Ryan Cooper

Here I argued that torture does not work for intelligence gathering, basically just recapitulating a large section from Darius Rejali's excellent book Torture and Democracy . I think it gets the point across fairly well, but reading it again I think I could have done a better job framing the argument. The argument isn't that torture never results in a prisoner divulging true information — that clearly does happen on occasion. Rather, the argument is that torture is worse than traditional interrogation and investigation techniques. (As Josiah Neeley noted on Twitter, even a Magic 8-Ball will give you "correct" information through mere chance on occasion.) Torture apologists make grandiose claims about its effectiveness, arguing that it is far more reliable than traditional techniques. Torture is a great and terrible evil, so if it can be shown that it is even simply equal to non-coercive techniques, that obviously implies its use is absolutely inexcusable under a...

Hell of a speech: Just devastating he lost his election. Devastating.

The big news in civil liberties circles today is the leak of a white paper laying out some of the legal reasoning behind the administration’s drone strike program. It’s not the actual memo itself , but it does appear to track the reasoning as it was described to Charlie Savage . Glenn Greenwald lays out all the legal implications in detail here , something I won’t bother to reproduce. I’d just like to focus on this already-infamous section on an “imminent threat:” Certain aspects of this legal framework require additional explication. First, the condition that an operational leader present an “imminent” threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons will take place in the immediate future. Here we have it, ladies and gentlemen, the reason why the actual drone memo is secret. Not (entirely) because of knee jerk secrecy instinct, and definitely not because it would harm national securi...

Glenn Greenwald says today what should be obvious by now: That Iran will use its nuclear weapons against the US and Israel is rather obviously the centerpiece of the fear-mongering campaign against Tehran, to build popular support for threats to launch an aggressive attack in order to prevent them from acquiring that weapon. So what, then, is the real reason that so many people in both the US and Israeli governments are so desperate to stop Iranian proliferation? Every now and then, they reveal the real reason: Iranian nuclear weapons would prevent the US from attacking Iran at will, and that is what is intolerable. It has become clear in the last decade that the United States is a deranged beast when it comes to the Middle East. We have done almost nothing good there, and killed hundreds of thousands of people, including many thousands of our own troops, in the service of making things worse there and here in practically every conceivable way. I still believe that on balance...

Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, and Conor Friedersdorf have been in a bit of a spat over drones. Greenwald and Friedersdorf argue, in essence, that the drone campaign is doing more harm than good. Here's a representative quote from the latter: Despite all these misgivings, it's the drone aided kill-stats to which Sullivan always comes back, as if our president's cool competence has allowed him to end the terrorist threat by remote controlled aircraft. But it really doesn't make sense to extol Obama every time a drone kills an Al Qaeda operative. There's no shortage of politicians who, if elected president, will give the CIA permission to fire on suspected terrorists in various foreign countries. Herman Cain would give that order. So would Rick Perry. Sarah Palin might even let drone operators practice on wolves. Would they be serving America's best interests in doing so? I don't think so. Neither does Jane Mayer . Nor Jeremy Scahill . Nor various anony...

Another problem I have with Why Nations Fail  and public choice theory is that it if anything understates the amount of horror one is likely to get out of a public choice dystopia. One can account for a great deal of the cruelty and terror inflicted by extractive dictatorships by a rational agent hypothesis--in Syria right now, for instance, Assad is murdering his own people by the score for fairly obvious self-interested reasons. His position is threatened by an uprising and he intends to bludgeon protesters into submission because that's the the only way to hang on to power. The next question, of course, is whether the repression itself is only fueling the uprising, but these sorts of things take on a life of their own quickly; once you've started, it's easy to get caught in a ratcheting cycle of violence. Robert Moses, via Wikimedia But pure, rational self-interestedness doesn't quite capture the full behavior of unaccountable elites. They are also often crue...

Check it out : The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now — with somebody — and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden may be a primitive “figurehead” — or even dead, for all we know — but whoever put those All-American jet planes loaded with All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bullseye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper. [...]  We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, may...

