When online communication first took shape, it often involved exchanges between individuals who had professional reasons to want to conceal their identities. Software engineers, who tend to be libertarian by nature, wanted to be able to engage in freewheeling discussions with like-minded cyber-adventurers without being constrained too much by overbearing managers or corporate dictates. Free speech and anonymity seemed to dovetail together.
But when the use of anonymity or fictitious identities is regarded as a right, all too often this ends up turning into a license for irresponsibility. The liberating effect of not having to be held accountable for ones own communication, breeds a fake boldness: the willingness to say things one would otherwise not dare say; the courage to “speak out” on the condition that one can do so while remaining in hiding.
The New York Times reports: There is a saying about academia that the disputes are so vicious because the stakes are so low. In the case of Raphael Haim Golb, a son of a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, the last few years have provided ample support for the first half of the saying. But the second half is less accurate.
Raphael and Norman Golb
In his cluttered fifth-floor walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village, Mr. Golb, 53, is waiting to begin serving a six-month sentence for waging an Internet campaign against his father’s academic rivals, including sending e-mails under a rival professor’s name. The younger Mr. Golb, who has a Ph.D. from Harvard and a law degree from New York University, is six feet tall, 120 pounds; digressive, tightly wound, bookish; a gadfly, an irritant, an obsessive. If you saw him on the street, you might worry about his safety.
Between 2006 and 2009, he created more than 80 online aliases to advance his father’s views about the Dead Sea Scrolls against what he saw as a concerted effort to exclude them. Along the way, according to a jury and a panel of appellate court judges, he crossed from engaging in academic debate to committing a crime.
What he accomplished through this manner of intellectual warfare is, like the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves, a topic on which opinion is passionately diverse, with no shortage of bad blood.
“This has nothing to do with scholarly debate,” said Lawrence H. Schiffman, vice provost of Yeshiva University and a widely published authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls, who became the prime target of Mr. Golb’s online activities. “It has to do with criminal activity.
“Fraud, impersonation and harassment are criminal matters,” he continued. “This was actually designed to literally end my career.” [Continue reading…]
As the repercussions of the Zygier Affair continue to reverberate through Israel’s political establishment, the need for a suitable scapegoat rises. According to a report in Haaretz, describes the Prison Service as “one of the most organized among Israel’s security organizations, but it is also the weakest.” say they suspect other parties involved in the so-called “Prisoner X” affair who have more political leverage will do everything in their power to place the blame on the Prison Service.
At present, many sources in the Prison Service say they suspect other parties involved in the so-called “Prisoner X” affair who have more political leverage will do everything in their power to place the blame on the Prison Service.
Certain individuals, they say, will try to divert the attention to the question of how Zygier managed to commit suicide in an observation cell.
Protocol requires every person who arrives at the Prison Service to appear on their first day before a committee of doctors, psychologists and other professionals who evaluate the likelihood that they will attempt to harm themselves or others. In Ben Zygier’s case, no such risk assessment is known to have taken place. The decision to skip this meeting was apparently made by someone other the Prison Service.
Furthermore, despite the fact that Zygier was held in an observation cell monitored by security cameras, it is evident that he was not monitored as closely as other prisoners.
Prison Service employees were kept in the dark about his identity and forbidden from engaging in conversation with him. They were permitted to check only if he was present. Only a few Prison Service employees even knew which government body was responsible for his arrest.
One of the major questions that has yet to be asked and which is likely to reduce at least some of the blame being leveled against the Prison Service is whether the Mossad instructed the Prison Service not to turn on security cameras in the cell. Prison guards did not consistently monitor video of Zygier, as they did for Yigal Amir, the assassin of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, when he was kept in the same cell.
The Prison Service has not commented on whether it was ordered to turn off the cameras in Zygier’s cell in order to prevent him from conveying messages to the prison guards or to explain why he had been arrested.
Even on the day Zygier was found dead by guards, none of them entered the cell when the medical team arrived. The guards who were on duty that day waited in a relatively distant wing of the prison and refused to enter even when they were asked by the medical team to help.
