Notes From The Green Building - Ginger Stampley has a good item on college students, college administrations, responsibility and suicide, informed by her perspective as a Rice alumna. What she says about Rice is true about MIT, where student Elizabeth Shinn committed suicide. (Her parents are suing MIT for not stopping the girl.

There was underground black humor -- part of the campus lore -- about the high number of suicides due to academic pressure. We knew the risks."

It sounds to me as if Elizabeth Shin's parents didn't

During my time at MIT, Building 54 (aka the Green Building) was the exit of choice for students who wanted to leave without going back home. I think MIT had the highest suicide rate of any US university back then, and seems to have kept up since. While news of suicides was kept out of The Tech, the official school paper, the unofficial right/libertarian paper reported them. (It's been a long time! I can't remember what it was called...)

MIT was the suicide capital of academe and has remained so, and it's hard to believe that anyone connected with the school wouldn't know that. It's even hard to believe anyone wouldn't hear about it in advance - it's information that student guides slipped in on campus visits and that guidance counselors have always known.

Umpty-Ump Is a Trend - Thomas Nephew cites a Guardian story about yet another al-Qaeda prisoner revolt, this time in Pakistan. That lengthens a list that already includes another prisoner riot in Pakistan, plus the famous Mazar e Sharif revolt. Think international scolds will shut up about the big bad US treating the Guantanamo prisoners as if they were, you know, dangerous?

Me neither.

Lame Excuses Department - Unqualified Offerings is actually just leaving the office, and will be back tomorrow. There are a couple of longer pieces brewing, on deterring Iraq for one, and more on "Libertarianism and My Sister," in response to some e-mail comments by Eve Tushnett. (Note to Eve: I'm not sure it's really a blog if you go two and a half weeks without updating...) But Offering Boy has a basketball game tomorrow and there's football on Sunday, so, well, we'll just see.

Not So Fast Mr. Offering - Reader Ronnie Carpio thinks I'm too hard on the radiophrenologists, and commends this New Scientist item about a study done at the University of Pennsylvania. If nothing else, it's pretty cool when scientists quote Saint Augustine. ("Deception is the denial of truth.") Both researcher and journalist are commendably cautious, especially in comparison to the NYT Magazine piece that set Unqualified Offerings off the other day.

However, more work is necessary before fMRI lie detection could be used for legal purposes, he says.

"Our study shows only an average difference in brain activity between lying and telling the truth in a group of young and healthy English-speaking people. In order to determine whether fMRI can be used to detect deception in any individual, much larger groups of different ages, cultures and socio-economic status should be studied."

Ronnie opines, regarding the ethics of actual functioning radiophrenological devices, "[the] model of search and seizure is a good one, and I suppose that's how it should be handled: a suspect can be scanned only if the police get a warrant, and then only with his lawyer present, and then with expert witnesses to instruct the jury on the scientific limitations of the test."

So that's Ronnie and Unqualified Offerings both, which ought to settle the issue before it even comes up.

A Cold Day in Hell - Unqualified Offerings agrees with a Charles Krauthammer column...

Just a Link - I rarely just link to items on major me-zines for go-read-this purposes, because it strikes me as pointless. For instance, I pretty much agree with everything Virginia Postrel and Instapundit have to say about Leon Kass, but I'd be delusive to imagine that anyone not named Offering reads this site and does not read the other two. So why tell you to go read what you already read anyway? As a result, the only time Certain Opinionators get mentioned around here is when I feel I have a minor value add to something they've said or if I think they're wrong. But since this site gets a lot of libertarian readers and it's at least conceivable that some libertarians don't read Mickey Kaus, which is a mistake on their part, but there you go. Anyway, his analysis of the historical problems with the film version of Black Hawk Down is intelligent and timely. Make sure to read it.

