This other HRW report is worth a glance too: New Orleans: Prisoners Abandoned to Floodwaters.

I wish i went to Princeton so I could watch...

ehh...Puck Frinceton as they say

That truly horrifying report, which is horrifying, upholds what I've been arguing for a long time: there has to be clear definition of what is and is not allowed. Short-sighted people jumped all over the "torture" memos from the top that attempted to explore and explicitly define what was and was not allowed. By attempting to split hairs and decide exactly whether certain coercive behavior that was borderline was acceptable or not, the memos became open to charges of encouraging torture-- even though the acts mentioned in the memo, while coercive, did not cross the boundary into torture. The originally criticized memo merely asked for a firm definition of what was and was not allowed. Shocked and honest, but misguided, criticism from all over insisted that it was "obvious" what was and was not torture.

Partially as a result of this furor, the reaction was to refuse to explicitly define what was and was not allowed. With this confusion and lack of guidence from the top, abuses were inevitable and did happen.

Clearly it was a mistake to shut off the debate of what was torture and what was allowed coercive behavior preemptively.

"I'm off to Princeton University for the next couple of days to participate in a conference sponsored by the Princeton Project for on National Security, which I referred to a year ago as "a nonpartisan effort to strengthen and update the intellectual underpinnings of U.S. national security strategy.""

seems like an example of being on the backward-bending portion of the labor supply curve ;)

War is Hell.

Not many (any?) Republicans at either TPM or Democracy Arsenal.

It looks like a strong program from an academic sense, but is there one person involved in the conference who supported the Iraq War?

It looks like a strong program from an academic sense, but is there one person involved in the conference who supported the Iraq War?

A certain D. Drezner perhaps?

Many people seem to forget that a substantial number of the left/democratic bloggers were pro-war.

Well, yeah thats a good point. Mr. Drezner also comes from the right side of the spectrum. That being said, its amazing how left out the right is in these things. Someone like Baker Spring from Heritage would fit right in with the bigwigs at this event. Even Frank Gaffney, though he has no PhD after his name and is a little excitable, would be a good addition to such a panel because, frankly, he speaks the views of a lot of key people on the right...