Author Archives: Paul Woodward

Who can build a new world?

Quoting the Pope, James Carroll writes: “Who am I to judge?” With those five words, spoken in late July in reply to a reporter’s question about the status of gay priests in the Church, Pope Francis stepped away from the disapproving tone, the explicit moralizing typical of Popes and bishops. This gesture of openness, which startled the Catholic world, would prove not to be an isolated event. In a series of interviews and speeches in the first few months after his election, in March, the Pope unilaterally declared a kind of truce in the culture wars that have divided the Vatican and much of the world. Repeatedly, he argued that the Church’s purpose was more to proclaim God’s merciful love for all people than to condemn sinners for having fallen short of strictures, especially those having to do with gender and sexual orientation. His break from his immediate predecessors—John Paul II, who died in 2005, and Benedict XVI, the traditionalist German theologian who stepped down from the papacy in February—is less ideological than intuitive, an inclusive vision of the Church centered on an identification with the poor. From this vision, theological and organizational innovations flow. The move from rule by non-negotiable imperatives to leadership by invitation and welcome is as fundamental to the meaning of the faith as any dogma.

Of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, about forty-one per cent live in Latin America. Catholicism has declined in Europe and the United States, but the pews of churches throughout the developing world are crowded. The election by the College of Cardinals of the first Latin-American Pope is a signal of the Church’s demographic pivot. Francis’s place of origin alone would make him a historic figure, but the statements he has made, and the example he has set, with gestures of modesty and compassion, show a man determined to realign the vast institution with the core message of Jesus.

Late last month, Francis issued the first major declaration of his pontificate, an “apostolic exhortation,” a long document addressed to Catholics which covers a range of issues. Titled “The Joy of the Gospel” and reflecting Francis’s style — there is no pontifical “we” — the exhortation is unrelentingly positive in tone. Francis writes, “We want to enter fully into the fabric of society, sharing the lives of all, listening to their concerns, helping them materially and spiritually in their needs, rejoicing with those who rejoice, weeping with those who weep; arm in arm with others, we are committed to building a new world.”

Time magazine’s choice of Pope Francis as “Person of the Year” provoked some indignant reactions from those who felt that the award should have gone to Edward Snowden. After all, it was hard to dispute that Snowden had gained much greater media prominence around the world in 2013.

While the argument is in many ways petty — after all, it’s not about an accolade that is of any lasting significance — the contrast between the two newsmakers is useful in as much as it provides an opportunity for reflection about the issues that most profoundly affect humanity.

In an open letter, Snowden writes that “the surveillance of whole populations without any suspicion of wrongdoing … threatens to become the greatest human rights challenge of our time.”

Let’s imagine that Snowden’s actions are ultimately successful and through a combination of public and legal pressure, the U.S. and other governments roll back their mass surveillance programs and intelligence agencies serve their national security objectives while respecting the privacy and constitutional rights of ordinary citizens.

In this scenario, Snowden would deserve to be recognized as arguably the most successful whistleblower in history.

At the same time, it’s reasonable to ask whether this victory would have a significant impact on the lives of most people on this planet. I suspect it would not.

Glenn Greenwald has said: “I don’t begrudge the choice of Pope Francis: some of his pronouncements are impressive with the potential to achieve real change.” But in America, it often seems like the best kind of real change most people hope for, is little more than that things not become even worse.

Thanks in large measure to the false hopes peddled by Barack Obama, there seems very little change Americans continue to believe in.

Given the recent history of the Catholic Church and the secular trends shaping society, it’s hardly surprising that there are some people who view Pope Francis with skepticism. Yet for those who believe that humanity is set on a death spiral caused by a self-destructive economic system, it would be terrible to overlook the potential of a real radical simply because we don’t share his theology or find his institutional trappings repugnant.

For an individual to have the potential to change the world, they need much more than a world-changing message. Their word needs to command some kind of authority giving them a measure of instrumental power. But above all they need to embody what they say. Whether Francis qualifies in these terms, it is too early to judge, but he clearly has that potential.

What kind of new world is the Pope striving to create? A world, to paraphrase the economist E.F. Schumacher, in which people matter.

While Pope Francis is being denounced by American conservatives as a “liberation theologian,” one observer sees less Marxism in his denunciations of capitalism than a restatement of the views of the political economist, Karl Polanyi:

Karl Polanyi is most famous for his book The Great Transformation, and in particular for one idea in that book: the distinction between an “economy being embedded in social relations” and “social relations [being] embedded in the economic system.”

Economic activity, Polanyi says, started off as just one of many outgrowths of human activity. And so, economics originally served human needs. But over time, people (particularly, policy-making people) got the idea that markets regulated themselves if laws and regulations got out of their way. The free market converts told people that “only such policies and measures are in order which help to ensure the self-regulation of the market by creating the conditions which make the market the only organizing power in the economic sphere.” Gradually, as free market-based thinking was extended throughout society, humans and nature came to be seen as commodities called “labor” and “land.” The “market economy” had turned human society into a “market society.”

In short (as social sciences professors prepare to slam their heads into their tables at my reductionism), instead of the market existing to help humans live better lives, humans were ordering their lives to fit into the economy.

Now, back to the pope. Pope Francis, in his exhortation, notably does not call for a complete overhaul of the economy. He doesn’t talk revolution, and there’s certainly no Marxist talk of inexorable historical forces.

Instead, Francis denounces, specifically, the complete rule of the market over human beings—not its existence, but its domination.

“Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest,” he writes. “Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded,” and “man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption.” He rejects the idea that “economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.” Instead, he argues, growing inequality is “the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation,” which “reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control.” And he repeats the exact language he used in an early address: “Money must serve, not rule!”

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Roger Waters, the ‘crushingly obvious’ parallels to Israel and the parallels we prefer to ignore

Keith Kahn-Harris writes: It’s happening increasingly often: a prominent public figure makes a vituperative criticism of Israel, accusations of antisemitism follow and then come emphatic denials. This time it’s Roger Waters, the Pink Floyd vocalist, who has fanned the constantly glowing embers of controversy. Among other things, he has claimed that the “parallels [between Israel’s actions against the Palestinians] with what went on in the 1930s in Germany are so crushingly obvious”, that the Israeli rabbinate views Palestinians as “sub-humans”, and that the “Jewish lobby” is “extraordinarily powerful”. This comes on the back of Waters’ long history of pro-Palestinian activity, including supporting a cultural boycott of Israel.

In response, Waters has been accused of antisemitism by firebrands such as Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and more measured voices such as Karen Pollock of the Holocaust Educational Trust. Waters vociferously denies antisemitism, complaining that defenders of Israel “routinely drag the critic into a public arena and accuse them of being an antisemite”.

So who is right? Is Waters guilty of antisemitism?

The problem with viewing the Waters controversy through the lens of the antisemitism debate is that it becomes a zero-sum game: whether his words were antisemitic or not. If they were not, then the assumption is that they would be acceptable.

Yet there are other ways to analyse discourse on Israel. What would happen if one temporarily (and, yes, artificially) removes the question of antisemitism and looks at Waters’ remarks the way one might look at other forms of political discourse? This leads to other questions: was Waters’ intervention useful? Were his words proportionate and reasonable? Should we take what he says seriously?

Accusations that Israel is behaving in a Nazi-like manner are hardly novel. In fact they are something of a cliche not just in the controversy over Israel but in a wide range of other debates. Godwin’s Law draws attention to the wearisome regularity with which Nazi Germany is invoked; for some, its corollary is that in any debate the first one to mention the Nazis has lost.

Not only is comparing Israel to Nazi Germany predictable, even the harshest reading of Israel’s actions shows that the analogy is completely over the top. Israel can arguably be accused of subtle and not-so-subtle forms of discrimination and even ethnic cleansing of Palestinians over its history, but it has never committed systematic mass murder and the existence of Palestinian citizens of Israel (albeit often marginalised) is something that no genuinely neo-Nazi regime could tolerate. [Continue reading…]

I suspect that part of the reason Waters and others grab the Nazi analogy is that breaking this kind of taboo is a kind of act of defiance through which someone can feel they are demonstrating an unswerving commitment to truth. It’s a way of attempting to say: I will speak the truth, whatever the consequences.

