The War Criminal President

From Andrew Sullivan
I posted about Philip Gourevitch's and Erroll Morris's superb and disturbing recent piece on Abu Ghraib here. What it shows once again is how Abu Ghraib was never, ever an exception. It was permitted, enabled, authorized and pre-meditated by Bush, Cheney, Yoo, Rumsfeld, Miller, and Addington, among many others. The techniques testified to correspond with chilling accuracy to techniques authorized by the president, for which we now have overwhelming evidence. Scott Horton reminds us what exactly some of the techniques were:
Enforced nudity. This technique is adopted for purposes of degrading and humiliating the prisoner, heightening his senses of vulnerability, weakness and shame. Enforced nudity also enhances other techniques, particularly hypothermia.
Starvation. As Davis notes, when the prisoner is entitled to an MRE, he would be given one component only of the MRE. The entire MRE constitutes a reasonable food ration which is properly balanced. Giving only one part of it reflects a decision to starve the prisoner.
Stress Positions. Perhaps the oldest and best established torture technique, widely used by the Inquisition in Europe, was the strapado. Hands would be fastened behind the back and the victim would be hoisted, causing severe stress to joints, frequent dislocation, and severe and sustained pain. The strapado would invariably get its victim to confess to anything, very quickly. During World War II, this same technique was widely adopted and used by the Germans, who called it Pfahlbinden. In the English of the Bush Administration, this technique is called a “stress position,” and it was widely used at Abu Ghraib.
Hypothermia.
Shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet secret police pioneered a very simple technique that had the advantage of leaving the victim’s body unbruised or bloodied, but whose physiological effects were equally if not more effective than direct beatings. In its mildest form, the victim was left with thin clothing in a cell with temperatures hovering just above freezing. A day of such treatment was generally enough to produce physical collapse. The Bush Administration, of course, not having the benefits of a Siberian winter, turns to far cruder and more brutal techniques, which Davis describes. The prisoner is stripped naked, dunked in a bath of ice water, and a window is left open to insure exposure.
For President Bush, these techniques are a part of the “Program.” More generally in the American media, you’ll hear these things referred to as “highly coercive techniques.” But they have a proper name, which is “torture.” Their use is a serious crime under international law, and under U.S. law. And that stubborn fact has driven much of the Bush Administration’s bizarre machinations relating to the Convention.
One day this president and vice-president will be prosecuted for war crimes.

That Curious Idea of Resurrection
How early Christians grappled to accept the idea that Jesus returned from the dead.By Larry Hurtado (SLATE)
Easter Sunday represents the foundational claim of Christian faith, the highest day of the Christian year as celebration of Jesus' resurrection. But many Christians are unsure what the claim that Jesus had been raised to new life after being crucified actually means—while non-Christians often find the whole idea of resurrection bemusing and even ridiculous.
These differences over what Jesus' resurrection represents and discomfort with the whole idea are nothing new, however: Christians in the first few centuries also had difficulty embracing the idea of a real, bodily resurrection. Then, as now, resurrection was not the favored post-death existence—people much preferred to think that after dying, souls headed to some ethereal realm of light and tranquillity. During the Roman period, many regarded the body as a pitiful thing at best and at worst a real drag upon the soul, even a kind of prison from which the soul was liberated at death. So, it's not surprising that there were Christians who simply found bodily resurrection stupid and repugnant. To make the idea palatable, they instead interpreted all references to Jesus' resurrection in strictly spiritual terms. Some thought of Jesus as having shed his earthly body in his death, assuming a purely spiritual state, and returning to his original status in the divine realm. In other cases, Jesus' earthly body and his death were even seen as illusory, the divine Christ merely appearing to have a normal body (rather like Clark Kent!).
The idea of a real, personal resurrection—meaning a new bodily existence of individuals after death, in one way or another—did not originate with Christianity or with claims about Jesus. Instead, it seems to be first clearly reflected in Jewish texts dated to sometime in the second century B.C., such as the biblical book of Daniel 12:2. At the time, it was a genuinely innovative idea. (Alan Segal's book Life After Death gives an expansive discussion of the origins of the idea of resurrection.) Many peoples of the ancient world hoped for one or another sort of eternal life, but it was usually thought of as a kind of bodiless existence of soul or spirit set in realms of the dead that might or might not be happy, pleasant places. In still other expectations, death might bring a merging of individuals with some ocean of being, like a drop of water falling into the sea.
