All day we’re hearing from the government spokespeople that Nick Berg was absolutely not held in US custody, while the angry parents insist that he was. No, the US asserts, he was in the custody of the Iraqi police prior to his capture and beheading by terrorists. He was never detained by the US military.

But emails between the US consulate and Berg’s family contradict this claim:

Text of e-mails from Beth A. Payne, a U.S. consular officer in Baghdad, to members of the family of Nicholas Berg. Copies of the e-mails were provided to The Associated Press by the Berg family.

April 1, 1:26 a.m. (To Michael Berg, Berg’s father)

I have confirmed that your son, Nick, is being detained by the U.S. military in Mosul. He is safe. He was picked up approximately one week ago. We will try to obtain additional information regarding his detention and a contact person you can communicate with directly.

April 1, 5:23 a.m. (To Suzanne Berg, Berg’s mother)

I have been able to confirm that your son is being detained by the U.S. military. I am attempting to identify a person with the U.S. military or FBI here in Iraq who you can contact directly with your questions.

There are more, all repeating that he’s in the custody of the US military.

Can we wonder why the Bergs are incensed, and why the story everywhwere is being described as “murky” and “confusing”? Something’s definitely rotten in Iraq, and the military had better clarify things fast. Loose ends like this can provide breeding grounds for conspiracy theorists.

Or so says this reporter, who contends that it’s just around the corner.

The one-child policy in China is coming to an end.

It has a few years left to run yet in most of the country, but Shanghai’s city government announced in mid-April that divorced people who remarry can have a child together even if they each have a child from a previous marriage.

It’s just the first crack in the dam, but more will follow.

“The one-child policy was never intended to last forever,” explained sociology professor Guo Zhigang of Beijing University, predicting that Beijing would follow Shanghai’s example within three years and that other provinces would follow.

The world’s largest experiment in social engineering by government fiat is going to be shut down – and seeing what is happening elsewhere, you wonder how necessary it all was.

She sees this as a profoundly good thing because a.) the ensuing drop in femal infanticide will help correct China’s unwieldy gender imbalance, and b.) it will also help eliminate the “population bulge” of Chinese who are now in middle age, ensuring there’ll be enough people working to support them when they retire.

I don’t have enough command of the birth statistics to offer informed comment. What I do know — and it was a big surprise to me — is that most if not all the Chinese people I discussed this with were strongly, even fervently in favor of the one-child policy.

They all said, in almost the same words, that China’s overpopulation problem threatened to crush the country in a sea of bodies, and that mandatory birth control and enforced abortion, as unattractive as they are, were absolutely necessary to deal with the huge threat of way too many mouths to feed.

When you consider that between 1949 and 2000 the population in China grew by more than 750 million people, I can understand where they’re coming from. Is it a time to end the controversial one-child policy? I just don’t know.

Related post: It’s raining men in China

Just go there. (For the transcript, go here.)

David Brock has certainly hit the ground running, and Media Matters is now my third stop each morning, right after TPM and Andrew Sullivan.

And people still believe in the “liberal media” myth? As Instapuppy would say, Heh. Indeed.

Too disgusting for words:

1. The Abu Ghraib “scandal”: Good. Kick one for me. But bad discipline in the military (taking the pictures, I mean). Let’s have a couple of courts martial for appearance’s sake. Maximum sentence: 30 days CB.

2. The US press blowing up the Abu Ghraib business: Fury at these lefty jounalists doing down America. They just want to re-live the glory days of Vietnam, when they brought down a president they hated. (PS: They hated him because he was an anticommunist, while they themselves tought communism was just fine.)

3. GWB apologizing to some barbarian chieftain for Abu Ghraib: Disgust. Correct approach: “Mind if we film some footage in YOUR jails?”

4. Revelations about sexual hanky panky in US armed forces: Outrage. I want to see someone cashiered — a general, at least. This is no way for soldiers to behave when on active service. Gross, unpardonable violation of military ethics. Whose damn fool idea was it to mix men and women in the same units?

Well, No. 4 isn’t as disgusting as the others. But this list confirms my long-standing opinion that Derbyshire, despite some good commentary he’s written about China, is deranged. I wish he’d go through recent newspaper columns from hawk columnists like David Brooks and George Will and see how horrified they are over the Abu Ghraib revelations, and how they are now questioning the Bush administration’s ability to win this war.

So much for this being a publicity stunt conceived by “lefty journalists.”

(Link via Pandagon.)

Sorry that I’m not able to post much today. Yesterday one of my two cats (the only children I’m ever going to have) got terribly sick, and today it got progressively worse. An hour ago my friend and I force-fed her with pedialyte and it seemed to help a bit. But not much. My friend is more sanguine than I am, and is hoping it’s just the flu. I’m worried, though; she’s just sitting in the same spot, breathing fast and not moving.

We’ve had her since 1991. The week we adopted her she got violently sick, and we took her to the vet who recommended we put her to sleep. She had feline leukemia, and they said she’d most likely die in a few days. There was no way she could live more than a few months, they said.

I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t let her die, and then the miracle happened: Within a few says she recovered her strength, and for the past 14 years she has been in perfect health. But I suppose it couldn’t last forever.

