From The "R Man", Richard Russell

Here's Richard Russell's latest take on the state of things. Must reading in my opinion.

What I believe is happening is that investors, both domestic and international, have collectively recognized that the dollar's in trouble. And if the dollar's in trouble, everything denominated in dollars is in trouble. This concept has such enormous implications that it's almost beyond the comprehension of most professionals and totally beyond the comprehension of the great American retail public.

What, America's "mighty" reserve currency in trouble? The answer is "yes," but it's an answer that few analysts or journalists are addressing. The US population has depended on the dollar's reserve-status and "invincibility" for so long that it has never occurred to them that their debt-laden currency could be slowly losing its reserve status. And you have to ask yourself -- when a nation has to borrow money to pay off its own rising debts, how long can it be before it's currency reflects this dire state of affairs?

My own opinion is that the stock market's weakness is a function of big money leaving the scene. Where is the big money going? The answer is -- away from US dollars. But towards what? Towards other paper currencies such as the euro or even the yen -- but mainly towards tangibles, towards anything of real value unencumbered by debt. And world money is certainly moving toward the only intrinsic (non-debt) currency -- gold (with silver as a second choice).

Is oil a tangible? Yes, I consider oil a tangible, but unlike gold, you can't buy actual oil and put it in your bank vault. Of course, there are oil futures, but I don't recommend futures for most subscribers. This reduces oil to oil stocks and ETFs, including XLE and VDE.

A few days ago I made the statement that this is not just another "emergency oil spike," this is our first primary bull market in oil and energy. Thus, I would treat oil in the same way I treat gold. I'm not trading oil, I'm not timing oil purchases. You take your position, and you sit and allow the primary trend to do its work.

Oil became overbought, and as expected, oil is now correcting. I don't know how far the correction will carry, but I suspect it will be mild. Those wanting to participate in the oil-energy bull market should think in terms of ERFs, or the closed-end fund PEO.

The ominous but brilliant piece below was from the PrudentBear site, a site that I never fail to turn to -- Russell.

Guest Commentary, by Rob Lee Signals of the End of the Dollar Standard October 5, 2005

Rob Lee is an economist who has been involved in investment markets for 30 years, the last few in nominal retirement. I am an economist who worked for 25 years in large investment companies in South Africa.

I "retired" to the UK a few years ago. For most of my career I lobbied for policies such as money supply targets and later inflation targets that were (implicitly) intended to substitute the role of gold as an independent anchor for the monetary system. I was never an advocate of any form of gold standard, unlike the current Fed Chairman, now ironically testing the fiat money system to destruction.

However, in recent years the scales have fallen from my eyes. As Voltaire said in 1729 "paper money eventually goes down to its intrinsic value - zero." Every fiat paper currency before or since has confirmed to this prediction. A fiat paper currency that is also the global reserve currency becomes this problem writ large. A US Treasury official of old - Sam Cross - put it this way: "if you postulate a system that depends on one country always following the right policies, you will find that sooner or later no such country exists. The system is eventually going to break down". In my view the Dollar Standard system is irretrievably breaking down, as signaled by four recent developments described below:

1. China has ended its currency peg to the dollar. The new exchange rate system for the Yuan is admittedly not yet a dramatic break from the dollar fixed peg . That is not the Chinese way. It is nevertheless hugely symbolic. It serves notice that China will be increasingly reluctant to accumulate dollars they know will depreciate in value over time. Chinese economic spokesmen have made no secret in public of their alarm at US profligacy - what is said behind closed doors?

China is clearly intent on exchanging its paper assets (predominantly dollars) for real assets, notably commodities in general and energy products in particular. On gold the strategy focuses on encouraging private citizens to own gold- deregulation of the gold market has been rapid by Chinese standards. [Ironically it may now be easier for citizens of China to invest directly in gold than it is in many western democracies].

China is likely to prefer to remove dollar support only gradually. Bear in mind though that most of the smaller economies in Asia tend to follow China - Malaysia announced a similar change to its exchange rate system very soon after the Chinese. Other countries from outside the region - notably Russia and Saudi Arabia - have indicated an intention to downgrade the dollar in their currency arrangements. Iran is attempting to create an oil trading exchange that does not transact in dollars. These are ominous straws in the wind for a currency so dependent on foreign capital.

2. Deflation in Japan is coming to an end. Japan is the biggest foreign holder of US dollars. For example, Japan held $680bn in US Treasury Securities at the end of June - nearly 34% of total foreign holdings. This compares with $291bn held by China (including Hong Kong). Japan will therefore play a critical part in any changes to the world's currency system.

US-Japan relations are far closer than those between the US and China. Japan also has literally more to lose from the demise of the dollar than China. Nevertheless the same logic that impels China's move away from US paper applies to Japan. As long as deflation remained the key economic concern in Japan supporting the dollar was the paramount objective of its exchange rate policy. However, there are clear signs of a self-sustaining recovery of domestic employment, investment, and consumption in Japan. The recent election victory of PM Koizumi should reinforce reform and recovery. These forces are simultaneously bringing an end to both the deflationary process and to dependence on exports for growth. The imperative to support the dollar will erode and interest rates in Japan will begin to normalize. Another straw in the wind - Japan did not increase its holdings of US Treasuries in the first half of 2005.

3. The US in effect now has to borrow abroad in order to service all its foreign debt. The remarkable down spiral in the US foreign financial position took another crucial but little noticed twist recently. In the second quarter of 2005 the US paid out more in income to foreigners on their US assets than it received in income on its foreign assets. Technically net foreign investment income went negative. No comfort should be taken from the fact the second quarter investment income deficit was a mere $0.5bn. The income deficit will deteriorate rapidly in coming years. The US has net foreign debt (foreign liabilities minus foreign assets) of more than $ 2.5 trillion, and this debt will grow rapidly as the US continues to rack up huge current account deficits (now roughly $800bn annually). The income deficit on this debt has only just gone negative because the US receives a rate of return on its foreign assets roughly double that of overseas investors in the US - about 7% versus 3.4% between 2002 and 2004.

This differential return reflects the fact that Americans have invested largely in riskier assets abroad while foreigners have opted more for Treasury securities. A world economic downturn (likely in my view) would reduce returns on US overseas assets, while rising US interest rates will raise the return to foreigners. The longer term dynamics of this process are alarming. Within a short period of years the US will be borrowing hundreds of billions merely to service existing debt. Economists call this the "debt trap" - and the US economy is heading inexorably into it Can the US dollar sustain its position as the world reserve currency in the face of these fundamentals? As the saying goes, you only have to ask the question to know the answer.

4. The gold price is breaking out in all key currencies. Not all the world's investors (or central bankers!) are blind to the scary developments sketched above. Gold in dollars has definitively been in a bull market for some time, but in recent weeks gold has decisively broken out all key currencies including the Euro, Yen, Swiss Franc and Sterling. Markets are recognizing that the failure of the Dollar Standard is one not only of US economic management but one inherent in the fiat money system itself. In the long term they may demand gold's return as an anchor to the global monetary system.

The flight from paper assets (and especially dollars) towards hard assets is now underway in earnest. There is still time - this is a multi-year trend - for investors to switch from devaluing dollars to rising gold. Those ahead of the herd are moving but the herd itself is yet to stir.

There you have it folks.

Winning Without Fighting

Bush once again has the Democrats discombobulated. They are almost forced to support his nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court despite her pro-life opinions and strong evangelical faith. They know so little about her that they can still plausibly hope that she might not be as "bad" as Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia. Should she fail to be confirmed, however, whoever is nominated in her place is most likely going to be a Thomas/Scalia clone, and it will be much harder to defeat a second nominee. Miers is about the closest thing to what the Dems want that they're likely to get, and they'll almost have to see her confirmed or face a far tougher fight over a more obviously qualified substitute.

If Miers really is a conservative and an intelligent strict constructionist, and if that's truly what the President wanted on the Court, then he is indeed a wizard at political strategy. He gets (ex hypothesi) a qualified originalist on the Bench by forcing the Dems to vote for her and without having to fight them for their vote.

Hugh Hewitt linked to someone today who recalls the words of Sun Tzu:

"For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the supreme excellence."

I think Sun Tzu would admire the Miers gambit.

Chaos and Anarchy

The LA Times tells us that media reports of chaos and anarchy in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina were highly exaggerated and largely incorrect. Indeed, it was these reports which caused relief teams to delay going into the city.

We'd do well to keep this in mind when we read the next dispatches from the MSM about how Iraq is descending into chaos and civil war.

Consciousness and Materialism

Philosopher David Chalmers notes that there has been a shift among philosophers of mind in the last decade from a strict materialistic reductionism (or physicalism) toward the view that mind cannot be reduced to matter (dualism), that mind and matter are essentially disparate entities. Dualists, by Chalmers' estimation, are still in the minority, but their numbers are growing. This is a fascinating development after a century and a half of philosophers and neurobiologists trying to show that mind is nothing more than a word we use to describe the function of the brain.

Materialism seems to be under assault everywhere. Marxist economic materialism has long been discredited, of course, and within the last fifteen years materialist conceptions of the cosmos have become increasingly untenable in light of discoveries being made by cosmologists about the fine-tuning of the fundamental forces, laws, and constants which govern the universe. Similarly, Intelligent Design is challenging materialism in the realm of biology, and now many philosophers are concluding that consciousness is something other than just chemical reactions in the brain.