Medical staff who arrived at the cell were surprised to discover that the prisoner had only one identifying detail listed: his name, Ben Alon. In any incidence of death, the Prison Service is required to provide details regarding the deceased, including identification number, age and emergency contacts. One medic attempted to inquire about the lack of information and claimed that the body could not be evacuated without additional identifying details, but he was asked to proceed without them. Medics and Prison Service officials were further surprised when during the evacuation they learned that Ben Alon’s name had been changed to Zygier.
Should a thorough investigation be held into the Ben Zygier affair and the circumstances of his suicide, it appears that the Prison Service would benefit from the results being publicized widely.
Journalists tend to be circumspect in telling stories where the facts are still emerging, but as a blogger I don’t suffer the same constraints. Enough information about the Zygier affair appears already sufficiently well-established to construct a strong narrative unlikely to be upturned even as new facts emerge.
Although in earlier attempts to do this I’ve focused on a possible Dubai connection, I now believe that Zygier was probably not a member of the Mossad team that assassinated Hamas commander Mohammed Mabhouh in Dubai on January 19, 2010. Zygier’s connection to that killing consisted most likely in the information he possessed about Mossad’s illegal use of foreign passports.
Haaretz has learned that Zygier told at least two of his friends in Australia that he had been recruited by the Mossad.
An Israeli official familiar with the affair said Zygier had boasted on several occasions to friends and strangers about working for the Mossad. One of those occasions was when Zygier visited Australia in 2009. “He talked too much,” the source said.
So why would someone like this be recruited to Mossad in the first place? One would expect that its background checks would be among the most stringent.
Perhaps it was because he was viewed more than anything else as a useful source of foreign passports — a commodity of greater value to Mossad than any other intelligence agency.
But wasn’t the means by which Zygier obtained passports — taking advantage of Australia’s liberal policy which allows their citizens to change their name once a year — very likely to backfire?
This brazen operation through which Zygier obtained multiple Australian passports might have seemed easy to justify both in his mind and in the minds of his Mossad supervisors. No laws were being broken to obtain the passports and as the son of Geoffrey Zygier — a prominent member of Australia’s Jewish community — Zygier probably enjoyed a certain sense of impunity. The Israelis may have felt that if Zygier came under suspicion, the Australians could be persuaded to back off since in Australia, just as in the U.S., officials and politicians are always reluctant to provoke the ire of their own domestic Israel lobby.
If this was the calculation it was clearly a gross miscalculation.
Once the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) were on to Zygier and had well-founded suspicions about what he had been doing, their primary goal would have been to make it clear to Mossad that Australia would not tolerate the continued illegal use of its passports by Mossad agents. Such use not only places ordinary Australians in jeopardy but also Australia’s own intelligence operatives who, unlike Mossad agents, don’t need foreign passports to travel — that is, they didn’t until Mossad succeeded in turning an Australian passport into an object of suspicion.
(I imagine that inside Mossad, the prevailing attitude is that the use of foreign passports is simply a matter of necessity for an intelligence agency protecting a country whose citizens have pariah status across the region. “We have no choice,” as Shimon Peres would say.)
So, in 2009, Zygier found himself being squeezed by two intelligence agencies: one eager for him to speak; the other insisting that he remain silent.
The tipping point came within days of the Mabhouh assassination as the faces of Mossad agents appeared on news reports around the world and their use of foreign passports, including Australian ones, became public knowledge.
In February 2010, The Age revealed that for at least six months prior to the Dubai killing, ASIO had been investigating at least three dual Australian-Israeli citizens who were suspected of using Australian cover to spy for Israel. We now know that one of the suspects was Zygier.
Prior to Dubai, the Australians might have been content to use their knowledge of what Zygier and the other dual citizens were doing simply to force Mossad to cut it out. They just wanted the Israelis to stop using Australian passports. After all, ASIO is an intelligence, not a law enforcement agency.
After the Dubai assassination, Australia’s acting ambassador in Tel Aviv, Nicoli Maning-Campbell, conveyed her government’s concerns to officials in Israel and within days, Israel faced diplomatic blowback as Australia abstained in a U.N. vote calling for a war crimes investigation of Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2009.
If for several months Mossad had felt they could rely on Zygier’s silence, time ran out in February 2010 and they concluded their only recourse would be to throw him in jail. Given the timing, it looks like he was being incarcerated not because of what he had done but because of what Mossad feared he might reveal about the inner workings of their passport abuse program.
