Archive for May, 2004
My Lai
Anyone hopeful that justice will be served in the Abu Ghraib investigation might wish to take a look back at the My Lai prosecutions:
In the end, Charlie company’s commanding officer, Lt Calley, was the only one to be convicted. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour. Within three days he was out of [...]
Cyderabad
The NY Times technology section has a good article about some of the reasons the BJP lost the elections:
In a country of 180 million households, only about 45 million have telephone lines. Among India’s 1.05 billion people, only 26.1 million have mobile phones. And while around 300 million Indians still live on less than $1 [...]
Alliances
If there can be gay Republicans, why can’t there be pro-life Democrats?
Amy Sullivan understands that political parties are about building alliances, they are not meant to be social clubs. It is precisely this aspect of the Democratic Party that Republicans have been so successful in using against them.
In a recent Prospect article, Geoffrey Nunberg put [...]
Torture
By using torture to question the top terrorists it has in custody, the government has effectively sabotaged any future prosecutions of al-Qaida players—major and minor—that might depend on evidence gathered through those interrogations. It’s plausible that skilled interrogation by the FBI, in accordance with American law, could have produced valuable evidence of these terrorists’ guilt, [...]
Usenet [Feeds]
Continuing my ongoing quest to document new and innovate uses for RSS feeds…
Looks like Google is pushing Atom (a standard that “competes” with RSS) with the launch of the Google Groups2 beta. They have added Atom feeds for thousands of Usenet groups. Here’s where you can link to one such feed.
Posted here, found the link [...]
Zimbardo
There have been a couple of posts I’ve read recently referring to the Zimbardo experiment in discussing Abu Ghraib. The best one was by Rivka, who wrote:
What does the Stanford experiment tell us about Abu Ghraib? I don’t think it absolves the low-level MPs from moral responsibility, but it should steer us away from explanations [...]
TypeKey
I’m upgrading my blogging software to MovableType 3.0. (Note: It is hard to find the free version for download, but its still there.) This means that there will be a new commenting system, which requires you to register with TypeKey in order to be able to post comments. It is either that, or I have [...]
ah-boo GRAYB
A few days ago, Mark Liberman posted a link to this Global Security web site with information on the proper pronounciation and meaning of the prison which has been so much in the news:
The prefered NIMA [National Imagery and Mapping Agency] transliteration is “Abu Ghurayb” (pronounced ah-boo GRAYB)
… The prefix “abu” means “the father [...]
I am Asian™
It seems that the phrase “I am Asian”™ has been trademarked by McDonald’s®.
Waco
Who is Army Chief of Staff Peter J. Schoomaker? He is one of the “Rumsfeld underlings” who gave testimony before congress about Abu Ghraib. David Neiwert gives us the scoop:
Schoomaker’s name may be familiar. Regular readers will recall it coming up in the context of a discussion of how the misadventure in Iraq stands as [...]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