As Kahn-Harris points out, however, this particular choice of analogy is cliched — it also has the appearance (intentionally or not) of serving as a form of baiting.

There are numerous other “crushingly obvious” parallels Waters could have pointed to, such as the treatment of Native Americans by European settlers who asserted a God-given right to claim this continent as their own.

Then there are parallels that most observers in the West would apparently rather ignore, namely, those in Syria where after the Palestinian occupied territories, Israel, and Jordan, the largest exiled Palestinian population resides.

By whatever metric one chooses to use, the scale of destruction wrought by the Assad regime over the last two years dwarfs the crimes of the Israelis over the last 65 years, yet so many of those who express outrage over massacres in Gaza, appear unmoved when the aggressors are not Zionists.

Israelis have been fittingly scorned for professing a humanitarian sensibility as they “shoot and cry” (Yorim u’Vochim), but among Israel’s critics who are willing to hold up a mirror there may be visible a similarly flimsy humanitarian impulse.

We often seem more concerned about who fired the gun and who manufactured the bullet than who got killed.

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Is the NSA trying to blackmail Snowden?

On 60 Minutes last night, CBS News was provided with an “unprecedented” view inside the NSA. This included an interview with Rick Ledgett, who is leading an NSA task force conducting damage assessment on the Snowden leaks.

John Miller: Of all the things he took is there anything in there that worries you or concerns you more than anything else?

Rick Ledgett: It’s an exhaustive list of the requirements that have been levied against– against the National Security Agency. And what that gives is, what topics we’re interested in, where our gaps are. But additional information about U.S. capabilities and U.S. gaps is provided as part of that.

John Miller: So, I’m going to assume that there’s one in there about China, and there’s one in there about Iran, and there’s another in there about Russia.

Rick Ledgett: Many more than one.

John Miller: Many more than one?

Rick Ledgett: Yes.

John Miller: How many of those are there?

Rick Ledgett: About 31,000.

John Miller: If those documents fell into their hands? What good would it do them?

Rick Ledgett: It would give them a roadmap of what we know, what we don’t know, and give them– implicitly, a way to– protect their information from the U.S. intelligence community’s view.

John Miller: For an adversary in the intelligence game, that’s a gold mine?

Rick Ledgett: It is the keys to the kingdom.

Note that in no point in this exchange does Ledgett assert that the NSA knows Snowden took this particular document collection, while Miller — who comes across more like a Hollywood parody of a journalist — fails to raise this question.

But suppose the NSA truly believes that Snowden took this collection of 31,000 documents. Not only would this be a cause of immense concern to the agency, but the belief itself would be a closely guarded secret.

What possible interest does the United States have in publicizing to its adversaries, that it has lost control of its most valuable intelligence assessments?

If Snowden’s life was not already in great danger, then now, thanks to the NSA (and CBS) he just became even more exposed. And maybe that’s the point.

The NSA wants Snowden to become more afraid of remaining outside the United States than afraid of returning.

Snowden clearly understood that the longer he retained possession of however many documents he took, the more vulnerable he would become, but he waited several months before revealing to the New York Times that he had handed over all the documents to Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras when they met him in Hong Kong in June.

The NSA — with CBS News’ help — however, wants to promote the view that Snowden has currently in his possession 1.7 million documents.

Even if Snowden follows up his earlier denial with another denial, he will remain under intense scrutiny by foreign intelligence services.

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The pharmaceutical industry and the fight against gun control

The Washington Post reports: One year ago, 20 children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., were gunned down by Adam Lanza. In the aftermath, there was hope among gun-control advocates that the event would spark pro-control reform. They’ve set their eyes on on a few states, but over the past year, more of them have loosened gun restrictions than tightened them. While gun control may face an uphill battle, though, a related policy area has seen change in the wake of the tragedy.

“We think that Sandy Hook opened up the eyes of governors and state legislators and policymakers around the country that mental health has been cut enough,” Andrew Sperling, the director of legislative advocacy at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, told Post TV’s “In Play.”

Some 36 states increased their mental health-care budgets in 2013, according to NAMI. In Colorado, where James Holmes opened fire on a crowded movie theater a little over a year ago, the mental-health budget was increased by 13.5 percent.

State-level efforts have focused on five broad categories — the mental-health system, crisis and inpatient care, community mental health, criminal justice and mental health, and civil rights and stigma reduction — NAMI wrote in a fall report.

The Post fails to note that the innocuously named NAMI, receives most of its funding from the pharmaceutical industry.

It’s not that pharma has a natural alignment with the opponents of gun control, yet what the NRA and its supporters have succeeded in doing in the wake of Newtown is to shift the debate away from gun control onto mental health — a shift which clearly serves the interests of the drug industry.

27% of all mental health services in the United States come through Medicaid and Medicaid is a cash cow for the pharmaceutical industry.

In the 1980s and ’90s, the psychiatric system went through a major transformation as psychiatric medication replaced psychotherapy as the standard of care. This broadened the scope of psychiatry in two ways. With patient care being reduced to medication management, doctors could see more patients. And with a massive growth in the number of Americans receiving disability for mental illness, the market for psychiatric medication has been booming, thanks in part to Medicaid funding.

The pharmaceutical industry has only one interest: selling drugs. It can reasonably be described as the most successful form of organized crime in human history. When companies repeatedly pay billions of dollars in settlements, it is clear that they regard such settlements as simply a component in the operating costs.

That the drug manufacturers are really nothing more than sophisticated drug pushers can be illustrated in numerous ways — consider for instance the way in which attention deficit disorder has become such a profitable diagnosis.

After more than 50 years leading the fight to legitimize attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Keith Conners could be celebrating.

Severely hyperactive and impulsive children, once shunned as bad seeds, are now recognized as having a real neurological problem. Doctors and parents have largely accepted drugs like Adderall and Concerta to temper the traits of classic A.D.H.D., helping youngsters succeed in school and beyond.

But Dr. Conners did not feel triumphant this fall as he addressed a group of fellow A.D.H.D. specialists in Washington. He noted that recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the diagnosis had been made in 15 percent of high school-age children, and that the number of children on medication for the disorder had soared to 3.5 million from 600,000 in 1990. He questioned the rising rates of diagnosis and called them “a national disaster of dangerous proportions.”

“The numbers make it look like an epidemic. Well, it’s not. It’s preposterous,” Dr. Conners, a psychologist and professor emeritus at Duke University, said in a subsequent interview. “This is a concoction to justify the giving out of medication at unprecedented and unjustifiable levels.”

The rise of A.D.H.D. diagnoses and prescriptions for stimulants over the years coincided with a remarkably successful two-decade campaign by pharmaceutical companies to publicize the syndrome and promote the pills to doctors, educators and parents. With the children’s market booming, the industry is now employing similar marketing techniques as it focuses on adult A.D.H.D., which could become even more profitable.

None of the above considerations should be taken to imply that mental health services are not indeed neglected in this country — simply that drugging and forced treatment are not the answer.

As for the issue of the epidemic of school shootings, ironically this has mostly served as a distraction from the much larger issue of gun violence.

Following the Gabrielle Giffords shooting in 2011, Emily Badger wrote:

Today, gun laws that target the mentally ill — alongside convicted felons — are founded on a series of assumptions: that people with mental illness are particularly dangerous, that legislation restricting their gun ownership will lead to decreased violence, and that this strategy will make a difference in the overall safety of society.

Such laws also assume that the background-check system is an effective means in the first place of keeping guns out of the hands of any type of dangerous person.