Avigdor Feldman, an attorney who was hired by Zygier’s family to advise him on making a plea bargain, says that shortly before his death in December 2010, the detainee had been warned that “he could very likely expect to be sentenced to an extremely lengthy prison term and to be shunned by his family,” yet Zygier maintained his innocence.
Mossad couldn’t rely on Zygier’s silence outside jail and then found he was likely to speak out while under trial. At this point the man eager to prove his innocence, supposedly killed himself. Dead men don’t talk.
In an era of Big Data, the prevailing myth is that what is known has become vast, while what is unknown lies on an ever-narrowing margin.
We live in a known world in which a few pockets of the unknown remain, but it’s just a matter of time before science succeeds in wrapping up its investigations. Every question will have been answered and for any individual, the only constraints on knowledge will be determined by the capacities of their own mind.
Thank Google, among others, for fabricating this fantasy image of the world.
As a measure of how little we know, try to remember precisely what you were thinking, precisely an hour ago.
No one can do that. No one’s memory operates with that precision and there are no means to record the stream of thought other than through memory.
So think about that: there are over 7 billion people on the planet most of whom currently attach a certain amount of importance to what is going on inside their own minds and yet all of whom know amazingly little about their own recent and distant experiences. Sure, we can piece together small fragments — enough to construct a narrative about who we are and what we have done — but the bulk of our experiences, once past, are gone for good. They have merged into the limitless void of the unknown and the unknowable.
We imagine that as we proceed through life, we are engaged in a process of perpetual aggregation, yet what we carry with us is utterly dwarfed by what we leave behind and is lost forever.
In The Guardian, Aluf Benn, the editor-in-chief of Haaretz, explains how censorship works in Israel. Interestingly he points out that “censorship has its advantages. Your military and intelligence sources are more open to give you secret information, trusting the censor to play bad cop.”
But the reason censorship operates effectively is because most Israelis do not question its value.
The success of censorship relies not on coercion and legal enforcement, but on public support. The military and intelligence community enjoy sacred status in Israeli society, and “national security” resonates much better than “civil liberties”. Many journalists accept censorship willingly as their national contribution, don’t argue with it, and criticise their peers who break with the official line. They are even proud of knowing the story and withholding it from their audience.
Israel is small and vulnerable and is situated in a dangerous neighborhood, so its national security needs trump all others — or so the narrative goes. Israel is a victim of circumstances.
But think about the mindset this engenders and it is one that is actually anathema to most Americans — a mindset of unquestioning trust in the state.
American mistrust of government can often veer towards the opposite extreme, yet there is such a thing as healthy suspicion of government power.
“National security” — wherever it is invoked — is an issue that almost always serves as a justification for secrecy. It delegitimizes citizenship and infantilizes the people.
For their own good, the people must not know what the government is doing. And when the people acquiesce, they are no longer being served by a representative government. They have instead turned themselves into the foundation of a totalitarian state.
“As long as ‘state security’ is sacred in the public mind, we will have censorship,” writes Benn. And as long as Israel functions as a security state, it cannot claim to be a democracy.
A Kuwaiti newspaper, Al-Jarida, reports today that according to Western sources, Ben Zygier aka ‘Prisoner X’ (who is claimed to have committed suicide in a high security Israeli prisoner in 2010) belonged to “band 131,” the Mossad team that assassinated Hamas commander Mohammed Mabhouh in Dubai on January 19, 2010.
Zygier is alleged to have provided Dubai authorities with detailed information about members of the Mossad team and in return for doing so was provided protection.
The same sources claimed that Zygier was later tracked down by Israel, kidnapped, and imprisoned on charges of treason.
The secrecy surrounding the Zygier case inevitably provides fertile ground for abundant speculation. For instance, Dimi Reider has an interesting theory about how Zygier could have exposed an Israeli false flag operation. But absent any additional evidence, I’d say that currently the Dubai theory ranks as somewhat more plausible.
Of course it leaves plenty of unanswered questions, but it’s not too difficult to fill in the blanks.
Let’s start with one feature of the Dubai investigation that was particularly striking at the time: the Dubai police were spectacularly efficient in identifying the Mossad agents.
