Author Archives: Paul Woodward

Seymour Hersh’s 10,000-word bin Laden story — told four years ago in 640 words by Larry Johnson

When Seymour Hersh releases each of his blockbuster reports, what supposedly makes his claims authoritative is, more than anything else, the mere fact that they come from Seymour Hersh.

The reader is meant to trust the word of retired intelligence officials, consultants, and other unnamed experts, because Hersh trusts them. And we are meant to trust Hersh because of his stature as a veteran investigative journalist.

We are being invited to join a circle of confidence. Which is to say, we are being hooked by a confidence trick. Hersh is the confidant of (mostly) anonymous sources of inside information of inestimable quality, and we then become confidants of Hersh when he lets us in on the secrets.

To say this is not to imply that everything Hersh reports should be doubted, but simply to note that his egotistical investment in his own work — the fact that Hersh’s stories invariably end up being in part stories about Hersh — inevitably clouds the picture.

As a result, ensuing debate about the credibility of Hersh’s reports tends to devolve into polarized contests of allegiance. Each side sees the other as having been duped — either duped by a conspiracy theorist (Hersh) or duped by government officials and the mainstream media.

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A week after Osama bin Laden was killed, Larry Johnson wrote a blog post that reads like an outline draft of Hersh’s latest report. Johnson is a retired senior intelligence official who claims to be knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. Maybe he was the “major U.S. source” on whom Hersh relied.

On May 9, 2011, Johnson wrote:

I’ve learned some things from friends who are still active that dramatically alter the picture the White House is desperately trying to paint. Here is what really happened. The U.S. Government learned of Bin Laden’s whereabouts last August when a person walked into a U.S. Embassy and claimed that Pakistan’s intelligence service (ISI) had Bin Laden under control in Abottabad, Pakistan. Naturally the CIA personnel who received this information were skeptical. That’s why the CIA set up a safehouse in Abottabad in September 2010 as reported yesterday in the Washington Post.

The claim that we found Bin Laden because of a courier and the use of enhanced interrogation is simply a cover story. It appears to be an effective cover story because it has many Bush supporters pressing the case that enhanced interrogation worked. The Obama operatives in the White House are quite content to let the Bushies share in this part of the “credit.” Why? It keeps most folks from looking at the claims that don’t add up.

Anyway, the intel collection at the safe house escalated and the CIA began pressing Pakistan’s ISI to come clean on Osama.

As Pakistan’s Dawn notes in an editorial, the Pakistani version of events — the Abbottabad Commission report — has yet to be officially released.

Buried after initial promises that it would be made public, one version of the report has already seen the light of day via a leaked copy to Al Jazeera. That version alone contains a deep, systematic, even fundamental critique of the manner in which the ISI operates.

Surely, it is morally and legally indefensible of the state to hide from the public the only systematic inquiry into the events surrounding perhaps the most humiliating incident in decades here. National security will not be undermined by the publication of a report; national security was undermined by the presence of Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil.

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Time to #BoycottBudLight

First up (to be completely honest): I’m not in a position to boycott Bud Light or any other Anheuser-Busch product.

It’s easy enough to identify pissy beer from the brand without needing to taste it — I’m confident I’ll be able to continue through the rest of my life without ever drinking a single Budweiser. That said, if there is a movement to #BoycottBudLight sprouting up among current drinkers, I applaud all those who support it.

The New York Times reports: A new label on some bottles of Bud Light, one of the brands owned by the beer giant Anheuser-Busch InBev, is falling flat among women, a demographic group the industry has been desperately courting in hopes of jump-starting flagging sales of suds.

In a continuation of its “Up for Whatever” campaign, a wide blue band low on the label says, “The perfect beer for removing ‘no’ from your vocabulary for the night.”

Protests quickly erupted in social media, criticizing what was perceived as perhaps not the best marketing language in the midst of public outcry over date rape on college campuses.

“As a woman, as a mother of a girl and a boy, I find this message very disturbing and dangerous,” someone using the name Danielle Sawada posted on Bud Light’s Facebook page. “I have been a Bud Light drinker for quite a while, but until this campaign ends, you do not have my dollars.”

Alexander Lambrecht, vice president for the Bud Light brand at Anheuser-Busch, says:

“It’s clear that this message missed the mark, and we regret it. We would never condone disrespectful or irresponsible behavior.”

With all due respect, that’s bullshit.

Anheuser-Busch is trawling a market that’s a bit lacking in discrimination, but even so, I seriously doubt that the advertising campaigns dreamed up their agency, BBDO, are being created by a group of idiots.

Rather than treat the corporate response as an admission of an honest mistake, it should in my opinion be viewed as a smokescreen — not so much a reaction to the campaign, but instead an integral component in the campaign strategy.

The watery beer behind the label has been on the market for over 30 years. Creating some buzz around an old brand has to get increasingly difficult — especially when the age at which young people start drinking is the period in life when they have least interest in imitating their overweight parents.

A campaign built around the hashtag #UpForWhatever is clearly aimed at breaking boundaries — not staying in well-worn tracks.

The outrage provoked by this campaign, far from being fallout from “missing the mark,” may in fact be the mark itself — free publicity on Twitter and across the media.

Arguably, the only way of having a big impact through social media is by stoking controversy. After all, outrage is the currency of the realm.

And in this case, expressing consternation gets turned into an equal opportunity exercise whose participants include executives not only at Anheuser-Busch but also BBDO.

The agency’s Director of Digital Strategy, Lucy Leiderman, tweeted: “Oh no. Bud Light’s new tagline: “The perfect beer for removing ‘no’ from your vocabulary for the night”… ” but then removed the tweet.

Was this just a bit of damage control on behalf of the agency? Maybe, but perhaps Leiderman can be given the benefit of the doubt.

Prior to her arrival at BBDO, she wrote quite astutely about the dangers of removing “no” from ones vocabulary, addressing her warning directly at advertising creatives:

Marketers everywhere are singing the siren song of increasingly outrageous social campaigns. Decision makers are seeing signs that the end of the traditional is nigh. More and more, the creative space has become a world of “yes.” And that’s a problem.

