More stuff you should be reading instead of this lousy blog…

• The head of Iraq’s newly sovereign government apparently killed six prisoners in cold blood just days before the handover. (Eschaton)
• Also via Eschaton, Margaret Cho makes a good point about a proposed ban on photography in New York City Subways and tells another chilling story of security guards using veiled threats to intimidate photographers.
• Colin Powell is such a disappointment to me. I would have voted for him for President a few years ago. Guess it just goes to show you how little we can really judge by appearances. The linked post claims that he knowingly lied during his famous pre-war UN appearance.
• More on Abu Ghraib prison abuses, via Brad DeLong. If you haven’t yet caught Sy Hersh’s latest speech, as I suggested to you yesterday, Holden at Eschaton has posted a few links to audio, video, and text versions, so make sure to read or watch it today.
• Interesting post at DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal, mostly for its description of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game.
• I’m naturally suspicious of any story that comes to me through Instapundit and quotes Ann Coulter, but Annie Jacobsen’s description of her flight from Detroit to Los Angeles gave me the screamin’ heebie jeebies.
• Local boy John Moe has a particular quirky sense of humor that we picked up right away in this Boing Boing post. Read all Possible Follow-up Songs for One-Hit Wonders here.
• Rhetorica has an interesting little nugget about the press’s failure to provide useful information in their coverage of politics.

More stuff you should be reading instead of this lousy blog…

• If the pro-life, pro-family conservatives don’t get royally pissed at the reports of young boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison, they will have conceded the moral high ground – indeed, they will have abandoned the fight altogether. EdCone.com has a link to Sy Hersh’s speech at the ACLU convention. (via Brad DeLong)
• Thanks to Athenae at Eschaton for the link to Dear George: Letters to the President. The site is soliciting and publishing open letters to the President as part of a theatrical performance project. The letters – from both supporters and detractors – are raw, emotional, intelligent, and compelling.
• I was taken aback to see that the President has never used his veto power. The Talent Show further notes the President’s failure to curb federal spending – despite his campaign promises.
• If there weren’t already enough reasons to love Arianna Huffington, the Greek goddess gives us one more as she whips out a wicked Wrath of Khan analogy in her column on Bush’s Presidential Pathologies. The article also summarizes some of Bush’s more egregious flip-flops.
• As you listen to the spin coming from the CIA and the White House about how they’re not to blame for pre-Iraq War intelligence failures, keep this article by David Corn in mind. It details who doubted the intelligence and what their doubts were. It includes the following:

  In a post-invasion interview with The New York Times, [UNSCOM Chief Inspector Hans] Blix questioned why the Bush administration had expected to find large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq. “What surprises me, what amazes me,” he remarked, “is that it seems the military people were expecting to stumble on large quantities of gas, chemical weapons and biological weapons. I don’t see how they could have come to such an attitude if they had, at any time, studied the reports” of the UN inspectors. He added, “Are the reports from here [the United Nations] totally unread south of the Hudson?”

• Nation’s Hit & Run notes PATRIOT Act mission creep.
• Dammit, Ralph! You know, I’ve defended Nader’s right to run for President and I would still do so, because I believe that strong third parties encourage healthy political debate. And if the Democrats can’t overcome Nader’s 3-5% support, they don’t deserve to be in office. But every time I hear Nader speak now it’s in the vein of this testy telephone exchange with Salon’s David Talbot. (DeLong) Nader’s defensive – almost conspiracy-minded – rantings make him look less like a reasonable alternative and more like a bitchy old crank. I really hate that, ‘cause I like a lot of what he has to say, and I have immense respect for his legacy as a consumer advocate. Dammit, Ralph. Grow up, willya?
• Corante scribbles its comments al over a letter from the RIAA to the Senate in support of the abominable INDUCE Act.
• God bless him, The Poor Man actually reads the Select Commitee On Intelligence Iraq Report.
• I’ve been following the story over at Brown Equals Terrorist. Ian Spiers’ story of being intimidated while taking pictures at the Ballard Locks is getting pretty good press coverage lately. What’s especially interesting to me is how he has used the power of the Internet to get his story heard, demonstrating the democratizing power of the blog. Go Ian!