The conventional wisdom among reporters and analysts covering the story was that this speedy detective work could largely be credited to state-of-the-art surveillance systems and software for tracking communications and financial transactions. It wasn’t so much a story about the brilliance of Dubai’s sleuths but more about the Western technology at their disposal. Maybe.
On the other hand, if as Dubai’s detectives examined the video evidence, they also had Zygier at their side identifying faces and naming names, that would certainly have expedited the process.
Why would Zygier have been so helpful? We can only guess, but it might have gone something like this: Dubai got a lucky break — they arrested him as he tried to flee.
However confident a Mossad agent might be when traveling across the Middle East with an Australian passport and a non-Jewish name, that confidence would likely swiftly evaporate if such an agent found himself detained by authorities who suspected he was in Mossad. In a country where torture has on occasions been administered directly by its rulers, it’s quite likely that an Israeli such as Zygier might have chosen to talk rather than risk being abused by a cattle prod.
One Hashomer friend who was on Kibbutz Gazit with Zygier in 1994 said that Zygier “never struck me as someone who was stable.”
“I could never imagine someone like that being good for Mossad,” said the acquaintance, who like most acquaintances interviewed about Zygier did not want to be identified. “Also, Ben talked too much.”
So, if he did spill the beans, then end up getting hauled back to Israel in secret, it seems quite possible that he would have then been charged with treason, a charge that Israeli Army Radio now reports that he faced.
Did the severe conditions in which Zygier was imprisoned, along with the humiliation of the circumstances that landed him there, lead him to commit suicide?
One of his Israeli lawyers who met him just days before his death says he gave no indication he was going to commit suicide.
“When I saw him, there was nothing to indicate he was going to commit suicide,” said Avigdor Feldman, a top human rights lawyer.
In an interview with Israel’s army radio, Mr Feldman said he had met Prisoner X to offer him advice ahead of his trial.
“His family asked that I meet him to advise him. The trial hadn’t properly started yet,” he said, indicating the prisoner had already been indicted and that talks were under way with senior prosecutors to reach a plea bargain.
“He asked for advice and I sat and listened to him. Not that I’m a psychologist, but he appeared rational, focused, he spoke clearly about the issue and didn’t exude any sense of self-pity.”
A day or two later, Mr Feldman’s liaison at the prison rang him to say the prisoner had died.
The lawyer admitted he was surprised “that a man who was being held in a cell like that, a cell which was being monitored and checked 24-hours a day, could manage to commit suicide by hanging himself.”
Mr Feldman, who said he knew the prisoner’s real name and had access to the file on his arrest but was unable to give any details for legal reasons, said it was clear the detainee was facing a very long jail term.
“I understood that he was told he was likely to face the longest possible jail term and that he was likely to be ostracised by his family,” he said.
A life sentence, perhaps in isolation, and being disowned by his family — Zygier might not have appeared suicidal but he certainly had reason to despair.
As Australia’s ABC News revealed in a Foreign Correspondent report, a prisoner being held in absolute secrecy in Israel’s Ayalon Prison — he was dubbed ‘Prisoner X’ — was a duel national Israeli-Australian Mossad agent named Ben Zygier — aka Ben Alon or Ben Allen.
After a few months of total isolation in 2010 and while under suicide watch, Zygier, who was married to an Israeli woman and had two young children, is alleged to have killed himself.
In 2010, following the assassination of the Hamas commander Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh on January 19, Mossad’s use of foreign passports came under investigation by several countries with citizens whose identities had been stolen and then used by Israeli agents entering and fleeing Dubai before and after the murder.
Australia’s The Age, now reveals that Zygier was under investigation by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) at that time, for possible links to Mossad.
Yesterday, Australia’s foreign minister Bob Carr said: “I’m not reluctant to seek an explanation from the Israeli government about what happened to Mr Allen [Zygier] and about what their view of it is.
Geoffrey Zygier
“The difficulty is I’m advised we’ve had no contact with his family [and] there’s been no request for consular assistance during the period it’s alleged he was in prison.”
Zygier’s father, Geoffrey Zygier, executive director for B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission, is a very prominent member of Australia’s Jewish community and its Israel lobby. He is Australia’s equivalent of Abe Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League.
In February 2010, when it became known that some of the agents involved in Mabhouh’s killing had been using Australian passports, then-prime minister Kevin Rudd expressed his alarm:
“We are going to get to the bottom of this,” Mr Rudd told ABC radio.
