4-28-2009

4-28-09—[On Dec. 10, 2007] John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who had participated in the capture of suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in 2002, appeared on ABC News to say that while he considered waterboarding a form of torture, the technique worked and yielded results very quickly. M. Zubaydah started to co-operate after being waterboarded for “probably 30, 35 seconds,” Mr. Kiriakou told ABC’s Brian Ross. “From that day on he answered every question.” His claims—unverified at the time, but repeated by dozens of broadcasts, blogs and newspapers—have been sharply contrasted by a newly classified Justice Department memo that said waterboarding had been used on Mr. Zubaydah “at least 83 times.” NYT A1

--Today the United States stands tenth, along with Australia, Spain, and Sweden, behind Canada, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Belgium, Ireland, Norway Denmark and France in the percentage of its young people (ages 24-34) who have earned a post-secondary degree. Since secondary education abroad is often stronger than in the United States, the comparative educational attainment of Americans is probably even worse than these rankings suggest. Among adults in the age 55-64, we still lead the world in the percentage who are college graduates—which means not only that over the past three decades many nations have surpassed us, but that, in the aggregate, younger Americans are less well educated than their elders. –NYRB, May 14, 2009, p. 38.