“In a society like ours where firearms are so prevalent — there are more handguns than there are people in the U.S. today — that seems like a highly dubious proposition,” [the director of the Division of Law, Ethics, and Psychiatry at Columbia University, Paul] Appelbaum said. “People who really want guns are arguably likely to be able to get them whether they are covered by this statute or not. It’s an empirical question as to whether this actually works in keeping guns out of anybody’s hands, or at least very many people’s hands.”

The best data Appelbaum has found, which dates to the late 1980s and early ’90s, also suggests that, at most, 3-5 percent of violent acts in the U.S. are attributable to serious mental illnesses as a risk factor — and most of those acts don’t involve guns. More recent studies in England and Sweden suggest that number for violent acts may be as low as 1-2 percent.

“To say that another way, if no one with a mental illness committed a violent act, we would still have 95-97 percent of the baseline level of violence,” Appelbaum said. “However you cut it, it looks as though we’re just talking about the tip of the iceberg in terms of problems of violence in our society, which raises the quite reasonable question as to why we’re so focused on the mentally ill?”

Not only is that focus a distraction, he adds, but it comes with the significant downside of further stigmatizing people with mental illness and confusing the public as to the notion that mental illness is a significant cause of violence in this country.

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The most arrogant creatures on Earth

Dominique Mosbergen writes: Researchers from the University of Adelaide in Australia argue in an upcoming book, The Dynamic Human, that humans really aren’t much smarter than other creatures — and that some animals may actually be brighter than we are.

“For millennia, all kinds of authorities — from religion to eminent scholars — have been repeating the same idea ad nauseam, that humans are exceptional by virtue that they are the smartest in the animal kingdom,” the book’s co-author Dr. Arthur Saniotis, a visiting research fellow with the university’s School of Medical Sciences, said in a written statement. “However, science tells us that animals can have cognitive faculties that are superior to human beings.”

Not to mention, ongoing research on intelligence and primate brain evolution backs the idea that humans aren’t the cleverest creatures on Earth, co-author Dr. Maciej Henneberg, a professor also at the School of Medical Sciences, told The Huffington Post in an email.

The researchers said the belief in the superiority of that human intelligence can be traced back around 10,000 years to the Agricultural Revolution, when humans began domesticating animals. The idea was reinforced with the advent of organized religion, which emphasized human beings’ superiority over other creatures. [Continue reading…]

At various times in my life, I’ve crossed paths with people possessing immense wealth and power, providing me with glimpses of the mindset of those who regard themselves as the most important people on this planet.

From what I can tell, the concentration of great power does not coincide with the expression of great intelligence. What is far more evident is a great sense of entitlement, which is to say a self-validating sense that power rests where power belongs and that the inequality in its distribution is a reflection of some kind of natural order.

Since this self-serving perception of hierarchical order operates among humans and since humans as a species wield so much more power than any other, it’s perhaps not surprising that we exhibit the same kind of hubris collectively that we see individually in the most dominant among us.

Nevertheless, it is becoming increasingly clear that our sense of superiority is rooted in ignorance.

Amit Majmudar writes: There may come a time when we cease to regard animals as inferior, preliminary iterations of the human—with the human thought of as the pinnacle of evolution so far—and instead regard all forms of life as fugue-like elaborations of a single musical theme.

Animals are routinely superhuman in one way or another. They outstrip us in this or that perceptual or physical ability, and we think nothing of it. It is only our kind of superiority (in the use of tools, basically) that we select as the marker of “real” superiority. A human being with an elephant’s hippocampus would end up like Funes the Memorious in the story by Borges; a human being with a dog’s olfactory bulb would become a Vermeer of scent, but his art would be lost on the rest of us, with our visually dominated brains. The poetry of the orcas is yet to be translated; I suspect that the whale sagas will have much more interesting things in them than the tablets and inscriptions of Sumer and Akkad.

If science should ever persuade people of this biological unity, it would be of far greater benefit to the species than penicillin or cardiopulmonary bypass; of far greater benefit to the planet than the piecemeal successes of environmental activism. We will have arrived, by study and reasoning, at the intuitive, mystical insights of poets.

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The disappearance of CIA contractor Robert Levinson: A rogue operation or a rogue intelligence agency? Updated

An Associated Press investigation has revealed that Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who went missing in Iran in 2007 and who was at that time described by the State Department as “a private citizen involved in private business in Iran,” was in fact working for the CIA. He had been hired by a team of analysts who were running a rogue intelligence operation.

A 28-year veteran of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI, Robert Levinson had a natural ability to cultivate informants. Former colleagues say he was an easy conversationalist who had the patience to draw out people and win their confidence. He’d talk to anyone.

“Bob, in that sense, was fearless,” said retired FBI Assistant Director Mark Mershon, who worked with Levinson in Miami in the 1980s. “He wasn’t concerned about being turned down or turned away.”

As the Soviet Union collapsed, Levinson turned his attention away from Mafia bosses and cocaine cartels and began watching the Russian gangsters who made their homes in Florida. Russian organized crime was a niche then and Levinson made a name as one of the few investigators who understood it.

At a Justice Department organized crime conference in Santa Fe, N.M., in the early 1990s, Levinson listened to a presentation by a CIA analyst named Anne Jablonski and spotted a kindred spirit.

Jablonski was perhaps the government’s foremost expert on Russian organized crime. Former colleagues say she had an encyclopedic memory and could, at the mere mention of a crime figure, quickly explain his place in the hierarchy and his method of moving money. When White House officials had questions about Russian organized crime, they often called Jablonski directly.

In the relatively staid world of CIA analysts, Jablonski was also a quirky character, a yoga devotee who made her own cat food, a woman who skipped off to Las Vegas to renew her vows in an Elvis-themed chapel.

After the Santa Fe conference, Levinson left a note for Jablonski at her hotel and the two began exchanging thoughts on organized crime. Jablonski invited Levinson to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., to speak to her colleagues in the Office of Russian and European Analysis.

By the time Levinson retired from the FBI in 1998, he and Jablonski were close friends. She attended his going-away party in Florida, met his family and harvested his knowledge of organized crime.

In retirement, Levinson worked as a private investigator, traveling the world and gathering information for corporate clients. Jablonski, meanwhile, thrived at the CIA. After the Sept. 11 attacks, former colleagues say, she was assigned to brief Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller about terrorist threats every morning.

In 2005, Jablonski moved to the Office of Transnational Issues, the CIA team that tracks threats across borders. Right away, she arranged for Levinson to speak to the money-laundering experts in the office’s Illicit Finance Group.

In a sixth-floor CIA conference room, Levinson explained how to track dirty money. Unlike the analysts in the audience, Levinson came from the field. He generated his own information.

In June 2006, the head of Illicit Finance, Tim Sampson, hired Levinson on a contract with the CIA, former officials said. Like most CIA contracts, it was not a matter of public record. But it also wasn’t classified. [Continue reading…]

Following an internal investigation into the events leading up to Levinson’s disappearance, Jablonski and Sampson were forced to resign. [The New York Times reports that Jablonski says she refused to resign and was fired. See update below.]

Jablonski later became chief data officer for Regulatory DataCorp, Inc. (RDC), a private intelligence company serving major banks. Yesterday evening the company’s website leadership page included this description of her:

jablonski

Today a company representative I spoke to said that she no longer works there but couldn’t tell me when she left. Presumably it was within hours of the publication of the Associated Press report.

USA Today reports that the White House strongly urged AP not to run the story:

“Without commenting on any purported affiliation between Mr. Levinson and the U.S. government, the White House and others in the U.S. Government strongly urged the AP not to run this story out of concern for Mr. Levinson’s life,” said a statement from Caitlin Hayden, a spokesperson for the National Security Council.

NBC News, however, reports that Levinson’s family believe the disclosure may be helpful:

Friends and relatives of Robert Levinson, a retired FBI agent who disappeared in Iran more than six years ago, say they hope new disclosures that he was working for the CIA will lead to more action to get him home.

