externality and free rider

There's a good deal of discussion in public policy that centers around provisions for a variety of "public goods". Some of these indeed are public goods, in the economic sense of the term. For examples
1) Common defence
2) Education
3) Public roads and transportation
4) General health
5) Assistance for disaster or unanticipated events (acts of war or terror, victims of crimes, natural disasters, catastrophic illness or injury principably)

We may add to these things that are considered important enough for social or cultural reasons that add costs to others when they are incorrectly funded, such as the re-alignment of large numbers of specialists to new specializations when the economy changes and their special talents and educations become less economically viable, or the provision of funds for retirement, health care, and education. These latter become important because when they are not provided, they deprive others of heuristic benefits and even productive and measurable incentives and gains.

Most of these are things that have long been known and thought to be in the public good by administrations stretching back to the Northwest Ordinance or the Massachusetts charter of government in the US (in particular education). They have continued, in various forms, to be approved of as necessary operations of the state by all but the most strident anarchists or libertarians. What I think needs to be questioned is the distinctions between properly allocating funds to pay for externalities and to cover the free rider problem, often by mandating them through taxes or forced savings, and the supposed need for governments to administer these funds once mandated into existence. For example, it is probably necessary for governments to price education at some minimal level such that its citizens will provision for it appropriately and not diminish or harm the chances of success and aplomb for their children. It is not necessary that governments run schools, or if they do, that they should do so within mandates that excludes competition. Similarly, it is probably necessary that some minimal accommodation be made for public health by individuals. It is not necessary that governments should determine how this minimal accommodation be dispensed or spent.

I bring this up because I'm still working through the cap-trade and carbon tax problem. Basically I think it will be acknowledged by most economists that pollution is a negative and undesirable externality. It is possible that if people were made aware of the costs of their energy consumption or food consumption or the amount of waste or pollution produced to make goods for their enjoyment that they would demand to price in these costs to be paid by the producers, and thus be able to have the cost of pollutants paid for. This does not however appear to be a pressing concern outside of maintaining visibly clean water or air. I accept that carbon should be regarded as a pollutant, or at least as undesirable, when unnecessarily produced as a byproduct of human activity. If we must have energy, it would be suitable to produce it in ways that are renewable or have fewer negative costs involved. So it makes sense to me to price in those costs in addition to the tremendous benefit of having cheap energy. As with health care however, it seems that there is a sense of entitlement to this. We seem to assume we should be entitled to have cheap gasoline and coal-fired power plants that are so cheap and so far away just as we assume that our employers should provide first dollar health care coverage for us. This makes it incredibly hard to state openly and plainly the political point of any reforms. For health care the idea of a good reform (from my perspective) is that consumers will pay more and share the cost of their health care. That is the essential point. Likewise, with energy and fuel costs, they will have to pay more. Again, that is the point. The idea is to decrease wasteful or irrational consumption choices by consumers while still maintaining their ability to consume the necessary productions of energy or health care. Instead we are promised that it will not cost us more. I think it may be entirely reasonable to set up a net zero price model for energy, to raise the tax on energy production where it contains pollutants, and simultaneously lower the taxes on income or payrolls such that the tax will become a more voluntary means of generating revenues and will, in effect, pay for itself when it reduces the market's consumption of wasteful or harmful goods (rather than the more expensive route of trying to regulate and police the market and to mandate what goods may or may not be produced, such as through CAFE standards). But without the ability to make these views plain to people, with their resistance to them and the resistance to the idea that they ultimately may be the ones making some choice about their participation in particular markets, the natural result of administrators of public policy is to make the choices for them and to tax in other ways in order to pay for those choices, strictly limiting the ability of the public to price its own relevant interests and values by diverting more money toward problems. Often rather than diverting more money toward solutions or benefits (the broken window fallacy). The costs of our choices do not diminish or magically go away when we make them through public institutions and pay for them with taxes anymore than they do when we refuse to allow those public institutions to make these choices (as we have done thus far in the health care debate). We still must face them.

Top 20

1) Kansas
2) Duke
3) Syracuse

4) West Virginia
5) Purdue

6) BYU
7) Texas
8) Kentucky
9) Kansas State
10) Ohio State
11) Wisconsin

12) Villanova
13) Missouri
14) Maryland

15) Georgetown
16) Baylor
17) Xavier

18) Clemson
19) California
20) Marquette

Michigan State, Florida State, and Tennessee are right after this.

Teams I'm leery of that I have up there: Texas, Maryland, Missouri, Xavier. All have few wins and losing records against quality opponents (top 50). Wisconsin sucks on the road. So does Cal. Not sure what to make of OSU either. The Turner injury didn't seem to hurt them ranking wise, but they've got a couple losses and bad games that aren't as indicative of how well they're capable of playing on the road or against quality teams (4-3 against top 25 is pretty good, especially since Kentucky has yet to play any games against the top 25).

history is trickier than the present

I have some quibbles with the Hiroshima analogy. Mostly because I think there's a modest utilitarian argument to be made that the nukes saved some lives in the end calculation and reduced the overall suffering in the process. And the net effect of them was to be so terrifying, so horrible in power, that it more or less ended the major (in particular European) world powers fighting each other in massive destructive conflicts as they had for centuries prior as the cause of much world suffering. It didn't end war, and really, what will? But the types of wars it ended make the devastation in Iraq from the "shock and awe campaign" of wanton destruction we engaged in look like a picnic.

