May 26th Items

I love Thomas Sowell... in a priceless column, he nails John Kerry to the wall. A must-read.

Walter Williams makes the case for applying the principles of triage to our failing educational system. He's going to be just about as popular as Bill Cosby...

The interesting thing is that California actually does something like this - they take troubled and disruptive students and place them in alternative schools. This approach has two advantages - it removes a burden from the general school system and allows the troubled students to get specialized help in smaller classrooms. This approach will never be adopted on the East Coast - it's "discriminatory" (translation: someone thought about the options and made a decision).

This gentleman thinks Fritz Hollings' recent anti-Jewish screed is an aberration - he's wrong. Anti-semitism is on the rise in America just as it is in Europe - one need look no farther than our college campuses.

John Yoo in the WSJ (subscription req'd):

It is important to recognize the differences between the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism. The treatment of those detained at Abu Ghraib is governed by the Geneva Conventions, which have been signed by both the U.S. and Iraq. President Bush and his commanders announced early in the conflict that the Conventions applied. Article 17 of the Third Geneva Convention, which applies to prisoners of war clearly state that: "No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever." This provision would prohibit some interrogation methods that could be used in American police stations.

A response to criminal action by individual soldiers should begin with the military justice system, rather than efforts to impose a one-size-fits-all policy to cover both Iraqi saboteurs and al Qaeda operatives. That is because the conflict with al Qaeda is not governed by the Geneva Conventions, which applies only to international conflicts between states that have signed them. Al Qaeda is not a nation-state, and its members -- as they demonstrated so horrifically on Sept. 11, 2001 -- violate the very core principle of the laws of war by targeting innocent civilians for destruction. While Taliban fighters had an initial claim to protection under the Conventions (since Afghanistan signed the treaties), they lost POW status by failing to obey the standards of conduct for legal combatants: wearing uniforms, a responsible command structure, and obeying the laws of war.

As a result, interrogations of detainees captured in the war on terrorism are not regulated under Geneva. This is not to condone torture, which is still prohibited by the Torture Convention and federal criminal law. Nonetheless, Congress's definition of torture in those laws -- the infliction of severe mental or physical pain -- leaves room for interrogation methods that go beyond polite conversation. Under the Geneva Convention, for example, a POW is required only to provide name, rank, and serial number and cannot receive any benefits for cooperating.

The reasons to deny Geneva status to terrorists extend beyond pure legal obligation. The primary enforcer of the laws of war has been reciprocal treatment: We obey the Geneva Conventions because our opponent does the same with American POWs. That is impossible with al Qaeda. It has never demonstrated any desire to provide humane treatment to captured Americans. If anything, the murders of Nicholas Berg and Daniel Pearl declare al Qaeda's intentions to kill even innocent civilian prisoners. Without territory, it does not even have the resources to provide detention facilities for prisoners, even if it were interested in holding captured POWs.

If anyone wants the full text, email me. As an interesting sidenote, the Tolerance Brigade at Berkeley are calling for Yoo's head for his role in drafting the memo on treatment of detainees for the Bush adminstration. Apparently freedom of speech applies only to certain people.

I still think this is the definitive description of the differences in the male and female psyche.

- Cassandra