JONNA SPILLBOR WRITES ABOUT FALSE ACCUSATIONS OF RAPE:

The statistics on false rape reports in the U.S. are widely divergent, and often too outdated to be meaningful. Not surprisingly, the numbers also depend on whom you ask. Organizations that tout a feminist agenda claim the number of false rape reports to be nearly non-existent – about two percent. But other organizations, taking the side of men, claim that false reports are actually very common – citing numbers ranging from forty-one to sixty percent.

Amid the statistics, the truth is impossible to ascertain – but it’s plain that false reports are indeed made, and that they can ruin the life of the accused, whether or not a conviction follows.

Falsely reporting any crime is shameful. Falsely reporting a rape is especially heinous. The liar who files the false claim dishonors – and makes life all the more difficult for – the many true victims who file genuine rape claims because they have been terribly violated, and seek justice for it. At the same time, and perhaps even more seriously, the false report begins to destroy the reputation, and sometimes the life, of the accused from the very moment it is made – a fact of which many accusers are keenly aware.

She says that penalties for false accusations need to be stiffer, and more strictly enforced. (Via TalkLeft).

CHEMICAL WEAPONS FOUND — at American University in Washington, DC!

Over the next few years, however, various types of historical documentation, including the aerial photos, suggested that the Army Corps had failed to search several areas of Spring Valley for pits where canisters of mustard, lewisite, and other poisonous agents might still be buried. Erik Olson, a senior attorney in the Washington, D.C., office of the Natural Resources Defense Council, found another key piece of evidence. After reading in the newspaper about the discovery of World War I chemical munitions in Spring Valley, he recalled hearing that his maternal grandfather, Sgt. C. W. Maurer, had buried chemical weapons when he was stationed at Camp AU in 1918.

In 1996, officials at the District of Columbia Department of Health expressed concern about the army’s investigation, noting that the aerial images and Sergeant Maurer’s photograph suggested that Spring Valley contained additional burial sites. The Army Corps of Engineers rejected most of the city’s arguments, but finally admitted in September 1997 that it had looked in the wrong place for the mustard burial pit. Although the 1927 aerial photograph had shown a ground scar in the vicinity of Glenbrook Road, the Corps’ 1993–1995 investigation had found no evidence of a disposal pit in the area. On reviewing the evidence, army engineers realized that because of a mapping error, they had missed the suspected pit by about 150 feet. The newly identified site was just across the American University property line, in the backyard of South Korean Amb. Hong-Koo Lee’s residence, an expanse of green lawn and ornamental gardens. . . .

Identifying potential chemical weapon burial sites involves an extensive review of historical documents, interviews with people who may have relevant information, and soil sampling. Currently, army officials estimate that the United States has 101 known or suspected chemical weapon burial sites in 38 states, the District of Columbia, and two territories (Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands).

And that’s here. Sheesh. Thanks to reader Ryan Fitzpatrick for the pointer. Fitzpatrick adds:

The area that we’re talking about isn’t huge, AU is not a sprawling campus, and even with the residential areas that used to be part of the campus, we’re only talking about maybe 1 to 1.5 square miles. But the chemical warheads had been sitting in the ground all that time, and they’re still uncovering more of
them last I heard.

1.5 square miles, in the middle of the DC metro area, and we’re just now recovering chemical weapons from World War I that we buried? And now everyone expects that we can waltz into Iraq and inside three months comb through the entire place with God-knows-how many square miles of empty, uninhabited ground these things could be buried in? I think I’ll give the administration a little bit more time before coming to any conclusions.

Not me — I’m putting them on a strict timetable, and giving them only half as much time as it took above!

UPDATE: Reader Gerald Hanner emails:

Yeah. A smallish project on my last active duty assignment at Offutt AFB NE involved trying to find where some toxic gunk from the manufacture of bombs (during WW II) was buried in the vicinity of Hastings NE. Seems that there was a big munitions plant at Hastings durin’ the wah. When the place went out of business after WW II residue, by-products, and chemicals used in the manufacture of explosives were simply dumped into pits and covered.

Forty years later I was on a team that was supposed to figure out where the stuff was so that it could be dug up and properly disposed of. During the time I was working on the problem we failed to find where the stuff was actually buried — even though we knew the general vicinity of its location. I even tried to get an SR-71 to scan the area with its sensors (I knew that some of their stuff could “see” stuff that was not completely on the surface.). When I retired it hadn’t been done.

Obviously, someone lied about the stuff having been there!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Josh Heit points to the official website on the American University excavation. He also observes: “The McKinley Building has a plaque at its entrance describing the testing done at AU during WWI for chemical weaponry. It was grafffited with anti-war slogans this spring.”

LT SMASH has an interesting roundup of posts from military bloggers in Iraq. Follow the links and you’ll see some news that isn’t getting reported in the Big Media.

DECLAN MCCULLAGH IS LESS CHARITABLE to the Greenpeace report on nanotechnology than I was:

Being an activist means always having to find something new to complain about.

Yeah, those guys do manage to crank out new “product” pretty steadily.