“This is a matter of the deepest concern to Australia.”
Mr Rudd said the integrity of the Australian passport system, used by millions of Australian travellers each year, had been compromised by this incident.
“What we have to establish first and foremost is was there a state involved in the use or forgery of these passports and the conduct of an assassination,” he told 3AW radio.
“It doesn’t matter which state it is. Any state that chooses to do this in relation to Australian passports frankly is treating the Australian people, the Australian Government and the Australian nation with contempt.
Australia’s domestic intelligence agency ASIO has long scrutinised Australian Jews suspected of working for Mossad.
The agency believes Mossad recruits change their names from European and Jewish names to “Anglo” names.
They then take out new passports and travel to the Arab world and Iran, to destinations Israeli passport holders cannot venture.
Warren Reed, a former intelligence operative for Australia’s overseas spy agency ASIS, told Foreign Correspondent that Australians were ideal recruits for Mossad.
“Australians abroad are generally seen to be fairly innocent,” he said.
“It’s a clean country – it has a good image like New Zealand.
“There aren’t many countries like that, so our nationality and anything connected with it can be very useful in intelligence work.”
The Department of Foreign Affairs has confirmed that Zygier also carried an Australian passport bearing the name Ben Allen.
Over two years after Ben Zygier’s death, his family has a right to avoid contact with the media, yet Geoffrey Zygier’s prominent position raises all sorts of questions about his silence. Is he trying to protect his family, Australia’s Jewish community or the Israeli government? He must have read about the conditions in which his son was imprisoned and surely have been greatly troubled.
This is how the story originally broke on June 13, 2010, in a brief report in Israel’s Hebrew daily Yedioth Ahronoth — a report quickly censored, but Didi Remez provided a translation:
Nobody knows who Mr. X. is. Ynet has learned that a man has been imprisoned for some time in wing 15 of Ayalon Prison but nobody knows who he is and what charges he is being jailed for. Nobody talks to him, nobody sees him, nobody visits him, nobody knows he is in jail. “He was placed in full and complete separation from the outside world,” said an Israel Prison Service official.
To enter the wing where the detainee is being held, you have to pass the jailers on the southern side of the prison and go through double iron doors. Unlike regular separation wings, where prisoners can talk loudly between the cells or see the goings-on in the corridors with mirrors, wing 15 has only one cell without neighboring cells and without a corridor, so that whoever is jailed in it is completely isolated from any living being.
“I don’t know any other prisoner or IPS detainee held in such severe conditions of separation and isolation,” said a Prison Service official. “There is confidentiality surrounding the detainee in wing 15 in every respect, including his identity and the crimes he committed. I doubt even the jailers in charge of him know who he is. There is too much confidentiality surrounding him. It is scary that in 2010 a man is imprisoned in Israel without us even knowing who he is.”
The official said, “it is simply a person without a name and without an identity who was placed in complete and absolute isolation from the outside world. We don’t know if he gets visits, if he gets the rights that every detainee deserves by law and if anybody even knows he is in jail.” The IPS declined to divulge who the person jailed there is. Its spokesman, Lt. Col. Yaron Zamir, said: “The IPS does not provide information about locations and names out of security considerations.”
Mr. X. is being kept in the wing originally built in order to jail Prime Minister Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir. Amir was jailed in the same cell under heavy security, with security cameras in the cell until December 2006, when he was moved to the separate wing at Rimonim prison in the Sharon district. The cell in wing 15 is relatively large and, in the case of Amir, his family met him in the cell so that he would not have to be taken out during visits.
Here again is the ABC News report which was first broadcast yesterday:
Whatever offense Zygier may or may not have been guilty of, the circumstances of his death while under such close surveillance raise an obvious question: did he commit suicide or was he murdered?
As Nitzan Horowitz, a member of the Knesset says: “It is intolerable to any reasonable person that in a democratic country, the authorities should be able to arrest people in complete secrecy and ‘disappear’ them from the public eye without the public knowing the arrest was even made.”
Intolerable in a democractic country, indeed — but in this instance Israel has been operating as a police state.
Stephen T Asma visited the slopes of the Mount Bisoke volcano in the Congo, where gorilla families roam, and the Serengeti, where he witnessed crocodiles preying on wildebeest. He wanted to better understand the existential fears that shaped the lives of our early ancestors.