Jeremy Scahill had an excellent piece in The Nation  a couple days ago about how, according to Scahill and his sources, President Obama is leaning on Yemen to keep a journalist named Abdulelah Shaye imprisoned there because he had been reporting on things that Obama would have rather kept quiet, like revealing that US had killed civilians with cluster bombs, and interviewing accused terrorists like Anwar Al-Awlaki. Kevin Drum doesn't buy it : Everything that Shaye reported in 2010 had long since been common knowledge. Obama has suffered, as near as I can tell, literally zero embarrassment from this episode. The al Majala attack got a small bit of media attention when it happened and has been completely forgotten since. So what kind of person would pressure the Yemeni president to keep an innocent journalist in prison over a slight so tiny as to be nearly nonexistent? Almost literally, this would be the act of a sociopath. The U.S. government insists that Shaye is no mer...

Greenwald waxes righteous on the case of well-paid Washington insiders shilling for designated terrorist groups: How reprehensible is the conduct of Fran Townsend here? Just two years ago, she went on CNN to celebrate a Supreme Court decision that rejected First Amendment claims of free speech and free association in order to rule that anyone — most often Muslims — can be prosecuted under the “material support” statute simply for advocacy for a Terrorist group that is coordinated with the group. And yet, the minute Fran Townsend gets caught doing exactly that — not just out of conviction but also because she’s being paid by that Terrorist group — she suddenly invokes the very same Constitutional rights whose ersosions she cheered when it came to the prosecution of others. Now that her own liberty is at stake by virtue of getting caught being on the dole from a Terrorist group, she suddenly insists that the First Amendment allows her to engage in this behavior... The background here: ...

Jonathan Bernstein strains mightily for optimism: And, as it turns out, the decision to leave casts quite a bit of light on how Madisonian democracy works in the US, both for good and for bad. It’s a story in which the ocean liner metaphor people use was absolutely apt. It took a whole lot of pushing, but this certainly appears to be the case in which citizen action, working through a political party, ended a war. I suppose this is basically true, but to me it really emphasizes how much the American system of government sucks. After Bush lied us into war, which ignited a disastrous bloody catastrophe in which thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died to no benefit whatsoever, we finally get to end the damn thing nearly nine years in—three years into a Democratic presidency. Bernstein seems to think this means the system is working. I'd say it means the system is close to failure, and we are increasingly incapable of confronting even the mo...

Matthew Yglesias takes a look back to 2002 as to why he was wrong about the war. He comes up with four sober reasons: erroneous foreign policy views, elite signaling, misreading the politics, and The Threatening Storm . He adds: You can, however, always get more psychological. I was 21 years old and kind of a jerk. Being for the war was a way to simultaneously be a free-thinking dissident in the context of a college campus and also be on the side of the country’s power elite. My observation is that this kind of fake-dissident posture is one that always has a lot of appeal to people. The point is that this wasn’t really a series of erroneous judgments about Iraq, it was a series of erroneous judgments about how to think about the world and who deserves to be taken seriously and under which circumstances. I still am stunned that fairly intelligent people like he and Ezra Klein were taken in by such hokum. But it's good of Yglesias to examine his past reasoning and try to learn f...

The bloggers I read most frequently are four: Matthew Yglesias , Kevin Drum , Andrew Sullivan , and Ezra Klein . Yesterday, I learned that all of them supported the Iraq War. (I already knew about the other three.) All of them have recanted their previous opinion, and probably learned a great deal from it. (Drum, most satisfyingly, said it was really fucking stupid of him.) Yglesias and Klein were pretty young at the time--they're only a couple years older than me. Still, that's a fairly devastating thing to be wrong about. When my convictions developed a little more, I thought--and still think--that the invasion was the most boneheaded major policy decision ever committed by the USA. Not the most horrible or devastating, but just the rawest, most undiluted dose of stupid ever. Way dumber than Vietnam. It got me wondering though...what did I think back then? I was a junior in high school, so it's a bit fuzzy in my mind. I was against the war, that much I rem...

Blogs don't do shit like this for the most part. It requires money, time, connections, and expertise. Jesus fucking Christ.