But it isn’t just a problem that results in outrageous advertising. By its very nature advertising is always coercive and always designed to precipitate choices that might otherwise not be made.

Every ad wants you to say “yes.”

As Bud Light lights up Twitter, Anheuser-Busch and BBDO are getting exactly what they want. The only way of making the backlash truly instructive will be if it moves beyond the digital sphere and consumers in significant numbers actually stop buying the beer.

Still, even if to my surprise, the #UpForWhatever campaign turned out to become a very expensive mistake, I don’t anticipate the kind of seismic shift that I would really hope for in American culture.

In the larger scheme of things, this is a somewhat trivial example of a trend that permeates almost every strand of public discourse.

Language, through its relentless abuse, gets stripped of meaning. As meaning ebbs away, there is a frenzy in which everyone is turning up the volume, trying to make themselves heard even when much of the time they have nothing of true value to say.

Advertising is inherently emotive. It is designed to provoke feelings — not thought.

It’s not by chance that BBDO would choose the hook of a generational phrase — whatever — in an effort to fuel mindless consumption, cloaked as free spirit.

Whatever signals a vocabulary already severely depleted as advertisers try and knock out its last line of defense.

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Charlie Hebdo didn’t publish that Mediterranean drowning cartoon — and it isn’t racist

Satire always takes the risk of being misinterpreted. Some publishers try to minimize that risk by alerting the reader, avoiding surprise, but usually burying the joke in the process.

When Ali Dilem drew a cartoon published by Liberte in Algeria, depicting African migrants drowning in the Mediterranean, he was referring to France’s immigration policy for non-EU residents, called “regroupement familial,” which arguably has done less to reunify families than see them broken apart. (H/t to Homo economicus for the explanation.)

Unfortunately, the cartoon has now taken on a life of its own on Twitter where it is being portrayed as a flagrant expression of racism by the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo:

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Saudis end military operation — and start another one — in Yemen

Yesterday’s announcement by Saudi Arabia of the end of the month-long air campaign, “Decisive Storm,” resulted in lots of news reports claiming that the bombing of Yemen had ended. Indeed, that’s what some Saudi officials seemed to think:

“The focus will now shift from military operations to the political process,” the Saudi Embassy in Washington said, adding this transition was at the request of Yemen’s Western-backed President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.

But if operation “Renewal of Hope” is supposed to mark a shift away from military operations, there’s no indication when that might happen.

“We are not talking about a cease-fire,” Saudi coalition spokesman Brig. Gen. Ahmed Asiri told the Saudi-owned television network Al Arabiya, adding that the next phase of the operation “has a military component.”

As foreign warplanes from the Saudi-led coalition continue bombing Yemen, the Saudi spokesman insists:

“Members of the coalition have reiterated their commitment to restore Yemen’s security and stability without any foreign interference,” the spokesman said.

Mohammed al-Basha, Yemen’s chief representative in Washington, yesterday provided this assessment of the situation:


In an analysis for Middle East Eye, Simona Sikimic and Mary Atkinson write:

With the violence still apparently raging on the ground, and the future aims of the coalition marred in uncertainty, many commentators and analysts have been left wondering why now?

“I was not sure that they [the coalition] had set out any goals in the first place,” said [Charlene] Rodrigues [a journalist focusing on Yemen]. “There did not seem to be any plan so I cannot say what has been achieved apart from destruction. The Houthis until now had shown no signs of giving up and they were still fighting.”

According to Simon Henderson, the director of the Washington Institute’s Gulf Programme, “The fighting had appeared to be stalemated for at least the past two weeks.”

“Although the announced outcome is being depicted as a military success, it is unclear how it fits into a Saudi strategy to reinstate the government of President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi, currently in exile in Riyadh, though the statement spoke of a political solution,” Henderson wrote on the think tank’s website.

Dawsari likewise stressed that the situation remained fragile.

“The decision to end Decisive Storm was a surprise to many people,” he said. “The storm started abruptly and ended abruptly. There is a lack of clarity in the announcement. It’s likely that there have been some negotiations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, but it’s hard to say.”

The Saudis and Hadi had rebuffed Iran’s offers of mediation just a day before announcing the end of Operation Decisive Storm. Yet, hours before the coalition press conference, the Iranians were dropping hints that a deal was on the horizon.

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Why has Russia lifted its ban on delivery of S-300 surface-to-air missile system to Iran?

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Kremlin lifted its self-imposed ban on the delivery of a powerful missile air-defense system to Iran on Monday, stoking sharp criticism from the White House and Israel and casting fresh doubt on the international effort to curb Tehran’s nuclear program.

U.S. lawmakers seized on Moscow’s announcement Monday to warn Russia was among a host of foreign countries using the prospect of a nuclear deal to begin seeking out lucrative business deals that could bolster Iran’s military and economy.

Any delivery of an air-defense system would complicate airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities by Israel or the U.S. should the diplomatic track fail.

Iran thinks that Russia will deliver the missile system this year, Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, told the Interfax news agency in Moscow on Tuesday.

The U.S. Senate is set to vote this week on legislation that would provide Congress with the power to approve, amend or kill any agreement that seeks to curb Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for a lifting of international sanctions.

Supporters of the bill, Republican and Democrat, said Russia’s lifting of its ban on the S-300 surface-to-air missile system could be just the beginning of countries testing the sanctions regime and a United Nations arms embargo on Iran.

“Before a final nuclear deal is even reached, [Russian President] Vladimir Putin has started to demolish international sanctions and ignore the U.N. arms embargo,” said Sen. Mark Kirk (R., Ill.), who sponsored legislation that seeks to impose new sanctions on Iran if a final deal isn’t reached by June 30.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the defensive systems didn’t come under the U.N. arms embargo, and that Russia implemented the S-300 ban voluntarily. “This was done in the spirit of good will to stimulate progress in the negotiations,” he said, adding that it was no longer necessary.

The State Department also said that the embargo imposed on Iran in 2010 didn’t prevent the delivery of S-300s. But the White House warned that the missile system, while defensive, could enhance Iran’s ability to challenge key U.S. allies in the Middle East, such as Israel and Saudi Arabia.

It said that Secretary of State John Kerry raised the issue with Mr. Lavrov on Monday.

