There is key information missing in General Stanley McChrystal's recipe to reform U.S. detentions in Afghanistan. The plan, part of the General's 66-page assessment published by the Washington Post, outlines a strategy to turn over "all detention operations in Afghanistan ... to the Afghan government once they have developed the requisite sustainable capacity to run those systems properly." This is the correct objective for the United States, but some of the ingredients for achieving it need to be filled in.
Let me start with the obvious, that yes, if Pelosi knew there were war crimes being committed by the administration, and failed to try to stop it, even at risk of prison time for violating secrecy laws, then that deserves condemnation, loss of her Speaker's gavel and perhaps even prosecution. I certainly think her and the other members of Congress who were at all briefed on these activities should be part of any investigation that takes place. That said, let's not get carried away and equate people who merely know about a crime, and those who actively plan and execute that crime. Morally there is a significant difference there.
However her predicament highlights a lesser feature of multiple Bush Administration intelligence scandals that needs more attention: Bush's penchant for only having the Gang-Of-Eight briefed, rather than the full Intelligence Committees of the House and Senate. This decision was quite deliberate, and legally it is highly consequential in so far as it eviscerates Congress' ability to conduct meaningful oversight or legislative check on the Executive branch.
As President-elect Barack Obama continues to build his national security staff, now focused on intelligence, it is possible that he might ask CIA Director Mike Hayden to stay on for a while, intelligence sources say.
CIA operatives want Hayden for a variety of reasons. Should Obama pick him, it would be an interesting capstone to the FISA saga.
It may seem unremarkable to assert that we've got such a thing as a cognitive surplus, but just in case, I'd hate for anyone to assume that it's because we're fundamentally different than our ancestors in much more than lifestyle technology. From Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel:
... [A]n entire field of science, termed ethnobiology, studies peoples' knowledge of the wild plants and animals in their environment. Such studies have concentrated especially on the world's few surviving hunting-gathering peoples, and on farming peoples who still depend heavily on wild foods and natural products. The studies generally show that such peoples are walking encyclopedias of natural history, with individual names (in their local language) for as many as a thousand or more plant and animal species, and with detailed knowledge of those species' biological characteristics, distribution, and potential uses. As people become increasingly dependent on domesticated plants and animals, this traditional knowledge gradually loses its value and becomes lost, until one arrives at modern supermarket shoppers who could not distinguish a wild grass from a wild pulse. ...
We didn't necessarily get smarter, as such, we made our environment simpler. It might not always be optimally healthy, but in general, all you need to do to survive food-wise in our society is get money (which may itself be quite a complicated procedure) and exchange it for things labeled as food in a clearly marked grocery or convenience store. That leaves a lot of mental labor free for other activities.
So while our base capacity for intelligence is unlikely to have changed much, and has likely just been devoted to other things, I'm going to turn around and suggest that we may actually be somewhat smarter than past generations. It's been long and well documented that malnutrition damages brain development (pdf), particularly protein malnutrition, and that this is a lifelong, permanent effect for the individual, even though it has no bearing on one's genetic makeup.
