Author Archives: Paul Woodward

Rogers and Feinstein promote farcical ‘defection’ story about Snowden

NBC reports: Bruce Riedel, director of the Intelligence Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a former CIA official, said Friday that one key question now in the Snowden affair is “Is it really Edward Snowden who is doing this, or is there a larger apparatus? I know that many people in the intelligence community… now no longer regard Edward Snowden as a thief or a traitor…. They regard him as a defector” who has gone over to a foreign intelligence agency.

It’s possible that Riedel, along with Rep. Mike Rogers and Sen. Dianne Feinstein and the members of the intelligence community they talk to are all complete idiots.

That’s definitely possible.

What’s more likely though, is that an assumption being made by the heads of the intelligence agencies is that the average American is an idiot. They imagine that if the word “defector” gets repeated often enough, the idea will catch on and through the power of muddled thinking — or no thinking at all — an increasing number of people will start to believe that we’re back in the Cold War and Snowden switched sides.

Here’s the syllogism:

Defectors go to Russia. Edward Snowden went to Russia. Therefore Snowden must be a defector.

Here’s the problem with this “logic”: If Snowden really was a defector, he wouldn’t have gone via Hong Kong and met Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras on the way. He wouldn’t have communicated with anyone other than his Russian handlers. All the intelligence in his possession would have remained secret, thus retaining its maximum value to its recipients.

The current debate would not be taking place because hardly anyone in the world would have heard of Snowden. His name would have been placed on missing persons’ lists and his disappearance would attracted little attention beyond his family. The NSA, given Snowden’s lowly position as an employee and subsequent contractor, would most likely still remain blissfully ignorant about his breach of its security.

Edward Snowden, happy to be enjoying his anonymity and the rewards for his services would now be enjoying his new life in Russia with far more freedom than he currently has.

Meanwhile, the only defection that has actually taken place is that of common sense departing from the minds of a large number of Snowden’s critics.

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Where is First Look heading?

Earlier this month, Pierre Omidyar announced the addition of Bill Gannon to First Look Media’s editorial leadership team. Gannon comes from from Time Inc.’s EntertainmentWeekly.com.

Drawing on his extensive experience in digital media as well as his diverse background in developing new editorial strategies and creating great user experiences, Bill will leverage all of his talents to help us build a next-generation media platform for a broad audience.

Gannon’s job title hasn’t been specified but his is presumably the lead editorial position. “Bill will assemble a specialized team to create a unique, digital approach to breaking news – from politics and business to sports and entertainment.”

Ray Rosen, from NYU, who is acting as an adviser to FLM and who is an opponent of what he calls The View From Nowhere (the pseudo impartiality that prevails in the mainstream media) was asked the following question in an interview with The Atlantic in December:

You’ve written that The View From Nowhere is, in part, a defense mechanism against charges of bias originating in partisan politics. If you won’t be invoking it, what will your defense be when those charges happen?

There are two answers to that. 1) We told you where we’re coming from. 2) High standards of verification. You need both.

Is “we told you where we’re coming from” referring to the organization itself, or the journalists it publishes, or both?

Both. Like I said: NewCo [renamed First Look] will not present itself as the Voice of God. Neither will its contributors. NewCo will not always be in harmony with itself, either. It will be messier than that.

Rosen did a short interview earlier this month with Gannon and given that Gannon is unknown to most people who are interested in FLM, it would have been great if Rosen had asked where Gannon is coming from. He didn’t and based on what Gannon says, the glibbest answer to that question is probably the most accurate: Entertainment Weekly.

The closest answer Gannon provided to the question of where he’s coming from was his explanation on his reasons for joining this venture:

I was initially attracted to the idea because it seemed to be a unique opportunity where my background in creating new editorial strategies and new user experiences could add value. I’ll be focusing on continuous news coverage and aggregation across a wide range of sections: world news, politics, business, entertainment, sports and more.

That’s marketing boilerplate — and a rehash of Omidyar’s press release. It’s the kind of statement I’d expect from someone entering a similar position in any new media outlet from Huffington Post to Buzzfeed. I get no sense of where Gannon is coming from other than that he believes he can devise ways of boosting the site’s popularity — on the unquestioned supposition that popularity is the best measure of success.

After the interview, Rosen adds an observation about the importance of establishing the right balance of “flow” and “stock” — terms defined by Robin Sloan:

Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist.

Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.

From the little that Gannon reveals, it sounds like he’ll be the kind of editor who focuses more on flow than stock — he’s no Lewis Lapham, that’s for sure.

If that’s the case, I remain skeptical about where FLM is heading since I firmly believe that any new media venture in America, for which investigative journalism is central, will for that very reason have limited popularity.

In attempting to legitimize the pursuit of a mass general interest audience, Gannon says: “The audience becomes aware of our our investigative journalism en route to their other news needs.”

On their way to catch up on Justin Bieber’s latest egg-throwing antics, users (who should not be narrowly defined as readers) will be enticed by the irresistible draw of reporting on fracking, climate change, or net neutrality.

From what I can tell, Huffington Post has already cracked this nut and established it goes the other way around: the serious bleeds to the trivial.

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What happened to AIPAC’s seventy senators?

AIPAC-senators

In 2005, AIPAC’s Steven Rosen when prompted by Jeffrey Goldberg to assess the level of the lobby’s influence famously said: “In twenty-four hours, we could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin.”

The “Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013” sponsored by Democratic Senator Robert Menedez has the support of fifty-nine senators. That’s a dangerously large majority but just short of a veto-proof sixty-seven votes and well short of Rosen’s seventy.

Does that mean that AIPAC is refraining from pulling its weight or is it just not as powerful as Rosen declared?

I called my Democratic Senator Kay Hagan, one of the co-sponsors of the bill, to tell her that if she follows through and casts a vote in favor, she won’t have my vote in November. Interestingly, her staffer was at pains to underline the fact that this is still in process and hasn’t gone to a vote. I got a strong sense that Hagan, perhaps like many other senators both Democratic and Republican, would be content demonstrating her loyalty to AIPAC without actually casting a vote.

In the report below, Republican Senator Roy Blunt essentially says that every senator’s hands have been tied by Senate leader Harry Reid and far from striking a defiant tone, Blunt seems content to be rendered powerless.

If the bill got just one more supporter, would Reid bow to pressure and let it go to a vote? And can’t AIPAC with all its influence turn just one more senator in its favor?

I get the sense that for everyone involved — including AIPAC — this is all political theater. They want to act tough, but at the end of the day, they probably don’t want to be held responsible for sabotaging the most significant diplomatic opening in a decade.

National Journal reports: Senate Iran hawks have lots of votes to back their sanctions legislation. What they lack is a plan to get the bill to the floor.

Fifty-nine senators — including 16 Democrats — have signed onto sanctions legislation from Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez and Republican Sen. Mark Kirk. The measure would punish Iran with sanctions if it reneges on an interim nuclear agreement or if that agreement does not ultimately abolish any nuclear-weapons capabilities for Iran.