Still, the Obama administration was measured in its criticism, noting that it didn’t believe the proposed missile sale would jeopardize the nuclear negotiations. [Continue reading…]

Some analysts may interpret Putin’s move as an effort to undermine the nuclear deal with Iran, but one can argue that on the contrary, the planned delivery of S-300 missiles may make the conclusion of the deal a fait accompli.

With an elastic clock, Benjamin Netanyahu has long favored a breathless time is running out narrative when it comes to closing the door on Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

If no deal is signed and within a few months Iran’s newly-reinforced defense systems make its nuclear sites extremely difficult to attack, 2015 is probably the last year that Israel could launch or instigate air strikes on Iran. It has never been plausible that it could conduct such attacks on its own, but the timing for it to enlist the support of others has probably never been worse.

The U.S. and Iran are effectively on the same side in a war against ISIS. American forces currently in Iraq would definitely become very vulnerable if the U.S. soon started bombing Iran.

Moreover, as Yemen becomes a quagmire for Saudi Arabia, an attack on Iran would likely become the tipping point for the current matrix of regional conflicts to start hopelessly spinning out of control.

Putin’ intention in approving the delivery of S-300 missiles at this juncture might simply be to push Russia first out of the gate in the race to cash in on the rewards from the inevitable ending the economic embargo on Iran.

Those who currently argue that the framework agreement is not good enough are rapidly being confronted with the reality that either the deal gets struck by the end of June or within a fairly short period Iran will see dwindling incentives for making any deal. Time is on Iran’s side.

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Obama administration still weighing merits of assassinations vs. trials

The New York Times reports: A Texas-born man suspected of being an operative for Al Qaeda stood before a federal judge in Brooklyn this month. Two years earlier, his government debated whether he should be killed by a drone strike in Pakistan.

The denouement in the hunt for the man, Mohanad Mahmoud Al Farekh, who was arrested last year in Pakistan based on intelligence provided by the United States, came after a yearslong debate inside the government about whether to kill an American citizen overseas without trial — an extraordinary step taken only once before, when the Central Intelligence Agency killed the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011.

Mr. Farekh’s court appearance also came as the Obama administration was struggling to fashion new guidelines for targeted killings. The decision to use an allied intelligence service to arrest Mr. Farekh has bolstered a case made by some that capturing — rather than killing — militant suspects, even in some of the world’s most remote places, is more feasible than the orders for hundreds of drone strikes might indicate.

“This is an example that capturing can be done,” said Micah Zenko, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations who studies counterterrorism strikes.

The Obama administration’s discussions about the fate of Mr. Farekh, who used the nom de guerre Abdullah al-Shami, began in earnest in 2012, and in the months that followed the C.I.A. and the Pentagon ramped up surveillance of his movements around Pakistani tribal areas.

Drones spotted him several times in the early months of 2013, and spy agencies used a warrant issued by the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor his communications. The Pentagon nominated Mr. Farekh to be placed on a so-called kill list for terrorism suspects; C.I.A. officials also pushed for the White House to authorize his killing. [Continue reading…]

What is left out of this analysis is consideration of the basic premise that any individual suspected terrorist can pose a national security threat.

The hysteria surrounding terrorism that has become embedded in the American worldview, presupposes that anyone who can be labelled a terrorist is inherently dangerous.

If the same line of thinking was applied across criminal law, then someone could be accused of being a murderer without committing murder.

The task of law enforcement would be to track down individuals who supposedly had a proclivity to commit crimes and could thus be convicted of being murderers, thieves, frauds, and so forth, because criminality was seen to be invested in the person rather than their actions.

This is what makes trials for terrorism difficult: prosecutors often seem to have more conviction that the accused is a terrorist than they have evidence to back up that claim.

Another issue lurking behind the Obama administration’s debate on the expediency of assassination is that the U.S. government and apparently many Americans have far fewer qualms if the targets are non-Americans.

If President Obama was to sign an executive order prohibiting the assassination of American citizens, would the ACLU commend him for doing so?

Why should the assassination of Americans be treated as a graver issue than the practice of targeted killing itself?

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Israel should be given the consideration it deserves

Juan Cole writes: US television news isn’t very good and it has clearly gotten worse over the past 20 years. In the aftermath of the Kerry-Zarif initial framework deal on nuclear energy in Iran, it seems obvious that an interview with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif would be newsworthy. But to my knowledge none of the networks or major cable news shows had him on.

Or you could have talked to the British, French, German, Russian or Chinese foreign ministers, all of whom were principals and all of whom would have had interesting insights.

Instead, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was given repeated access to millions of Americans to talk trash about the deal over the weekend and to make mostly false allegations about its contours. Israel is a small country of 8 million with a gross domestic product in the range of Portugal. Netanyahu isn’t a party to the deal.

As Bill Clinton famously once said: “Who the fuck does he think he is?”

The parties to this agreement (the P5+1 and Iran) collectively represent 30% of the world’s population. Israel — smaller than 96 other countries — makes up 0.11% of humanity.

Iran’s close neighbors make up 5.5%, including several states which regard the Islamic republic as their primary foe, and yet none of whom assert a right to have the instrumental role in shaping global affairs that Israel claims.

The world’s tolerance for Israel demanding a level of influence utterly disproportionate to its size, is wearing thin.

Those who never know when to stop asking for more, risk losing the advantages they already enjoy.

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Al-Qaeda’s freedom grows in Yemen following Saudi attacks

From the vantage point of Washington, a view consistent for many years has been that the danger posed by failed states is that they become havens for extremism.

U.S. governments apparently have little interest in the welfare of the populations in such states (unless images of starving children inconveniently appear in the media). The overriding concern for the U.S. is the potential for al Qaeda or its likes to take advantage of these kinds of environment.

A few days ago, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest made a surprising claim about the implications of Yemen falling apart. Supposedly, this will have little impact on U.S. counter-terrorism efforts:

“We would greatly prefer to have U.S. personnel on the ground in Yemen that would enhance our efforts. But the fact that they have had to temporarily relocate does not mean that we are unable to continue to apply pressure on extremists who may be plotting against the United States and the West inside of Yemen,” Earnest said. “We do continue to have that capability. So, for as dangerous as Yemen is to American personnel, Yemen is also a dangerous place for those extremists.”