All-Star Madness - Justin Slotman links to an ESPN column suggesting HORSE join or replace NBA All-Star Weekend festivities like the dunk contest, the 3-point shooting contest and the scamming chicks contest. As Justin says, that would rule. But I think there's a better idea out there, propounded by local DC sports radio personality Steve Czaban. (Czaban gets national exposure as Jim Rome's backup.) Tell me if this wouldn't be cooler even than HORSE:

Nobody cares about East versus West. So just select two dozen All-Stars with a position distribution adequate to fill two teams. From here, every step is televised live on All Star Night.

1. The two top vote-getters each become captain of one team.
   
2. Captains take turn picking players for their squads, like at a playground.
   
3. Game is played Shirts versus Skins. Coaches optional.
   

A Syllogism in Quotes - Moira Breen of Inappropriate Response quite reasonably asked for answers to questions raised in her mind by "An Open Letter to Perry de Havilland." While official responses to her questions were sparse, unofficial responses are suggestive...

"The cheerleader blogs...have completely accomodated themselves to the aims of the "National Greatness" conservatives." - Unqualified Offerings

"Good read, but I don't know that it's true that the members of the Official Constellation of warbloggers (I'm not sure of the exact list, but gather he's including Reynolds, Den Beste, Welch, Layne, and Johnson) "have completely accomodated themselves to the aims of the 'National Greatness' conservatives". - Inappropriate Response

"Michael Kelly has a good column about seeing it through and rebuilding Afghanistan, while this report makes clear that the last thing the mullahs running Iran want is a free, prosperous, country next door. Reason enough to do it, and to drop a daisy-cutter or two on their pawns in Afghanistan, if necessary." - Instapundit.Com

"Like other empire-nations before it, America is rich enough to support a great foreign legion (of soldiers, governors, aid-givers, spies) who slog and grind professionally. The sacrifices required by the rest of us are, most of the time, at a minimum." - Michael Kelly

Like I Was Saying - Air Force Virginia, who is actually a contractor, she tells me, so Unqualified Offerings feels comfortable mentioning that her last name is "Warren," writes anent the brain-scanning machines:

It doesn't have to *work*, silly. Look at the widespread use of polygraph tests.

Which is true. It just needs to assure money and status gains for its developers and practitioners. Of course, Unqualified Offerings already said, "we might well get thought police who suck at what they do," which is not far off AFV's point.

But there's more to say, and wonder. First, UO suggests the term "radiophrenological devices" for the sorts of machines described in the NYT Mag article referenced in the "Will This Do?" item below. Second, Charles Moulton Marston, inventor of the polygraph, also created Wonder Woman. Will any of the radiophrenologists create a classic, fitfully popular comic book character? Third, AFV assures the world that she is going to start a blog of her own, and judging by the writing I've seen, it will be a good one. Your best bloggers, Unqualified Offerings says in a spirit of Olympian detachment, are libertarian Elvis Costello fans. Watch this space for an inaugural link announcement. Or, even better, monitor her brain waves until you detect the precise pattern found in those about to start a weblog, which is what Unqualified Offerings intends to do.

What About the Little Guy - The up-and-coming "Balloon Juice" blog comments on an entertainment news story as follows:

EMI pays 28 million to Mariah Carey so she WILL NOT sing for them.

I think they got screwed. I will not sing for them for significantly less.

Oh, he thinks this is cute, this John Cole does. I find the story frightening. How are the rest of us going to be able to afford to pay Mariah Carey not to sing to US??

Aim at the Target, Please - During the 90s, in the aftermath of Waco, Ruby Ridge and Okahoma City, one ran into fellow "antigovernment extremists" who devoted enormous energy to UN road signs and flame throwers in Central Texas and whether David Koresh was some intelligence agency's asset who has passed his smell date. I thought then and still do that if I were Big Government, I'd far rather people spend their time thinking about that sort of thing than about no-knock raids, administrative law courts and civil asset forfeiture, let alone the hundreds of government agencies with SWAT teams. If one has to have enemies, and the despised Professor Foucault insisted that one does, best to have enemies that will obligingly punch at shadows.

