Now this may make Rove worry ...

Dissension Grows In Senior Ranks On War Strategy (washingtonpost.com)

'I lost my brother in Vietnam,' added Hughes, a veteran Army strategist who is involved in formulating Iraq policy. 'I promised myself, when I came on active duty, that I would do everything in my power to prevent that [sort of strategic loss] from happening again. Here I am, 30 years later, thinking we will win every fight and lose the war, because we don't understand the war we're in.'

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Karl Rove isn't worried about the Iraqi POW scandal; he can tell from monitoring right wing radio and listening to the sweet sounds of fundagelical silence (fundamentalists always excel at hypocrisy) that Bush's reelection is on track. They won't even have to dump Rumsfeld before term 2.

On the other hand, murmurings from the military are worrisome. If Kerry could leverage that theme he'd be attacking "the base".

The Nine Ways of Being an Accessory to Another’s Sin.

Words Fail: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal

This comes from DeLong, but Google tells me it's part of quite old Catholic doctrine.

The Nine Ways of Being an Accessory to Another’s Sin.

1. By counsel.
2. By command.
3. By consent.
4. By provocation.
5. By praise or flattery.
6. By concealment.
7. By partaking.
8. By silence.
9. By defense of the ill done.

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See also my post on the two "specialists" who spoke to the Baltimore Sun. They have chosen honor.

Bush - the analysis

The Misunderestimated Man - How Bush chose stupidity. By Jacob Weisberg at Slate

As the president says, we misunderestimate him. He was not born stupid. He chose stupidity. Bush may look like a well-meaning dolt. On consideration, he's something far more dangerous: a dedicated fool.

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But he's the people's fool. Bush reminds me somewhat of Andrew Jackson in his psychology and temperament.

Send a "Care Package" to any soldier

Any Soldier ... AnySoldier.US ... www.AnySoldier.US ... Care Packages

I've read some good reviews of this effort.

The rats are a jumpin'

The Washington Monthly

BROKEN PROCESS OR OFFICIAL POLICY?....Apparently everyone's been trying to warn Bush and Rumsfeld about possible abuse of prisoners in Iraq for months now. And not just the usual bleeding hearts:

* David Kay: "I was there and I kept saying the interrogation process is broken. The prison process is broken. And no one wanted to deal with it. It was too, too distasteful. This is a known problem, and the military refuses to deal with it."

* Paul Bremer: "Bremer repeatedly raised the issue of prison conditions as early as last fall — both in one-on-one meetings with Rumsfeld and other administration leaders, and in group meetings with the president's inner circle on national security. Officials described Bremer as 'kicking and screaming' about the need to release thousands of uncharged prisoners and improve conditions for those who remained."

* Colin Powell: "According to eye witnesses to debate at the highest levels of the Administration...whenever Powell or [Richard] Armitage sought to question prisoner treatment issues, they were forced to endure what our source characterizes as 'around the table, coarse, vulgar, frat-boy bully remarks about what these tough guys would do if THEY ever got their hands on prisoners....'"

Well, maybe these folks really did try to get everyone to pay attention to this issue or maybe they're just covering their own asses after the fact. Who knows?

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Lovely round-up! Guess who gets the Donkey's tail? Rumsfeld. Not that he doesn't deserve it.

None of this would have happened absent photos and videos, and the photos wouldn't have become so widely distributed absent digital cameras. Digital images are easy to replicate and distribute; it was the wide distribution of the visuals that made exposure inevitable. Rumsfeld, Myers et al knew roughly what was happening across the system, though Al Ghraib sounds like it was extreme even by their standards. They figured they could keep it quiet -- until the photos appeared. Look for solders to be forbidden to carry digital cameras.

Shades of Rodney King. Humans are so irrational - most of us respond to images in a completely different way than we respond to words and concepts.

A very different take on US reaction to the Abu Ghraib affair

The Daily Telegraph | Good ol' girl who enjoyed cruelty

In Fort Ashby, in the isolated Appalachian mountains 260km west of Washington, the poor, barely-educated and almost all-white population talk openly about an active Ku Klux Klan presence.

There is little understanding of the issues in Iraq and less of why photographs showing soldiers from the 372nd Military Police Company, mostly from around Fort Ashby, abusing prisoners has caused a furore....

Like many, England signed up to make money and see the world. After her tour of duty, she planned to settle down and marry her first love, Charles Graner.

