Links for April 26th

Letters of Note: On bureaucratese and gobbledygookThis is a delightful memo sent by Civil Aeronautics Board chairman Alfred E. Kahn to the organization's top staff in 1977, begging them to please stop writing in "bureaucratese," and to instead use "straightforward, quasi-conversational, humane prose." He provides some specific examples that still apply nicely today. Wikipedia: List …

Catching up with Abu Zubaida.

You’ll remember the name Abu Zubaida. That’s the guy President Bush bragged about capturing back in 2002, describing him as “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations.” Zubaida denied it, saying that he had nothing to do with al-Qaeda. So we held him at a CIA black operations site and tortured him in order to get him to …

Eleven-year-old “terrorist” released from Guantanamo.

A 21-year-old was just released from Guantanamo after being arrested at the age of fourteen for allegedly associating with al-Qaeda at the age of eleven. There was zero evidence of any such thing, hence his release. So we wrongly imprisoned a child for seven years, raised him in a prison, and set him free in …

Study: American prisoners more likely to reoffend than Guantanamo detainees.

Prisoners released from Guantanamo have a recidivism rate five times lower than American prisoners. That’s based on comparing the Defense Department’s 14% rate with the DOJ’s general recidivism stats. Those 14% are merely suspected of planning crimes, so I’ve compared them to the 67.5% of released American prisoners who are arrested. So either these suspected …

McDonnell opposes establishing a prison for Guantanamo prisoners in Virginia.

Bob McDonnell says he opposes transferring Guantanamo Bay prisoners into any Virginia facilities. For the record, I’d be perfectly happy to have them in Virginia. Hell, I’d be happy to have them right here in Albemarle County, in any place that’s appropriate for a prison facility of that size. McDonnell describes these guys as “some …

We’re parroting China’s own POW torture techniques.

The U.S. military learned its torture techniques by imitating Chinese communist methods from the Korean War. And how did they learn about these methods? From a 1957 U.S. military study of how so many American POWs came to make false confessions. They even reused the original chart of techniques, changing only the title, “Communist Coercive …