So why does Justin Raimondo spend an entire column running on about how "the Rockefellers" - the Rockefellers! - are behind what he calls "a furious post-9/11 anti-Saudi propaganda campaign that has gone into overdrive in recent weeks?" When right wingers start with the Rockefeller talk, everyone else heads for the exits. At best it's irrelevant. I neither know nor care whether "the Rockefellers" want to bring down the House of Saud and replace it with someone more congenial. Aramco is a large corporation as prone to rent-seeking as any other, so I don't reject the possibility out of hand. But so what? That "the Rockefellers" might want to topple the House of Saud means no more regarding the merits of the policy than that Charles Johnson and Glenn Reynolds do. It's either wrongheaded and wrong for the US to go to war to topple the present Royal Family or it isn't, regardless of who pays off whom.

Going down the Rockefeller path causes Raimondo to make some very dubious claims:

Speaking through Jeff Jacoby – in an act of ventriloquism that no doubt had the dummy-columnist's full cooperation – the Aramco-Rockefeller consortium delivered this "ultimatum" to their former business partners...

There is a factual claim here, a serious one, and it comes with out evidence. The claim is that Jacoby is not just a neo-imperialist crank but an agent of a particular corporate interest. Unless Raimondo has evidence of Jacoby being rented, Krugmanlike, for the duration of an article, it's not just bogus, but scurrilous. Then there's the lax timing of the Rockefeller assault. Raimondo identifies the turning point as a meeting of Abdallah and various oil executives on September 23 - 1998.

Virtually overnight it is discovered by all sorts of instant "experts" that Wahabism, the official state religion of our longstanding ally, is the equivalent of Nazism if not outright devil-worship. That this sudden awakening to the alleged "Saudi threat" occurred in tandem with the Rockefeller's acrimonious (and costly) break with the House of Saud is, of course, the purest coincidence.

Every supposedly baleful, Rockefeller-inspired maneuver Raimondo cites, from Martha McSally to Andrew Sullivan's "sudden" outrage over Saudi persecution of gays to the general outbreak of anti-Wahabism among pundits, happened three years after Raimondo's Big Meeting. If that's "tandem" it's tandem like a Dr. Seuss bicycle that extends across several pages from front seat to back seat. Strangely, all of these baleful events happened, by purest coincidence, within three months of a bunch of Saudi hijackers (and friends) killing 3500 people at the behest of a rich Saudi guy - three months of diffidence from the investigative organs of what Raimondo calls the US' "most loyal Arab ally." There's tandem and then there's tandem, it appears.

Then there's the muddiness of motive. According to the sources Raimondo references, present at the meeting were "The four American oil giants Mobil Corp, Exxon Corp, Texaco Inc. and Chevron Corp. (which established the Arabian American Oil Co now known as Saudi Aramco, in the 1930s) the other three were Atlantic Richfield Co., Conoco Inc. and Phillips Petroleum Co." Which seems to be the Aramco contingent, aka The Rockefellers, versus the outsiders. Surely the outsiders could buy their own pundits and government officials, couldn't they? Why do only The Rockefellers do that? (Hm, since Unqualified Offerings has steadily argued for a US pullout from Saudi Arabia but against a US conquest of same - in the absence of evidence that Saudi intelligence actually carried out the September massacres - wouldn't it be a prime candidate for Conoco money? Are they willing to use PayPal?)

This strikes UO as the problem with almost every "Big Oil" explanation of political developments. Big Oil really is big, and it has its fuligin fingers in lots of pies. So almost anything that happens can be seen to benefit some oil company or other. Enron, we have learned, though not from Charles Dodgson's blog, lobbied hard for the Kyoto treaty.

Raimondo wastes a column with a weak argument that would be pointless if proven. Something tells me this is happening just the way Jimmy Carter planned it...

