take the time to put out televised defenses to the Arab world, the least he can do is apologize personally. Take responsibility for once in his life. I'm reminded of something his father---a nevertheless shockingly better man---said:

"I will never apologize for the United States of America - I don't care what the facts are."

George H. W. Bush, Newsweek, (Commenting on the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by the U.S. warship Vincennes, killing 290 passengers.), August 15, 1989

Sigh.

A couple of articles (and letters and websites) express alarm over declining American dominance of science. America has dominated for so long because it is wealthy enough to suppport lots of basic research, has the world's best university system, especially for supporting research, and because the federal government has plowed hundred of billions into the sciences, especially for military and medical applications. As long as these characteristics separate the US from the rest of the world, a disproportionate amount of science will take place in our borders, but as other countries put more money into science (and the US cuts back federal spending), other countries will catch up. Moreover, the key factor of production, bright scientists, is one no one has a monopoly on, and in the long run, one should expect the best scientists to come from all over the world. And I don't think that's bad, from a global perspective.

Here's some interesting data from NYT:

% PhD holders in US who are foreign born in 2000:

Engineering 51%
Physical sciences 45
Math/comp sci 45
Life science 45
Social science 13

Gosh, it's easier for me to applaud the global leveling of science when my field remains in large part an American preserve. We'll see how my tune changes when I have to really compete...

"The international media don't send reporters to cover genocides, it seems. They cover genocide anniversaries."

Mad Social Science idea of the day, courtesy of Bruce Ackerman (who I hope doesn't mind the classification): How Nader voters can have their candidate and Kerry, too.

Disney has told its subsidiary Miramax to pass on Michael Moore's new film, which criticizes Bush. Moore's agent claims Disney chief executive Eisner told him the refusal was about tax breaks

Mr. Moore's agent, Ari Emanuel, said that Michael D. Eisner, Disney's chief executive, asked him last spring to pull out of the deal with Miramax. Mr. Emanuel said Mr. Eisner expressed concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where Mr. Bush's brother, Jeb, is governor.

"Michael Eisner asked me not to sell this movie to Harvey Weinstein; that doesn't mean I listened to him," Mr. Emanuel said. "He definitely indicated there were tax incentives he was getting for the Disney corporation and that's why he didn't want me to sell it to Miramax. He didn't want a Disney company involved."

Disney executives deny that accusation, though they said their displeasure over the deal was made clear to Miramax and Mr. Emanuel.

Is Emanuel telling the truth? I can't imagine revealing these details is good for his career as an agent, so I'm inclined to believe that he is very ticked off and not making it up. If it is true, it's especially disturbing because Disney owns television network ABC. Should we assume that Disney let's it be know to ABCNews that they shoudl avoid offending the Bush administration to save on Disney's taxes?

posts from Josh Marshall: on Bush's lack of leadership and general cluelessness, and on Rumsfield's Clinton moment.

Plus, here's the Taguba report no one at the top seems to have read. You can be more up to speed than the pres or SecDef. Of course, that's not hard.

The fools who trusted this huckster are starting to bring the knives out:

"Ahmed Chalabi is a treacherous, spineless turncoat," says L. Marc Zell, a former law partner of Douglas Feith, now the undersecretary of defense for policy, and a former friend and supporter of Chalabi and his aspirations to lead Iraq. "He had one set of friends before he was in power, and now he's got another." While Zell's disaffection with Chalabi has been a long time in the making, his remarks to Salon represent his first public break with the would-be Iraqi leader, and are likely to ripple throughout Washington in the days to come.

Zell, a Jerusalem attorney, continues to be a partner in the firm that Feith left in 2001 to take the Pentagon job. He also helped Ahmed Chalabi's nephew Salem set up a new law office in Baghdad in late 2003. Chalabi met with Zell and other neoconservatives many times from the mid-1990s on in London, Turkey, and the U.S. Zell outlines what Chalabi was promising the neocons before the Iraq war: "He said he would end Iraq's boycott of trade with Israel, and would allow Israeli companies to do business there. He said [the new Iraqi government] would agree to rebuild the pipeline from Mosul [in the northern Iraqi oil fields] to Haifa [the Israeli port, and the location of a major refinery]." But Chalabi, Zell says, has delivered on none of them. The bitter ex-Chalabi backer believes his former friend's moves were a deliberate bait and switch designed to win support for his designs to return to Iraq and run the country.

From a good article in Salon.

The article has this rumor, too:

But the neocons have bigger problems than Chalabi. As the intellectual architects of an "easy" war gone bad, they stand to pay the price. The first to go may be Zell's old partner Douglas Feith. Military sources say Feith will resign his Defense Department post by mid-May. His removal was reportedly a precondition imposed by Ambassador to the U.N. John Negroponte when he agreed to take over from Paul Bremer as the top U.S. official in Iraq. "Feith is on the way out," Iraqi defense minister (and Chalabi nephew) Ali Allawi says confidently, and other sources confirm it. Feith's boss, Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, may follow. Bush political mastermind Karl Rove is said to be determined that Wolfowitz move on before the November election, even if he comes back in a second Bush term. Sources say one of the positions being suggested is the director of Central Intelligence.

