I’m dividing this response into three sections.
1. Discussing the efficacy of torture.
2. Discussing the morality of torture
3. Discussing the pragmatism inherent in the moral position.
Efficacy
The author of the article Ronaldus cited says, “I would have told my interrogator anything they wanted to hear to make it stop.” I suspect that this is what supporters of the practice find appealing. After all, we want information from these individuals and torture will make them talk. The question is, what will they say? Individuals being tortured are seldom capable of thinking long term. They want the torture to stop and stop now. Torture has a nasty way of producing testimony that sounds very important ( the kind that will make the torturers stop), but turns out to be untrue.[3,4,5,6,7,8] It should be noted that water boarding was pioneered by the Spanish Inquisition [9], who were famous for extracting false confessions from their victims. Acting on false information can be extremely dangerous for our troops and our nation as evidenced by this story from citation 8 :
“I am aware of too many cases where torture – or abuse – backfired. Just to cite one: a previously cooperative and truthful detainee named Al-Libi was taken by the CIA to be tortured in Egypt. Under duress he claimed that there was a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. This information was rushed to Secretary Colin Powell who used it in his speech to the United Nations as a justification to go to war with Iraq. Al-Libi later recanted, and all of his information – both when he was cooperative and later when he was tortured – were deemed tainted. It was determined that he made up the connection in order to make the torture stop.”
To misquote Ronald Reagan, it’s not that the tortured don’t talk, it’s that they say so many things that just aren’t so.
Morality
“Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” - Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution
It feels almost like a distopian alternate reality to find myself having to put forth an argument that torture is immoral, but here we are. I’d ask you to look at citations 1 and 2. While recognizing that the Huffington Post is hardly a reliable unbiased source, I’d ask you to only pay attention to the factual accounts of George Washington’s abhorrence of the mistreatment of prisoners during the Revolution even when the British were committing horrific crimes against American prisoners. I’d ask you to note Alexander Hamilton stopping an execution of British soldiers, despite the fact that similar executions of American soldiers were commonplace.
In the original post Ronaldus ends with “I would rather be waterboarded than beheaded.”
We’ve often discussed the concept of personal responsibility. Is there any greater abdication of personal responsibility than to use the actions of the most barbaric and brutal people to justify your own? Is there any thing more base than finding the lowest and meanest examples of human behavior and saying, “I merely need to do better than that”?
I have always deeply admired my grandfather who served as an administrator of a prisoner of war camp during WWII. Even as Allied soldiers in the custody of the Germans and Japanese were subjected to indescribable horrors, our nation remained true to its ideals. The prisoners we took were treated civilly. My grandfather learned German so he could speak with his prisoners. By the end of the war, there were several who he considered friends.
This strikes right at the core of who we are as Americans. Ronald Reagan famously said, “America is a shining city upon a hill”. Are we content to let that go and merely be not the worst nation in the world. Ronaldus and I have often discussed the question of American Exceptionalism. Many a great nation has meteorically risen on virtuous ideology. Greece and Rome were more democratic in their institutions and had a greater regard for human rights than most of their contemporaries. Thomas Paine, even while calling for revolution against Britain, acknowledged it as the best and freest nation then on the earth. The short lived Napoleonic French Empire rose phoenix-like from the ashes of the French Revolution with “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite” on its lips. All of these nations rose on idealism, but succumbed to the temptation of might makes right when they had achieved a dominant position in the world. I’m afraid that the question of whether or not America is exceptional must be answered today at the height of our power. I believe we have inherited an exceptional nation. Whether it remains so is entirely in our hands. I take American Exceptionalism not as an article of faith, but as a duty that I must live up to. I hope that in the crucible of dominance, America can demonstrate its exceptional nature. I do not think embracing the methods of the Spanish Inquisition is at all helpful to the case for American Exceptionalism.
Pragmatism
As a father, I must concede that it is difficult to cling to morality in the face of the mortal threat that terrorism poses, but I genuinely believe that remaining true to our ideals will make us and our children safer in the short, medium and long term.