Down a dirt track at the edge of town, in the trailer where England grew up, her mother Terrie dismissed the allegations against her daughter as unfair.

"They were just doing stupid kid things, pranks. And what the Iraqis do to our men and women are just? The rules of the Geneva Convention, do they apply to everybody or just us?" she asked.

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Graner is the alleged ring leader. The article mentions also widespread alchohol abuse among the guards. This is so different from the NYT coverage of Appalachian reaction one wonders which journalist went there and which covered the story by phone.

As the initial shock wears off look for the apologist response to fit into one of these categories:

1. It was no worse than college hazing. Bunch of whimps. It's a tough world ...
2. It's a tough world ... you gotta play tough.
3. Just following orders ...

I'm mostly curious about how this plays with the evangelical wing of the Republican party. It will be their response that determines whether Rumsfeld goes or stays. I'm betting they decide to look the other way. Hypocrisy is a well developed art among fundamentalists of all stripes.

Graner -- the solder from hell

The New York Times > National > The Prison Guards: Abuse Charges Bring Anguish in Unit's Home

May 5 — Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr. is a guard at one of Pennsylvania's most heavily secured death row prisons, accused by his former wife of violent behavior....

... Six soldiers from the 372nd, a reserve unit out of Cumberland, are expected to face courts-martial, including Specialist Graner and Sergeant Frederick.

... An internal Army report made public this week described Specialist Graner, 35, as supervising some of the abusive behavior. He also appears in several photographs, including one in which he stands with arms folded over a pile of naked Iraqi men.

Specialist Graner, who wears a Marine Corps eagle tattoo on his right arm, served in the corps from April 1988 until May 1996, when he left with the rank of corporal, according to military records. He went to work immediately at the State Correctional Institution Greene, in southwestern Pennsylvania, where he has held an entry-level corrections officer position ever since.

Two years after he arrived at Greene, the prison was at the center of an abuse scandal. Prison officials declined to say whether Specialist Graner had been disciplined in that case, citing privacy laws.

Inmates and advocates for prisoner rights asserted in 1998 that guards at the prison routinely beat and humiliated prisoners, including through a sadistic game of Simon Says in which guards struck prisoners who failed to comply with barked instructions.

After an investigation, the warden was transferred, two lieutenants were fired and about two dozen guards were reprimanded, demoted or suspended.

Specialist Graner was involved in a bitter divorce. In court papers, his wife, Staci, accused him of beating her, threatening her with guns, stalking her after they separated in 1997 and breaking into her home. Since 1997, local judges have issued at least three orders of protection against him, records show.

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At least one of the Iraqi victims knew him as "Joiner".

It is early in the investigation and the trials, but it is very likely that Graner was the wrong man to guard prisoners anywhere. A full investigation will focus on how he was accepted into the National Guard and why he wasn't stopped sooner.

As I'd noted earlier, any idiot could write a play about this -- but that won't be the end of it. This thing has legs. Americans are perfectly capable of forgetting tragedies of all sorts (anyone recall that Afghan wedding bombing?), and of overlooking crimes and atrocities, but this business has sex, degradation, violence, passion and pornography. Americans can't possibly give that up. The affair will be mined by Hollywood, playrights, magazines and the entertainment industry for years to come. Everyone involved will become a celebrity of one sort or another, including any Iraqi victims willing to appear on Oprah.

I guess that's better than ignoring the affair. No wonder Bush is furious with Rumsfeld. Bush probably won't fire Rumsfeld (Bush is too ornery to do that now), but he'll retire him come November.

The WSJ: an ethics problem of a different order

The Washington Monthly

Read the article, it's a great story. USA Today and the NYT have been wracked by journalism scandals. WSJ hasn't been. Maybe that's because what's scandalous at the NYT and USA Today is just normal behavior at the WSJ.

NYT interviews a key witness in the Abu Ghraib case

The New York Times > International > Middle East > Iraqi Recounts Hours of Abuse by U.S. Troops

Mr. Abd, 34, is at the center of an explosive scandal over American mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners, but he remained calm in a detailed, two-hour account of his time at the fearsome Abu Ghraib prison. He claimed that he was never interrogated, and never charged with a crime. Officials at the prison said Tuesday that they could not comment on his case.

