Wrong, Again

Hmmmm—so maybe I was wrong, signing that petition in my knee-jerk fashion this morning. You know, the online petition supporting Edward Snowden, the 29 year-old guy now somewhere—supposedly—in Hong Kong.

I’m thinking this way because of Thomas Friedman and his column this morning, “Blowing a Whistle,” in The New York Times. Here’s the crux of his argument:

Yes, I worry about potential government abuse of privacy from a program designed to prevent another 9/11 — abuse that, so far, does not appear to have happened. But I worry even more about another 9/11. That is, I worry about something that’s already happened once — that was staggeringly costly — and that terrorists aspire to repeat.

I worry about that even more, not because I don’t care about civil liberties, but because what I cherish most about America is our open society, and I believe that if there is one more 9/11 — or worse, an attack involving nuclear material — it could lead to the end of the open society as we know it. If there were another 9/11, I fear that 99 percent of Americans would tell their members of Congress: “Do whatever you need to do to, privacy be damned, just make sure this does not happen again.” That is what I fear most.

Friedman argues as well that, to date, there have been no known abuses of the data mining programs and goes on to quote David Simon:

The question is more fundamental: Is government accessing the data for the legitimate public safety needs of the society, or are they accessing it in ways that abuse individual liberties and violate personal privacy — and in a manner that is unsupervised. And to that, The Guardian and those who are wailing jeremiads about this pretend-discovery of U.S. big data collection are noticeably silent. We don’t know of any actual abuse.

Simon makes a point: there’s a big difference between collecting data—in this case collecting phone numbers or emails—and actually analyzing the data—that is, listening to the calls or reading the emails. To listen / read, the government has to go before a judge and give good reasons. Yes, the public won’t know—no suspected terrorist should be reading in The New York Times that the feds are on to him. And yes, it’s a little difficult to ascertain that the government is really playing by the rules. But still, it’s a system.

OK, you say, but why not go after the data when you have a suspect, and a court order to do so? Are you seriously going to give me the have-to-have-a-haystack argument?

Looks like I will. Why? For reasons of time and space.

Look, let’s pretend there a terrorist with a dirty bomb that he intends to put in Times Square at 9AM on Monday. He knows that; you don’t. Do you collect his phone history while the clock is ticking, or do you have the material at hand and then race to analyze it?

OK—that’s time, what about space? Well, you may be dealing with foreign governments, some of whom may not be in any hurry at all to comply with or honor requests from the US government for data. Which, by the way, they may not even have.

“Nobody is listening to your calls,” said Obama, who went on to say that if we don’t trust the executive, judicial and congressional branches of the government…um, don’t we have a problem?

Two thoughts.

As I wrote a day or two ago, the analysis of data tends to come in to an investigation after a tip is received, a laptop is discovered, and interrogation reveals a plot or a suspect.

Now two cases.

First case took place in Orlando shortly before September 11, 2001, when José Meléndez Pérez, a US Custom and Border Protection agent, confronted a Saudi national, Mohammed al Qahtani, and smelled a rat. Al Qahtani didn’t have a place to stay, he didn’t have a return ticket, didn’t have a credit card, but guess what? He had $2800 in cash. Some of his answers were contradictory; he was hostile.

Remember, now we know—no credit card because he didn’t want the trail, hence the large amount of cash. And probably a member of his cell was picking him up and giving him shelter, and as for the return ticket? Meléndez Pérez didn’t know any of that. But Melendez Perez said no way: the story didn’t add up, and he denied Qahtani entry. And that’s why Flight 11 had four, not five hijackers.

Second story—Russia tells the FBI about a guy in Cambridge, MA, who may need a bit of looking into. They do, they drop the ball, and two years later, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, completely unscrutinized by our sophisticated systems, drops the bombs at the finish line to the Boston Marathon.

So my first thought? A system is as good as the people who use it, and I worry that the bells and whistles of technology will dazzle people and delude them into thinking that that’s enough.

And my second thought?

It’s so damn hard to believe a president who says, “trust me,” when his director of national intelligence tells a lie to a congressman. Wyden asked a simple question, and deserved an honest response.

So did we all.

Round Two

You know the story as well as I do: the two explosions; the 78 year-old runner blown to the street; the smoke lifting; the stunned man filming the event, who can only keep saying “Oh, my God.”