Throughout our history, our commitment to the humane treatment of prisoners has served us well. In the Revolution, the British populous and parliament was repulsed by accounts of British brutality even while being surprised by the civilisation demonstrated by those who the King was calling barbaric and traitorous. This helped to weaken the British will to continue to pursue the war [12,13], and even led some of the British and Hessian troops to change sides and support the revolution [11]. After the surrender of Germany and Japan in WWII, we were able to occupy both nations with surprisingly little difficulty. Again this had a great deal to do with the people of these countries becoming aware of the crimes their nations had committed relative to the honorable behavior of the Allies. [12] In both of these cases maintaining the moral high ground was crucial to our military success, but in this war on terror, the moral high ground is even more crucial. Even the Bush administration said that this war must involve winning the hearts and minds of the populous of the terrorist producing countries. I believe our country is capable of doing so, but only by clinging to the ideals that have served us so well in the past.
1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-horton/a-tale-of-two-georges_1_b_41091.html
2. http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0614/p09s02-coop.html
3. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2302-2005Jan11.html
4. http://www.americanthinker.com/2004/10/torture_as_an_interrogation_te.html
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture
6. http://www.fas.org/irp/dni/educing.pdf
7. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/opinion/23soufan.html?_r=3&partner=rss&emc=rss
8. http://multi-medium.net/2009/02/11/the-effectiveness-of-torture
9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding
10. http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=george_w_and_human_rights
11. http://www.myrevolutionarywar.com/pow.html
12. http://books.google.com/books?id=_90e_nGQrlsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=British+abuse+of+prisoners+American+Revolution&source=bl&ots=XMFOTYvX9o&sig=sAU6KI6Z2mkrtnhzC_FjFzmbpVw&hl=en&ei=DaINTYuJNML6lwfn5oiADA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false
13. http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/2002_summer_fall/pows.htm
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Response to "The Cooling World"
I’m sorry this has taken so long. The holidays and what not have gobbled up my time. I’ll try to get to water boarding in a more timely fashion.
I’m glad I asked about your intent, because my original assumption was that you were trying to suggest an equivalency between one article in 1975 and the overwhelming consensus by the scientific community today. I hope you’ll indulge me in addressing this false equivalency just because I’d already looked into it somewhat before you clarified your intent.
The one Newsweek article is essentially what every climate change denier trots out in order to suggest that some elusive “they” predicted widespread cooling in the 1970s. It was cited by James Inhofe on the floor of the Senate and has been referenced by Rush Limbaugh at least a thousand times.
Despite how widely it’s been cited, the fact remains that it is only one article. The reality is that anthropogenic global warming due to emissions of greenhouse gases was being discussed in scientific literature as early as 1896 [7]. Sometime around the late 1960’s / early 1970’s the question was being asked by many people whether the pollution we were pumping into the air may have widespread climatic ramifications. As all of you know, the scientific method suggests that the appropriate response to a question is to make observations and propose hypotheses to answer the questions being asked.
A great many hypotheses were suggested and the Newsweek article reflects one of them. A survey of peer reviewed scientific journals undertaken by the American Meteorological Society of articles addressing climate change from 1965 to 1983 found only seven articles suggesting global cooling and 44 warning of global warming, so even in the 70’s, global cooling was not viewed by the scientific community as the dominant threat. [3] Over the years, experimentation and observation eliminated many of the hypotheses suggested and a broad based consensus coalesced around the current understanding of Global Warming as evidenced by the similar survey of peer reviewed journals undertaken in 2004 which identified 928 articles on climate change published between 1993 and 2003. I’ll quote the author of the survey, Naomi Oreskes, here :
The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position. [9]
This progression of numerous hypotheses being systematically eliminated to arrive at consensus is exactly the way science is supposed to work. Unfortunately science is ill suited to the clean ideological narrative style of political propagandists as is evidenced by the fact that in spite of an overwhelming scientific consensus on an issue that is clearly a scientific question, this question still rages in the political theater.
The consensus on the IPCC report [8] in the scientific community today is overwhelming. For a well documented article on the consensus, I’ll point you to reference 10. I’d also encourage you to look at that entire series as every objection I’ve ever heard a climate change denier employ is addressed in some detail therein.
As to the idea that it is foolish to make economic decisions based on climate predictions that may or may not be accurate, I’d ask you to consider the shipping industry, the airline industry, the construction industry, owners of swimming pools and anyone in the tourist industry. All of these industries and hundreds of others make economic decisions based on scientists best guesses about what the weather will do all of the time. They certainly seem to believe that the risk mitigation inherent in paying attention to such data is worth the risk of unnecessarily losing revenue due to inaccurate predictions.
