The report that abu Musab al-Zarqawi personally committed the brutal murder of Nicholas Berg raises a number of thoughts for me. The murder and the knowledge of its videotape were bad enough (I’ve seen the still photos published in the papers, but have not looked for the video or for photos showing the actual murder). Giving the murderer a name seems to make things even worse, though it’s hard to say why this should be. There are, though, some important issues that need to be raised.

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Remember to watch the “Eurovision Song Contest”:http://www.eurovision.tv/ this weekend. If you have no idea what this is, you can read my “primer on the subject”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000433.html from last year.

*Update*: Never let it be said that the tools of empirical social science are not abused on this website. I decided to see whether my prejudices about the geopolitics of the Eurovision were empirically confirmable. To this end, I dug up data on voting patterns in the Eurovision from 1975 to 1999. (From a B and B in “Stirling”:http://www.stirling.gov.uk/, too. If only all social science data were this easily available.) Confining ourselves to a group of countries who competed during (almost) all these years, we can aggregate their voting scores into a directed graph representing their preferences for one another’s songs over the years. Given that Eurovision songs are (to a first approximation) uniformly worthless, we can assume that votes express a simple preference for one nation over another, uncomplicated by any aesthetic considerations. We then abuse the tools of network analysis to see how the voting patterns cluster. And to think “Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com got published in “Slate”:http://www.slate.com for calculating a “correlation coefficient”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/000865.html#000865.

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The philosopher Alan Gewirth has died, “according to Jacob Levy over at the Volokh conspiracy”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_05_07.shtml#1084404300 . Like Jacob, I’m astonished to learn that Gewirth was 90 years old. I’ll add obituaries to this post as they appear. “Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34812-2004May17.html , “University of Chigago Press Release”:http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/04/040517.gewirth.shtml .

Amid all the bad news, we should celebrate the fact that in the world’s largest democracy “the forces of secularism have triumphed and those of communalism have been defeated”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/3712201.stm. Congress is far from perfect, but it is a great deal better than the alternative. Sonia Gandhi may well become the world’s best Italian prime minister as a result (not that the competition in that field is all that stiff).

Some months ago I bought tickets to this Saturday’s performance of “The Valkyrie at English National Opera”:http://www.eno.org/whatson/full.php?performancekey=19 , having failed to notice that it clashed with “the last day of the football season”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_prem/fixtures/default.stm . Not only did it clash, but the first act would begin at half-time. So I faced the prospect of sitting through the incestuous romance of Siegmund and Sieglinde whilst in a state of anxiety about the score at “Anfield”:http://www.liverpoolfc.tv/ . Happily, “thanks to”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_prem/3703591.stm Southampton third-choice goalkeeper “Alan Blayney”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/shared/bsp/hi/football/statistics/teams/s/southampton/players/255787/html/profile_hi.stm , I can relax and enjoy myself as nothing now hangs on the Liverpool–Newcastle match. Thanks Alan! Now I only have the club “selling-out to the Thai Prime Minister”:http://soccernet.espn.go.com/headlinenews?id=300102&cc=5739 to worry about.

I just watched one of the craziest at bats I’ve ever seen in a baseball game. Alex Cora, one of the weakest hitters in baseball, was facing Matt Clement, a pretty good pitcher. After the count ran to 2-1, Cora fouled off 14 consecutive pitches. After the first 7 the commentators were talking about how absurd it was to see all these consecutive foul balls. By 14 they didn’t even have any cliches left. The really surprising thing was that almost all the fouls were close to the lines – hardly any of them went into the stands.

Then on the 18th pitch of the at bat, Alex Cora, in one of the toughest parks to homer in in baseball, hit one into the bullpens beyond right field. Long at bats are fun to watch, but they often end anti-climactically. But Alex Cora hitting a home run, that was a nice ending. I do feel bad for the Cubs fans, because they seem cursed this game, but I’m pretty pleased I got to see something like that.

This NYT article about reported abuses in Afghanistan similar to those at Abu Ghraib is worth reading in full. But this in particular struck me, because the US military is frankly admitting to abusive procedures as a matter of policy:

Mr. Siddiqui [a former Afghan police colonel detained by US forces for 22 days] said he was stripped naked and photographed in each of the three places he was held. Sometimes, as in Bagram, it appeared to be part of a detailed identification procedure.

There he was photographed full length, naked, from the front, back and two sides, he said. Something was inserted into his rectum during that procedure, he said, but he does not know what it was or why it was done. “I was feeling very bad,” he said.

General Barno [commander of US forces in Afghanistan] said that this may have been to search for hidden items, but that the practice of strip searches and fully naked identification photographs was being reviewed and changed. “We’re concerned as well about the cultural impact of doing that,” he said.

