drat fink
View current page
...more recent posts
Thursday, Aug 19, 2004
truth or dire
"Harvey Rishikof and Michael Schrage have a really interesting essay in Slate about some new medical techniques which could be used by the intelligence community to extract information from detainees unwilling to talk -- in lieu of barbaric practices like those used at Abu Ghraib and possibly used in U.S. secret detention facilities abroad. The essay raises a litany of difficult moral, practical and legal issues, and none of these are easily resolved."
technolibertarians
technology liberation front
scandal us
"WASHINGTON -- A long-awaited report on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal will implicate about two dozen military intelligence soldiers and civilian contractors in the intimidation and sexual humiliation of Iraq war prisoners, but will not suggest wrongdoing by military brass outside the prison, senior defense officials said yesterday."
Wednesday, Aug 18, 2004
washing up
"The problem with these newsprint confessions is not that they are craven, insufficient and self-serving, which of course they are. The problem is that, on the whole, they do not correct the pre-war mistakes, but actually further them. The Post would have you believe that its "failure" before the war was its inability/reluctance to punch holes in Bush's WMD claims.
Right. I marched in Washington against the war in February 2003 with about 400,000 people, and I can pretty much guarantee that not more than a handful of those people gave a shit about whether or not Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That's because we knew what the Post and all of these other papers still refuse to admit—this whole thing was never about weapons of mass destruction. Even a five- year-old, much less the literate executive editor of the Washington Post, could have seen, from watching Bush and his cronies make his war case, that they were going in anyway."
out damn spotter
dont know what to believe about the "outing" of al-qaida spy mohammed khan. as neither the pakistan nor american govt have much credibility whos to say theyre both not liable.
chris craft
i had a similar reaction to chris matthews as campaign desk. it wasnt that matthews was getting exercised over the spin, it was that they had misused a quote from his show. hey chris, spin happens all the time, not just when its a convenient ploy to boost your own self importance or ratings (not that theres any difference).ill give him minor props for hardblogger.
troop transport
"Foreign policy scholar Chalmers Johnson, author of The Sorrows of Empire and, Blowback, discusses the frauds and realities surrounding Bush's troop shift proposal. Interviewed for Democracy Now! by Amy Goodman."
a mighty wind
for the texans
free verse
gangs of america: the rise of corporate power and the disabling of democracy
exam notes
"Another way of looking at it: compare the Red Eleven with California, which has 54 electoral votes, just two more than their total, but 33,871,648 people, almost twice as many. Cali has 627,235 people per presidential elector; the eleven aforementioned states have 359,069 people per elector. Wyoming, the most overrepresented state in the union, has 164,594 people per elector -- barely a fourth of California's total. That's right, Wyomingans are almost four times better represented in the Electoral College than are Californians."