In November, when the abuse took place, few Shiite Muslims like Mr. Abd were carrying out attacks against United States forces. Nearly all the attacks were attributed to forces loyal to Saddam Hussein, mostly Sunni Muslims, and fighters from other Muslim countries.

'The truth is we were not terrorists,' he said. 'We were not insurgents. We were just ordinary people. And American intelligence knew this.'

Mr. Abd spoke with no particular anger at the American occupation, though he has seen it closer than most Iraqis. In six months in prisons run by American soldiers, in fact, he said most of them had treated him well and with respect.

'Most of the time, they wouldn't even say, `Shut up,' ' he said.

That changed in November — he does not know the exact date — when punishment for a prisoner fight at Abu Ghraib degenerated into torture. That night, he said, he and six other inmates were beaten, stripped naked (a particularly deep humiliation in the Arab world), forced to pile on top of one another, to straddle one another's backs naked, to simulate oral sex. American guards wrote words like 'rapist' on their skin with Magic Marker, he said...

...He was arrested in June at a military checkpoint, when he tried to leave the taxi he was riding in. He was taken to a detention center at the Baghdad airport, he said, and then transferred to a big military prison in Um Qasr, near the Kuwaiti border. He said he had stayed for three months and four days.

The treatment in Um Qasr, he said, "was very good," adding: "There was no problem. The American guards were nice and good people."

After the three months, he said, he was transferred to Abu Ghraib, a sprawling prison complex 20 miles west of Baghdad, where Mr. Hussein incarcerated and executed thousands of his opponents.

But after the prison fight, the victim pointed out Mr. Abd and six others to American guards, and at that moment, his time in prison turned.

Mr. Abd said he and the other men had been handcuffed and taken inside the prison to a cellblock called "the hard site," reserved for the most dangerous prisoners. There he saw, for the first time, an American soldier called "Joiner or something." (Mr. Abd does not speak English. The man he pointed out in the picture as Joiner has been identified in other reports as Specialist Charles A. Granier, of the 372nd Military Police Company.)

"In my pocket, I had three cigarettes," Mr. Abd said. "Joiner said to me, `Put them in your mouth and smoke all of them. If one falls out of your mouth, I will crush you with my boot.' "

The command came through the translator, an Egyptian known by the prisoners as Abu Hamid. In an area in front of the cells, he said, were "Joiner," the translator and two other male soldiers, one bald and one with reddish hair and complexion. He said there were two women: the one whose name he did not know, and the one with the camera, whom he knew as Miss Maya...

...About 10 days after it started, the nightly abuse ended, for no explained reason. "Joiner" just stopped coming to the cell block, and about a month later, Mr. Abd and two others among the seven were transferred to a civilian Iraqi prison in Baghdad.

Two weeks or so after that, an American military investigator came to visit him. He showed Mr. Abd the pictures and said he needed him to make a statement against the military police who had mistreated him. Mr. Abd trusted him.

"He said, `Don't be afraid. Tell us what happened. We are on your side,' " Mr. Abd remembered. " `Tell us everything they have done.' "

Mr. Abd was released in mid-April. Looking back, the only explanation he can imagine for the mistreatment is that "Joiner" had been drinking.

"Americans did not mistreat me in general," he said. "But these people must be tried."...

...About 10 days after it started, the nightly abuse ended, for no explained reason. "Joiner" just stopped coming to the cell block, and about a month later, Mr. Abd and two others among the seven were transferred to a civilian Iraqi prison in Baghdad.

Two weeks or so after that, an American military investigator came to visit him. He showed Mr. Abd the pictures and said he needed him to make a statement against the military police who had mistreated him. Mr. Abd trusted him.

"He said, `Don't be afraid. Tell us what happened. We are on your side,' " Mr. Abd remembered. " `Tell us everything they have done.' "

Mr. Abd was released in mid-April. Looking back, the only explanation he can imagine for the mistreatment is that "Joiner" had been drinking.

"Americans did not mistreat me in general," he said. "But these people must be tried."About 10 days after it started, the nightly abuse ended, for no explained reason. "Joiner" just stopped coming to the cell block, and about a month later, Mr. Abd and two others among the seven were transferred to a civilian Iraqi prison in Baghdad.

Two weeks or so after that, an American military investigator came to visit him. He showed Mr. Abd the pictures and said he needed him to make a statement against the military police who had mistreated him. Mr. Abd trusted him.

