born live love die

Malcolm Nance is an Arabic-speaking counterterrorism expert and a combat veteran with twenty-eight years of operational experience in the Middle East. He has published a sweeping new strategic proposal for engaging Al Qaeda.

I spent twenty years in intelligence and four years in the SERE program waterboarding people before I ever opened my mouth on the subject. Marc Thiessen is a fool of the highest magnitude if he thinks he knows anything about waterboarding. His claims are based not on first-hand experience but on a classified briefing from people with an agenda of justifying what was done. That makes Thiessen into a court stenographer for war criminals rather than a person with any real claim of expertise. As for his claim about the relationship between Pol Pot–era waterboarding and what we have done derived from the SERE program, he’s wrong. Before I arrived at SERE, I went to S21 prison in Cambodia. Right next to the Wall of Skulls sits the exact waterboard platform that the SERE program copied for our own use in the training program. Remember, our goal was to prepare pilots for the techniques they might face if they fell into the hands of our enemies. I was waterboarded on arrival at SERE, and then as a senior staffer, I performed the technique or supervised it through hundreds of evolutions.

Thiessen’s central purpose is apparently to glorify the most extreme practices used by the CIA in the Bush era and to argue that each of these practices, including waterboarding, is vitally necessary to our national security–even though no president used them before, and it seems that President Bush himself halted many of these practices over Cheney’s objection. We have prosecuted and convicted men for using these techniques in the past, and we were right to do so.

This suggests to me that, while he may cite Thomas Aquinas, Thiessen has no sense of honor and no moral compass. I give him credit for his loyalty to the Cheneys, but he’s blind to their errors in judgment. The use of waterboarding and other torture techniques was a powerful recruitment tool for Al Qaeda; it spawned thousands of would-be suicide bombers. Thiessen claims that we gained “intelligence” by using these torture techniques. But this shows that he knows nothing about the intelligence process or how our enemy grows and sustains itself.

Thousands of American POWs died and suffered resisting torture practices that we have always called the tools of the enemy. The SERE program was designed to help them grapple with this inhumanity and retain their dignity in the face of it. Now Thiessen and his boss want us to embrace the tactics we used in that program–taken from the Russians, the Communist Chinese, the North Koreans, the North Vietnamese, the Khmer Rouge–as our own. He claims that these techniques are unpleasant but have no long-term physical or mental impact. Really? I challenge him to put up or shut up. I offer to put him through just one hour of the CIA enhanced interrogation techniques that were authorized in the Bush Administration’s OLC memos–including the CIA-approved variant of waterboarding. If at the end he still believes this is not torture, I’ll respect his viewpoint. But not until then. By the way, I can assure you that, within that hour, I’ll secure Thiessen’s written admission that waterboarding is torture and that his book is a pack of falsehoods. He’ll give me any statement I want in order to end the torture.

Yeah, what he said.

Read the whole thing.

There is a much longer post I want to write about the relationship between capital and services, but I don’t have the time. Slate has an article about broadband availability , quality and price in the United States and the rest of the world.  Not surprisingly, rates are high in the United States, availability is high, but speed is low.  The managed monopolies that provide broadband have no incentive to provide high speed at a low cost.  They are incentivized to provide the service to the largest number of subscribers who have only one option and then charge them a lot of money for that service.

But penetration doesn’t tell the whole story. To get an up-to-date picture of where we actually stand, the New America Foundation—where we both work—recently took a very close look at both speeds and prices in more than a dozen leading broadband countries. As it turns out, U.S. residents paid more for bandwidth than nearly every other country surveyed. Typically, the lowest price for broadband in the United States, not counting promotions and bundled deals, costs an average of $35 a month for a measly 1 megabit per second connection. Twice this speed is available in Denmark and Canada for lower prices; more strikingly, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Sweden have broadband available for under $20 a month. Additionally, the fastest speeds in the United States are comparatively slow. The common top speed available for residential services in the Unites States is 50 Mbps (and costs $145 a month), while several nations have speeds available that are up to four times faster, for less than $60 a month.