Hundreds of al Qaeda prisoners have just been freed from a prison in al-Mukalla. Is the White House now going to argue that this represents a setback for al Qaeda with its operatives having lost the relative safety of their prison cells?

Gregory D. Johnsen reports: Around 1 a.m. on Thursday, masked gunmen armed with RPGs, hand grenades, and assault rifles stormed a central security prison in eastern Yemen, freeing more than 300 prisoners, including a top al-Qaeda commander.

Pictures posted to social media, apparently pulled from CCTV footage near the prison, show a pick-up truck full of heavily armed men near the prison. Other photos capture a large explosion punching through the dark sky and, in another, an open gate with a few figures walking away.

The prison break in al-Mukalla – one of the largest cities in Yemen and 300 miles east of fighting in Aden – freed Khalid Ba Tarfi, an AQAP regional commander who was captured in 2011, along with hundreds of others. In recent years, Yemen’s prisons have become de facto jihadi academies as more hardened veterans have been dumped into communal cells with younger more impressionable prisoners.

The incident underscores the degree to which the country’s security forces have collapsed amid months of political chaos and the recent barrage of a Saudi-led bombing campaign.

“Things have completely spiraled out of control in the south,” one Yemeni government official told BuzzFeed News. “There’s been a total collapse.”

One of the predictable, if unintended, consequences of more than a week of Saudi airstrikes is the growing freedom al-Qaeda has to operate in the country. [Continue reading…]

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Obama administration on the Middle East: The distance between statements and facts

The New York Times reports: Making sense of the Obama administration’s patchwork of policies “is a puzzle,” said Tamara Cofman Wittes, a researcher at the Brookings Institution and former senior State Department official.

“But whether that puzzle reflects the lack of a coherent policy on the administration side or whether that puzzle simply reflects the complexity of the power struggles on the ground in the region — well, both are probably true,” she said.

The chaos gives regional rivals “more reasons to fight out that power struggle and more arenas to do it in,” Ms. Wittes said.

The lightning pace of events has fueled criticism that the Obama administration has no long-term strategy for the region. In picking proxies and allies of convenience, the argument goes, the administration risks making the chaos worse — perhaps strengthening terrorist groups’ hand, and deepening the chances of being drawn into fights Americans do not want.

One senior Obama administration official described the difficulty of trying to develop a coherent strategy during a period of extreme tumult.

“We’re trying to beat ISIL — and there are complications,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We have a partner who is collapsing in Yemen and we’re trying to support that. And we’re trying to get a nuclear deal with Iran. Is this all part of some grand strategy? Unfortunately, the world gets a vote.”

The administration had until recently held up Yemen as a model of a successful counterterrorism campaign, only to see the American-backed government in Sana crumble and the efforts against Qaeda operatives in Yemen crippled indefinitely. Earlier this week, American Special Operations troops stationed there had to detonate their large equipment before evacuating Yemen and flying across the Red Sea to an American base in Djibouti — concerned that the war matériel would fall into the hands of the Houthi forces.

In Yemen, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, the administration talks as if it is supporting the orderly transitions to state building, but its actions are in fact helping to dismantle the central states, said Peter Harling, a researcher with the International Crisis Group, who with the journalist Sarah Birke recently wrote an essay analyzing the regional dynamic.

In each case, local players like the Islamic State or the Houthi movement have stepped into a power vacuum to stake their own claims, but none have the credibility or wherewithal to unify or govern.

But Washington, Mr. Harling said, insisted in each case on maintaining the fiction that its favored local player had a viable chance to rebuild an orderly state — whether moderate rebels in Syria, the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad or the Hadi government in Yemen.

The Western powers “have to pretend the situation is not as bad as it is, so they don’t have to accept failure and take ownership of the situation,” Mr. Harling said. “In many years of working in the region, I have never seen such a distance between statements and fact.”

“Unfortunately, the world gets a vote,” said a senior Obama administration official who didn’t want to be named.

I can imagine those words coming from the lips of deputy national security adviser for strategic communication Ben Rhodes, and the the reason he wouldn’t want to be named would not be because of the proverbial sensitivity of the issues. It would simply be for the sake of saving himself embarrassment. And avoiding the risk of having such words quoted back to him in a Senate hearing while he seeks approval for some position in another administration.

When the question is whether this administration has a coherent strategy and the response is that unfortunately, the world gets a vote, the implication is that under the Obama administration’s unchallenged management, the problems of the Middle East could all be sorted out. The problems, so the argument goes, all come from those other pesky foreign powers.

That’s the kind of claim that can only be insinuated and must additionally be cloaked in anonymity, because if made explicitly and with attribution it would deservedly draw a derisory response.

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The Canterbury Scene remembered

Earlier this month, Daevid Allen died at the age of 77. Even though (to my surprise) he got an obituary in the New York Times, his name will not have been widely known among Americans.

He was an Australian Beat poet, latter-day minstrel and co-founder of Soft Machine and Gong. Upon his arrival in England in the mid-60s, he helped give birth to what would later become known as the Canterbury Scene.

For centuries, Canterbury was known as a place of pilgrimage in South East England, but during the late ’60s and early ’70s the name began to signal something else: a new musical culture.

Like many forms of creativity this didn’t fit neatly inside a ready-made niche.

In the era of record stores, albums had to be racked somewhere and the Canterbury groups would usually get shoved under Progressive Rock, but what they really represented was a meeting place between rock, jazz, classical, avant-garde, and what had yet to be dubbed World music.

But the Canterbury Scene couldn’t exactly be defined in stylistic terms. It was more of a tribe of musicians engaged in fluid collaborations, forming bands which had a habit of gaining their widest recognition after they had already dissolved.

Inventive, dense, complex, eccentric, lyrical, classical, experimental, psychedelic, romantic — the Canterbury sound had all these qualities. And the musicians creating this sound tended to express a particular constellation of English values: non-conformist, whimsical, innovative and yet unpretentious.