I don't think it's the best case to be made. It's possible there were other ways to end the war just as swiftly. My actual "numerical" or utilitarian concern isn't necessarily even massive American casualties from the enormous two phased invasion that we had planned for the main islands of Japan and the sustained bombing and naval campaigns alongside them, but for Japanese civilians from starvation and continued firebombing, as well as any eventual invasion deaths they would suffer in needless combat, all of which would vastly exceed our own pain and tolls, to the possibility of millions of deaths, not "mere" hundreds of thousands. We were blockading Japan with unrestricted submarine warfare. Rather successfully at that. So much so that we were unable to press the German navy for using the same tactics as a war crime because the Japanese lawyers would argue at their own war crimes tribunal, quite reasonably, that Chester Nimitz should be brought up on the same charge. I also don't think the fact that the Japanese leadership and generalship was brought up as heinous war criminals, many of them executed or imprisoned for their crimes, makes any difference in this calculation, other than to suggest that it would have been difficult to secure the surrender of their nation prior to compounding suffering and defeats. That we were fighting "evil men" with the powers of a large and powerful nation and its resources behind them doesn't make our own evil tactic or strategy any better.

The same is true now. Al Qaeda and its leaders may indeed be "evil men" in the same vein, criminals of a different order, but it is no better of us to resort to barbarous tactics and strategy to defeat them. To compare it to torture, I think I can see the moral equivalency involved in claiming "anything goes in war" and that these two should be equally regarded as falling under that umbrella. I'm not so sure I would say that "anything goes" in order to defend the atomic bomb. It's by far one of the weaker arguments in its favor and it doesn't excuse other things we were doing, also deemed out of military necessities at the time, that may have been just as bad if not worse (blockades, firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo for example). If it might "save lives" or more broadly reduce suffering of all involved, then I'm prepared to defend something as the least bad option of a bad situation (and a global shooting war is, quite simply, one of the worst "bad situations" you could imagine).

I don't think torture can save lives, certainly not enough lives and suffering to merit the excuses. As with the atomic bomb, there are other alternatives that might have worked or might have been more useful. Unlike the bomb, we have long experience with counter-factuals that supply us with the idea that these alternatives DO work, DID work, and WILL work in the form of other methods of interrogation that have provided us with intelligence and verifiable results across the entire scope of human history giving us far less uncertainty and far less moral quibbling to say that something is still clearly a violation of humanity to undertake. That's even before acknowledging that torturing prisoners in the immediate tactic sense to prevent some major attack from happening say, does not do much to prevent the next one. The atomic bomb at least ended the war. It's possible to say with a counter-factual that we could have done it with a lesser price, but I am not sure that the facts prior to Hiroshima and the invasion of Manchuria bear that out. Perhaps that assessment is incorrect. I do think lots of historians disagree with me. I'm not really sure that I am convinced of it myself (as I said, it is a modest calculation rather than a strong one). I am convinced that there isn't significant evidence to suggest that we need to abuse captured and helpless enemies of the state. Either to elicit strategically important information from them or to satisfy some bloodlust vendetta against them.

I didn't need another 280 pages to tell me that Yoo and Bybee (and others) made this possible simply because they didn't care about the law or the justice system that they were supposed to uphold out of legal and political expediency to justify something that they were told and assured we needed to do. The view of the President's national security power as unchecked and dictatorial, even to the point of threatening a man's family with bodily harms or the inflicting of actual pain and suffering upon that same man, is not something we should want Presidents to actually possess. There is no price and no "worst bad situation" for which that becomes justified as official state policy. If some CIA agent goes rogue and beats the living hell out of a terrorist someday, and somehow saves New York from blowing up, then we can have this discussion about whether or not to charge that agent (I still think we should. Though it's possible we wouldn't be able to bring ourselves, as a society, to convict this person of a crime). But if someone tells him its okay and, indeed necessary, ahead of time, someone in charge, that person should be tried and convicted of a crime. Cruelty should not be made into official state policy. To do that invites the image of a boot crushing a man's face for an eternity. To use a weapon of mass destruction, a bomb of immense power, upon a city while engaged in a war, is indeed a hateful and cruel act. As is the act of engaging in the war itself. It might still be regarded, in some small measure, as a necessary one. For that, we have the misfortune of not possessing good counter-factual evidence with which to argue against ourselves for an eternity. I can suggest, as with the history of torture, that we now at least may have the opportunity to have learned from that event, drawing out from it as an error if we wish to do so, and accepting that we must work diligently and dedicate ourselves to the eradication and prevention of massive wars between the nations while we possess the weapons capable of annihilating one another. Of the arguments against torture, this is the strongest one against using the atomic bomb in August 1945: that it must never again happen and be permitted in our names. We have learned from a considerable body of history of what use is torture to the state and its people, and that history is less than favorable to the view that it "saves lives" or is "necessary" to gather intelligence.