The idea that the taxation of carbon emissions would destroy our nation’s economy is simply absurd in the face of the historical record. Our nation has taxed all sorts of stuff throughout its history [11], and no tax has managed to cripple or even seriously hinder our economic progress yet. To attribute some sort of mystical quality to the carbon tax that it will be the one to bring our nation to its knees is just silly.
The more serious threat to our economy is that we are ceding our position as a high tech leader in the field of energy production and efficiency to other nations. Our nation has always been well served by being on the leading edge of technological advancements, but while we remain mired in a fossil fuel funk [12], Germany is becoming the world leader in solar power [13]; France is the undisputed leader in nuclear power [14]; Europe, Japan and China are out developing us in high speed rail [15] and the most fuel efficient vehicles are being made by Japanese and European automakers [16]. All of these are technologies in which the US was an early pioneer but has now allowed itself to be surpassed.
I really have no doubt that our economy can survive one more tax as it’s survived all past taxes. I do not believe for an instant that our economy will survive us insisting on being dinosaurs clinging to the energy production and transportation paradigms of the previous century. To allow ourselves to be left behind is truly against the American spirit of being pioneers in innovation that has made our country the economic powerhouse it is today. I believe if we do not act it will be the ruin of our once great nation.
1. http://www.grist.org/article/they-predicted-global-cooling-in-the-1970s/
2. http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/
3. http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/Myth-1970-Global-Cooling-BAMS-2008.pdf
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
5. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-global-cooling-myth/
6. http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/nas-1975.html
7. http://web.lemoyne.edu/~giunta/Arrhenius.html - 1896 discussion of global warming
8. http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/index.htm
9. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/306/5702/1686.full
10. http://www.grist.org/article/there-is-no-consensus/
11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_history_of_the_United_States
12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States
13. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany
14. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
15. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail
16. http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bestworst.shtml
I’m glad I asked about your intent, because my original assumption was that you were trying to suggest an equivalency between one article in 1975 and the overwhelming consensus by the scientific community today. I hope you’ll indulge me in addressing this false equivalency just because I’d already looked into it somewhat before you clarified your intent.
The one Newsweek article is essentially what every climate change denier trots out in order to suggest that some elusive “they” predicted widespread cooling in the 1970s. It was cited by James Inhofe on the floor of the Senate and has been referenced by Rush Limbaugh at least a thousand times.
Despite how widely it’s been cited, the fact remains that it is only one article. The reality is that anthropogenic global warming due to emissions of greenhouse gases was being discussed in scientific literature as early as 1896 [7]. Sometime around the late 1960’s / early 1970’s the question was being asked by many people whether the pollution we were pumping into the air may have widespread climatic ramifications. As all of you know, the scientific method suggests that the appropriate response to a question is to make observations and propose hypotheses to answer the questions being asked.
A great many hypotheses were suggested and the Newsweek article reflects one of them. A survey of peer reviewed scientific journals undertaken by the American Meteorological Society of articles addressing climate change from 1965 to 1983 found only seven articles suggesting global cooling and 44 warning of global warming, so even in the 70’s, global cooling was not viewed by the scientific community as the dominant threat. [3] Over the years, experimentation and observation eliminated many of the hypotheses suggested and a broad based consensus coalesced around the current understanding of Global Warming as evidenced by the similar survey of peer reviewed journals undertaken in 2004 which identified 928 articles on climate change published between 1993 and 2003. I’ll quote the author of the survey, Naomi Oreskes, here :
The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position. [9]
This progression of numerous hypotheses being systematically eliminated to arrive at consensus is exactly the way science is supposed to work. Unfortunately science is ill suited to the clean ideological narrative style of political propagandists as is evidenced by the fact that in spite of an overwhelming scientific consensus on an issue that is clearly a scientific question, this question still rages in the political theater.
The consensus on the IPCC report [8] in the scientific community today is overwhelming. For a well documented article on the consensus, I’ll point you to reference 10. I’d also encourage you to look at that entire series as every objection I’ve ever heard a climate change denier employ is addressed in some detail therein.
As to the idea that it is foolish to make economic decisions based on climate predictions that may or may not be accurate, I’d ask you to consider the shipping industry, the airline industry, the construction industry, owners of swimming pools and anyone in the tourist industry. All of these industries and hundreds of others make economic decisions based on scientists best guesses about what the weather will do all of the time. They certainly seem to believe that the risk mitigation inherent in paying attention to such data is worth the risk of unnecessarily losing revenue due to inaccurate predictions.