“Bob is a courageous man who has dedicated himself, including risking his own life, in service to the U.S. government,” Levinson’s family said in a statement provided to NBC News. “But the U.S. government has failed to make saving this good man’s life the priority it should be.”

While the account told by the AP places emphasis on the role of Anne Jablonski, characterizing her as “quirky” (like 20 million other Americans she practices yoga) and implies that as “kindred spirits” she and Levinson perhaps carry equal responsibility for conducting a rogue operation, the story says nothing about the prevailing culture in the CIA after Vice President Dick Cheney had said that it would need to operate on “the dark side.”

The idea of a group of analysts contracting an American to conduct a clandestine mission inside Iran might sound reckless, but the fact is, they were working inside an agency that was engaged in targeted killing, torture, kidnapping, and the operation of secret prisons.

Governments, their agencies, and companies, all expect unswerving loyalty from their employees, but the obligations of loyalty invariably seem to flow in only one direction.

Update: Following the publication of the AP report, the New York Times has also released a report which it has published after receiving the Levinson family’s permission. The report contains a great deal of additional information about the fruitless efforts to find Levinson. It also contains details that raise questions about whether Jablonski was turned into a scapegoat by the CIA. It should be noted that the agency’s own investigation was triggered by the intervention of Levinson’s senator, who had himself be informed about the case by the Levinson family’s lawyer.

In March 2008, a year after Mr. Levinson’s disappearance, his wife was called to a meeting at F.B.I. headquarters. There C.I.A. officials acknowledged for the first time that he had worked for them. Had it been left up to the C.I.A., it is unlikely that meeting would have occurred.

Mr. McGee [the family lawyer] and Mr. Silverman [a retired NBC investigative producer who had arranged Levinson’s meeting in Iran] had given records from Mr. Levinson’s files that documented his C.I.A. work to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, called in top agency officials and demanded an explanation. Those officials said they had never been alerted that an agency contractor was missing and promised to investigate.

Not long afterward, two C.I.A. officials met with Ms. Levinson and Mr. McGee at his office in Pensacola, Fla. They started by delivering a message. “They wanted to officially apologize on behalf of the C.I.A. to the Levinson family,” Mr. McGee recalled.

According to Mr. McGee, the C.I.A. officials said that while an inquiry had not found a “smoking gun” proving that the agency knew in advance about Mr. Levinson’s trip, it did conclude that Ms. Jablonski and her boss, Mr. Sampson, had misled officials about his work.

The agency gave Ms. Jablonski, Mr. Sampson and another top C.I.A. analytical official a choice: They could resign from the agency or be fired, according to several people familiar with the matter. Mr. Sampson and the other official resigned. Ms. Jablonski said she had refused and had been fired. In 2008, when Mr. McGee made it clear he was prepared to sue the C.I.A., the agency agreed to pay $2.25 million to Christine Levinson, whether or not her husband returned.

Ms. Jablonski later said in an interview that the C.I.A.’s suggestion she had abandoned a friend to protect her career was a lie. She said she had never imagined Mr. Levinson would go to Kish and insisted that she would have stopped him had she known.

She described herself as a convenient scapegoat for the C.I.A. She said that during the agency’s internal inquiry she had been repeatedly interrogated inside a windowless room by two former operatives. The men belittled Mr. Levinson’s intelligence reports as useless and suggested she might have been complicit in his disappearance.

“For all we know, you were angry with your friend and sent him to Iran to be killed,” she said one of them told her.

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How computers are making people stupid

The pursuit of artificial intelligence has been driven by the assumption that if human intelligence can be replicated or advanced upon by machines then this accomplishment will in various ways serve the human good. At the same time, thanks to the technophobia promoted in some dystopian science fiction, there is a popular fear that if machines become smarter than people we will end up becoming their slaves.

It turns out that even if there are some irrational fears wrapped up in technophobia, there are good reasons to regard computing devices as a threat to human intelligence.

It’s not that we are creating machines that harbor evil designs to take over the world, but simply that each time we delegate a function of the brain to an external piece of circuitry, our mental faculties inevitably atrophy.

Use it or lose it applies just as much to the brain as it does to any other part of the body.

Carolyn Gregoire writes: Take a moment to think about the last time you memorized someone’s phone number. Was it way back when, perhaps circa 2001? And when was the last time you were at a dinner party or having a conversation with friends, when you whipped out your smartphone to Google the answer to someone’s question? Probably last week.

Technology changes the way we live our daily lives, the way we learn, and the way we use our faculties of attention — and a growing body of research has suggested that it may have profound effects on our memories (particularly the short-term, or working, memory), altering and in some cases impairing its function.

The implications of a poor working memory on our brain functioning and overall intelligence levels are difficult to over-estimate.

“The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory, the scratch pad of consciousness, to long-term memory, the mind’s filing system,” Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, wrote in Wired in 2010. “When facts and experiences enter our long-term memory, we are able to weave them into the complex ideas that give richness to our thought.”

While our long-term memory has a nearly unlimited capacity, the short-term memory has more limited storage, and that storage is very fragile. “A break in our attention can sweep its contents from our mind,” Carr explains.

Meanwhile, new research has found that taking photos — an increasingly ubiquitous practice in our smartphone-obsessed culture — actually hinders our ability to remember that which we’re capturing on camera.

Concerned about premature memory loss? You probably should be. Here are five things you should know about the way technology is affecting your memory.

1. Information overload makes it harder to retain information.

Even a single session of Internet usage can make it more difficult to file away information in your memory, says Erik Fransén, computer science professor at Sweden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology. And according to Tony Schwartz, productivity expert and author of The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, most of us aren’t able to effectively manage the overload of information we’re constantly bombarded with. [Continue reading…]

As I pointed out in a recent post, the externalization of intelligence long preceded the creation of smart phones and personal computers. Indeed, it goes all the way back to the beginning of civilization when we first learned how to transform language into a material form as the written word, thereby creating a substitute for memory.

Plato foresaw the consequences of writing.

In Phaedrus, he describes an exchange between the god Thamus, king and ruler of all Egypt, and the god Theuth, who has invented writing. Theuth, who is very proud of what he has created says: “This invention, O king, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.” But Thamus points out that while one man has the ability to invent, the ability to judge an invention’s usefulness or harmfulness belongs to another.

If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.

Bedazzled by our ingenuity and its creations, we are fast forgetting the value of this quality that can never be implanted in a machine (or a text): wisdom.

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How easy is it to make sarin?

“It’s not hard to make sarin. You could mix it in the backyard. Two chemicals melded together.” — Seymour Hersh interviewed on CNN, December 9, 2013.

The idea that the chemical warfare agent, sarin, is easy to make is central to Seymour Hersh’s claim that the August 21 attacks killing hundreds of Syrians could have been carried out by the rebel group, the Al Nusra Front. (With unquestioning confidence in the reliability of his source(s), Hersh rests this claim on classified intelligence reports none of which he claims to have seen.)

Hersh’s backyard sarin production appears to be concocted from fiction. The only non-state actor known to have engaged in large-scale sarin production was the Japanese cult, Aum Shinrikyo. They invested $30 million in this endeavor which included the creation of a production facility.

The plant was a free-standing three-story building, staffed by workers with chemistry and chemical-engineering expertise who designed and built proper process controls. It was a complex, expensive operation, and its production capacity was approximately 2 gallons of sarin per batch.

Dan Kaszeta, a former officer in the U.S. Army Chemical Corps and former member of the U.S. Secret Service, estimates that the August attack would have required one ton of sarin — far more than Aum Shinrikyo was able to produce even with their dedicated facility.

Hersh says “there’s two inert substances” used for producing sarin. But Kaszeta points out that the precursors are neither easy to obtain nor inert. Methylphosphonyl difluoride is both reactive and corrosive and as a Schedule 1 substance under the Chemical Weapons Convention, is tightly controlled.

