Years · 2004

May 2004

27 posts

Article

More Iraqi torture

“The unreleased images show American soldiers beating one prisoner almost to death, apparently raping a female prisoner, acting inappropriately with a dead body, and taping Iraqi guards raping young boys, according to NBC News.” Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel,…

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An Iraqi Enclave Strategy

I spoke with a military officer who suggested that the recent civil violence in Iraq had accelerated implementation of an “enclave” strategy in Iraq. He thinks this may help us turn the corner; I think he is nuts. The creation…

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ICRC: Iraq Abuses Widespread

The ICRC called a press conference to comment on the publication, by the Wall Street Journal, of a confidential January 2004 report on detention in Iraq submitted by to Coalition Forces in February 2004. The report alleged that the conditions…

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Abuses in Iraq

The Washington Post has an excellent editorial today, linking the human rights abuses in Iraqi prisons with the Bush Administration’s pathological aversion to international norms and conventions: Abuses will take place in any prison system. But Mr. Rumsfeld’s decisions helped…

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Its only 20 million killed …

Working on my dissertation, I’ve noticed a strange fascination among the nuclear warfighting crowd with the idea that 20 million casualties was low enough to risk in a crisis with the Soviets. Here is a passage from Herman Kahn in…

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National Aerospace Initiative

The National Research Council recently released a study (April 2004) of the National Aerospace Initiative, a DDRE/NASA initiative to invest in hypersonics, space access, and space technology. A lot of this research is worthwhile, but a lot is also wasteful.…

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Puzzling over a classified payload

Last October, Orbital Sciences Corporation announced that the U.S. Air Force ordered a Minotaur space launch vehicle to launch a classified payload in 2005. The Minotaur launch vehicle provides “low cost, reliable space launch capability in support of U.S. government…