Gives a whole new meaning to the word "slap happy"

This isn't actually news, but the report on the treatment of "enemy detainees" has been released and it's stunning. They literally took SERE instructors and "reverse engineered" their tactics into methods for torturing people.

Here's the report

From page xx:

"(U) On December 30, 2002, two instructors from the Navy SERE school arrived at GTMO. The next day, in a session with approximately 24 interrogation personnel, the two SERE instructors demonstrated how to administer stress positions, and various slapping techniques. According to two interrogators, those who attended the training even broke off into pairs to practice the techniques." (emphasis added)"

I went through Survival School in the early 1990s when I was reassigned into an airborne position. Survival School is fun: You spend some quality time in Eastern Washington State, hiking around the woods, learning how to survive and get rescued by search & rescue choppers and then the SERE trainers "capture" you and send you to a fake POW camp. At the camp, you are hooded, buried alive, denied sleep, put in stress positions and interrogated. At the end, they raise the American flag and everyone has a beer. Very touching.

As the report makes clear, the units that train airborne military personnel are NOT interrogators. They aren't actually getting any information from the trainees. They are playing a role designed to give airmen experience with what might happen to them if they get shot down and captured by an enemy.

For example, there were pilots in the first Gulf War who got shot down and captured by the Iraqi army. They were tortured routinely as part of their interrogations. One told us about his experience getting his teeth wired to a car battery in a contraption that he called the "Sony Talkman". The Iraqis demanded to know how USAF bombs were being guided to their targets. His method of resistance was to provide false but credible information. He told them that the US military had satellites with lasers so powerful that they could illuminate a target from space that the laser-guided bombs could seek out. The truth was that special forces teams had to infiltrate the territory and illuminate the target from several hundred yards away.

So let me get this straight. We found some guys in the military who are paid to torture, demean and otherwise fuck up military personnel in order to prepare them for a hellish POW experience. We flew them down to Gitmo and trained military policemen in these methods so that they could be used on Gitmo prisoners. These methods that were DESIGNED to be illegal and violations of the Geneva Convention?

Hitch Switch

After September 11th, Christopher Hitchens was one of the left-wing writers who veered hard right. He tirelessly defended the war in Iraq in the leadup to the invasion and has never stopped, even after all the pretenses that were use to justify the war have been shown to be faulty (WMD), mendacious (9/11 connected to Iraq) or overstated ("beacon" of democracy).

And yet we now see that Hitchens is praising the Democratic nominee for President for his rhetoric and policy with respect to Pakistan. In Slate, he writes that

Sen. Barack Obama has, if anything, been the more militant of the two presidential candidates in stressing the danger here and the need to act without too much sentiment about our so-called Islamabad ally. He began using this rhetoric when it was much simpler to counterpose the "good" war in Afghanistan with the "bad" one in Iraq. Never mind that now; he is committed in advance to a serious projection of American power into the heartland of our deadliest enemy. And that, I think, is another reason why so many people are reluctant to employ truthful descriptions for the emerging Afghan-Pakistan confrontation: American liberals can't quite face the fact that if their man does win in November, and if he has meant a single serious word he's ever said, it means more war, and more bitter and protracted war at that—not less.

Habeas

From today's glorious 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court finding the Detainee Treatment Act unconstitutional and affirming that the men held prisoner at Gitmo have habeas rights under the Constitution:

"Officials charged with daily operational responsibility for our security may consider a judicial discourse on the history of the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 and like matters to be far removed from the Nation’s present, urgent concerns. Established legal doctrine, however, must be consulted for its teaching. Remote in time it may be; irrelevant to the present it is not. Security depends upon a sophisticated intelligence apparatus and the ability of our Armed Forces to act and to interdict. There are further considerations, however. Security subsists, too, in fidelity to freedom’s first principles. Chief among these are freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adherence to the separation of powers. It is from these principles that the judicial authority to consider petitions for habeas corpus relief derives."

- Kennedy, J.

That ain't nothing but the truth, my friends. Nothing but the truth.

Boozing with Hillary

Go on, NY Times editors, why not just come right out and say that Hillary was drunk?

"And then there was Wednesday night’s airborne bourbon swig in front of reporters on her plane, with Mrs. Clinton holding court for the diminishing press pool accompanying her.
Fernando Suarez, a reporter for CBS News who has been traveling with Mrs. Clinton’s campaign since October, asked her if she had ever been to Mount Rushmore before her visit there earlier in the day. Mrs. Clinton said she in fact had.
'Before you were born,' she added, looking at Mr. Suarez, who is 29, and noting that 'I did a lot of things before you were born.'
She swirled the bourbon in her glass and nodded mischievously.
'And thank god you weren’t around,' Mrs. Clinton continued. 'Or I wouldn’t have enjoyed any of them.'"

