Bad stuff happened in Iraq, stuff Adam Reuter doesn't want to talk about. Not with his friends, not with the line cooks in the burger joint where he worked when he first came home or the tenants in the apartment complex he manages now.

He doesn't even want to talk about it with his wife, who worried because he was jumping out of bed in the middle of the night.

But when he agrees to talk about the war -- really talk about it -- he goes right to how the insurgent crumpled after he pulled the trigger. How later, during the firefight, he ended up just a few feet from the corpse. Bullets buzzed by, and he was supposed to keep an eye on the alley, but he couldn't help but glance over.

"He just lay there," Reuter remembers. His eyes and mouth open. His whiskers a few days old. The bullet had gone in his neck cleanly, just to the right of his Adam's apple, but had come out ugly from the back of his head. He was maybe 25, a little older than Reuter. And his blood was pooling, thick and almost black in the darkness.

Back From Iraq - Washington Post

The tin foil hat crowd has always assumed that the NSA was either directly monitoring domestic communications in the US, or at least that a foreign ally was doing it and sharing the results with them. This never really bothered me, because I assumed that the NSA wouldn't care about anything I would ever do. The NSA is mostly concerned with warfare, in which the rules of civil society don't really apply, and the only rules that matter are the ones prohibiting genocide and sadistic treatment of people. If I was ever interested in commiting espionage on behalf of a nation state, I would assume that all the rules were off and I would act accordingly.

The problem is that terrorism breaks down the barriers between what was once the domain of war and the domain of law enforcement. In the wake of 9/11 we have vigorously engaged in information sharing between domestic law enforcement and intelligence. So, wereas we might not have a problem with the NSA spying domestically in the context where they are really only looking for Soviet Spies, our feeling might be different if they are really looking for anything illegal, and sharing that information with local authorities. What we have now is somewhere in the middle, and its likely to erode further.

The minute someone says that we could have caught such and such a child abuser or murderer if the NSA had only shared the information with the police, its over. They'll start sharing it, and they'll share more and more, and you'll have the surveillance state.

Some people embrace this. They figure it is inevitable. It probably is. And they figure they aren't going to break the law, so why should they worry. I think our system often produces the wrong laws, and too many of them, and whats more, the aura of omnipresent suspicion and fear that accompanies the knowledge of the panopticon of the police state sucks the life right out of a culture. Its no longer reasonable to conceive of such a place as a "free country."

Whats worse, it is inevitable as these loopholes widen and the information sharing spreads that these systems will be used for political and economic manipulation, criminally.

This is the challenge our generation faces. How can you avoid creating a police state in an environment litered with terrorists and murderers and child abusers when omnipotent technology is at hand and it can help fight them? Is it even possible?

Its not about the surveillance...

After more than half a century of wartime valor, maritime tragedy and cinematic triumph, the aircraft carrier Oriskany is preparing for its final mission: sinking into an afterlife as an artificial reef.

swords to ploughshares

Carrier Will Sink to Serve - Los Angeles Times

I often try to explain why my wife and I live where we do. In the country, in nature, where we can raise pigs and chickens - those are the phrases I end up using. But it really comes down to living as close to wildness as we can. I realize that now. What makes it easier is that so many wild creatures don't mind living near us - so near that we hardly think of them as wild any more. The grace of wildness changes somehow when it becomes familiar, when you know it as well as we know the wild turkeys and the downy woodpeckers.

The next generation - Editorials & Commentary - International Herald Tribune

Senator Coburn told me that he's not anti-birth-control: "I'm not a no-condom person. I prescribe tons of birth control products. But that's only one-half of the issue. The other half is preventing S.T.D.'s." This is not the message of the federal abstinence initiative, however. The emphasis there is squarely on promoting a moral framework that puts sexuality in a particular place. As the 2007 federal guidelines for program financing state, "It is required that the abstinence education curriculum teaches that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity."

Read and be warned.

-janelane, SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE

Contra-Contraception - New York Times

Around 1970, Walter Mischel launched a classic experiment. He left a succession of 4-year-olds in a room with a bell and a marshmallow. If they rang the bell, he would come back and they could eat the marshmallow. If, however, they didn't ring the bell and waited for him to come back on his own, they could then have two marshmallows.

Marshmallows and Public Policy - New York Times

The US has defended its treatment of suspects detained in its "war on terror", telling a UN committee that it considers the use of torture as wrong.

the problem is that by ignoring other treaty obligations and ignoring due process to the detainees speculation has run rife fueled by the Abu Ghraib scandal. I don't want to believe such things of any American administration since they are a betrayal of American values and further they are a violation of values which many of us want to move towards as normative however standards we apply to many countries should not be taken on faith. The administration says trust us but doesn't seem to appreciate that this appeal to faith if say it came from Iran or China wouldn't wash. Iran says it only wants to enrich uranium for domestic purposes. America asserts no torture is being carried out at its facilities. America can't have everything its own way as standards should apply to all.

BBC NEWS | World | Americas | US denies terror suspect torture

The CIA has reportedly water-boarded Khalid Sheik Mohammed -- a practice in which the suspect is made to fear that he is drowning in order to encourage him to talk. And Army logs report that interrogators threatened Qahtani with dogs, made him strip naked and wear women's underwear, put him on a leash and made him bark like a dog, injected him with intravenous fluids and barred him from the bathroom so that he urinated on himself. With these shortsighted and inhumane tactics, the administration essentially immunized the real culprits, so it was left seeking the execution of a man who was not involved in Sept. 11.

is this true? is this documented?
if true there can be no justification for Gestapo tactics
I note the word "reportedly" but if these allegations have foundation then the torturers and those who gave the orders need, our collective standards of human rights demand, that they do serious time in jail.
You don't defeat Nazis by emulating the enemies of civilisation. Crusaders who descend into barbarianism lose: they lose first themselves then the war.

How Not to Fight Terrorism

Last Sunday's Boston Globe carried an alarming 4,000-word front-page article about President Bush and the Constitution. It seems that Bush has asserted the right to ignore "vast swaths of the law" simply because he thinks that these laws are unconstitutional.

the vexed question of Constitutionality

Constitutional Cafeteria

A report published in March in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that more than a third of the troops who served in Iraq sought help for mental health problems within a year of returning home. That high percentage is deceptive, however. The report said it is likely that "there are still considerable barriers to care." It referred to a prior study that showed that more than 60 percent of the Iraq veterans who screened positively for generalized anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder had not sought treatment.

When Warriors Come Home - New York Times