Jonathan (#8) is dead on the money.

Ooops, I was totally mispelling Abu Ghraib. D'oh!

ANNOYEDCAPITALIST, GAVINKOVITE, SONGE: We have several good reasons to believe that this was not the work of a "few bad apples":

1) It is well documented that many of the methods used at Abu Gharaib, and Guantanamo, were designed by the CIA throughout the 60's and 70's, and were taught by the USA to various other repressive regimes, such as those in the southern cone of South America (read about the "School of the Americas" for example).

2) We know that various legal preperations were made by the Bush administration for expanding the legal definitions of allowable "interrogation methods". (E.g. declaring individuals as enemy combatants not deserving of Geneva Convention protections.)

3) People who worked at Abu Gharaib (such as Janis Karpinski) have claimed that indivduals working as civillian contractors for the DOD directed much of the abuse.

4) General Ricardo Sanchez, a senior millitary figure in Iraq, authorized the use of many of these techniques explicitly (e.g. military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns, sensory deprivation, see the following article from the WP: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35612-2004Jun11.html

5) It makes no sense that soldiers, who are typically decent human beings, would do this sort of thing simply for pleasure. I think it is safe to say that, more often than not, soldiers do bad things when they are instructed to not because they want to.

It is a fact: Torture is a tool used by the American government, they used it before (in the Phillipines, Latin America, etc.), and they're using it presently. It is not used to extract information (as noted by others, it is not very good for that); it is used to terrorize individuals and members of a populace or armed movement who pose a political/millitary threat. The "Western Powers", headed by the USA, are in the business of repression and terror like other governments, but they are smart enough to restrict its use to people outside their own nations. The sort of outrage that Cory and others feel is a natural, and humane, response to repression and terror. It is only with ideological "we're the good guys" glasses that anyone can have a reaction otherwise.

It's a very interesting study (Euston, Tatsuno & McNaughton just published it in Science), but this article way overstretches what we know about hippocampal function or what this study found. That barcode business is very speculative (though a reasonable enough theory), and why exactly certain patterns of activity are played back during sleep and why this would be faster than the awake patterns is also unknown...

I'm sorry, Taubes' hyperbole totally drives me nuts. Two simple facts: a) athletes aren't fat, b) people who over-eat (i.e. most westerners) are fat. I have a lot of sympathy for the idea that carbs, especially highly refined sugars, are a major source of obesity in the West. But, Taubes provides a very unconvincing argument that exercise isn't important. He dismisses the evidence that people who exercise tend to be leaner, and then says exercise makes you more hungry. Well, what if you exercise but use *willpower* to not eat more? I lost a lot of weight a year ago - 20 kg (44lbs) in 2 months - simply by increasing my daily exercise while maintaining my diet. The exercise did make me hungry, but it was possible to resist the temptation to eat more.

This guy is trying to sell books, so he's sexing the story up, making it all sound like much more of a conspiracy than it really is. And sadly, the Quirks & Quarks host doesn't really challenge him on some of his bolder claims. I've got to be honest, it is exactly this sort of story that makes me allergic to the mainstream media's coverage of science.

I'm sorry, Taubes' hyperbole totally drives me nuts. Two simple facts: a) athletes aren't fat, b) people who over-eat (i.e. most westerners) are fat. I have a lot of sympathy for the idea that carbs, especially highly refined sugars, are a major source of obesity in the West. But, Taubes provides a very unconvincing argument that exercise isn't important. He dismisses the evidence that people who exercise tend to be leaner, and then says exercise makes you more hungry. Well, what if you exercise but use *willpower* to not eat more? I lost a lot of weight a year ago - 20 kg (44lbs) in 2 months - simply by increasing my daily exercise while maintaining my diet. The exercise did make me hungry, but it was possible to resist the temptation to eat more.

This guy is trying to sell books, so he's sexing the story up, making it all sound like much more of a conspiracy than it really is. And sadly, the Quirks & Quarks host doesn't really challenge him on some of his bolder claims. I've got to be honest, it is exactly this sort of story that makes me allergic to the mainstream media's coverage of science.