"He said, `Don't be afraid. Tell us what happened. We are on your side,' " Mr. Abd remembered. " `Tell us everything they have done.' "

Mr. Abd was released in mid-April. Looking back, the only explanation he can imagine for the mistreatment is that "Joiner" had been drinking.

"Americans did not mistreat me in general," he said. "But these people must be tried."

...On Tuesday, he said, he would travel, finally, with his family back to his home in Nasiriya, though he said he could not stay. He said he would be too ashamed. He wants the American government to pay compensation. He said he felt he needed to move out of Iraq, and despite it all, he said he would not refuse an offer to move to America.

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His narrative rings true -- particularly the relatively benign course prior to the November episode. I wonder about drug abuse in the US guards. This sounds less like a planned procedure inspired by military intelligence and more like a Fellini movie. Were he to end up in a US court, a jury could make him a (justly) wealthy man.

Bush Asks Congress for Additional War Funding (washingtonpost.com)

Bush Asks Congress for Additional War Funding (washingtonpost.com)

Sophisticated munitions, combat intensity and the high cost of an all-volunteer Army have already made the Iraq war an expensive conflict. With an additional $25 billion, the war's total cost exceeds the inflation-adjusted costs of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War and the Persian Gulf War combined, according to a war cost study by Yale University economist William D. Nordhaus.

At $174 billion, the Iraq conflict would be approaching the inflation-adjusted, $199 billion cost of World War I, a level the war will likely pass next year.

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I presume he means the US cost of WW I, not the cost of all participants?

Impressive numbers, but the relevant number is percentage of GNP. I think that's still a relatively small number, though growing.

Google is indexing the full content of the scientific literature

Nature Publishing Group: science journals, jobs and information

From a UMLS list posting by Mike Cumments:

Google appears to be getting ready to index all of the full content of the scientific literature. They are doing a pilot with publishers until the end of 2004. At this stage they seem to be focused on simply doing a PageRank type search without delving into the semantic content. They do a standard Google search and apply a filter for only the URLs of the 9 publishers.

See http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb040503-1.shtml for background.

The project description is http://www.crossref.org/crossrefsearch.html.

For a search of the full text content of these publishers using Google go to http://www.nature.com/dynasearch/xrs/

From the infotoday article:

CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org), a 300-member publisher trade association, has announced a pilot project called CrossRef Search that will enable users to search the full text of scholarly journal articles, conference proceedings, and other sources from nine leading publishers. Google will supply the search technologies and CrossRef the reference links to publisher Web sites. While Google will also incorporate CrossRef content connections into its general Web search engine, users who go to publisher Web sites and click on the CrossRef Search icon will reach just the scholarly subset. However, searching through the icon will access content from all participating publishers...

... Searching CrossRef Search will be available to all Web users at no charge. Content will include current journal issues as well as back files. The system uses CrossRef’s DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) or standard URLs to identify and link to content.

At present, publishers participating in CrossRef Search are:

American Physical Society (http://prola.aps.org/xrs.html)
Annual Reviews (http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/search/external)
Association for Computing Machinery (http://portal.acm.org/xrs.cfm)
Blackwell Publishing (http://www.blackwellsynergy.com/servlet/useragent?func=showSearch&type=external)
Institute of Physics Publishing (http://www.iop.org/EJ/search)
International Union of Crystallography (http://journals.iucr.org/; click “search” and scroll down the page)
Nature Publishing Group (http://www.nature.com/dynasearch/app/dynasearch.taf)
Oxford University Press (http://hmg.oupjournals.org/search.dtl; each journal’s search page includes a link)
John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/crossref.html)

These initial publishers produce some 1,100 journals, according to Pentz. Participants have investigations underway to test how to use DOIs to improve indexing and metadata for better retrieval and to enable persistent links from search results to the full text of content at publisher sites.

The initial pilot will last throughout 2004. CrossRef plans to gather feedback from scientists, scholars, and librarians through e-mail forms and formal evaluations using external consultants, according to Pentz. CrossRef is also hoping to discuss similar programs with other search engines, Pentz said.

There are only two rules for joining the pilot program, according to Pentz. “The publisher has to have all their content indexed through the way Google indexes and make the search box available to everyone at no charge.” ...