Meanwhile, she’s hanging in there, and she even got up for a few minutes tonight and ate some food. Maybe there’ll be another miracle, and she’ll live another ten years. But she looks so weak and helpless, and I feel totally depressed. We’ll see how she’s doing tomorrow, and if there’s no improvement I’ll have to consider once again putting her to sleep.

It’s funny, how attached we get to our little pets. I can’t really imagine waking up without her jumping up to on the bed to say good morning….

I couldn’t watch the Nick Berg beheading, but the Memory Hole has it for those who are still undecided whether Al Qaeda terrorists are animals or not. (They are.)

I watched the video of the beheading of Daniel Pearl in 2002 and still cringe when I think about it. Once was enough. But I disagree with those who say these things shouldn’t be made public. As Andrew Sullivan said yesterday, let the world see just how vile and low Al Qaeda is. Why not show them at their very worst?

UPDATE: The link above is being swamped with hits, so it may not function. You can also view the graphic photos here.

Glutter is getting some great press today, her excellent article on the oppressive nature of the Chinese government appearing here. Great work.

My only question is in regard to a footnote where she writes that the Tiananmen Square “tank man” was Wang Weilin and that he was executed in 1989. I had thought these were rumors, and that there is no documentation that he was arrested or executed, or that his name was definitely Wang Weilin. (Jan Wong wrote in Red China Blues that he is still in hiding). But maybe the riddle has been answered and I just didn’t read about it.

Hilarious little article in The Register highlights the text of a spam message that brought back to mind the English subtitles I’d often see in pirated Chinese CDs.

It is a pearlite goods factory of Hebei province of China, the main variety that the speciality produces: Pearl mere sands, pearlite( 2. 5 mm-7mm),it regulate explosives densities because pharmaceutical( hate pearlite water), hate water keep pearlites warm board of, The cement pearlite keeps the board warm, the pearlite is helped and strain the pharmaceutical. The price is favourable , welcome old and new customers to consult the business, but process and made according to different needs, Hope to cooperate with you!

No, I don’t know what “pearlite” is either, but the article gives some helpful links if you’re curious.

As I heard Oklahoma Senator Inhofe question Major General Taguba today in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee I wanted to sink into the floor.

Sen. Inhofe (R-OK): First of all, I regret I wasn’t here on Friday. I was unable to be here. But maybe it’s better that I wasn’t because as I watch this outrage that everyone seems to have about the treatment of these prisoners I have to say and I’m probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment.

The idea that these prisoners — they’re not there for traffic violations. If they’re in cell block 1A or 1B, these prisoners, they’re murderers, they’re terrorists, they’re insurgents, and many of them probably have American blood probably on their hands and here we’re so concerned about the treatment of those individuals.

Funny that according to Seymour Hersh and the Red Cross, as many as 80 percent are there due to random arrests and were guilty only of being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

This was a sick, nasty, ugly performance that shows the world America at its very worst — reactionary, holier than thou, always right, vitriolic, sneering at truth and justice, and willing to paint anyone as an enemy or a terrorist if that will effectively silence and invalidate them. Time for some big changes come November.

Update: Kevin Drum was as horrified as I was:

As near as I can tell, Inhofe’s only regret is that we went too easy on the guys at Abu Ghraib. And the Geneva Convention is for pussies.

I know for a fact that most Republicans find this kind of sentiment abhorrent, so how is it that.

Needless to say, Fox News played the clip again and again, portraying Inhofe as some kind of hero.

Just last week I wrote, “McCain must hate Bush with a fierce passion. I would love to see him jump ship and join Kerry, impossible though it may be. Then we’d have an election campaign for the books.”

It was a fantasy, but now Andrew Sullivan is making a passionate argument for a Kerry-McCain ticket.

There is no one better suited in the country to tackle a difficult war where the United States is credibly accused of abusing prisoners than John McCain. He was, after all, a victim of the worst kind of prisoner torture imaginable in the Hanoi Hilton. His military credentials are impeccable but so are his moral scruples and backbone; that’s a rare combination. As a vice-presidential candidate, he would allow Kerry to criticize the conduct of the war and occupation, but also to pursue them credibly. He would give Kerry credibility on national defense, removing the taint of an “antiwar” candidacy headed by a man who helped pioneer the antiwar forces during Vietnam. He would ensure that a Kerry victory would not be interpreted by America’s allies or enemies as a decision to cut and run from Iraq.
….

McCain could say that this national crisis demands that he put country ahead of party and serve. His loyalty to his party would therefore be trumped by loyalty to his country. Kerry could also say that his impulse is to be a “uniter, not a divider,” and that, unlike Bush, he will actually show it in his pick for the vice-presidency. Their platform? Winning the war, cutting the deficit, reforming corporate excess. A Kerry-McCain ticket, regardless of the many difficulties, would, I think, win in a landslide. Will it happen? Still unlikely. But Abu Ghraib has shortened the odds; and the arguments for such a dramatic innovation just got a lot stronger.

In normal times the idea of a split ticket would be absurd. But these aren’t normal times, and some real out-of-the-box thinking is called for. It still sounds like a fantasy, with a hundred reason why it’s not practical. But stranger things have happened. It would almost certainly spell a Kerry victory and ensure the end of the Bush dynasty. It’s a truly thrilling notion.

Update: Now Kevin Drum chimes in, supporting the idea. Can we raise the noise level on this and create a shift, from fantasy to possibility?