Beyond Palm Beach - This site has not had much occasion to praise George Will during its existence and expects that such occasions will remain rare. But Will has a good piece today about Democratic Party polling shenanigans in Missouri last November.

Will This Do? - Reader Ronald Carpio writes with a link to a New York Times Magazine item about developments in forensic brain-scanning technology, and asks, "But what do you think about (assuming they can be made to work) brain-scanning "truth machines" [like the ones discussed in the article]. Are such devices still coercive?"

First off, it's very nice to be asked. This blogging thing sure beats haranguing subway riders while not wearing pants, just as Unqualified Offerings' probation officer promised it would.

There appear to be two issues here - principle and praxis. On the praxis side, having read the article and having done some reading on memory and consciousness over the years (Unqualified Offerings is a Searlite, if you're wondering), the various probe initiatives discussed in the Times article strike me as, in all likelihood, crocks. It looks like it would take Elizabeth Loftus maybe fifteen minutes to shoot holes in every wonder machine discussed. And it's worth noting that the article seems to get all its information from parties with a financial interest in at least the appearance of the viability of the various scanning devices.

The civil liberties implications of that prospect are unnerving to many: thoughts are not crimes. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, the F.B.I. and C.I.A. are taking a closer look at brain mapping. And the Department of Defense is helping finance Norseen’s research. If such efforts succeed, we might soon see the arrival of genuine thought police.

The CIA "wasted" decades of time and money on psychic research. (Who is Unqualified Offerings to say "wasted?" That pipe dream kept people in cushy jobs for years and years.) Local school districts and law enforcement agencies went gaga over the infamous Quadro Tracker in less nervous times. As Instapundit has noted time and time again since the fall, while the American people have not panicked unduly over terrorism, sectors of the American government have been downright hysterical. That's a very warm market for half-baked schemes. And of course, actual efficacy is not a prerequisite for getting thought police - we might well get thought police who suck at what they do.

As to the principle of the thing, let's imagine what I don't believe can exist: a nondestructive "truth machine" that can copy accurate memories like a computer can copy a file to a floppy. When you copy a file to a floppy, the contents of the hard drive remain the same, and the computer remains the same computer. You haven't destroyed any of its function to do so. That distinguishes an analogous "truth machine" from torture, and from hypothetical brainwashing machines and the like. Now the principle is What justifies search and seizure? and that's how I would want to approach it.

Destroy or Disprove - One more thought on torture and self-ownership. One runs into the argument that the ability of the torturer or brainwasher to break the will of a victim proves that free will and consciousness are illusions in the first place. It proves no such thing, any more than putting sugar in someone's gas tank proves that internal combustion is an illusion.

Clever Hans and Doctor Jeste - The torture piece has generated some reactions that deserve amplification. The Illuminated Donkey avers,

I have to admit I'm a bit unclear about Henley's argument. His leading point seems to be that the track record of government terrorist investigations simply doesn’t warrant entrusting the authorities with that sort of power, with the Higazy case being the current example (though it appears that coercive interrogative methods approaching torture were used to elicit some sort of confession).

I’m not really sure how he moves from that point to the doomsday scenario he describes, however. His argument seems to be that if we take the step of allowing torture in order to prevent potential attacks, there will still be situations (imagine a worst-case Higazy scenario) where this leads us to make wrong choices, hypothesizing a case where a torture-induced false confession leads agents down a blind alley with disastrous consequences. But even if this were the case, it’s not as if investigation is the zero-sum game he describes, where we have to throw all of our resources at one location. Some of his statements indicate that he has a moral position against using torture, while others indicate that his take is a more practical one.

I do have a moral position against using torture. In fact, the mere notion that an American feels the need to convince other Americans not to torture makes me so mad I could just fucking spit. I abominate torture because of all that self-ownership stuff. Torture is the violent attempt to destroy another's self-possession; it attempts to make an animal of a person and to own that animal. That is vile.