Even if the precursors are obtainable, anyone trying to make sarin in an at-home lab would face a challenge because, in many ways, the ingredients are more dangerous than the final product. An intermediate step in the production, for example, requires the use of hydrogen fluoride gas at a high temperature. Hydrogen fluoride is nasty stuff, and a lot of it is needed to make sarin. Even in its more stable liquid form, the smallest leak would destroy all the chemistry equipment and almost everything else in a modern kitchen. Anyone trying to combine these ingredients may kill or seriously harm himself and anyone nearby.

Amy E. Smithson, a researcher on chemical and biological weapons at the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, who investigated the Aum Shinrikyo attacks in Japan emphasized that in assessing the capacity of non-state actors to use chemical weapons there is a huge gulf between the “theoretical possibility” and the “operational reality.” And keep in mind that Aum Shinrikyo was operating in the tranquility of peacetime Japan — it’s obstacles were all technical with none from the battlefield.

“By almost any standard, Aum was a terrorist nightmare – a cult flush with money and technical skills led by a con-man guru with an apocalyptic vision, an obsession with chemical and biological weaponry, and no qualms about killing,” Smithson writes.

But by almost any standard, Aum Shinrikyo’s chemical weapons program, and an earlier attempt to develop biological agents, failed to produce anything close to the killing power the group desired.

The cult started off by trying to simply acquire chemical weapons from a rogue U.S. operation peddling nerve gas on the black market – but found itself dealing with a front for the U.S. Customs Service.

For terrorists, the lesson here is plain: Worldwide law enforcement and intelligence agencies represent no small obstacle.

When Aum Shinrikyo then turned to producing its own stockpiles of chemicals in 1993, it soon ran into complex problems involved in dispersing nerve gas in ways that kill lots of people.

“Weaponizing” chemical agents requires munitions that disperse the substances in droplets, which can kill on skin contact, or vapor, which can be lethal if inhaled. But most explosive devices within the technological reach of terrorists would either destroy most of the chemical agents upon detonation or fail to effectively disperse them.

Spraying also can effectively disperse chemical agents. But most experts believe that 90 percent of any agent sprayed outdoors will not reach its intended targets in lethal form, given the vagaries of temperature, sunlight, wind and rain. Pumping chemical or biological agents into a building’s indoor ventilation system is no easy task either, requiring detailed knowledge of how air is distributed from floor to floor.

In Aum Shinrikyo’s first attempt to attack a rival group by spraying sarin gas from a moving van, Smithson notes, “the sprayer completely malfunctioned and sprayed backwards.” The second attempt ended up exposing the group’s security chief to the toxic nerve agent.

When the cult finally executed its climactic subway attack, its dispersal method of choice was poking holes in plastic bags with sharpened umbrella points. Noxious fumes then seeped from the bags into the subway cars.

The resulting chaos and death shocked the world. “Rescue crews found pandemonium, with scores of commuters stumbling about, vision-impaired and struggling to breathe,” Smithson writes. “Casualties littered the sidewalks and subway station exits. Some foaming at the mouth, some vomiting and others prone and convulsing.”

But in the final analysis, she notes, 85 percent of the 5,510 people treated at Tokyo hospitals and clinics were simply worried, not harmed. Twelve ultimately died from sarin exposure, about 40 others were seriously injured, and slightly less than 1,000 were “moderately ill.”

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America outside the world

In September 2001, 80% of Americans thought that protecting the U.S. from terrorist attacks should be the nation’s top foreign policy priority — and that was before the 9/11 attacks.

The culture of fear that the Bush administration promoted and exploited, engaged tendencies that permeate this nation’s history and wasn’t simply the product of opportunistic manipulation of a traumatic event.

Al Qaeda had tapped deep into the American psyche dramatically confirming a sense that the United States and the world somehow stand apart. Paradoxically, the attacks both challenged and affirmed the idea of a homeland providing safety, divided from a world that always harbors danger.

Twelve years after 9/11, protecting the U.S. from terrorism remains for 83% of Americans the number one foreign policy goal for this nation. In contrast, a mere 37% think that tackling climate change should be the top priority, down from 44% in 2001 and 50% in 1997.

And even as President Obama’s overall job approval ratings continue to slide, his rating for handling the threat of terrorism is higher than on any other issue of foreign policy.

51% of Americans think this president is “not tough enough,” while 50% say that his use of drones makes them feel safer, in contrast to a mere 14% who say that the use of drones makes this country less safe.

Somehow the world appears to only exist beyond these shores and largely outside American awareness. And to the extent that it impinges on our awareness it is invariably presented as problematic.

Pew Research reports:

For the first time since 1964, more than half (52%) agree that the U.S. should “mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own;” 38% disagree. Two years ago, the public was nearly evenly divided (46% agreed and 50% disagreed in May 2011) and, as recently as 2006, more disagreed than agreed that the U.S. should mind its own business internationally (53% vs. 42%).

Similarly, 80% agree with the statement, “We should not think so much in international terms but concentrate more on our own national problems and building up our strength and prosperity here at home,” up slightly from 76% in 2011. The level of support for this statement, which has been tested since 1964, now rivals the previous high set in the early 1990s.

Views on global engagement do not vary much across party lines. Majorities or pluralities of Republicans (52%), Democrats (46%) and independents (55%) think the U.S. does too much to try to help solve world problems, and agree that the U.S. should mind its own business internationally (53%, 46% and 55%, respectively). And close to eight-in-ten among each group agree that the U.S. should concentrate more on our own national problems, rather than thinking so much in international terms (82% of Republicans, 76% of Democrats and 79% of independents).

No doubt American attitudes towards global engagement are shaped predominantly by two factors:

1. A realistic assessment that the results from a decade of war show that U.S. military engagement overseas has accomplished next to nothing positive.

2. A widespread yet baseless view that the United States government disperses foreign aid more generously than any other nation. According to OECD figures for 2012, development aid from the U.S. as a percentage of GDP places the U.S. behind eighteen other countries. In absolute terms, $30.46 billion aid from the U.S. (population 317 million) compares with $43.36 billion from the five largest European countries, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain (combined population 315 million).

But aside from these factors, there is an underlying mindset which pollsters cannot attempt to quantify and which many Americans would struggle to articulate or perhaps even recognize.

It is this spirit through which America sets itself apart. This is the shadow of American exceptionalism; a sense of insecurity that masks itself with an attitude of superiority. For within America’s many self-aggrandizing postures is a core of self-doubt.

How can America be so much greater than a world about which most Americans know so little?

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The twilight zone: When Seymour Hersh and Pamela Geller start singing from the same song sheet

“It’s one lie after another…more perilous, more sinister, more deadly.”

That’s Pamela Geller’s reaction to a “bombshell allegation” dropped by Seymour Hersh alleging that President Obama lied about the August 21 chemical attack in Syria.

Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack. In the months before the attack, the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports, culminating in a formal Operations Order – a planning document that precedes a ground invasion – citing evidence that the al-Nusra Front, a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.

I know that a lot of people revere Hersh’s reporting as though it was the voice of God, but as an atheist I reserve the right to suspect that sometimes he’s delusional.

Cherry picking intelligence to justify war — yep, we’re back in Iraq.

But wait a minute. In this administration’s mad rush to war, how come Obama, Kerry et al, were falling over themselves in their eagerness to grab the unexpected lifeline thrown to them by Russia and Syria with the promise of chemical weapons destruction?

And consider this: it would seem that Hersh’s sources know more about what’s going on in Syria, than most of the key players. Hersh must have no more than two degrees of separation from Assad — which could well be the case and maybe provides all the more reason for casting a skeptical eye on his reporting.

Note: while Hersh says that al-Nusra should have been viewed as a suspect, he doesn’t actually provide any direct evidence that they were involved — he simply cites alleged evidence that they had the capacity to be involved.

Contrast this with what is thus far the most detailed reporting on the attacks that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on November 22:

The Wall Street Journal has pieced together a reconstruction of that fateful day from battlefield reports and dozens of interviews with eyewitnesses, rebels, medics, activists and Western intelligence officials. It reveals both the horror of the attack and the months of miscalculations by the Syrian regime, opposition groups and U.S. government that left them all unprepared for what happened.