Oh, you are, are you? How thoughtful. “Fully naked identification photographs”? Is that so we can spot the terrorists when a big group of naked Afghanis come running towards us? “I remember him, strawberry birthmark on the right buttock, dresses left. Take him out, boys.” WTF? WTF!!?? What the hell is happening to my country?

I have simply no idea what the point of fairly predictable, mildly revolting, ex-Lefty right-winger, seems

Terry Welch, who is serving as an Army public affairs specialist in Afghanistan, has a very reasonable request. He says that what Afghan children want, more than anything, are pens. Pens are cheap. Below the fold is his letter, including a link to OfficeMax and his address.

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Given the current revelations from Abu Ghraib, it is worth remembering that a major reason for the USA’s attempts to undermine the International Criminal Court was that making American troops accountable would impede them in the War on Terror. I personally don’t have much time for the Hague tribunal; I think that the US opposition to it on grounds of national sovereignty were valid and I don’t like unaccountable international institutions. But hell … isn’t it just a bit ironic that the US Army managed to achieve what nobody thought was possible (a successful war with minimal civilian casualties) and then fouled up on the kind of “war crimes” that nobody ever so much as imagined that the US Army would commit?

Not that there’s much hope left, but have they simply given up on trying to win “hearts and minds” in the region? Is now really the best time for this?

Mr. Bush issued an executive order banning virtually all American exports, except for food and medicine, and barring flights between Syria and the United States, except during emergencies.

And it seems that it is mostly hearts and minds that will be affected:

In the near term, the action is largely symbolic, since trade with Syria, at about $300 million a year, is insubstantial and Syrian airlines do not fly to the United States. Moreover, the trade ban does not preclude investment, though American firms like ConocoPhillips and Chevron, which currently do business in Syria, will be required to turn to foreign suppliers to service their operations there, a State Department spokesman said.

I guess here’s the real target:

Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Miami Republican who was an original sponsor of the Syria Accountability Act, expressed satisfaction with the president’s announcement.

“He went beyond what was asked of him,” she said.

Just a quick note to the fairly large proportion of our readers who also run weblogs. The photographs of Iraqi prisoners being humiliated and tortured are important historical documents, but the faces of those being victimised are not particularly important details. Nothing important is lost by linking to a version of the photographs in which the victims’ anonymity is preserved rather than one in which they are clearly identifiable. While some of the torture victims were extremely nasty people, many weren’t (apparently, many of them had been picked up simply by mistake), and in any case it is not good form to condemn the practice of humiliating prisoners while simultaneously disseminating pictures which increase the humiliation.

The genie is out of the bottle, obviously (thanks to quite scandalous insensitivity on the part of the world’s newspaper), but we can at least show willing ourselves. This will be doubly important, obviously, if and when the currently “secret” (and apparently much more distressing for the victims) photographs become public.

Update: When I rather loftily said above that “nothing is lost by linking to version of the photographs in which the victims’ anonymity is preserved”, I assumed that I’d be able to find such versions pretty easily, but apparently not. I’ve tried all sorts of search terms, but can’t find a single instance of publication of the photos in which anyone bothered to blur the faces. Christ. Did literally nobody stop to think about this last week? Last time I take a holiday.

In response to the exposure of widespread torture prisoners in Iraq (on all sides) and elsewhere, it’s inevitable that the “ticking bomb” problem should be raised.

‘You hold a terrorist who knows the location of a defusable bomb which, if exploded, will kill x million people. Do you have the right to torture him/her to find the bomb?’

Various answers to this question have been offered, none of which seem entirely satisfactory.

Instead of offering an answer to this question, I’m going to look at a question that follows immediately, but doesn’t seem to have been asked. Suppose that someone has used torture to extract information from a prisoner in the belief (factually correct or not and morally sustainable or not) that doing so was justified by a “ticking bomb” situation. What should they do next?

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When some good is arbitrarily granted to one group of people but denied to another group of people, there are two ways of implementing fairness. The first is to remove the arbitrariness by granting it to both groups. The second is simply to deny it to both groups. The latter course is especially appealing when you think that the value of the good is, in fact, highly dubious, or when you think that it involves unwarranted interference in people’s lives.

Why, then, in the debate about gay marriage is the first strategy the only one that people are debating? My colleague, Claudia Card, a renowned lesbian philosopher, published a paper over a decade ago arguing against gay marriage — on the grounds that no-one should be married, because marriage is not a good thing. At the time I was more bemused than persuaded by the argument, and now that I have revisited the paper and the issue I think that she is wrong. But I am surprised that her basic stand has received so little attention in the debate, at least among thoughtful people who are not completely caught up in the politics of the issue. (Alex Cockburn has a column which expresses this view, but I’ve not seen it much in any more mainstream place).

Here’s why:

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