All this does is add to that considerable ledger. At some point, I imagine people will be able to read more of it. The stuff that's already been released (the original torture memos which this investigation was looking at), should chill one's blood with the amount of unchecked authority it allows for by the President and his agents in the pursuit of "national security", and in the specific and grotesque manner that each approval is "tested" against whatever legal or ideological principle was applied and ultimately found acceptable.


As to the revised version, it sounds like it boils down to "you had to be there" as the excuse. I think, in so far as the rogue agent using torture in the field on a captured prisoner, this is correct. We can still reasonably disagree that their judgment was correct and could argue that merit or demerit of that case and its particulars in a court room or a Congressional hearing or some like forum. But those rogue agents weren't the ones targeted for investigation by the OPR. "Their" lawyers were. The people who are supposed to provide dispassionate advice on whether their actions could be interpreted as a violation of the law or not. I don't think we can reasonably approve of state empowered actors removed from the emotion and tension of that terrible situation being face to face with a man who wants to kill American citizens and knows (with a certainty which we never have possessed) how or where they might do it next, that we can construct an appropriate legal architecture to protect the men in the room from "doing whatever they feel they need to do" that would protect the men who are abused in that room from being abused with malice and impunity rather than with the understanding that it would have to be justified at some later date and held to account. It would seem more appropriate to let the American public decide this after the fact in accordance with the established laws of our country and those international treaties which we have ratified on the subject of torture and let our ideals govern over our passions and values.

Yoo's argument, rather than the OPR's justification of it, appears instead to be something like "we don't know what 'is' is". Which was laughable when Clinton tried it (over something far more humorous than the dark and twisted world of John Yoo). We perfectly well knew what was and wasn't torture in the legal sense because we had tried or attempted to try people in a court of law for doing many of the things we did. We even tried some of the Americans who did them at Abu Ghraib. You don't need to be Eric Blair to describe and figure out these things.

things you notice when you flick around the boob tube

"Wanker" has to be bleeped out on cable? Really? "Bollocks" usually isn't.

CPAC who?

Ron Paul won the straw poll. At last, our long national nightmare of unprincipled hypocritical conservatives is over?

Except Sarah Palin managed to get up in front of a collection of tea partiers and rail and ramble about the importance of the military establishment and the police state mentality. And almost every speaker at CPAC was a hypocrite, either directly supporting, voting for, or indirectly supporting through their contact with Wall Street, the very things they say were useless and wasteful programs carrying us toward socialism (this includes people like Glenn Beck, Palin, etc). Maybe these conservatives had discovered their religion of fiscal restraint by the time the auto bailouts took place. But it's kind of too late by then to fight for their honor and expect us to take it seriously. I myself have rather ambivalent views that would be difficult to explain to the average person and probably take me outside the Paul-ite consensus. I'd have preferred to use monetary policy to provide stimulus to the economy in the short run simply because the banking system required it in order to continue to function, and the banking paralysis was a key player in the aggregate demand drops we suffered both in 1931 and in 2008. A direct loan to specific banks however did not make sense and regardless of what Obama, Paulson, or anybody else in government says now or at the time, did not need to be done. Walking people through the economics behind the Great Depression is not exactly fun and will result in many a glazed look in the eyes of the listener. So it's much easier to look annoyed when the government "wastes" hundreds of billions of dollars, and I can accept that this is the public reaction. What's not funny about all that is that the same government that wasted that money is composed in part by the people who are now telling us how dumb that was who helped spend it. That shit is just aggravating.

The fault lines once you get outside of the fiscal messaging of restraint and budgetary control continue to mount. I don't take it seriously that Paul and his various acolytes were briefly accepted into the fold because the economics have taken the forefront for the time being. I am myself am now more of a Gary Johnson fan, I like my obscure cranks who are at least principled politically (makes them easier to judge at least without as much of the hypocrisies). Still, you need look no further than their own messages once you escape the budget to find out that nobody in the GOP/conservative wing of the country takes Paul's libertarianism/Constitutionalism seriously. Police powers: More, screw those inconvenient old mutterings in the 4th and 8th amendments. Have you seen those evil terrorists and criminals who hate us all? They don't care about our stupid laws and neither should we! Gays: Burn in hell and we need a federal amendment to protect the majority straight people! DADT: keep it. Flag burning: we need an amendment! Censorship: get Miley Cyrus off the air (we're not satisfied to rally against gangsta rap like idiots, we're now policing the Disney channel's content)! Schools: Must "teach the controversy"! (this is one point I get really annoyed with Paul and have thus moved onto the Johnson train. The Civil War/federalism debate and gold standard stuff doesn't get me hot either) War: Bomb Iran! America's global might and empire must remain supreme! Israel: can do no wrong! We should wear their colours proudly too! Immigrants: go back where you came from and speak American! These are basic policy positions of the various wings that make up the GOP establishment. Most of them are so radical to any sensible form of libertarian as to be considered insane.