Next thing you know philosophers will be resurrecting the concept of soul. It reminds me of the closing words of Robert Jastrow's God and the Astronomers. Jastrow notes that scientists have struggled, like men climbing a mountain, for every foothold and handhold that would help them reach the pinnacle - an understanding how our universe works. Every scrap of knowledge came at a great cost in effort and labor. Finally, after centuries of working their way toward the summit, they heave themselves over the last ledge only to find a bunch of theologians who've been sitting at the top all along.

It's the RINOs' Fault

No Left Turns' Julie Ponzi makes the point that if conservatives are unhappy with Bush's pick for the Supreme Court they shouldn't blame Bush they should blame the Quisling Republicans in the Senate:

And finally, if we really want to pick a fight with someone, why not take it to the spineless Republicans in the Senate whose shameful behavior in the last year has given us this moment? One might ask WHY Bush feels the need to play politics right now instead of complaining about the fact that he does. The Senate is why. We all know the Senate is why. Voinovich and DeWine--Ohio's two senators--are why. We need to do something about that before before we demand more of Bush. To do less is peevish and, worse, it hurts our cause. We will get another shot at it. The problem is that I think the people we most want to get the next nomination will be so tainted by the support of these childish rants that they won't be taken seriously. Too bad.

Quite so. Bush chooses to avoid a fight because he's not sure he can win it if he has to rely on RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) like Chafee, Snowe, Specter, Collins, as well as weak knees like Voinovich and DeWine. We, too, wish he would have selected a known quantity and that we'd have the fight the Democrats keep pushing us into, but we can't join with those conservatives who are essentially proclaiming that they just don't trust Bush to make a wise selection to the Court. For perhaps sound reasons he's chosen someone he believes he knows well, and there is some reason to expect that Ms Miers will vote with the Court's conservatives. Whether she has as solid an understanding of the constitution as an Antonin Scalia is much more uncertain but will no doubt become more clear at the hearings.

We understand conservative frustration and disappointment, but we think that people like William Kristol and George Will, who have excoriated the President for his selection of Ms. Miers, might well wind up looking foolish in the backlight of their harsh words. We'll see.

Uh, Oh. Not a <i>Christian</i>!

From the New York Times comes this shocking revelation about Harriet Miers:

"I think the one thing that comes across is she genuinely cares about people, at every level - professionally, personally, socially," said Hugh Hackney, a lawyer in Dallas who has known her since their undergraduate days at S.M.U. "She has always taken a great deal of time to really consider other people."

One thing Ms. Miers shares with her boss is a deep faith. She was introduced to Valley View Christian Church in Dallas by Justice Hecht, of the Texas Supreme Court. He was an elder at the church and often plays the organ during Sunday services.

"Harriet has placed her faith in Jesus," said the Rev. Ron Key, who was the longtime pastor there until recently. "She may have been religious before, but it's become more of a priority, more of a focus of her life. She has become a strong example of what happens in a person's life when they come to the faith."

Even as you read this, urgent letters from People For the American Way and other left-liberal organizations are being delivered to blue state homes all across the country calling on concerned liberals to rise up in outrage that Bush would nominate a Christian to the Supreme Court. How dare he treat the wall of church and state with such disdain? Christian women should be in church serving pot-luck suppers. They don't belong on the Supreme Court where who knows what mischief they'll stir up. There's no telling how much harm the nation could suffer by giving that kind of power to someone whose convictions are informed by the gospel.

This is going to be an ugly fight. We can't wait.

Assisted Suicide

The first case the Supreme Court is hearing this session is whether Oregon's assisted suicide law should be allowed to stand. The Bush administration opposes it on the grounds that the federal government has final authority on how controlled substances can be used and since federal legislation prohibits the use of drugs to help people end their lives, state laws allowing doctors to prescribe lethal doses of these substances should be struck down.

There are several questions raised by this case: Is it wise to have doctors assisting people in killing themselves? If doctors should not do this why do we have doctors assist the state in executing condemned prisoners? Will allowing the state to help people die erode the value we place on life? These are all important questions, but I'm not sure that they're relevant to the Supreme Court's ultimate decision. The narrow issue is whether it is unconstitutional for the state of Oregon to allow doctors to prescribe lethal dosages of drugs when federal law forbids it. The wider issue is whether the states have the right under the constitution to permit their citizens to take their own lives under certain circumstances.

It seems that there is really only one way a conservative can consistently answer this latter question and that is to say that the states should indeed have that right. This is ultimately a state's rights matter, just like conservatives say abortion should be. It would be very difficult to argue, as conservatives do, that whether their citizens should have the right to kill their unborn children should be left to the voters of each state to decide, but that whether their citizens will have the right to kill themselves must not be left to the voters of the states.

This is not to say that laws permitting self-euthanasia, or assisted self-euthanasia, are wise or moral. It's simply to say that the decision as to whether such practices should be legally condoned should be left to the citizens of the state in the same manner conservatives believe laws on abortion should be. How it can be argued that euthanasia is a matter for the federal government to control but that Roe v. Wade should be overturned and abortion laws thrown back into the lap of state legislatures is not very clear, at least not to me.

Testing ID

There's an interesting article in the New York Times on the great clash between the magisteria of religion and science at the first Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science and Religion.

Whatever the arguments may be for rejecting evidence of intentional design in the biosphere, it seems that one must be not only unable but a forteriori unwilling, to see the evidence that the cosmos itself is the product of purpose and intelligence. Even if only half of what Michael Denton says in Nature's Destiny or Stephen Barr writes in Modern Physics and Ancient Faith is true, the evidence for a telic universe is simply astounding.

The atheist, I suppose, can always fall back on the old chestnut that no amount of evidence is sufficient to constitute proof that the universe was created by a mind and that it is incumbent upon the one who asserts the existence of something to prove that the entity exists.

What this ignores, however, is the fact that proof is person-relative. What constitutes proof for one who is willing to be persuaded will not constitute proof for the man who is unwilling to be moved by it. There is, as Pascal said, enough evidence to convince any man who is not dead set against it, and Denton and Barr have written books which bring that evidence into bold relief. There is indeed sufficient evidence to convince all but the most obdurate that something besides randomness and coincidence were at work in the crafting of this universe.

The writer of the Times article, George Johnson, states that "If the God hypothesis [i.e. the Designer hypothesis] is meaningful, it should be subject to a test. But the theistic gloss Dr. Polkinghorne and others give to science is immune to this kind of scrutiny. It has, by design, no observable consequences."

Whether this is true for Polkinghorne's work or not we cannot say, but it is hardly true for the work of others. Denton, for example offers this test:

If any fundamental force or physical law or chemical property were found which could have been other than what it is and not make the existence of higher life forms impossible then the teleological interpretation of the world would be discredited. If higher forms of life were to be discovered elsewhere in the universe thriving in environments significantly different from our own, there would be no grounds for maintaining the opinion that our world is uniquely suited for life. The argument from cosmic design rests on the conviction that our world is so exquisitely fine-tuned for life that if it were structured just a little bit differently than it is life would be impossible. If that conviction were to be falsified the argument from cosmic design would lose its force.

Having said that, it should be pointed out that the criterion of testability as a measure of meaningfulness is a two-edged sword. If an assertion must be testable to be scientifically meaningful then what are we to make of the Darwinist claim that life arose and evolved to its present state through purely mechanistic, blind, and unguided processes acting over long periods of time? The task of contriving a test of this assertion would baffle the finest minds in science, yet it's considered by all hands to be a perfectly meaningful claim.

There are many similar claims in science that defy testing, but which are considered meaningful propositions. If we are to dismiss the claim that the universe is the product of intentional design because of an alleged inability to be tested then we're going to have to also throw out a great deal of evolutionary biology and modern physics.

The American Soldier

Yesterday we posted an account of the toughness and courage of American soldiers and Marines. Today we direct you to this story which illustrates another side of the American soldier.

Despite the Left's steady focus on the mistreatment of prisoners that occured over a year ago at the hands of a relative few sadists, the average American G.I. is more like these guys in "Deuce Four" than they are like Lynde England.

The Peculiar Story of Judith Miller

The Judith Miller story is more than a little odd (See here for a complete account of the affair). Miller, you will recall went to prison rather than reveal her sources for a story - which she never wrote - on the matter of how Valerie Plame's identity as a covert operative for the CIA came to be made public.

The source she was ostensibly protecting was Dick Cheney aide Scooter Libby, but Libby told her over a year ago that she had his permission to testify about any conversations she had had with him.

He then wrote a letter last month repeating his permission to reveal anything she wanted to the grand jury investigating the matter. Even so, she chose to remain in jail for another ten days before agreeing to testify.

Why? PowerLine has the details of the story and offers these three possibile answers to the question:

1) Miller went to jail because she wanted to pose as a martyr, and she just needs an excuse for why she now wants to go home. That's plausible as far as it goes, but it doesn't explain why Miller stayed in jail for another week and a half after getting Libby's "clarification," while her lawyer negotiated with the prosecutor. 2) Miller went to jail because she didn't want to answer questions about her tipping off a terrorist-supporting group [for whom] the FBI was about to execute a search warrant, an episode that also could have come before Fitzpatrick's grand jury. She and her lawyer laid the blame on Libby so that the public wouldn't learn about the other episode, which is pretty much unknown. Plausible, and consistent with what we've been told about her lawyer's deal with the prosecutor--if, indeed, the terrorist tipoff was something that Fitzgerald could have pursued. I'm not sure whether that's correct or not. 3) The third alternative is the most sinister: Miller went to jail to protect not Libby, but another source or sources, and the prosecutor has agreed not to ask her about those other sources. If that's true, it suggests that someone in the administration--presumably, either Karl Rove or Scooter Libby--is being set up.