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I doubt there's a large amount of money in this for Google, but it fits with the social mission of their CEOs. I doubt it makes their VC's happy.

Canopy Economics

Google Search: "canopy economics"

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I was thinking about economics the other day. I used to think of the economy in terms of plate tectonics. When the fundamentals change, when the plates move, the visible surface is transformed.

Nowadays though, the surface seems very persistent. Even when the ground shifts, processes, institutions, entities, persist. Zombie processes stagger on beyond their life expectancy. The economy seems to have a "mind of its own".

So now I think of economics in terms of the "canopy", the layer of the forest that lies above roots and trunks. In a tropical forest I believe the trunks can die, but the canopy -- suspended by interconnections, can be relatively undisturbed.

Call this "Canopy Economics".

A google search found no matches on that phrase. Now there is one!

Update 9/11/06: Well, there are more hits on the Google search now -- but they're all 'splogs'! That is, computer generated web pages designed to trap search engines. I guess they harvested the concept from this page. Hmmm. What would be the neurologic and viral analog of that? DNA fragments, harvested and recombining, emergent systems ....

Update 11/24/07: The splog hits are gone now, and "canopy economics" returns two posts of mine and one post about forestry economics.

Lord of the Flies at Abu Ghraib

Iraq Prison Supervisors Face Army Reprimand (washingtonpost.com)

Overall, the report portrays the prison as being run by a poorly led, undermanned and demoralized group of U.S. soldiers. Because of Army personnel policies, it notes, the 800th MP Brigade did not receive replacements as members left for medical reasons or because their terms of service were finished. Also, the report found, the troops' quality of life was 'extremely poor.' They lacked many of the facilities provided to soldiers at other U.S. bases in Iraq, such as mess halls, barbershops and post exchanges, which offer magazines, toiletries and other personal items for sale.

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Neglected and forgotten young soldiers in a bloody awful citadel of suffering. The only rewards and attention they get comes from satanic private contractors tasked with interrogations too nasty for the CIA to touch.

An idiot could write a play about this. Let the battle for the movie rights begin. Maybe the victims, including those both victim and perpetrator, will be able to sue for a share of the proceeds.

A War for Us, Fought by Them: Bring back the draft (NYT OpEd)

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: A War for Us, Fought by Them
By WILLIAM BROYLES Jr.

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I can't really excerpt meaningfully from this NYT OpEd essay. It's a succinct and well written piece by a playwright who's a former (involuntary) marine and a father of a marine serving in Iraq. Unlike most wars, including Vietnam, no child of any administration official is serving in Iraq. Not only is this unfair, it allows the corporate and ruling elite to neglect our soldiers. The Abu Gharaib disaster is, on first inspection, partly a consequence of that neglect. If you drop young people into a terrible environment, and don't provide relief, structure, and support, you get 'The Lord of the Flies'.

The author says we need a draft, presumably of both genders, for the 'war against terror'. Since I have three young children, and since this is likely to be a Forever War, I can't claim much personal enthusiasm for the idea. Nor, however, can I deny the logic. On the other hand, as the author notes, GWB and Cheney managed to avoid service (in Cheney's case he was honest about his avoidance) during a draft. I find it hard to believe, in today's world, that a draft would be any more fair than it was in Vietnam. The result might even be less representative than our volunteer army.

Philosophically though, I don't disagree. I suspect if we had such a draft, Bush would not be up for reelection.

The fallen americans: not as much outrage as some would guess?

Terrorism & Security | csmonitor.com

The Christian Science Monitor reports that the effect of the photos was somewhat blunted because Arabs 'say they expect no less from the United States given the widely held view that it is running a brutal and oppressive occupation in Iraq.'

'Will the pictures make a difference in the Arab world? Probably not,' says Michael Young, a Lebanese political analyst. 'It simply confirms what people already think about the Americans. But it will be embarrassing for the Americans in Iraq, and that's where it's going to count.'

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Maybe this was Bush's strategy ... Our reputation is so low it cannot fall further.

I wonder if this might episode might, paradoxically, ease tensions in in Iraq. It's immensely annoying to have a "superior" civilization constantly blathering about their innate goodness, discipline, and all around wonderfulness. I suspect Bremer can't get away with that act any longer; nor can any other American representative in Iraq. Iraqis have had a dark and shameful recent past, but now they know that that their occupiers are flawed as well. Time for a real discussion?