This, from an article entitled "High Spirits for a Battler Who Is Low on Delegates"....

NY Times trending poorer?

Much has been made about the NY Times and their focus on the consumer preferences of exceedingly rich people, while ignoring real people and their concerns. Editors at the Times have denied any slant in their reporting.

Now, we have a Thursday Styles section that includes two articles about less expensive consumer options: "Dress for Less and Less" by Eric Wilson and "Penny Pinching Looks Great" by David Colman. This follows on the Sunday metro section cover story "Starting Salaries but New York Tastes", which included a young New Yorker who left her wardrobe back in Nebraska and received periodic boxes from her mother instead of shopping for new clothes in Manhattan.

Can we say that the NY Times is trending poorer?

Emily

Of all the thousands of webposts, NYTimes.com comments and gawker.com attempts to suck pageviews out of Emily Gould, this one was the most memorable to me:

David Williams Says: May 22nd, 2008 at 1:46
pm
I must tell you that I’m a 68-year-old man who has never read a blog before or posted a comment on one. But I just read your piece in the New York Times magazine, and it left me with such a storm of feelings I have been moved to seek you out.
First, the piece reminded me of much of the “new journalism” of the 1960’s. One of the principal sources of that kind of writing was Esquire magazine, which in those days was the most exciting and interesting
magazine in the world, unlike the superficial and irrelevant waste of paper it has since become. The modus operandi of the editor, Harold Hayes, as he himself described it, was to contract the best writers in the country and let them write about anything they wanted. The result was a vibrant voice that no publication has achieved since. For years I’ve yearned for some contemporary equivalent — a source of insightful, perceptive writing illuminating the times we live in. Your NYT piece is precisely that. And I love it.
At nearly 69, I’ve felt tremendously deprived not to be able to enter the world your generation lives in via the observations and insights of one of its members. (That was what the “new journalism” and especially the Esquire of the 1960s and very early ’70s provided for my generation. Your piece, for instance, reminds me a little of James Baldwin’s account of his relationship with Norman Mailer, “The Black Boy Looks At The White Boy.” Much of the best of that Esquire can be found in the wonderful, voluminous collection the magazine put out at the end of the ’60s, Smiling Through The Apocalypse.) I’m so grateful to have discovered a writer who again unlocks my mind and opens my eyes and takes me into the world she inhabits. As a minor example, it was so satisfying to get to know a young woman with tattoos; I’ve wondered for years who these people are, what do tattoos, which in my generation labelled the resentful and disaffected, mean to this generation, what would an attractive young woman with tattoos be like? And as someone who loves the art of writing, your hyper-insightful, wonderfully written piece gives me hope that that art has not been smothered to death by the embrace of the academy.
And, to get personal (as befits a blog, I guess), you also broke my heart. Three years ago I left New York after living for 37 years on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, spending several summers on Fire Island, and your voice spoke to me of that world, that life, in a way that so beautifully evoked not only the City but its best inhabitants — the young, curious, eager persons I knew when I was young there. It probably is not irrelevant that your photo reminds me very much of the love of my life, a very smart, very talented, funny and rambunctious young woman, a resident of the Village, in those days still the place for those with literary and other artistic ambitions. To be reminded of all that was painful, and sad, but, still, to have those feelings in relation to the world you live in makes the world I lived in come alive again in my mind.
Thanks for the memories.

From Emily's personal blog

Bill Simmons phoning it in

Fans of Bill Simmons ("The Sports Guy") have noticed that his columns on espn.com have become less and less frequent and that his podcasts have become more and more irrelevant and self-referential. His last column on Page 2 of espn.com is a collection of random thoughts without any attempt at a sustained thesis. His last few podcasts have been about reality television, his friend Jacko's song, written by the band Theocracy and Chuck Klosterman's stay in Germany at the University ofLeipzig. His last conversation with Klosterman barely touched on the sports world, with a discussion of the NBA playoffs and the (seemingly) inevitable Lakers v. Celtics final.

Deadspin has theorized that Simmons is disenchanted with the restrictions imposed on his work by his corporate employer, specifically on the cancelled podcast with Barack Obama (which, obviously, is a huge get for an internet writer/podcaster).