Not that everyone necessarily cares! Viz. Alan Dershowitz and his "torture warrant" enthusiasm, which only shows how "the rule of law" has come to mean "rule by lawyers" - so long as the professional apparatus in which Alan Dershowitz has status, power and a whole lot of money controls the torture action, what could be wrong with that?

See? I'm spitting, just like I warned everyone. Let me try again.

The primary argument in favor of an official resort to torture is utilitarian, and Americans are a practical people. So any hope of opposing torture means meeting utilitarian arguments with utilitarian objections. The utilitarian argument for is that the magnitude of possible harm from terrorist attacks are so great that to forego torture might mean a nuke destroying a city or a plague annhilating the country - sometimes called the "ticking bomb" scenario. My utilitarian counter-argument was paraphrased aptly by a reader I'll call Air Force Virginia, just in case it's not okay for active-duty military personnel to go around being quoted on websites: "See, I thought it was obvious--after all, torture doesn't *work* if your goal is to get accurate information. It only works if your goal is to get your victim to say a particular thing, and you must of course tell him what you want to hear so he can say it."

Pause to clarify a couple of things:

1) I am mad. I am not mad at the Donkey. The Donk merely offers an opportunity to clarify arguments that might have been drafted better in the first place, something of a trend here lately. (See "Wilderness of Carters" below.) The Donk, when you can keep him off basketball, is on the side of the blogging angels.

2) I don't argue that torture will never give you accurate information, and I doubt AF Virginia would either. I do argue that it goes awry in the "tell them what they want to hear" way often enough to render it useless for the purposes of the argument actually advanced - that is, the "ticking bomb." Hence our title: Over the years there have been experimenters who believed they had taught apes to use sign language or dolphins to squeak recognizable english. "Clever Hans" was a horse in 1900s Berlin who could do math. A nice capsule of the case appears on a website whose author abjures quoting without permission. But it's short. Anyone who does not know the case should read it.

Hans could not do math. But he could interpret cues of which his testers were unaware, so if his testers knew the answer to a problem, Hans could pick that answer. It made them happy, and that he could do. Once someone thought to use testers who didn't know the answers to the problems, Hans, well, Hans' mathematical abilities regressed to the equine mean. So Koko the Gorilla, so Alpha and Beta in Day of the Dolphin.

It should be pretty clear what happens if the animal is keying on the tester's cues and the tester "knows" the wrong answer to the problem: the animal chooses the tester's preferred, wrong answer.

Torture makes animals of human beings. It reduces them to hindbrains attached to way too many nerves. "Successful" torture leaves a "client" whose only concern is to stop the torture, and the only way to do that is to satisfy the torturer. There is no guarantee whatsoever that a truthful answer satisfies the torturer even if the victim has a truthful answer to give. But you can bet that confirming a preexisting hunch will, and you can bet that the victim has a desperate incentive to figure out from verbal and nonverbal clues what you think he should be telling you.

Which just restates at much greater length what I said telegraphically the first time. The new business is very serious, The Donkey's argument that "it’s not as if investigation is the zero-sum game he describes, where we have to throw all of our resources at one location." I argue that while an investigation is not a zero-sum game, it is a game of diminishing returns - there are finite resources and they can be wasted. Even the largest investigation has finite resources to bring to bear and finite egos directing it. Most of all, in the "ticking bomb" scenario, it has finite time to accomplish its goal. Clara Thomas Boggs wrote, anent wrongful convictions,

To me, it is very clear that a wrongful conviction begins at the scene of the crime, then after the first errors are made, all other decisions are made to protect the initial one. This is where I would begin making things right -- at the investigative level.

Note that Boggs does not say that the errors have to be willful or malicious, nor even that the "protection" needs to be. Once investigators have a theory (this "grad student" and his radio are connected to the attack on the trade center, e.g.), they will tend to evaluate evidence on the basis of how well it fits the theory. This can become, in paranoid enough hands, positively rococo. Viz. the history of CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Jesus Angleton and "the prophet Golitsyn," detailed in Unqualified Offerings touchstone text Wilderness of Mirrors, by David Martin.

