After my recent post on the Senate Armed Ser­vices Committee’s report on detainee abuse, I received a few sup­port­ive emails and one mild dis­sent. (By the way, folks, why not skip the email and just post com­ments here instead, for the sake of dis­cus­sion?) I want to address that dis­sent briefly here. CG wrote:

After the Senate report was released, it seems obvi­ous that the media would follow suit and bring atten­tion to this issue, but should we really be con­grat­u­lat­ing the media and the Times for doing its job? Wouldn’t it be better to ques­tion what took them so long and, fur­ther­more, what they plan to do going for­ward with the new admin­is­tra­tion? . . . [L]ooking ahead, will these same pub­li­ca­tions call upon the newly elected admin­is­tra­tion to charge or release all those held by the US—for as you are aware, detain­ing a person with­out charge or suf­fi­cient judi­cial over­sight is also ille­gal under inter­na­tional law and seen as a war crime by many.

It’s pos­si­ble that I wasn’t emphatic enough on this point, but I think it will be clear to anyone who returns to the orig­i­nal post that I wasn’t con­grat­u­lat­ing the media.

I begin this, my first post here at DE, by thank­ing Bobby (or Robert P. Baird, as he is some­times called) for asking me to join up.  I’ll do my best not to bore.  

To more press­ing issues: some remark­able inves­ti­ga­tions of our government’s recent excesses are under way as I type.  No doubt many read­ing this post have heard about some of the more eccen­tric recent attempts to pros­e­cute Cheney and/or Bush in small Amer­i­can cities and towns; at least one of these, in South Texas, led to an indict­ment.  These smaller inves­ti­ga­tions are hard to take too seri­ously, espe­cially the one in TX, which was led up by a pros­e­cu­tor regarded even by locals as loopy.  The inves­ti­ga­tions that I think we should take seri­ously are being car­ried out by sanc­tioned gov­ern­men­tal bodies.  It’s not that they are dig­ging up new infor­ma­tion.  It’s that the media tends to wait for the author­i­ties to give them the wink and nod, and they’re now doing so, both at home and in allied coun­tries like Spain and Ger­many.

In the Novem­ber Issue of The Atlantic, blog­ging king­pin Andrew Sul­li­van puts to words the inef­fa­ble plea­sure–and embar­rass­ing self-​exposure–of blog­ging. He lands on sev­eral beau­ti­ful for­mu­la­tions of the attrac­tion: the “instantly public” diary form, par­tic­i­pa­tion in the “online con­ver­sa­tion of humankind,” a “superficial medium” that “masked con­sid­er­able depth” via a single con­cep­tu­ally new tech­no­log­i­cal fea­ture, i.e., the hyperlink.

Sul­li­van strikes me as the per­fect blog­ger to con­sider the ontol­ogy of blog­ging, as his own blog, The Daily Dish, offers a per­fect exam­ple of the inevitable back­lash that comes from insta-writing.  His taste of crow was lead­ing a pas­sion­ate and emo­tional drum­beat up to the Iraq War in which he was guilty of nasty charges to war crit­ics and skep­tics, which he has since recanted and from which he con­tin­u­ally repents with an equally pas­sion­ate and emo­tional out­rage at the Bush administration’s tor­ture poli­cies and other crimes of war.

From Celia Dugger’s arti­cle in the Times today about a Zim­bab­wean cholera epi­demic that has infected 16,000 people and killed 780:

Infla­tion offi­cially hit 231 mil­lion per­cent in July, but John Robert­son, an inde­pen­dent econ­o­mist in Zim­babwe, esti­mates that it has now surged to an astound­ing eight quin­til­lion per­cent — that is an eight fol­lowed by 18 zeros.

For the record, that’s 8,000,000,000,000,000,000%

(Photo by the New York Times.)