So it’s happened again, a dozen years after September 2001. We have spent billions of dollars on “security,” we’ve lost significant amounts of freedom, we have allowed the government to strip us of rights in order to “protect” us. In addition, we’ve lost the ability to think, and fallen victim to fear. Does anybody really think that having zillions of people scrutinize us as we empty our pockets and take off our shoes and belts and go through metal detectors at our airports is making us safer? Wouldn’t a simple lock on the cockpit door have done the trick? And why, since hijacking has been around since the 60’s, wasn’t it standard procedure to lock the cockpit?

So yes, I watched the videos compulsively yesterday, until it occurred to me—it wasn’t doing my stomach any good. Nor was it being particular useful to the people of Boston, so why was I doing it?

Later I wondered—under what circumstances would I ever put a bomb (or two or four, however many there were) in a crowd full of innocent people? Would I ever? Would I ever have so much hurt, so much pain, that it would give rise to that level of rage and bile?

I hope not.

OK—Adolf Hitler. When would I have the necessary knowledge to justify putting the bomb under his desk? Would I need to have seen the concentration camps? Would hearing accounts be enough? Would just seeing the Jews crammed in the cattle cars be sufficient?

So now the country is watching a city block of Boston, Massachusetts, and scratching their heads and saying, “why do they hate us?” The answer, most people think, is that there is such a thing as evil, and the people who perpetrated this deed were evil.

Well, I think there’s an alternative explanation, and the New York Times reported on it today. “US Practiced Torture After 9/11,” announced the headline, and my response was, predictably, “duh….”

Of course we were practicing torture—will anybody in the world forget that sadistic photograph of the female soldier, her cigarette dangling from the side of her mouth, her foot resting on top of a heap of naked prisoners? We admitted that we water-boarded, it was reported that the justice department had written memos, and that we had signed off on these “interrogation” techniques, but that no—national security, we couldn’t read them.

So it was a true “dog bites man” moment for me, but not, apparently for a Republican guy named Asa Hutchinson, who served under Bush as head of the Drug Enforcement Agency and undersecretary of the Homeland Security. He was the Republican balance to a bipartisan report, and he initially started out believing that no, there was no torture committed. But here’s what the New York Times has him saying:

“This has not been an easy inquiry for me, because I know many of the players,” Mr. Hutchinson said in an interview. He said he thought everyone involved in decisions, from Mr. Bush down, had acted in good faith, in a desperate effort to try to prevent more attacks.

“But I just think we learn from history,” Mr. Hutchinson said. “It’s incredibly important to have an accurate account not just of what happened but of how decisions were made.”

He added, “The United States has a historic and unique character, and part of that character is that we do not torture.”

Yeah? Wanna ask the rest of the world?

I read once that there was a British maxim—a man is judged by how he treats his enemy. And nations as well; that said, how well do we score?

Well, the Army Field Manual on Interrogation may reveal a hint or two; section M allows for interrogation sessions for up to 40 consecutive hours.

“Doesn’t sound like much,” you say. Right, but try staying awake from 8AM Monday morning to midnight the next day—that’s 40 hours.

And the very fact that it was officially permitted led to other things, not officially permitted. Here’s one chilling sentence from the Times story:

The C.I.A. not only water boarded prisoners, but slammed them into walls, chained them in uncomfortable positions for hours, stripped them of clothing and kept them awake for days on end.

Oh, and here’s another one:

The core of the report, however, may be an appendix: a detailed 22-page legal and historical analysis that explains why the task force concluded that what the United States did was torture. It offers dozens of legal cases in which similar treatment was prosecuted in the United States or denounced as torture by American officials when used by other countries.

Nor does the report spare the Obama administration:

While the Constitution Project report covers mainly the Bush years, it is critical of some Obama administration policies, especially what it calls excessive secrecy. It says that keeping the details of rendition and torture from the public “cannot continue to be justified on the basis of national security” and urges the administration to stop citing state secrets to block lawsuits by former detainees.

Well, you know where I land on this issue. Obama didn’t want to focus on the past, he said, he wanted to focus on the future, going forward.

Lovely sentiment.

Bullshit.

No president is gonna go after a former president, for the simple fact that every president is going to BE at some point a former president.

So now we know. Oops, so sorry—looks like we went a little overboard.

Is that enough?

Let’s see—what time is it, over there in the Hague?

Today, Everybody Goes to Their Rooms

It was a time when if you spoke out, you suffered real consequences. There’s Phil Donahue, for example, once at the pinnacle, and the next day in the pit. The Dixie Chicks, whose remarks in London set off a furor. And now we can add Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado.