After you spend time with wild animals in the primal ecosystem where our big brains first grew, you have to chuckle a bit at the reigning view of the mind as a computer. Most cognitive scientists, from the logician Alan Turing to the psychologist James Lloyd McClelland, have been narrowly focused on linguistic thought, ignoring the whole embodied organism. They see the mind as a Boolean algebra binary system of 1 or 0, ‘on’ or ‘off’. This has been methodologically useful, and certainly productive for the artifical intelligence we use in our digital technology, but it merely mimics the biological mind. Computer ‘intelligence’ might be impressive, but it is an impersonation of biological intelligence. The ‘wet’ biological mind is embodied in the squishy, organic machinery of our emotional systems — where action-patterns are triggered when chemical cascades cross volumetric tipping points.
Neuroscience has begun to correct the computational model by showing how our rational, linguistic mind depends on the ancient limbic brain, where emotions hold sway and social skills dominate. In fact, the cognitive mind works only when emotions preferentially tilt our deliberations. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio worked with patients who had damage in the communication system between the cognitive and emotional brain. The subjects could compute all the informational aspects of a decision in detail, but they couldn’t actually commit to anything. Without clear limbic values (that is, feelings), Damasio’s patients couldn’t decide their own social calendars, prioritise jobs at work, or even make decisions in their own best interest. Our rational mind is truly embodied, and without this emotional embodiment we have no preferences. In order for our minds to go beyond syntax to semantics, we need feelings. And our ancestral minds were rich in feelings before they were adept in computations.
Recognizing the primacy of feeling in human evolutionary development and that the limbic system evolved long before the arrival of hominids, it would seem hard to dispute that other animals also have feelings. Even so, science has been slow to embrace this idea. Asma attributes this to the lingering effects of behaviorism, but I would trace it back to the Bible.
The Enlightenment might have elevated reason high above religious dogma, yet it expanded rather than closed the apparent separation between Man and Nature and in so doing, perpetuated rather than rejected the Biblical ideology that promotes belief in the uniqueness of human beings. Even if, thanks to Darwin, we could see ourselves as primates, our defining attribute — language — set us apart from all other species.
Even now, we view feelings as a higher faculty and on that basis speculate about how far back they go.
Did emotions really begin to appear with the birth of mammals? Presumably dinosaurs would have had fear and aggression; these useful affects might be distributed throughout the vertebrate clade. But did they ‘care’ about their young, like mammals do? Did they bond? No one really knows for sure. Scientists try to solve some of these deep-time questions by looking at contemporary reptile brains and behaviors. Most reptiles don’t require parenting: just overproduce your eggs, fertilise, and walk away. Reptiles never evolved care because they didn’t need it. But they did need ‘fight or flight’ and of course they have it: it’s located in the lower, older part of the brain, unlike mammalian care, which is in the higher limbic.
The problem with thinking about feeling in this way is that it turns particular feelings into kinds of species, some, all or none of which, might be found to inhabit a particular creature. It doesn’t strip feeling down to its core.
Feeling is the motor of life that makes us advance and recoil and what we can observe as physical motion in others we experience as attraction and aversion in ourselves. These are visceral reactions out of which complex feelings emerge and onto which we can impute all sorts of qualities, yet under each particular human feeling, such as hope or despair, there is some kind of movement with a physical expression. The movement might only take place on the face or through breath or muscle tension, but in some way the body moves.
Looking then at feeling as this lifelong motion driving us down certain pathways and away from others, this seems to be an attribute of all creatures down to the tiniest microbe.
Australia’s ABC News reports: Evidence has been unearthed that strongly suggests Israel’s infamous Prisoner X, who was jailed under extraordinary circumstances in 2010, was an Australian national from Melbourne.
Investigations by the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent program have revealed Ben Zygier, who used the name Ben Alon in Israel, was found hanged in a high-security cell at a prison near Tel Aviv in late 2010.
His body was flown to Melbourne for burial a week later.
The death goes part of the way to explain the existence in Israel of a so-called Prisoner X, widely speculated in local and international media as an inmate whose presence has been acknowledged by neither the jail system nor the government.