U.S. and Israeli communications intercepts reveal chaos inside the Syrian regime that night. When the reports of mass casualties filtered back from the field, according to the officials briefed on the intelligence, panicked Syrian commanders shot messages to the front line: Stop using the chemicals!

Calls came in to the presidential palace from Syrian allies Russia and Iran, as well as from Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group whose fighters were inadvertently caught up in the gassing, according to previously undisclosed intelligence gathered by U.S., European and Middle Eastern spy agencies. The callers told the Syrians that the attack was a blunder that could have profound international repercussions, U.S. officials say.

Now if al-Nusra had launched the attack, apparently the Assad regime, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah were all ignorant of this.

Hersh’s bombshells usually appear in the New Yorker. Maybe their unswerving loyalty to Obama forced them to take a pass on what could have been a hot-selling cover story.

Or, maybe they concluded Hersh must have been smoking crack cocaine while he pumped out this masterpiece.

A note on Hersh’s sources: A “former senior intelligence official” and a “senior intelligence consultant” are cited as the primary sources for the information in this report. Ray McGovern, for instance, is a former senior intelligence official and he’s been outside government for 23 years and he seems to rely on sources like Mint Press to learn about Syria. A lot of journalists hope their readers will be duly impressed by the phrase senior intelligence official and ignore the prefix former. In reality, former officials often have no better access to current intelligence information than anyone else. As for a senior intelligence consultant, we might as well be told “some guy in Washington.”

It’s too easy to dress up hearsay and make it sound like inside information if your readers are inclined to believe everything you write simply because you happen to be a veteran investigative reporter. As always, it’s much more important to study the content than the packaging.

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The specter of global domination

spectreWhen Ian Flemming created the fictional SPECTRE (SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion), a terrorist organisation aimed at world domination, he chose a familiar icon — the octopus — long favored by those who want to evoke images of evil. Its tentacles represent strength, stealth, ugliness, vast reach, and ruthlessness.

nrolFor the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which chose a world-grasping octopus and the slogan “Nothing is Beyond Our Reach” to adorn its latest spy satellite that launched from California on Thursday, the octopus represents “a versatile, adaptable, and highly intelligent creature.”

That’s an accurate description of an octopus as a creature but not of an octopus as a symbol.

While the mission of NROL-39 is classified, it is believed to be a remnant of the Future Imagery Architecture, a program which was described in the New York Times in 2007 as “perhaps the most spectacular and expensive failure in the 50-year history of American spy satellite projects.”

nrol-39

In a recent interview with the BBC, Glenn Greenwald said:

The goal of the United States government and the UK government, its closest surveillance ally, is to eliminate all privacy globally, by which I mean, to make every form of electronic communication by and between all human beings, collected, stored, analyzed, and monitored by the U.S. and its four English-speaking Five Eyes partners in the surveillance world.

One can view NROL-39 and its choice of symbols as yet another example of this relentless drive towards global domination in surveillance that Greenwald describes, or, one can apply a bit of analysis in a more fruitful, realistic but perhaps less hyperbolic direction.

As news reports appeared showing the NRO’s poor choice of imagery, I expect that inside the Pentagon and across the intelligence community, there was no shortage of individuals who smacked their own foreheads as they wondered: who could be so clueless? U.S. intelligence already has a massive image problem. It just got worse.

As a defense establishment agency, I’m sure the NRO does not have an artist-in-residence who is given a free hand to design and deploy a spy satellite logo of their choice. On the contrary, like any other government bureaucracy, the NRO no doubt has a careful review process through which draft designs are viewed and approved or rejected. So it’s very unlikely that when NROL-39 blasted into orbit, the global dominating octopus on its side lacked any of the sign-offs in the stages of authorization required by the agency. In other words, government officials across multiple ranks of seniority saw the logo and said: “Looks good to me.”

What the octopus logo reveals says much less about the ability of the intelligence agencies to control the world than it says about the competence and judgement of the people in charge.

The NRO is run by Betty J. Sapp and she isn’t a rocket scientist — business management is supposedly her expertise.

When those aspects of an intelligence agency’s work that are on public display evince this level of cluelessness, there’s no reason to imagine that under a cloak of secrecy it operations are more efficient.

We probably have less reason to be worried about our freedoms being curtailed than we have reason to be angry about the vast waste of resources all incurred in the name of national security.

octopus-domination

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Do you love your country?

Yesterday I got a new pair of glasses and as the optician made sure they were spotless, I was amused to see she was using a cloth in the form of a small British flag — a Union Jack.

“It’s fortunate that the British don’t view their flag the same way Americans view theirs, otherwise I might take offense,” I told her. She seemed to have no idea what I meant as I alluded to American traditions regarding the respectful handling of Old Glory.

The ambiguity of British national identity is embedded right in the structure of the flag, with its English, Scottish, and Irish elements.

If Scotland votes in favor of independence next September, perhaps there should be a debate about whether the Union Jack retains its St Andrew’s Cross — St. Andrew being Scotland’s patron saint. Maybe the time will have come to toss out the name and concept of a United Kingdom.

Following yesterday’s parliamentary interrogation of the newspaper’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, by British MPs, The Guardian reported:

In perhaps the most unexpected exchange of the session, [Keith] Vaz [chairman of the home affairs select committee] asked Rusbridger if he loved his country – an apparent reference to critics of the Guardian who have accused it of weakening its security. Vaz [who was born in Aden, which is now part of Yemen] asked : “You and I were both born outside this country, but I love this country. Do you love this country?”

Rusbridger [who was born in Northern Rhodesia, which later became Zambia]: “I’m slightly surprised to be asked the question but, yes, we are patriots and one of the things we are patriotic about is the nature of democracy, the nature of a free press and the fact that one can, in this country, discuss and report these things.”

Vaz: “So the reason why you’ve done this has not been to damage the country, it is to help the country understand what is going on as far as surveillance is concerned?”

Rusbridger: “I think there are countries, and they’re not generally democracies, where the press are not free to write about these things, and where the security services do tell editors what to write, and where politicians do censor newspapers. That’s not the country that we live in, in Britain, that’s not the country that America is and it’s one of the things I love about this country – is that we have that freedom to write, and report, and to think.”

Mindful of the way his answer would be reported, Rusbridger did not hesitate to identify himself as a patriot, but even if this was not Vaz’s intention, the mere asking of the question brought to the hearing a tinge of McCarthyism.

As much as Britain has marched in lockstep with the United States since 9/11, its susceptibility to engage in slavish imitation has not extended as far as politicians or other public figures feeling duty-bound to sport Union Jack lapel buttons. Fortunately, for the British, the flag remains an ambiguous symbol.

If Rusbridger had been born in Edinburgh instead of Rhodesia, Vaz might have refrained from raising the question of patriotism. After all, if the vote on independence was phrased in the most emotive way, it could simply ask those being polled: which country do you love more: Britain or Scotland?

No doubt the voters themselves will largely be confronting more practical questions about economics and the future and their choice will not be wholly guided by sentiment.

Both in Britain and America and elsewhere, the ultimate test of patriotic loyalty goes far beyond love of country.

Are you willing to die for your country?

Even during an era in which martyrdom has become identified with religious extremism, not many Americans view the willingness to die while defending the United States as an expression of extremism. And yet those Americans who have been called on in recent years to demonstrate that willingness have disproportionately been under-privileged.

In contrast, those Americans who are willing to send other Americans to die for their country, have rarely even been willing to give up their job — let alone sacrifice their life — for the sake of the nation.

Before anyone makes a bold declaration about the extent and depth of their love of country, it’s worth asking: what do you mean by “love” and “country”?

Is this love simply another name for blind obedience? And do we confuse countries with their national emblems?

