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Tuesday, May 18, 2004
MOD_PANTS 
| | The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld¹s decision embittered the America intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of elite combat units, and hurt America¹s prospects in the war on terror. |
| | Not only did Global Security archive the original, but the HTML on the page source shows the original PUB_DATE and the new MOD_DATE. |
| | They forgot that their HTML software kept track of modifications to the page. Doh. They thought they'd edit it, not change the date on the memo, and we'd never notice. |
| | Oh, DoD!! ... Your underpants are showing! |
| | That said, I don't see the big difference, or the Big Deal. As both memos said, |
| | No responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses as witnessed in the recent photos and videos. |
| | No, it's those irresponsible officials, right? |
| | My first question is, What's happening in Guantanamo? We've got hundreds of prisoners in lockdown there. What do responsible officials not want us to know about them? |
| | Perspective. Terrorism is terrible. The Bad Guys we're fighting (some locked in Guantanamo) are really bad. |
| | So: How much and exactly what kind of bad stuff are we permitted to do by the relative worseness of the enemy? |
| | And how many more enemies are we making by doing whatever bad stuff we feel justified in doing? |
| | It's all about moral accounting, folks. Factor everything in. Make the equation as big as you can. Include all the perceptions on the part of neutrals who will be made enemies by what they perceive, and by the contagions of rumors that spread constantly in war zones. All of it. |
| | Remember to factor stupidity in there too. Taking pictures of humiliation and torture is as stupid as a president recording his own criminal cover-up. And far more likely. |
| | Then ask if the the war was, and still is, worth what we're spending in lives, money, respect and other assets, fungible and otherwise. |
| | Ask if the likelihood of a terrorist act against the U.S. has been reduced. Are we safer now? Will we ever be? |
| | Remember that war, at its best, is a lesser evil, and that justifying it often (though not always — remember Hitler) requires inflating the evil of the enemy. |
| | "I have become what I beheld and I am content that I have done right.," said Elliot Ness in David Mamet's screenplay for The Untouchables. That was right after Ness killed the very evil Frank Nitti by pushing him off the roof of a building. |
| | The difference in war is that innocents die. Saddam killed innocents by the tens (or perhaps hundreds) of thousands. We kill innocents by the dozens. Saddam killed innocents intentionally. We kill them unintentionally. Saddam's Iraq was a terrorist state. Our Iraq is merely terrifying. |
| | I'm not offering answers here. Just truthful questions. |
Burlingame's finest airport
| | SFO has a web site, it turns out. I dunno why that surprises me. I was looking for something that SFO spokesman Ron Wilson said a few years ago. Something like, "All airports will be under construction until the end of time." It was a good line, but I can't find it. |
| | In fact, I can't find a "spokesman" any more, either. Or even a "Director of Community Affairs," which Wilson used to be. |
| | Who is the voice of SFO these days? I see here that Wilson is now a consultant with ABC News. A year ago the spokesman was Mike McCarron. |
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