That's What I'm Tonkin About! - From ABC News:

The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee asked the FBI on Friday to investigate forged documents the Bush administration used as evidence against Saddam Hussein and his military ambitions in Iraq.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia said he was uneasy about a possible campaign to deceive the public about the status of Iraq's nuclear program.

Probably not in time to stop the war, but maybe, just maybe, we won't have to wait quite so long for the lies to be detailed this time. Of course, it could be a short, easy probe if the FBI talks to the right people:

Secretary of State Colin Powell has denied the U.S. government had any hand in creating the false documents.

"It came from other sources," Powell told a House committee Thursday. "We were aware of this piece of evidence, and it was provided in good faith to the inspectors."

So, first stop: Colin Powell. First question: "Um, Colin. So where did this thing come from?"

Come to think of it, what do we need the FBI for? Why couldn't - I don't know - ABC News ask him?

I'll have to ask you to forgive my ignorant questions. I was born in a different country, and I'm still getting used to how things work in this one.

Airplane Glue - Bruce Rolston of Flit on the "smoking gun" "unmanned chemical warfare vehicle" that turns out to have been, well, a model plane:

NOTE: Does this mean I think the Iraqi drone on display, that can only fly 2 miles, is the best they've got at their little ersatz Area 51? Of course not. When war comes, and the Humvees pull up with the keys to the blast door of the secret hangar, they will find the drone Mk. 2, that can fly at least 100 per cent farther than that. With an actual lawnmower engine this time. And carrying a small hand grenade.

He also writes:

Speaking of press appearances without substance, it's getting to difficult to find ANYTHING in Colin Powell's presentations to the UN that can stand up to any scrutiny.

Reminder: this is (inexplicably) a war supporter talking. He also links to a New Republic story about more pro-war falsehoods.

All of which makes this Charles Dodgson item seem particularly relevant. (Warning: Major Godwin's Law violation. But the antiwar camp is running a major Godwin's Law deficit compared to the pro-war camp so far, so Dodgson comes in under budget.)

Department of I Did Not Know That - Atrios appears to have signed on as a contributor to "Billboard" group blog of the famously right wing - and fabulously entertaining - New York Press.

Fantasy Girl - Avedon Carol responds to my ribbing about her Gore fantasies. She also wonders if she should add Julian Sanchez to her "Loyal Opposition" list. Well duh! was my first reaction. Julian rocks, and he could probably even explain about how libertarians have already figured out that "all Big Institutions can turn ugly on you, even when they are privately-owned." But the question got me thinking: who else should be on Avedon's list of the "loyal opposition." Herewith, my nominations:

Eve Tushnet - because what blogroll is complete without a brilliant, pro-life, anti-authoritarian Catholic conservative? Eve already has some impressive synergy going on with Christian leftists like Jeanne d'Arc, but she makes a great "loyal opposition" for almost anyone.

Julian, of course.

Colby Cosh - Because Canadian conservatism was never this funny. As for opposition value on Avedon's site, I don't think he's even against the war. Particularly underrated!

Franklin Harris - Anarcho-capitalist fanboy. Who doesn't want to know what someone like that thinks?

Unruled - Sort of like Franklin Harris, but without the insights into Battle of the Planets. A sharp, no-nonsense writer.

I'd offer a longer list, but I've stopped reading any blog who's author uses the verb coinage "Fisk" without irony.

Toothless Hags - In internationalist gospel, the problem with the League of Nations was that it lacked enforcement powers and/or the power of the United States to compel states to respect its decisions. Thus it could neither prevent nor reverse Italy's conquest of Abyssinia, which aggression led, with other things, to World War II. Meantime, the United States is at least declaring that the UN can't prevent it from conquering Iraq. Critics can justly call the UN irrelevant no matter which way things shake out - if the US goes to war without the blessing of the Security Council, the UN is impotent and irrelevant. If the US actually secures authorization, the UN is nothing but a (balky) rubber stamp for determined US policy. A toothless hag like the League of Nations.

But one of the Fates was a toothless hag too. Let's turn it around for a second. Don't look at the 1930s from the perspective of the "international community." Look at it from the perspective of Italy. Would Italy have been smart to heed the clear sentiment of the League? They conquered Abyssinia, and thereby set in motion a train of events that led to ruinous war, German and then allied occupation and, not incidentally for the country's political class, the execution of much of the government.

