For reasons that don't bear repeating here, I am forced to use msn.com as my homepage when I log onto the internet from my office. Usually, I click past the features that Microsoft has passed off as "news" and go wherever it is that I was trying to go. But occasionally, the teaser headlines give me pause. Today was one of those days.

Today's headlines included a box entitled "Strictly Business", with the following links to helpful business-related articles:

- PDA or cell? Best tech tools for biz trips
- Top-selling US cars
- Work-at-home tips
- MBAs: hotter than ever

I recalled hearing something recently about how studies have suggested that an MBA is in fact not worth the money it costs to get one, and so I was intrigued by the last article. I clicked the link to read about "MBAs: On the Rise", thinking that perhaps the studies I had heard about were flawed, or had been challenged, or something. I was surprised, therefore, to find the following disclaimer, just after the headline: "This article is brought to you by The Princeton Review, a sponsor of the College and Grad pages on Encarta.com." Hmmm.

I read the article. Typical, but not surprising, given the sponsor, is the following quote: One thing is certain: No matter what the economy is doing or what kind of money people are making, an MBA will always provide a student with more knowledge, experience, and networking capability. There was no source credited for this bold statement. Arguably, it simply restates the accepted wisdom, so no source is necessary.

Except for one thing: a number of studies, including one by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, the accrediting organization for US business schools, say that the conventional wisdom is untrue. And as I recalled, these studies are not old news, either: the July 2002 issue of Business 2.0 reports that a number of studies, among them reports by the AACSB, Stanford Business School professor Jeffrey Pfeffer and Chicago Business School professor Ronald Burt, have concluded that there seems to be no correlation between MBAs and career enhancement. One study noted that in a survey of MBA graduates, a majority of the respondents said that the skills that are most useful in the real world -- one on one communications, managing change and listening skills -- are not taught even "moderately effectively" at most business schools.

MSN, by the way, reported none of this. Now, anyone who bases his or her decision to get an MBA based on one article on MSN.com sponsored by Princeton Review is acting with questionable judgment and doesn't deserve much sympathy in the first place, but this example does raise the larger question of the objectivity of information on sites like MSN, Yahoo and other "destination" homepages. Previously, I have seen alot of discussion about this issue in the context of search engines' "sponsored links" (and the FTC has said that it may require better disclosure of sponsored links), but relatively little about it in the related, but separate, context of "sponsored content."

To its credit, MSN did mark the article as a paid advertorial -- but only after you clicked on the "news" headline. Still, I have to wonder, since the article appears on the site for Encarta, Microsoft's electronic encyclopedia: What other information in the encyclopedia is shaped by its "sponsor"?

A puzzling side note to my last post, particularly in view of the widespread world condemnation of Israel for the attack on Sheik Shehada:

According to the Times of India, Arafat believes that the world has been "silent" about the attacks:

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on Tuesday deplored what he called "the silence of the international community" after an Israeli air raid which killed 14 Palestinians, including nine children, as well as the militant leader who was targeted, the WAFA news agency reported.

"It is carnage which no human being can imagine," he said. "I ask the whole world how it can remain silent before such crimes and not seek to put an end to them?"

He charged that "Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon does not want peace but is seeking to continue his policy of massacres".

I have heard reports in the past that Arafat may suffer from Parkinson's disease or some other neurological ailment. Could this be evidence of that? [I'm not suggesting it is. I'm just saying that it's hard to read the condemnations of Kofi Anan, Javier Solana, Jack Straw, George W. Bush and all the rest and then make a public statement that the world is "silent". The other explanation is that the Times of India got it wrong, which I have no information about.]

On the subject of the latest chapter in the Middle East trainwreck (the killing of Sheik Salah Shehada), I had intended to write about the disparity between the international condemnation following Israel's latest violence and the relative silence that has followed recent Palestinian terrorism. Basically, my question was "why is it that the international opinion machine that has proven so adept at condemning Israel's retaliatory strike is incapable of condemning Palestinian violence?" As I thought more about it, though, I wondered if perhaps that question itself wasn't obscuring a larger, and more significant question: Is it a healthy thing for Israel's supporters to be arguing for this sort of "moral equivalence"?

In considering these questions, I thought an example would be helpful.