The ancient Jewish and early Christian idea of personal resurrection represented a new emphasis on individuals and the importance of embodied existence beyond the mere survival or enhancement of the soul, although there was debate about the precise nature of the post-resurrection body. Some seem to have supposed it would be a new body of flesh and bones, closely linked to the corpse in the grave but not liable to decay or death. Others imagined a body more like that of an angel. But whatever its precise nature, the hope of resurrection reflected a strongly holistic view of the person as requiring some sort of body to be complete. With ancient Jews, early Christians saw resurrection as an act of God, a divine gift of radically new life, not an expression of some inherent immortality of the soul. That is, the dead don't rise by themselves; they are raised by God and will experience resurrection collectively as one of the events that comprise God's future redemption of the world and vindication of the righteous.
In the ancient Judaism of Jesus' time, however, resurrection was not universally affirmed. Some devout Jews (particularly the religious party called Sadducees) apparently considered the whole idea ridiculous, as evidenced by the New Testament, which gives us some of the most direct references to disputes among ancient Jews about the matter. In Mark 12:18-27, Sadducees taunt Jesus with a question about a woman married several times, asking him whose wife she will be following the resurrection. Jesus strongly affirms resurrection, but he insists that those resurrected will not marry and portrays the Sadducees' question as reflecting a foolish ignorance of God's power.
In the earliest expressions of their faith that we have, Christians claimed that Jesus' resurrection showed that God singled out Jesus ahead of the future resurrection of the dead to show him uniquely worthy to be lord of all the elect. However, the paradigmatic significance of Jesus' resurrection was also very important for early Christians.
In Christianity's first few centuries, when believers often suffered severe persecution and even the threat of death, those who believed in Jesus' bodily resurrection found it particularly meaningful for their own circumstances. Jesus had been put to death in grisly fashion, but God had overturned Jesus' execution and, indeed, had given him a new and glorious body. So, they believed that they could face their own deaths as well as those of their loved ones in the firm hope that God would be faithful to them as well. They thought that they would share the same sort of immortal reaffirmation of their personal and bodily selves that Jesus had experienced. Elaine Pagels, a scholar of early Christianity, has argued that those Christians who regarded the body as unimportant, perhaps including "Gnostics," were less willing to face martyrdom for their faith and more willing to make gestures of acquiescence to the Romans—for example, by offering sacrifices to Roman gods—because they regarded actions done with their bodies as insignificant so long as in their hearts they held to their beliefs.
By contrast, Christians who believed in bodily resurrection seem to have regarded their own mortal coils as the crucial venues in which they were to live out their devotion to Christ. When these Christians were arraigned for their faith, they considered it genuine apostasy to give in to the gestures demanded by the Roman authorities. For them, inner devotion to Jesus had to be expressed in an outward faithfulness in their bodies—and they were ready to face martyrdom for their faith, encouraged by the prospect of bodily resurrection. Indeed, Christian martyrs are pictured as engaged in a battle with the Roman authorities (and the Devil, whom Christians saw as behind Roman malevolence toward them), with the martyrs' bodies as battlegrounds in which the integrity of their person and their personal salvation could be lost or retained.