Not such a good deal for the Italians. I'd argue that the League condemnation was a signal of what they were letting themselves in for. My point is not that US policy toward Iraq is nothing but Italian policy toward the Horn of Africa. My point is that one ignores alarms at one's peril. I would never want the UN to have veto power over US security. It's a talking shop, and should be. But what the talking shop is saying is that the "coalition of the unwilling" threatens to metastasize. We'd be fools not to take that seriously.

Read it and Weep - The UN Convention Against Torture, signed and ratified by the United States of America. (link via So It Goes. Pedro has been on the torture beat - in German - since February.) See particularly Articles 2 and 3:

Article 2

2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

Article 3
1. No State Party shall expel, return ("refouler") or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.

Article 2, Section 2 and Article 3, Section 1 about cover all the legal issues. They told us in college that ratified treaties have the force of US Law. Article VI, Clause 2 of the US Constitution reads - and forgive me for this exercise in nostalgia - "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."

Moral issues aside, it appears to be illegal to do what we're doing. Period. If the government wants to open a campaign to withdraw from the UNCAT, I'll take my chances on the debate. As it stands, many officials appear to be breaking the law under color of official duty. That sounds like a high crime rather than a misdemeanor.

Long Fuse - The torture proponents keep bringing up the hypothetical "ticking bomb" scenario. They also adduce the famous 1995 "Philippines Affair" on the effectiveness of torture as an investigative tool, about which Eve quoted a report yesterday:

The Philippine intelligence agencies, suspecting a plot, arrested and tortured a man they thought was one of the terrorists. They broke most of his ribs, burned his genitals with cigarettes and poured water into his mouth until he couldn't breathe. After 67 days, he came up with the information which enabled the Filipinos, together with the Americans - who were provided with the fruits of the interrogation - to frustrate the plot.

67 days. A committed subject can hold out against unspeakable cruelty for 67 days. Do the timers on those Al Qaeda nukes go up that high?

Old joke: Man asks a woman in a bar, "Would you sleep with me for a million dollars?" Woman allows that, well, for that kind of money, she supposes she would. How about for this shiny new quarter? the man continues. The woman, outraged, demands, "What the hell do you think I am??" "We've already established that," the man replies. "Now we're just haggling over the price."

And that's the function of the "ticking bomb" scenario.

Over There - I just posted a few observations on the ever-dicier British situation on Stand Down.

Self-Parody Watch - I adore Avedon Carol, but this adventure in wishful thinking reminded me of a column I read in 1980 by George Will or William Buckley or someone like that, in Jimmy Carter's voice, in which, for the good of the country, he laid out all the reasons why he was withdrawing from the Presidential race and urging Americans to vote for his opponent, Ronald Reagan, instead.

Compare and Contrast - In his No to War post, Arthur Silber reminds us that most legislators voted for the USA-PATRIOT Act without having read it. Similar stories have appeared about legislators not knowing the details of what was in the McCain-Feingold bill either. It's an open secret that our legislators actually read relatively few of the bills they consider.

Meanwhile, there's Sarbanes-Oxley and its "knowledge standard" for CFOs and CEOs, Section 302 of the law, reviewed on a law firm's site here. As my boss explained the knowledge standard the other day, CEOs and CFOs are personally liable for knowing everything about their companies' finances and accounting. There is no "I had no idea" excuse available.

Sauce for the . . . ?

It's Not Just Liberals like Jonathan Edelstein and others jumping off the war bus now. Arthur Silber says "Not This War, Not This Way." Excerpt:

So, to go back to the beginning, this is where I stand now: protect the lives and the rights of U.S. citizens. Take quick strikes against our enemies when and where you must. Avoid long-term foreign intervention. But as for this war being urged by the Bush Administration, to be pursued by the specific means they are employing, and to be followed by decades of foreign involvement together with the necessary, and strangling, domestic bureaucracy required to support it: no, thank you. And I say that as a truly loyal American -- loyal to the founding principles of this country, which our current leaders appear to have abandoned long ago.