Whatever the answer her behavior is strange, and it will be interesting to see what she has to say to the grand jury. Our hunch is that this investigation is going nowhere, at least nowhere that the enemies of Karl Rove would like to see it go. All of the excitement that rippled through the MSM last spring and summer as they eagerly anticipated seeing Rove brought low and maybe even led out of his office in leg irons, has evaporated away like a morning mist. Just another case of a great deal of left-wing sound and fury signifying nothing. Next up, Tom DeLay.

Tough Breed

Here's a brief story about the kind of men who are fighting against Islamic extremists in Iraq so that our families are safer from them here:

Lt. Col. Matthew Lopez was awarded the Silver Star for his actions during multiple firefights his Marines were engaged in during battles in al Qaim, Iraq, in April 2004. Shot in the back during an ambush on his convoy and with multiple broken ribs, it was not until after a second firefight further down the road and well into the night that he recieved treatment.

Lt. Col. Lopez was awarded the prestigious Silver Star today for his actions during Operation Iraqi Freedom, when his unit came under fire near the Syrian border in Iraq.

Riding in the 3rd vehicle of an 8-vehicle convoy, heading to assist other Marines in another firefight, Lopez's own unit was suddenly hit with enemy fire. The Marines fired back as they had numerous times before.

When the smoke cleared, Lopez and his Marines had killed 25 insurgents. Twenty-two Marines in the convoy lay wounded, including Lopez himself.

"The shot hit (my) back," said Lopez. In addition, the impact of the round also broke a few of his ribs.

"My first thought was I didn't want to pass out," said Lopez, a Chicago native. "We'd already fought through one ambush and I wanted to get the injured Marines to the (corpsman) as quickly as possible."

The Marines were involved in another fight at a forward base checkpoint, and needed fire support. It wasn't until that night that Lopez was treated for the wounds he sustained.

Lt. Col. Lopez was Cpl. Jason Dunham's Battalion Commander, who saved his fellow Marines by selflessly diving on a grenade thrown by an insurgent. Dunham's Kilo Company 3/7, has a lion's share of honorable Marines, right up the chain to their commanding officer.

Brave, tough men. It's little wonder the enemy has never won a single combat engagement with our troops in Iraq. Nor is it any wonder that the enemy prefers to attack women and children rather than take on Marines like these.

Fly Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee

Conservatives are split on George Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers for a seat on the Supreme Court. The American Center for Law and Justice calls Miers an "excellent" choice. But others are less pleased. A group called Public Advocate has released a statement which states that:

"The President's nomination of Miers is a betrayal of the conservative, pro-family voters whose support put Bush in the White House in both the 2000 and 2004 elections and who were promised Supreme Court appointments in the mold of Thomas and Scalia. Instead we were given 'stealth nominees,' who have never ruled on controversial issues, more in the mold of the disastrous choice of David Souter by this President's father.

"When there are so many proven judges in the mix, it is unacceptable this President has appointed a political crony with no conservative credentials. This attempt at 'Bush Packing' the Supreme Court must not be allowed to pass the Senate and we will forcefully oppose this nomination."

Strong stuff. William Kristol at the Weekly Standard is no less dismayed, claiming to be "disappointed, depressed, and demoralized."

Viewpoint joins Kristol in being disappointed that Bush didn't pick a proven conservative from among the eight or nine candidates that have outstanding judicial records, and we're concerned, too, that Meirs has no real record from which her views can be gleaned. Most of all, we're concerned that her nomination seems to have delighted Senator Chuck Schumer.

Conservatives fear that the specter of David Souter hangs ominously over both John Roberts and Harriet Miers since, like Souter, they both purport to be conservatives but also like Souter, we have no way of assessing the depth of their commitment to an originalist reading of the constitution. Souter has turned out terribly, and the trepidation among conservatives is due to the possibility that Roberts and, even more, Miers, may turn out likewise.

Perhaps. But the difference in the present case is that George Bush is committed, we hope, to putting constitutional originalists on the court. He also knows Miers very well. Unlike his father who didn't know anything about Souter, W. knows Miers' philosophy. Presumably, her convictions mesh with those of the President. If we believe his own judicial convictions and instincts to be correct then it is probably unwise to condemn him for his selection at this point in time. Conservatives have been disappointed by George Bush on more than one occasion, but in picking judges he's been impeccable and has, in our view, earned the benefit of the doubt. One is justified in withholding it only if one thinks that Bush is unprincipled enough to go back on his word that he wants conservative judges on the court. Whatever one thinks of Bush, however, "unprincipled" is hardly a fair description of his conduct in office over the last five years.

We think that much of the disgust and frustration expressed by conservatives over the Meirs pick derives from a desire for a resolution of the power struggle going on in the Senate. Conservatives want Republicans to apply the coup de grace to the floundering Dems who act as if they are still the majority party. Republicans, unfortunately, too often act as if they're still in the minority and seem loath to use the prerogatives bestowed by their majority status. This frustrates conservatives who want Bush to nominate a Scalia/ Thomas type justice and then dare the Democrats to filibuster.

In other words, conservatives are spoiling for a slugfest, but Bush prefers to beat the Democrats with finesse rather than brute force. That's what he did with Roberts and what he'll probably do with Meirs. He has taken something of a gamble, to be sure, but if both picks turn out to be more conservative than Sandra Day O'Connor then Bush will have succeeded in his goal of moving the court to the right without shedding much blood. Conservatives want him to fight like Joe Frazier, but he prefers to dance like Muhammed Ali. If he's confident of the conservatism of his selections then it's hard to fault him for his tactics.

The President has enough enemies on the Left. He doesn't need criticism from the Right unless we're sure he deserves it. On this matter we're not yet sure that he does.

The Next Pick

ConfirmThem.com thinks the next SCOTUS nominee will be either Michael Luttig or Karen Williams. Here's an article on Williams. We'll probably find out tomorrow who the nominee will be.

Operation Iron Fist

The Fourth Rail describes in a series of posts what's going on along the Syrian border with Operation Iron Fist. Go here then scroll down to the post titled Operation Iron Fist in Qaim. This post has a map which shows the locations of the towns mentioned in subsequent entries. After reading this one, work your way back up to the most recent posts. It's interesting reading and it gives a perspective on what the American strategy is there that is at odds with what the media has been saying.

Is There <i>Anything</i> They Won't Say?

A friend writes to express dismay with the testimony at the Dover ID trial in Harrisburg, PA:

Has reading the paper about the ID trial driven you crazy?? To say under oath, as testimony in a major court proceeding, that the ID thinkers want to return us to a time when epilepsy [was believed to be] caused by demons is so ludicrous. Does that guy really think that [ID theorists] don't believe epilepsy [is an illness]? Outragous accusations!

He's quite right, of course. There's a lot of outrageous stuff being said in this courtroom. Two especially irritating examples leap to mind. One is that the plaintiffs are going to great lengths to discredit Intelligent Design by showing that the people who were instrumental in getting the ID statement read in Dover classrooms are very outspoken about their religious convictions. This may be relevant in showing that the introduction of ID into classrooms was driven by sectarian considerations, but even if board members went too far in voicing their religious views that is simply irrelevant to whether or not ID is a legitimate topic for a science classroom.

Scientists from Darwin to Dawkins have not been reticent about their atheism and how it derives from their evolutionary views. Yet no one in the media or in the courtroom seems to think that this disqualifies evolution as a legitimate topic for a science class, nor should they. But if it is acceptable for atheistic scientists to talk about how Darwinism "makes it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist," and so on, why is it disqualifying for a Christian to voice an alternative opinion? If it is perfectly acceptable to teach students that evolution is the product of a "blind, unguided natural process," which is essentially a religious rather than a scientific claim, why is it not acceptable to tell students that not everyone believes this to be so?

The second frustrating thing about the case is the repeated attempts to hitch ID to creationism so that by discrediting creationism ID is discredited as well. Intelligent Design is not creationism, at least not as that term has come to be used in the current debate, but a supine national media, anxious to believe the worst of the rubes who embrace ID, decline to undertake the journalistic labor necessary to investigate the philosophical legitimacy of the linkage. They'd much prefer to write smug, supercilious columns poking fun at the Dover school board members than to actually do their jobs and give the public pertinent information about what creationism and Intelligent Design actually are.

So my reply to my friend is yes, what's being said is outrageous and frustrating, but then there's some comfort in realizing that for the plaintiffs to succeed, their witnesses have to distort the truth and the media have to be complicit in the deception. If one has to lose, it's much better to lose because the other side had to misrepresent one's position than to lose because the other side had a better argument. There's consolation in the fact that, if this is the best the other side can do, ID is in very good shape indeed.

Religion and Social Well-Being

We hope that this is not what's passing for scholarship in the social sciences nowadays:

Religious belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today. According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems. The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.

It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality.

Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its "spiritual capital". But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.

The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: "Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world. In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so."

Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a social scientist, used data from the International Social Survey Programme, Gallup and other research bodies to reach his conclusions. He compared social indicators such as murder rates, abortion, suicide and teenage pregnancy.