And that is how I "move to the doomsday scenario." The torture enthusiasts are trying to sell us torture on the basis of doomsday scenarios - the "ticking bomb." We shouldn't buy, for the reasons set forth above.

Civilian Virginia (Postrel) weighed in on the issue too the other day. She agrees that torture should never be legitmized as a legal investigative technigue. I worry that her proviso, "If circumstances are so compelling that such cruel and corrupting practices seem justified, the torturers should face the possibility of punishment" may create some dire incentive problems. If the possible punishments are slaps on the wrist, you get a fair amount of torture. If the punishments are draconian, you get a fair amount of coverups. And if the unofficial direction from on-high is to torture regardless of the risk of punishment, you get cynicism in the ranks. But I take her point, I think, that for all this theorizing, real investigators may find themselves with an honest-to-god ticking bomb scenario on their hands and an obviously guilty party in front of them with testicles just waiting to be squeezed. Who can say we wouldn't squeeze them ourselves in that case?

You Are Here - Best [Neocon-Approved Items] of the Web outdoes itself today. Discussing an article about the Mogadishu premiere of Black Hawk Down, geographically-challenged writer James Taranto avers

Yesterday we noted that Somali-American leaders are calling for a boycott of "Black Hawk Down" on the grounds that it depicts Somalis as "savages." CNN reports that a bootleg copy of the movie was screened in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, and the Somalis in the audience acted like, well, savages:

Audience members seemed to take delight in scenes of U.S. defeat. Each time an American chopper went down in the film, the audience cheered. Every time an American serviceman was killed, the audience cheered some more.

Unqualified Offerings has long felt that the conservatives are actually right about the lax standards of US schools. Apparently those schools passed James Taranto through without getting across the fact that Somalia is not part of the United States. Give American audiences a movie in which American and Somali fighters try to kill each other and they'll cheer the Americans. Give Somali audiences the same movie and they'll do the reverse. Give Peruvian audiences a movie in which Peruvian and Ecuadoran fighters try to kill each other and - wait! See if you can answer that one yourself.

The Dead Hand of the Past - This depressing technical note out of blog-heavy Casa Cortlandt, world headquarters of Ones and Zeros, Turn of a Friendly Die and What She Really Thinks:

Ones and Zeros basic template converted from DIVs to Tables. That should clear up some problems.

As Laura Dern's character whimpered in Blue Velvet, "Where's my dream??"

Attack in India - Gunmen have shot up the street outside a USIA building in Calcutta. That makes it too soon to discard this Unqualified Offerings theory.

Wilderness of Carters - Instapundit.Com references this site's recent item about Jimmy Carter's decision, according to Robert Gates and Zbigniew Brzezinski, to fund the Afghan resistance before the 1979 invasion. In the course of doing so he makes some remarks that could be construed as gently satirizing the piece's conclusion that Jimmy Carter destroyed the Soviet Union.

Now, the first thing to point out is that Unqualified Offerings has no standing to complain if the Viceroy of Araby gets a little fresh with it. And the man has a point, the end of that piece kind of got away from Unqualified Offerings. It wasn't so much trying to say "Jimmy Carter destroyed the Soviet Union" as Jimmy Carter has secretly been the Supreme Ruler of Earth since 1980 and that if you watch the occasional local TV news footage of Carter doing the Habitat for Humanity bit, you will notice that people who approach him seemingly to deliver a tool or confer about some architectural issue and then scurry away are actually members of the Trilateral Commission.

No, that wasn't it...

