Bombs and rockets – Page 26 – a sibilant intake of breath

House of Cards

House of Cards is a British television series available on Netflix.ca. It is like an evil version of Yes, Minister – documenting the functioning of British politics, but with a much darker and more brutal tone. For example, the Prime Minister uses the SAS to carry out assassinations which are blamed on the IRA; security personnel murder unarmed civilians with impunity; and extensive cover-ups are successfully undertaken.

It’s the sort of show political junkies might appreciate, though I think it is probably less true to life overall than its more light-hearted equivalent.

Prosecuting high-level Western war criminals

Writing in the Ottawa Citizen, Dan Gardner argues convincingly that the admission of former President Bush that he ordered people tortured makes him a war criminal who can be prosecuted as such:

Do laws apply to the United States and its president as they do to other nations and men? On the weekend, Swiss officials were very nearly forced to answer that explosive question. Depending on George W. Bush’s travel schedule, Canadian officials could be put on the spot next.

In his memoirs, published late last year, and in subsequent interviews, Bush explicitly said he ordered officials to subject terrorism suspects to waterboarding and other torture techniques. The fact that he had done so wasn’t much of a surprise. There was already heaps of evidence implicating the Bush administration, up to and including the president. What was shocking was that Bush admitted it. He even seemed to boast about it. “Damn right,” he said when Matt Lauer asked whether he had ordered waterboarding.

Gardner goes on to recognize that Bush is unlikely to actually be charged by any state, given how much doing so would probably harm that state’s bilateral relationship with the United States.

Under the terms of the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment (UNCAT), an official doesn’t need to engage in torture directly to be in contravention. The torture needs to happen at “the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity”.

By that standard, there are probably a lot of war criminals around. It’s not clear whether President Obama has stopped all American-initiated interrogation techniques that constitute torture. Similarly, given what is known about the Afghan security services, it is quite possible that officials from states including Canada have violated international law by handing over prisoners to people who were likely to torture them (potentially violating Part II of the Third Geneva Convention).

In a related story, British journalist George Monbiot has helped to establish a bounty for those who attempt to arrest former British Prime Minister Tony Blair for committing war crimes.

Egypt and oil

FiveThirtyEight has some interesting analysis posted on Egypt, Tunisia, and (lack of) oil supplies:

Egypt does have some oil: it produces about 600,000 barrels a day, with a retail value of about $18 billion annually. Still, because of Egypt’s large population, this would translate to only about $220 per capita. And most of Egypt’s oil stays in its domestic market: it exports only 89,000 barrels a day, which would produce $2.6 billion a year at a price of $80 per barrel, or just $32 per person. This is much less than the aggregate figure for the Middle East, which is $1,605 per person.

All told, countries are probably better off when they don’t have oil. Most of the ones that have it are at least partly corrupted because of it, and even the ones who avoid that get hooked on oil revenues despite the better angels of their environmental consciousness.

The Best American Essays 2010

For those without a great deal of time to spend reading GQ and The Atlantic Monthly, an anthology like this one prepared by Christopher Hitchens is probably a good idea. It covers a range of topics – from the political to the scientific to the literary.

As I mentioned before, I found John Gamel’s piece on eye disease especially compelling. Steven Pinker also has an interesting piece on personal genomics, which involves a fair bit of discussion on the genetic influence on personality (something I am meaning to write about at greater length soon). I hope I live to see the day when my entire genome can be sequenced for $1,000 or so.

Perhaps the most educational essay is Frederick Starr’s “Rediscovering Central Asia,” which relates some of the cultural and scientific history of the region that now includes Afghanistan and former Soviet Republics like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Starr argues that Westerners have been wrong since September 11th, 2001 to see the place as doomed to be a backwater forever, and just a source of dangerous fanatics:

Donning a bush jacket and filming at dawn and dusk, [Dan Rather] presented the region as inaccessible, backward, exotic, marginal and threatening – in short, the end of the world…

Even though the Central Asia of Rather’s depiction was and is an evocative image, it carries some bothersome implications. On the one hand, it conjures up a place where the best the United States and the world community can hope for is to limit the damage arising from it. That means destroying whatever threatens us and then getting out. The problem is that the thinking behind such an approach can then become self-fulfilling: a place we judged to be hopeless becomes truly so, and even more threatening than before.

If anything, I think many in the west overestimated the potential for transformation in Afghan society following September 11th. At least, they severely underestimated how much time and effort it would take to put the country on any kind of durable liberal footing.

Increasingly, it does look as though the wisest course after September 11th might have been to capture or kill as many members of Al Qaeda as possible, without overthrowing the central government and making an under-resourced effort to establish a state that respects human rights or democratic principles. Now, it seems plausible that all that will arise from that effort will be a relatively brief and bloody pause in Taliban control, in the space between the dramatic arrival and more subdued departure of NATO armies.

Sovereign debt crises in the EU

I find all the economic anxiety in the European Union (EU) to be rather worrisome, from a long-term historical perspective. I think the last 500 years of history demonstrate pretty convincingly that the most benign possible way for European states to spend their time is arguing over agricultural subsidies and cheese standards. It’s definitely a lot more congenial than building tanks and smashing through Poland and Belgium over and over.

As such, I rather hope the EU is able to sort things out and set up systems that prevent these problems in the future. There definitely need to be ways in which the actions of less responsible governments can be prevented from requiring frequent bailouts from more responsible governments, but I don’t think the risk of that happening from time to time is so severe that it is worth derailing the whole European project over.