"Information Dominance"

Like a genie in a bottle or a humunculus risen from clay that turns to destroy its creator, our military techniques and strategies have been employed against us in the "Global War on Terror." As the massively documented article in today's Times makes clear, the Department of Defense has taken a strategy originally developed for use against the Soviet Union and other Cold War enemies (electronic warfare and its descendants, information warfare and information dominance) and deployed it against us.

Electronic warfare developed early in the 20th century. Essentially, it operates as a "force multiplier" for military operations by denying the enemy the ability to communicate and to conduct surveillance and reconnaissance. This is accomplished by jamming their radio frequencies with white noise so that their military units cannot share operational intelligence or commands from higher echelon units to junior units. Enemy radar sites are jammed, disrupted or attacked with "beam riding" missiles that home in on the radar stations emitting signals.

In later years, simply denying the enemy the ability to communicate evolved into planting false information within the enemies command and control communications network. Meaconing, for example, is the practice of placing false radio beacons to draw aircraft off course. RB-50 reconnaissance aircraft were drawn over the border in Turkey by Soviet meaconing and shot down for violating Soviet airspace. Spoofing is another technique, whereby fake radio transmissions mimic enemy units communication, sowing confusion and disinformation, or create the illusion of friendly forces in places where they are not located. In World War II, Allied forces in England created a diversion by spoofing a massive invasion force with fake communications that operated as a decoy for the Normandy invasion force. Psychological operations were conducted during the Vietnam war, broadcasting propaganda and dropping leaflets in order to destroy the enemy's morale and sow discontent.

In the 1990s, these many different techniques and strategies, electronic warfare, meaconing, spoofing, psyops, etc., were all gathered together under the doctrine of "information warfare" and, later, "information dominance." This doctrine was deployed in the Gulf War as a coordinated joint strategy by all branches of the military to deny Iraqi communications, create false data to confuse and misdirect Iraqi military units and to induce via propaganda individual soldiers into surrendering.

The latest revelations that the Department of Defense and cultivated and deployed retired military officers as "analysts" on Fox News, NBC, CNN and other news networks in order to spread talking points, false information and propaganda. This effort grew out of the doctrine described above:

Torie Clarke, the former public relations executive who oversaw the Pentagon’s dealings with the analysts as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, had come to her job with distinct ideas about achieving what she called “information dominance.” In a spin-saturated news culture, she argued, opinion is swayed most by voices perceived as authoritative and utterly independent.

And so even before Sept. 11, she built a system within the Pentagon to recruit “key influentials” — movers and shakers from all walks who with the proper ministrations might be counted on to generate support for Mr. Rumsfeld’s priorities.

(emphasis added)

This is reminiscent of the use of interrogation training techniques used on US military units that fly reconnaissance missions in international airspace near enemy territory, such as North Korea. Lessons learned in the POW camps of North Vietnam about how to resist interrogation, not just physical torture but also mental manipulations, were used on US military personnel in order to train them for the possibility of capture and interrogation by the enemy. These techniques included sleep deprivation, stress positions, political indoctrination, simulated burials and waterboarding. In the Global War on Terror, these techniques, which we borrowed from the worst of our enemies during the Cold War, were actually employed at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and in secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe.

Now it appears that another Cold War military doctrine has been directed toward another application, except this time, instead of "enemy combatants" and "terrorists", the target is the American public.

Must Read: Bill James on Freakonomics blog

This Freakonomics Q&A is a treat for baseball fans. Bill James, the autodidact statistician and "creator" of sabermetrics, has brought a real sea change to baseball in general and the Red Sox in particular. Lots of gems in here. My favorite:

Q: Using various statistics over a player’s lifetime, and comparing them to “league norms,” is it possible to determine which players may have used steroids?
A: Absolutely not, no. The problem is that many different causes can have the same effects. If a player used steroids, this could cause his home run total to explode at an advanced age — but so could weight training, Lasix surgery, better bats, playing in a different park, a great hitting coach, or a good divorce. It is almost always impossible to infer specific causes from general effects.

McCain's "Wisdom"

Today's opinion piece in the WSJ on Obama opens up what will surely be a favored line of attack through the rest of this election: Obama means well but he's naive and immature. Can't be trusted with the security of the nation.

The main point of the essay is that Obama doesn't understand defeat and the consequences of defeat in quite the mature and deep-seated way that McCain understands it. Noting that Obama only has one defeat on his resume (a failed bid for Congress), the comparisons to McCain's Vietnam (and post-Vietnam) experience with the demoralized military of the Seventies are meant to suggest that McCain possesses the measured wisdom earned through decades of experience.

