Madam Speaker, have you no decency?
It’s kind of hard to run a witch hunt when you’re the lead witch.
[Tuesday morning update]
Some questions for the Speaker:
You said that you concurred with the letter written by Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) that raised concerns about waterboarding. Is there any documentation to back that up? Did you sign the Harman letter? Were you aware of it in real time, or only later, when it was declassified? Did you send your own letter? Did you ever express your concerns with President Bush during any of your meetings with him between 2002 and 2008?
As I say in comments, I’m all for a truth commission, as long as it’s a whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth commission. Bring it on.
[Bumped]
knowing of a crime is a lower act then committing a crime.
Besides Most Dems would be happy to see Pelosi leave.
She’s considered a weak leader out of the Tom Foley school as opposed
to a strong leader like Tip Oneill or Carl Albert or Sam Rayburn.
So wanting investigations into possible violations of the Convention Against Torture is the same as McCarthy’s bullying? And being briefed about torture is the same as ordering it?
Whatever was done, she and other Congress members condoned it just as much as the administration officials did. If she wants to have a witch hunt, put her on the stand first.
If you have a Nuremberg Trial, it should go into Wether Key legislators of
Both parties consented to Serious violations of the Torture convention and
wether Key Judges assented to rulings when they knew that was going to
result in Torture.
Some of the Extradition warrants were signed knowing the subjects would be tortured.
Now First in Line Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, LTG Gonzales, The Abu Ghraib Chain of Command, The Gitmo Chain of Command, CIA Director Tenet and Goss, DCI Director of Ops, DCI Special Assistant for Gitmo, Abu Ghraib,
Bagram. AG Gonzales, OLC Yoo and Bybee, Pelosi, Delay, Hastert,
Harman, Hoekstra, Reid, Lott, Frist. Feinstein, Bond. Libby, Herrington,
Rove.
If you have a commission, or a Jury hearing this, put them all in
and see what comes out.
Jim:
Does Shannon’s Source Coding Theorem and the concept of the entropy of an information source have any meaning to you?
Paul: Yes, but I’m not sure what the relevance is here. Could you explain?
Rand: You are recklessly conflating very different levels of responsibility. One way to tell the difference: could a different president, vice-president, CIA director, and/or legal counsel have made a difference to the interrogation practices used? Certainly. Could a different House Minority Leader? It’s doubtful — even if she had leaked her briefings and made a huge stink the administration could and probably would have continued its policies.
Stepping back a bit, it is doubtless true that many people bear varying responsibility for what happened in those interrogation rooms. I include American voters, who were told a fair amount but did not let it stand in the way of re-electing Bush/Cheney. I include the leadership of the Democratic Party, who did not make it a big issue in the 2002 or 2004 elections. There are few heroes or clean hands in this story.
One way to proceed is to conclude that since everyone in leadership bears some responsibility, we should forget all about it until a future generation has enough distance to render a fair judgement (which is pretty much how we handled Japanese internment). I think that would be an enormous lost opportunity. The story of torture in the “war on terror” is something we can and should learn from today.
You are recklessly conflating very different levels of responsibility.
Hilarious. Yes, “recklessly” because it hurts your hyperpartisan Speaker of the House.
One way to tell the difference: could a different president, vice-president, CIA director, and/or legal counsel have made a difference to the interrogation practices used? Certainly. Could a different House Minority Leader? It’s doubtful — even if she had leaked her briefings and made a huge stink the administration could and probably would have continued its policies.
But at least she wouldn’t look like such a blithering and lying idiot now, trying to pretend that she didn’t know anything about it in her partisan attacks on the former administration. In fact, I’m all for a “truth commission,” because it will blow up in the Dems’ face much worse than the Ollie North testimony did.
You may want to fantasize that you’re on the popular side of this issue, but most of the public would have been happy if we’d roasted Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on a spit to get the information. You’re just making yourself look like a fool along with the Speaker.
Pelosi threw this crap about Harmon out so that she could deflect the heat from herself and get a shot in at an old enemy at the same time.
“, but most of the public would have been happy if we’d roasted Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on a spit to get the information.”
True, but, we ended up torturing a lot of nobodies to get bad information.
fat lot of good that did, and a lot of harm it induced.
Remember all those Code orange alerts for attacks on Malls? That was
because they were torturing these guys.
Entropy is the probabilty weighted sum of the logarithm of the odds over a set of outcomes.
Suppose the odds against something happening is 1024:1 — that “something” is only 1 out of 1024 other outcomes. Representing that particular outcome requires log_2(1024) or 10 bits. The number of bits required to represent all other outcomes is again log_2 of the odds against each such outcome.
The entropy of an information source, given in units of binary bits, is the number of bits required to represent each outcome weighted by the probablity of that outcome taking place. The formula is commonly expressed
E = sum_i p_i log_2(1/p_i)
Shannon’s Source Coding Theorem asserts that the number of bits required to represent an information source is equal to its entropy. Any more bits is wasting bandwidth.
A predictable information source has low entropy, and an information source that is perfectly predictable from prior observations is of zero entropy.
A lot of what Rand posts is of low entropy — if Rand posts on a topic, a person can kinda figure out by now what his take is going to be on the subject. On the other hand, Rand is paying for the bandwidth, and if he is wasting bandwidth by repeating himself, well, that is his dime, and he has been a thoroughly gracious host of paying for the bandwidth to let the many of us respond.
There are some sources that are of zero entropy. No, that does not mean that such a source necessarily repeats the same bit pattern, time after time after time. Zero entropy occurs when the conditional probability of saying any particular thing is p = 1 given the priors.
For example, if when Rand says “A”, that one can predict that a source will respond “B” where B = f(A) with p = 1 except over a subset with measure zero, zero entropy is established.
In fact, I’m all for a “truth commission,” because it will blow up in the Dems’ face much worse than the Ollie North testimony did.
I’m for a truth commission, because I think we should know the truth, regardless of the political fallout.
You may want to fantasize that you’re on the popular side of this issue, but most of the public would have been happy if we’d roasted Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on a spit to get the information.
You may be right. But we as a nation should at least know that about ourselves, and make some effort to reconcile it with our professed ideals, our treaty commitments, etc.
Paul:
Thanks for the refresher.