For readers here who find my choices of music and even the fact that I post any music, strange, the Canterbury Scene is part of the explanation why — which is to say, while as a teenager my friends were listening to Led Zepplin, The Who, and Deep Purple, I was engrossed with the offbeat creations of the likes of Matching Mole, Gong, and Hatfield and the North.

Here, and for the next few days, is an introduction to the Canterbury scene and the music which — at least to my ear — remains as original and inspiring now as it was when it was recorded over 40 years ago.

Egg — ‘Enneagram’ (from The Civil Surface, 1974)

Gong – ‘Love is How U Make It’ (from Angel’s Egg, 1973)

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Personal and public tragedies

“Ask not what disease the person has, but what person the disease has,” the Canadian physician William Osler would often say.

Although he is often described as the father of modern medicine, that particular lesson has not been deeply learned either by medical practitioners or the public at large.

Andreas Lubitz, the 27-year-old German pilot who is believed to have deliberately crashed a Germanwings Airbus A320 airliner in the French Alps, is now reported to have been suffering from depression.

Depression has thus been turned into a one-word explanation for what led to the catastrophic end of Flight 9525.

In the world of simplistic narratives in which we live, a lot of people will now imagine that anyone with depression has the potential to become a mass killer.

But the true story of what led a young man to end his own life and at the same time kill another 149 people, may never be known. It’s quite possible that his deadly impulse did not coalesce into a firm intention until he found himself alone in the cockpit.

William Saletan assumes the dubious role of a fatalistic suicide counselor when writing:

If a person is determined to kill himself, telling him to abstain isn’t enough. The least he can do — and perhaps the most he can do — is to spare the lives of others.

That’s a bit like talking someone down by imploring them not to jump off a building until passersby have cleared the sidewalk. It might sound like a reasonable request, yet it overlooks the tunnel vision of despair. It’s an attempt to appeal to a person’s sense that life is precious when that is the very sense that they have already lost.

In the aftermath of any catastrophic event, we always crave an explanation — a way of understanding what happened, and in this case, a way of becoming confident that something similar will not happen again.

Aircraft crews wear uniforms for a very good reason: we entrust ourselves to their safe care with the expectation that they follow something akin to military discipline in their allegiance to procedure. Uniformity in appearance helps reinforce the expectation of uniformity in behavior. That’s why no airline will ever introduce “casual Friday” where the flight and cabin crews can show up however they please. Even though we know each individual has their own personal life, as passengers we rely on their personal lives not intruding on their work.

Lubitz may have foreseen that his diagnosis was going to destroy his career and concluded that if he couldn’t work as a pilot — if he had to abandon his life’s dream — he had no reason to live. That might explain his suicidal intention, but it wouldn’t explain why he chose to end the lives of everyone around him.

To understand that choice, we might need to understand why he chose to become a pilot in the first place.

Since in piloting the emphasis is on technical proficiency, as passengers we tend not to be too concerned about the pilot’s people skills. Can he land the aircraft safely is all we care — and at least 95% of the time it will be he.

But flying a passenger aircraft doesn’t only require skill in its operation, it also requires a deep sense of responsibility. No doubt most pilots take on and carry that responsibility in an admirable way, but I have to wonder whether in an age of paranoia, the ability and perceived need to isolate the flight crew from the passengers has come at the expense of the human factor.

The flight crew need to be just as concerned about the welfare of the people on board as do the cabin crew and yet within the post 9/11 security constraints it’s common for pilots to get no more than a fleeting glimpse of their own passengers as they pass through the departure gate.

Within the prevailing security mindset, airlines are now being required to consider implementing a rule that many already apply: that whenever a pilot leaves the cockpit another crew member should stand in so that a single pilot is never left alone.

But there might be other procedural changes not directly related to security that could have reduced the risk of the Germanwings tragedy.

Flight crews could just as easily receive passengers and point them to their seats as does the cabin crew. If Andreas Lubitz had met and made eye contact with everyone on the aircraft in this way, he might not have chosen to end their lives — he might even have had second thoughts about ending his own.

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The myth of the two-state solution

Israel declared its independence in 1948. Less than twenty years later it expanded its territorial control across the West Bank and Gaza (and Sinai).

What has subsequently come to be referred to as “The Occupation” has referred to the status quo which (with a few modifications) has endured for the overwhelming majority of Israel’s existence.

The Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, and the so-called “peace process” which followed, have merely provided political cover for the relentless expansion of Jewish settlement and Palestinian dispossession across the West Bank.

What right-wing Zionists refer to as Judea and Samaria is not an aspiration — it is the political reality of a state in which full democratic rights are granted to Jews but not Palestinians.

While the mantras of ending the occupation and dismantling the settlements have tirelessly been repeated, year after year, the settlements have grown.

Both the terms settlement and occupation, mask with seeming impermanence a reality that has been set in reinforced concrete.

Given that over the course of more than twenty years, no progress whatsoever has been made towards the implementation of a two-state solution, the fact that it has now been rejected by Benjamin Netanyahu is a non-event. Yet this is a non-event that is deeply upsetting to many American Jews.

It’s not that they believed that peace was just around the corner. On the contrary, the value of the two-state solution has never derived from expectations about the future. Instead, its value is based very much in the present.

For liberal Americans — Jewish and non-Jewish — the two-state solution ideologically sanitized Israel by ostensibly embodying the desire that the political aspirations of both Jews and Palestinians could be recognized. If this promise is taken away, liberals are deprived of a fiction that allowed them to avoid confronting the illiberal nature of the Jewish state.

Americans want to be able to say they support Israel and democracy and Israel is forcing them to choose between the two.

Noam Sheizaf provided a reality check for participants at the J Street conference in Washington DC this week, when he said:

In Israel, we’ve got to the point where arguing for a state for all its citizens — equal rights for everyone — is a form of ‘Arab nationalism’ that should be made illegal. While arguing for an ethnic state that gives privileges to one group over the other is ‘democracy’…

I am 40 and I only know one Israel — and that’s from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea. And in which there live Palestinians and Jews, roughly the same size of populations — they’re totally mixed with each other. They’re mixed in the Galilee, they’re mixed along the coast, they’re mixed in the West Bank by now, they’re mixed in the Negev — everywhere Jews living next to Palestinians.

