“This is science at its steamiest.”

Left Behind: Jacob Weisberg, in Slate, says that those fulminating about the supposedly inane or offensive comments of the anti-war left — he mentions Susan Sontag’s notorious New Yorker essay in the first paragraph — are missing the boat. There really is no serious anti-war left at the moment. Opposition to the war, he suggests, is confined to stalwart pacifists. those considered cranks even by the left, and “others whose ears hear only evil about the United States.” Even the American Friends Service Committee, he notes, concedes that the anti-war movement “is still in the process of taking shape.” Nothing like the Vietnam opposition, in which prominent intellectuals and radicals explicitly sided with our enemies, the better parallel is WWII, in which opposition sentiment was “marginal and idiosyncratic” … and scant.

Given its insignificance, the fixation of the supporters of the war on the opposition serves their own ulterior motives, which he goes on to explicate — in essence, since there is no serious anti-war movement, the patriots have had to invent one.

I recall blinking with relish to the item about Paul Krassner leading his audience in a rollicking chorus of a cherished obscenity last month in response to Cokie Roberts’ scurrilous, similar observation that there was no opposition that matters. Many of us who think we are earnest opponents of the war will be distressed at Weisberg’s comments, yet there’s something there we should take to heart. His sobering appraisal echoes my own concerns that dissent — to the war or the dramatic attack on our civil liberties that is its concomitant — is not massive or visible, not building up any momentum or impact. The majority of the thinking public does not read AlterNet, ConsortiumNews, tompaine.com or the left-leaning weblogs into which we pour our passion, largely for one another. We seem to be preaching only to the converted…

CIA blunder sparked Taleban revolt that became a mass suicide — ‘Whether it was incompetence, overconfidence or duty that prompted two CIA operatives to interrogate dozens of Taleban on their own will perhaps remain a mystery.

But their decision triggered a revolt that became the single bloodiest engagement since the Afghan war began.’ The Times of London

‘Human rights watchdog Amnesty International has called for an urgent inquiry into the killing of hundreds of Taleban prisoners who staged an uprising near the Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif.’ BBC

A village is destroyed. And America says nothing happened. Sarcastic commentary from an Independent correspondent, just as news emerges that five Afghani and three American forces were killed by an errant one-ton bomb dropped from a silent, remote B-52 high above on a sector north of Kandahar which representatives of the newly-formed Afghani government were surprised is even a bombing target. It’s my impression that we’re hearing about alot more targeting errors in this war. It doesn’t seem to me this could be attributed to reporting bias (which finds US military blunders and ‘friendly fire’ casualties sexy to report on in any conflict), and, if anything, journalists have less on-the-ground access than they have in other conflicts, and what information is released by Americna official sources is more highly controlled. Looking for knowledgeable military commentary that could address whether, and if so why, we are indeed having more targeting problems with our munitions as they supposedly get smarter and smarter.

Bush Describes Reaction to 9 – 11. He says his first thought was “There’s one terrible pilot.” He’s down in Florida again, talking to schoolchildren again (actually a town meeting to help his brother’s reelection prospects by stemming the tide of declining tourist revenues for Florida, but answering a third grader’s question), as he was on Sept. 11th when he heard about the attacks. He’s very comfortable explicating his ideas to elementary school students. NY Times

Robert Bork supports military tribunals. Not surprising. But much is being made of this comment toward the bottom of the article: “If there is a problem with Bush’s order, it is the exemption of U.S. citizens from trials before military tribunals.” Much as I’m among those who love to hate Bork, he’s being taken out of context. For someone who rationalizes the tribunals for foreign terrorists, it is not surprising that he also says he supports them for Americans for the same reasons (safeguarding sensitive intelligence data, the risk of them going free if given a fair enough trial, etc.); but he’s talking about American terrorists! It seems to me the Left can’t have it both ways; if we complain that the reactionaries are selective in the terrorists they’re after, and not including in the scope of their proposed repression so-called domestic terrorists (which, these days, comes mostly from the American Right), we can’t also complain about Bork’s equanimity here…

Many people saying bad things: I agree with Phil Agre, who calls this Jon Carroll opinion piece from the SF Chronicle the best response to Cheney’s academic witchhunt against unpatriotic thought. Add me to the list.

The Laws of War Yale University Law School and the Uniform Code of Military Justice

I think I won’t link to Bruce Sterling’s “Geeks and Spooks” speech at the “Global Challenges, Trends and Best Practices in Cryptography” conference at the Information System Security and Education Center, Washington, DC on November 20. Many others are. Oops, I just did. If you read it, persist; he’s slow to get into the meat of things. Viridian Notes

Authority Finder: “Whether you are writing a paper, business plan, speech, or simply looking for reliable research material, use Authority Finder to locate a quote from an authoritative source to support your hypothesis or argument. Use this intelligent tool to instantaneously find, quote, and cite a relevant and legitimate source with a few clicks of a mouse.” This looks like it will be a very useful resource. [via net.narrative environments]

(“It reminds me of the Taliban. If you’re not Muslim, you’re worthless,” said Bob Farnan, the owner of Port Inglis Restaurant. “She just reversed the situation.”) Mayor banishes Satan from Inglis, Florida. Critics are up in arms about the mayor’s crossing the boundary between church and state in her official proclamation, which has been rolled up and placed in hollowed-out fenceposts labelled Repent, Resist and Request at the four entrances to the town. How about just how dumb it is? [Sorry, more eloquent words fail me…]

“Here’s one from the banality of evil file,” Rafe at rc3 comments regarding Bush’s order preventing access to the presidential papers of his predecessors:

“Bush’s goal is obviously to keep records from the Reagan administration sealed. Either the papers contain information so damning that they would ruin his father’s legacy or the careers of some of his current staffers, or they contain trivial information that would be embarrassing to people he doesn’t want to see get embarrassed. If it’s the former then Bush is evil. Americans have the right to know what was done in their name. If it’s the latter, Bush is a small and petty man who’s willing eviscerate a useful and important law to protect people from things they probably ought to be accountable for anyway. John Dean is certainly right about one thing, if Bill Clinton had tried to pull a stunt like this, the Republicans would have been beating down his door with subpoenas.”