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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

lchic - 09:05am Aug 9, 2002 EST (#3580 of 3606)

FISK - Lies Afghanistan - local rogue(s)

"" The problem is that Mr Agha, like almost every other governor in Afghanistan, is a bit of a rogue. Taxes do not all go to central government. His own militia are better paid than government soldiers. But his claim that his schoolteachers were paid twice the average salary of those in Kabul was untrue. They are paid half the salary of Kabul teachers. His references to "our President, the esteemed Mr Karzai" may have satisfied Mr Utunnu (a boy with a treble voice later serenaded the UN's expert on kid soldiers with paeans to both Mr Karzai and Mr Agha), but it's no secret in Kabul that the governor is a loose cannon.

^{http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia_china/story.jsp?story=322793}

lchic - 09:28am Aug 9, 2002 EST (#3581 of 3606)

Obituary : Ralph Bennett was one of the select band of dons recruited to work at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, who later wrote scholarly accounts of the role of military intelligence in achieving victory.

As a young intelligence analyst (senior producer/duty officer, Hut 3), he trans.lated and evaluated the Ultra decrypts of the German Enigma cipher for most of the war. When the Ultra secret was finally broken in 1974, Bennett was commissioned by his publisher son, Francis, to write the first of his books on Second World War intelligence. Ultra in the West: The Normandy Campaign 1944-45 brought together his experience as an insider at Bletchley — he was handling material with which he was familiar — with his skills as a professional historian. The result was an analysis of considerable authority.

In 1989 he published Ultra and Mediterranean Strategy 1941-45, and these two works quickly became established as essential source books for any student of Ultra — but Bennett was noticably more cautious in assessing the impact of Ultra than other experts.

In 1994 he published his most ambitious book, Behind the Battle: Intelligence in the War with Germany, a wide-ranging summary of the value and limitations of intelligence work.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-378296,00.html

lchic - 09:52am Aug 9, 2002 EST (#3582 of 3606)

USA - PRISONERS (COVER story see economist.com )

""America's incarceration rate was roughly constant from 1925 to 1973, with an average of 110 people behind bars for every 100,000 residents. By 2000, however, the rate of incarceration in state and federal prisons had more than quadrupled, to 478. America has overtaken Russia as the world's most aggressive jailer. When local jails are included in the American tally, the United States locks up nearly 700 people per 100,000, compared with 102 for Canada, 132 for England and Wales, 85 for France and a paltry 48 in Japan. Roughly 2m Americans are currently behind bars, with some 4.5m on parole or on probation (the probationers are on suspended sentences). Another 3m Americans are ex-convicts who have served their sentences and are no longer under the control of the justice system.

......

America's huge criminal class also has profound political implications. Most states limit the voting rights of felons and ex-felons. As a result, 4.7m Americans, or 2.3% of the voting population, have lost their rights. The figure is nearly 7% in Alabama. One in six black men cannot vote in Virginia and Kentucky. This causes alienation, and changes elections.

http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1270755

lchic - 10:08am Aug 9, 2002 EST (#3583 of 3606)

EU standards on UK - compensation claims - Prison

Last month the Strasbourg court ruled it was a breach of the right to a fair trial for a governor to sit as "judge and jury" in internal disciplinary hearings for offences that would be considered criminal outside prison .

The government was forced to begin releasing around 900 inmates who had had up to six weeks added to their sentences for each disciplinary offence.

Ministers also braced themselves for compensation claims which could run into millions of pounds from prisoners who had served extra time illegally. About 80,000 "added days" had been imposed on inmates each year.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,771464,00.html

rshow55 - 12:41pm Aug 9, 2002 EST (#3584 of 3606)

http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1270755 is fascinating, and I'm finding it especially interesting (and wrenching) because of my personal situation. lchic 8/9/02 9:52am

General question: What happens when a society starts issuing a lot of "social death sentences" which mean that, for survival, the person sentenced has to lie?

You get a lot of lying. A lot of paralysis. A lot of fraudulent and evasive interaction stemming from the original lies. A lot of negative assumptions about unconventional stories of any kind. A lot of fear diffusing society, some of it intense. A lot of circumstances that become bound up by lies - making all sorts of adjustments that would be possible otherwise impossible.

Credentialling requirements become MUCH more rigid. Helping people with credentialling problems becomes MUCH more dangerous.

The fear level in society gets higher. Informal solutions to problems become harder, more constrained. Things that ought to be easy to check become dangerous to check.

All those things have applied to many cultures in the Islamic world for centuries, with remarkably ugly, crazy results, and terrible kinds of inflexibility.

648 rshow55 3/17/02 7:45pm ... 1759 rshow55 4/25/02 5:10pm
2540 rshow55 6/15/02 8:37am

Brutality Cloaked as Tradition By BEENA SARWAR http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/06/opinion/06SARW.html (NYT) Op-Ed

These problems also apply, much more than they should, and much more than they used to, to the United States.

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