HERE’S A RATHER POSITIVE REPORT from Iraq. But there is some criticism:

Couvillon “loves to get too involved. He believes the people too much because he likes them,” Muhammad said. “Things are too democratic here; the Marines should be ruling with a more iron hand. People come to him for help, saying they were abused when they just want a handout, and sometimes they get it.”

I wonder what Robert Fisk would say?

SOME PEOPLE ARE PROCLAIMING an AP report by Charles Hanley as proof that the Bush Administration fudged facts on the war. But Bryan Preston says it’s Hanley who can’t be trusted.

WHENEVER I START TO WONDER if I’m being too hard on the Justice Department, there’s a story like this:

California and other states that want to make marijuana available to sick or dying patients are flouting federal drug laws in much the same way that Southern states defied national civil rights laws, a senior Bush administration lawyer said.

Oh, yeah, it’s exactly the same.

BRIAN CARNELL REPORTS that occupiers are exploiting inhabitants of Afghanistan in violation of international law.

ARNOLD LOOKS AS IF HE MIGHT HAVE A SHOT at the coveted Moxie endorsement.

BOBBY ALLISON-GALLIMORE offers advice for new law students.

DEFENSETECH REPORTS that a German firm is offering smart-bomb countermeasures. Thanks, guys.

TONY QUINN:

The recall is about much more than Gov. Davis. It is an assault on the whole political class in California by an electorate in a very bad mood. Voters have concluded that the electoral process has become a private affair of incumbents, their campaign consultants and the various interest groups that fund these endeavors, and now they have a chance to do something about it.

Sounds plausible.

UPDATE: Sgt. Stryker says more or less the same thing, in more colorful fashion:

Oooh, that’ll really stick in the professionals’ craw , eh? If real people put down the bong, go to the ballot box and exercise their right to vote, they’ll screw up all kinds of shit for people who’ve spent an entire lifetime getting by on voter apathy.

I like the monkey bit, too.

THE AGITATOR is becoming a group blog. This should be interesting.

THE GUARDIAN is perpetuating the myth that African-Americans are “cannon fodder,” something that wasn’t true in Vietnam, and isn’t true now. Ambit notes the error.

But if you don’t like a war, it has to be racist somehow . . . .

IAIN MURRAY WRITES on privatizing the BBC. He seems to think the idea is gathering momentum:

The BBC would become the latest in a long line of British institutions that had their over-mighty political pretensions cut down by privatization or marginalization. . . . The great irony will be that this greatest and most-needed of all privatizations will probably be undertaken by a center-left government that shares Lord Reith’s paternalist instincts. The people’s government has decided that the people’s broadcaster no longer represents the people. In that at least the Blairites are correct.

Interesting.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON WRITES that after-the-fact questions about 9/11 intelligence failures are to some degree beside the point. He also suggests that we still haven’t learned the necessary lessons:

The 9/11 tragedy was not due simply to bureaucratic inertia or to some sort of oil conspiracy that overlooked criminal behavior of the sheiks of the petroleum states (though all that no doubt played a role), but was far more a dividend of political correctness. If Senator Graham is sincerely worried about our lethal oversights and mistakes, he should examine the orthodoxies and policies that have precluded the according of special scrutiny to radical Islamists in mosques and religious schools across America. Most operated with impunity for decades under the exemptions provided by the false gods of “diversity” and “multiculturalism.”

Had Mr. Atta and his fellow killers been arrested on probable cause, their Islamic haunts raided, and assorted charities and fundraisers shut down on September 10, 2001 — cries of racism, profiling, and McCarthyism would have drowned out the purportedly farfetched excuses that such preemptory FBI raids had in fact saved thousands in Manhattan.

After a long shootout precipitated by American troops who tried to approach a private residence in Mosul, the sons of Saddam were killed in a deadly firefight. Several of our own troops were wounded. Almost immediately, columnists and congressmen — Mr. Rangel was especially visible in this regard — implied that we had engaged in targeted assassinations. Indeed, we had apparently not even made an attempt to provide due process!

Read the whole thing.

DONALD LUSKIN IS challenging the New York Times to correct Paul Krugman’s errors:

When is the “newspaper of record” going to run a correction of Paul Krugman’s egregious mathematical error in which he claimed, in his August 1 column, that growth in real per capita California state spending from $1,950 in 1990 to $2,211 in 2003 was “only 10%,” when anyone with a pocket calculator can tell that it is really 13.4 percent? And when will it correct Krugman’s flatly deceptive claim that this growth “was simply a matter of keeping up with the population and inflation,” when calculations of real per capita growth, by definition, already take those factors into account?

I challenge the Times either to demonstrate that Krugman’s calculation and his characterization are accurate, or to correct his errors. For a Princeton economics professor, this should be a simple matter to straighten out with the editors.

And when is the “newspaper of record” going to run a correction retracting the embarrassing quotation that Krugman attributed to the Bush administration’s Treasury Department in his August 5 column, but which no one in the Bush administration or the Treasury Department ever actually said?