The study concluded that the US was the world's only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from "uniquely high" adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested.

Mr Paul said: "The study shows that England, despite the social ills it has, is actually performing a good deal better than the USA in most indicators, even though it is now a much less religious nation than America." He said that the disparity was even greater when the US was compared with other countries, including France, Japan and the Scandinavian countries. These nations had been the most successful in reducing murder rates, early mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion, he added.

Mr Paul delayed releasing the study until now because of Hurricane Katrina. He said that the evidence accumulated by a number of different studies suggested that religion might actually contribute to social ills. "I suspect that Europeans are increasingly repelled by the poor societal performance of the Christian states," he added.

He said that most Western nations would become more religious only if the theory of evolution could be overturned and the existence of God scientifically proven. Likewise, the theory of evolution would not enjoy majority support in the US unless there was a marked decline in religious belief, Mr Paul said.

"The non-religious, pro-evolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator. "The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted."

I wasn't aware of it, but apparently those pious Christians fervently worshipping in their churches on Sunday morning and poring over copies of The Purpose Driven Life are also leading secret lives of murder, mayhem, and sexual promiscuity the rest of the week. I also never realized that devout Christians lead the world in suicide. Looks can be be very deceiving, apparently, and we will henceforth be reluctant to sit in the front of the church lest one of those homocidal maniacs in the pews behind us suddenly pulls out a gun and starts filling the sanctuary with bullets.

On the other hand, has there ever been an academic study more counter-intuitive, more self-serving, or more simple-minded than this one? Mr. Paul commits the fallacy of assuming that because there's a correlation between high dysfunctionality and high levels of religiosity that therefore religion is not beneficial to national social health. It's a bit like arguing that because the U.S. has a high incidence of cancer and also has high numbers of doctors that therefore doctors are not really beneficial to our nation's well-being.

In order to prove his bizarre conclusion Meyer would have to show that the set of dysfunctional people is identical to the set of religious people, but this he does not do. It is far more likely that the two sets scarcely even overlap in this country, in which case the results of his study are meaningless.

He also misses the mark when he conjures up an alleged widely-held fear that "a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster" in order to show that the putative fear is refuted by his study. The problem with a non-theistic citizenry, however, is not that it must experience societal disaster, but rather that it is far more likely to. A citizenry that lacks a transcendent ground for moral values, human dignity and human worth, must eventually either acknowledge that these things really don't exist at all or invent some fiction in which to ground them.

Either way, such a society will gradually become increasingly more cynical, skeptical, and nihilistic. Government may keep the wheels on the wagon with legal duct tape for a couple of generations as the religious bolts that fasten them to the axles work their way loose, but it's quite likely that when the bolts have all fallen out, the wheels will spin off too. That it hasn't happened yet in some European countries (Though see here) means only that the masses have yet to realize the full implications of their abandonment of the transcendent.

Indeed, in those European nations where authorities have sought to work out the full logic of their atheism and where they have possessed the power to impose their will on the masses - nations like the Stalinist U.S.S.R. and Nazi Germany, for example - societal disaster is precisely what we have seen.

Mr. Paul strikes us as an atheist who aspires to prove that atheism is beneficial to society. If so, his work is still ahead of him, because this silly study certainly gives no one any reason to think that he's made his point.

For a technical critique of Paul's work by a statistician go here.

No Good Ideas

Howard Fineman writes about the Democrats' despair over their dismal political prospects. They recognize that not only does their stable of candidates lack the star power of the Republican lineup, their "idea people" are singularly void of any ideas. They lack, as a party, a unifying ideal for them to rally behind and to stand stoutly for. The only imagination they display is the sort seen in the fellow in the Capital One commercials who thinks up ever more clever variations on the word no.

No to more refineries, no to more drilling, no to social security reform, no to tax cuts, no to Bush's judges, no to the war on terror, no to tort reform, no to civility in our political discourse, no to anything George Bush wants to do for the United States and the American people.

Although Fineman doesn't say it the fact of the matter is that most of the ideas that seem to resonate with voters right now are conservative ideas. The Democrats have defined themselves as an anti-party. Their only distinctive is that they are opposed to Bush and all his works. Because there is nothing for which they can be said to stand they give the impression that their only motive for seeking elective office is the acquisition of power. Power must be an end in itself for the Dems because they haven't a clue what they would do with it if it ever fell back into their laps except use it to punish political opponents.

A platform based on lust for power and sweet revenge may rouse the fringes into a frenzy, but it's not likely to inspire the rank and file to turn out for Democratic candidates. The Democrats seem soulless and forlorn because, quite simply, they are.

Bennett's "Blunder"

Much of the commentary, even from conservatives, about William Bennett's alleged faux pas misses the mark. Ed Morissey at Captain's Quarters is an example:

Do we know that the crime rate would go down, any more than if we aborted every white baby in America? No, we do not, and that mistaken assumption creates the much smaller but legitimate criticism of Bennett's remarks. At the heart of that assertion, Bennett has to assume that all other things being equal, blacks are more likely to commit crime than non-blacks as part of their innate nature, and not as part of an environment.

First mistake: using blacks as an example. Had he said "poor", he would have been much closer to the mark. The poor do not have an innate compulsion to commit crime either, but the environment in which they enter the world creates more pressure towards criminal behavior. That does not hold true for "all black children" -- only for those born into that environment.

This is all beside the point. The reason why Bennett used the construction "black baby" is clear to anyone who understands the context of the remark. He was commenting on a study that appears in a book called Freakonomics in which the authors show a correlation between the onset of large-scale abortion on demand in this country in 1973 and lower crime rates beginning about 18 to 20 years later. The authors, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, argue that the correlation exists because crime is largely a poor minority phenomenon and so is abortion.

In other words, the authors argue that because there have been millions fewer black babies born in the last thirty years, crime has gone down (Their thesis may be right or wrong. It's a mistake, however, to think that they were advocating abortion as a means of reducing crime, much less abortion of black babies. They were simply noting a correlation).

Bennett was nevertheless objecting to the notion that abortion should be seen as a legitimate means of reducing crime rates. With the Levitt/Dubner book in mind, he was in effect insisting that aborting babies, even those in the high-crime demographic, even if crime could be profoundly curtailed by so doing, is a reprehensible social policy.

That's all Bennett was saying. Whatever it might be that's wrong with what he said we confess that it eludes us.

Prognosticating Dover

Bill Dembski offers his take on three possible outcomes of the Dover Intelligent Design trial and what each portends for the future of ID:

Before the Dover trial concludes, I want to offer some remarks about what I take will be its long-term significance. I want to do this now so that critics won't be in a position to accuse me of spinning or rationalizing the outcome of the trial once it is reached (of course, they'll still find fault, but that's par for the course). As I see it, there are three possible outcomes:

1.The Dover policy, in which students are informed that the ID textbook Of Pandas and People is in their library, is upheld.

2.The Dover policy is overturned but the scientific status of ID is left unchallenged.

3.The Dover policy is not only overturned but ID is ruled as nonscientific.

For what it's worth, my subjective probabilities are that outcome 1. has about a 20% probability, outcome 2. has about an 70% probability, and outcome 3. has less than a 10% probability. (Part of what prompts these numbers is that the ACLU is completely outmanning the Thomas More Law Center, which is defending the Dover policy. When I was an expert witness in the case, TMLC had one full-time person on the case and two or three part-timers. The ACLU, by contrast, had at least twelve full-timers on the case.)

Of course, I regard 1. as the best outcome for ID. That's not to say I think the Dover policy is particularly astute. Indeed, that's why the ACLU has come to this case both guns blazing, namely, because the policy is less than optimally formulated and they hope that they can take down not only the policy but also ID with it (their model is what happened to creationism in Edwards v. Aguillard in the 80s).

Fortunately, ID is in a much stronger position scientifically than creationism, so the ACLU faces a much tougher opponent than back then. Unfortunately, members of the Dover school board have, through their actions, conflated ID with an apparent religious agenda. For instance, it doesn't help the ID side that William Buckingham, then a member of the Dover school board, in trying to get the Dover policy adopted, remarked: "Two thousand years ago somebody died on the cross, can't somebody stand up for him?"

If the policy is upheld, it will embolden school boards, legislators, and grass roots organizations to push for intelligent design in the public school science curriculum. As a consequence, this case really could be a Waterloo for the other side.

But will outcome 2. or 3. constitute a Waterloo for ID? Outcome 2. certainly won't. It may make policy makers more cautious about how they incorporate ID into educational policy. But it certainly won't stop them, especially with Santorum language in the Federal Government's education policy.

That leaves outcome 3. Although I would hate to see this happen, mainly because of all the young people who would continue to be indoctrinated into a neo-Darwinian view of biological origins, this would hardly spell the end of ID. For one thing, ID is rapidly going international and crossing metaphysical and theological boundaries. The idea that ID is purely an "American thing" can no longer be sustained. Interest is growing internationally and it will continue to grow regardless of the outcome of the trial. Also, ID is of great interest to college and graduate students, so these ideas will continue to be discussed.

But the most important thing to understand about this case is that the significance of a court case depends not merely on the judge's decision but also on the cultural forces that serve as the backdrop against which the decision is made. Take the Scopes Trial. In most persons minds, it represents a decisive victory for evolution. And yet, in the actual trial, the decision went against Scopes (he was convicted of violating a Tennessee statute against teaching evolutionary theory).