And that division is even before you get to the point where most of that establishment presided over and indeed fueled a massive growth in government spending, even for their supposedly reviled social welfare purposes. Or the hypocrisy of claiming to be a party based on "limited government" while having and demanding ever more legal and enforceable power over the individual on the matters of social taste and culture. I'll give the Democrats some credit. They may not have been able to pass their agenda as successfully while in power so far, but at least most of the time they're honest about what they want to spend more of the taxpayer's money on when they're not in power (education, health care, etc). You ought to know what you're getting if you're measuring the policies on the merits of cost/benefits and so on (naturally in many cases I am opposed). Though I think we can agree the frustration and failure over the diminishing power and lack of accountability over "national security" policies has been a considerable and spectacular problem of that same messaging.

I can sympathize the common libertarian's feeling of being out in the political wilderness. It would be nice, for us anyway, if a major political movement took our views more seriously and actually tried to implement some of them in order to restrict the powers of the state in many crucial ways. But the reality is that neither political party is likely to be the vehicle in which to defeat a government too often beholden to powerful (often corporate) interests. The same party and movement that will embrace such views will fail to execute them once in office because it has major sponsors to keep happy rather than principles to uphold. Thus the appropriate place for the libertarian is generally to watch the lions try to kill each other and find it amusing when political parties spout off about different rhetorical things as though there was some great principle being violated all while they themselves did the same thing not long ago.

Watchdog. Gadfly. Annoying policy crank. "You want jobs?" Don't look at the government, they actually cannot do anything significant about it in the short run. That sort of thing. That's us. There's a reason that sort of view is unpopular. Maybe it's a little too cynical. Maybe it's a little too honest or principled to work in politics. You're supposed to promise the moon and deliver a fossilized piece of horse dung in politics and that's not something "we" do. If that's the case, so be it. Accept and embrace the role as the outsider and quit pretending that somehow all these unreasonable people who want government big enough to control our social lives or to provide for social welfare for all (not merely the poor and downtrodden), have somehow repented of these views and conceded their folly on the road to some libertarian Damascus. Reading Ayn Rand won't make these people convert into a libertarian overnight (and in my view, won't even make people into very good libertarians, it certainly doesn't appear to make people into very good people). So we should not get too excited when Paul wins a straw poll (with no real opposition anyway, I mean seriously, Romney? Palin?) or when Ayn Rand and Hayek book sales go up through the roof. Wait for the results to see if there's any real payoff from such things. Hayek and Rand have been around a long, long time in political terms. History has shown there won't be much of a victory parade worth mentioning.

quick hitting #2

Torture and just war theory

That, despite the theological haranguing and relative length for a blog posting, needs to be read and distributed widely amongst the predominately Christian supporters of torture techniques. It is easy for me to arrive a moral conclusion that torture is wrong, and easier still to arrive at a conclusion that it serves no greater strategic or tactical advantages to deploy it. Only temporal feelings of revenge and malice are left sated, and no great goals are achieved or security defended by inflicting pain and suffering upon the captured enemy. It is even strictly advised against CENTURIES ago by my nome de plume ("Treat captives well, and care for them."), indicating that it's not the progress of time that has made man a better creature or better governor over his nature.

Another substantive criticism, one which is not often raised when major political messages are made, is to imagine the tactics or methods being used by our enemies and to consider how we would feel, what we would find them to be, under those altered circumstances. That critique isn't strictly limited to torture advocacy, I think for example it applies to people complaining about the Citizens United decision as well, but it seems strange that "American exceptionalism" is taken to mean that we are somehow ennobled as to not be corrupted by the same tactics and methods that, if left to our enemies, are to be denigrated and punished. It seemed to me that one of the greater and lasting points of America's unique experiment, at the time, was to recognize that men were fallible and to place as little power as was deemed necessary into men of power so that they could not be twisted with aspirations to abuse that power as though they were immune to its influence, which is the precise opposite of this new claim. In any case, since it seems pretty clear from most polling data I've seen that our staunchest supporters of this are Christians (or claim to be), it likewise seems essential that the arguments of theology that they rely upon to justify such unjustifiable actions are debated and smashed down by other Christians.

They're not likely to listen to me, at least not in my experience.

And they're not likely at all to care about the substance of their arguments; that these tactics of torture and violence produce some sort of positive result justifying their actions, a position which can be demonstrated to be false, but for which evidence to that effect will be ignored. Mostly because torture serves deeper and darker impulses than efficacy and strategic provisions of security in the first place, and those more reasoned arguments are only raised to provide a shield against acknowledging openly these dark impulses as existing, thus maintaining a precious illusion of immunity from them. (ie, when we do it, it's "enhanced interrogation" but when the Japanese, the Khmer Rouge, the Gestapo, or the Inquisition did it, it was evil and hateful torture)

Update: I'm not sure what's going on with the link at Sullivan's blog. It's still in my feed reader, but it seems to be inaccessible at the actual website.