That count has climbed rapidly since the bipartisan pair introduced their legislation in late December. But now it’s unclear whether that support will be enough to clear the bill’s next major hurdle: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Reid is siding with the White House, which has put intense pressure on lawmakers not to act on sanctions, arguing it could result in both a nuclear-armed and hostile Iranian state. And without Reid’s backing, supporters of the Menendez-Kirk bill are unsure how to move the measure to the floor.

“I assume that if the Democrat senators put enough pressure on Senator Reid he might bring it to the floor,” said Missouri Republican Sen. Roy Blunt. “But, you know, we are at a moment in the Senate where nothing happens that Senator Reid doesn’t want to happen; and this is something at this moment that Senator Reid doesn’t want to happen.”

And for now, sanctions supporters are still mulling their strategy.

“We are talking amongst ourselves. There is a very active debate and discussion ongoing about how best to move forward,” said Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, a cosponsor of the bill. “There are a number of alternative strategies, but we’re deliberating them.”

While Reid has, at least for now, foiled their policy plans, sanctions supporters are still scoring the desired political points on the issue. They can report their efforts to their constituents while blaming Reid for the inaction.

Jon Stewart, comparing these senators to egg-throwing Justin Bieber, is perfectly clear about which “constituents” they are trying to represent: AIPAC and Israel. (It’s a shame that Daily Show writers, having crafted a strong piece then felt compelled to add some “balance” by treating Rouhani’s tweet with scorn: “World powers surrendered to Iran’s national will.” If he can placate his hawkish critics just with a tweet, I’m sure Obama is envious.)

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Nuclear weapons and the illusion of ‘safe hands’

At the beginning of 2004, Graham Allison wrote:

The Bush administration has yet to develop a coherent strategy for combating the threat of nuclear terror. Although it has made progress on some fronts, Washington has failed to take scores of specific actions that would measurably reduce the risk to the country. Unless it changes course — and fast — a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States will be more likely than not in the decade ahead.

A decade later hardly anyone seems to be pushing that particular panic button and yet the world still bristles with an estimated 17,300 nuclear weapons.

Apart from the fewer than 10 weapons North Korea is estimated to possess, the rest of the world’s nuclear arsenal is supposedly protected by ‘safe hands.’ How safe those might be in Pakistan is highly debatable and likewise there is little reason to have complete confidence in nuclear security in India, Russia, or Israel. But most Americans are probably confident that the nuclear arsenal in this country is the most carefully protected in the world, and maybe it is — on paper.

But it turns out — and this should come as no surprise — that the real nuclear peril here and everywhere else derives not from the designs of madmen, but rather from human frailty. Or to put it in words every American understands: because shit happens.

We already know that in 1961 two hydrogen bombs with a combined power of more than 500 Hiroshimas were accidentally dropped over North Carolina. Subsequently, a “secret investigation concluded that in the case of one of the devices only a single low-voltage switch stood between the US and catastrophe.”

The New York Times now reports that 34 of the U.S. Air Force officers who are directly in control of launching nuclear weapons have been suspended because they were found to be cheating on “proficiency tests that assess their knowledge of how to operate the warheads.”

This comes just weeks after an Air Force general was fired because of his drunken antics.

The officer, Maj. Gen. Michael J. Carey, was removed as commander of the 20th Air Force, which maintains and operates intercontinental ballistic missiles, after being accused of drinking heavily, insulting his guests, consorting with someone identified as the “cigar shop lady,” and slurring his speech while weaving in Red Square, “pouting and stumbling.”

Last May the Air Force disclosed that it removed 17 officers assigned to stand watch over nuclear-tipped Minuteman missiles after finding safety violations, potential violations in protecting codes and attitude problems.

And last November, The Associated Press reported that Air Force officers with nuclear launch authority had twice been caught napping with the blast door open. That is a violation of security regulations meant to prevent a terrorist or intruder from entering the underground command post and compromising secret launch codes.

When these are the vulnerabilities of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, there’s little reason to assume that these weapons are being guarded any more carefully elsewhere.

Posit a threat as external and no effort or expense will be spared to erect every imaginable barrier whose claimed effect will be to enhance everyone’s safety.

But when a much larger threat comes from within and comes from the simple fact that people make mistakes — that no system is absolutely unbreakable — and the only rational solution is one that hardly any politician has the guts to advocate: global nuclear disarmament.

It isn’t a question of whether this can be accomplished; it’s simply a question of whether this will happen before or after a catastrophic nuclear accident.

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Understanding the psychology shaping negotiations with Iran

“The only way for interaction with Iran is dialogue on an equal footing, confidence-building and mutual respect as well as reducing antagonism and aggression,” Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said in a speech after taking the oath of office last August.

“If you want the right response, don’t speak with Iran in the language of sanctions, speak in the language of respect.”

In the following article, Nicholas Wright and Karim Sadjadpour describe how an understanding of neuroscience — or lack of it — may determine the outcome of negotiations with Iran.

The whole piece is worth reading, but keep this in mind: every single insight that gets attributed to neuroscience has been clearly established without the need to conduct a single brain scan. Indeed, everything that is here being attributed to the “exquisite neural machinery” of the brain can be understood by studying the workings of the human mind and how thought shapes behavior.

It is important to draw a sharp distinction between the examination of the mind and observing the workings of the brain because the latter is totally dependent on the output of intermediary electronic scanning devices, whereas minds can study themselves and each other directly and through shared language.

One of the insidious effects of neuroscience is that it promotes a view that understanding the ways brains work has greater intrinsic value than understanding how minds work. What the negotiations with Iran demonstrate, however, is that the exact opposite is true.

To the extent that through the development of trust, negotiations are able to advance, this will have nothing to do with anyone’s confidence about what is happening inside anyone’s brain. On the contrary, it will depend on a meeting of minds and mutual understanding. No one will need to understand what is happening in their own or anyone else’s insula cortex, but what will most likely make or break the talks will be whether the Iranians believe they are being treated fairly. The determination of fairness does not depend on the presence or absence of a particular configuration of neural activity but rather on an assessment of reality.

Treat us as equals, Iran’s president said — and that was almost 15 years ago!

Nicholas Wright and Karim Sadjadpour write: “Imagine being told that you cannot do what everyone else is doing,” appealed Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif in a somber YouTube message defending the country’s nuclear program in November. “Would you back down? Would you relent? Or would you stand your ground?”

While only 14 nations, including Iran, enrich uranium (e.g. “what everyone else is doing”), Zarif’s message raises a question at the heart of ongoing talks to implement a final nuclear settlement with Tehran: Why has the Iranian government subjected its population to the most onerous sanctions regime in contemporary history in order to do this? Indeed, it’s estimated that Iran’s antiquated nuclear program needs one year to enrich as much uranium as Europe’s top facility produces in five hours.

