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38 posts from July 2009

July 17, 2009

Coe's Boys: The Fellowship and the C Street Complex

Another sex scandal out of the Fellowship's C Street Complex, a kind of fundamentalist flophouse for members of congress run by Doug Coe's elite sect, the Family. The resident to stray is Mr. Family Values himself, Rep. Chip Pickering. Sen. John Ensign and Gov. Mark Sanford are also C Street alumni.

July 16, 2009

Jeffrey Goldberg smears Human Rights Watch

Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic is accusing Human Rights Watch of "fundraising corruption" for allowing some of its officers to discuss the group's work in Gaza at a fundraiser in Saudi Arabia. The corruption charge is specious. Assuming Goldberg believes what he's saying, he got punk'd by an Israel-based group called NGO Monitor with ties to the Israeli government. The whole pseudo-controversy seems calculated to distract from HRW's latest revelations about Israel's use of white phosphorus in Gaza. 

It all began with a May 26 story in Arab News about the rising stature of Human Rights Watch in Saudi Arabia and the Muslim world. AN reported that prominent Saudi businessman and intellectual hosted a welcoming dinner for HRW officials during their recent visit to the kingdom. The host, who also happens to be a managing director at Morgan Stanley in London, reportedly praised group for its work in Gaza.

HRW attracted worldwide attention for its work on Israel and the Gaza Strip including its reportage on Israel's use of white phosphorous in Gaza.

Continue reading "Jeffrey Goldberg smears Human Rights Watch " »

July 15, 2009

Man: Labor pain good for women

Midwifery professor Denis Walsh argues that labor pain is good for women:

In an article for Evidence Based Midwifery, published by the Royal College of Midwives, Dr Walsh said the NHS was too quick to give in to requests for pain-killing injections.

He said: ‘A large number of women want to avoid pain, but more should be prepared to withstand it. Pain in labour is a purposeful, useful thing which has a number of benefits, such as preparing a mother for the responsibility of nurturing a newborn baby.’ [...]

He said labour pain was a timeless component of motherhood, but warned: ‘There has been a loss of rites-of-passage meaning to childbirth, so pain and stress are viewed negatively.’ [Daily Mail--where else?)]

The guilt trip is part of Prof. Walsh's larger crusade against epidural anesthesia for laboring women in the National Health Service.

It's one thing to argue that the risks of a particular pain-relief strategy outweigh the benefits, or to point out that some technique is often used on people who don't need it. Those are empirical questions.

It's another thing entirely to assert that women ought to endure pain for their own good. That's a dubious value judgement based on an unsupported claim about the benefits of pain.

Does Walsh have studies supporting a link between labor pain and maternal responsibility? Or is that just his pet theory that he feels entitled to dispense as if it were a medical fact? If pain builds character, does he advocate torturing new dads to harden them up?

Even if it's true that labor pain confers some marginal psychological benefit, a responsible clinician would lay out the potential costs and benefits and let the patient decide. Of course, the principle applies for pain relief options. Every option from drug-free birth to general anesthesia has its own costs and benefits. It's pretty rare that any one strategy is medically necessary, so the decision should be left to the woman.

Dr. Amy Tuteur, The Skeptical OB, has a great post about the sexist roots of the anti-anesthesia evangelism. She argues that Walsh is carrying on a long and ignoble tradition of romanticizing labor pain and dismissing women's suffering.

July 14, 2009

Pick the real Pentagon project: Dragon Tank or corpse-eating robot ambulance

One of these projects was made up by the Onion. Was it the Dragon Tank or the corpse-eating robot ambulance?

Why would Cheney hide proposed Al Qaeda hit squads from congress?

The New York Times is reporting that the super-secret program Dick Cheney ordered the CIA to conceal from Congress involved a plan to send teams of hit men to hunt down suspected al Qaeda operatives. 

We're told that job was ultimately left to killer drones because death squads proved impractical.

But if that was it, why would Dick Cheney order the CIA deny the program? The U.S. declared war on AQ after 9/11. The CIA has been operating against AQ ever since. You don't have to be a high-ranking intel committee member to know about the drone strikes, you just have to read a newspaper once in a while. Of course, Cheney is notoriously paranoid and secretive. But the administration even sends out press releases about its shiny killer drones.

A former CIA counterterrorism official told TPM Muckraker that there's no legal difference between killing with a drone and shooting or stabbing the victim.

So, it seems safe to assume that the program involved something more than a vague plan to send CIA agents to hunt down suspected terrorists in Afghanistan, or even Pakistan.

July 10, 2009

Torture is a Moral Issue

This is, of course, a truism.  Not the least less true for that, but it still falls in the realm of, "D'uh".