Wolfowitz in charge of the CIA!?! Our enemies would have parties in celebration. al-Qaeda would send W. a thank you note. I hope this is baseless.

On legal practices of ancien regime France:

"To enforce the law against suicide, it was ordered that the bodies of people who took their own lives be salted, brought before a judge, and sentenced to public display. Nor could the accused escape their day in court by dying in the often miserable conditions of the prisons. They too would be salted and put on trial. Breton historians have discovered that in 1784 in the town of Cornouaille, Maurice LeCorre had died in prison and was ordered salted for trial. But due to some bureaucratic error, the corpse did not get a trial date and was found by a prison guard more than seven years later, not only salted but fermented in beer, at which point it was buried without trial." Mark Kurlansky, Salt, p 227-228.

The Kabbalah---it's not just for Jews anymore.

Christian fundamentalist creationist dinosaur theme park. And what do you, know, it's run by a nut who hates Jews and democracy.

The "plan" for Falluja has fallen apart. You can see the wheels starting to come off in this article last night; now the first Iraqi general is out after 4 days, and a new, non-Baathist, non-Fallujan Iraqi general is in (maybe?). Uh, George, how can we stay the course if there's no clue what comes next?

Testimony about the general treatment of Iraqis is starting to come out:

Day and night lost meaning shortly after Muwafaq Sami Abbas, a lawyer by training, arrived at Baghdad International Airport for an unexpected stay. In March, he was seized from his bed by U.S. troops in the middle of the night, he said, along with the rest of the men in his house, and taken to a prison on the airport grounds.

The black sack the troops placed over his head was removed only briefly during the next nine days of interrogation, conducted by U.S. officials in civilian and military clothes, he said. He was forced to do knee bends until he collapsed, he recalled, and black marks still ring his wrists from the pinch of plastic handcuffs. Rest was made impossible by loudspeakers blaring, over and over, the Beastie Boys' rap anthem, "No Sleep Till Brooklyn."

The forced exercise was even harder for his 57-year-old father, a former army general who held a signed certificate from the U.S. occupation authority vouching for his "high level of cooperation and assistance" in the days after the war.

Father and son are now free -- and angry about what they endured in a suddenly notorious U.S.-run prison system in Iraq. But months later, Abbas's three brothers are still inside Abu Ghraib prison, he said. He is their only legal advocate, trying to refute written charges that they are members of the Iraqi insurgency.

"The savagery the Americans have practiced against the Iraqis, well, now we have seen it, touched it and felt it," Abbas said. "These types of actions will grow more hostile forces against the coalition, and this is the reason for the resistance."

The photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib -- images that reached Iraqi newspapers on Sunday, following a three-day holiday -- have reinforced the long-held view here that the U.S. occupation is intent on humiliating the Iraqi people. The system has been rife with complaints for months, but now the testimony of former Iraqi prisoners claiming abuse at the hands of U.S. jailers has gained new credibility while further damaging the reputation of the U.S. occupation authority.

Interviews with former Iraqi prisoners and human-rights advocates present a picture of the U.S. prison system here as a vast wartime effort to extract information from the enemy rather than to punish criminals. Former prisoners say lengthy interrogation sessions, employing sleep depravation, severe isolation, fear, humiliation and physical duress, were regular features of their daily regimen and remain so for the estimated 2,500 to 7,000 people inside the jails.

The system comprises 16 prisons, four of which hold prisoners accused of being part of the anti-occupation insurgency. But there are countless other holding cells on U.S. bases, many once used by former president Saddam Hussein's government, where young Iraqis spend their first fearful hours in captivity.

"We have to get to the bottom of it," coalition spokesman Daniel Senor said on CNN's "Late Edition." "We have to engage in a robust investigation, which we are doing. . . . But let's not express frustration with the entire military in the process."

Abdullah Mohammed Abdulrazzaq, an unemployed 19-year-old, was held for six months in several prisons around Iraq. "How can we not hate the Americans after the treatment we have received?" he said. "It is not human."

Four Humvees arrived for Abdulrazzaq at 2:30 a.m. one day in September, he said. He was awake when troops crashed through his apartment door. The electricity had cut out hours before in Adhamiya, a comfortable northwest Baghdad neighborhood where he lives with his widowed mother, and the heat was stifling.

The troops held a picture of the wiry teenager holding a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, he recalled. In hood and handcuffs, Abdulrazzaq was taken to Adhamiya Palace, a compound once used by the former president's eldest son, Uday Hussein. It is now a U.S. Army base, and one of the sitting rooms became the venue for long, intense interrogation sessions.