Historically, then, how Christians have understood Jesus' "resurrection" says a lot about how they have understood themselves, whether they have a holistic view of the human person, whether they see bodily existence as trivial or crucial, and how they imagine full salvation to be manifested. Does salvation comprise a deliverance from the body into some sort of immediate and permanent postmortem bliss (which is actually much closer to popular Christian piety down the centuries), or does salvation require a new embodiment of some sort, a more robust reaffirmation of persons? This sort of question originally was integral to early Jewish and Christian belief in the resurrection. In all the varieties of early Christianity, and in all the various understandings of what his "resurrection" meant, Jesus was typically the model, the crucial paradigm for believers, what had happened to him seen as prototypical of what believers were to hope for themselves.Larry W. Hurtado is head of the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh. His recent books are The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God?and Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity

Disproving Herrnstein and Murray's Bell Curve

Uploaded by Ressurection on Jul 25, 2005
Disproving Herrnstein and Murray's Bell CurveHerrnstien and Murray raises the point that the division between the well-paid elite and the lower class Americans are becoming widely divided. Upon raising this point they came up with the Bell Curve. The Bell Curve has two main components that correlate with income, the AFQT test (which measures intelligence), and parental SES (social economic Status). To Herrnstein and Murray, intelligence heavily correlates with income. They argue that that IQ is real and it does matter; in other words the smart people (or people with higher IQ) will get high-quality jobs, hence making their incomes higher. They feel that inequality is, “natural and fated.” To prove their point that IQ does matter and the smart people just keep getting smarter and dumb keep getting dumber they analyzed the National Longitudinal Survey Of Youth (NLSY). Herrnstein and Murray show that the NLSY subjects who scored high on the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT, which Herrnstein and Murray treated as an IQ test) were doing well versus those who had scored on the low end ended up doing poorly. But the AFQT does not measure natural intelligence. Another component of the bell curve is a person’s SES (social economic status) social factors like race, age, gender, community, environment, and parent’s social economic status contributes to how well a person is able to succeed. To Herrnstein and Murray SES is not a stronger predictive validity than the AFQT, but it goes hand in hand with each other. They are basically trying to say that riches are usually inherited from one generation to another. For example, a well-endowed family has the money to send their child to a prestigious school, where a highly stressed learning atmosphere surrounds their child. Also coming from a well-endowed family, one can network with other elite people who may own big corporations. On the other hand, a child coming from a low-income household may not be able to attend a prestigious school then they loose out on the learning atmosphere and they do not get the opportunity to network with other elite people. Hence that is why the children of elite parents are less likely to end up poor. Herrnstein and Murray’s Bell Curve is completely inaccurate and it is false. First of all, you cannot base a person’s intelligence income on just a test. But the book states that, “IQ like test were only of modest importance compared with social context in explaining individual attainment,” and that, “Herrnstein and Murray exaggerated the role of the AFQT test relative to social factors.” The AFQT test is more of a school achievement test rather than a natural intelligence test. It measures how well test takers learned and retained their knowledge of what they learned in school; and it measures their test taking skills. You cannot base a person’s intelligence or achievement level on just a test. In some cases people may not be good test takers, but they still can have a great amount of intelligence. Secondly, SES is a stronger predictive validity than the AFQT. In chapter four in Inequality by Design, research shows that if everyone had the same AFQT scores, but still differed from one another in social background, inequality in income would be unchanged. But if people were all equal in SES and differed from AFQT scores, income inequality would be reduced greatly. It is true that the probability of being in the bottom quintile of the income distribution is higher for African-Americans, Hawaiians, than for Caucasians, but the bell curve’s explanation of this fact is wrong, Herrnstein and Murray return to the NLSY and show that blacks and whites with similar AFQT scores earn the same income. They say that the AFQT scores explain the black and white gap in earnings. It is wrong because in reality they are not judged the same. Why is it that an African-American with the same AFQT score as a white person has to work twice as hard to get a high-quality job? In America we believe that there is such a thing as equality of opportunity, which is everyone, has a chance to get a good education and work hard to achieve these high quality jobs. We also believe that people get the jobs and incomes that they deserve. But what we don’t consider when we talk about how everyone has an equality of opportunity are social factors like race/ethnicity, sex, class, history, and government. In the United States the ideology of all men are created equal, but some men are created more equal than others. People are born with different capacities, which they will seek to find out or not, but the question is does each individual have an equal chance at finding this out. Give people an equal chance