Blackadder Goes Forth

The fourth season of the British comedy series Blackadder focuses on the first world war and the efforts of Rowan Atkinson’s character to avoid going over the top into the machine gun and artillery blast of no man’s land. His cynical view of the war is contrasted with the naive patriotism of the upper class twit portrayed by Hugh Laurie who – right until the last episode – has a kind of exaggerated cheerfulness that mocks superficial public support for war efforts.

All told, the series is a pretty convincing demonstration of the pointlessness of WWI and the dangers of unthinking nationalism and militarism. The entire season is available on Netflix.

Mythbusters

For the unfamiliar, Mythbusters is a television show in which a group of geeks test the validity of ‘myths’ about how the world works. Examples include whether poppy seeds can make a person fail a drug test, whether cell phones interfere with aircraft instruments, whether falling bullets can be lethal, etc.

While many of these questions can probably be answered with a reference text and as calculator, what distinguishes the show is how they set out to physically test the myths in question. Rather than just calculating how much helium it would take to lift one of them, they build a gigantic rig of 50 huge helium-filled tubes in a gigantic hanger.

In the past, I have been a bit bothered when they have done something physically that could have been very easily disproven with a bit of math. A little moment in an episode I saw yesterday changed my thinking a bit though. It was the demeanour of Adam Savage – one of the show’s two main hosts – when they were trying to make him buoyant in air by filling a small inflatable boat with helium. In the little clip, it is obvious that both he and Jamie Hyneman know perfectly well that the boat won’t have sufficient buoyancy. They do the physical test not because it is necessary, but because it illustrates their methodology.

As an XKCD comic points out, the lack of scientific rigour in some Mythbusters experiments is only a very minor basis for criticizing the show. It’s obvious that they put more thought into their trials than they have time to discuss on the show. For instance, testing the myth that Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in a thunderstorm with a key on the string, they mention in passing the use of an ‘authentic’ key. Furthermore, it seems clear that their major message is about the importance of empirical testing and verification, which is ultimately the best mechanism we have for making sure what we believe about the world is remotely accurate.

The show is a lot of fun, and I think it transmits some really important ideas about science. Their fondness for explosives certainly makes for enjoyable television. Furthermore, Kari Byron’s participation certainly doesn’t hurt the show’s entertainment value; she has to be one of the most attractive women in the entertainment industry, particularly when welding.

War photographer

In my photojournalism class, we watched the 2001 documentary War Photographer, about the work of James Nachtwey. The film showed him working in both conflict zones and zones of acute poverty, including Indonesia, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. It was interesting and well done, and may well have been a balanced portrayal, but the absence of any kind of critical comment on Nachtwey made it feel somewhat like a hagiography.

It may well be the case that Nachtwey is a talented and self-sacrificing man who has helped to increase public concern about various sorts of severe suffering. At the same time, an account based on his own perspective – along with that of his friends, admirers, and co-workers – cannot make that case convincingly. I suppose this is a fundamental problem with autobiographies. Perhaps there should be some sort of third-party certification process where impartial outsiders compare the content of a book or film with all the information they can gather, and then certify or refuse to certify the content. Of course, not many politicians or other public figures would be willing to go through such a screening.

One potent message conveyed by the film is about extreme poverty. Seeing families living right beside dangerous railroad tracks in Indonesia sends a powerful emotional message. Of course, our intellectual response to seeing that varies depending on a constellation of other beliefs. Some people will see that and think: “This shows why economic growth is such a vital phenomenon, when it comes to improving human welfare”. Others will focus more on distributive justice, and say that the issue is less about enriching everyone, and more about transferring wealth from the affluent to the desperately poor.

Ethics and weapons of mass destruction

Unsurprisingly, my review of Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb generated a discussion on the ethics of the United States using such bombs on Japan in 1945.

In the same book, a moral question with some similar characteristics comes up. Describing the American attack on Iwo Jima, Rhodes explains:

Washington secretly considered sanitizing the island with artillery shells loaded with poison gas lobbed in by ships standing well offshore; the proposal reached the White House by Roosevelt curtly vetoed it. It might have saved thousands of lives and hastened the surrender – arguments used to justify most of the mass slaughters of the Second Worlld War, and neither the United States nor Japan had signed the Geneva Convention prohibiting such use – but Roosevelt presumably remembered the world outcry that followed German introduction of poison gas in the First World War and decided to leave the sanitizing of Iwo Jima to the U.S. Marines.

In the end, 6,821 American marines were killed and 21,865 were injured. 20,000 Japanese troops died, with 1,083 ultimately surrendering.

I presume most readers think the use of poison gas would have been more immoral than attacking with Marines, despite how similar numbers of Japanese troops would likely have been killed in either case. What I am curious about is the reasoning. Is the use of certain kinds of weapons fundamentally unacceptable, regardless of the consequences of their use or non-use? Or would using poison gas on Iwo Jima have established a harmful precedent that would have caused greater suffering later? Or is there some other justification?

Spying on the U.N.

In addition to describing many situations of allies spying on allies, Richard Aldrich’s GCHQ: The Uncensored Story Of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency also describes a number of alleged incidents of the United States and United Kingdom spying on the United Nations, particularly during the led-up to the Iraq War.

Aldrich describes how the NSA and GCHQ used the UNSCOM weapons inspectors in Iraq as “short-range collectors” of signals intelligence (SIGINT). He also describes the bugging of the U.N. headquarters in Iraq during that period, the bugging of the U.N. Secretariat (including Secretary General Annan’s office), and espionage conducted against non-permanent members of the Security Council before the vote that would have authorized the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Aldrich claims that “listening in on the UN was routine” and that “in 1945 the United States had pressed for the UN headquarters to be in New York precisely in order to make eavesdropping easier”.