One group has everything — all the rights — the other one has privileges given to it according to a complicated system of citizenship and where they happen to live and where their grandparents were in ’48…

I think we need to start looking at this in civil rights issues, if that’s what we believe in — and that’s the kind of activism I’m looking for. Not redrawing maps in a way that will keep some people in and some people out so that we can call themself [a] democracy.

Sheizaf also took J Street to task for its failure to talk about Gaza:

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Israel spied on Iran nuclear talks with U.S.

When Israel is described as one of America’s closest allies, maybe more emphasis should be placed on the term close than ally — as in too close, which would be to call Israel, America’s most intrusive, troublesome ally.

And this would explain why, as U.S. officials say: “The U.S. expends more counterintelligence resources fending off Israeli spy operations than any other close ally.”

What the following report speaks to is a conviction among Israeli leaders and their supporters — many of whom are American citizens — that Israel has a right to use any means available not merely to influence but rather to control and if needs be, to sabotage U.S. foreign policy.

The Wall Street Journal reports: Soon after the U.S. and other major powers entered negotiations last year to curtail Iran’s nuclear program, senior White House officials learned Israel was spying on the closed-door talks.

The spying operation was part of a broader campaign by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to penetrate the negotiations and then help build a case against the emerging terms of the deal, current and former U.S. officials said. In addition to eavesdropping, Israel acquired information from confidential U.S. briefings, informants and diplomatic contacts in Europe, the officials said.

The espionage didn’t upset the White House as much as Israel’s sharing of inside information with U.S. lawmakers and others to drain support from a high-stakes deal intended to limit Iran’s nuclear program, current and former officials said.

“It is one thing for the U.S. and Israel to spy on each other. It is another thing for Israel to steal U.S. secrets and play them back to U.S. legislators to undermine U.S. diplomacy,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on the matter.

The U.S. and Israel, longtime allies who routinely swap information on security threats, sometimes operate behind the scenes like spy-versus-spy rivals. The White House has largely tolerated Israeli snooping on U.S. policy makers—a posture Israel takes when the tables are turned.

The White House discovered the operation, in fact, when U.S. intelligence agencies spying on Israel intercepted communications among Israeli officials that carried details the U.S. believed could have come only from access to the confidential talks, officials briefed on the matter said.

Israeli officials denied spying directly on U.S. negotiators and said they received their information through other means, including close surveillance of Iranian leaders receiving the latest U.S. and European offers. European officials, particularly the French, also have been more transparent with Israel about the closed-door discussions than the Americans, Israeli and U.S. officials said.

Mr. Netanyahu and Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer early this year saw a rapidly closing window to increase pressure on Mr. Obama before a key deadline at the end of March, Israeli officials said.

Using levers of political influence unique to Israel, Messrs. Netanyahu and Dermer calculated that a lobbying campaign in Congress before an announcement was made would improve the chances of killing or reshaping any deal. [Continue reading…]

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Israel and Netanyahu: A racist prime minister can only stay in power with the support of racist voters

Allison Kaplan Sommer says that: “Israelis, whether they want to admit it or not, have spent a good part of the past year feeling afraid.”

She goes on to detail how Benjamin Netanyahu masterfully built his election campaign around the exploitation of that fear.

He systematically painted the main contenders vying for the premiership Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni as weak and ineffective, laughably so. He began by feminizing them and infantilizing them with mocking videos that portrayed them as gossiping girlfriends in a kitchen and misbehaving children in a preschool.

As the campaign wore on, he moved away from a comic approach and started making his charges more seriously. His rivals were naive dupes, he said, vulnerable to foreign pressure, and would leave Israel exposed to its enemies – while he positioned himself in contrast as a strong protector who can stand up to pressure no matter where it came from (even the White House!) and whatever he deems necessary to keep Israelis safe, no matter how brutal, immoral, or racist.

The derisive manner in which Netanyahu condescended to “Tzipi” and “Bougie” and “the left” when he spoke evoked the famous Jack Nicholson speech in “A Few Good Men” when, testifying as Col. Jessup, he smirks “Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom … My existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall.”

At every juncture, when the going got tough for Netanyahu, appealing to fear was his go-to campaign strategy. Some might argue it was his entire campaign strategy. To those who understood this, it was clear in his showdown with President Obama that he would never submit to White House pressure to cancel his speech before Congress, no matter how hard Obama and the Democrats piled on the pressure.

The reason had nothing to do with the urgency of the issue of Iran or even Netanyahu’s desire to impress his electorate with the speech – but because backing down would utterly undercut the tough unbending image he was working to project to the electorate.

The ultimate proof of the effectiveness of his scare-mongering tactics – and his willingness to cross any line to implement them – was the now-infamous last-minute online video released well into Election Day, expressing fears based on factually-challenged claims: “Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls. Left-wing organizations are busing them out.” He compared the need to vote for him to the emergency military reserve call-up notice: “Get out to vote, bring your friends and family – in order to close the gap between us and Labor. With your help, and with God’s help we’ll establish a nationalist government that will safeguard the State of Israel.”

In the video, Netanyahu puts out the call in the urgent tones of of a military commander planning strategy and giving out orders with a tone of urgency. He makes the pronouncement seated in front of a map of the Middle East, clearly designed to remind voters of the neighborhood in which they reside: Hamas to the south, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and now, ISIS just over the border with Syria.

It all worked brilliantly. Israelis went for the devil they know – they voted for an internationally unpopular bully rather than roll the dice on a man they feared might be too nice to keep them safe.

Whether one is an Israeli or not, Jewish or gentile, everyone understands what it means to be afraid. Fear is easy to exploit and so those whose fears are exploited are easy to view as victims.

From this perspective, Netanyahu, the bully, coerced Israelis and took advantage of their prevailing fears.

For Israel’s liberal supporters — especially in America — this way of viewing Netanyahu’s ability to retain his hold on power is essentially sympathetic. It provides room for loving Israel while despising its leader.

But Israel’s prime minister did not get re-elected simply by being a very effective fear-monger. What he did was wholeheartedly tap into the racism that lies at the core of Israelis’ fears.

Netanyahu did not snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by desperately resorting to racism. Racism was his trump card which he played with perfect timing, confident that it would have its desired effect.