is called the equality of opportunity, but class, gender, race, and government makes a difference and alters this opportunity. When Herrnstein and Murray constructed what they call, “parental SES,” they had a lot of key variables missing, which can affect who is at risk of being poor regardless if they are intelligent or not. One key varaiable they failed to incorporate while constructing the parental SES was parental home enviornent. Parental home environment meaning that they did not include the number of siblings each respondent had, the community in which they lived in, and what class they came from. Many studies have shown that the more siblings that people have, the chances of them getting ahead, and their families effective wealth are less than those of people with less siblings. Class, there are three types of class types. First you have the elite class or the rich and smart class; then you have the middle class; and lastly you have the class that is in poverty. Class really does matter for example, say you were born into the poverty automatically you are stereotyped as dumb or of lower intelligence. Now if you were born into the elite class you are automatically stereotyped as prestigious and smart. In a scenario where someone from the poverty class and someone from the elite class are applying for the same job whom do you think is going to get it? Even though these two candidates might have the same credentials more than likely the candidate from the elite class will get the job. As regards who gets jobs, although estimates of likely performance surely play a role (an estimate often governed by the employers estimation of the credentials of the prospective employee and the value of his or her "work experience,") one's capacity to secure the job depends very much on social resources, including the candidates personal presentation of potential for the employer and on interpersonal networks. Indeed, "contact networks are usually the largest channels of job matching," especially for jobs associated with higher incomes (Jobs, Wages, and Government Website).” Another factor that they fail to consider is Gender. Gender contributes to inequality, and it can affect your income regardless if you are of high intelligence. Women were not considered physiologically equal to men. Male authority came from a belief that males were genetically prone to be aggressive. Women’s low wages and high family responsibilities play important independent roles. Women are seen as weak, we are seen as staying home and tending to family responsibilities. Today’s society still thinks that women are not as strong as men are that they can’t do manual labor like men can. For example if a women were to apply for a stevedore position many people would think that the women is crazy, and they would think that she is not capable of unloading all those heavy crates. Another example is till this day you haven’t seen a corporate CEO, which is a lady. That’s because females do not hold as much power as men do. But physical appearance cannot measure your real strength, what if the woman looks fragile, but really is strong? “Women are more likely to be poorer than men because low wages, and for those who are mothers, few hours of work account for most of women’s poverty”(Inequality by Design, pg 91). Statistics show that full time individual workers greatly differ in men and women. There are about 36,476 full time male workers versus the 26,324 full time female workers, which is a difference of 10,152 workers. Therefore if women are not occupied with family duties, the jobs that best fit them are the jobs that do not require too much labor, or in other words the lower quality jobs. Lastly Herrnstein and Murray fail to consider race. Race is another important factor of inequality. It continues to play a great role in deciding the success of Americans from jobs to housing to even education. The statistics show that: Race #of workers in thousands Median weekly earnings White 81,758 610 Hispanic 11,627 407 Black 12,527 477 (weaklyearnings.htm) As you can see the number of white workers greatly outnumber the number of workers in the Hispanic and the Black section. You can also see that the weekly earnings have a great gap between the whites and the other races. There are strong stereotypes especially against Blacks. According to a study conducted in four major cities, the studies showed that race often manifested itself in the highly segregated market and housing section (the elite section), where employers preferred some racial groups to others (raceandsucess.htm). It is a typical stereotype that any other race besides the whites are likely to have a better chance to be on welfare and to commit crimes. I think this stereotype makes other races have to work harder for a position even if they have the same credentials as a white person. In conclusion Herrnstein and Murray’s Bell Curve is not accurate and is false because they seem to confuse correlation with cause. They fail to consider too many factors.

The truth about toy boys
One website taught this correspondent about the pleasures of younger flesh. But first she had to learn the ropes
Jane Macdonnell
A 28-year-old employee of mine introduced me to the joys of younger men on a work trip last summer. At 42, I was fresh out of a 10-year marriage and most likely to spend my evenings at home reading the BBC Good Food magazine. It had never even crossed my mind that anyone, let alone a younger man, might find me attractive.
When I split up with my husband, one of his parting shots was that nobody would ever find me attractive again, and that he was the only chance I had left. At the time, I believed him – so much so that even before I succumbed to this new fling, I had to get the fling to repeat himself four times before I believed that he wanted to go to bed with me. But, as it turns out, there are plenty of young men out there who are keen to date older women. Now, I date them exclusively.
