Torture is immoral. The CIA being authorized to use torture is immoral. That’s why we shouldn’t do it. There is no argument for violent sadism as a preventive measure that preserves any moral high ground including an appeal to our fears of being attacked by a terror cell. We are state sponsors of violent sadism, no matter the outcome of the torturing of prisoners. And if that’s okay with you, then fine, but that’s exactly what it is.

But it’s clear it was a waste. It’s also clear tortured prisoners were savvy enough to screw with us:

Before I get into the weeds, let me be clear: there are almost no black Muslims in Montana. Just 0.6% of Montana’s roughly 1 million people are African American, or about 6,100 total. Just 0.034 Montanans identify as Muslim (or around 345 people). Montana has both the fewest African Americans and fewest Muslims. It is almost certainly the least likely state to find black Muslims seeking to wage jihad.

[..]

A year after CIA decided KSM was not really going to have a non-existent cell of black Muslims start forest fires, the FBI nevertheless warned a bunch of Rocky Mountain states, including Montana, to be on guard for the threat.

via KSM Had the CIA Believing in Black Muslim Convert Jihadist Arsonists in Montana for 3 Months | emptywheel

This information is why every state has swollen counter terrorism budgets from DHS through a funding source known as the “State Homeland Security Program” (SHSP). Even after program wide cuts to SHSP, Montana still got about $3.5 million in 2013 and $3.7 million in 2014.

This would be hilarious if it wasn’t TORTURE.

T. Coates on the culture of TNR:

A writer for TNR told me how, in the mid-’90s, Peretz would come down to the office from Cambridge and lobby young writers to write what turned out to be the fictional “Taxi Cabs and the Meaning of Work.” The writer told me that the young interns and fact-checkers would squirm in their seats. But no one took a stand. And perhaps it is too much to expect writers in their mid 20s, with editors in their late 20s, to say to Peretz, “Please stop shopping this racist bullshit.” But the task was made infinitely easier by a monochrome staff that could view Peretz’s racism as an abstraction, and not something that directly injured their families.

via The New Republic’s Race Problem – The Atlantic

MSNBC Dr. Nancy Snyderman decided to break quarantine imposed upon her after exposure to the Ebola about a week early to go pick up take out. Anecdotal, but this increases my prejudice against TV medical advice.

Coates in the Atlantic:

And this was the summer of Jordan Davises, the summer of bodies when every day, a black parent could log on to the Internet and see the bodies of black people choked into oblivion, beaten on the side of the road, stalked and raped, tased for straying too long, pistol-whipped for running too fast, shot down for mental illness, shot down for cos-play, shot down for allegedly ignoring orders, shot down for too quickly obeying orders.

“I’m still watching,” McBath told me. “It might be a different circumstance, but it all brings back to my mind what happened with Jordan. This is what certain individuals believe about black people. Our forefathers have spent a lot effort trying to get rid of these prejudicial ideas.”

I asked her about Trayvon Martin. And she told me again that Jordan had been horrified by Martin’s shooting. “Jordan kept saying, ‘Mom, that could have been me. Mom, that could have been me.’ We talked at length,” she said. “He said, ‘He didn’t even do anything wrong.’ And I told him, ‘Jordan, you don’t have to be doing anything wrong. You are a young black male and they are certain people who will never give you respect.'”

via To Raise, Love, and Lose a Black Child – The Atlantic.

“For these people, The Cosby Show was just amusement,” McBath said. “They don’t know that in the black community the Cosbys exist. They don’t know that we educate our children, we train up our children, we have fathers, nurturing, and supporting. We have that. But that’s the America that a lot of people don’t know exists, and they don’t know because they don’t want to see it.”

But American blindness had not dissuaded her, and when I asked about the path forward she spoke mostly (like the president she supports) of communal self-improvement. “We’ve become apathetic and comfortable, thinking we have arrived,” she said. “A lot of us know we have an African-American president, but they don’t know how he got there. They don’t know what our forefathers did to get him there. And you can’t fault our children. Shame on us, the parents. Shame on us.”

In this I heard the essential problem of 21st-century black philosophy. Black people are a minority in the country they built. The legacy of that building has remanded them to the basement of America. There are only two conscious ways to escape the basement: (1) Appeal to the magnanimity of white people. (2) Become super-human.

via To Raise, Love, and Lose a Black Child – The Atlantic.

When your son is murdered for being a teenager, all the cold hard rationalizations go out the window. We want to focus on what we could have done to protect them. She didn’t do anything wrong. Her son didn’t do anything wrong. Our kids being historical experts and deferential to our parents that won’t save them from murderous bigots. The shame should lie with the killers.