The ‘terrorism expert’ industry

Ken Silverstein has a good article in the June 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine (p. 58-59, behind a paywall) looking closely at the resume of one Matthew Levitt, one of the many so-called ‘terrorism experts’ who on closer examination do not seem to have the kind of expertise they claim to have. Their main function seems to be to hype the terrorist threat beyond all recognition and it is easy for them to do so because everyone, except the general public, benefits: They get paid to give their opinion as ‘expert witnesses’ in the government’s prosecution of terrorism cases, the media get to write sensationalistic stories, and the government achieves its goal of keeping the population terrified and docile.

In the past decade, the federal government has brought to trial hundreds of alleged terrorists. Some of these cases have been deadly serious and others decidedly dubious, but regardless of the indictment’s plausibility, prosecutors often rely on an “expert witness” to frame and buttress their charges. In their constellation of star witnesses, few have shone brighter than Matthew Levitt, Ph.D., who has testified or submitted written opinions in at least thirteen terrorism-related trials.
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Terrorism experts often have professional, ideological, and financial incentives to side with the government. For his turns as an expert witness, Levitt typically bills the government $200 an hour. Not coincidentally, his role also dovetails neatly with the policy objectives of his employer, the Washington Institute, which was founded by the powerful pro-Israel lobby AIPAC. These gigs are, of course, self-reinforcing, each one serving to further legitimate Levitt as an expert. Less well served by this arrangement are defendants, whose cases can be won or lost on the basis of witness testimony that is all the more convincing when the government withholds so much of the hard evidence from the jury.

And so it goes.

Where are you on the global fat scale?

Americans tend to be obsessed about how they look, especially their weight. Now there is a tool to further feed that obsession for those who may have wondered how they might compare if they happened to live in another country. When you insert your personal data into this global body mass index calculator, it returns your own BMI along with the ranges of BMI for 177 other countries in the world,

It turns out that the US is sixth in average BMI, being beaten by Micronesia, Tonga, Croatia, Samoa, and Argentina. I was wondering what it might be about these small Pacific islands that might cause three of them (rank 176, 178, and 173 respectively out of 193 countries in terms of population) to rank in the top four.

I have not been to any of these countries and so have no first hand experience but my wife who has been to Argentina says that she would never have guessed that they ranked above the US because she saw hardly any overweight people there, unlike what she sees here. This should serve as a warning that using our personal impressions (which are always based on small and usually unrepresentative samples) to infer the characteristics of entire populations can lead to wildly erroneous conclusions.

The things that cause bipartisan outrage

I thought that our political leaders had become so jaded that they just did not care about anything anymore. If they were not angry about presidential assassination programs, starting wars without their approval, prosecution of whistle blowers, torture, suspension of habeas corpus, and corporate and financial larceny on a grand scale, to name just a few things, then what possibly could they get mad about? But then along comes an issue that unites and rouses them to great heights of bipartisan indignation. [Read more…]

Midwest Freethought Conference

One of the organizers sent me an email about it:

I’d like to ask you to plug or mention our conference on your blog. The Midwest Freethought Conference is coming up (all too quickly) on August 3-5 in Omaha, NE. We have a GREAT lineup of speakers, and, due to the OmahaCoR’s billboard invitation to non-believers (the first atheistic billboard in Nebraska), a huge amount of publicity. The speakers are, in (more or less) order of appearance: Brian Dunning, Adam Brown, Dave Muscato, Amanda Knief, PZ Myers, Amanda Brown, Hemant Mehta, Jerry deWitt, Sarah Morehead, AJ Johnson, Dan Barker, and Fred Edwords. [Read more…]

Mitt Romney’s magical IRA

The saga over Mitt Romney’s finances keeps getting more complex. The latest involves his Individual Retirement Account.

The IRA was introduced as a means to encourage people to save for their retirement by putting away some money each year that was tax-deductible (up to a certain income level) and where the accrued interest was tax-exempt. The idea was that when you started withdrawing the money in your retirement, your tax rate would be lower because you were now in a lower income bracket. For most people, it is their IRA, coupled with the Social Security income, that they depend upon in their later years. [Read more…]

The world as seen by frightened people

I came across a website called The Thinking Housewife where the host Laura Wood and her friends (?) give advice to people who write in. A recent question was from Jennifer about what to do with new neighbors in their apartment complex who are lesbians and would like their child to play with Jennifer’s. Jennifer, a Catholic, wants to know the best way to protect her children’s innocence from being contaminated by hanging around with such undesirables. [Read more…]