Thus, unlike outcome 1., which would be a Waterloo for the other side, I don't see outcome 3. as anything like a Waterloo for our side. It would make life in the short-term more difficult, and it certainly would not be pleasant to have to endure the gloating by the other side, but the work of ID would continue. In fact, it might continue more effectively than under outcome 1., which might convince people that ID has already won the day when in fact ID still has a long way to go in developing its scientific and intellectual program.

To sum up, we might say that outcome 1. would be a recipe for complacency, outcome 2. would encourage us to take greater care and try again, and option 3. would inspire us to work that much harder for ID's ultimate success. I trust that Providence will bring about the outcome that will best foster ID's ultimate success. The important thing is ID's intellectual vitality.

Whether favor or adversity is, at least for now, the best tonic for ID's intellectual vitality remains to be seen.

I'm not quite as sanguine as Dembski about the consequences of 2. and 3. Whether the scientific status of ID is legally left unchallenged or ID is ruled to be unscientific it seems to me that a defeat for Dover will be conflated in the public mind with a judgment that ID is nothing more than creationism. This is the impression that the plaintiffs are working assiduously to create in the media, and a defeat for Dover will be like embedding that misimpression in cement. It'll be devilishly difficult to correct the error once the cement dries.

Political Hackery

The Washington Post, no fan of Republicans in general nor Tom DeLay in particular, nevertheless smells a partisan hit job by Texas district attorney Ronnie Earle:

[A]t least on the evidence presented so far, the indictment of Mr. DeLay by a state prosecutor in Texas gives us pause. The charge concerns the activities of Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC), a political action committee created by Mr. DeLay and his aides to orchestrate the GOP's takeover of the Texas legislature in 2002. The issue is whether Mr. DeLay and his political aides illegally used the group to evade the state's ban on corporate contributions to candidates. The indictment alleges that TRMPAC took $155,000 in corporate contributions and then sent a check for $190,000 to the national Republican Party's "soft money" arm. The national committee then wrote $190,000 in checks from its noncorporate accounts to seven Texas candidates.

Perhaps most damning, TRMPAC dictated the precise amount and recipients of those donations. This was an obvious end run around the corporate contribution rule. The more difficult question is whether it was an illegal end run -- or, to be more precise, one so blatantly illegal that it amounts to a criminal felony rather than a civil violation. For Mr. DeLay to be convicted, prosecutors will have to show not only that he took part in the dodge but also that he knew it amounted to a violation of state law -- rather than the kind of clever money-trade that election lawyers engineer all the time.

As The American Spectator observes:

The only problem is that similar transactions are conducted by both parties in many states, including Texas. In fact, on October 31, 2002, the Texas Democratic Party sent the Democratic National Committee (DNC) $75,000, and on the same day, the DNC sent the Texas Democratic Party $75,000. On July 19, 2001, the Texas Democratic Party sent the DNC $50,000 and, again on the same day, the DNC sent the Texas Democratic Party $60,000. On June 8, 2001, the Texas Democratic Party sent the DNC $50,000. That very same day, the DNC sent the Texas Democratic Party $60,000.

Mr. Earle, of course, is not interested in such shenanigans when perpetrated by Democrats. Only when it is Republicans who may have stepped a toe over the line is his finely honed sense of justice roused from its slumbers. Mr. Earle is a political hack who is using the power of his office to destroy his political enemies. He needs to be reigned in.

Thanks to Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters for the links.

Must the Designer be God?

Telic Thoughts puts us on to an excellent argument made a couple of years ago by atheist Toby Wardman in defense of the argument for God based on cosmic design. Wardman argues that the universe clearly is fine-tuned and refutes several common objections against the argument from design. Even so, Wardman concludes that the argument does not lead to the existence of a creator God:

I have argued that the fine-tuning argument is strong, and cannot easily be dismissed. Ultimately, I don't think it makes the existence of God any more likely, but this is not because of any weakness in the argument; it's because the question raised by the conclusion ('Why is the universe life-permitting?') isn't answered by positing a creator God. That suggestion just pushes the question another step further back: for why should a God exist with the right characteristics to create a universe? If the theist's reply is that God can exist uniquely without the need for any further explanation, then the theist is admitting that unusual and significant things [like universes suited for life] can exist unexplained, and if this is admitted, then we don't need to postulate a Designer for the universe after all.

In other words, the argument from cosmic design is very strong in pointing to a a certain intentionality or purpose in the universe. Nevertheless, one cannot conclude from the argument that the source of that intention is the God of traditional theism. Whether Wardman's conclusion is correct or not, it is certainly interesting since it is precisely what Intelligent Design advocates have been saying for the last ten years and what the plaintiff's attorneys and witnesses in the Dover ID case are strenuously seeking to deny.

That the universe looks to be designed is as obvious as anything can be. The question is whether the design is real or merely apparent, i.e. is it the product of a purposeful cause or is it just coincidence. ID seeks to demonstrate that the design is real and stops there. We could go on, once that answer is reached, and ask whether the cause is the God of theism or some other entity like a world soul or cosmic mind, but, despite what the critics are at pains to demonstrate in the Dover case, ID does not formally ask those questions. It leaves them to theologians and philosophers of religion.

In short, it is possible to believe that the universe is the product of intentional design without believing that the designer is the God of Christianity. Thus it is possible to talk about ID in public school science classrooms without stepping into the domain of religion. It is not possible to have genuine design without a designer, but it is possible (at least logically) to have a designer that is not the God of theism.

That an atheist has made this point in a well-reasoned essay is something that merits attention. People interested in the argument based on the fine-tuning of the universe should read his defense. It really is well done.

No, No, A Thousand Times No

Twenty two Democrats voted against John Roberts' confirmation today. What legitimate reason could they possibly have had for rejecting someone this highly qualified? If they won't vote for Roberts they won't vote for anyone that Bush is likely to pick for O'Connor's seat. He could nominate Ted Kennedy and the Dems would still vote no just because he was Bush's pick. How can anyone take them seriously?

Self-defeating Nature of Naturalism

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost has posted another installment in his series on the self-defeating nature of naturalism. Carter revisits an argument made by, inter alia, C.S. Lewis and Alvin Plantinga, that one who embraces both naturalism and evolution must conclude that his reason cannot be relied upon to lead him to truth, and that logical argument leads to truth only by coincidence.

The argument is roughly as follows: If our reason is the product of blind, purposeless processes acting to promote human survival then the discovery of truth is not a function of reason, except, at best, incidentally. There's no logical connection between survival value and truth. When, then, someone argues that evolution is the explanation for the complexity of life most in tune with reason, the materialist has no grounds for thinking it therefore to be true. We cannot have any confidence in any conclusion based upon reason because the function of reason is survival, not truth, and truth is not necessarily related to survival.

Nor can we adduce any argument to justify our confidence in reason, of course, since to do so would be to beg the question. We'd be assuming that our reason is trustworthy in order to show that it is so.

Anyway, the first installment of Carter's series can be found here, the second here, and the most recent can be found here.

A reader at one of Carter's posts asks to be given an example of something which has survival value which is nevertheless not true. The reader is trying to make the point that in designing our reason to promote survival, natural selection perforce designs it simultaneously to discern truth. He is mistaken in this, though. Look at the question from the standpoint of a naturalistic materialist. Natural selection has evidently favored human belief in gods since such belief is ubiquitous in our species, and must, therefore, have survival value. Yet the naturalist considers such beliefs to be false and superstitious.

The upshot of all this is that naturalism, the belief that nature is all there is, is self-defeating. If naturalism were true then our reason would not be trustworthy and any argument we employ to defend naturalism would be suspect and probably wrong.

Wrong ANSWER

Christopher Hitchens brings his inestimable skills as a journalist to bear in a dissection of the organizations behind the "antiwar" rallies this past weekend in this piece in Slate.

Here are a few appetizers:

The name of the reporter on this story [in the New York Times] was Michael Janofsky. I suppose that it is possible that he has never before come across "International ANSWER," the group run by the "Worker's World" party and fronted by Ramsey Clark, which openly supports Kim Jong-il, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milosevic, and the "resistance" in Afghanistan and Iraq, with Clark himself finding extra time to volunteer as attorney for the genocidaires in Rwanda.

Quite a "wide range of progressive political objectives" indeed, if that's the sort of thing you like. However, a dip into any database could have furnished Janofsky with well-researched and well-written articles by David Corn and Marc Cooper-to mention only two radical left journalists-who have exposed "International ANSWER" as a front for (depending on the day of the week) fascism, Stalinism, and jihadism.

To be against war and militarism, in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, is one thing. But to have a record of consistent support for war and militarism, from the Red Army in Eastern Europe to the Serbian ethnic cleansers and the Taliban, is quite another.

It is really a disgrace that the liberal press refers to such enemies of liberalism as "antiwar" when in reality they are straight-out pro-war, but on the other side. Was there a single placard saying, "No to Jihad"? Of course not. Or a single placard saying, "Yes to Kurdish self-determination" or "We support Afghan women's struggle"? Don't make me laugh. And this in a week when Afghans went back to the polls, and when Iraqis were preparing to do so, under a hail of fire from those who blow up mosques and U.N. buildings, behead aid workers and journalists, proclaim fatwahs against the wrong kind of Muslim, and utter hysterical diatribes against Jews and Hindus.

