Day: June 14, 2003

At the Rittenhouse Review Fact Checking Is Apparently Just Too Hard

rWhile doing some research on a somewhat related topic, I happened across this noxious post a couple months ago at the Rittenhouse Review blog. It just amazes me how frequently people will go on about something when a few minutes search Google would solve the mystery. Instead James Capozolla decides to make an idiotic statement about the disappareance of a young Georgia girl (whose body was found a few weeks later),

Oh, did I forget to mention that Ashleigh Moore is a black, African-American girl?

I hate to sound cynical, but I wonder if Ashleigh, despite her very Anglo-Saxon-sounding name, is just a little too dark to earn herself an Amber Alert, let alone spark a new wave of national hysteria.

Why was there never an Amber Alert for Moore? Because her case didn’t fit the criteria that Georgia and other states have for issuing Amber Alerts. In fact, Georgia has a web page outlining the criteria a case has to meet to result in an Amber Alert.

The main criteria across the board is that there has to be confirmation that the case is indeed a kidnapping and there has to be enough information about the kidnapping to make it likely that an Amber Alert will do some good.

All of the Amber Alerts I’ve heard of, for example, usually involve a case where police have detailed information about both the kidnapped kid and the kidnapper, and usually the circumstances surrounding the kidnapping as well. It was meant to fit situations like Amber Hagerman where there was a witness to the abduction and widespread dissemination of the description of the kidnapper and victim might have resulted in someone spotting either of them.

In Moore’s case, she simply disappeared. No witnesses, no firm evidence she was kidnapped or that she was in immediate danger. The problem is that if the system issues warnings for every kid who comes up missing, the Amber Alerts will simply be ignored. (In fact, police won’t even issue Amber Alerts where they believe a kidnapping hs occured but where they don’t believe the child is in any immediate danger — such as when noncustodial parents kidnap their children).

But why bother to spend a few seconds on a little research? Verifying things is just too hard.

Update: Henry Hanks points to this post at JustOneMinute pointing out others who fell for this nonsense about Amber Alerts.

More Jayson Blair Corrections

The New York Times posted a list of corrections to 10 stories written by Jayson Blair. This one made me laugh out loud,

“The Coolest of Months, So It Seems”
April 29, 2000

In this article, about unseasonably cool weather in April, 2000, Mr. Blair quoted Edmund Florimont . . .

Okay, that’s just weird. I can understand the motive behind making stuff up about the sniper case to land your stories on page 1, but Blair couldn’t even write a throwaway piece about unseasonably cool weather without resorting to his bag of tricks? That’s pathological.

On Depleted Uranium

Earlier this week the local hometown paper ran a nonsensical op-ed about depleted uranium. The person who wrote the op-ed didn’t even seem to have any idea why the military uses DU, which can be found with a single Google search or even in most of the anti-DU literature. Anyway, this is a response I wrote which the local paper promises they’ll run as an op-ed next week:

There were numerous errors and omissions in Mary Ann Schwenk’s June 9 op-ed, “Federal bill to ban depleted uranium weapons should be revived.”

Schenk claims that “our government has not informed us as to why they decided to use DU weapons,” but the reason why depleted uranium is used both in weapons and in armor plating is hardly any secret — it is about 70 percent denser than lead which gives it extra stopping power when used in armor and additional penetrating power when used in munitions.

During the first Persian Gulf War, for example, an American tank outfitted with DU armor was able to withstand direct hits from three Iraqi T-72 tanks and not only survive but also disable all three enemy tanks.

As a weapon, DU is primarily used to target tanks. Because shells made of DU are able to penetrate armor much easier than other materials, DU munitions allow American forces to engage the enemy at a range of up to 25 percent further than with weapons made of traditional metals.

But isn’t DU radioactive? Yes, in fact, it is about as radioactive as most dirt. Since DU is actually about 40 percent less radioactive than naturally occurring uranium found in almost all rock, soil and water, it poses the same radioactive risk that most dirt does.

When a United Nations Environmental Program team analyzed soil samples from holes where DU rounds had impacted in Kosovo, for example, they found that most samples had radiation levels within normal ranges and just a small number of samples had slightly higher levels of radiation. As UNEP put it in its report, “Surface contamination in the areas we visited is trivial and does not pose any threat to the environment.”

The major long-term danger from DU is the possibility that large amounts of it would enter the water supply. Since DU is a heavy metal, large-scale ingestion of it would pose potential health risks, and UNEP has recommended the monitoring of groundwater where large numbers of DU shells have been expended.

Depleted uranium is also used in a number of civilian applications including x-ray tubes and as a radiation shield (casks used to store spent nuclear wastes, for example, are typically made out of depleted uranium encased in stainless steel).

The claims that DU is some sinister highly radioactive weapon whose use may constitute genocide under international agreements would certainly have made a great X-Files episode, but the facts simply don’t support such flights of fancy.