Last week, three Palestinian gunmen, dressed in IDF uniforms, ambushed a bus near the Emanuel settlement in the West Bank, and killed seven people, including an 11-month old infant, her father and her grandmother. According to reports at the time, her mother and two-year old brother were wounded by gunfire.

Actually, "ambush" is an antiseptic, almost clinical description of what happened. To quote the New York Times,

As an armor-plated bus from Bnei Brak, an Orthodox town near Tel Aviv, lumbered up a winding road to Immanuel, a powerful bomb exploded, riddling the vehicle with shrapnel and blowing out its right tires, police and army officials said.

The gunmen, hiding in a scrub-covered rise by the side of the road, opened fire, closing in on the bus as it came to a stop in a shallow ditch by the side of the road, authorities said. The assailants poured gunfire and hurled grenades through the upper windows of the bus, which were not bulletproof. Passengers took cover on the floor, trapped in the vehicle, whose doors were disabled.

Three (count 'em, three) different terrorist organizations immediately claimed "credit" for the attack, including wings of Hamas and Fatah. Fatah, remember, has been linked to Arafat, and Hamas is widely regarded as a "legitimate" competitor for power in a post-Arafat Palestine. But read the Times article, or indeed, any coverage in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Nary a peep from the world community condemning the brutal killing and wounding of civilians. Not a word from the international community about the intentional and cold-blooded murder of an eleven month old girl.

[This is all the more difficult to understand when you consider, as the Washington Post noted, "it came hours before representatives of the "quartet" -- the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations -- met in New York to discuss moving forward on the Bush administration's latest Middle East peace initiative." To his credit, Bush had spokesman Ari Fleischer condemn the "latest act of violence", but apparently, the EU and the UN -- even as they were gathered to discuss the situation in the Middle East -- didn't comment (or, if they did, it wasn't reported in the mainstream press).]

Now consider Israel's bombing of Shehada's residence. As far as we know now, Shehada, under an assumed name, was hiding in a house in a heavily populated area in Gaza. Overnight, an IDF F-16 fired a one-ton missle into Shehada's residence, killing him, his wife and possibly three of his children (there are conflicting reports of whether it is two or three) either in the explosion or when the building collapsed around them. The bomb also destroyed two or more other residences nearby, killing an additional ten or eleven people (again, there are 14 confirmed dead, but it's not entirely clear who was where). As many as nine of the dead were children.

Here is how the major newspapers reported the international community's response:

The New York Times: But the Israeli airstrike and the resulting civilian deaths drew sharp criticism around the world, including from President Bush. "This heavy-handed action does not contribute to peace," Mr. Bush's chief spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said today in Washington. Mr. Fleischer said the United States regretted "the loss of innocent life. Meanwhile, European, United Nations and Arab officials condemned the Israeli attack as unjustified and irresponsible, and some called it criminal. They said the attack was counterproductive to efforts to calm tensions in the Mideast. "This kind of operation is not conducive toward peace and reconciliation," said Javier Solana, the European Union's chief of foreign and security policy.

The Washington Post: European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana called the attack an "extra-judicial killing operation" that "comes at a time when both Israelis and Palestinians were working very seriously to curb violence and restore cooperative security arrangements. . . .[U.N. Secretary General Kofi] Annan issued a statement late Monday deploring the attack, saying, "Israel has the legal and moral responsibility to take all measures to avoid the loss of innocent life; it clearly failed to do so."

The Times of London: The West and the Arab world united in denouncing the attack, saying it violated international law by targeting innocent civilians. . . . Britain was among the most outspoken critics, with Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, calling the airstrike unacceptable and counter-productive. Mike O’Brien, the Foreign Office Minister, summoned the Israeli Ambassador to tell him the strike was considered unjustified and disproportionate.

This disparity of condemnation led me to the initial question: why isn't all Middle East violence -- regardless of who perpetrated it -- publicly deplored in the international community? My question, by the way, is one that any number of Jewish and pro-Israel organizations ask all the time. And it's a legitimate question. But as I alluded to earlier, there may be a deeper question that is obscured by focusing only on the condemnation issue.