And I’m not alone. There are 6,000 members of www.toyboywarehouse.com, an internet dating service created specifically to introduce younger men to older women. So far, I have been out with several men in their twenties, including a nuclear physicist who was quite geeky, and one who lied about his age and turned out to be just 20. At the moment, I’m seeing a 26-year-old. I receive about 10 e-mails a day – far more than your average dating website – and all of them are totally over the top. And when you have come out of a marriage to a man who didn’t pay you any compliments, it is pretty strong stuff.
For women like me – single, successful and of a certain age – the ideal dating partners aren’t the divorced-dad brigade, as everyone assumes. Who wants another embittered divorcé looking for a second mum for his kids? If you already have children (I have two) and your own money (I run a company with more than 100 employees), and you’re finally finding the time to enjoy yourself, you want someone who is looking for the same no-strings-attached fun as you. So boys in their twenties are perfect.
A lot of it is about energy. When men reach my age, they slow down. Their idea of a fun night is one spent watching the telly. Women, however, speed up, so there is a huge mismatch. Getting my husband just to agree to go on holiday used to be like pulling teeth. Younger men also have a huge appetite for romance, and like to indulge it with a woman who isn’t trying to settle down.
It’s not just about sex – which can be pretty average – it’s also about attention. I get endless messages from them, asking me how my day went. When you’re a boss or a mum, nobody asks you how you’re doing.
Another appealing factor is the lack of competition. With my ex, I was caught in a terrible cycle of constantly playing down what I earned and achieved in order to make him feel better. I made sure I drove the small car and he drove the big car, and I always used to let him pay for things in restaurants, even though it was pretty much my money. With young men, I don’t have any of this. Because I’m so much older, they don’t find my success threatening, they just accept it.
Which is not to say that the whole toy-boy dating game is free of problems – the main one being that they’re so young. They always come on strong, then back off when you suggest meeting up. They can be incredibly flaky and constantly seek your approval. And they’re often unsure of what they want, hedging their bets in such a way that, if you’re not careful, can hurt.
I met my nemesis in the form of a 23-year-old estate agent called Charlie. He was gorgeous, and his attention was hugely flattering. He would text obsessively and constantly send e-mails. So when a few months into the relationship he started cancelling at the last minute and going Awol for several days at a time, I suspected that I might not be the only woman he was dating.
I set up a fake profile – not to entrap him, but just to see – and, sure enough, after a mere two days he made an approach. Then I noticed a post from another woman on the website’s forum, saying that she’d had a bad experience with one of the boys, and some of the details sounded familiar. I contacted her and discovered that, yes, it was Charlie. She had even confronted him, and he had gone demented, saying that lots of people were in touch with other people on the website. Which is fine, but he hadn’t been honest about it. I remember he had even said to me at dinner once: “Why would I need to be on that website now I’ve met you?”
In the end, I didn’t confront him myself, I just broke off contact. I simply sent him an e-mail saying he had been found out and then never heard from him again. I’m not naive, I do expect some fast and loose behaviour: at 23, you don’t really know what you want, and I’m sure I did the same at his age.
But they’re not all like that. Some of them are looking for mother figures: dependable women who aren’t flaky or airheaded like women of their own age. Boys in their twenties are, well, boys in their twenties. I don’t regret it, but I did give him one expensive present, which was foolish, and I wouldn’t do again. I’m more cautious now – but it hasn’t put me off.
Probably for all these reasons, my friends were sceptical at first. They presumed these boys would only be after money and/or sex and consequently mess me around. A lot of them also don’t understand what I see in a younger man. The other day, one of my friends asked me why I didn’t want a man to look up to. They can’t grasp the fact that I genuinely don’t need a male role model, and I don’t need anyone to provide for me, either.
As I explained to a friend who asked me when I was going to ditch this “whole silly game”: imagine you get to work on a Monday morning, and you have two e-mails in your inbox. One says: “Wow, you’re so hot, I can’t stop looking at your photo. I’ve never seen such a combination of sophistication and sex, blah, blah, blah.” And the other says: “Hi, I’m Jim. Divorced dad, three boys. Don’t see a lot of them, because my cow of an ex-wife refuses to let me have access, but, hey, I’m not bitter. Trying to rebuild my life and looking for someone to do it with.”