For the time being I'll just post the text below.

To have lived in an America where its former vice-president can boast of supporting the torture of human beings is tragic and terrifying enough. For me and many others, this is not America. As a former president said of the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib,

“This is not America. America is a country of justice and law and freedom and treating people with respect.”

But it is more than disturbing, especially as we begin Lent, to watch a Catholic cable channel, EWTN, present a self-described Catholic, Marc Thiessen, defending torture on Catholic grounds as compatible with the Magisterium of the Church. Now I am not one to criticize Catholics who in good conscience dissent from the Magisterium on some topics, because I do so myself. I certainly do not deny that I am in conflict with the Magisterium on the question of homosexuality. This is not true of Marc Thiessen, as he is interviewed in an extremely supportive fashion by Raymond Arroyo, a Catholic media figure prominent enough to have been given the only English language interview with Pope Benedict XVI.

As the interview happens, Catholics keep calling in to protest, as Arroyo notices. He never challenges the absurdity that waterboarding isn't torture. He never brings up the Church's own horrifying past with respect to the use of torture, including the stress positions defended by Thiessen today. But the Catechism is very clear about this:

Torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity.

Notice that torture for a Catholic includes "moral violence," in which a human being's body is not even touched - the kind of sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, or crippling total isolation deployed by the US government for months at a time. Subjecting someone to weeks of sleep deprivation as was done to al-Qhatani, or freezing human beings to states of near-deadly hypothermia, let alone threatening to crush the testicles of a prisoner's child, as John Yoo said was within the president's legal and constitutional authority in the war on terror, is obviously at the very least moral violence. The idea any of it is somehow defensible as a Catholic position is so offensive, so absurd, so outrageous it beggars belief.

Moreover, the US Catholic Bishops have also made their position quite clear. From Dr. Stephen Colecchi, Director, Office of International Justice and Peace, Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops:

"Torture is about the rights of victims, but it is also about who we are as a people. In a statement on Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, issued in preparation for our recent national elections [2008], the bishops reminded Catholics that torture is 'intrinsically evil' and 'can never be justified.' There are some things we must never do. We must never take the lives of innocent people. We must never torture other human beings."

This is not a hedged statement. It is a categorical statement that what Thiessen is defending is, from a Catholic point of view, intrinsically evil and something that cannot be done under any circumstances. Pope John Paul II's Enclyclical, Veritatis Splendor, contains the following passage:

"... 'there exist acts which per se and in themselves, independently of circumstances, are always seriously wrong by reason of their object'. ... 'whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity' ... 'all these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honour due to the Creator.'"

The notion of the integrity of the human person, of human dignity, is integral to the Catholic faith. We are all made in the image of God, imago Dei. The central and divine figure in our faith, Jesus of Nazareth, was brutally tortured. He was also robbed of dignity, forced to wear a mocking crown of thorns, sent to carry a crippling cross through the streets of Jerusalem, mocked while in agony, his body exposed naked and twisted in the stress position known as crucifixion - which was often done without nails by Romans so that the death was slow and agonizing in the way stress positions are designed to be. Ask John McCain. That the Catholic church in the Inquisition deployed these techniques reveals the madness and evil that can infect even those institutions purportedly created to oppose all such things.

Human dignity is reflected in the Geneva Conventions which bars outrages on human dignity against prisoners in captivity. Here is an iconic photograph of an individual robbed of all human dignity:

This technique was not invented by Lynndie England. It was also used at Gitmo and directly authorized by the man Thiessen worked for. Forced nudity is another way in which the human being is robbed of dignity:



This photograph is particularly striking since it so closely mimics in its form the way in which the Romans exposed Jesus on the cross. Forced nudity of this kind was also directly authorized by Thiessen's bosses. The argument that these techniques were somehow invented by low-level soldiers on the night-shift and had nothing whatsoever to do with the waiving of Geneva or the specific techniques authorized by the last president is simply, flatly, demonstrably untrue. We have the memos and the documents and the Red Cross Report and we have the unanimous conclusion of the Senate Armed Services Committee Report:

"The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military dogs to intimidate them only appeared in Iraq after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and GTMO. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officers conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in IUS military custody."

What was done to human beings under the CIA program that Thiessen's boss, Cheney, has repeatedly and proudly insisted he supported and authorized and that Thiessen is now promoting in his new book, was far worse. Waterboarding, which Thiessen describes as the worst of the tortures, was not, in fact, the worst. Sleep deprivation - another medieval torture technique - can be far more grueling. Alex Massie has a recent post on the subject which I urge you to read. It contains this description from a torture victim subjected to sleep deprivation under the apartheiid regime:

"It is the equivalent of bear-baiting, and we banned that centuries ago. I was kept without sleep for a week in all. I can remember the details of the experience, although it took place 35 years ago. After two nights without sleep, the hallucinations start, and after three nights, people are having dreams while fairly awake, which is a form of psychosis. By the week's end, people lose their orientation in place and time - the people you're speaking to become people from your past; a window might become a view of the sea seen in your younger days. To deprive someone of sleep is to tamper with their equilibrium and their sanity."