The idea that the taxation of carbon emissions would destroy our nation’s economy is simply absurd in the face of the historical record. Our nation has taxed all sorts of stuff throughout its history [11], and no tax has managed to cripple or even seriously hinder our economic progress yet. To attribute some sort of mystical quality to the carbon tax that it will be the one to bring our nation to its knees is just silly.
The more serious threat to our economy is that we are ceding our position as a high tech leader in the field of energy production and efficiency to other nations. Our nation has always been well served by being on the leading edge of technological advancements, but while we remain mired in a fossil fuel funk [12], Germany is becoming the world leader in solar power [13]; France is the undisputed leader in nuclear power [14]; Europe, Japan and China are out developing us in high speed rail [15] and the most fuel efficient vehicles are being made by Japanese and European automakers [16]. All of these are technologies in which the US was an early pioneer but has now allowed itself to be surpassed.
I really have no doubt that our economy can survive one more tax as it’s survived all past taxes. I do not believe for an instant that our economy will survive us insisting on being dinosaurs clinging to the energy production and transportation paradigms of the previous century. To allow ourselves to be left behind is truly against the American spirit of being pioneers in innovation that has made our country the economic powerhouse it is today. I believe if we do not act it will be the ruin of our once great nation.
1. http://www.grist.org/article/they-predicted-global-cooling-in-the-1970s/
2. http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/
3. http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/Myth-1970-Global-Cooling-BAMS-2008.pdf
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
5. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-global-cooling-myth/
6. http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/nas-1975.html
7. http://web.lemoyne.edu/~giunta/Arrhenius.html - 1896 discussion of global warming
8. http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/index.htm
9. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/306/5702/1686.full
10. http://www.grist.org/article/there-is-no-consensus/
11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_history_of_the_United_States
12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States
13. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany
14. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
15. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail
16. http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bestworst.shtml
Sunday, November 14, 2010
A Thought Provoking Speech
I have heard sound bytes of this speech a bunch of times but have never read or listened to the whole thing and find it very relevant today. I knew I agreed with many of President Reagan's positions but because we were all so young and I only vaguely remember the fall of the Berlin wall I wanted to get some idealism from the source. I realize that the speech is very idealistic but one has to start somewhere. My point in posting this is to point out that government no matter what party is often overgrown and creates more problems than it solves. There is some specific example in this speech that are from nearly a half century ago and still are not solved but the ideas in this speech are worth consideration.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Waterboarding
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/3223809/Sun-writer-endures-waterboarding-agony.html
This is a link to a story about a journalist in the UK who allowed himself to be waterboarded for science. After reading about it I don't want to do it but if it is used in a "safe" manner I can't see an issue with using it. Does it have a record of actually drowning people to the point of death? If it is used to get information that is later verified to have saved lives ect. and leaves no physical scars I wonder, A:what all of the hoopla is about, B:Why aren't we using it more often. Not to suggest that it should be used willy nilly, but under the right circumstances it seems like and effective tool.
I would rather be waterboarded than beheaded.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
The Cooling World
Here is my position and the reasoning behind posting this article. I think that we as human beings do not have adequate information to conclude that, A: climate change is caused by man B: we can do anything about it if we wanted to. I think that we should not burden and possibly destroy our economy with regulation(ie Cap and trade, carbon emission taxes ect.) to attempt to stop something of which we do not have adequate data or understanding. Thank you for the format clarification Dan!
From the April 28, 1975 issue of Newsweek (a pdf file): (look at the temperature change graph in the pdf file, I am not sure how to embed it in the blog)
The Cooling World
By Peter Gwynne
28 April 1975There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production — with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas — parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia — where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually.
During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree — a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.
To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic.
“A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”
A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.
To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth’s average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras — and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average.
Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the “little ice age” conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 — years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.
Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. “Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data,” concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. “Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions.”
Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of westerly winds over temperate areas. The stagnant air produced in this way causes an increase in extremes of local weather such as droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons and even local temperature increases — all of which have a direct impact on food supplies.
“The world’s food-producing system,” warns Dr. James D. McQuigg of NOAA’s Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, “is much more sensitive to the weather variable than it was even five years ago.”
Furthermore, the growth of world population and creation of new national boundaries make it impossible for starving peoples to migrate from their devastated fields, as they did during past famines.
Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects.
They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.
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