Yeah. The proper focus of that piece was less that Carter should be credited with visionary genius than that Carter's character needs to be reconsidered. As one reader wrote, Our Vietnam cost us 50,000 lives and the Vietnamese an order of magnitude more. Carter's willingness to "give the Soviet Union a Vietnam of its own" meant a conscious willingness to see that much harm inflicted on the USSR and Afghanistan. The decision actually looks colder and more calculating as your estimation of Carter's foresight decreases. Consider: Reagan really believed, correctly, that he could bleed the Soviet Army and Treasury dry and win the whole thing once and for all. So a Reagan decision to give the Soviet Union a Vietnam of its own is a gamble taken in the hope of an ultimate payoff. To the extent that Carter didn't believe Afghanistan would "leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history," all the decision promised was some notches for our side in an endless game of counting coup. That's cold.

Years ago in an interview, Elvis Costello said, anent John Major's image, something to the effect of You don't get to be Prime Minister by being a doofus, you get to be Prime Minister by being a son of a bitch. Jimmy Carter turns out to prove that rule after all.

Nevermore - By the hammer of Grapthar, Unqualified Offerings' tax dollars are avenged! It's a twofer when its beloved Steelers win and the despised Baltimore Corporate Welfare Queens lose. Then there was the sheer comedy value of LB/accessory Ray Lewis' fashion crime at the postgame press conference. Leather do-rag and a tent-sized overcoat made from what appears to be the pelt of the rare Silver-Tipped Yeti. He may have beaten that murder rap, but there's hope that they'll get him on an Endangered Species Act charge.

(Yeah yeah, Unqualified Offerings knows: The Steelers sucked Heinz Field from the public teat too. Start an Unqualified Pennsylvania Offerings site and give them hell for it if it bothers you - and it should. Note: UO tried, it really did. But it couldn't find a photo of Ray Lewis in his postgame outfit to link to.)

Pointer - If you're following the link from Justin Raimondo's column in Antiwar.com today, the items you are looking for are here and, especially, here. Some of the items in the grandiosely-titled "Best of Unqualified Offerings" section at left may also interest you.

UPDATE: Doh! Link tags on the first "here" didn't actually enclose any clickable text all day. Just fixed it.

The Shadow of the Torturer - The Illuminated Donkey feels that the official story of the Egyptian Radio is pretty close to the actual story. The truth is, we have no firm basis to believe otherwise. Here are the outlines of the official story then:

1. A foreign-born grad student, son of a diplomat, evacuates his hotel on September 11 in the face of attacks that have left the hotel closed to this very day.
2. In October, a hotel employee tells the FBI, mistakenly, that he found an aviation transceiver in the grad student's room safe.
3. In December, the FBI throws the grad student into solitary confinement, because he just won't cooperate with investigators - that is, he won't admit that the radio is his or what he was doing with it.

   [His lawyer] said his client wept as agents threatened to involve his family in the investigation.

   ``They certainly used the skills in trying to break someone, trying to crack the nut,'' Dunn said angrily.

   
   
4. On January 11, prosecutors formally indict the student for lying to investigators, successfully arguing that he is too dangerous to release on bail.
   
5. When the radio's rightful owner comes to reclaim it, the FBI goes back to the hotel employee, who changes his recollection.
   
6. The student is freed.
   

Even if the above is not true, it could be. So let's consider the case where it is. And let's consider how the case plays out in a scenario where Alan Dershowitz has been heeded and government investigators have official sanction to torture terrorism suspects. Let's make military tribunals available too.

The arguments for torture and military tribunals are that terrorists don't deserve the protections afforded in ordinary criminal cases, because terrorists aren't ordinary criminals. Torturing information out of a terrorist might, we are told, save literally millions of lives if it enables the government to foil a biological attack, or tens of thousands of lives if it stops a nuke. And letting a terrorist off because of technicalities in civil proceedings means justice denied and danger ahead.

These arguments assume that government investigators know what they are doing.

The record of, for instance, the Moussaoui case does not support the claim. Nor, it would seem, does the Higazy case. The right question is not, Are terrorists ordinary criminals? They question is, Are terrorist suspects terrorists? Clearly, the answer will be Yes sometimes and No some other times. Note that this is exactly congruent to the question of whether criminal suspects are criminals. Investigations and fair trials are the best ways we've come up with for determining acceptable answers.