I should have said “ex-professor,” since the university fired him on 24 July 2007.

And why did he get the sack?

For very serious reasons, say his detractors: plagiarism and academic falsification. Not so, say his supporters, he came out and said the unspeakable: the September 11^th attacks were an inevitable and natural result of our terrible foreign policy. But he went further, as you can read below in an excerpt from his essay, “Some People Push Back”:

There is simply no argument to be made that the Pentagon personnel killed on September 11 fill that bill. The building and those inside comprised military targets, pure and simple. As to those in the World Trade Center . . .

Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire – the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to "ignorance" – a derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.

Ouch—that’s pretty strong. And it’s certainly a good way to start a debate. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a debate that it spawned, but a firestorm. The media picked it up in January of 2005, with FOX News in particular playing it up—according to Wikipedia, Fox had twice the coverage than the other networks combined.

Is it true? Also debatable—there was a restaurant at the top of one of the towers, so that means waiters and cooks, groups not often held responsible for contributing to the American global financial empire. There must have been maintenance people, secretaries, messengers. But Churchill makes a point—there was also a CIA office in one of the tower. And even if some innocent people got killed, well, we have a term for that—collateral damage. A term, by the way, that we did not get from the Pashto, Dari, or Iraqi Arabic.

Well, the fight spread to a very good school—Hamilton College, which had invited Churchill to speak. And after a news program “invited” viewers to send email to Hamilton College, the school was flooded with 6000 of them.

Eventually the school canceled the lecture, because, in the words of its president, Joan Stewart, there were “credible threats of violence.”

Two former governors of Colorado called for Churchill’s dismissal, and the Board of Regents of the University of Colorado issued a statement “apologizing” to the American people. The Colorado Legislature issued a proclamation calling Churchill’s remarks “evil and inflammatory.”

Things really got bad when people read this, taken from “Dismantling the Politics of Comfort:”

If I defined the state as being the problem, just what happens to the state? I've never fashioned myself to be a revolutionary, but it's part and parcel of what I'm talking about. You can create through consciousness a situation of flux, perhaps, in which something better can replace it. In instability there's potential. That's about as far as I go with revolutionary consciousness. I'm actually a de-evolutionary. I do not want other people in charge of the apparatus of the state as the outcome of a socially transformative process that replicates oppression. I want the state gone: transform the situation to U.S. out of North America. U.S. off the planet. Out of existence altogether.

“Treason,” cried the governor of Colorado, and called for his dismissal.

The university did something different—pored over Churchill’s research, and found, according to them, serious faults.

There was the question of the blankets of smallpox victims that, according to Churchill, the US army cunningly distributed to the Indians in 1837 at Fort Clark. You may remember this old tale—it’s sometimes alleged to be the first instance of genocide. And the university confirmed that for six times in ten years, Churchill had, according to Wikipedia, “falsified his sources and fabricated his claims.”

Then there was the question of the remarkable similarity between his work and the work of his ex-wife, Annette Jaimes. But Churchill, unbelievably, came up with the reason—he had written the work and his wife at the time had published it, under her name. And since he had written it, well, couldn’t he use it?

There were other allegations as well. And in the end, the university committee unanimously agreed that Churchill had engaged in “serious research misconduct.”

Right—so what to do about him? Oddly, only one of the five people on the committee voted to dismiss him; two members thought the material insufficiently serious to warrant action; two other members favored temporary suspension.

Hunh?

There’s something screwy here. Have we really come to the point where an academic can be found guilty of “four counts of falsifying information, two counts of fabricating information, two counts of plagiarizing the works of others, improperly reporting the results of studies, and failing to ‘comply with established standards regarding author names on publications’” and then not receive sanctions? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Churchill_academic_misconduct_investigation)

Well, the university took action, and fired Churchill in July of 2007. Churchill, of course, took the university to court, initially won and then lost on appeal. And today, the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

My take? There used to be a time when professors could speak their mind, when they could say the things nobody else could, they could write what others might not. In the best schools they were championed; in the worst they were tolerated. The University of Colorado was completely off base.

Second ending. There used to be a time when professors were rigorous in respecting the work of others, in attributing that work, and in representing it fairly in their own writing. Plagiarism is stealing, and for people who value the life of the mind, it is the ultimate, unthinkable crime. Churchill was completely off base.