Ori­en­tal­ist garbage. I’ve seen sev­eral reports before that inter­roga­tors at Guan­tanamo are using women inter­roga­tors in var­i­ous ways to gain psy­cho­log­i­cal dom­i­nance over the detainees. For instance a com­mon claim seems to be that Mus­lim men don’t know how to deal with women in posi­tions of author­ity. My com­ment on this:

Here’s the lat­est:

British jour­nal­ist Brian Whitaker ana­lyzed a book called “The Arab Mind” that accord­ing to inves­tiga­tive reporter Sey­mour Hersh is being used by the U.S. military:

Reader Whitaker’s entire arti­cle about this piece of racist garbage whose best use is as a doorstop.

The sec­tion of the news story about men­strual blood really jumped out at me because it’s so glar­ingly wrong:

The state­ment Strict inter­pre­ta­tion of Islamic law for­bids phys­i­cal con­tact … with any men­stru­at­ing women, who are con­sid­ered unclean is sim­ply false.

Here’s a page by con­ser­v­a­tive Saudi scholar Shaykh Muham­mad al-Munajjid that dis­cusses in quite some detail what the rules are for a man and his wife when she’s men­stru­at­ing: Inti­macy with one’s wife when she is men­stru­at­ing. Short answer: every­thing short of actual inter­course is allowed between a mar­ried cou­ple. Rules regard­ing phys­i­cal con­tact between men and women have to do with the degree of rela­tion­ship with them, and do not change depend­ing on whether the woman is men­stru­at­ing or not, except that mar­ried cou­ples should refrain from inter­course. Just to make this clear, Muna­jjid has another arti­cle called A men­stru­at­ing woman is not impure.

Any kind of blood (not just men­strual blood) is con­sid­ered rit­u­ally impure for prayer in that you have to wipe it off before begin­ning the prayer; here is what Muna­jjid says about rit­u­ally impure substances:

(“wudoo”, also spelled “wudu”, is the rit­ual purifi­ca­tion that a Mus­lim under­takes before prayer).

The arti­cle men­tions that they also took the water away so that the detainee couldn’t wash off the “blood”. Islamic law fea­tures a very well-known exemp­tion allow­ing peo­ple to do tayam­mum or dry ablu­tion when they can’t find water. This ref­er­ence also says that if they can’t even do tayam­mum, they can pray as they are:

Assum­ing that the inter­roga­tors blocked the detainee even from doing tayam­mum, he could still pray in what­ever state he was in.

In other words, the basis of this entire exer­cise is garbage and doesn’t accu­rately reflect Islamic rules at all.

How­ever, I sus­pect that most any­body, and espe­cially men, would freak out if they thought a woman was touch­ing her­self to put men­strual blood on her hands then touch­ing them with it. It’s not lim­ited to Mus­lims, I’m pretty darn sure about that.

Added: An Aus­tralian detainee reports that as part of his treat­ment, he was strapped to the ground while a woman he believed was a pros­ti­tute (see other arti­cle above) men­stru­ated on him. Is this the image of our coun­try we want to broad­cast to the world? Is this the kind of thing that makes you say, “I’m proud to be an Amer­i­can”? [Al-Muhajabah’s Islamic Blogs]

I think Al-Muhajabah is right–I can’t speak for any­one but myself, but I would cer­tainly be hor­ri­fied by the kind of treat­ment these men are sub­jected to, and I’m not a Mus­lim. In fact, I sus­pect pretty much any civ­i­lized per­son would react the same way to this kind of thing, regard­less of their reli­gion or lack thereof.

Get in Line for Sudafed. Sens. Dianne Fein­stein (D-Calif.) and Jim Tal­ent (R-Mo.) yes­ter­day intro­duced a bill, dubbed the Com­bat Meth Act, that would allow sales of reme­dies con­tain­ing pseu­doephedrine only in phar­ma­cies, require that they be kept behind the pharmacist’s counter, force buy­ers to present ID and sign a reg­istry, and limit pur­chases to nine grams (about a dozen 24-packs of Sudafed) a month. [Hit and Run]

bq. There are two par­ties in Con­gress, runs the old joke: the Stu­pid Party and the Evil Party. When the Stu­pid Party in the ascen­dancy it passes stu­pid laws, and when the Evil Party is on top, it passes evil laws. But some­times they get together and pass law that are both stu­pid and evil. This is called bipartisanship.

Indeed.

GENE HEALY: Inter­est­ing Poll Results. Accord­ing to Tuesday’s Wash­ing­ton Post, the Pew Research Cen­ter recently found that “66 per­cent of Repub­li­cans agreed that ‘We should all be will­ing to fight for our coun­try, whether it is right or wrong.’” (Only 33 per­cent of Democ­rats agreed with that state­ment.) In a related poll, 98 per­cent of neo­con­ser­v­a­tives emphat­i­cally agreed that all those other guys should be will­ing to fight for our coun­try. [Lib­erty & Power: Group Blog]

Now if only those Repub­li­cans could tell the dif­fer­ence between fight­ing for their coun­try, and fight­ing for a government.

I’ve seen the first three episodes of the new Bat­tlestar Galac­tica series on Sci-Fi (along with the pilot minis­eries), and it’s very good. The orig­i­nal series was my favorite TV show when it was on, but when I see reruns as an adult it looks pretty bad. This new series is a huge improve­ment, and I hope that it con­tin­ues to live up to the qual­ity it’s shown so far.

