“Binney, for his part, believes that the [NSA] now stores copies of all e-mails transmitted in America, in case the government wants to retrieve the details later.”
Jane Mayer, The New Yorker; required reading.
Seriously, the article, long as it is, is required reading.
The ultra Orthodox Hasidic newspaper Der Tzitung took a whole new approach to publishing the iconic White House Situation Room photo so that we wouldn’t have to worry about who the woman was in the background. In fact, we wouldn’t have to worry about women at all in the photo, even the Secretary of State.
Dogs have been fighting alongside U.S. soldiers for more than 100 years, seeing combat in the Civil War and World War I. But their service was informal; only in 1942 were canines officially inducted into the U.S. Army. Today, they’re a central part of U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan — as of early 2010 the U.S. Army had 2,800 active-duty dogs deployed (the largest canine contingent in the world). And these numbers will continue to grow as these dogs become an ever-more-vital military asset.
So it should come as no surprise that among the 79 commandos involved in Operation Neptune Spear that resulted in Osama bin Laden’s killing, there was one dog — the elite of the four-legged variety. And though the dog in question remains an enigma — another mysterious detail of the still-unfolding narrative of that historic mission — there should be little reason to speculate about why there was a dog involved: Man’s best friend is a pretty fearsome warrior.
Above from the introduction to An FP Photo Essay By Rebecca Frankel | Foreign Policy. Check out the pups.
But even if it were the case that valuable information were obtained during or after the use of torture, what would it prove? Nobody has ever argued that brutality will never produce truthful answers. It is sometimes the case that if you torture someone long and mercilessly enough, they will tell you something you want to know. Nobody has ever denied that. In terms of the tactical aspect of the torture debate, the point has always been — as a consensus of interrogations professionals has repeatedly said — that there are far more effective ways to extract the truth from someone than by torturing it out of them. The fact that one can point to an instance where torture produced the desired answer proves nothing about whether there were more effective ways of obtaining it.
Excerpt from Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.
“The snuffing of Osama Bin Laden has already filled the Snake River Canyon with a torrent of coverage from newspapers, the Web, and television. The news output will only expand in the coming days, and as it does, remain skeptical about it. As we know from the coverage of other major breaking-news events—the Mumbai massacre, the death of Pat Tillman, Hurricane Katrina, the rescue of Jessica Lynch, to cite just a few examples—the earliest coverage of a big story is rarely reliable.
Jack Shafer – Slate Magazine posted yesterday evening.
Photo of White House team watching operation.
New Yorker Writers on Osama bin Laden — great first morning analysis from people who are knowledgeable — among them Lawrence Wright, Steve Coll, George Packer, Jeffrey Toobin and David Remnick.
LBJ told a story about a man who stopped by a newspaper vendor every morning, paid for the paper, glanced at the front page and then threw the paper back on the stack and walked away. The vendor was happy to be able to sell the paper twice, but finally his curiosity got the better of him.
“Mister,” he asks, “how come you pay for the paper, but just look at the first page?”
“I’m looking for an obituary,” the man replies.
“But mister,” the vendor says, “the obituaries are inside the paper.”
“No,” the man says as he walks off, “the obituary for the son-of-a-bitch I’m looking for will be on the front page.”
The Right trashes all Democrats . . .
“As far as Clinton goes, in fact, calling him white trash who didn’t know his place was pretty mild, almost a compliment. Rightwing Republican operatives slimed him as a sleazy land speculator, a drug dealer, a drug addict, and even a murderer. His wife, of course, was a… lesbian (which to them is something to be ashamed of . . .).”
“A general reminder whenever budget issues are discussed: the U.S. government is — this isn’t original — best thought of as a giant insurance company with an army.”
Here are some of the reasons we’ve held people at Guantánamo, according to files obtained by WikiLeaks and, then, by several news organizations: A sharecropper because he was familiar with mountain passes; an Afghan “because of his general knowledge of activities in the areas of Khost and Kabul based as a result of his frequent travels through the region as a taxi driver”; an Uzbek because he could talk about his country’s intelligence service, and a Bahraini about his country’s royal family (both of those nations are American allies); an eighty-nine year old man, who was suffering from dementia, to explain documents that he said were his son’s; an imam, to speculate on what worshippers at his mosque were up to; a cameraman for Al Jazeera, to detail its operations; a British man, who had been a captive of the Taliban, because “he was expected to have knowledge of Taliban treatment of prisoners and interrogation tactics”; Taliban conscripts, so they could explain Taliban conscription techniques; a fourteen-year-old named Naqib Ullah, described in his file as a “kidnap victim,” who might know about the Taliban men who kidnapped him. (Ullah spent a year in the prison.) Our reasons, in short, do not always really involve a belief that a prisoner is dangerous to us or has committed some crime; sometimes (and this is more debased) we mostly think we might find him useful.
Wonderful piece from Joe Posnanski — Daughters and Roller Skating.