Capital is selfish and doesn’t want competition.  We need to fix that.  Infrastructure should belong to the people.  What would our civilization be like if all the roads were private and you needed to pay to leave your house?

Read the whole thing.

We are using up too much stuff.  Stuff like phosphorus.

From Kansas to China’s Sichuan province, farmers treat their fields with phosphorus-rich fertilizer to increase the yield of their crops. What happens next, however, receives relatively little attention. Large amounts of this resource are lost from farm fields, through soil erosion and runoff, and down swirling toilets, through our urine and feces. Although seemingly mundane, this process cannot continue indefinitely. Our dwindling supply of phosphorus, a primary component underlying the growth of global agricultural production, threatens to disrupt food security across the planet during the coming century. This is the gravest natural resource shortage you’ve never heard of.

Phosphorus is used extensively for a variety of key functions in all living things, including the construction of DNA and cell membranes. As it is relatively rare in the Earth’s crust, a lack of phosphorus is often the limiting factor in the growth of plants and algae. In humans, it plays an essential role in bone formation. Without a steady supply of this resource, global agricultural production will face a bottleneck, and humankind’s growing population will suffer a serious nutrition shortage.

Our supply of mined phosphorus is running out. Many mines used to meet this growing demand are degrading, as they are increasingly forced to access deeper layers and extract a lower quality of phosphate-bearing rock (phosphate is the chemical form in which nearly all phosphorus is found). Some initial analyses from scientists with the Global Phosphorus Research Initiative estimate that there will not be sufficient phosphorus supplies from mining to meet agricultural demand within 30 to 40 years. Although more research is clearly needed, this is not a comforting time scale.

Too many people.

Police use stop and frisk laws to target certain people or to exert authority.  I can see, a little bit, that the ability to detain people they see as suspicious can be a used to reduce crime, but I have seen to much of the authority assertion to think that any good comes of it.

Eric Rachner, a Seattle cyber security expert and one of the golf players, wasn’t satisfied when the city dismissed charges against him after a possibly illegal arrest for refusing to provide identification.  Rachner discovered through sleuthing that police had withheld video-recorded evidence in his case.

And

Rachner was wearing a faded t-shirt, jeans and leather jacket, and didn’t remotely resemble the guy who misfired the ball, who wore English golfing duds, a Tattersall’s hat and fake orange sideburns.  Confronted by officer Michele Letizia, Rachner politely declined to state his name. He also indicated where he kept his wallet with ID. The policeman removed the wallet from Rachner’s pocket, but both men declined to open it. The officer expressed fear he could be accused of stealing cash.

Letizia threatened to arrest the 32-year-old Capitol Hill reveler for obstruction if he didn’t provide his name as others had. The cop told Rachner that booking on a Saturday night could mean cell time until Monday. Rachner remained mum. Letizia arrested him, based on the refusal to provide ID, according to arrest and court documents.  With those facts, the arrest appears to have been illegal based on a 1982 Washington Supreme Court ruling, though a 2004 U.S. Supreme Court case makes the situation less clear-cut.

The story is long and not easily reduced to quick cuts, so read the whole thing.

I’ve been watching a new television show, Parenthood, a little.  I liked the movie, mostly, and this show tries to recapture some of those story beats.  Some of the writing is good, most of it mawkish.  Characters often perform the “adults behaving badly” dance with very little veritas.  Characters behave in ways that would make me run away if they happened in real life.  Example: a woman shows up and tells the youngest of the clan, a player, that he fathered a son some five years before.  Mom, who has raised this boy as a single child for five years, drops it on the player in front of the son with “He wanted to meet his daddy.”

No responsible mother I know would ever do that.  The writers of the show thought it would be a good line to end the scene.  Dopey line, dopey line.

I digress.

One of the characters in the drama is a boy with Asperger’s syndrome.  I have been blessed with two wonderful children and I don’t know what it is like to parent a child that exhibits that range of behavioral symtoms.  The boy’s mother had a great scene where she described the amount of worrying she does.  I thought that was good.  Being a parent is like never having a day off of a very important job.

A mother with an autistic child has been treating her son with marijuana.

