Friday, December 07, 2007 - Posts
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There's a great discussion going on in the Fray about the varying IQs of older and younger siblings, featuring Norwegian study author Petter Kristensen and psychology writer Judith Rich Harris. Check it out.
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Reading the story about the CIA's destruction of interrogation tapes that Dahlia points to, I couldn't help being struck by an eerie parallel. This story is unfolding a couple of days after the Supreme Court heard oral argument in the latest case about whether the Guantanamo Bay detainees have any right at all to get to federal court. Days after an earlier go-round about Guantanamo at the high court, in 2004, the Abu Ghraib story broke. The timing raised eyebrows because at oral argument, Paul Clement (now solicitor general) had answered "no" to a question from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg about whether the government ever engages in torture.
There was no moment like that at argument this week, and the timing of the CIA story seems driven by the New York Times, which says that it told the CIA Wednesday that it was about to report on the tapes' destruction. And yet the parallel is there: This week, the government assured the court that the detainees had more rights than anyone in their situation before. Never mind that we're destroying the evidence of how we've treated them. Just don't look behind the curtain.
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Remember that whole big legal debate we were having last month about water-boarding? Remember when we were trying to understand why Michael Mukasey wouldn’t just come out and say water-boarding is torture? Remember when everyone thought the Bush administration was just trying to provide legal cover for the torturers???
Wrong. Why provide legal cover for the torturers if you can just destroy the evidence?
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