His interrogators -- first U.S. soldiers, then a man who he said wore the uniform of a Kuwaiti army captain -- sought information on the location of weapons of mass destruction, Hussein and the insurgents in his neighborhood. For the next three days, he said, the Kuwaiti man tortured him using electricity.

U.S. soldiers came in and out of the room where he was tied naked to a chair, he said, adding that he saw their boots from beneath his blindfold and heard them speaking English. He collapsed because of the physical stress and lack of food and water. He was eventually taken to Baghdad International Airport on a stretcher.

"I told the American soldier when I arrived to do something for me, and punish this Kuwait soldier," he said. "He told me, 'I can't do anything against him. And you are going to find the same treatment here.' "

After a few days of interrogation, Abdulrazzaq said he was taken to Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad. There he lived in a tent with 40 other prisoners. Showers were available once a week when Army water tankers pulled up in front of portable bathrooms. A liter of water was expected to last each prisoner a week, he said, and a weekly Army MRE augmented their one meal a day.

Unruly prisoners were placed in shipping containers used to house the prison dogs, he said. The smell inside was horrible, and detention there would last days.

He was interrogated every two weeks. He was taken to a room with his hands and feet tied together, he said, then thrown on the floor. In that position, he would endure hours of questioning, much of it designed to elicit a confession that he was part of the insurgency or inform on his neighbors -- many of whom, he said, were already tent mates.

Then one day he was informed at 5 a.m. that he was being released. He never saw a lawyer or any evidence against him, beyond the photograph that he claims is a fake.

"I told him Allah released me, not you," he said.

Saif Mahmoud Shakir, a 26-year-old taxi driver, always carries the papers he received on his March release from Abu Ghraib. He said he was taken from his house in July, accused of participating in the insurgency and threatening to kill a translator working for the Americans. The man owed him $60, he said, and was trying to avoid repaying the loan by lying about him to U.S. troops eager to hunt down the insurgents.

He said he served most of his time in Umm Qasr, Iraq's southern port, where the occupation authority assembled a vast prison camp out of tents. His twin brother, Ali, was taken with him, and the two moved from prison to prison together for months.

His first stop was another U.S. base in Adhamiya. There, he said, he was beaten by his interrogators before being taken to a special section of the airport prison where he said he was held along with senior members of Hussein's government.

"I arrived there and I was urinating blood because my kidney had been injured by the beatings," he said. "The doctor was very sympathetic and gave me medicine and fruit."

Shakir, whose gaunt cheeks are covered by a thin beard, said U.S. interrogators used his relationship with his brother to try to extract a confession. On three occasions following extended sessions, he said, they were taken in Humvees into the desert north of the port. There, he said, they were buried up to their necks in the sand.

"I couldn't see my brother," he said. "Then I heard shots fired. They came back and told me my brother was dead."

But his brother had not been killed, and the interrogators sometimes fired near his head to frighten him. The only time he was shot, Shakir said, was by rubber bullets used by guards if prisoners were outside the tent after 9 p.m., even to use the bathroom. He has two dark, dime-size scars on his right biceps.

The brothers were separated in March when Shakir was released from Abu Ghraib, where he spent his final months in captivity, and his brother remained inside. At 5 the morning after his release, U.S. soldiers came looking for him.

"My father showed them my release papers, and they threw them back at him," Shakir said. "They just kept asking, 'Where is Saif?' So I don't sleep there anymore."

Apparently, we torture our friends as well as bystanders and enemies (I guess if the idea is to create a unified new Iraq...). This fits with the grumbling coming out of the British military that the US has been abusing Iraqis. Particularly disturbing is the key role of private contractors in such sensitive duties as interrogation. Pete Singer is the top expert on military outsourcing (and a fellow political scientist from Harvard); here's his take in the Guardian.

Meanwhile, evidence is piling up that military intelligence was behind a lot of the abuse at Abu Ghraib. We'd better come up with stiffer penalties that a "repimand". Our military spokesman in Iraq isn't fooling anyone:

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said on ABC that he isn't sure Army military intelligence ``had anything to do with the individual acts of criminal behavior.''

``Those were clearly the acts of individuals,'' Kimmitt said, appearing on the program after Karpinski. ``They made the choice to do those. And now they seem to be a little concerned they've been caught and being prosecuted for that.''

Kimmitt added, however, that the investigation is reviewing ``concerns expressed about the military intelligence.''

Asked whether more people are under investigation, Kimmitt said it's possible but he didn't want to ``pry into'' an ongoing probe.

``Something's going on here that's wrong and we need to get to the bottom of this. There's been determination to open up every door and find out what's going on,'' Kimmitt said.

Of course the people photographed torturing Iraqis are responsible for their actions, regardless if they were under orders or not. But it's way too lately to call this an isolated incident. The cat is out of the bag. (And we've been using it way too much.)

If you're as mad as I am, you'll find this funny, but it's way over the top.