Iraq


Defending the Indefensible

rice seems to be defending rendtion and secret prisons as she:

…chastised Europe leaders today, saying that before they complain about secret jails for terror suspects in European nations, they should realize that interrogations of these suspects have produced information that helped “save European lives.”

Really, some specifics would be helpful here.

…Ms. Rice repeatedly emphasized that the United States does not countenance the torture of terrorism suspects, at the hands of either American or foreign captors.

What exactly does she mean by torture? We know the bushites think about it a bit differently than many of the rest of us.
Reaching for justification and admitting that it is happening she goes on to say:

“We must bring terrorists to justice wherever possible,” she said. “But there have been many cases where the local government cannot detain or prosecute a suspect, and traditional extradition is not a good option.”

Why not? Please condi some details are in order here.

“In those cases,” she added, “the local government can make the sovereign choice to cooperate in the transfer of a suspect to a third country, which is known as a rendition.
“Sometimes, these efforts are misunderstood,” she said.

Echidne responds:

I want to hear a lot more about “the efforts being misunderstood”, a lot more. Like in what way are we misunderstanding them, exactly? Is it that the European interrogation centers were just chosen because they had excellent food and beer?

So much for the transparency the bushies seem to demand from everyone else. For instance, on November 10th stephen hadley said the following:

In terms of intelligence, you know, one of the problems, in dealing with a closed society such as North Korea, is you don’t know what you don’t know, and what you do know tends to be fairly limited. And as you know, we don’t know as much about their enrichment program as we would like. And that’s one of the reasons why, as part of the six-party talks, it will be very interesting to have — and very important to have a declaration, to have dismantlement procedures and verification measures so we can be sure that in a otherwise fairly non — extremely non-transparent society, these commitments to give up nuclear weapons and nuclear programs are carried out.

This is all well and good and we can agree with hadley. However, let’s revise his statement just a bit (italics):

In terms of intelligence, you know, one of the problems, in dealing with a closed administration such as bush’s, is you don’t know what you don’t know, and what you do know tends to be fairly limited. And as you know, we don’t know as much about their rendition program as we would like. And that’s one of the reasons why, as part of the six-party talks, it will be very interesting to have — and very important to have a declaration, to have disclosure procedures and verification measures so we can be sure that in a otherwise fairly non — extremely non-transparent administraton, these commitments to give up torture, rendition and secret prisons are carried out.

Yep, they need to look into the mirror a little more often and we should remember that whenever the bushies decide to accuse an opponent of some foul behavior it is often, if not always, a behavior that one or more of the bushies is trying to hide.
Update: Also see the heretik.


2000 Dead

James Joyner reports that 2000 American troops have now died in Iraq:

Each American casualty represents a personal tragedy for their loved ones and should be soberly weighed by all of us. At the same time, it is low by any historical measure; we had more people killed on D-Day, for goodness sake. Nor is it an indication of the worth of the mission for which these troops died. If the war in Iraq was not worth fighting, then one death is too many. Otherwise, the toll has to be weighed against the benefit to the nation, which remains to be seen.

From this vantage point one death was too many and 2000 is still too many.
Take a look at 2000 dead. May they rest in peace. And, may the 1000s of Iraqis who have died as a result of this war also rest in peace.
Via …You Are A Tree


How Stupid Are the Aliens?

Natasha suggests that the alien invaders in War of the Worlds are pretty stupid:

You’ve had a million years (or even tens of thousands) to plan the invasion of a planet, and not only do you wait as an established civilization grows up, but you neglect to do even minimal epidemiological surveys? In all that time, you don’t send one bloody probe to take air and soil samples, culture the results and maybe experiment with some of the lifeforms on your planet to see if there’s anything to be worried about?
It’s almost as blitheringly stupid as planning to re-invade a middle eastern country for over a decade, ignoring every well-founded opinion on how things will probably go once you get the opportunity, and creating conditions that ensure you can’t call for backup if the things people said would go wrong, go wrong. But not quite. There’s a lot of recent and well-documented history describing the outcome of land wars in Asia, whereas the movie aliens were clearly invading an inhabited planet for the very first time, so there’s an excusable learning curve to go through.

This might be stronger than some of the other 9/11 comparisons I’ve seen over the past week.
Well, the Modulators are on there way to turn off their brains, enjoy the movie and then turn their brains back on to watch some fireworks.
Happy 4th!
Update: Movie Review courtesy of Mrs Modulator: “That Sucked!” I’m not about to argue with her. If you are human you can not turn off enough brain cells or suspend enough disbelief to make War of the Worlds a good movie.
As to the current event analogies: Spielberg stuck some hooks in the movie to try snag folks but it was too obvious to be meaningful.
How about this for another variant, one for the 4th of July: If you infect it with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness the slimy red tendrils of government will wither and die.