Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Many probably couldn’t recall using an airport without the sense of dread engendered by the post-911 security response, or living in a country that wasn’t at war with a noun. Regardless of how much anything has really changed, they were entitled to feel that some sort of weight had been lifted, and to celebrate that.
I was fourteen in 2001. It's impossible, at this remove, to separate the sense of the world changing I had then from the ways that everyone's world changes as they go through adolescence; what I do remember, clearly, is the idea that 911 and everything that came with it was temporary, that sooner or later things would go back. That the post-Cold-War concerns of the 90s would reassert themselves.
And they did, sort of, but through the light of changed things, and the world I'd expected to grow up in never happened, and all the temporary things became permanent. I suppose that's how it always happens, one way or another.
It doesn't feel celebratory, though; it just feels like the cap on that decade of my life. And it makes me wonder what's going to happen next.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Sacha,
If the US just wanted him dead they could have bombed the place.
They thought about it, and decided not to on the grounds that then they'd never get anyone to believe he was dead. Which is probably correct.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Andrew C,
As the population increases there is more chance of a random match, but saying that above this at least one other person will test positive is not a true. Its more likely, but not definite. And the same sentiment works in reverse too.
I’m sure it was just a nice simplification, but it shows how the sort of human-can-understand-this projection onto a statistical number can be a bit misleading. I wonder if this sort of twisting is used by lawyers in the courts to confuse…?
Hrm, okay: try "you can't rule out the possibility that there could have been a random match". For things like murder (or identifying dead terrorist leaders) it's a possibility you need to be able to rule out (to a reasonable degree).
It also depends how much other evidence you have and how many people you're testing, of course. If you have no circumstantial evidence and/or are testing a lot of people, you need higher certainty. One person, also ID'd through other methods - less certainty needed.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
Although our DNA is roughly 99.9% identical, there is such a huge variation in the other 0.1% (which are mostly non-coding regions) that you can usually nail down a statistic like: ‘there is a 1 in a hundred million chance this is not bin Laden or one of his brothers, all of whom are accounted for’.
And, given the number of human beings around, you need that level of certainty to be, well, certain.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Rob Hosking,
Or Time Magazine, who had bin Laden on the cover in 1998, I seem to recall. I think they even had an interview with him. (I’m going on memory here). I know Time doesn’t have the circulation it once did, but it still gets a bit wider than a few pointy heads.
Yeah, but it's not the same as a day-to-day concern; I'm sure plenty of people knew about it, but that's not the same as worrying about it. Plenty of people knew that Christchurch had a significant earthquake risk. The number who actually worried about it was rather smaller. Emotional comprehension and intellectual awareness of these sort of rare-event risks are streets apart; few enough in the US had the latter, still fewer the former.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Paul Campbell,
It’s probably more interesting for Osama’s DNA because his father had many wives – whether or not he and his sister share a common mother would have some impact on how useful her DNA would be
Half-siblings is still plenty close enough for a match. As good as first cousins, essentially.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Russell Brown,
Could you elucidate? I’m prepared to believe they had DNA (familial?) for comparison, but obviously I have no idea what they might have been able to show.
Oh, not because they doubt the validity - with sibling DNA you could establish it was Osama beyond reasonable doubt - but because firstly, in biological terms,we talk about percentage similarities in DNA to establish species, and "99.5% similar" DNA is...similar enough to be human. Well, maybe Neanderthal.
Secondly, because if you can say that a given sample of DNA is 99.5% certain to belong to one person (i.e. be related to the known sample you're testing it against) ...well, you're basically saying that 5 times out of 1000, any other random sample would give you a false match. There are seven-billion-odd people on this planet. Fewer than seven billion are of the right age, gender, and ethnicity, but still. When you look for familial DNA matches, you look for probabilities more like one in millions that a random sample would match the known sample - in New Zealand, for instance, you'd want a certainty of better than 1 in 4 million. Above that, at least one other random person in the country will test positive by chance.
Now I'm quite sure the spokesperson was saying "99.5%" in the way most people use it, as a shorthand for "we're really, really sure". I'm certain it wasn't the actual statistical probability they got back. But if you're used to working with these things, it sounds pretty funny.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Ian Dalziel,
I see American 'Justice' is still dispensed from the barrel of a gun...
interesting that they then had to transport his body almost the entire length of Pakistan to "bury him at sea" - gets rid of that pesky .1% doubt in the DNA I suppose...I can assure you from personal checking that to a lab full of biologists, "the DNA results made them 99.5% certain it was bin Laden" is a hysterically funny joke.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Craig Ranapia,
With all due respect to President Obama, vengeance is not justice. It wasn’t in 1946, and it isn’t now. Justice is hard and elusive; perhaps we will never find it in this world, or any other. But I just thought we were supposed to be better.
We are supposed to be. But I find it quite likely that Obama's administration weighed up the problems with being seen to be executors of vengeance rather than justice against the problems of carrying out that justice, and decided that vengeance was the most pragmatic option. I'm not sure this is a situation where there were any "better" options, only options with different consequences.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to glennd,
911 surprised on its *scale* and daring, but not in any sense of being unique.
No, it was unique. The sense in the popular consciousness was that foreigners couldn't come to the US and kill people. Pearl Harbour was half the Pacific away; all the US's twentieth-century wars had been fought on foreign soil. The sense of isolation and safety might have been false, but it was certainly there. There may have been a lot of analysts and journalists to whom it didn't come as a surprise, but to the general public, it was entirely unexpected, and crippling.
Personally, I find all the celebration saddening. Even students on our uni campus turned out late at night to wave flags and cheer (although that was probably as much about the end of the semester in two days as anything else, they were primed for that sort of thing already). It's just so pointless - it had to be done, but it won't really change anything. The world isn't safer. People are still dead. People are still dying. People are still going to die, on both sides. It might be symbolically huge, but at the end of the day it's just a few more bodies for the pile.
But, please, don't take my word for it - buy both books I listed above as a start.
Or get them out of your local library! I haven't read Ghost Wars but I can absolutely recommend The Looming Tower. If you want to know where Al Qaeda came from, that's the place to start.