It lasts for what seems like for ever. In one case under the direction of Thiessen's boss, Dick Cheney, a prisoner was subjected to 960 hours of it, with a few short breaks. Here is what Marc Thiessen's boss, Dick Cheney, supported, from the Bradbury memo:

“The primary method of sleep deprivation involves the use of shackling to keep the detainee awake,” wrote Bybee’s eventual replacement, Steven Bradbury, on March 10, 2005. “In this method, the detainee is standing and is handcuffed, and the handcuffs are attached by a length of chain to the ceiling.” The detainee’s feet are shackled to a bolt in the floor, giving him a “two-to-three-foot diameter of movement.” His hands “may be raised above the level of his head, but only for a period of up to two hours.” His weight is “borne by his legs and feet during sleep deprivation,” ensuring that he had to keep awake, for if he “los[t] his balance” from exhaustion he would feel “the restraining tension of the shackles.”

[...]According to the memo, the “maximum allowable duration for sleep deprivation” is “180 hours,” or seven and a half days, “after which the detainee must be permitted to sleep without interruption for at least eight hours.”

A footnote to the memo indicated that there was an associated technique of keeping a detainee awake through “horizontal sleep deprivation.” In that technique, “the detainee’s hands are manacled together and the arms placed in an outstretched position — either extended beyond the head or extended to either side of the body — and anchored to a far point on the floor in such a manner that the arms cannot be bent or used for either balance or comfort.” Interrogators would place similar restraints on the detainee’s legs. “The position is sufficiently uncomfortable to detainees to deprive them of unbroken sleep, while allowing their lower limbs to recover from the effects of standing sleep deprivation,” Bradbury wrote.

This is not just torture; it is sadism and cruelty that any Catholic of any kind must find abhorrent. It is so close to crucifixion it chills the soul and shocks the conscience. Here is an FBI description of the treatment of a human being at Guantanamo Bay - an FBI eye-witness description - of what was done to a human being made in the image of God, under the direct authority of Thiessen's boss:

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position on the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more.'' The agent also described military police manipulating the temperatures in detainees' cells. One was kept in air conditioning so frigid ``the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold.'' ''When I asked the MPs what was going on, I was told that interrogators from the day prior had ordered this treatment,'' the agent wrote. On another occasion, the same agent saw an ''almost unconscious'' prisoner in a room where the temperature was ''probably well over 100 degrees'' -- and a pile of his hair on the floor. The detainee ``had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night.''

Again this was at Gitmo, and cannot even be attached to defenseless scapegoats as at Abu Ghraib, because that prison was monitored directly by the government of the United States in a program the former vice-president "strongly supported" and which Thiessen is now defending on a Catholic cable channel.

On the show, Thiessen argues that this kind of treatment of human beings is compatible with Catholic just war theory, because the hundreds of prisoners subjected to these techniques - many of whom were innocent and none of whom had been given fair trials with due process to make even a preliminary assessment of whether they were terrorists at all - knew of impending plots and therefore were still technically fighting the US and metaphorically on the battlefield.

First off, remember that just war theory defends warfare as a last resort act of defense. The Vatican opposed the Iraq war on those grounds. Even on the battlefield, just war theory requires that the force used be minimal to the goal of self-defense and proportional to the force being fought. The idea that a combatant, already taken out of combat, shackled in a cell, defenseless and weaponless, represents a version of a battlefield threat proportional to the use of torture is so outside any understanding of Catholic teaching it really does quite simply shock the conscience.

Secondly, every prisoner captured in war of any kind may have information related to pending attacks. Many may have been briefed about future operations. Leading commanders captured may know a huge amount about what may be coming. In the Cold War, nuclear annihilation of the entire country was at stake. But Geneva explicitly bars such acts of torture under any circumstances, and explicitly makes the case that no impending threat can justify its use, or anything that can remotely be seen as similar to its use. The language is broad and sweeping for a reason. It is not broad and sweeping so that governments can argue that the need to use "severe mental or physical pain or suffering" to extract information legitimately allows them to explore how far they can go. It is broad and sweeping in order to tell such officials that they cannot and should not go anywhere near it under any circumstances.

And before we get the argument that these prisoners are somehow not eligible for such treatment because they are terror suspects not uniformed soldiers, let me repeat yet again the simple fact that the baseline protections against torture and abuse and outrages on human dignity are not just reserved for formal prisoners of war in uniform.

The baseline provisions of Article 3 apply to any prisoner of any kind, including irregulars out of uniform, including terrorists fighting guerrilla wars. In the past the US has actually prosecuted the use of almost identical enhanced interrogation techniques" against irregulars out of uniform as serious war criminals. One defense of such techniques by the deployers of "enhanced interrogations" were that

(c) That the acts of torture in no case resulted in death. Most of the injuries inflicted were slight and did not result in permanent disablement.

The United States executed those responsible for these techniques in 1948, and yet all these decades later, we have a vice-president and his speech writer going on television to brag about them.