There are only two serious attempts at swamp-draining currently under way. In Afghanistan and Iraq, agonizingly difficult efforts are in train to build roads, repair hospitals, hand out ballot papers, frame constitutions, encourage newspapers and satellite dishes, and generally evolve some healthy water in which civil-society fish may swim. But in each case, from within the swamp and across the borders, the most poisonous snakes and roaches are being recruited and paid to wreck the process and plunge people back into the ooze. How nice to have a "peace" movement that is either openly on the side of the vermin, or neutral as between them and the cleanup crew, and how delightful to have a press that refers to this partisanship, or this neutrality, as "progressive."

We're sure that the rallies in Washington and elsewhere attracted many good-hearted patriots who are also opponents to American policy in Iraq, but when one climbs into the sty with pigs one gets more than mud on one's shoes. If opponents of the war really want to gain a hearing for their arguments they should stop hanging out in the sty.

Delay's Indictment

Anyone interested in the full story on the Tom Delay indictment should visit Michelle Malkin's site. She has lots of analysis and links. The short version is that this looks like an ugly political hit job on Delay. Whether you like the guy or not, anyone with a basic commitment to fairness should at least be skeptical of the justice of this indictment brought by District Attorney Ronnie Earle who has repeatedly used his power to harrass conservative political figures of both parties.

Earle's indictment of Delay, whether or not there's anything to it, hands the Democrats a club with which to beat the Republicans for the next several months, and they will not scruple to employ it. If Delay is guilty of an infraction then, of course, he should pay the penalty (just as Bill Clinton and Al Gore should have paid the penalty for taking illicit campaign contributions from Chinese businessmen and Buddhist nuns). But if this indictment gets thrown out of court for want of substance, as it certainly appears that it might, then Earle should be disbarred for abuse of his office.

The Cascade Effect

Security Watchtower documents the degradation of enemy leadership in Iraq over the last month. Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail comments on this and notes that "in the Anbar and Diwana provinces, sixteen leaders, including six "emirs", five senior facilitators and 5 brigade or cell leaders have been killed or captured. This list excludes the Coaliton's success in dismantling the al-Ahwal brigade in the city of Hit."

Each success leads to a cascade of further successes. Every capture of enemy documents and leadership provides us with intelligence which leads to the elimination, in one way or another, of more of the enemy's leaders. The steady loss of this expertise and the constant fear of capture or sudden death must be taking a serious toll on the morale of the insurgents.

Wretchard at Belmont Club describes the difficulties the enemy is facing and concludes with this observation:

[T]he worst of it is the wastage to cadres. Those who write that body counts are a meaningless metric to apply against the insurgency ignore the fact that formations which sustain heavy casualties lose their organizational memory while those who suffer lightly retain them. Lt. Col. Joseph L'Etoile is on his third and half of his men are on their second tours of Iraq . For Abu Nasir and many of his foreign fighters, the memory of what to avoid next time has been lost on this, their last tour of Iraq.

Wretchard borrows heavily from Bing West writing at Slate. Part of West's post follows:

A wide strip of blacktop running straight southwest from Fallujah, Route Boston is flanked by thick groves of palm trees that provide cover for terrorists armed with explosives. Boston was often closed to traffic, demonstrating that the insurgents, defeated in pitched battle, could successfully revert to classic guerrilla tactics. One option to reduce the threat of IEDs was to remove the vegetation. But clearing acres of trees would deprive thousands of farmers of shaded pastureland for their livestock.

Instead of cutting down the trees, the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Joseph L'Etoile, set out to track down the people who had set the mine. This was L'Etoile's third "pump," or deployment, to Iraq. Half of his 1,000-man battalion had at least one prior pump. Drawing on that experience, L'Etoile sent out 96-hour patrols through the countryside along the highway. Every day, dozens of Marines scoured the palm groves, checking farms and back roads, thinking like guerrillas about hide sites and escape routes. At night, the Marines moved to their own hide sites, sent out night patrols, got up in the morning and moved on, usually startling farmers accustomed to seeing Americans only on the roads.

On the second day of his patrol, Staff Sgt. Van Schoik was leading 26 Marines through a farmyard a few hundred yards from where Pfc. Romero had been killed. Van Schoik noticed that the cars on Route Boston were slowing down and then driving away at high speed. Approaching the highway slowly, the Marines noticed a spot where the swamp reeds were bent over. In the mud near a culvert, they found a cache of a dozen artillery shells-about 800 pounds of high explosives, enough to rend the stoutest armored vehicle.

When they saw the insurgents, the drivers had hastily fled. Van Schoik sent a squad across the highway to cut inland and set up a blocking position. He took the rest of his force, spread out, and then noisily surged forward, searching through the undergrowth. Van Schoik never saw the two insurgents-the digger with a shovel and his guard with an AK-47-break cover on the other side of the road and race toward their safe house, a farm in a palm grove several hundred meters away. When the Marine blocking force stepped into view in front of them, the insurgents tried to escape across an open field and were shot down.

Read the whole post. It's an interesting perspective on the day to day work of our Marines.

The Lottery

It's difficult to say exactly what the criticism of Michael Brown is. That he is held in contempt by members of the committee set up to investigate what went wrong in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is clear. That they have a specific complaint about what Brown should have done differently is not. Breitbart.com has this report on today's hearings:

Former FEMA director Michael Brown blamed others for most government failures in responding to Hurricane Katrina on Tuesday, especially Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. He aggressively defended his own role. Brown also said that in the days before the storm, he expressed his concerns that "this is going to be a bad one" in phone conversations and e-mails with President Bush, White House chief of staff Andy Card and deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin.

And he blamed the Department of Homeland Security _ the parent agency for the Federal Emergency Management Agency _ for not acquiring better equipment ahead of the storm. His efforts to shift blame drew sharp criticism from Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike.

"I'm happy you left," said Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn. "That kind of look in the lights like a deer tells me you weren't capable of doing that job."

Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss., told Brown: "The disconnect was, people thought there was some federal expertise out there. There wasn't. Not from you."

Brown appeared before a special congressional panel set up by House Republican leaders to investigate the catastrophe. "My biggest mistake was not recognizing by Saturday that Louisiana was dysfunctional," two days before the storm hit, Brown said.

Brown, who for many became a symbol of government failures in the natural disaster that claimed the lives of more than 1,000 people, rejected criticism that he was inexperienced. "I've overseen over 150 presidentially declared disasters. I know what I'm doing, and I think I do a pretty darn good job of it," he said.

Brown joined FEMA in 2001 and ran it for more than two years.

Rep. William Jefferson, D-La. told Brown: "I find it absolutely stunning that this hearing would start out with you, Mr. Brown, laying the blame for FEMA's failings at the feet of the governor of Louisiana and the Mayor of New Orleans."

In a testy exchange, Shays compared Brown's performance unfavorably with that of former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. "So I guess you want me to be the superhero, to step in there and take everyone out of New Orleans," Brown said.

"What I wanted you to do is do your job and coordinate," Shays retorted.

Criticized by Shays for failing to get better equipment to make communication easier among emergency agencies, Brown blamed those above him. "We put that money in our budget request and it was removed by the Department of Homeland Security" he said.

Brown said he was "just tired and misspoke" when a television interviewer appeared to be the first to tell him there were desperate residents at the New Orleans Convention Center. Brown said he learned a day earlier that people were flocking there.

He blamed "a hysteric media" for what he said were unfounded reports of rapes and murders. And he said Americans themselves must play a more active role in preparing for natural disasters - and not expect more from the government than it can deliver.

Republican Rep. Kay Granger of Texas told Brown: "I don't know how you can sleep at night. You lost the battle."

Brown in his opening statement cited "specific mistakes" in dealing with the storm, and listed just two. One, he said, was not having more media briefings.

As to the other, he said: "I very strongly personally regret that I was unable to persuade Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin to sit down, get over their differences, and work together. I just couldn't pull that off." Both Blanco and Nagin are Democrats.

In Baton Rouge, La., Blanco's press secretary, Denise Bottcher, responded: "Mike Brown wasn't engaged then, and he surely isn't now. He should have been watching CNN instead of the Disney Channel," Bottcher said.

Committee Chairman Tom Davis, R-Va., cautioned against too narrowly assigning blame. "At the end of the day, I suspect that we'll find that government at all levels failed," Davis said. He pushed Brown on what he and his agency should have done to evacuate New Orleans, restore order and improve communication.

"Those are not FEMA roles," Brown said. "FEMA doesn't evacuate communities. FEMA does not do law enforcement. FEMA does not do communications."

Brown said the lack of an effective evacuation of New Orleans before the storm was "the tipping point for all the other things that went wrong." A "mandatory" evacuation was ordered Sunday by Nagin, the mayor. However, buses were not provided and thousands of residents were stranded without transportation in low-lying areas.

The congresspersons are quite good at bullying and insulting. They seem less competent at actually pin-pointing problems. The article itself is an example of a bias against Brown. Every time Brown gives a reason for why FEMA didn't do what people thought it should do the reader is given the impression that he's just trying to shift the blame. It doesn't seem to matter that maybe he's correct to place the onus where he does. At least nobody on the committee seems interested in finding out. They'd much rather strut and preen before the cameras taking their kicks at their helpless victim to impress the folks back home.

The committee's "work" reminds one of the book The Lottery where citizens in a town draw lots and the loser is ritually stoned to death by everyone in the town. Michael Brown lost the lottery and the committee members, Republicans and Democrats, are determined to stone him with great relish.