With the return of the White Russian, I felt confident enough by Thanksgiving to make a big meal. Previously, a fragrant house often overstimulated J; last year, he dumped his full Thanksgiving plate on my very pregnant sister-in-law. This time, we sat, said grace. J didn’t lunge and try to grab the food. He didn’t stab Grandpa with a fork like he had last Christmas. He just ate with gusto, and, I think, even a little appreciation.

I think that if dope worked for my child, I would use it.

In today’s Inigo Montoya file, there is an excellent takedown of people who use the word ‘libertarian’ to describe themselves.

The truth is, there are real Libertarians out there, people who place a very high value on individual rights and who believe this government — like most every government — too often interferes with those rights. Of course, actual Libertarians realize that for individual rights to have any meaning, they require the presence of a body that can ensure those rights.  They know that freedom can’t be maintained in an absence of information, and that there must be agencies that create the transparency needed for effective individual action and ensure there are consequences to dishonesty. Real advocates of the free market realize that term has no meaning unless the market is free from coercion and the law is not defined by “might makes right.” They know that individual freedoms are incompatible with a system where corporations are treated as super-citizens and that Libertarianism requires that workers be more valued that abstract entities that live only on paper.

The difference between actual Libertarians and Republicans hiding from their tarnished name is quite easy. Actual Libertarians are concerned about the freedom of individuals. Conservatives use Libertarian as a code word meaning “I want to continue to enjoy all the privileges I do now, but I don’t want to share them with you and most of all I don’t want to pay any taxes.” Push come to shove, they’re happy to abbreviate that to “Screw freedom. I just don’t want to pay taxes.”

Read the whole thing.

In 1993 and 1994, Billy Kristol wrote a series of memos that outlined the process by which Republicans could return to power.  He saw that it was possible to get power by freezing the process by which laws are made and then ride the wave of populist reaction to that by blaming the Democrats.  It worked in 1994.  But none of the Republican policy proposals were enacted.

Kristol’s Carthaginian strategy worked politically, or seemed to. Newt Gingrich and Contract With America Republicans swept into power in the 1994 midterm election on the basis of monolithic opposition to Clinton’s economic plan and social agenda. But the Gingrich “revolution” soon failed. Its ideas were not enacted, Bill Clinton won re-election in 1996, and its leaders fell to a variety of scandals. Congressional Republicans kept their opposition to government at the level of rhetoric only, becoming bigger spenders than ever. But this outcome did not dim the GOP’s essential faith in the Kristol approach. Under Obama, the Republican Party has simply tried to replay its script from the Clinton years, opposing everything the president proposes, looking for heretics to burn, and calling the other side extreme—though this time without blocking the president’s major initiative. They’ve been at it again this week, claiming, absurdly, that financial regulations supported by Democrats would amount to a perpetual bank bailout.

The politics of Republican implacability are based on what might seem an obvious insight that competition is a zero-sum game. If Democrats pass their plans, they succeed politically and Republicans lose. But while elections are zero-sum, politics as a whole is not. Without some level of bipartisan cooperation, voters become increasingly cynical, the system becomes too paralyzed to address the major issues, and the whole country suffers in consequence. Longer term, it is hard to see the politics of “no” as a winning Republican strategy.

President Barack Hussein Obama gets to look like a thoughtful, rational man.  I like it.

I’m listening to Jakob Dylan’s album, Seeing Things. Up On The Mountain, in  part:

Oh, here it comes and there it goes
The unbearable sound of the earth making men out of boys
First you learn and then you’ll teach
About that bright, bright light

Making its way
On up the mountain night and day
And you’ll get tired and you’ll get weak
But you won’t abandon your masterpiece

Now there’s a light making its way
On up the mountain night and day
And you’ll go down and you’ll go deep
But you won’t surrender your masterpiece

You won’t surrender your masterpiece
You will deliver your masterpiece

It can be heard on line at Rhapsody, iLife and other places.

Jakob Dylan and Jack Johnson speak to me more than most song writers.  They are fathers and I think they get it.  I’m listening to the secret song that was on The Wallflowers album, Breach.

