How to Interrogate Terrorists

Heather Mac Donald has an excellent, long but absolutely excellent, article about how the military interrogates terrorists.

It is an excellent summary of all the restrictions currently in place on American interrogators and how those restrictions benefit terrorists and prevent military interrogators from extracting information necessary to save lives and win the war on terror.

Why it is understandable that some of our liberal friends may want to prevent the torture of prisoners, MacDonald highlights how the definition of "torture" has expanded to include basic police techniques used by American police on common criminals. Since these restrictions are announced and debated publicly, terror suspects know things like the fact that military interrogators cannot touch them, threaten them, yell at them, or keep them up too late at night (not an exaggeration, read the article).

With such an intimate knowledge of the techniques that will and will not be used against them it is easy for terrorists to know what they have to be able to get through without giving up information. These restrictions endanger all civilized people and we should be carefully consider if terror suspects deserve the kind of protections that uniformed combatants that follow the Geneva conventions do.

Timothy Burger

Merit and Class in America

From a very compelling article in the Economist:

"Take the study carried out by Thomas Hertz, an economist at American University in Washington, DC, who studied a representative sample of 6,273 American families (both black and white) over 32 years or two generations. He found that 42% of those born into the poorest fifth ended up where they started at the bottom. Another 24% moved up slightly to the next-to-bottom group. Only 6% made it to the top fifth. Upward mobility was particularly low for black families.

On the other hand, 37% of those born into the top fifth remained there, whereas barely 7% of those born into the top 20% ended up in the bottom fifth. A person born into the top fifth is over five times as likely to end up at the top as a person born into the bottom fifth.

Jonathan Fisher and David Johnson, two economists at the Bureau of Labour Statistics, looked at inequality and social mobility using measures of both income and consumption. They found that mobility “slightly decreased” in the 1990s. In 1984-90, 56% and 54% of households changed their rankings in terms of income and consumption respectively. In 1994-99, only 52% and 49% changed their rankings." (emphasis added)

Interesting because, while social and economic mobility may not be where we would like it to be, 6% of those born to the poorest of the poor in America become the richest of the rich in their lifetime. It is incredible to assume that the poorest of the poor should be able to become the richest of the rich, and an admirable goal. However we should also remember that the richest people are also trying to stay there, and everyone in the middle are also trying to become the richest. It is not a static target, only 20% of us can be in the top 20%, and 20% of us must be in the bottom 20%, there is no way that everyone can be above average.

It is also interesting to note that social mobility decreased during the 1990s, during the Clinton years, during the golden years the media and Democrats are trying to get back to. During the Reagan year, the "me" decade when the rich got richer and the poor got poorer, social mobility went up. It is this simple, big government strives for mediocrity, it strives to make it hard to excel and "get more than your share" and now we can see the numbers to support that. High taxes don't just hurt the rich, they have an even larger income on people trying to get rich, a key point that liberals miss.

Timothy Burger

A Great Economic Power

The Wall Street Journal reports today that the Institute for Supply management reported that manufacturing activity increased in December the 19th straight month of growth in manufacturing in the US. The Commerce Department also announced that factory orders also rose 1.2% in November. This is good news, for the supposedly vanishing American manufacturing base. Despite what some politicians would have you think, it seems that we still have a manufacturing sector, and it seems to have been growing, not shrinking for the past 19 months.

Most economic forecasters predict that the "failing Bush economy" will continue to grow at about 3.5% in 2005, and that unemployment will remain low as new jobs are created.

However, a look across the pond shows that our more enlightened European friends are not doing as well. The French government statistics agency Insee recently announced that the French economy did not grow at all in the 3rd quarter of 2004, that it expects the French economy to grow at .6% in the fourth quarter and at a rate of less than 2.1% for all of 2004, following up a weak 1% growth rate for 2003 (presumably hurt by the end of the profitable arms trade with a certain Iraqi dictator). The French (who have been so critical of the US) have a budget deficit of 3.6% of GDP (slightly less than the US). French unemployment stands at 9.9%.

However the most important point is how this affects the French people. France is a socialist nation, they have high taxes and plenty of wealth redistribution, policies America's Democrats would have the US adopt. But the bottom line is clear bad tax policy destroys jobs. French unemployment stands at 9.9%, almost twice the unemployment level in the US. Unfortunately this is not an anomaly, Europe struggles with double digit unemployment on a regular basis. Their economies can't grow, and they can't create jobs because of their burdensome taxes are regulations. Think about that the next time you hear a Democrat talk about a new government program that will "get the economy back on track" I don't think our nation wants to be on their track.

Timothy Burger