PowerLine comes to a similar conclusion, but having watched the hearings, claims that Brown was the only person there who seemed to know what he was talking about. No surprise there.

By the way, we read that New Orleans police superintendent Eddie Compass is resigning. What we'd like to know is when Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco are going to do the honorable thing and step down themselves? It's too bad that government relief aid to Louisiana can't be made contingent upon the resignations of the two people whose actions and inactions did the most to insure that chaos would follow the storm.

No Kidding

This is the quality of argument that the Intelligent Design folks are up against in Harrisburg:

"Intelligent design is not a science and therefore it cannot be construed as a science whatsoever." - Ken Miller, Brown University biology professor, the only witness to testify Monday.

ID is not science therefore it is not science. Very compelling. And then there's this:

A group calling itself the Campaign to Defend the Constitution created a Web site to promote the teaching of evolution and attack what it defines as the "religious right."

Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, and former ACLU executive director Ira Glasser are among the group's leaders.

The group said in a news release that on Thursday it will release a letter, signed by Nobel laureates, leading scientists and clergy, that urges governors of all 50 states to ensure science classes teach evolution and "base curricula on established science, not ideology."

The release of this letter would be a strange move for people interested in arguing that ID should not be taught in science class because it's not testable and because it's inherently religious.

As we wrote the other day in Viewpoint:

Thirty eight Nobel winners might sound like a powerful voice on behalf of evolution, but we shouldn't be too hasty to allow ourselves to be impressed. The letter contains these words:

"Logically derived from confirmable evidence, evolution is understood to be the result of an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection."

Thirty eight Nobel winners, 34 of them scientists, signed off on this definition. Why is this remarkable? Two reasons: The first is that this statement accurately defines Darwinian evolution, but it does not define a scientific theory. How can the claim that evolution is unguided and unplanned ever be subjected to testing? What experiments or observations would count for or against it? The answer, of course, is that there are none. These brilliant scientists are in effect calling for schools to teach metaphysics in public school science classes while at the same time demanding that a competing metaphysical theory, Intelligent Design, be banished from science classes because it can't be scientifically tested.

The Nobel winners, by signing this letter, also signed off on a theological claim. If life is the result solely of "unguided, unplanned processes" then by teaching evolution, schools are, by implication, teaching that God has nothing to do with life on earth. To the extent that this definition for evolution will be presented to students, they will be taught that evolution makes God irrelevant. This is exactly what the Dover school board was seeking to avoid by crafting the statement to be read to students that evolution is not necessarily the truth of the matter.

The irony of this lawsuit is obvious. The plaintiffs allege that it is illicit for some people to claim that an intelligent designer, or even God, did have a role to play in the emergence of life but that it's not illicit for others to deny that any designer or God was involved. Why is the former claim considered an unacceptable conflation of church and state but the latter is not?

We hope Dover's attorneys ask these questions of the plaintiff's witnesses.

Chaos in New Orleans?

Since everyone wants to find who underperformed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina perhaps we should look at the reports put out by officials and amplified through the media. Talk about incompetence, consider this:

NEW ORLEANS - After five days managing near riots, medical horrors and unspeakable living conditions inside the Superdome, Louisiana National Guard Col. Thomas Beron prepared to hand over the dead to representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Following days of internationally reported murders, rapes and gang violence inside the stadium, the doctor from FEMA - Beron doesn't remember his name - came prepared for a grisly scene: He brought a refrigerated 18-wheeler and three doctors to process bodies.

"I've got a report of 200 bodies in the Dome," Beron recalled the doctor saying. The real total?Six, Beron said. Of those, four died of natural causes, one overdosed and another jumped to his death in an apparent suicide, said Beron, who personally oversaw the handoff of bodies from a Dome freezer, where they lay atop melting bags of ice.

State health department officials in charge of body recovery put the official death count at the Dome at 10, but Beron said the other four bodies were found in the street near the Dome, not inside it. Both sources said no one had been murdered inside the stadium. At the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, just four bodies have been recovered, despite reports of heaps of dead piled inside the building. Only one of the dead appeared to have been murdered, said health and law-enforcement officials.

That the nation's frontline emergency-management officials believed the body count would resemble that of a bloody battle in a war is but one of scores of examples of myths about the Dome and the Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the news media and even some of the city's top officials, including the mayor and police superintendent.

The vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees - mass murders, rapes and beatings - have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law-enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know.

"I think 99 percent of it is [expletive]," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong - bad things happened. But I didn't see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything ... 99 percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved."

Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state Health and Human Services Department administrator overseeing the body-recovery operation, said his teams were inundated with false reports. Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan said authorities have only confirmed four murders in the entire city in the aftermath of Katrina - making it a typical week in a city that anticipated more than 200 homicides this year.

"I had the impression that at least 40 or 50 murders had occurred at the two sites," he said. "It's unfortunate we saw these kinds of stories saying crime had taken place on a massive scale when that wasn't the case. And they [national media outlets] have done nothing to follow up on any of these cases; they just accepted what people [on the street] told them. ... It's not consistent with the highest standards of journalism."

As floodwaters forced tens of thousands of evacuees into the Dome and Convention Center, news of unspeakable acts poured out of the nation's media: People firing at helicopters trying to save them; women, children and even babies raped with abandon; people murdered for food and water; a 7-year-old raped and killed at the Convention Center. Police, according to their chief, Eddie Compass, found themselves in multiple shootouts inside both shelters, and were forced to race toward muzzle flashes through the dark to disarm the criminals; snipers fired at doctors and soldiers from downtown high-rises.

In interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Compass reported rapes of "babies," and Mayor Ray Nagin spoke of "hundreds of armed gang members killing and raping people" inside the Dome. Other unidentified evacuees told of children stepping over so many bodies "we couldn't count." The picture that emerged was one of the impoverished, overwhelmingly African-American masses of flood victims resorting to utter depravity, randomly attacking each other, as well as the police trying to protect them and the rescue workers trying to save them. The mayor told Winfrey the crowd has descended to an "almost animalistic state."

Four weeks after the storm, few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence. The piles of murdered bodies never materialized, and soldiers, police officers and rescue personnel on the front lines assert that, while anarchy reigned at times and people suffered indignities, most of the worst crimes reported at the time never happened. "The information I had at the time, I thought it was credible," Compass said, admitting his earlier statements were false. Asked the source of the information, Compass said he didn't remember.

Nagin frankly acknowledged he doesn't know the extent of the mayhem that occurred inside the Superdome and the Convention Center - and may never. "I'm having a hard time getting a good body count," he said. Compass conceded that rumor had overtaken, and often crippled, authorities' response to reported lawlessness, sending badly needed resources to situations that turned out not to exist.

Military, law-enforcement and medical workers agree that the flood of evacuees - about 30,000 at the Dome and an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 at the Convention Center - overwhelmed their security personnel. The 400 to 500 soldiers in the Dome could have been easily overrun by increasingly agitated crowds in the Dome, but that never happened, said Col. James Knotts, a midlevel commander there. While the Convention Center saw plenty of mischief, including massive looting and isolated gunfire, and many inside cowered in fear, the hordes of evacuees for the most part did not resort to violence.

"Everything was embellished, everything was exaggerated," said Deputy Police Superintendent Warren Riley. "If one guy said he saw six bodies, then another guy the same six, and another guy saw them - then that became 18." Inside the Superdome, where National Guardsmen performed rigorous security checks before allowing anyone inside, only one shooting has been verified - and even that shooting, injuring Louisiana Guardsman Chris Watt of the 527th Engineer Battalion, has been widely misreported, said Maj. David Baldwin, who led the team of soldiers who arrested the alleged assailant.

Watt had indeed been attacked inside one of the Dome's locker rooms, where he entered with another soldier. In the darkness, as they walked through about six inches of water, Watt's attacker hit him with a metal rod, a piece of a cot. But the bullet that penetrated Watt's leg came from his own gun - he accidentally shot himself during the commotion. The attacker was sent to jail, Baldwin said.

Inside the Convention Center, Jimmie Fore, vice president of the state authority that runs the center, stayed in the building with a core group of 35 employees until Thursday. He said thugs hot-wired 75 forklifts and electric carts and looted food and booze, but he said he never saw any violent crimes committed, nor did any of his employees. Some, however, did report seeing armed men roaming the building, and Fore said he heard gunshots in the distance on about six occasions.

Rumors of rampant violence at the Convention Center prompted Louisiana National Guard Col. Jacques Thibodeaux to put together a 1,000-man force of soldiers and police in full battle gear to secure the center around noon on Friday. It took only 20 minutes to take control, and soldiers met no resistance, Thibodeaux said. They found no evidence, witnesses or victims of any murders, rapes or beatings, Thibodeaux said.

One widely circulated story, told to The Times-Picayune by a slew of evacuees and two Arkansas National Guardsman, held that "30 or 40 bodies" were stored in a Convention Center freezer. But a formal Arkansas Guard review of the matter later found that no soldier had actually seen the corpses, and that the information came from rumors in the food line for military, police and rescue workers in front of Harrah's Casino, said Col. John Edwards of the Arkansas National Guard, who conducted the review.

Reports of dozens of rapes at both facilities - many allegedly involving small children - may forever remain a question mark. Rape is a notoriously underreported crime under ideal circumstances, and tracking down evidence at this point, with evacuees spread all over the country, will be nearly impossible. The same goes for reports of armed robberies at both sites.