Which one would you go for?
Some names have been changed

Russia redefines democracy
By Allan Little BBC News, Moscow
On the banks of the Moscow River, facing the Kremlin, there is a long squat grey-faced apartment block known as the House on the Embankment. It has a special place in Russia's history.
It was built by the early Bolsheviks when they moved the Russian capital back to Moscow from St Petersburg.
It housed the families - more than 500 of them - of high-ranking Kremlin officials. They were the bureaucratic elite of the world's first attempt at a socialist state. It was, in its day, the only house in all Russia to have hot running water.
A decade ago, when I lived here as the BBC's Moscow correspondent, I went to visit one of its residents. She'd lived there since 1931. More than anything she remembered the Red Terror of 1937.
President Yeltsin was, for many, a westernising tsar and it is a truism of Russian history that westernising tsars come to grief
Four-fifths of the families in the house lost at least one member to Stalin's infamous purges, victims of the paranoia that seized the Kremlin that winter.
She told me she remembered listening at her door to the nightly raids by Stalin's feared secret police, hearing the boots on the wooden stairs, the tramp along the corridors and the knock at the door, trying to guess from the sound which of her neighbours was being taken in the night.
Hostile world
Everywhere you look in Moscow there is a physical reminder of the grandeur and cruelty of this country's history.
The Bolsheviks despised the tsarist capital St Petersburg - Russia's elegant bay window on the Baltic, its gateway to the western world.
They saw its construction in the 18th Century as a flawed and doomed attempt to westernise Russia.
Moscow better suited their temperament - the impenetrable, defensive walls of the Kremlin sealed them off, isolated and defended them from the hostile world which they believed surrounded them.
It is foolish and unfair to push the analogy too far, because Vladimir Putin is not Stalin and Russia is a far happier place today, and far more free.
But Moscow - with its architecture of defensive seclusion from the world, its remoteness from the European mainstream - makes it better suited to today's Russia, too.
Putin circle
Mr Putin's hand-picked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, is a direct beneficiary of Mr Putin's own astounding popularity. What is it that he has articulated that has connected so successfully with so many Russians?
The Putin circle calls the new Russia a sovereign democracy - a democracy defended against hostile foreign meddling
Many Russians have come to regret the 1990s. President Boris Yeltsin was, for many, a westernising tsar, and it is a truism of Russian history that westernising tsars come to grief.
Mr Putin has been the corrective - Russia reverting to type.
The Putin circle who now govern here regret the years of weakness, not just because they plunged Russian society into chaos and criminality but because, during Russia's temporary absence on the international stage, the United States made huge strides forward.
The Putin circle believes the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, and countless other popular revolts on its borders, were not the result of popular uprisings at all but orchestrated by America and its allies to subvert real democracy among Russia's former allies.
If there has been, under Mr Putin, a retreat from the democratic changes of the 1990s in Russia it reflects, in part at least, a determination not to allow - as one Putin ally put it - "orange events" sponsored by forces hostile to Russia.
Very Russian paradox
The Putin circle calls the new Russia a sovereign democracy - a democracy defended against hostile foreign meddling.
But the odd - and very Russian - paradox is this: that this retreat from the democratic experiment in the 1990s seems genuinely popular.
Russians have voted to endorse it, and so it carries a democratic - or at least a popular - legitimacy of its own. And so the big question "Is Russia a democracy?" remains open.
More than half a century ago, America's greatest Soviet analyst, George Kennan, wrote a letter to the US state department from Moscow.
In it, he said that ever since the Bolshevik revolution, American diplomats had been trying to answer the question: "How has Bolshevism changed Russia?"
It was, he had concluded, the wrong question. It was more important to consider how Russia had changed Bolshevism.
Perhaps we should similarly invert today's question and ask not how democracy has changed Russia, but how Russia - eternal, enduring, long-suffering - is changing democracy.
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