Things

• For a heavy but very good read, check out this New Yorker article on the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. (h/t Mark.) For some reason we haven’t seen many big pieces mentioning the impact of extra-tough interrogation tactics—the euphemism bell just went off—on the interrogators themselves, but this piece notes that it’s not just the bad guys suffering psychological damage.
• On another note from the article, it seems that one argument for putting the detainees through a regular trial is the simple need to be able to put them somewhere. In the meantime, the best the government can do for the “What do we do with these guys once they’re not as immediately useful?” question seems to be a big shrug. If there’s not a court record of a trial and later sentencing, thirty years from now we’ll still be asking ourselves, “Why exactly are we still hiding a bunch of dangerous Arab and Pakistani guys in Poland when it would have been a lot easier to have just tried and sentenced them to our supermax in Colorado?”
• As much as today’s political climate can be depressing, it’s a lot easier to be 27 in 2007 than it was in 1917.
• One easy way to make your online comment / argument look less intelligent and original is to post song lyrics along with it. I was reading a dude’s critique of the media in some comments section recently and he posted the refrain to “March of the Pigs” by Nine Inch Nails, as if the creative effort of an artist who isn’t you is a good stand-in for using things like applicable facts, reason and logic to show that you know stuff.

  Nope.

• This past week saw a mild embarrassment for Rudy Giuliani’s campaign thanks to his daughter’s Facebook membership in “One million strong for Barack”. Meanwhile, it seems that every editor I know from either TIME or Slate (I just gotta use internal title style—force of habit) got together recently and agreed to set up profiles, so now I’m Facebooked in with all the work peeps. So, just a friendly reminder that you never know who’s checking your stuff (probably me, because Facebook is great), and then sometimes you do know, and that person’s kind of a big deal.

  “What?! The Internet is public?! Who knew?”

Peace, I’m out.