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Bureaucratic efficiency is not always a good thing. The National Security Advisor’s push to align regional dividing lines throughout the national security agencies is probably a mistake. Jim Jones should take pointers from McGeorge Bundy’s time as National Security Advisor.
Archive for April, 2009
April 23rd, 2009
Category: Torture
Experts are coming out of the woodwork to dispute Cheney’s assertion that torture works; none are providing additional evidence in defense of his assertion.
April 22nd, 2009
Category: Torture
“a few bad apples can ruin things for everyone”
Especially if they are the Secretary of Defense, the Vice President, the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, the CIA director, the National Security Advisor, and the president.
April 22nd, 2009
Category: Terrorism and its control
The Obama release of the OLC torture memos will ultimately result in discovery of the full record related to Bush administration torture, and possibly to legal jeopardy for some Bush administration officials. It’s fine if this process proceeds without the active participation of Obama administration policy makers and political operatives.
April 21st, 2009
Category: Watching Conservatives
An absurd slander directed at Judge David Hamilton and eagerly believed by the usual suspects.
April 20th, 2009
Last week I posted some thoughts on the allocation of responsibility for risk to small car occupants between the owners of smaller and larger cars. Megan McArdle correctly notes that small cars are overall more dangerous than large ones, and not only because of the large ones, and correctly notes something even more important, which [...]
April 19th, 2009
Category: Arts and Cultural Policy, Health Care
On Friday our students put on their annual talent show in a room of about 4000 square feet with a high, hard ceiling. They set themselves up with a sound system, necessary for the electronic keyboard but otherwise I think any of the performers could have done fine acoustically as the room is quite hard. [...]
April 19th, 2009
…went in dumb, come out dumb too.” LSU is doing its best to make Randy Newman right about this, with a remarkably ham-handed firing to shut up one of its most distinguished faculty (more here). Apparently, like so much of Louisiana, they would rather have a nice steady flow of federal money coming into the [...]
April 17th, 2009
Instead of complaining about the release of the torture memos, the CIA ought to work on being a decent intelligence service.