More to Thiessen's point that torturing is a legitimate form of self-defense in just war theory, let me again reiterate the US Catholic Bishops' spokesman's statement on the matter:

Torture is 'intrinsically evil' and 'can never be justified.' There are some things we must never do. We must never take the lives of innocent people. We must never torture other human beings.

Then we have the astonishing argument from Thiessen that the torture-victims in the Cheney program he supported were grateful for being tortured, because when they were forced beyond what they could endure - which, of course, is Thiessen's unwitting admission that what he was doing was definitionally torture - they were grateful. They were grateful because their duty to Allah had been fulfilled and they were then free to spill their guts. They had done their religious duty and had been brought to a spiritual epiphany that allowed them to tell us so much.

There is much to say about this but let me on Ash Wednesday simply remember the Catholic church's own shameful history of torture. It was done, according to the Inquisitors, as a way to free the souls of the tortured, to bring them to a religious epiphany in which they abandoned heresy and saved themselves from eternal damnation. It is hard for modern people to understand this, but as a student in college of the years in which my own homeland used torture to procure religious conversion, it is important to remember that the torturers sincerely believed that what they were doing was in the best interests of the tortured. In fact, it was a sacred duty to torture rather than allow the victims to die and live in hell for eternity, a fate even worse than the agonies of stress positions or even burning at the stake. Why? Because the torture they would endure in hell would be eternal, while the torture on earth would not last that long.

This is not an exact parallel to the way in which Thiessen defends torture. But the meme that it somehow relieved the victims, that it liberated them, that it helped them to embrace giving information without conflict with their religious faith is horribly, frighteningly close to this ancient evil. For a Catholic to use this argument on a Catholic television program and to invoke the Magisterium of the Church in its defense is simply breath-taking in its moral obtuseness.

Today is a day for repentance. It is not a day for me to condemn anyone else, given my own failings and sins. And I want to repent today for those many occasions when my anger at what has happened, and my own profound guilt in unwittingly supporting those who made this happen, has gotten the best of me. On a blog, anger can run fast and deep and I will pray today for forgiveness for intemperance. My essays - written over time and in a different rubric - take care not to do this, as evidenced here and here. People do evil most of the time because they think they are doing good. In fact, the greatest evils have been committed in the name of good.

But what has happened in this country, what we have allowed ourselves to do to others, innocent and guilty, is something for which I believe repentance is necessary. As Christians and as Catholics, we are required to follow Our Lord's impossible example and not just love our friends, but to love our enemies. This does not mean pacifism; and I have a long, long record of supporting what I believe were just wars. I mean understanding that war is always evil even when it is necessary, but that some things, like torture, abuse and dehumanizing of others under our total control, are never justified.

And once done, once perpetrated, they damage the souls of the torturers as profoundly as they destroy their victims.

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

quick hitting

Looks like the Dubai hit squad was connected to Israel in some way, even if it ends up being a "plausible denialability" way like the post-Munich team that went out to take out the Black September organisation in the wake of 1972. It isn't surprising to me that nation-states can and will use their monopoly of force to kill potential threats to their national security. What is surprising is the number of advocates and nation-states that skip over lesser steps which are probably more effective in the strategic sense, such as legally capturing, detaining, and possibly executing such people through rule of law, in the rush to some tactical success of having killed the latest criminal de jour. Thinking tactically, with the idea of eliminating the threats, doesn't focus on the more important question of how to actually eliminate the threat and instead replaces "threat" with body counts as though this would serve as a deterrence.

Be afraid

Terrorist!

Except I haven't seen this referred to as anything other than some sort of disgruntled American citizen. Weird how when its a crazy American guy who goes off and blows something up or kamikazes into an office building, it's a disgruntled or disaffected person, but those crazy Muslims are obviously the only ones who are terrorists.

Indeed, Kweli noticed as did I that in the wake of actual bombings and shootings, we are quick to point the blame at those crazy Muslims before we find out it was "one of us". In this case, it's doubtful that people consider this anything more than an accident when they first heard about it. At least until they heard what the target was and who was involved. As it happens, there's a long ranting manifesto online somewhere, and as usually befits such activity, it's pretty clear there's a rational mind at work even if it is divorced from some realistic understandings of the world around it. There were clear motivations, such as the absurd police state that would, he suspects probably accurately, only get worse in the wake of an act like this, that we should be made aware of, just as there are clear motivations in the case of Hezbollah or Iran or the Taliban. It's not always possible to satisfy all of these concerns. Some of them, such as his annoyance and choice of target in vengeance against the IRS, wouldn't go away tomorrow under any reasonable worldview. But it is necessary to be aware of what causes some acts of aggressive violence, and to be clear that sometimes these aggressive acts are acts by insane or deranged lunatics and sometimes that they are calm and rational responses to an insane series of events. The line between them is not always very clear in reporting. In this case I lean more toward the former for now. Though there are some remarkably clear expressions, the decision to use violence to express his frustration with the IRS, of all places certainly one people are frustrated with on a daily or yearly basis but not generally to the point of assault, is a much better definition of insanity than the one he gave.