To many, the answer is obvious: Iran is seeking a nuclear weapons capability (which it has arguably already attained), if not nuclear weapons. Yet the numerous frameworks used to explain Iranian motivations—including geopolitics, ideology, nationalism, domestic politics, and threat perception—lead analysts to different conclusions. Does Iran want nuclear weapons to dominate the Middle East, or does it simply want the option to defend itself from hostile opponents both near and far? While there’s no single explanation for Tehran’s actions, if there is a common thread that connects these frameworks and may help illuminate Iranian thinking, it is the brain.

Although neuroscience can’t be divorced from culture, history, and geography, there is no Orientalism of the brain: The fundamental biology of social motivations is the same in Tokyo, Tehran, and Tennessee. It anticipates, for instance, how the mind’s natural instinct to reject perceived unfairness can impede similarly innate desires for accommodation, and how fairness can lead to tragedy. It tells us that genuinely conciliatory gestures are more likely and natural than many believe, and how to make our own conciliatory gestures more effective.

Distilled to their essence, nations are led by and comprised of humans, and the success of social animals like humans rests on our ability to control the balance between cooperation and self-interest. The following four lessons from neuroscience may help us understand the obstacles that were surmounted to reach an interim nuclear deal with Iran, and the enormous challenges that still must be overcome in order to reach a comprehensive agreement. [Continue reading…]

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Al Qaeda’s real impotence and the threat from Iraq’s prime minister Maliki

A lot of ink has been spilled in recent weeks about the rising power of al Qaeda.

“Fallujah fall just the beginning — Al Qaeda virus is virulent and spreading,” an op-ed by the Heritage Foundation’s Peter Brookes, captures the spirit of this perception of a resurgence of what some people portray as the greatest source of evil ever to appear on Planet Earth.

The thing is, viral growth of any kind cannot be reliably measured by the ability to grab headlines. However widely dispersed groups branded as al Qaeda affiliates become, the feature that distinguishes each of them is that their predilection for violence makes them unpopular. They are like psychopathic gatecrashers. Everyone knows when they show up at a party and everyone wishes they’d go some place else.

Scaring everyone around you is a good way of getting noticed but it’s not a good way of making friends and at the end of the day, whatever else one might say about these men of violence, they have profound problems making and sustaining meaningful relationships. Their dysfunctionality makes it impossible for them to become the driving force behind any popular social movement; their direct impact on the wider world will never be more than marginal.

The real global impact of al Qaeda is not one that it has the capacity to generate itself; it is the impact created by governments which either cynically or paranoiacally react to a threat whose scope they been blown out of all proportion.

Anthony H. Cordesman writes: No one can deny that al Qaeda is a violent extremist threat wherever it operates. It poses a threat in terms of transnational terrorism in the United States and Europe, and a far more direct threat to the people who live in every area it operates. It has consistently been horribly repressive, violent, and often murderous in enforcing its political control and demands for a form of social behavior that reflect the worst in tribalism and offers almost nothing in terms of real Islamic values.

Like all extreme neo-Salafi movements, al Qaeda is also an economic and social dead end. It does not offer any practical way of operating and competing in a global economy, it is too dysfunctional to allow meaningful education and social interaction, and it finances itself largely through extortion in ways that cripple the existing local economy. Moreover, it does not tolerate competition even from other Islamist fighters. In Syria, it has provoked its own civil war with other hardline Islamist movements – a civil war it now seems to be decisively losing to other Sunni rebel factions.

It is precisely that type of behavior, however, which should lead U.S. officials, analysts, and media to do a far, far better job of reporting on exactly what has really happened in Anbar, and in cities like Fallujah and Ramadi. Bad as Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) is, far too much of the evidence points to Prime Minister Maliki as an equal threat to Iraq and to U.S. interests. Ever since the 2010 election, he has become steadily more repressive, manipulated Iraq’s security forces to serve his own interests, and created a growing Sunni resistance to his practice of using Shi’ite political support to gain his own advantage.

He has refused to honor the Erbil power-sharing agreement that was supposed to create a national government that could tie together Arab Sunni and Arab Shi’ite, and he has increased tensions with Iraq’s Kurds. As the U.S. State Department human rights reports for Iraq, Amnesty International, and the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) make all too clear; Maliki’s search for power has steadily repressed and alienated Iraq’s Sunnis on a national level. It has led to show trials and death sentences against one of Iraq’s leading Sunni politicians including former Vice President Taqris al-Hashimi, who has been living in asylum in Turkey since being convicted and sentenced to death in absentia by an Iraqi court. It has shifted the promotion structure in the Iraqi Security Forces to both give the Prime Minister personal control and has turned them into an instrument he can use against Sunnis.

Al Qaeda in Iraq – nor its recent incarnation the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) – has not risen up as a rebirth of the opposition the U.S. faced in 2005-2008. In spite of attempts by the Maliki government to label virtually any major Sunni opposition as terrorists, the steady increase in that opposition orginated primarily in the form of peaceful and legitimate political protests against Maliki’s purges of elected Iraqi Sunni leaders, and a regular exclusion of Sunnis from the government – including the Sons of Iraq in areas like Anbar. It came because Maliki used the Iraqi Security Forces against segments of his own population in the name of fighting terrorists and extremists. It came because of the failure to use Iraq’s oil wealth effectively and fairly – resulting with an economy that the CIA ranks Iraq 140th in the world in per capita income. The opposition to Maliki’s government also resulted from corruption so extreme that in December 2013 Transparency International ranked Iraq the seventh most corrupt country in the world, with only Libya, South Sudan, Sudan, Afghanistan, North Korea, and Somalia ranking worse than Iraq in terms of corruption.

Any analysis or news report that focuses only on al Qaeda’s very real abuses is little more than worthless – it encourages the tendency to demonize terrorism without dealing with the fact that terrorism almost always only succeeds when governments fail their people. Just as serious counterinsurgency can never be successful if it only addresses the military dimension, counterterrorism cannot succeed if it is not coupled with an effort to address the quality of the nation’s political leadership and governance, and the legitimate concerns of its people.

Any failure to analyze Maliki’s actions since the 2010 election – his disregard for the Erbil agreement that called for a true national government, his manipulation of the courts to create multiple trails and death sentences for political oppponents, including one of Iraq’s vice presidents – Tariq al-Hashemi; his use of temporary appointments to take control of key command positions in the Iraqi Security Forces; his efforts to bribe senior Iraqi Sunni politicians to support him with ministerial posts; and his steadily increasing suppression of Sunni popular opposition and protests – is dishonest, lazy, intellectual rubbish. [Continue reading…]

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Studying ritual in order to understand politics in Libya

When I was an undergraduate, early on I learned about the value of interdisciplinary studies. Had I been on a conventional academic track, that probably wouldn’t have happened, but I was lucky enough to be in a department that brought together anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, theologians, and religious studies scholars. In such an environment, the sharp defense of disciplinary turf was not only unwelcome — it simply made no sense.