Right after they correct Maureen Dowd’s egregious misquotes, I suspect. And maybe after they correct the serious error on federal sentencing that law professor Eric Muller pointed out.

UPDATE: An economist reader emails:

Luskin does a good public service by getting on Krugman. Krugman’s column is an embarrassment to my profession. However, Luskin’s latest does Krugman a disservice and I would hesitate to tout it.

Here is Krugman’s relevant sentence.

As analysts at the nonpartisan California Budget Project point out, real state spending per capita was only 10 percent higher in 2002-03 than it was in 1989-90 — that is, most of the spending growth was simply a matter of keeping up with the population and inflation.

Now the 13% versus 10% correction is, of course, valid assuming Luskin’s numbers are correct, but on the real per-capita business (and I hate to admit it) I’m with Krugman. The raw number of the budget increase is huge – something like 40%. The real per-capita increase is 10% (or, more correctly, 13%). That implies that “most of the spending growth was simply a matter of keeping up with the population and inflation” just as Krugman states. Krugman isn’t stating that real per-capita spending didn’t increase, but only that real per-capita increases make up a minority of the raw increase. That is, 10/40 (or 13/40) is less than 1/2.

Perhaps Luskin will have a response.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Luskin emails:

It doesn’t surprise me that an economist would have no problem with Krugman’s statement about real per capita spending. When I first read the statement it didn’t bother me either, because I easily knew what Krugman meant — he was implicitly saying that population growth and inflation reduced what would otherwise seem to be even greater spending growth to “only 10%” (of course it’s rally 13.4% according to Krugman’s own source, but that’s another matter). But then I started getting emails from readers, who are not economists. They were confused and misled by the way Krugman chose to express himself. I went back and read it again, and could see what they meant. Considering that Krugman has been browbeating the Treasury Department for the way it speaks about tax distribution statistics, he should set a high standard and say exactly what he means. The evidence of the emails I got is that people were misled — and it’s no coincidence that they were misled in the direction that flattered Krugman’s point. While that element of Krugman’s statement may not deserve a “correction” per se, he should certainly acknowledge its flaws (and hopefully not in his usual supercilious way of sighing, smiling ironically, and then going on about how he sometimes forgets that he’s not writing for other trained economists, and space is so constrained, and so on and so on….).

There you are.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Luskin now has more on his blog.

BIG WMD DISCOVERY — IN CHINA?

An accident in China involving chemical weapons allegedly left behind by Japanese troops in World War II has left at least 36 people ill. Metal drums containing what is thought to be mustard gas were found on a construction site in the city of Qiqihar in Heilongjiang province.

Most of the injured are construction workers and people who came into contact with the drums after they had been unwittingly opened.

Obviously the Chinese don’t have enough people on the ground. . . Reader Rob Hinkley emails:

The lessons?

[1] Things can stay hidden for a long long time.
[2] Just because a chemical weapons program may have closed down years ago doesn’t mean that barrels of product weren’t stashed away for use.

Indeed.

UPDATE: Bryan Preston has more thoughts.

THREATENING VIOLENCE AGAINST SCHWARZENEGGER?

California Democratic Party Spokesman Bob Mulholland this weekend warned Arnold Schwarzenegger that “real bullets” will be coming his way during his campaign to be governor!

“Schwarzenegger is going to find out, that unlike a Hollywood movie set, the bullets coming at him in this campaign are going to be real bullets and he is going to have to respond to them,” warned Mulholland in an interview with a camera crew from ABC NEWS.

Hmm. Threatening a candidate with “real bullets?” Somehow I think that if a Republican had said this about a member of the Kennedy clan (which, of course, Arnold is), it would be getting more play. . . .

Of course, Mulholland ought to be keelhauled by the Society For Preserving The Distinction Between The Real and The Metaphorical for using “real bullets” to mean “nasty words,” anyway.

Literally keelhauled or metaphorically keelhauled? I’m still trying to decide. Meanwhile let’s just say that Mulholland’s attack has “misfired.”

UPDATE: And maybe Mulholland should be “terminated.” Ralph Luker observes:

This is the sort of thing that gives Davis his reputation as the state’s greatest champion of intimidation and smear since Richard Nixon. Firing Mulholland now might improve Davis’s chance of surviving the recall campaign. It’s never too late to try to create the appearance of decency.

I rather doubt that a smear campaign against Arnold can work, and I suspect that it will simply drag down everyone associated with Davis and reconfirm voters’ suspicion that the gang in charge will do anything to preserve its own power. But California politics is not my strong suit.

UPDATE: Hey, maybe it wasn’t metaphorical after all. . . .

IT’S NOT JUST FOR CELLPHONES ANYMORE — and it never was! Ralph Kinney Bennett has an interesting piece on the history of driver distractions.

DONALD SENSING HAS VIDEO of the Braves’ unassisted triple play on his site.

LIMBAUGH VS. THE BLOGOSPHERE: The latest round is over at Spoons’ place.

UPDATE: Here’s more from blogger and Limbaugh subscriber Susanna Cornett.