PS: I'm now trying to follow the Dubai Hamas assassination story. It's sort of harder than this because at least in the Austin case, the information is broadly available and dissembled to the public, even if the actual conclusion of "whodunit" doesn't phrase out explicitly as "terrorist" in the reporting. Anything dealing with Palestine seems to only be reported through significant partisan filtering and facts are frequently dismissed entirely. It's less easy to figure out what the hell is going on.

in case one wonders

Yes, the dreadful quantities of snow here means in part I've shifted some attention toward basketball. Other than the continuing insurance causes mortality gains debate, I'm not sure there's much happening worthy of commentary. I'm also amused that the counter-intuitive examination of just how many lives might be "saved" by health insurance is being depicted as a "right-wing" claim. Right-wingers, of the sort commonly assumed in the normal right-left political scene, have no interest whatsoever in this statistical figure. They're still busy claiming there are rations and death panels in the health care bills or that it was happening "too fast".

So yeah, there's that, and that the Winter Olympics are boring (for me). The All-Star game was kind of a downer with the several lame and pointless fouls at the end of a close game. Usually the 4th quarter is the part of the pickup game routine that is crisp and well-run while the first and second maintain a lot of crazy passes and dunks. This time it felt sloppy in the 4th and was pretty crisp (with a couple exceptions) for the first 36 minutes. The dunk contest was totally forgettable. Start putting HORSE in prime time and get rid of it. There were several better dunks in the game the next day than anything I saw over the weekend. The fact that Nate Robinson won the year Iguodala did this (look where his head is as he does the dunk) should basically say all there is to say about how dumb this event has gotten.

If Obama ends up moving the KSM trial back toward a military tribunal, I will rant and rave about how stupid that is. Politically for Democrats and strategically in the "global war on terror". I don't have much hope that they'll keep the trial in New York. Concrete jungles where dreams are made of don't have much to do with paying for people's paranoia to the tune of 8 or 9 figures worth of "security". Personally I thought 70 million (the original estimate) was too high for the provision of security. The only reason to object to the cost of the trial is that it will probably be a capital case. There's no reason to provide additional security over and above what New York already has designated to it because of its political connections and symbolic importance (as the site of a couple major terrorist incidents in its past). None. Zero. Please show me the evidence that the trials of terrorists or terrorist plotters around the globe in such strange places as Spain, Australia, India, or Indonesia required millions of dollars of additional security. There isn't any. All this is is smoke for people who already didn't want to have the trials in the first place.

The continuing saga of Mirandizing the underwear bomber is also not really worth commenting on because the arguments being made by the various Cheney-ite Republicans are not factually correct in the slightest. The guy is talking, was talking, and wouldn't be talking any "better" if he were sitting in a black site being tortured than he has been with a lawyer around in a federal jail. Making any other argument is hysterical, somewhat funny for me, but not worth talking about because it is pure and basic cynical politics. Same deal with "we need military tribunals". It bears no relation to the reality of the previous 8 years where we didn't need military tribunals to convict these people, to detain them without constitutional protections, and where some captured terrorist bombers were mirandized and treated as common thugs processed by our ordinary justice system. Politics is fun to observe for its hypocrisies and insanities, but it's not really worth treating the arguments it generates as serious or worth discussion and discourse.

Top 20 again

Last rankings

1) Kansas
2) Duke
3) Syracuse (that loss at home dropped them back behind Duke again. For reasons I still cannot quite figure out)

4) West Virginia
4) Wisconsin
6) Texas
7) Kansas St
8) Purdue
9) BYU
10) Kentucky
11) Villanova
12) Ohio State

13) Georgetown
14) Maryland
15) Missouri
16) Baylor
17) California

18) Marquette
19) Michigan State
20) Xavier

Clemson and Vanderbilt are right outside that list

Current list of teams in my top at-larges not in the Bracketology field
Minnesota (41)
Mississippi (40)
Mississippi St (42)
Arizona State (36)
Washington (35)
None of those has a convincing case for inclusion yet, Miss. St looks like the best case (despite being the lowest ranked on my list) because they have a better record against quality teams. Unfortunately for them, they also haven't played many because the SEC sucks this year. Lunardi presently has both Charlotte and Rhode Island in, for reasons I'm not sure make any sense. Supposedly the A10 is great so winning it would be also great, I say it's good but it's still behind the Pac-10 as a whole, and the Pac-10 is really down this year.

Most dangerous non-BCS conference teams:
Obviously BYU and New Mexico. Xavier is highly ranked by my system, but hasn't played much or won much. They're commonly many at-large teams "best win". After that there's Old Dominion, Butler, and Utah State (which Lunardi has as a 13th seed..and I have as a 7, by far the most underrated team by my count). Northern Iowa, Temple, and Gonzaga look to be overrated to varying degrees. All have some bad losses, though at least Temple and Gonzaga have some good wins. Cornell is also pretty badly overrated (in the tournament sure, top 25...no..this is crazy talk). Richmond is getting a little too much pub also. I don't see them as a 7 seed.