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 were “tantamount to torture.” Pierre Kraehenbuehl, director of operations of the International Committee of the …
Abuses in Iraq
by | 2004-05-06 | No Comments
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 create a lawless regime in which prisoners in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been humiliated, …
Its only 20 million killed …
by | 2004-05-05 | No Comments
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 On Thermonuclear War (1961): “Feasible combinations of military and non-military measures might make the difference …
National Aerospace Initiative
by | 2004-05-04 | No Comments
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. The NRC study has some detailed budgetary information and a list of programs (hypersonic ABM …