For the record, as might be apparent, I, like many supporters of Israel, find the international condemnations of Israel in this and similar cases hollow and hypocritical because the same condemnations do not generally follow Palestinian attacks. What I term "moral equivalence" requires that, if you deplore the violence surrounding the attack on Shehada, you have to be equally fervent in deploring the violence that Hamas inflicted last week near Emanuel. In fact, perhaps more fervent -- if you assume that Israel and the Palestinians are at war (in fact, if not in name), then Shehada was a legitimate military target, and the civilian deaths that accompanied his, though tragic, were legitimate collateral damage in a wartime attack. Conversely, the attack at Emanuel is not defensible, since there is no evidence that the civilians attacked were targeted because they had military significance -- they were simply civilians who were attacked for being civilians. The rules of war prohibit that.

But this leaves the larger question: do we supporters of Israel really want it to be morally equivalent to Palestinian terrorists? As my discussion of the rules of war suggests, the answer is no. We want to believe that Israel has the moral high-ground. And so, we invent justifications (as I did in the last paragraph), and then deplore the disparity of condemnation since, obviously, we are arguing from the moral high-ground.

Part of the problem is the language of the international condemnations. You'll notice, if you look at the comments of Javier Solana and Jack Straw, that the Europeans were focused on expediency -- what is or isn't productive. The Israeli action was "counterproductive" to Palestinian concessions toward peace. Well, by that token, Palestinian violence is equally counterproductive to Israeli concessions, right? So it would stand to reason that if the proper measure is expediency, the EU and British condemnation should flow evenly whenever either side commits an act of violence, right? On this score, Israel's supporters are correct that international condemnation is frequently hypocritical and offensive. But this still leaves us fighting for "equivalence" when the real question is morality.

Notice Kofi Annan, however, who couched his criticism in terms of morals: "Israel has the legal and moral responsibility to take all measures to avoid the loss of innocent life." Here is a condemnation I will take. You see, the "equivalence" argument permits us to pass over the difficult moral issues Annan raises: what are Israel's moral duties in this undeclared war? In a conflict between a sovereign and a militia, does the sovereign, by virtue of its social compact, have legal obligations to refrain from certain actions? If you win the battle, but lose your soul, can you ever win the war?

I don't know the answer to these questions, but I think that instead of spending energy railing against the lack of equivalence, I would rather that Israel's supporters confront the moral and ethical questions. It's part of what Judaism is about.

In this regard, I commend to you a letter by Martin Lang to the editors of the New York Times that I found very wise. The letter said this: the laws of war aside, the Israeli government has lost its moral compass if it accepts the death of these civilians as simply collateral damage. Moreover, the attack sends precisely the wrong message -- to quote the author, the attack "makes a clear statement that there are no moral restraints on the killing of innocent people to achieve an objective."

In other words, to accept the civilian deaths as simply a cost of achieving the political objective is to become the very terrorists you are fighting. Is this the equivalence we want?

Food for Thought

For an interesting contemporary/historical comparison, consider re-reading "It Can't Happen Here" by Sinclair Lewis [It Can't Happen Here on amazon.com]. I was going to summarize why I think it's relevant today, but I found that Don Roberts, one of the reader-reviewers at Amazon, said it better than I could:

But, probably the true value of this work, Lewis does identify as the one true villian as those in the middle, the people who take no extreme position, because it is their unwillingness to take action that allows the extreme elements to take over and make the evil happen. Overall, it's a great wake up call to anyone who thinks it can't happen here, and who feels someone else should take the risks.

Two recent news items lead me to the conclusion that I'm not paranoid -- that the Bush administration's handling of the Padillo, Hamdi, Moussaoui, Reid and Lindh cases is a harbinger of a looming battle over what are fundamental civil rights and why do they matter.

These are the items: first, the Department of Justice is considering a program known as Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System). In essence, the program encourages us to spy on each other. In the words of the TIPS website, "Operation TIPS will be a national system for reporting suspicious, and potentially terrorist-related activity. The program will involve the millions of American workers who, in the daily course of their work, are in a unique position to see potentially unusual or suspicious activity in public places." In connection with TIPS, the Department of Justice will maintain a national database of information provided by informants, and parcel out that information to local and state authorities. Again, the website: "All it will take to volunteer is a telephone or access to the Internet as tips can be reported on the toll-free hotline or online. Information received will be entered into the national database and referred electronically to a point of contact in each state as appropriate." As a number of sources have pointed out, this system bears a striking resemblance to systems used by such paragons of democratic ideals as East Germany. [New York Times, Washington Post]. DoJ denies this is the case. [For an interesting essay on why all of this matters, check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation essay "A Watched Populace Never Boils." Not directly on point, but close.]