More stuff you should be reading instead of this lousy blog…

• The July issue of Popular Science had a couple of interesting links:

  National Geographic’s MapMachine is an incredibly rich online atlas, with maps of every kind from every corner of this globe and beyond.

  Slooh.com is an online observatory. For a yearly fee, you can get real-time pictures of whatever the Canary Islands telescopes are pointing at. As a member, you can participate in group sessions to decide where the ‘scope will point next, and you can also schedule a short “solo mission” and be master of your own observatory.

• I’ve been hearing a lot lately about Outfoxed, a new documentary that kicks over the slimy rock known as Fox News and shines a light on what crawls out. Holden at Eschaton pulls this chestnut out of the Salon review of the film.
• And, courtesy of the Outfoxed filmmakers, you can read Fox News memos over at Wonkette and judge for yourself whether Fox “bends the rules and twists the news.”
• Man, the guy has cajones the size of Texas. Bush flip-flops on assault rifles. (Eschaton)
• I still don’t trust the big entertainment companies, but the new alliance between the movie and tech industries is cause for cautious optimism. (Ars Technica)
• Political Animal Kevin Drum points a big red arrow at America’s health care system failure.
• Science Blog reports Scientists find 75 percent of red snapper sold in stores is really some other species

More stuff you should be reading instead of this lousy blog…

• I guess when President Bush says that he’s environment-friendly, he’s talking about the environment inside a logging company board room. (via Eschaton)
• The trick with cognitive dissonance is smile a lot and say the words fast so that they sound logical. See Fanatical Apathy for more.
• Hilarious: Newt Gingrich was [Bill} O’Reilly’s first guest tonight & both of them were acting shocked—SHOCKED!!—at the “level of invective” directed against a “sitting President”. See News Hounds for more on what these paragons of civility had to say.
• Brad DeLong asks where the outrage is.
• Richard Dreyfuss has some outrage, but it’s focused on PBS’s censorship in the name of self-preservation. (via Reason Hit & Run)
• There but for the Grace of God… Katherine at Obsidian Wings tries to imagine what life would be like if she weren’t protected by her skin color.
• There is a really illuminating article in The New Republic called Closing of the Presidential Mind. The article describes the backlash to social science that created the neo-conservative movement. Franklin Foer’s column explains quite a few things about the Bush Administration’s approach to policy.
• Ars Technica has posted the latest version of their System Guide. If you’re in the market for a new Windows or Linux box, check out their recommendations for price, performance, and form factor.

VerifiedVoting.org is hosting a national “Computer Ate My Vote” day today. Click the banner below to get info on issues with electronic voting machines…

More stuff you should be reading instead of slumming it at this lousy blog…

• Ron Reagan Jr. will speak at the Democratic Convention on the subject of stem cells, and is quoted in this article as saying he will vote for John Kerry “as a way to defeat Bush”.
• Let me repeat this post by Holden over at Eschaton in its entirety, as it seems to sum up the basic theme of the conservatives’ defense:

  Shorter Andy: The War on Iraq is unjustifiable, but I’m glad we fought it.

• Suspicion that Tom DeLay has been involved in some hinky high-jinks deepens.
• Nice post by Athenae at Eschaton about real values versus poseur values.
• Lotta buzz about postponing election day in the event of a terrorist attack. There’s this at Eschaton, this at MSNBC (via Rhetorica), and this really bothersome post at Hullabaloo.
• Design lessons from Apple’s stores. (Mac News Network)
• This is a couple of days old, but Balta has a nice little rant on the Pentagon’s snubbing of the Supreme Court.
• P2P Watch – Gadgetopia reports that file sharing is still going strong.
• Also interesting is this CNET News story on the iPod’s effect on Microsoft’s approach to DRM. This is part of the problem with so-called digital rights management: the consumers in their media rooms have a funny way of deciding how they want to use their music that doesn’t always fit in with schemes concocted in board rooms.
• The excellent Lawrence Lessig, champion of sensible copyright policy, makes the point here that were fair use to be successfully challenged by the RIAA and others, our First Amendment rights to free speech would be seriously impinged.