Maybe Bush really is a lib­er­a­tor .…. Did any­one catch Pres­i­dent Bush’s endorse­ment of anar­chism today?

At least I reckon that’s what he must have meant when he said “Amer­ica will not impose our own style of gov­ern­ment on the unwilling.”

As one of the unwill­ing, I was very happy to hear this. [Mises Eco­nom­ics Blog]

I would be too, but I know he means this about as much as he meant his pre­vi­ous cam­paign promises about pur­su­ing a more hum­ble for­eign policy.

“Min­is­ter, what were ‘fam­i­lies’?”. I have always endured a dis­tinctly uncom­fort­able ambiv­o­lence on the sub­ject of the phys­i­cal chas­tise­ment of chil­dren. My ratio­nal incli­na­tions are to dis­ap­prove of it as a whole. The law pro­tects adults from being phys­i­cally assaulted by other adults and I find the argu­ments that seek to exempt young­sters from this law to be flawed and unper­sua­sive. That said, I know that there are many good and lov­ing par­ents who some­times smack their chil­dren out… [Samizdata.net]

Arthur Sil­ber has writ­ten some excel­lent essays on child abuse and how it relates to the accep­tance of tor­ture, con­quest, etc. It’s inter­est­ing (in a sad sort of way) to read the com­ments to this post on a Cru­sader site. Many of the same peo­ple who have advo­cated the con­quest of Iraq, pro­claimed their big­otry against Mus­lims, and their sup­port of tor­ture, are now argu­ing that it’s not only accept­able but desir­able for par­ents to assault their children.

House Paint Foils Wardrivers. Ant writes “Security-minded U.S. dec­o­ra­tors’ sup­ply out­fit, Force Field Wire­less, claims to have devel­oped a do-it-yourself solu­tion to the inter­na­tional men­ace of maraud­ing geek wardrivers: DefendAir paint ‘laced with cop­per and alu­minum fibers that form an elec­tro­mag­netic shield, block­ing most radio waves and pro­tect­ing wire­less net­works.’ Accord­ing to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel’s report, one coat of the water-based paint ‘shields Wi-Fi, WiMax and Blue­tooth net­works oper­at­ing at fre­quen­cies from 100 mega­hertz to 2.4 giga­hertz”, while two or three appli­ca­tions are ‘good for net­works oper­at­ing at up to five giga­hertz.’ How­ever, there are down­sides to this.” Since it’s a water-based paint, exte­rior use is only rec­om­mended for peo­ple who want more cop­per and alu­minum in the soil sur­round­ing their house. [Slash­dot]

I won­der if this would be of any use as tem­pest shielding?

Chile: Social­ism, Dic­ta­tor­ship, and Lib­er­al­ism. Despite years of pol­icy débâ­cle and dic­ta­tor­ship, writes Ryan McMaken, Chile has taken a turn toward lib­er­al­ism that has gone largely unno­ticed. Unlike many Latin Amer­i­can coun­tries, Chile is not notable for its strong­man pol­i­tics (like Venezuela) or its ongo­ing guerilla wars (like Colom­bia), but is rather a place where peo­ple pre­fer to get on with the busi­ness of doing busi­ness. By Ryan McMaken. [Lud­wig von Mises Insti­tute Arti­cles]

Cut­ting the Gor­dian knot. One of the cur­rent con­tro­ver­sies around the war on ter­ror is how to treat the pris­on­ers. Dale Franks at the excel­lent Ques­tions and Obser­va­tions blog gets it pretty much right, I think. My pre­ferred method of deal­ing with these ter­ror pris­on­ers would be to get two cap­tains and a major together as a tri­bunal, declare them to be unlaw­ful com­bat­ants, and put them in front of a fir­ing squad. Now, maybe, because we’re nice guys,… [Samizdata.net]

For any­one who thinks that the tor­ture and mur­der of pris­on­ers by the Feds is an anom­aly, and not rep­re­sen­ta­tive of what Amer­ica has become, here we have a bunch of cru­saders openly advo­cat­ing the mur­der of pris­on­ers. Caveat: some of the mur­der­ous lunatics com­ment­ing on this post are British.

Gmail Mes­sages Are Vul­ner­a­ble To Inter­cep­tion. Michael Wally writes “GMail mes­sages are vul­ner­a­ble to inter­cep­tion. An attacker has only to trans­mit mal­formed test mes­sages to him­self, and infor­ma­tion left over in mem­ory, from pre­vi­ous mes­sages des­tined for other peo­ple, will appear with the test mes­sages, in the attacker’s inbox. Some­times, this infor­ma­tion may include user­names and pass­words… Do you use GMail? Are you com­mu­ni­ca­tions pri­vate? Should they be? Well, here’s what we fig­ured out about the issue, that may or may not help you — or per­haps GMail, if any­one can get ahold of their devel­op­ers, to tell them about it.” [Slash­dot]

Of course they’re vul­ner­a­ble to inter­cept–all email is vul­ner­a­ble to inter­cept. If your email is not encrypted, it is not pri­vate at all. All that web-based sys­tems like GMail do is make it mar­gin­ally eas­ier to inter­cept messages.

I do have a GMail account which I use occa­sion­ally as a backup for my main account, but I cer­tainly don’t con­sider it pri­vate or secure. That’s what PGP is for.