What he said.
UN Wire
If you look over on the left, you will see this add for the UN Wire. I don’t generally pimp the ads I am running, but this isone you might want to click. I signed up, and it really is a nice way to get a look at what the UN is doing besides Oil-for-food, etc.
It is also a nice resource to find stories you would otherwise miss, such as this horrifying news:
Set on an arid plain southeast of Kirkuk, Hasira looks like a place forsaken by time. Sheep amble past mud-brick houses and the odd sickly palm tree shades children’s games. There is no electricity.
Yet along with 39 other villages in this region that Iraq’s Kurds have named Germian (meaning hot place), Hasira and its people have become noted for presenting the first statistical evidence in Iraq of the existence of female circumcision, or female genital mutilation (FGM), as critics call it.
“We knew Germian was one of the areas most affected by the practice,” says Thomas von der Osten-Sacken, director of a German nongovernmental organization called WADI, which has been based in Iraq for more than a decade.
Of 1,554 women and girls over 10 years old interviewed by WADI’s local medical team, 907, or more than 60 percent, said they had had the operation. The practice is known to exist throughout the Middle East, particularly in northern Saudi Arabia, southern Jordan, and Iraq. There is also circumstantial evidence to suggest it is present in Syria, western Iran, and southern Turkey.
But while this practice was suspected in the region, there was never solid proof that the procedure was so prevalent.
This is an atrocity that needs immediate attention.
Science, Memory, and Eyewitness Testimony
Details of a fascinating new study were released today in Live Science:
When people see violent or erotic images, they fail to process whatever they see next, according to new research.
Scientists are calling the effect “attentional rubbernecking.”
“We observed that people fail to detect visual images that appeared one-fifth of a second after emotional images, whereas they can detect those images with little problem after viewing neutral images,” said Vanderbilt University psychologist David Zald.
The effect is akin to rubbernecking on the highway, Zald and his colleagues say. Your brain might suggest you watch the road ahead, but your emotions force you to look at the accident on the side of the road.
Research subjects were handed a stack of pictures that included pleasant landscapes and architectural photos. They were told to search for a particular image. Negative images were placed anywhere from two to eight spots before the search target.
I haven’t read the study, so I can not attest to the methodology or the accuracy of the description quoted above, but the first thing that came to mind was the accuracy of eyewitness testimony.
While it is generally accepted within the legal community that eyewitness testimony is the least reliable evidence, many juries don’t realize this, and in case after case after case, eyewitness testimony has turned out to be just plain wrong. I am not going to go into the accuracy of eyewitness testimony, as Jeralynn Merritt has ably put forth numerous posts on the reliability of this sort of evidence.
You can see where I am going with this. If this study shows what I think it does (I need to get my hands on a copy), and further studies go more in depth and verify this, it might then be time to change the rules regarding evidence in jury trials as they pertain to eyewitness testimony. With the number of people we currently have on death row, and the number of people released very year because of DNA evidence, quite literally, lives are at stake.
And for those of you who think that I am merely parroting some sort of liberal ‘coddle criminals’ mentality, I will let you explain how convicting innocent men and letting guilty ones remain free to roam around meancing society is the ‘conservative’ position.
Science, Memory, and Eyewitness TestimonyPost + Comments (37)
Election Hijinks
This is cute:
Despite a zero-tolerance policy on tampering with voters, the Republican Party has quietly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide private defense lawyers for a former Bush campaign official charged with conspiring to keep Democrats from voting in New Hampshire.
James Tobin, the president’s 2004 campaign chairman for New England, is charged in New Hampshire federal court with four felonies accusing him of conspiring with a state GOP official and a GOP consultant in Virginia to jam Democratic and labor union get-out-the-vote phone banks in November 2002.
A telephone firm was paid to make repeated hang-up phone calls to overwhelm the phone banks in New Hampshire and prevent them from getting Democratic voters to the polls on Election Day 2002, prosecutors allege. Republican John Sununu won a close race that day to be New Hampshire’s newest senator.
At the time, Tobin was the RNC’s New England regional director, before moving to President Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign.
A top New Hampshire Party official and a GOP consultant already have pleaded guilty and cooperated with prosecutors. Tobin’s indictment accuses him of specifically calling the GOP consultant to get a telephone firm to help in the scheme.
“The object of the conspiracy was to deprive inhabitants of New Hampshire and more particularly qualified voters … of their federally secured right to vote,” states the latest indictment issued by a federal grand jury on May 18.
Since charges were first filed in December, the RNC has spent more than $722,000 to provide Tobin, who has pleaded innocent, a team of lawyers from the high-powered Washington law firm of Williams & Connolly. The firm’s other clients include Bill and Hillary Clinton and former Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros.
Oddly enough, the ‘non-partisan’ American Center for Voting Rights had no mention of this in their latest report.
The Commission Knew…
It appears the 9/11 Commission knew about the claims raised yesterday by Curt Weldon, and chose to dismiss them:
The Sept. 11 commission was warned by a uniformed military officer 10 days before issuing its final report that the account would be incomplete without reference to what he described as a secret military operation that by the summer of 2000 had identified as a potential threat the member of Al Qaeda who would lead the attacks more than a year later, commission officials said on Wednesday.
The officials said that the information had not been included in the report because aspects of the officer’s account had sounded inconsistent with what the commission knew about that Qaeda member, Mohammed Atta, the plot’s leader.
But aides to the Republican congressman who has sought to call attention to the military unit that conducted the secret operation said such a conclusion relied too much on specific dates involving Mr. Atta’s travels and not nearly enough on the operation’s broader determination that he was a threat.
The briefing by the military officer is the second known instance in which people on the commission’s staff were told by members of the military team about the secret program, called Able Danger.
The meeting, on July 12, 2004, has not been previously disclosed. That it occurred, and that the officer identified Mr. Atta there, were acknowledged by officials of the commission after the congressman, Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, provided information about it.
Something else for us to keep our eyes on…
Why Does Drug Reporting Suck?
Jack Schafer asks the important question.
Short answer: Because it always has.
Daily Plame Flame Thread
Walter Pincus delivers the goods:
The origin of Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV’s trip to Niger in 2002 to check out intelligence reports that Saddam Hussein was attempting to purchase uranium has become a contentious side issue to the inquiry by special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who is looking into whether a crime was committed with the exposure of Valerie Plame, Wilson’s wife, as a covert CIA employee.
After he went public in 2003 about the trip, senior Bush administration officials, trying to discredit Wilson’s findings, told reporters that Wilson’s wife, who worked at the CIA, was the one who suggested the Niger mission for her husband. Days later, Plame was named as an “agency operative” by syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak, who has said he did not realize he was, in effect, exposing a covert officer. A Senate committee report would later say evidence indicated Plame suggested Wilson for the trip…
The full Senate committee report says that CPD officials “could not recall how the office decided to contact” Wilson but that “interviews and documents indicate his wife suggested his name for the trip.” The three Republican senators wrote that they were more certain: “The plan to send the former ambassador to Niger was suggested by the former ambassador’s wife, a CIA employee.”
Just do it in the comments.