While numerous people told The Times-Picayune that they had witnessed rapes, in particular the rape of two young girls in the Superdome ladies' room and the killing of one of them, police and military officials say they know nothing of such an incident.

Between Nagin and Compass it's little wonder that New Orleans was such a mess. These guys bear a lot of responsibility for making their city look bad, and the media bears a lot of responsibility for being so willing to run with stories based on rumor with no first hand confirmation. If this is the best the media can do in reporting a disaster then maybe they should be kept out of the next one. They apparently do more harm than good.

Unintelligent Testimony

The plaintiffs in the Dover Intelligent Design case called Brown biologist Ken Miller to the stand as an expert witness today. In the course of his testimony Miller challenged the accuracy of Of Pandas and People, the intelligent-design textbook to which Dover students are referred. Miller said the book omits discussion of what causes extinction. Since nearly all original species are extinct, he said, any intelligent design creator would not have been very intelligent.

This statement is so absurd that it's hard to believe it comes from a prominent scientist at a prestigious school. In fact, Miller's entire testimony was riddled with so many examples of sloppy thinking that it will no doubt be an everlasting embarrassment to him.

Miller's complaint that the designer must be unintelligent since its work tends to go extinct is ridiculous. It might be relevant if ID advocates claimed that the designer was an omniscient, omnipotent being, although even then it would presume an insight into that being's purposes to which Dr. Miller could hardly be privy. As it is, however, ID makes no claims about who the designer is or what its nature is. Extinction is no more evidence that the designer is unintelligent than obsolence in automobiles or computer software platforms is evidence that the engineers who designed them are not intelligent.

Miller simply assumes that God is believed by ID advocates to be the designer, but in so doing he confuses the personal beliefs of some ID advocates with the logical entailments of their theory.

By focusing on extinction Miller is simply seeking to deflect the court's attention from the much more pertinent issue of how those extinct organisms ever reached the level of sophistication and complexity they achieved in the first place.

Mike Gene and others at Telic Thoughts romp through Dr. Miller's testimony ripping it to shreds. Gene's imaginary cross-examination of Miller is especially whithering. Don't miss it.

Unfortunately, the media won't be nearly as insightful and analytic as the folks at Telic Thoughts, and Miller's claims will sound perfectly reasonable to a public which really has a very nebulous understanding of what, exactly, ID asserts.

How to Address Looting

Among the stories emerging from the rubble of Katrina is this one by Reuters:

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - After the storm came the carjackers and burglars. Then came the gun battles and the chemical explosions that shook the restored Victorians in New Orleans' Algiers Point neighborhood.

"The hurricane was a breeze compared with the crime and terror that followed," said Gregg Harris, a psychotherapist who lives in the battered area. As life returned to this close-knit neighborhood three weeks after Hurricane Katrina, residents said they hoped their experience could convince political leaders to get serious about the violence and poor services that have long been an unfortunate hallmark of their city.

"I think now it's a wake-up call," Harris said. After the storm, the neighborhood association had to act as law enforcement and emergency response unit as city services collapsed and the police force was unable to protect them.

Citizens organized armed patrols and checked on the elderly. They slept on their porches with loaded shotguns and bolted awake when intruders stumbled on the aluminum cans they had scattered on the sidewalk.

Gunshots rang out for days, sometimes terrifyingly close. For Harris, the first warning sign came on Tuesday, the day after the storm, when two young men hit his partner, Vinnie Pervel, over the head and drove off with his Ford van.

"A police car drove up behind me and saw it happening but he didn't do anything," said Pervel, who heads the 1,500-household neighborhood association. Then residents heard that police vehicles were being carjacked and looters were taking guns and ammunition from nearby stores.

"We thought, 'Perhaps this is going to get really ugly,"' said Gareth Stubbs, a marine surveyor who lives across Pelican Street from Harris and Pervel. A Texas woman who runs a Web site called Polimom.com served as a link between those who stayed and those who had left. With her help, they stockpiled an arsenal of shotguns, derringer pistols and an old AK-47.

They were put to use the next day. "Some looters came up and pulled a gun on the wrong group of men," said Harris, who said he did not fire a gun himself and declined to say who else was involved in the battle.

"Two men were shot right there," Harris said, pointing down the street as he watered his rose bushes. "One was shot in the back, the other in the leg, and the third I was told made it a block and a half before he died in the street. I did not go down to see the body."

The next day a nearby stockpile of chemicals exploded, shaking the houses and sending a fireball 300 feet into the sky. The fire burned for another three days, Harris said. "For five days we didn't need FEMA, the Red Cross or the National Guard," Harris said. "The neighborhood took care of itself."

We don't suppose that there'll be much enthusiasm for calls for stricter gun control legislation in neighborhoods like this one.

Prisoner Abuse

The Left-wing blogosphere is outraged by this report of prisoner abuse in Iraq, and conservative blogs are largely silent, waiting, one hopes, for more information to come in. Here are the salient facts as they've been reported so far:

Much of the abuse allegedly occurred in 2003 and 2004, before and during the period the Army was conducting an internal investigation into the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, but prior to when the abuses at Abu Ghraib became public.

The Captain [who reported the abuse] is quoted in the report describing how military intelligence personnel at Camp Mercury directed enlisted men to conduct daily beatings of prisoners prior to questioning; to subject detainees to strenuous forced exercises to the point of unconsciousness; and to expose them to extremes of heat and cold-all methods designed to produce greater cooperation with interrogators. Non-uniformed personnel-apparently working for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to the soldiers-also interrogated prisoners. The interrogators were out of view but not out of earshot of the soldiers, who overheard what they came to believe was abuse.

Specific instances of abuse described in the Human Rights Watch report include severe beatings, including one incident when a soldier allegedly broke a detainee's leg with a metal bat. Others include prisoners being stacked in human pyramids (unlike the human pyramids at Abu Ghraib, the prisoners at Camp Mercury were clothed); soldiers administering blows to the face, chest and extremities of prisoners; and detainees having their faces and eyes exposed to burning chemicals, being forced into stress positions for long periods leading to unconsciousness and having their water and food withheld.

Prisoners were designated as PUCs (pronounced "pucks")-or "persons under control." A regular pastime at Camp Mercury, the report says, involved off-duty soldiers gathering at PUC tents, where prisoners were held, and working off their frustrations in activities known as "F____a PUC" (beating the prisoner) and "Smoke a PUC" (forced physical exertion, sometimes to the point of collapse). Broken limbs and similar painful injuries would be treated with analgesics, the soldiers claim, as medical staff would fill out paperwork stating the injuries occurred during capture. Support for some of the allegations of abuse come from a sergeant of the 82nd Airborne who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch quotes him as saying that, "To 'F____ a PUC' means to beat him up. We would give them blows to the head, chest, legs, and stomach, pull them down, kick dirt on them. This happened every day. To 'smoke' someone is to put them in stress positions until they get muscle fatigue and pass out. That happened every day. Some days we would just get bored so we would have everyone sit in a corner and then make them get in a pyramid. This was before Abu Ghraib but just like it. We did that for amusement.

"On their day off people would show up all the time," the sergeant continues in the HRW report. "Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent. In a way it was sport. The cooks were all U.S. soldiers. One day a sergeant shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to bend over and broke the guy's leg with a mini Louisville Slugger that was a metal bat. He was the cook."

The sergeant says that military intelligence officers would tell soldiers that the detainees "were bad" and had been involved in killing or trying to kill Americans, implying that they deserved whatever punishment they got. "I would be told, 'These guys were IED [improvised explosive device] trigger men last week.' So we would f___ them up. F___ them up bad ... At the same time we should be held to a higher standard. I know that now. It was wrong. There are a set of standards. But you gotta understand, this was the norm. Everyone would just sweep it under the rug ... We should never have been allowed to watch guys we had fought."

The Army alone says it has conducted investigations into more than 400 allegations of detainee mistreatment. To date, more than 230 Army personnel have been dealt with in courts martial, non-judicial punishments and other administrative actions.

There are several things to be said about this. First, our disgust with this report is based not at all on any sympathy for the detainees (at least not those who are known to be terrorists). They are low-lifes who would blow up women and children as well as American soldiers were they given the chance. We really don't feel their pain much. Second, we find it somewhat reassuring that these reports date back to the period before Abu Ghraib. Hopefully, our military brass has put out the word that this behavior will not be tolerated. Thirdly, the last paragraph suggests that it has indeed not been tolerated for some time.

Having said that, the American military is disgraced by this sort of conduct by its soldiers. We are not among those who believe that raising one's voice at a detainee constitutes inhumane treatment, nor are we convinced that some of what was done to these prisoners rises to the level of atrocity, as some would depict it. Beating people, however, even if it's these sub-humans, just to work off one's frustrations or to provide a form of recreation for bored G.I.'s, is completely reprehensible and inexcusable, not just because of the effects it has on the prisoner but even more because of the effect it has on the soldier. It dehumanizes the person who administers the beating and turns our soldiers into savages rather than professionals.

We understand that the legal status of these detainees, since they're not uniformed soldiers, is a little blurry, but that is not justification for beating them or torturing them for amusement. Such conduct belies a cruelty and viciousness in those who participated in it that has no place in a professional military. The people who did it should, if the allegations are accurate, be punished for embarrassing and shaming the United States, and we are glad to see that that appears to be what is in store for them.