on torture

US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (via TPM) on torture:

In such cases, "smacking someone in the face" could be justified, the outspoken Scalia told the BBC. "You can't come in smugly and with great self satisfaction and say 'Oh it's torture, and therefore it's no good."'

and

Scalia said that it was "extraordinary" to assume that the Constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" also applied to "so-called" torture.

no comment.

US Senat passed the immunity bill for telecom companies. pretty sad day.

Lancet is back in the news!

a new mortality study on Iraq just brought back the discussion about the Lancet papers. (Lancet 2004 and lancet 2006)

the study "Violence-Related Mortality in Iraq from 2002 to 2006" published in the "new england journal of medicine"
is used by the usual suspect (lead by one David Kane) and in right wing editorials (WSJ) as a contradiction of the Lancet results.
the death estimate by violent cause in the new study (151000, 95% uncertainity range 104000-225000) is lower that that found in Lancet 2 (601000, confidence interval ranges from 426,000 to 793,000)

while the NJoM study finds a lower number of violent deaths, the result is still a shockingly high mortality. an interesting part of the new paper is, that security did not allow polling (mostly in 2006) in some clusters in Anbar and Baghdad.
the authors chose to reconstruct the mortality in those clusters by using the IBC numbers, a dead count based on reports in news paper articles.
the general tone of the paper tends to be more positive toward the IBC (a project using a very different method, producing definetly an undercount) and slightly sceptical of the Lancet results (a scientific study done in a very similar way).

a few talking points to notice are: (good discussion, as always, can be found on deltoid)

1. the numbers of the NJoM are in good agreement with the Lancet 1 numbers for the early period of the war.

2. while the paper finds a smaller increase in violent deaths than the Lancet 2 paper, it shows a masiive increase in the rate of non-violent deaths (doubled deathrate, some calculations lead to an estimate of 400000 total excess deads, in comparison with a total of 650000 in the lancet 2)

3. the paper does not show an increase in dathrate after the Samarra bombing and in early 2006. this is extremely strange, as the increase in violence was even registered by the US military and lead to the surge.

4. the mortality results are a small part of a huge survey about health in iraq. the questions fill about 20 pages, the relevant part being on page 16.

more soon.

Turkey keeps bombing Iraq

Iraq strongly condemned Monday Turkish air strikes on Kurdish rebel bases in its northern territory, branding them a "cruel attack" on Iraqi sovereignty that claimed innocent lives.

so, how much closer to a free, peaceful and independent Iraq have we gotten lately?

ps: sorry for the latest lack of post. i was slightly busy, commenting on some CO2 issues. but it looks like i will return home soon :)

immunity for spying?

telecommunications companies won a skirmish in the Senate on Monday as a bill to protect them from lawsuits for cooperating with the Bush administration’s eavesdropping programs easily overcame a procedural hurdle.
..
By 76 to 10, with Democrats divided, the Senate voted to advance the bill for consideration. A measure to block it, which was led by Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut fell short, as those who wanted the bill to reach the floor got 16 votes more than the 60 needed to achieve that goal.

america, where are you going to?

where are the democtrats?

this is insanity!

on torture

TPM has a very good post on torture and the problems waterboarding is giving Michael Mukasey.

in short: if he says, that waterboarding is torture (well, it obviously is!) those who used the technique in the past could be prosecuted.

, but the key to his rationale appears to be his expressed fear that the attorney general's public acknowledgment that waterboarding is torture would place interrogators in "personal legal jeopardy."

well, they obviously SHOULD be prosecuted. but that seems to be beside the point.

the current US administartion has gotten involved in a huge number of criminal affairs. at this time, it looks like they are concentrating on covering their backs..

Big Oil ignores Pentagon lies

on the day that the US military starts declaring al-qaeda destroied or cripped, the oil price reaches some high point due to fear of a turkish incursion.

looks like those economic analysists undersatnd, that al-qaeda is not the most important force in the Iraq debacle?

and that US victory declarations are not worth the paper that they are printed on.

absurde claim by heritage

the heritage foundation is lauding the faked petraeus numbers with an absurd claim:

When the media covered the Petraeus-Crocker hearings, they missed one really big story: With about 160,000 combat troops, Gen. Petraeus managed to stem the rising tide of violence in Iraq. That is a statistic worth noting because, according to the “experts,” it couldn’t be done.

instead of noting the faked numbers or at least noting, that a reduction to the 2006 deathtoll numbers is NOT good, they get everything completely wrong