Ivor van Heerden, a hurricane and levee expert with Louisiana State University, said the mistakes are the latest example of sloppiness and a lack of scientific peer review in Corps’ work
“It’s peoples lives we’re playing with and all we’re getting is fuzzy science,” van Heerden said.
“I don’t claim to be an expert on the Muslim religion ... but everyone I know that is an expert on the Muslim faith says the president of Iran’s theory is one that is not shared by the overwhelming majority of people of that faith, that there has to be an Armageddon and the 12th or 13th — I thought it was the 13th — Imam comes to power," McCain said. "I'd find that very disturbing if that view was shared by a lot people.”
“It is dangerous to have a leader of a nation who believes and desires and promotes Armageddon to advance a particular religious outcome.”
First, the psychologists argue that profiling won't work the way the F.B.I. does it. (F.B.I. profiling assumes a stable relationship between configurations of offense behaviors and background characteristics, which is not supported by the research evidence.) Second, they note that the F.B.I. claims a high degree of accuracy for the method that supposedly shouldn't work. Then, they explain the illusion of accuracy as due to subjective validation.
It also turns out that it shouldn't be surprising that the profile is bogus. It wasn't based on a representative sample. According to Gladwell, the F.B.I. profilers who came up with the serial killer profile, John Douglas and Robert Ressler, chatted only with convicts who were in prison in California. Furthermore, they had no standardized protocol for interviewing their subjects.
(FBI agents) Douglas and Ressler didn’t interview a representative sample of serial killers to come up with their typology. They talked to whoever happened to be in the neighborhood. Nor did they interview their subjects according to a standardized protocol. They just sat down and chatted, which isn’t a particularly firm foundation for a psychological system. So you might wonder whether serial killers can really be categorized by their level of organization.
A few years ago, Laurence Alison, one of the leaders of the Liverpool group and the author of “The Forensic Psychologist’s Casebook,” went back to the case of the teacher who was murdered on the roof of her building in the Bronx. He wanted to know why, if the F.B.I.’s approach to criminal profiling was based on such simplistic psychology, it continues to have such a sterling reputation. The answer, he suspected, lay in the way the profiles were written, and, sure enough, when he broke down the rooftop-killer analysis, sentence by sentence, he found that it was so full of unverifiable and contradictory and ambiguous language that it could support virtually any interpretation.
The best minds in the F.B.I. had given the Wichita detectives a blueprint for their investigation. Look for an American male with a possible connection to the military. His I.Q. will be above 105. He will like to masturbate, and will be aloof and selfish in bed. He will drive a decent car. He will be a “now” person. He won’t be comfortable with women. But he may have women friends. He will be a lone wolf. But he will be able to function in social settings. He won’t be unmemorable. But he will be unknowable. He will be either never married, divorced, or married, and if he was or is married his wife will be younger or older. He may or may not live in a rental, and might be lower class, upper lower class, lower middle class or middle class. And he will be crazy like a fox, as opposed to being mental. If you’re keeping score, that’s a Jacques Statement, two Barnum Statements, four Rainbow Ruses, a Good Chance Guess, two predictions that aren’t really predictions because they could never be verified—and nothing even close to the salient fact that BTK was a pillar of his community, the president of his church and the married father of two.
The marketing of Musharraf as a bulwark against radical Islam and the Taliban is one of the biggest jokes of the post-9/11 era. He wasn't for the Taliban before he was against them. He was the Taliban.
If U.S. officials had wanted to catch Osama bin Laden, all they had to do was call Musharraf. On 9/11, the Al Qaeda leader was laid up in a Pakistani military hospital in Islamabad. If the dictator refused, invading Pakistan —if you’re into that sort of thing — would certainly have been more justifiable than Afghanistan or Iraq. A Pakistan War could have neutralized the world's most dangerous nuclear threat, established a valuable strategic American foothold between India and China, and — if we worked with the UN — scored us popularity points for restoring democratic rule.
Such a war would have been far more justifiable than Afghanistan or Iraq. No country was more responsible than Pakistan for 9/11. Pakistan hosted Al Qaeda's headquarters in Kashmir. Most of its training camps were in Kashmir and Pakistan's Tribal Areas--not Afghanistan. On July 22, 2004, The Guardian reported that General Mahmoud Ahmed, chief of the ISI under Musharraf, had sent $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker. The Wall Street Journal confirmed that Pakistani intelligence had financed 9/11, but the 9/11 Commission decided not to investigate our “strategic ally in the war on terrorism.”
Musharraf was always a huckster. Anyone who paid attention could see that, but that's the problem: we never do.