Rather than letting the power of racism become blunted by being scattered among the small parties of the Right, Netanyahu successfully presented voting for Likud as the best way of holding back the Arab threat.

In America, for a politician, even at a minor local level, to make such a blatantly racist move would almost certainly destroy his career.

Even though racism still pervades American culture in many ways, it is no longer culturally acceptable. Even though a lot of the political opposition to Barack Obama has had racist undertones, racism rarely blatantly shows its face in contemporary America — at least among those who hope to win elections. Racism has to be concealed, but when exposed, is generally disavowed.

When Netanyahu warned about “Arab voters coming out in droves,” he was in fact reiterating the core presupposition upon which Zionism is founded: that non-Jews pose a threat to Jews and Jewish security depends on the protection of Jewish power.

Peter Beinart, one of Netanyahu’s harshest critics, describes Israel as “the one state in the world that has as its mission statement the protection of Jewish life.”

That is indeed true, but the implication is that without the protection of such a state, Jewish life is inevitably in jeopardy.

Yet even though the U.S. Constitution has no provisions that relate specifically to the protection of Jewish life, it’s hard to argue that Jews living here are any less safe than those living in Israel.

On the contrary, what protects Jewish life and the lives of every other minority more than anything else is not any form of nationalism, but instead it is democracy.

In a democracy, citizens share equal rights. In Israel they do not.

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How to save jobs and destroy the planet

If I was invested with the powers of a dictator, I’d be especially ruthless in one particular way: I’d show no mercy to those guilty of crimes against language.

No, I wouldn’t be another Bryan Henderson — the Wikipedia editor who has a vendetta against the phrase “comprised of.”

The guilty, in my book, are not those who fail to bow in obeisance to the mythical gods of grammar. What I view as an inexcusable abuse of language is to regard it as nothing more than a tool of deception.

The people who specialize in this corrupt art, work in advertising, public relations, and politics, and they create things like this:

The American Progressive Bag Alliance.

Plastic bags — fluttering down windswept streets, getting caught in branches, blocking drains, choking animals, poisoning groundwater, and colonizing oceans — might seem to have a life of their own. Apparently they are now also demanding political rights and claim they are progressive.

It turns out, however, that APBA is not an alliance of bags, but instead (predictably) it represents the transnational corporate power and interests of the plastics industry:

  • Advance Polybag, Inc. – bag manufacturer
  • The Dow Chemical Company – resin maker
  • ExxonMobil Corporation – HDPE resin maker
  • Hilex Poly Co., LLC. – bag manufacturer, co-founder
  • Inteplast – bag manufacturer
  • NOVA Chemicals, Inc. – polyethylene manufacturer
  • Superbag Corporation – bag manufacturer
  • Total Petrochemicals USA – polyethylene manufacture
  • Unistar Plastics, LLC – bag manufacturer

I imagine that those came up with the name American Progressive Bag Alliance, have to drug themselves to sleep — and probably drug themselves at work, too. Either that, or through a self-administered lobotomization which cuts out principles for the sake of career, the conscience they were born with, withered away a long time ago.

If, like me, you’ve never heard of this alliance before, Bill Raden explains what they have done:

Just when Californians were getting used to the idea of living without getting free, single-use grocery bags at the supermarket checkout, Secretary of State Alex Padilla recently announced that a referendum effort aimed at rescinding the plastic bag ban signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown in September had qualified for the 2016 ballot. Pending the results of next year’s vote, the announcement effectively suspends the July 1 implementation of the measure, Senate Bill 270, which would have been the first statewide bag ban in the nation. (Citywide bans, such as those passed in Los Angeles and San Francisco, will remain in place.)

Padilla’s office says that a random sampling found that the measure’s supporters collected at least 555,236 valid signatures — more than the 504,706 needed. Ironically, Padilla had been a key force behind the passage of SB 270, when he was in the State Senate.

Californians currently use about 11 billion disposable plastic shopping bags annually with a market value that the plastic bag industry estimates at between $100 million to $150 million. Those sales will now be secure for an additional 15 months.

The effort to put the so-called “people’s veto” onto the ballot was mounted by the American Progressive Bag Alliance, the same industry consortium that bitterly fought passage of the ban.

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ISIS’s Islamic credentials still in dispute

The latest chapter in the backlash provoked by the Atlantic’s controversial article, “What ISIS really wants,” comes from Mehdi Hasan in a 5,000-word piece for the New Statesman.

The rise of Isis in Iraq and Syria has been a disaster for the public image of Islam – and a boon for the Islamophobia industry. Here, after all, is a group that calls itself Islamic State; that claims the support of Islamic texts to justify its medieval punishments, from the stoning of adulterers to the amputation of the hands of thieves; and that has a leader with a PhD in Islamic studies who declares himself to be a “caliph”, or ruler over all Muslims, and has even renamed himself in honour of the first Muslim caliph, Abu Bakr.

The consequences are, perhaps, as expected. In September 2014, a Zogby poll found that only 27 per cent of Americans had a favourable view of Islam – down from 35 per cent in 2010. By February 2015, more than a quarter of Americans (27 per cent) were telling the pollsters LifeWay Research that they believed that life under Isis rule “gives a true indication of what an Islamic society looks like”.

Yet what is much more worrying is that it isn’t just ill-informed, ignorant or bigoted members of the public who take such a view. “The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic,” wrote Wood in his widely read 10,000-word cover report (“What Isis really wants”) in the March issue of Atlantic, in which he argued, “The religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.”

Hasan responds by saying we need to ask: “is Isis a recognisably ‘Islamic’ movement? Are Isis recruits motivated by religious fervour and faith?”

The answers he provides to these questions come in a form reminiscent of nineteenth century ethnography.

There is no need for us to understand the natives (those being the members of ISIS) by their own accounts — given the notorious duplicity of this murderous tribe, such accounts could hardly be relied upon. It is instead sufficient and wholly appropriate to look at ISIS through the eyes of observers — even observers who profess no direct knowledge of the organization.

Thus, the first piece of evidence of the lack of religiosity of ISIS comes from a former hostage, Didier François, who noted that hostages were not provided with a Quran.