The second item is the news that the Bush administration wants to review the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. This act prohibits the armed forces (except in narrow circumstances) from being involved in domestic law enforcement. The law traces back to the Reconstruction era, and was proposed by Southern legislators who were tired of fifteen years of military occupation after the Civil War. Reconsideration of this limitation on the military is not a new idea -- in the more immediate aftermath of September 11, a number of senators and some senior Pentagon officials apparently made public their views that posse comitatus might be in order. But, according to the New York Times, as recently as May, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the Pentagon would not seek any changes in the law. Now, the administration has ordered DoJ and Defense Department lawyers to review the law. According to the Times, this change of heart "surprised" many senior military officers and Pentagon officials.

As in my previous posts, I am struck by the feeling that these items further demonstrate that the administration is making all of this up as it goes along. Nevertheless, I am beginning to see an underlying theme: centralizing power in the federal executive. Don't get me wrong -- I'm not spinning conspiracy theories about black helicopters or anything, but just noting that the Bush initiatives appear to have in common the idea of centralizing our security infrastructure into the federal executive as a way of avoiding messy questions about the Constitution. Military tribunals (answering ultimately to the President). A federal database of "suspicious activities". Military law enforcement. All of these things are ultimately answerable to the President himself; all of things they would replace are not.

[If anything, this power gathering is consistent with Bush's pledge to bring the mindset of the CEO to the Oval Office. I note for the record that Bush's timing in this regard is ironic, given the beating that CEOs are currently taking in the public mind, and will leave it for another time to ponder whether we can learn anything from the corporate governance flap that applies to Bush's White House].

In the end, I'm not sure where to go with this. One of the founding ethos of this country was that centralization of power was bad, and that in order to protect against despotism, it was necessary to distribute the power among the three branches of government, and to install all of the checks and balances that make our system both enduring and unique (even a bit quirky at times). By that measure, the Bush administration's tactics are indefensible, probably unconstitutional, and just plain wrong. At the same time, however, the justification offered by the Bush administration is compelling -- in these trying times, the old rules may indeed not apply. Any thoughts?

In case anyone is out there actually reading my posts, I thought the following email that I got from a family member who does read this blog might be of interest:

Dear Dan,
More on the topics of enemy combatants. This page links to an article in the Weekly Standard by David Tell. He basically defends the administration's actions and favorably compares it to Roosevelt's. I assume the reference is to ex parte Quirin. I had not heard before that executions had taken place before any public notification of anyone that they would occur.
Tell claims, opposite to what I had believed and asserted, that 'enemy combatant' designations can be challenged in court, i.e. that the government's power to make such designation is not as unchecked as I had thought.

However, a commentator, Habeus Corpussel, vehemently disputes Tell's claims and holds that the administration is way over the line, especially in the Jose Padilla case.

Media Watch, part II

Score another one for the New York Times, whose national news desk grudgingly gets my nod today. Although the national desk missed the enemy combatant aspect in the John Walker Lindh story, today's paper has a small article reporting that Judge Robert G. Doumar, a Federal District Judge in Norfolk, VA, has ordered that by next week, prosecutors must justify the continued detention of Yasser Esam Hamdi without charges. Prosecutors have taken the position that "enemy combatants" may be held without charges as long as we are at war. According to the article, the judge is concerned that since the "war" is an ongoing war on terrorism, and not a declared war, the government's position means that Hamdi could be detained forever.

Based on my highly unscientific survey (in which I surfed major-media websites CNN, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer and MSNBC), it appears that other mainstream news outlets did not pick up the story. Go figure.

If you have read previous posts on this page, you'll notice that I have a thing for even-handed applications of the Constitution, even when we're applying it to people who despise it and us. In particular, I've written at length about the unconstitutional incarceration of Yasser Hamdi and Jose Padillo, both American citizens, both being detained without any of the protections that American citizens are entitled to under the Constitution.