However, there is a howling mistake in the examples given. First, McCain virtually jerked the rug out from under President Clinton, forcing a rapid exit and withdrawal from Somalia in the wake of a firefight that left U.S. soldiers dead, their bodies defiled on television. But then, years later, McCain wrote that Osama bin Laden saw a weakness in the United States' withdrawal and felt emboldened to act. So, which is it? Was McCain wise to push for withdrawal from Somalia instead of escalating our involvement? Or was he foolish for cutting our losses and retreating in shame? Are we meant to infer that McCain has somehow learned from his mistake?

Patches? We don't need no stinkin' patches...

Many moons ago, I spent more than a few years in the military intelligence community, mostly in the Far East. The "spook" world is intriguing, as it manages to blend the cerebral and the visceral into a tight-knit intellectual/warrior culture. On the one hand, studying the enemy requires high-level analytic ability but, on the other hand, the purpose of all the academic pursuit is to more accurately target lethal force, to put "steel on target", as they say.

This is all kept under wraps, of course, for good reason. One interesting glimpse into this world is in today's NYT, with an article about patches created by various "black ops" organizations like the National Reconnaisance Office and various stealth military units (mostly U.S. Air Force). The picture above is from Skivvy Nine, the "legendary" USAF unit in the Republic of Korea. One key to the code: the knight is a chess reference; intelligence, like the knight, is the most unpredictable force on the battlefield.

What?! Who's still doing LBO deals?!

This is hilarious. Bain Capital and THL are suing their lenders in Texas over the terms of the debt that the lenders are offering to fund Bain and THL's leveraged buyout of Clear Channel.

Bain and THL should consider themselves lucky that their lenders even exist, much less that they are still offering to attempt syndication of LBO debt in this frozen, illiquid market.

I'd recommend a quick read of the memo from Ropes & Gray, counsel to Bain and THL, the sponsors of this ill-fated LBO.

We're living in a completely different LBO landscape from 2006 (when this deal was struck) and even as late as May 17, 2007 (when it was re-negotiated), sponsors were getting crazy stuff from banks like equity bridges, cov-lite and paper-thin covenants (e.g., no debt-to-equity maximum ratio, no "no call" protection). Banks were bending over backwards to get lending business from sponsors. But that worm turned around June/July '07 and we're in a completely different world. The banks have a solid argument that the credit crunch is an event similar to legal concepts like force majeure and impossibility of performance. They should walk away clean. Paying the breakup fee would be noblesse oblige.

Tyler Kepner's Objective Journalism

The NY Times Sports section is a consistently amusing section of the paper, full of credulous reporting and thinly veiled homerism. The disconnect between the national ambitions of the rest of the paper, with barely any city coverage on Page One and proliferating lifestyle sections (House & Home, Thursday Styles, etc.), and the Sports section (relentlessly centered on New York) is a little jarring when you pull back to 30,000 feet to look at it. It would seem that the Sports section, like the City section, is left to its own devices by the powers that be. And where the City section has excelled, as in the Eliot Spitzer/Ashley Alexandra Dupre reporting, the Sports section has been almost irrelevant for many years.

A particularly lame exemplar of this section is Tyler Kepner, whose breathless reportage of the Greatness of All Things Yankee commences once again today with a turd of a story about Yankee Stadium.

Horace Mann

Lots of chatter over at Gawker about the New York magazine cover story on Horace Mann. It's a long story about students mocking teachers online, watered-down disciplinary actions for children of rich trustees of the school and various "liberal" teachers getting booted.

From an editorial standpoint, this story is great for New York magazine. It helps feed the idea that NYM is a "must read" for folks on the Upper East Side that sit right in the magazine's sweet spot for advertisers. Is it "news"? In a conventional sense, no, of course not. 99% of New Yorkers do not care about Horace Mann or any of the "elite" private schools. But that 1% that do care have to read this article and talk about it with their friends. Great niche marketing/journalism.

On the other hand, it's poorly written, confusing, too long and tedious. The subject matter is a hash of old news with a sprinkling of new quotes.

Ban the Presidential First Pitch

As a Nats fan, I have to ask: why are we burdened with the Presidential first pitch? It's just wrong. He's not a king, he doesn't represent the United States (just the executive branch) and the team represents the people of Washington D.C., not any particular political party. Putting out the red carpet for this putz (or any of the many morons to come in future years) is just embarassing.

Jaffee tri-folds

The classic MAD magazine tri-folds by Al Jaffee are available on the NYT website. I don't know why but I recall Richard Nixon and Vietnam featuring in more than their fair share of these tri-folds back in the Seventies when I was a kid reading MAD Magazine.