And I repeat, and this is the point that must be remembered: the seeds for the destruction of our remaining liberties and freedoms are already present -- and, in many instances, much more than just the seeds. And one final thought: if we should come to an almost fully and completely regulated and controlled state, where our every move is watched and recorded, we may not need to fear attacks from foreign nations or terrorists, and we may indeed have a "peaceful" country.

The Dark Stain - Jonathan "Head Heeb" Edelstein traces the subcontracting of torture by the US government back farther than Al Qaeda and beyond antiterrorism:

A running theme throughout these comments is that subcontracting torture is something new to the terror war - a "canary in the coal mine" indicating a trend toward repressiveness in the United States. The truth is, however, that this particular canary has been dead for at least thirty years. Subcontracting of torture by American authorities is an old, old story, originating in another dirty war - the "war on drugs."

There follows a detailed and depressing history of connivance and outright participation in torture abroad by federal agents, and an even more depressing legal history in which the courts have repeatedly declined to strike down the practice.

It just goes to show that almost everything baleful really does start with the war on drugs. It also, in the same post, impels Jonathan off the fence onto the anti-war side of the Iraq crisis.

BETTER TO DIE LIKE A MAN THAN LIVE LIKE A BEAST is the item where Eve Tushnet starts her powerful, eloquent and thrilling response to the question of torture. One of the finest adventures in the felt thought (and examined principle) that I can remember reading. Read down from the link provided. I would quote - oh how I would quote - but superb as the excerpts are, the original is better. Read.

(Memo to Brad DeLong: Eve Tushnet can fairly be classified as a "religious conservative.")

More succinct if less complete is Glenn Reynolds:

All I can say is, that (1) the French did it a lot in Algeria; and (2) they still lost; and (3) it's wrong. Even if you can explain away (1) & (2) by noting that, well, we're talking about The French here, that doesn't work for (3).

I should have thought that, for Glenn's crowd at least, "the French did it" would be all the argument one would need. (CalPundit suggests the same.)

Here, more or less, is what I wrote to Gene on the subject this weekend. Among other things, Gene wanted to know why I was famously (in the limited circle of my longtime readers) okay with "gutshooting Osama Bin Laden and watching his agonizing death":

1. If I shoot Bin Laden and watch him bleed to death, it's in the name of a purely personal satisfaction. It doesn't implicate the country. We should also consider the possibility that I'm not such a great guy for doing such a thing. That's my cross to bear. To turn that into an official act is rather a different thing. Remember that ace student of power, Lenin's core questions: "Who? Whom?" When you go from bullet to cheese grater, whom stays the same, but who changes drastically.

2. I doubt I'd go through with it anyway. I'd just blow him away and call someone to pick up the body. And I do oppose the death penalty, so again, there's a difference between my avenging a grief and the state claiming official retribution. (I would be against an officer of the state killing Bin Laden in cold blood. Killing him in the press of battle or the heat of the chase would be another thing.) And I may still be wrong to kill an enemy I've already rendered harmless. Just because I want to do it, just because I'm pretty sure I would do it, doesn't make it justifiable.

3. This gets to whether torture is worse than executing someone - or rather, it gets to why torture is worse than executing someone. I think there's a cleanliness to killing one's mortal enemy that is not found in the act of torture. I alluded, in one of those spring 2002 items, to "all that self-ownership stuff." I think what I meant by that is that torture aims at, in an important sense, enslaving someone, not just on the physical but on the mental and spiritual levels. Slavery may just be a worse sin than murder. [Addendum from this morning: Eve writes "Death is what you wish for when being tortured."]

4. Just as a factual, legal matter. I believe the US has signed the convention against torture.

5. Eugene Volokh says torture wouldn't bring us down to the level of Al Qaeda because "ends matter" and ours are nobler than Al Qaeda's. In other words, the ends justify the, well, you know. Read Leonard again.

6. Here's where we could be pretty soon, Gene: We're about to take over Iraq, whose "territorial integrity" we plan to guarantee. You and I know how many groups in Iraq are against that. When they attack our troops, which will be called terrorism, though it will actually just be guerilla warfare, we could find ourselves shipping our internal Iraqi enemies - they've killed our people, they may know of plans to kill more, they may have allied with our enemy, Al Qaeda, we might think they had access to Bad Things from Saddam's inventory that we haven't been able to find - off to be tortured. At that point, Gene, we will have overthrown Saddam Hussein for, among other reasons, the fact that he tortured his internal enemies, so that we can do it instead.

