No Proof Required

Yahoo ran a story about the latest way to get even with people: accuse them of being members of Al-Qaeda. While the extent of the damage to this poor guy was a bit of humiliation and several hours in a jail cell, imagine what would have happened if he had flown into Egypt or Syria and had no Western European or North American citizenship to save his skin: he would have likely been tortured into giving confessions and then convicted based on the same.

During this same week, the BBC broke a story about Curveball, an Iraqi defector, liar, and alcoholic whose testimony was central to the arguments Colin Powell presented to the UN for invading Iraq. Without a doubt, the US would have invaded Iraq regardless of the reason. The point here is that Powell put his own credibility and that of his country at stake with little to go on.

This all reminds me of university: I found that when I was asked to write an essay, if I stuck to the positions presented by the professor during class, I got higher grades than when I presented my own views. Regardless of how much I defended my own views or how blindly I regurgitated the professor's views, the results were the same: Say as I say, get an A. It worked, and I'm a pragmatist, so I used it to my advantage.