Even so, universities remain structurally antagonistic to interdisciplinarity, both for intellectual reasons but perhaps more than anything for professional reasons. Anyone who wants to set themselves on a track towards tenure needs to get published and academic journals all fall within and help sustain disciplinary boundaries.

I mention this because when questions are raised such as what’s happening in Libya? or the more loaded, what’s gone wrong in Libya? the range of experts who get called on to respond, tends to be quite limited. There will be regional experts, political scientists, and perhaps economists. But calling on someone with an understanding of the human function of ritual along with the role different forms of ritual may have had in the development of civilization, is not an obvious way of trying to gain insight into events in Benghazi.

Moreover, within discourse that is heavily influenced by secular assumptions about the problematic nature of religion and the irrational roots of extremism, there is a social bias in the West that favors a popular dismissal.

What’s wrong with Libya? Those people are nuts.

Philip Weiss helped popularize the expression Progressive Except on Palestine — an accusation that most frequently gets directed at American liberal Zionists. But over the last two years a new variant which is perhaps even more commonplace has proliferated across the Left which with only slight overstatement could be called Progressive Except on the Middle East.

From this perspective, a suspicion of Muslim men with beards — especially those in Libya and Syria — has become a way through which a Clash of Civilizations narrative is unwittingly being reborn. Add to that the influence of the likes of Richard Dawkins and his cohorts on their mission to “decry supernaturalism in all its forms” and what you end up with is a stifling of curiosity — a lack of any genuine interest in trying to understand why people behave the way they do if you’ve already concluded that their behavior is something to be condemned.

A year ago, the science journal Nature, published an article on human rituals, their role in the growth of community and the emergence of civilization.

The report focuses on a global project one of whose principal aims is to test a theory that rituals come in two basic forms: one that through intense and often traumatic experience can forge tight bonds in small groups and the other that provides social cohesion less intensely but on a larger scale through doctrinal unity.

Last week, the State department designated three branches of Ansar al Shariah — two in Libya and one in Tunisia — as terrorist organizations. The information provided gives no indication about how or if the groups are linked beyond the fact that they share the same name — a name used by separate groups in eight different countries.

There’s reason to suspect that the U.S. government is engaged in its own form of ritualistic behavior much like the Spanish Inquisition busily branding heretics.

Maybe if the Obama administration spent a bit more time talking to anthropologists and archeologists rather than political consultants and security advisers, they would be able to develop a more coherent and constructive policy on Libya. I’m not kidding.

In Nature, Dan Jones writes: By July 2011, when Brian McQuinn made the 18-hour boat trip from Malta to the Libyan port of Misrata, the bloody uprising against Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi had already been under way for five months.

“The whole city was under siege, with Gaddafi forces on all sides,” recalls Canadian-born McQuinn. He was no stranger to such situations, having spent the previous decade working for peace-building organizations in countries including Rwanda and Bosnia. But this time, as a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of Oxford, UK, he was taking the risk for the sake of research. His plan was to make contact with rebel groups and travel with them as they fought, studying how they used ritual to create solidarity and loyalty amid constant violence.

It worked: McQuinn stayed with the rebels for seven months, compiling a strikingly close and personal case study of how rituals evolved through combat and eventual victory. And his work was just one part of a much bigger project: a £3.2-million (US$5-million) investigation into ritual, community and conflict, which is funded until 2016 by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and headed by McQuinn’s supervisor, Oxford anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse.

Rituals are a human universal — “the glue that holds social groups together”, explains Whitehouse, who leads the team of anthropologists, psychologists, historians, economists and archaeologists from 12 universities in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. Rituals can vary enormously, from the recitation of prayers in church, to the sometimes violent and humiliating initiations of US college fraternity pledges, to the bleeding of a young man’s penis with bamboo razors and pig incisors in purity rituals among the Ilahita Arapesh of New Guinea. But beneath that diversity, Whitehouse believes, rituals are always about building community — which arguably makes them central to understanding how civilization itself began.

To explore these possibilities, and to tease apart how this social glue works, Whitehouse’s project will combine fieldwork such as McQuinn’s with archaeological digs and laboratory studies around the world, from Vancouver, Canada, to the island archipelago of Vanuatu in the south Pacific Ocean. “This is the most wide-ranging scientific project on rituals attempted to date,” says Scott Atran, director of anthropological research at the CNRS, the French national research organization, in Paris, and an adviser to the project.
Human rites

A major aim of the investigation is to test Whitehouse’s theory that rituals come in two broad types, which have different effects on group bonding. Routine actions such as prayers at church, mosque or synagogue, or the daily pledge of allegiance recited in many US elementary schools, are rituals operating in what Whitehouse calls the ‘doctrinal mode’. He argues that these rituals, which are easily transmitted to children and strangers, are well suited to forging religions, tribes, cities and nations — broad-based communities that do not depend on face-to-face contact.

Rare, traumatic activities such as beating, scarring or self-mutilation, by contrast, are rituals operating in what Whitehouse calls the ‘imagistic mode’. “Traumatic rituals create strong bonds among those who experience them together,” he says, which makes them especially suited to creating small, intensely committed groups such as cults, military platoons or terrorist cells. “With the imagistic mode, we never find groups of the same kind of scale, uniformity, centralization or hierarchical structure that typifies the doctrinal mode,” he says.

Whitehouse has been developing this theory of ‘divergent modes of ritual and religion’ since the late 1980s, based on his field work in Papua New Guinea and elsewhere. His ideas have attracted the attention of psychologists, archaeologists and historians.

Until recently, however, the theory was largely based on selected ethnographic and historical case studies, leaving it open to the charge of cherry-picking. The current rituals project is an effort by Whitehouse and his colleagues to answer that charge with deeper, more systematic data.

The pursuit of such data sent McQuinn to Libya. His strategy was to look at how the defining features of the imagistic and doctrinal modes — emotionally intense experiences shared among a small number of people, compared with routine, daily practices that large numbers of people engage in — fed into the evolution of rebel fighting groups from small bands to large brigades.

At first, says McQuinn, neighbourhood friends formed small groups comprising “the number of people you could fit in a car”. Later, fighters began living together in groups of 25–40 in disused buildings and the mansions of rich supporters. Finally, after Gaddafi’s forces were pushed out of Misrata, much larger and hierarchically organized brigades emerged that patrolled long stretches of the defensive border of the city. There was even a Misratan Union of Revolutionaries, which by November 2011 had registered 236 rebel brigades.

McQuinn interviewed more than 300 fighters from 21 of these rebel groups, which varied in size from 12 to just over 1,000 members. He found that the early, smaller brigades tended to form around pre-existing personal ties, and became more cohesive and the members more committed to each other as they collectively experienced the fear and excitement of fighting a civil war on the streets of Misrata.