Wisely, Rusbridger qualified his love of Britain by identifying some of the things that make it lovable — such as freedom of expression and the ability to publish without seeking permission from a state censor. But the mere fact that he was being questioned was indicative of a trend being pushed by those who prize loyalty and obedience to state-defined interests, more than they prize a free and independent press.

Countries can change fast and one of the surest signs they are changing for the worse is when journalists are accused of being insufficiently patriotic.

Had Rusbridger been more blunt he might have said: I love what my country represents but not what it is becoming.

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Amazon’s brave new world

“Fulfillment,” in Amazon’s lexicon, is all about getting what you want and getting it now. It is the acme of the consumer age through which the maximum number of desires can be fulfilled in the minimum amount of time. And it is in the service of this debased expression of human existence, that Amazon dedicates all its efforts.

But Amazon’s commitment to fostering customer loyalty, creates the impression of a human interest, concealing the indifference that the company displays towards its own workers — workers who are treated so badly that they probably envy their counterparts at Walmart.

The fact that Amazon calls its warehouses “fulfillment centers” shows the degree to which as a company, Amazon views its employees as simply expendable cogs in a machine. And since the closest most Amazon customers ever come to a human interaction with the company comes indirectly via UPS deliverers, most of Amazon’s actual workers toil invisibly in conditions far removed from anything that could be defined as fulfilling. Adding insult to injury, these workers then get branded with job titles like “Pick Ambassador” — tokens of respect, clearly designed to obscure the lack of respect with which Amazon views its employees.

In 2011, the Allentown Morning Call reported on conditions inside Amazon’s Lehigh Valley warehouse:

Workers said they were forced to endure brutal heat inside the sprawling warehouse and were pushed to work at a pace many could not sustain. Employees were frequently reprimanded regarding their productivity and threatened with termination, workers said. The consequences of not meeting work expectations were regularly on display, as employees lost their jobs and got escorted out of the warehouse. Such sights encouraged some workers to conceal pain and push through injury lest they get fired as well, workers said.

During summer heat waves, Amazon arranged to have paramedics parked in ambulances outside, ready to treat any workers who dehydrated or suffered other forms of heat stress. Those who couldn’t quickly cool off and return to work were sent home or taken out in stretchers and wheelchairs and transported to area hospitals. And new applicants were ready to begin work at any time.

An emergency room doctor in June called federal regulators to report an “unsafe environment” after he treated several Amazon warehouse workers for heat-related problems. The doctor’s report was echoed by warehouse workers who also complained to regulators, including a security guard who reported seeing pregnant employees suffering in the heat.

In a better economy, not as many people would line up for jobs that pay $11 or $12 an hour moving inventory through a hot warehouse. But with job openings scarce, Amazon and Integrity Staffing Solutions, the temporary employment firm that is hiring workers for Amazon, have found eager applicants in the swollen ranks of the unemployed.

Many warehouse workers are hired for temporary positions by Integrity Staffing Solutions, or ISS, and are told that if they work hard they may be converted to permanent positions with Amazon, current and former employees said. The temporary assignments end after a designated number of hours, and those not hired to permanent Amazon jobs can reapply for temporary positions again after a few months, workers said.

Temporary employees interviewed said few people in their working groups actually made it to a permanent Amazon position. Instead, they said they were pushed harder and harder to work faster and faster until they were terminated, they quit or they got injured. Those interviewed say turnover at the warehouse is high and many hires don’t last more than a few months.

From Jeff Bezos’s point of view, Amazon represents nothing less than the nature of the future and in saying this he is expressing a kind of technological determinism — the latest face of unstoppable progress.

But what he is articulating is more importantly a philosophy of commerce in which human interaction is seen as redundant or a form of inefficiency.

Sure, he wants to cultivate strong relationships, but these aren’t relationships between people; they are relationships between customers and an amorphous corporate entity towards which we are meant to turn for the fulfillment of all our needs.

Finally, just in case anyone took the bait of the promise of goods delivered by drones (a prospect that should be viewed as skeptically as the chances of Santa Claus climbing down a chimney), James Ball lists a few of the logistical problems:

It’s all well and good for the unmanned vehicles to fly to a particular GPS site, but how does it then find the package’s intended recipient? How is the transfer of the package enacted? What stops someone else stealing the package along the way? And what happens when next door’s kid decides to shoot the drone with his BB rifle?

None of that starts to come close to the legal minefield using drones in this way entails. At present, flying drones of this sort for commercial use would be illegal in the US. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which regulates this area, intends to make commercial drones legally viable and workable by 2015, but this deadline is all-but impossible: managing the skies with this much low-level traffic is a problem people are nowhere near solving. Opening up crowded urban areas full of terror targets to large numbers of flying platforms is always going to be packed with conflicting interests and difficulties. And all this has come before the first lawsuit caused after someone is injured by a faulty drone (or that one your neighbour shot), crashing down to earth.

What Jeff Bezos announced amounted, essentially, to an aspiration to change how his company delivers products, in about five years time, if technology advances and regulation falls his way. If his TV appearance hadn’t included the magic word “drones”, Bezos’s vague aspirations to change an aspect of his company’s logistics probably wouldn’t have made waves. Lucky for him, he did – winning his company positive publicity just ahead of what is usually the biggest online shopping day of the year, the dreadfully named Cyber Monday.

Floating an exciting-but-impractical innovation for a swath of press coverage is such an old PR tactic you’d hope no one would fall for it, and yet everyone still does.

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Google’s plan to prolong human suffering

The idiots in Silicon Valley — many of whom aren’t yet old enough to have experienced adventures of aging like getting a colonoscopy — seem to picture “life-extension” as though it means more time to improve one’s tennis strokes in a future turned into a never-ending vacation. But what life extension will much more likely simply mean is prolonged infirmity.

If it was possible to build an economy around “health care” — which should much more accurately be called disease management — then the prospect of a perpetually expanding population of the infirm might look like a golden business opportunity, but what we’re really looking at is an economy built on false promises.

Daniel Callahan writes: This fall Google announced that it would venture into territory far removed from Internet search. Through a new company, Calico, it will be “tackling” the “challenge” of aging.

The announcement, though, was vague about what exactly the challenge is and how exactly Google means to tackle it. Calico may, with the aid of Big Data, simply intensify present efforts to treat the usual chronic diseases that afflict the elderly, like cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s. But there is a more ambitious possibility: to “treat” the aging process itself, in an attempt to slow it.

Of course, the dream of beating back time is an old one. Shakespeare had King Lear lament the tortures of aging, while the myth of Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth in Florida and the eternal life of the Struldbrugs in “Gulliver’s Travels” both fed the notion of overcoming aging.

For some scientists, recent anti-aging research — on gene therapy, body-part replacement by regeneration and nanotechnology for repairing aging cells — has breathed new life into this dream. Optimists about average life expectancy’s surpassing 100 years in the coming century, like James W. Vaupel, the founder and director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany, cite promising animal studies in which the lives of mice have been extended through genetic manipulation and low-calorie diets. They also point to the many life-extending medical advances of the past century as precedents, with no end in sight, and note that average life expectancy in the United States has long been rising, from 47.3 in 1900 to 78.7 in 2010. Others are less sanguine. S. Jay Olshansky, a research associate at the Center on Aging at the University of Chicago, has pointed out that sharp reductions in infant mortality explain most of that rise. Even if some people lived well into old age, the death of 50 percent or more of infants and children for most of history kept the average life expectancy down. As those deaths fell drastically over the past century, life expectancy increased, helped by improvements in nutrition, a decline in infectious disease and advances in medicine. But there is no reason to think another sharp drop of that sort is in the cards.

Even if anti-aging research could give us radically longer lives someday, though, should we even be seeking them? Regardless of what science makes possible, or what individual people want, aging is a public issue with social consequences, and these must be thought through.

Consider how dire the cost projections for Medicare already are. In 2010 more than 40 million Americans were over 65. In 2030 there will be slightly more than 72 million, and in 2050 more than 83 million. The Congressional Budget Office has projected a rise of Medicare expenditures to 5.8 percent of gross domestic product in 2038 from 3.5 percent today, a burden often declared unsustainable.