Which demonstrates what? If, on the contrary, ISIS had been schooling its hostages in Islam, would this, for Hasan, buttress the assertion that the group is indeed very Islam? I doubt it.

Another field account Hasan offers comes from an American journalist:

In a recent despatch from Zarqa in Jordan, birthplace of the late AQI leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and “one of the country’s most notorious hotbeds of Islamic radicalism”, Foreign Policy magazine’s David Kenner sat down with a group of young, male Isis supporters.

“None of them appeared to be particularly religious,” Kenner noted. “Not once did the conversation turn to matters of faith, and none budged from their seats when the call to prayer sounded. They appeared driven by anger at humiliations big and small – from the police officers who treated them like criminals outside their homes to the massacres of Sunnis in Syria and Iraq – rather than by a detailed exegesis of religious texts.”

As Hasan and others frequently note, there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. If one was to randomly listen in on conversations between groups of Muslims and also observe how often they pray, would this be a reliable way of determining who should or should not be described as very Islamic?

For good reasons, most non-Muslims would avoid referring to Muslims as people who call themselves Muslim, because in the religiously diverse world in which we live, the business of determining who does or does not authentically represent their own faith is an intra-faith issue.

Are Jehovah’s Witnesses genuinely Christian? Are Hasidic Jews more Jewish than secular Jewish Zionists?

These are questions best left to be argued about and between those who ascribe themselves these identities, because they are inherently subjective issues.

To call ISIS very Islamic seems to me much less a statement about Islam than it is a retort to those who assert that ISIS’s Islamic trappings are simply a facade.

*

Paradoxically there is often a secular slant to arguments about who does or does not legitimately represent any particular faith and this comes through the concept of religious fanaticism.

In societies where religion is generally viewed as a private matter, the religious fanatic is the person who is seen as taking their religion too seriously. This is a secular perception.

Mainstream religions tend to have greater tolerance for non-believers, those of weak faith, and the less devout. Indeed, the capacity for any religion to enlarge itself depends to some degree on its ability to be inclusive by lowering the bars to membership.

Those groups that get marginalized and dubbed fanatical, tend to be the ones who are also preoccupied with questions about religious purity, strict adherence to scripture and narrowly defined authenticity.

As understandable as it is that the vast majority of Muslims want to disavow ISIS and assert that it does not in any way represent Islam, denunciations of the literal application of Sharia law by others are heard much less frequently.

When an Iranian court implemented an order that a convict have one of his eyes gouged out last week, it would be very hard to argue that this was an un-Islamic implementation of law. On the contrary, it could reasonably be described as very Islamic — even if this approach to Sharia disturbs many Muslims.

Saudi Arabia’s delegation to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva last week defended the state’s escalating use of the death penalty by saying it is authorized under Sharia law. Saudi Arabia is frequently criticized for its appalling human rights record, but rarely is it accused of being un-Islamic.

Inside every religion there are power struggles and contested claims about who holds the most legitimate authority. But just as is the case in so many other facets of life, these are ultimately mundane expressions of egotism.

Flag-wavers of all descriptions see their flags (be they national or religious) as emblems of power a portion of which they are claiming as their own.

Hasan concludes:

To claim that Isis is Islamic is egregiously inaccurate and empirically unsustainable, not to mention insulting to the 1.6 billion non-violent adherents of Islam across the planet. Above all else, it is dangerous and self-defeating, as it provides Baghdadi and his minions with the propaganda prize and recruiting tool that they most crave.

He started out by asking whether ISIS recruits are motivated by religious fervour and faith and proceeded to demonstrate that they are not.

But if that’s really the case, how could claiming ISIS is Islamic actually serve as a recruiting tool?

Religious veneration always invokes a separation between the sacred and the adherent. The pristine religion is somehow imagined to exist independent from its followers, yet the fact is that religions are their adherents.

Islam is Muslims. Judaism is Jews. Christianity is Christians. Buddhism is Buddhists.

Religions come into existence and also die and it’s easy to tell when a religion has died. Its temples and sacred texts might survive and yet it has no human form.

ISIS is Islamic by a measure that probably isn’t worth disputing, but those who argue that it is not Islamic seem as deluded as those who view it as the epitome of Islam.

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Why American public opinion is often not worth measuring

Five years ago, a CNN opinion poll of adult Americans asked:

Do you think Iran currently has nuclear weapons, or not?

71% of the respondents answered “Yes.” Only 3% expressed no opinion, which is to say, acknowledged that they didn’t know.

In the intervening period, as news of ongoing negotiations between Iran and the U.S. (and the rest of the P5+1) has occasionally captured the headlines, I guess a number of those who believed that Iran already has nuclear weapons have since deduced that there would be no negotiations taking place if indeed Iran was already nuclear armed.

The results of a poll released earlier this month indicated that a majority of Americans (Democrats, Republicans, and Independents) now “support an agreement that would limit Iran’s enrichment capacity and impose additional intrusive inspections in exchange for the lifting of some sanctions.”

And yet, another recent poll shows that an even larger majority of Americans believe a nuclear deal with Iran would make little difference in preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Perhaps that’s because there are still a lot of Americans who believe Iran already possesses nuclear weapons.

As much as anything, the information opinion polls gather says as much about the questions as the answers.

If I was a pollster, I’d be tempted to ask questions like this:

Have you tried the new energy drink, P5+1?

Do you think it tastes better than P5?

I’d also present a questionnaire to all members of Congress, asking:

What does the “P” in P5+1 refer to?
a) Peerless
b) Protestant
c) Permanent
d) Piquant
e) Don’t know

And who is the 1?
a) Israel
b) North Korea
c) Germany
d) United States
e) Don’t know

But seriously, the professional pollsters could provide a valuable public service if they simply prefaced every attempt to gather public opinion by underlining the value of answering, “don’t know,” when that’s really the truth.

With some gentle coaxing, we might find that Americans are not as delusional as they often appear. They’re simply afraid of revealing how little they know.

If people were less embarrassed about intentionally exposing their ignorance, then polls might more than anything else highlight the degree to the United States is a dysfunctional democracy in which the media, political, and educational systems are failing to sustain an informed citizenry.

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