Which brings me to John Walker Lindh. From what I've read, I have no doubt that he is guilty of at least some of the things he was charged with, and I think that his plea bargain, in the main, is appropriate -- 20 years and cooperation with authorities in prosecuting others. Standard stuff in criminal prosecutions. There is another provision to his sentence, however, one that you have to look hard to find any reporting about. It is this: for the rest of Lindh's life, the government may immediately capture and detain Mr. Lindh as an "enemy combatant" if the government determines that he has engaged in any crimes of terrorism.

"Enemy combatant" is code. It means that if the government decides that Lindh has engaged in "crimes of terrorism" (an ill-defined list of offenses), he agrees to be forego constitutional protections in federal court and be tried in an extra-constitutional military tribunal. In other words, Lindh has agreed that, at the whim of the government, he loses, among other things, the right to counsel, the right to a public trial (within limits), the right to trial by a jury, the right to be charged by a grand jury, or indeed, the right to be charged at all. Conceivably, he could be detained indefinitely for "protection" of the national interest.

Interestingly, mainstream media seems to have missed, or glossed, this point. To wit, the New York Times, in its main news article on this story, described the length of the proposed sentence, and then added, "In addition to accepting the jail time and a possible fine, Mr. Lindh also agreed to forgo any profits from writing or talking about his experience and said he would testify for the government against others who might be charged in connection with the fighting in Afghanistan." No mention of the "enemy combatant" clause.

Elsewhere, the Times wrote: "Under the deal, Mr. Lindh must serve almost all of the sentence, largely because there is no parole in the federal sentencing system. He pleaded guilty to one charge of providing services to the Taliban and another of carrying explosives while committing that felony. As part of the agreement, any profits Lindh might make from telling his story would be turned over to the government, said U.S. District Attorney Paul J. McNulty, chief prosecutor in the case." Again, no mention of the "enemy combatant" provision.

The Washington Post and MSNBC didn't mention this nuance, either. Here is the Post: "Lindh also agreed to cooperate with investigators by providing any information about al Qaeda and other groups in southern Asia and assisting other prosecutions." And here is what MSNBC had to say: "He must cooperate with authorities, cannot profit from books or films about his experiences and will testify before civilian courts or military tribunals if, for example, detainees are prosecuted in such a forum." To read these descriptions, you'd think that the plea agreement was standard fare.

To be fair, CNN did pick up this angle of the story, although it's not clear that they delved deeper than the public statements by the prosecuters. CNN quoted U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty as saying "'should he [Lindh] again associate with terrorists, he could be brought back into court, where he would be considered an enemy combatant.'" This is true, and probably good police practice, as well, but it's not the whole truth. The whole truth, which CNN did not report, is that Lindh can be brought into a military tribunal, not "back into court." The difference, though small, is significant.

Ironically, given that the TImes' national desk missed the enemy combatant aspect of the story, the only mainstream explication of the issue that I have seen came in a Times sidebar news analysis, buried on the jump page. There, Adam Liptak addressed the issue head-on, as part of a larger analysis that suggests the Bush administration is making this stuff up as it goes along. Liptak offers an insightful analysis of the similarities or differences among the Lindh, Padillo, Hamdi, Moussaoui and Reid cases, and concludes that whether the respective individuals are merely "detainees" or are criminal defendants pending trial in federal courts depends largely on when they were taken into custody, not where they were captured, where they were born or what they are alleged to have done.

I would add one minor note: it appears, based on some quick legal research, that the plea agreement is itself probably not unconstitutional. As suggested in United States v. Knights, a defendant can agree, as part of a plea agreement, to waive fundamental constitutional rights. In Knights' case, the defendant agreed, in exchange for a sentence of parole, that he would submit to police searches at any time and for any reason; when he was later searched and found to have been carrying drugs, he complained that he had been unconstitutionally coerced into waiving his rights against unreasonable searches. The Supreme Court did not address this issue directly -- it found that the search that led to Knights' subsequent conviction was based on probable cause and therefore never reached the issue of whether the agreement itself was per se constitutional. Still, the Court's dicta suggests that the Court wouldn't object to such plea arrangements.