Modern medicine is very good at keeping elderly people with chronic diseases expensively alive. At 83, I’m a good example. I’m on oxygen at night for emphysema, and three years ago I needed a seven-hour emergency heart operation to save my life. Just 10 percent of the population — mainly the elderly — consumes about 80 percent of health care expenditures, primarily on expensive chronic illnesses and end-of-life costs. Historically, the longer lives that medical advances have given us have run exactly parallel to the increase in chronic illness and the explosion in costs. Can we possibly afford to live even longer — much less radically longer?

At the heart of the idiocy which Silicon Valley cultivates are a host of profound misconceptions about the nature of time.

Having become slaves of technology, we take it as given that time is measured by clocks and calendars. Life extension is thus conceived in purely numerical terms. Yet the time that matters is not the time that can be measured by any device.

That’s why in an age in which technology was supposed to reward us all with extra time, instead we experience time as being perpetually compressed.

Having been provided with the means to do more and more things at the same time — text, tweet, talk etc. — our attention gets sliced into narrower and narrower slivers, and the more time gets filled, the more time-impoverished we become.

For the narcissist, there can be no greater fear than the prospect of the termination of individual existence, yet death is truly intrinsic to life. What it enables is not simply annihilation but more importantly, renewal.

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Iran deal exposes the limits of the Israel lobby’s power

Mohammed Ayoob writes: The impact of the Iran nuclear deal is unlikely to be limited to the nuclear proliferation arena. While the question whether the deal has prevented Iran from ever developing nuclear weapons capability or has merely postponed the inevitable by a few months or years will continue to be debated, one should not ignore the wider strategic consequences of the agreement for several reasons.

First, it has the potential of introducing a sea change in the relationship of the United States that could unfetter Iranian diplomatic capabilities that can be used in pursuit of its broader regional goals. This is the reason why Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies have reacted so harshly and negatively to the agreement. If things proceed down the path of an Iranian-U.S. rapprochement in the context of a war weary American public opinion, Riyadh can no longer automatically depend upon U.S. diplomatic and military support against Iran in its competition for power and influence in the Persian Gulf.

Second, it has demonstrated unequivocally that on vital strategic issues in which U.S. and Israeli interests diverge Washington does possess the residual political will to make hard decisions in the teeth of Israeli opposition, something that analysts of all hues had doubted for a long time. This may signal the beginning of the unraveling of the prevailing myth that U.S. policy toward the Middle East is shaped in Tel Aviv and not in Washington. It also explodes the myth that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is an all-powerful force when it comes to fashioning U.S. policy toward the Middle East. Its consequences, therefore, go beyond the Iranian nuclear issue and are likely to impact public perceptions in the United States and abroad regarding the deadlock over the Palestinian issue and the likely direction of U.S. policy on the unending Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This explains Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s uncompromising hostility toward the Geneva agreement even at the expense of doing grave damage to Israeli-U.S. relations. [Continue reading…]

One of the paradoxes of the practice of railing against power — be that the power of the Israel lobby, or government, or corporations — is that those who persistently issue such warnings can be reluctant to acknowledge that such power has limits.

Thus in the current situation there are those who will insist that sooner or later Congress, on the command of AIPAC, will impose new sanctions and destroy the agreement Iran. Or, that due to pressure from Israel and Saudi Arabia the current agreement will expire without a permanent agreement being reached.

Both of those scenarios are certainly possibilities but my sense is that what this weekend’s agreement reveals is that the opponents of U.S.-Iranian rapprochement are manifestly swimming against the international tide.

The neocon trolls, beguiled by their own apocalyptic rhetoric, are convinced that the evil Islamic republic, hellbent on its pursuit of nuclear weapons, can pursue no other course. Yet what all the evidence makes clear is that Iran’s leaders — like those of any other state — are acting in accordance with what they perceive as their own interests and currently they see those interests best served by improved international relations.

The lesson here is about flexibility. Those with the skill to hold on to power are often more pragmatic than their opponents.

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Memo to Glenn Greenwald: Secrecy is not the root of all evil

AP and Al-Monitor concealed their knowledge of secret talks between the U.S. and Iran.

The mere fact that Glenn Greenwald regards this as Tweet-worthy seems to imply that he sees something nefarious in the Associated Press and Al-Monitor colluding with government officials by failing to disclose what they had learned at the time of discovery.

I guess for a transparency zealot this kind of collusion would have to be problematic, but let’s get real.

Wherein lies the greater public service: making all information public at the earliest opportunity even if that disclosure might sabotage diplomacy? Or, in recognizing that there are times when forging an agreement absolutely depends on confidentiality so that negotiations can proceed without interference from parties that oppose the existence of such negotiations?

All I can say is: thank goodness AP and Al-Monitor kept quiet. They did the right thing.

Moreover, let’s be honest. Greenwald himself has been sitting on stories for months for reasons that I doubt will ever be made public. The process through which the Snowden revelations have trickled out has not been a model of transparency.

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Have the neocons made an unprecedented advance in nuclear weapons design?

It’s generally understood that the construction of a nuclear weapon using uranium requires highly enriched uranium — enriched to 80% or greater.

Daniel Pipes writes:

[T]he American goal for the accord was that the Iranians not “advance their program” of building a uranium nuclear bomb (and perhaps a plutonium bomb too); the apparent deal exactly permits such advancement, plus sanctions relief to Tehran worth about US$9 billion.

Under the terms of the agreement, Iran will not be able to enrich uranium above 5% and its stockpile of 20% enriched uranium will be divided in two with half being available for the production of medical isotopes and the other half diluted down to 5%. There will be no remaining stockpile with the potential to be enriched to a level required for bomb making, yet Pipes asserts that such an advance remains possible.

Has he discovered something that no one else in the world knows about: how to make a nuclear weapon with low-enriched uranium?

The NSA better keep a close eye on Pipes. He could become the next A.Q. Khan.

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After rapid release of hot air, Israeli leaders may soon run out of cliches

spent-force

The New York Times reports: Israeli leaders denounced the agreement reached Sunday in Geneva, saying they were not bound by it and reiterating the principle that Israel would be ready to defend itself without assistance against any threat.

After weeks of intense lobbying against any deal between the world powers and Iran that does not ensure the dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel called the agreement “a historic mistake,” saying in remarks that were broadcast from the start of his weekly cabinet meeting, “Today the world has become a much more dangerous place because the most dangerous regime in the world has taken a significant step toward attaining the most dangerous weapon in the world.”

Mr. Netanyahu excoriated the world’s leading powers for agreeing to Iranian uranium enrichment for the first time and for relenting on sanctions “in exchange for cosmetic Iranian concessions that can be canceled in weeks.”

“Israel is not bound by this agreement,” he said. “As prime minister of Israel, I would like to make it clear: Israel will not allow Iran to develop a military nuclear capability.”

The foreign minister of Israel, Avidgor Lieberman, told Israel Radio that “Israel will have to make a reassessment” and that “all the options are on the table.”

“We are talking about the greatest diplomatic achievement for the Iranians,” he said. “We have to take our decision in a cleareyed, independent manner, and we have to be serious enough to be responsible for our fate. Responsibility for the fate of the Jewish people and for the state of Israel lies with the Israeli government alone.” [Continue reading…]

Yada, yada, yada. What options on which table?

Jeffrey Goldberg is in no doubt that Israel no longer has any military options:

[Obama] boxed-in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu so comprehensively that it’s unimaginable Israel will strike Iran in the foreseeable future. Netanyahu had his best chance to attack in 2010 and 2011, and he missed it. He came close but was swayed by Obama’s demand that he keep his planes parked. It would be a foolhardy act — one that could turn Israel into a true pariah state, and bring about the collapse of sanctions and possible war in the Middle East — if Israel were to attack Iran now, in the middle of negotiations.

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