More stuff you should be reading instead of pretending that this blog will bring you enlightenment…

• Check out Disinfopedia, the online encyclopedia of propaganda.
• The Importance Of… has a new Category called INDUCE Act. Each day, the site will list a new device or technology that would be threatened by Orrin Hatch’s miserable bill.
• US News has a sickening report on the extent of the miserable conditions at Abu Ghraib prison. (via The Poor Man)
• I miss Atrios’s stuff, but Holden has been a fine fill-in at Eschaton lately. Today, he questions Tom DeLay’s ethics, and snips a bit from a BBC piece on Tony Blair’s ethics. The latter is, I think, especially important to read. The British have a seemingly more-developed moral compass when it comes to holding their own politicians to account. The Beeb’s piece reminds us that many – perhaps most? – of the world outside of the Blair and Bush administrations did not buy into the idea that Iraq needed to be invaded. Despite indications in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report that American intelligence analysts conspired to mislead Congress and the public about Iraq’s weapons-making capabilities, both administrations are now trying the spin that they were misled by their intelligence agencies. Tony Blair goes so far as to claim a “global intelligence failure,” as if that lets these administrations off the hook. But as Dame Pauline Neville-Jones points out, even if we accept that spin, Bush and Blair are ultimately responsible for these failures, and their acceptance of faulty intelligence would indicate their incompetence as leaders. True statesmen – true patriots – accept the responsibility for failure because they understand that “falling on the sword” makes it possible for true reconstruction to begin.
• Kevin Drum busts open the Senate Intelligence Committee report and sees it for what it is – an indictment of the Bush administration and an indication of their complete failure to justify the war.
• Create your own Presidential address. (via Eschaton)
• Bob Schieffer asks Congress to get serious about doing their job to improve the lives of American citizens. (Fox News Hounds)

From the President’s remarks on the Senate Intelligence Committee Report

[L]isten, we thought there was going to be stockpiles of weapons. I thought so; the Congress thought so; the U.N. thought so. I’ll tell you what we do know. Saddam Hussein had the capacity to make weapons. See, he had the ability to make them. He had the intent. We knew he hated America. We knew he was paying families of suiciders. We knew he tortured his own people, and we knew he had the capability of making weapons. That we do know. They haven’t found the stockpiles, but we do know he could make them. And so he was a dangerous man. He was a dangerous man. The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power. America is safer.

Let’s get this straight: we don’t invade another country, destroy its government, kill innocent civilians, endanger our troops, and ruin our military’s ability to respond effectively to additional crises just because some tin-pot dictator could make a WMD. I could make a WMD… theoretically… but I’m not going to make a WMD. Saddam Hussein apparently didn’t make a WMD, or he destroyed his stockpiles. Saddam Hussein wasn’t a dangerous man, he wasn’t capable of putting the US or our allies in grave peril, and the world is not safer because he’s not in power.

I wonder… how many Iraqi civilians would Saddam have killed by now had he stayed in power? Would it have been more than the over 11,000 we’ve killed since January of ‘03? How many of our troops would still be alive or in one piece if Saddam were still in power? How many terrorists have we created because of our reckless actions? By what measure does anyone assert that we’re better off now than we were two years ago?

For some reason today I was thinking of the President’s oft-repeated assertion that “Terrorists hate freedom,” and It was kind of sticking in my craw. The idea just doesn’t make sense to me for lots of reasons, yet the phrase is so appealingly simple that it seems to have embedded itself into the consciousness of politicians and pundits alike, and to have passed by almost without scrutiny.

Here’s one problem I have with the “Terrorists hate freedom” meme: If terrorists hate freedom and terrorists attack America because we have freedom, then the only way to keep America safe would be to either kill all terrorists or eliminate America’s freedom. The first solution doesn’t seem possible, and the second doesn’t seem palatable (though, I could be wrong).

And why would terrorists hate freedom, anyway? What would be the threat to terrorists if freedom were to come to their country? I guess I could understand if a totalitarian state were to be taking arms against us, but for a seemingly rootless and country-less agglomeration of bad actors to declare war on the mere existence of American freedom… that’s an argument that I just can’t follow.

The dangers of accepting the canard are twofold: first, if terrorists hate freedom and America = freedom, then there’s really nothing we can do on our side to stop the terrorists from hating us. They just hate us for who we are and cannot be reasoned with so only the most draconian law enforcement tactics will suffice to keep those crafty terrorists from hurting more Americans.