You absolutely should read One In A Billion: A boy’s life, a medical mystery. It won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting and is fascinating. It’s three parts (see the left column at the link for the three). You may need some tissues.
Modern war fighting technology still requires good human judgment — Anatomy of an Afghan War Tragedy.
That’s it for now.
Fact: If health care costs in the United States were about the same as they are in other wealthy nations (all of whom have better health care), there wouldn’t be a federal deficit problem.
Harvard historian Jill Lepore has a must-read op-ed piece in the Sunday Times. It begins:
The House Budget Committee chairman, Paul D. Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, announced his party’s new economic plan this month. It’s called “The Path to Prosperity,” a nod to an essay Benjamin Franklin once wrote, called “The Way to Wealth.”
Franklin, who’s on the $100 bill, was the youngest of 10 sons. Nowhere on any legal tender is his sister Jane, the youngest of seven daughters; she never traveled the way to wealth. He was born in 1706, she in 1712. Their father was a Boston candle-maker, scraping by. Massachusetts’ Poor Law required teaching boys to write; the mandate for girls ended at reading. Benny went to school for just two years; Jenny never went at all.
Their lives tell an 18th-century tale of two Americas. Against poverty and ignorance, Franklin prevailed; his sister did not.
A more thoughtful if critical look at Three Cups of Tea and Greg Mortenson: What Mortenson Got Wrong.
It’s just one side of the story, but once you read scores of them confirming your own experience, you figure with enough smoke there must be some fire: Customer Catches Best Buy Breaking Law, Gets Banned From Store.
Joe Posnanski takes a look at some ballplayers who appear to have played at Hall of Fame levels, but never even got a serious look: The Hall of Not Famous Enough.
Also, Joe wants to know which is the Greatest Rock Band In The World. If you aren’t familiar with Arcade Fire, Muse, Wilco and the Flaming Lips, this discussion is not for you.
Medical care is an area in which crucial decisions — life and death decisions — must be made . . .
That’s why we have medical ethics. That’s why doctors have traditionally both been viewed as something special and been expected to behave according to higher standards than the average professional. There’s a reason we have TV series about heroic doctors, while we don’t have TV series about heroic middle managers or heroic economists.
The idea that all this can be reduced to money — that doctors are just people selling services to consumers of health care — is, well, sickening. And the prevalence of this kind of language is a sign that something has gone very wrong not just with this discussion, but with our society’s values.
No minimally honest or rational person can reconcile the President’s Friday signing statement with the vow he gave during that campaign event, nor can any such person reconcile his claimed war powers regarding Libya with the view he emphatically expressed during the campaign. And, of course, the list of similar departures from his own claimed views during the campaign is depressingly long: from railing against the evils of habeas corpus denial to fighting to deny habeas review to Bagram detainees; from vowing to protect whistleblowers to waging the most aggressive war in American history against them; from condemning the evils of writing bills via secret meetings with industry lobbyists to writing his health care bill using exactly that process; from insisting that Presidents have no power to detain or even eavesdrop on Americans without due process to asserting the power to assassinate Americans without due process, etc. etc. etc.
It would be one thing if these full-scale reversals were on ancillary issues. But these are fundamental. They’re about the powers of that office and the nature of our government. And Obama made these issues the centerpiece of his campaign.
“In his State of the Union Address, President Obama promised that this year, for the first time ever, American taxpayers would be able to go online and see exactly how their federal tax dollars are spent. Just enter a few pieces of information about your taxes, and the taxpayer receipt will give you a breakdown of how your tax dollars are spent on priorities like education, veterans benefits, or health care.”
“Taxpayers will have until Monday, April 18 to file their 2010 tax returns and pay any tax due because Emancipation Day, a holiday observed in the District of Columbia, falls this year on Friday, April 15. By law, District of Columbia holidays impact tax deadlines in the same way that federal holidays do; therefore, all taxpayers will have three extra days to file this year.”
In addition to Matt Taibbi’s The Real Housewives of Wall Street —
The Straight Dope, a fascinating interview of The Wire‘s David Simon by Bill Moyers. I could have done a week of best lines from this piece alone.
And the sad, strange tale of Boston Corbett, The Man Who Shot the Man Who Shot Lincoln.
Read this article by Matt Taibbi.
It made me sick.
“But it should be recognized that [the President’s] plan is a rather conservative one, significantly to the right of the Rivlin-Domenici plan.”
Bob Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities quoted by Paul Krugman.
Significantly to the right of the Domenici plan. Egad!
[Posted from my iPad]
Jill sent this along:
At the Brazil school shooting:
“Police were alerted to the shooting when two young boys, at least one with a gunshot wound, ran up to two officers on patrol about two blocks away. The officers sprinted to the school and at least one quickly located the gunman on the second floor and traded shots with him.”
Whereas at Columbine, police and SWAT refused to enter the building for almost two hours. This, despite being aware that a teacher was bleeding to death inside the building. The killers were dead for an hour before anyone ever attempted to enter the building.