But six of the groups evolved into super-brigades of more than 750 fighters, becoming “something more like a corporate entity with their own organizational rituals”, says McQuinn. A number of the group leaders had run successful businesses, and would bring everyone together each day for collective training, briefings and to reiterate their moral codes of conduct — the kinds of routine group activities characteristic of the doctrinal mode. “These daily practices moved people from being ‘our little group’ to ‘everyone training here is part of our group’,” says McQuinn.

McQuinn and Whitehouse’s work with Libyan fighters underscores how small groups can be tightly fused by the shared trauma of war, just as imagistic rituals induce terror to achieve the same effect. Whitehouse says that he is finding the same thing in as-yet-unpublished studies of the scary, painful and humiliating ‘hazing’ rituals of fraternity and sorority houses on US campuses, as well as in surveys of Vietnam veterans showing how shared trauma shaped loyalty to their fellow soldiers. [Continue reading…]

When people talk about nation-building, they talk about the need to establish security, the rule of law and the development of democratic institutions. They focus on political and civil structures through which social stability takes on a recognizable form — the operation for instance of effective court systems and law enforcement authorities that do not abuse their powers. But what makes all this work, or fail to work, is a sufficient level of social cohesion and if that is lacking, the institutional structures will probably be of little value.

Over the last year and a half, American interest in Libya seems to have been reduced to analysis about what happened on one day in Benghazi. But what might help Libya much more than America’s obsessive need to spot terrorists would be to focus instead on things like promoting football. A win for the national team could work wonders.

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In the video below, Harvey Whitehouse describes the background to his research.

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Americans’ views of other countries

PolicyMic: A new Pew Poll conducted near the end of 2013 asked Americans which countries they liked and which ones they didn’t. While the results are colored by ongoing events across the world, they also reflect Americans’ long-standing attitudes towards some of our neighbors.

At the top of America’s favorite-country list is Canada, at 81% approval, presumably because Canada is about as inoffensive and friendly a country as you can imagine. Americans also remained steadfast friends with Great Britain at 79% approval, and were big fans of Japan at 70% approval despite the two nations’ economic competition.

Other countries didn’t fare so well on the favorability index. Israel remains largely liked by Americans at 61%, but if a Gallup poll from 2012 is to be believed, that’s down from 68% in 2011 and 71% in 2012 (Gallup’s numbers seem higher than Pew’s, so the spread may be less significant). But it’s now more widely disliked than France at 26% and 24% respectively. The ratings have a partisan spin, with 74% of Republicans and just 55% of Democrats approving of Israel this year. [Continue reading…]

None of these numbers are particularly surprising, but for me the most striking one is a 52% unfavorable view of Mexico.

I’m inclined to assume that American views of Mexico and of Mexicans are firmly intertwined and thus that this unfavorable view of America’s southern neighbor is mirrored in views about Mexicans who live this side of the border.

I used to live in California and was at that time a legal alien but like the many illegal aliens in that state, I was more struck by the fact that we were being branded as aliens rather than which might be deemed legal or illegal.

Moreover, since I was not visibly alien (so long as I kept my mouth shut), the greatest insult in being branded this way was clearly being imposed on the people who were visibly indigenous to this continent.

Whether it’s in North America or the Middle East, the settlers have no right to pass judgement on who belongs on these lands.

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How RT helped create ‘news’ about a ‘massacre’ in Syria

This is how RT, formerly known as Russia Today, describes itself:

RT news covers the major issues of our time for viewers wishing to question more and delivers stories often missed by the mainstream media to create news with an edge.

The key word in this description is create.

As James Miller demonstrates in the following analysis, RT can certainly spin a dramatic yarn even when it has no evidence to back up its claims.

No doubt RT appeals to an audience that questions much of the information that is presented in the mainstream media. But as I’ve said before, critical attention is of limited value if it only gets cast in one direction. Too often, skepticism and gullibility come wrapped together.

James Miller writes: 80 civilians “massacred,” bodies thrown in ovens, and an international cover up of a horrific act of terrorism — these are just some of the striking claims made by the Russian network RT. On December 15th, the Russian state-owned media outlet formerly called “Russia Today” reported claims made by the Syrian and Russian governments that dozens of people had been butchered by radical Islamists in the Syrian town of Adra.

By the 17th, RT had even more alarming and detailed claims:

“People put in ovens, entire families kidnapped, Christians and Alawites executed — These horrifying reports come to RT from the town of Adra, north of the Syrian capital which has been occupied by Islamist rebel groups. At least 100 people are said to have been massacred by the rebels, but as the Syrian Army continues to liberate the city, that number is expected to rise. Our crew spoke to some of the survivors.”

This massacre in Adra, if it could be proven, could have been one of the worst massacres so far in Syria’s civil war.

According to the report, Adra’s residents were attacked by Islamist rebels, whom they have dubbed “the decapitators,” in a town that RT describes as “an industrial town” populated by workers who were trapped when a rebel surprise attack caught them, and the Syrian military, off guard.

There is only one problem — it has been more than three weeks since this report aired, and there is not a single piece of evidence that supports the claim that Islamic radicals massacred anyone in Adra. There’s not even evidence that a massacre has occurred at all. Even worse, several of RT’s key pieces of information have proven to not only be false, but to have been falsified in such a way that it appears that RT either made no attempt to verify the facts, or perhaps even helped falsify the report themselves. [Continue reading…]

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Greenwald says Israel is ‘absolutely right’ to link NSA spying to Pollard case

On Monday evening Glenn Greenwald was interviewed on Israel’s Channel 10 television. The interview was conducted in English. (It is preceded by a commercial and then interrupted half-way through with another commercial.)

The NSA intercepts communications by Israeli politicians, so why should the U.S. take issue with Israel gaining access to U.S. intelligence provided to them by Jonathan Pollard?

That appears to be Greenwald’s line of reasoning.

The fact that Pollard was a U.S. citizen employed by the government; that in return for the intelligence he was providing the Israelis he expected to get paid half a million dollars; that it is widely believed that Israel used this intelligence as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the Soviet Union — are these just pesky little details that have little bearing on the principles?

What Greenwald calls ‘hypocrisy’ — for the U.S. to spy on its ‘close ally’ Israel — is in the eyes of many others, good judgement.

Officials are loath to talk publicly about it, but spying on allies is a fact of life: the United States invests billions annually to monitor the communications of its friends. Many American embassies around the world contain a clandestine intercept facility that targets diplomatic communications. The goal is not only to know the military and diplomatic plans of our friends but also to learn what intelligence they may be receiving and with whom they share information.

That doesn’t come from a report on the Snowden revelations. It comes from Seymour Hersh’s report on Pollard written for the New Yorker in 1999.

If Israel was about to launch a unilateral attack on Iran without consulting the U.S., would it be desirable for the U.S. to gain advance warning of such a plan? You bet!

And how would such intelligence be gathered? By trying to recruit Israelis willing to spy on their own government? Fat chance.

Even if they are limited, this is in fact one of the useful services of the NSA: spying on America’s most dangerous ally.

What Pollard did was provide Israel with the means to launch an attack without tipping off the NSA in advance.