Secondly, if we accept that terrorists hate freedom, but what terrorists actually hate is, say, our policies, then we will be making America less safe by failing to address the root causes of terror. It’s like pumping air into the tires on your car when you’ve run out of gas… it ain’t gonna work, folks.

Recent events suggest that the Justice Department, Homeland Security, Congress, and law enforcement officials seem to depend on the “terrorists hate freedom” justification to promote and enact evermore infringing attacks on the rights of US citizens. Innocent American citizens are placed on Homeland Security watchlists and subjected to harassment for taking pictures in a public place. Prisoners are held in extra-legal no-mans-lands, without right of due process. Psychological and physical torture of innocents is justified in secret memos. These acts don’t seem to match up with a government concerned with promoting freedom.

Terrorists hate something. It seems likely to me that what they hate is American power and the particular way we project it in the world. It doesn’t seem likely to me that terrorists hate freedom, nor does it seem likely that such a simple-minded analysis adds anything to solving the problem of keeping America safe.

More stuff you really should be reading instead of vainly searching this blog for enlightenment…

• Steve Winwood intentionally releases a song through the P2P networks. Sales surge. RIAA refuses to comment. (Wired News)

  There goes America.

• The House of Representatives fudges the rules so to keep the Patriot Act intact. Your reading habits can be accessed at libraries and book stores and, thanks to gag rules, you can’t be told that you’re under investigation. (via Reason Hit & Run) Democrats chanted “shame, shame, shame” as the voting was held open, but the Republicans apparently were not shamed. (Wired News)
• Digby has a couple of examples of what I would term hysterical overreactions to minor threats. Via the comments, The Donkey documents some more instances of thought crime.
• Sid the Fish has the latest Ash-trocity.
• Then again, Cynthia Tucker expresses hope that all may not be lost, that Americans may not be as willing to give up their liberties as the neo-cons had hoped. (via Brown Equals Terrorist)

  Shame

• Who says it better than a Scot? Rev John Mann says Bush and Blair should be ashamed. (via Eschaton)
• Well, Helen Thomas can say it pretty wel. “The government lies,” says the 83-year-old reporter. Rock on, HT. Tell it like it is. (via Rhetorica)
• Whoops! A rather convenient fire destroyed microfilm of Bush’s service records. The Poor Man has more. Here, too. And here.
• Who cares anyway? After all, the facts don’t matter, says Bush policy director Tim Adams. (DeLong)
• The Donald has probably the best line on The Bin Laden: “Tell me, how is it possible that we can’t find a guy who’s 6-foot-6 and supposedly needs a dialysis machine?” Trump said. “Can you explain that one to me? We have all our energies focused on one place – where they shouldn’t be focused.” (via Eschaton) Maybe it’s because they’re letting him get away. (Sid’s Fishbowl)

  Confusion

• The Poor Man has a few choice words for Andrew Sullivan and others who don’t know much about history and know fuck-all about reading poetry. Brad DeLong backs him up and reprints the Langston Hughes poem “Let America Be America Again,” which is pretty hard to read without getting emotional.
• Hmmm… Perhaps Saddam didn’t gas his own people after all. (via Eschaton)
• I’m with Sid the Fish and Eschaton’s Tena on this one. Tom Ridge announced at a press conference today that al Qaeda operatives were preparing to attack the US, only Homeland Security doesn’t know when, where, or how. Now, what the hell am I supposed to do with information like that? Of course, we all know what the cumulative effect will be of these meaningless attack warnings, and Eschaton’s Holden gives it to us in graphic form.
• Furthermore, Aethena at Eschaton doesn’t get claims that we know what al Qaeda’s thinking anyway

  Body Counts

• Iraqis: 400 killed and 1600 wounded in Iraq in the last 10 days. Perhaps 10,000 total casualties since the start of the war. (via Sid’s Fishbowl) In fact, Iraq Body Count reports between 11,164 and 13,118 civilians killed since January, 2003.

• Coalition forces: 1000 dead, 5394 wounded. (via icasualties.org)

  Fafblog

• Read Fafblog. Read Fafblog NOOOOOOW! Final words from Giblets, Medium Lobster, and Fafnir on Kerry’s VP pick. Also, Fafnir’s terrorist warning and Giblets’s new favorite blogger.