Torture, and the repudiation of it, is part of how I come to be here.  It's, actually, how I came to be lots of places on the web. I was an interrogator, and interrogation instructor for the US Army for 16 years.   I was enlisted from 1993, to 2009.  Half my service was before, "That Tuesday," in Sept. '01, and half after.

I was in the invasion force in April 2003.  A couple of my friends were on the third vehicle to cross the berm, with the armored column of the 3ID (one of them said, "it was all sand in front of us, and when I turned around, there were all the tanks lined up behind me).

Torture is more than a moral  issue to me.  It's personal.

Funny. I had a "quiet war" (if you have to have one, try for a quiet one, trust me on this).  That is, perhaps, funny sad, more than funny ha-ha, but it's still funny.  Then I was home. Away from the hustle and strife.  I didn't have the sound of semi-distant gunfire in the mornings. I wasn't sleeping with a rifle in arm's reach.  I didn't have to put on armor to go to supper.

But the war wasn't over.  My war, to be clicéd, didn't really start until April, 2004.  Just about the time I was released from Active Duty back to the Calif. Army National Guard, when Abu Ghraib hit the news.

It clobbered me. 

Imagine that you are priest.  A good priest.  You know there are some bad apples. You know there are priests who take advantage of their parishioners.  Not just the usual foibles of being human, and committed to a difficult way of life, but those who take advantage of the peculiar relationship they have to those who are in their care.  But you don't think it's endemic. You trust that in the egregious cases the Church will step in to stop things.

Then the scandal breaks. 

That's a crisis of faith.  So too for me was Abu Ghraib.

I was lucky.  Because I was in the Guard, I could speak pretty freely.  I'd been blogging about the war, and politics; while I was in hospitals recovering, but once I was back in the Reserve Component I wasn't worried about AR 600-200, quite so much.  When I wasn't on orders, I was a private citizen.

Torture doesn't work.  As a means of systematically collecting information it fails.  As means of collecting it, "just this once" it might get valid information, but you will never know, and the odds are so highly stacked against you that it's better not to try.

So I went "to and fro" around the web, making the arguments.  It has gotten to the point I can script the response pattern.  I wish it were boring.  I wish I could stop.  I pray it doesn't become an obsession.  A couple of months ago I was in one of the routine pissing matches, and I stumbled on an article which seemed relevant. It was a journal article, and I didn't have a subscription, nor yet a handy library in which to go and read it.

So I did what one does in such situations...  I sent an e-mail to the author, asking if I could get a copy. What I got, in addition, was in invitation to speak at a conference. Dr. Arrigo refuses to participate in them without an interrogator present; because, she says, there is no way to get it right, without one.  I jumped at the chance.

Why?   Because torture is a moral issue?  If not me, who?  If not now, when?

You can see me speaking here:

If you want to see some of the rest of the conference go here

The torture apologists, and the torture mongers are arguing that torture is, at the very least, the lesser  evil.  They are, at the upper bound arguing it's a moral good; even a moral imperative.  They are wrong.  I am in the position of being able to speak to their error.  So I will.  Here, there and everywhere.

It sounds self-aggrandizing, even melodramatic.  What it is, is sort of tedious, and boring. The same arguments, the same responses, the same foolish stupidity, cupidity, and duplicity.  Evil is banal.  All it takes to flourish is the silence of assent.

Well, the war radicalized me, and I brought it home with me.  Someday I hope it's over.  Someday I want the "debate" to be closed. Until that day... I'll just have to keep on keeping on.

Thank you for your support.

July 09, 2009

So much for the surge in Juarez

It shouldn't come as any great surprise that the de facto military occupation of Juarez isn't helping:

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (Reuters) - A massive army surge has failed to calm raging drug gang violence in Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican city on the U.S. border that is at the heart of President Felipe Calderon's drug war.

An influx of 10,000 troops and federal police in March brought temporary calm, but three months later drug murders have resumed and are overtaking 2008 levels, according to police and media tallies. [Reuters]

Of course, the drug warriors will say that the apocalyptic violence is proof that Calderon's brilliant ant-violence plan is working. The cartels are feeling the pressure and turning on each other and the state. That's certainly happening, but few wars are won by attrition. How do we get from tactics that systematically exacerbate the violence to a strategy for bringing the violence under control? The war is costing the cartels money, but they've still got billions upon billions of dollars to spend on weapons and bribes. 

Continue reading "So much for the surge in Juarez" »

Lindsay Beyerstein on CNN: "Stimulus II, The Reckonning" [Video]

Here's the link to my CNN appearance.

Decorated surgical masks in Mexico

When swine flu struck in May, Mexicans tried to protect themselves with surgical masks. Some people turned their masks into canvasses. Designs ranged from the whimsical to the ghoulish to the political.

Morning Coffee - 9 July 2009

Coffee Street Coffee's on at UN Dispatch.

Reader Victor Manfredi contributed the photo, which he took on his recent trip to Brazil.