7. I thought we weren't supposed to like France. So why do we want to be them? We are just about to the point of making the same justifications for the same behavior that the French government did during the Algerian Civil War. That didn't work out so good from either a practical or a moral perspective.

8. If anything should be simple, if anything should twang the That's Just Wrong bone, the considered infliction of cruelty on another human being should do it, especially when the consideration is official.

Origin Story - Joseph Stromberg offers a biography of those famous twins, Shock and Awe.

Just Asking - So the IAEA says, as you've probably already read on your more punctilious blogs, that "A key piece of evidence linking Iraq to a nuclear weapons program appears to have been fabricated . . .

Documents that purportedly showed Iraqi officials shopping for uranium in Africa two years ago were deemed "not authentic" after careful scrutiny by U.N. and independent experts, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told the U.N. Security Council.

ElBaradei also rejected a key Bush administration claim -- made twice by the president in major speeches and repeated by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell yesterday -- that Iraq had tried to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes to use in centrifuges for uranium enrichment. Also, ElBaradei reported finding no evidence of banned weapons or nuclear material in an extensive sweep of Iraq using advanced radiation detectors.

"There is no indication of resumed nuclear activities," ElBaradei said.

Faked?

Knowledgeable sources familiar with the forgery investigation described the faked evidence as a series of letters between Iraqi agents and officials in the central African nation of Niger. The documents had been given to the U.N. inspectors by Britain and reviewed extensively by U.S. intelligence. The forgers had made relatively crude errors that eventually gave them away -- including names and titles that did not match up with the individuals who held office at the time the letters were purportedly written, the officials said.

The punch line?

"We fell for it," said one U.S. official who reviewed the documents.

The IAEA is happy to play along:

A spokesman for the IAEA said the agency did not blame either Britain or the United States for the forgery. The documents "were shared with us in good faith," he said.

Okay, so here's my question. That's a serious matter, isn't it? Forging documents intended to be used in all seriousness to decide questions of war or peace? Is anyone going to investigate the provenance of those documents? The IAEA? The media? Does the Post betray the slightest interest, in the article, where such things might have come from?

I can actually answer the last question: No, it doesn't.

Weekly Fitness Blog Post - Weight 187. Waist unchanged from last week. It appears to be the case that you can lose fat and build muscle combining diet with slow-cadence weight training, just as Ken Hutchins and Diana Moon said you could. It hasn't cured my blood pressure, but maybe no exercise program would.

Quick exercise stuff. It turns out there is a full, lavishly-photographed suite of dumbbell-and-bench exercises in Body for Life, by Bill Phillips. I'll probably but the book just for those, converting them to slow-cadence routines and ignoring the rest of the book. Tonight Mrs. Offering started on the same routine. She was still able to make it up the stairs at the end of it, which only means we haven't found the right weight for her squats yet . . . My mother is starting to feel genuine changes in her physical capability. I let her in on the secret tests I'd been running: for years she has needed help with curbs and steps, using a banister if available or a relative if not. The last couple times, I took her hand as usual, but dropped my arm at the same rate as her step, so that she was really doing the whole thing on her own. And she did. This wouldn't have been possible before her exercises.

My plan was to talk lots and lots about the Reason-mag-centered Atkins Diet controversy this weekend. Michael Fumento had a sharply critical piece on NYT Science correspondent Gary Taubes somewhat famous NYT Magazine article about Atkins, quoting a nutritionist saying, in so many words, that Taubes "sold out" for the sake of a book contract. Taubes responded to Fumento on Reason's site. Fumento responded to the response and, if I'm getting all the nuances, at some point Fumento and his editors got really mad at each other. (Rishawn Biddle has that story here and here. Jeremy Lott suggests the letter Fumento might have written to his editor instead.) Atkins follower Avedon Carol has an interesting response on her own site.

I haven't made much of being on Atkins myself in these posts. I was going to sieze the occasion to do so this weekend. But I got busy, and I just did my exercises and my arms are quivering. So hold that thought.