Hersh reported:

Israel made dramatic use of the Pollard material on October 1, 1985, seven weeks before his arrest, when its Air Force bombed the headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Tunisia, killing at least sixty-seven people. The United States, which was surprised by the operation, eventually concluded that the Israeli planners had synergistically combined the day-to-day insights of the SIGINT Requirements List with the strategic intelligence of the FOSIF reports and other data that Pollard provided to completely outwit our government’s huge collection apparatus in the Middle East. Even Pollard himself, the senior official told me, “had no idea what he gave away.”

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Personal brand journalism — where the messenger becomes the message

Michael Wolff writes: There is a new vision of journalism – call it the auteur school – in which the business shifts from being organized by institutions to being organized around individual journalists with discrete followings.

The latest development is the announcement by Ezra Klein that he will likely leave the Washington Post and is looking for investors to back him – with a reported eight figure investment (ie more than $10m!) – in an independent enterprise.

Last week Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, who ran the Wall Street Journal tech conference AllThingsD, announced that, following the WSJ ending its relationship with them, they were setting up in business backed by NBC and other investors.

Glenn Greenwald, who broke the NSA-Edward Snowden story for the Guardian, is the headliner in a new left-oriented journalism venture backed by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

The former New York Times data wiz-kid, Nate Silver, has left the Times to set up a new site and vertical business under the auspice of ABC and its subsidiary ESPN. Andrew Sullivan, a blogger first at the Atlantic and then at the Daily Beast, may be the grandfather of the auteur school, leaving the Daily Beast a year ago to set up his own subscription site.

In fact, one might as well include here Tina Brown, who used the seemingly attractive economics of the web, along with her personal brand and the backing of Barry Diller, to claim journalistic independence with the Daily Beast – and in the process lost, I am reliably told, an astounding $100m.

And that leads to my cautionary question: is this all journalistic vanity and hubris, ending in certain tears, or is there plausible economic logic to individual journalistic fiefdoms? [Continue reading…]

It’s natural that a lot of attention is focused on the economics of journalism these days, since newspapers are struggling to survive, but even if it turns out that the trend towards personal brand journalism provides a viable business model, it’s questionable whether it will result in good journalism.

There’s no good reason to uncritically accept something just because you read it in the New York Times. Equally, there is no good reason to agree with an opinion just because it was expressed by someone like Glenn Greenwald. Yet one sees this all the time. Instead of his media appearances generating much serious discussion, there’s much more cheering in response to knockout punches. Another opponent eviscerated. Whoopee!

“I’m with …” goes the all-purpose expression of allegiance. Which is as good as saying: I don’t think; I’ve found someone else who can think for me.

Unfortunately, in the political arena — perhaps more so than any other arena where ideas supposedly matter — there is far too much signalling of affiliation and far too little independent analysis.

As a publication, The Economist (a name whose mention might cause some brains to freeze, given its ties to the corporate establishment) has one particular merit: they avoid the use of the byline.

Why? Because they believe “what is written is more important than who writes it.”

That idea is of course completely at odds with the idea of personal brand journalism where what is important is apparently determined by who writes it.

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Naturally, more people see the U.S. as the greatest threat to world peace — and would like to live here

Huffington Post reports: There’s really no way to sugarcoat it: The rest of world believes that the United States is the country that poses the greatest threat to world peace, beating out all challengers by a wide margin.

This is the conclusion of a massive world opinion poll conducted by Win/Gallup International and released at the close of 2013. The poll, which was first conducted in 1977, asked over 66,000 thousand people across 65 countries this year a variety of questions about the world, including which country they would most like to call home, whether or not the world is becoming a generally better place and which country poses the greatest threat to world peace.

The U.S. was voted the biggest threat by far, garnering 24 percent of the vote. Pakistan was a very distant second with 8 percent, followed by China (6 percent) and Afghanistan (5 percent).

Emily Barasch at PolicyMic finds this assessment of the U.S. “startling.” But for people around the world to see the U.S. as a threat to world peace should be about as surprising as hearing that most people understand that a hippopotamus is a dangerous animal. Sure, a hippo might look like a cuddly animal, but anything that weighs 15,000 pounds and can run at 30 mph is potentially lethal.

The United States is the world’s military hippo — with none of the charm. No other country in modern history has spent as much money engaged in warfare or unleashed as much explosive force with its weaponry.

What’s most disturbing is that when Americans were asked which country they think is the greatest threat to peace in the world today, the largest number (20%) named Iran. But not only that — the more educated they were, the more likely they were to name Iran.

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Out of this world: Titan, Dione, Pandora, and Pan

The only thing the New Year marks for sure is our place in the Solar System as we circle the Sun.

Here’s a reminder of how unfamiliar and other worldly this place in space, our home in the galaxy, our corner of the universe, really is: a view of four of Saturn’s moons in descending order of size — Titan in the background behind Dione, with Pandora over to the right, and Pan nothing more than a speck on the left nestled in the Encke Gap of the A ring.

four-moons

(NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)

Although frigidly cold, Titan has some Earth-like features — a climate with wind and rain, and surface features such as dunes, rivers, lakes and seas. For scale, this is how Titan would look if placed alongside the Moon and the Earth:

titan-scale

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Less than one third of Americans believe in evolution

(Note: Because of the misleading way in which Pew presents its own findings, multiple reports run with a headline similar to this one in USA Today: “One-third of Americans reject human evolution.” That would appear to imply that two-thirds of Americans accept the theory of evolution that provides the foundation for evolutionary biology. However, the rejectionists that the survey identifies are those who believe in the literal truth of Genesis, Adam and Eve etc.. Those who subscribe to Intelligent Design or other non-scientific Creationist evolutionary narratives are viewed by Pew as believing in human evolution.)

I am not a militant atheist. I have little patience for the anti-religion campaigning engaged in by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and their ilk. The idea of trying to rid the world of religion makes no more sense than trying to abolish sport.

Human beings are not governed by reason and people who become enslaved by rationality, inevitably become emotionally malformed. The human capacity to express and experience love is a capacity without which we would cease to be human. As Pascal said: “The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.”

We live in a world constructed by thought and shared ideas and our ability to make sense of life springs in large part from the fact that we continuously filter our experience through stories — stories through which we tell ourselves who we are, where we live, and why we live.

Because of this, I don’t think that science should or can be thrust down anyone’s throat…

And yet to learn that less than a third of Americans believe in evolution is deeply depressing — even if not surprising.

Those who want to put a strong political spin on the results of a new Pew Research Center poll on views about evolution are emphasizing the fact that the greatest concentration of skepticism on evolution is among Republicans while pointing to the figure of 67% of Democrats believing in evolution.

The pollsters, however, fudged the basic question by implying that it’s possible to believe in evolution without accepting its scientific basis.

Pew’s primary interest was in differentiating between those Americans who take Genesis literally and those who don’t. Those Americans who believe “a supreme being guided the evolution of living things for the purpose of creating humans and other life in the form it exists today” are counted as believing in evolution, even though they don’t believe in natural selection.