I could argue that waiving one constitutional right in exchange for parole is fundamentally different from waiving most meaningful rights in exchange for twenty years in jail, as Lindh appears to have done, but I would need to do more research on that (for which I have no time at the moment) and I would need to decide if I believe that position, which I'm not sure I do.

I was recently introduced to a philosophical problem known as "Newcomb's Problem". Basically, the problem is this:

Suppose that there is a Being known as a "Superpredictor". The Superpredictor can examine a person and 99% of the time, correctly determine how a person will choose when faced with a series of options. Now suppose that, to test the Superpredictor, you participate in a test. This is the test: You have entered a room that contains two boxes. One of the boxes is clear, and contains $10,000. The other box is opaque, and may or may not have $1,000,000 in it. You may choose to take just the opaque box, or you can choose to take both boxes. But here's the catch: at some time before you enter the room, the Superpredictor examines you, and predicts whether you will take one box, or both boxes. If the Superpredictor predicts that you will take both boxes, she will not put $1,000,000 in the opaque box, and you will walk away with only the $10,000 in the clear box. If the Superpredictor predicts that you will take just the opaque box, she will place the $1,000,000 in the opaque box. How do you choose?

There is a great deal of literature on this problem, with some thinkers likening this to Prisoner's Dilemma (you and an accomplice are arrested and questioned in separate rooms; if one of you confesses but the other does not, the confessor gets one year in jail and the non-confessor gets a 30 year sentence; if you both confess, you get 15 year sentences, and if neither of you confesses, you are released without charges), and others applying various decisional value theories. The analyses tend to center on how one can rationally maximize one's return, by taking one box or two.

After discussing this paradox with my wife, she pointed out that if you attempt to apply reason to the problem, the paradox leads you into an endless loop. The trick is to simply believe that by taking the one box, you will be rewarded. She posited this analysis:

Newcomb's Problem describes the biblical injunction that "the meek shall inherit the Earth." In order for the meek to inherit the Earth, they must have faith that whatever trials they endure are part of the test and believe, even if it is irrational, that remaining humble will eventually earn them their just reward. Accordingly, they must be prepared to stand by their belief in spite of overwhelming pressure to abandon it, and be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice -- to die believing that their reward will come in the world to come (whether it's Heaven, or Eden, or whatever). In short, they must have faith, even when it is irrational. On the other hand, if a person is vain enough to believe that he, and not God, is in control, and therefore takes actions to "make" his own destiny, that person is, by definition, not the meek, will be adjudged unworthy of inheriting the Earth, and will be denied whatever heavenly reward would otherwise be his.

In the context of Newcomb's Problem, she continues, before you enter the room, you have been judged by a supreme being (the Superpredictor) that is capable of seeing into your pysche (or your soul). If you have lived a life believing that through humility, you will receive your just reward, you would naturally believe that in order to received the reward, you should not try to make your own destiny. Therefore, you would take only the opaque box containing the $1,000,000, but forego the $10,000 even though it means you might take nothing. For your belief, the supreme being will reward you by filling the opaque box with $1,000,000. On the other hand, if you have not lived a life of humility and therefore would naturally take both boxes in order to reduce the chance that you walk away with nothing, this too would be known, and the Superpredictor would not reward you with $1,000,000.

In a future post, I may return to this, since I am troubled by the implications of her analysis (I guess I don't have faith...), but in the meantime, if you're interested in more about Newcomb's Problem, try this website.

Follow-up to my post on 6/21.

More on Justice Scalia's evolving vision for the judiciary, as expressed, in part by the dissent in Atkins v. Virginia (the same dissent that I took issue with in my inaugural post on June 21). This is an Op-Ed from the New York Times by Princeton's Sean Wilentz. Check it out.

Follow-up to my post on 6/24.

After reading my post, a friend sent me this article by Akhil Reed Amar at The New Republic. Apparently, I'm not alone in saying that Jose Padillo and Yasser Esam Hamdi are entitled to some form of due process, and are absolutely entitled to consult with lawyers in connection with their detention/incarceration.

In my 6/21 post, I repeated a statement from the New York Times that only two countries besides the U.S. permitted executions of retarded murders -- Japan and Kyrgyzstan. It turns out that the Times got it wrong, meaning that I got it wrong, too. Apparently, Kyrgyzstan's law specifically prohibits the execution of someone who is retarded. Mea culpa.