What appears to be an unreliable witness report established in investigators minds the conviction that Abdallah Higazy, from a suspicious country in a suspicious place, owned a suspicious device. His repeated denials did not shake that conviction; they strengthened it. Absent from the reports on the Higazy case is any suggestion that Higazy's denials inspired investigators to go back to the hotel and pursue whether its staff really knew what it was talking about. Instead, his denials represented a problem of cooperation to be overcome:

While Mr. Higazy admitted to no ill will, his lawyer said that during one interview session with F.B.I. agents, Mr. Higazy was subjected to "unrelenting pressure," under which he may have made confused or false statements about the radio. In Federal District Court last week, Mr. Himmelfarb said Mr. Higazy had admitted that the radio was his and had told agents three different versions of how he had acquired it.

Mr. Dunn said he had been excluded from that interview, and Mr. Higazy said he was unsure what he told the agents.

It's not hard to see what the next step is in a regime of legal or tacitly-approved torture.

So you don't care? It's a shame if an innocent man gets harmed, but we're not talking burglary cases here, and the harm potential means that we have to switch the relative values we assign to letting an innocent man suffer and a guilty man go free? You're pretty tough-minded about harms you expect will fall on other people! But let's look at the dynamic from your perspective anyway. Suspect denies involvement, because he's not involved, but you don't see it that way. Under normal, acceptably-intimidating pressure, the suspect continues to deny involvement. Time keeps on tickin' tickin' tickin' into the future. He won't crack. Let's torture him! Early on, he still denies involvement. How well-trained he is! If he can maintain his cover story through this level of pressure, he must be one tough operator. Let's ratchet up the pain threshold. Let's, in our frustration, ask increasingly leading questions, to the point that even Koko the gorilla would know what she has to tell us to make us happy. So he tells us, confirming in our minds whatever uselessly-garbled version of some real plot we suspected in the first place. All this while, time has kept on tickin' tickin' tickin'. Pausing only to drop the twitching shell of our suspect in front of a tribunal, we rush headlong down the blind alley our partial understanding and blinkered imaginations conjured in the first place.

And while we race toward Boston, Detroit goes up in a ball of fire.

A mere hypothetical? No less so than the happy-ending version of the "ticking bomb" scenario.

Football Considered as a Helix of Semiprecious Stones - Wow. Just finished watching the Oakland-New England playoff game, and it has that Instant Classic feel to it. How long has it been since I saw an NFL game played on a field covered with snow? More, a field where the snow buries even the tips of the grass? At least a decade, if not two. I have vague memories of such games happening all the time when I was a lad. Nowadays, a greater proportion of teams are in the south and west and an awful lot of northern teams play indoors. You see games with falling, even driving snow, sure. But the NFL has become obsessive about field care (outside of Philadelphia), which means tarps, plows and underground heating coils on one side and merest nature on the other. The NFL wants flash and dash and the NFL gets what it wants, and that means the best possible field conditions.

So this was a throwback game - to a point. I don't think any 70s team in such conditions would have passed as much as Oakland and especially New England did. They'd have ground out 60 run plays a side for four quarters and hoped the other guy fumbled.

A lot of the change is technological. Better shoes with more cleat choices. Goretex undies. And better athletes. That's technological change too: The body of a professional athlete is worth millions of dollars over even a merely decent career, so many more millions go into that body's production and maintenance. I'm not talking steroids either. I'm talking nutrition science, sports medicine and training regimens built on the most sophisticated physiological understanding available. Time was, football players had jobs in the offseason. They couldn't afford not to. Heck, time was, football players smoked. Now, not only they but their teams can't afford for them to work at anythingbut attend to the care and feeding of their own prowess. O you geeks who hate jocks, you made the modern jock.