The fact that Pew chose to slice the question in this way is itself illustrative of the weak influence science has in American culture. “Evolution” is being treated as an object of belief coming in many varieties, rather than as hard, incontrovertibly proven scientific fact.

No one would conduct a poll asking Americans whether they believe the Earth revolves around the Sun and yet when it comes to the subject of evolution, the deference to religious belief is so engrained that evolution is treated as a completely subjective term — evolution, whatever that means to you.

Why does this matter?

The world cannot tackle climate change if America turns its back on science. And yet as a culture, America currently stands somewhere between the sixteenth and the twentieth century. Copernicus was successful but the jury’s still out on Darwin.

If two-thirds of the population is skeptical about evolution, what chance is there of persuading them that climate change is caused by human activity?

It hardly seems coincidental that almost exactly the same number of Americans who believe in human-caused climate change also believe in evolution through natural selection. (I would hazard a guess that it’s not just the same number, but also the same Americans.)

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The ghosts of Benghazi

David Kirkpatrick reports: Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there [on September 11, 2012] and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.

A fuller accounting of the attacks suggests lessons for the United States that go well beyond Libya. It shows the risks of expecting American aid in a time of desperation to buy durable loyalty, and the difficulty of discerning friends from allies of convenience in a culture shaped by decades of anti-Western sentiment. Both are challenges now hanging over the American involvement in Syria’s civil conflict.

The attack also suggests that, as the threats from local militants around the region have multiplied, an intensive focus on combating Al Qaeda may distract from safeguarding American interests.

In this case, a central figure in the attack was an eccentric, malcontent militia leader, Ahmed Abu Khattala, according to numerous Libyans present at the time. American officials briefed on the American criminal investigation into the killings call him a prime suspect. Mr. Abu Khattala declared openly and often that he placed the United States not far behind Colonel Qaddafi on his list of infidel enemies. But he had no known affiliations with terrorist groups, and he had escaped scrutiny from the 20-person C.I.A. station in Benghazi that was set up to monitor the local situation.

Mr. Abu Khattala, who denies participating in the attack, was firmly embedded in the network of Benghazi militias before and afterward. Many other Islamist leaders consider him an erratic extremist. But he was never more than a step removed from the most influential commanders who dominated Benghazi and who befriended the Americans. They were his neighbors, his fellow inmates and his comrades on the front lines in the fight against Colonel Qaddafi.

To this day, some militia leaders offer alibis for Mr. Abu Khattala. All resist quiet American pressure to turn him over to face prosecution. Last spring, one of Libya’s most influential militia leaders sought to make him a kind of local judge.

Fifteen months after Mr. Stevens’s death, the question of responsibility remains a searing issue in Washington, framed by two contradictory story lines.

One has it that the video [Innocence of Muslims], which was posted on YouTube, inspired spontaneous street protests that got out of hand. This version, based on early intelligence reports, was initially offered publicly by Susan E. Rice, who is now Mr. Obama’s national security adviser.

The other, favored by Republicans, holds that Mr. Stevens died in a carefully planned assault by Al Qaeda to mark the anniversary of its strike on the United States 11 years before. Republicans have accused the Obama administration of covering up evidence of Al Qaeda’s role to avoid undermining the president’s claim that the group has been decimated, in part because of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

The investigation by The Times shows that the reality in Benghazi was different, and murkier, than either of those story lines suggests. Benghazi was not infiltrated by Al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests. The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs. [Continue reading…]

Irrespective of whatever actually happened in Benghazi, the ability of most Americans of all political stripes to view such an event without a distorted perspective is severely constrained by the degree to which terrorism has become a pillar of the American worldview.

The neoconservatives were resoundingly successful in promoting the idea of a global terrorist network — not one which has a formal, verifiable structure; but one that exists more like a mycelium of evil.

Its tentacles are subterranean, vast, and yet ethereal. It is everywhere and nowhere, elusive and yet all-powerful; at some moments about to expire and yet paradoxically always an inextinguishable force.

We are meant to fear it just as resolutely as we cling to any object of faith. Indeed, to fail to view terrorism with sufficient gravity is to fail to uphold ones responsibilities as a patriotic American.

Even though it’s more than a decade since 9/11, terrorism remains America’s cultural straightjacket — that’s why even now in popular culture we have yet to see the war on terrorism being satirized.

At the height of the Cold War, when thousands of young Americans were getting killed in Vietnam in the name of standing up against Communism, it was somehow possible for Mel Brooks to create Get Smart and poke fun at spies and the paranoiac neuroses of the era.

The world has since pulled back from the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction and yet by some spectacular defiance of logic or any sense of proportion, terrorism has been conjured as an even greater threat.

At this time, 83% of Americans believe that protecting this nation from terrorist attacks should be the U.S. government’s top foreign policy priority whereas only 37% would prioritize dealing with global climate change.

That, to my mind, is a definition of collective insanity.

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Talking to animals

chimpanzee

As a child, I was once taken to a small sad zoo near the Yorkshire seaside town of Scarborough. There were only a handful of animals and my attention was quickly drawn by a solitary chimpanzee.

We soon sat face-to-face within arm’s reach, exchanging calls and became absorbed in what seemed like communication — even if there were no words. Before the eyes of another primate we see mirrors of inquiry. Just as much as I wanted to talk to the chimp, it seemed like he wanted to talk to me. His sorrow, like that of all captives, could not be held tight by silence.

The rest of my family eventually tired of my interest in learning how to speak chimpaneze. After all, talking to animals is something that only small children are willing to take seriously. Supposedly, it is just another childish exercise of the imagination — the kind of behavior that as we grow older we grow out of.

This notion of outgrowing a sense of kinship with other creatures implies an upward advance, yet in truth we don’t outgrow these experiences of connection, we simply move away from them. We imagine we are leaving behind something we no longer need, whereas in fact we are losing something we have forgotten how to appreciate.

Like so many other aspects of maturation, the process through which adults forget their connections to the non-human world involves a dulling of the senses. As we age, we become less alive, less attuned and less receptive to life’s boundless expressions. The insatiable curiosity we had as children, slowly withers as the mental constructs which form a known world cut away and displace our passion for exploration.

Within this known and ordered world, the idea that an adult would describe herself as an animal communicator, naturally provokes skepticism. Is this a person living in a fantasy world? Or is she engaged in a hoax, cynically exploiting the longings of others such as the desire to rediscover a lost childhood?

Whether Anna Breytenbach (who features in the video below) can see inside the minds of animals, I have no way of knowing, but that animals have minds and that they can have what we might regard as intensely human experiences — such as the feeling of loss — I have no doubt.

The cultural impact of science which is often more colored by belief than reason, suggests that whenever we reflect on the experience of animals we are perpetually at risk of falling into the trap of anthropomorphization. The greater risk, however, is that we unquestioningly accept this assumption: that even if as humans we are the culmination of an evolutionary process that goes all the way back to the formation of amino acids, at the apex of this process we somehow stand apart. We can observe the animal kingdom and yet as humans we have risen above it.