Come back babybird/ With your dirty wings in tatters/ Come home where you belong/ Nobody knows you better/ Now bring back your velvet heart/ And we’ll make you brand new feathers/ Sleep through the morning light/ With your arms around your brother

Now outside faces cry/ With the tears of lonesome orphans/ And behind every mask/ is the face of another/ Wherever you have been/ wherever you took cover/ No arms that pulled you in/ could hold you like your mother

When all my colors fade/ And my wings, they’ve turned to leather/ I’ll know the reasons why/ God let me get older/ When all my days are through/ And I fly these hills no longer/ I’ll lay beneath the stars/ And I’ll watch you flying over

Jakob Dylan gets it.

There is an element of racism in this country that I can’t stand.  I live in the Pacific Northwest where there is racism, but less it seems than other parts of the country.  My brother has been living in the South for many years and I wonder if he sees things the way I see them.  I think probably not.

In recent days, several elected officials in Southern states have been pricks about slavery and the Civil War.  Eugene Robinson has a better response than me.

It was bad enough when Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell proclaimed “Confederate History Month” without mentioning slavery, but at least he came to his senses and apologized. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s contention that the whole controversy “doesn’t amount to diddly” is much worse.

“I don’t know what you would say about slavery,” Barbour told CNN, “but anybody that thinks that you have to explain to people that slavery is a bad thing, I think that goes without saying.”

And that’s the problem — Barbour thinks it “goes without saying.” The governor of the state whose population includes the nation’s highest percentage of African Americans believes it is appropriate to “honor” those who fought for the Confederacy. Clearly, he has no problem revisiting the distant past. Yet he sees no reason to mention the vile, unthinkable practices — state-sanctioned kidnapping, torture and rape — that those Confederate soldiers were fighting to protect.

It amounts to much more than “diddly” that so many Americans try hard to avoid coming to terms with the reality of slavery. It wasn’t just “a bad thing.” Littering is a bad thing. Slavery was this nation’s Original Sin, and yet many people will not look at it except through a gauze of Spanish moss.

The Atlantic slave trade was one of the last millennium’s greatest horrors. An estimated 17 million Africans, most of them teenagers, were snatched from their families, stuffed into the holds of ships and brought to the New World. As many as 7 million of them died en route, either on the high seas or at “seasoning” camps in the Caribbean where they were “broken” to the will of their masters.

If he has never done so, Barbour should hold in his hands some of the leg irons, manacles and other restraints that were used to subdue the Africans. He should visit some of the plantations where slave cabins still stand — there are plenty in his state — to get a sense of how the Africans lived. He should spend a long, hot day picking cotton. He should read the accounts of plantation life written by former slaves, and then he should explain why there is any reason to “honor” soldiers who fought to perpetuate a system that could never have functioned without constant, deliberate, unflinching cruelty.

The Tea Party movement has a lot of racist dog whistlers in it.  These are people who use words and images that will appeal to other racists, but somehow not be heard by people who are not racists, much like only a dog can hear a dog whistle.  I’m tired of it.

Sarah Palin used school ground metaphors to describe the treaty just signed by President Obama.  Someone at Slate has decided to help her with some other policy issues.

On the banking bailout
“In the lunch line, the fattest kid in school asks for your ice cream cup. Now, you’re willing to give him your green beans or mashed potatoes, but not the ice cream. So he says, ‘If I can’t have your ice cream, I’ll fake a heart attack, they’ll close the cafeteria, and nobody will get their ice cream cups.’ So you give him your ice cream cup. Later, when Principal Summers finds out, he says, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, giving Fatty your ice cream! Because of you, he’s fat.’ As punishment, nobody gets ice cream, except Fatty, because he moved to another school, where he’s pulling the same deal.”

And this one may be closer to the truth than Palin wants to say.

On universal health care
“You’ve got a tough math test coming up, so you tell your mom your head hurts and you need to stay home. But you don’t get to skip classes and hook up with your boyfriend after hockey practice, because the school nurse comes to your house and spends the whole day taking your temperature and asking you trick questions. You end up having to lie in bed and study math, it costs the school so much money that they cut hockey, and then you find out you’re pregnant!”

Bristol much?