After a couple days of deeply dispiriting news about torture-memos and abominable training exercises gone terribly wrong, it's good to get a little reminder of good news from Oliver Kamm, who reminds us that the war in Afghanistan not only failed to produce a refugee crisis or starvation, but rather reversed an existing refugee crisis, bringing 3.6 million Afghanis back to that country from their places of exile.

Another bit of good news, discovered while I was looking for that Washington Post link, seems to show that the *approved* 24 interrogation techniques mentioned in the article on the 2002 "torture memo" did not include any of the actual torture methods discussed, and that the darkly-described, vague reports of "new methods" fell into the category of deceit and disorientation. The new methods included environment-manipulation and sleep-schedule distortions, with the most dubious new method being an attempt to deceive the prisoner into thinking that they had been put in the hands of a third state party which *would* use torture.