But instead, what actually sets us apart in the most significant way is not the collection of attributes that define human uniqueness, but rather it is this very idea of our separateness — the idea that we are here and nature is out there.

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Fantasy news technology from First Look Media

Following an announcement that Pierre Omidyar has doled out $50 million which represents 20 percent of his initial commitment to his new media venture First Look Media, Jay Rosen, an adviser to the project, says the details include the answer to a question he has frequently been asked: is this going to be a business or a non-profit? The answer is both. The news and editorial operation will be a non-profit and helping sustain this will be a new for-profit media technology company.

At the Atlantic, Robinson Meyer is guzzling the Kool-Aid:

First Look is something curious and iridescent — a technology for-profit making products for a news non-profit, selling those products elsewhere, and giving the proceeds back to the non-profit. First Look is two parts, closely joined, feeding and making a home for the other.

One of the first challenges for any new technology company is to convince investors that whatever kind of genius the company’s founders might possess, they also have some idea about how they can make their innovations profitable.

First Look has an advantage over other start-ups in this respect because its lead investor stepped forward before anyone had come up with either an innovative technology or a business plan. The premise seems to be that the Greenwald/Snowden brand has already acquired such immense value, that the new product can be constructed around the brand (and of course thousands of so-far unreleased documents from the NSA).

In Omidyar’s announcement there is one hint of realism:

The journalism operation, which will be incorporated as a 501(c)(3), will enjoy editorial independence, and any profits eventually earned by the technology company are committed to support First Look’s mission of independent journalism.

The key word there is eventually.

Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill, and Jay Rosen, probably aren’t too worried about how long eventually takes, because Omidyar’s investment of $250 million will provide financial security for several years. Moreover, since they are all on the non-profit news side, they can leave it to Omidyar to figure out if or how he’s going to make the technology side profitable.

My prediction is that by the time First Look has either succeeded or failed in demonstrating that it represents a new way of making the news business sustainable, Greenwald will have departed from journalism.

In reference to his role in bringing the Snowden revelations to the world, Greenwald has said: “when you go into journalism, this is exactly the sort of thing that you hope one day you’re going to be able to do.”

I suppose there will come some point in time when I feel like most or all of the documents that are in my possession that ought to be published have been published, and that most of the reporting that I think ought to be done has been done. That won’t necessarily end it, because I’m sure the fallout of that reporting will continue, the public debates over things, the consequences from these revelations will endure. And I will likely play some role in debating those things and talking about them and writing about them, but in terms of the very surreal craziness that has become my life, I’m looking forward to that subsiding.

Having repeatedly said that he has so far published reports on less than half the documents that need reporting, it sounds like Greenwald sees plenty of life left in this story, but it’s an open question whether anything comes after Snowden (apart from the book and the film).

Whether future whistleblowers choose to turn to Greenwald and First Look, may hinge on whether this venture ends up being perceived as a new way of doing journalism or an old way of making money: find a cheap or free raw product and then exploit ones role as an exclusive distributor who can fix prices and control the flow of goods to market.

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The NSA’s goal is to render humanity speechless

Testifying before the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties and Home Affairs via a video link this week, Glenn Greenwald reiterated what has become his central claim about the significance of the documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

The documents reveal, Greenwald says, that: “the ultimate goal of the NSA is … nothing less than the elimination of individual privacy, worldwide.”

He acknowledges that “at first glance that [claim] might seem like it’s a bit hyperbolic, like it’s a little bit melodramatic, but it isn’t. It is a literal description of what the NSA and its closest surveillance partners are attempting to achieve.”

There is of course a glaring obstacle that the NSA will somehow need to overcome in order to accomplish its objective: the ability of people to speak to each other, face-to-face, privately.

Another loophole is the ability of people to communicate privately through the use of handwritten messages exchanged on pieces of paper — that anachronism known as a letter.

Thankfully, the shift to electronic communication has resulted in a rapid decline in the use of the near redundant handheld device called a pen and likewise, skill in composition is also in decline.

Thanks to the global proliferation of mobile phones and other handheld devices, significant strides have already been made in the effort to prevent people meeting and talking to each other.

The proliferation of opinion-driven journalism which functions as a cognitive echo-chamber, has contributed greatly in diminishing people’s capacities to think.

All in all, the NSA can be increasingly confident that however people communicate, they will have less and less to say.

Some observes may remain skeptical about the NSA’s objective of eliminating privacy, but Greenwald assures the skeptics that his claim is well-founded.

“The reason that I know that that is what they are attempting to achieve is because this is what they say over and over and over again. On occasion they say it publicly and repeatedly they say it in their private documents, which were written when they thought nobody was able to hear what it was they were saying.”

Meanwhile, as the world’s attention remains fixed on the NSA, there is another intelligence organization operating out of sight which deserves much closer attention.

Regulatory Datacorp, Inc. (RDC), based in King Of Prussia, Pennsylvania, is the world’s number one data source. Some people might think that description belongs to Google, so how do we know it belongs to RDC?

“The World’s #1 Data Source” — there it is in black and white on the company’s website. For an operation that employs only 50 people and whose estimated annual revenue is a modest $3.5 million, it’s quite an accomplishment to have become number one in anything, but who am I to doubt the accuracy of their self-assessment.

They also claim to have compiled an anti-terrorism database which contains more than one million records of individuals and groups, and we all know that the bigger the database, the more useful will be the information it contains.

That’s why we know that if the NSA can collect everything, they will soon know everything.

At this point, no doubt, there are some readers who are wondering why I’ve gone to these lengths to mock Greenwald’s central claim.

Here’s why: it’s a huge distraction from the key issues. He is pandering to a libertarian fear of government that generates an enormous amount of traffic on the internet, and by so doing diminishing the focus on issues that should be of greater concern. Namely, that government officials have repeatedly lied to the public and to our elected representatives and that while claiming to serve the interests of the public they are squandering public resources.

Even if we take at face value the goal of “collect everything,” it’s an unattainable objective in terms of providing real utility.

We have less reason to imagine it poses a real threat to our privacy than it does to the condition of our roads and the quality of our schools.

Americans are paying for a bloated national security apparatus whose principal goal is its own expansion and perpetuation.

You should be less afraid of how much the NSA intrudes into your communications than of the ease with which it empties your pockets.

And on that front, have no doubt that the NSA is still winning.

The panel which just delivered to President Obama its proposals on NSA reform did not even consider questions about the agency’s budget.

How could they?

As everyone in Washington and across America is fully aware, money spent in the name of national security is sacrosanct. To question such spending is regarded as tantamount to questioning the value of American lives.

If the effort to correct the imbalance between privacy and security is successful and yet the security apparatus retains most of its political and institutional power, we won’t have much to celebrate.

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