The case is regarded as one of the most sensitive secrets of Israel’s intelligence community, with the government going to extraordinary lengths to stifle media coverage and gag attempts by human rights organisations to expose the situation.
The Prisoner X cell is a jail within a jail at Ayalon Prison in the city of Ramla. It was built for the assassin of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.
The ABC understands Mr Zygier became its occupant in early 2010. His incarceration was so secret that it is claimed not even guards knew his identity.
Israeli media at the time reported that this Prisoner X received no visitors and lived hermetically sealed from the outside world.
When an Israeli news website reported that the prisoner died in his cell in December 2010, Israeli authorities removed its web pages.
An Israeli court order prohibiting any publication or public discussion of the matter is still in force; Israel’s internal security service, Shin Bet, has effectively blocked any coverage of the matter. [Continue reading…]
As the former Australian intelligence officer interviewed above indicates, it would be virtually impossible for someone detained as Zygier was, to commit suicide. And assuming that he had committed what the Israeli government regarded as an act of treachery, it’s frankly hard to imagine that he was recruited by another intelligence agency — with the possible exception of Australia’s. What seems more likely is that what for Israel represented a betrayal, may for Zygier have involved a crisis of conscience. But as a Mossad agent, he knew too much for Israel to take the risk of witnessing him speak out. First he disappeared, then he was permanently silenced.
Given that bin Laden was shot while standing inside a pitch-black room — the Shooter could see him through his nightscopes; given that the SEAL was struck by how skinny bin Laden appeared — an indication that he was not wearing a suicide vest; and given that he was visibly confused as he groped around in the darkness, there seems little reason to believe that capturing bin Laden would have been unfeasible.
If President Obama knew that the death of the al Qaeda leader would provide a political reward of inestimable value, he also knew that the detention and trial of bin Laden could easily become a massive liability to his presidency.
Where would bin Laden be detained? Where could he be put on trial? Would there be any risk of failing to convict him on the most serious charges? If tried, convicted, and executed, would the lengthy process end up elevating his status as a martyr?
Even if Obama didn’t issue an order to kill, no one seems to have been in any doubt that this was the goal of the mission. Indeed, has not kill, don’t capture become the signature of a president who banned torture and promised to shut down Guantanamo?
The goal was to execute bin Laden and capitalize on a broadly felt desire for vengeance.
If he had still actually posed a real threat to America, he would also have been a source of invaluable intelligence. The White House’s calculation, however, seems to have been that bin Laden’s dead body was worth far more than any information he could share.
There was bin Laden standing there. He had his hands on a woman’s shoulders, pushing her ahead, not exactly toward me but by me, in the direction of the hallway commotion. It was his youngest wife, Amal.
The SEALs had nightscopes, but it was coal-black for bin Laden and the other residents. He can hear but he can’t see.
He looked confused. And way taller than I was expecting. He had a cap on and didn’t appear to be hit [by shots fired in his direction earlier]. I can’t tell you 100 percent, but he was standing and moving. He was holding her in front of him. Maybe as a shield, I don’t know.
For me, it was a snapshot of a target ID, definitely him. Even in our kill houses where we train, there are targets with his face on them. This was repetition and muscle memory. That’s him, boom, done.
I thought in that first instant how skinny he was, how tall and how short his beard was, all at once. He was wearing one of those white hats, but he had, like, an almost shaved head. Like a crew cut. I remember all that registering. I was amazed how tall he was, taller than all of us, and it didn’t seem like he would be, because all those guys were always smaller than you think.
I’m just looking at him from right here [he moves his hand out from his face about ten inches]. He’s got a gun on a shelf right there, the short AK he’s famous for. And he’s moving forward. I don’t know if she’s got a vest and she’s being pushed to martyr them both. He’s got a gun within reach. He’s a threat. I need to get a head shot so he won’t have a chance to clack himself off [blow himself up].
In that second, I shot him, two times in the forehead. Bap! Bap! The second time as he’s going down. He crumpled onto the floor in front of his bed and I hit him again, Bap! same place. That time I used my EOTech red-dot holo sight. He was dead. Not moving. His tongue was out. I watched him take his last breaths, just a reflex breath.
And I remember as I watched him breathe out the last part of air, I thought: Is this the best thing I’ve ever done, or the worst thing I’ve ever done? This is real and that’s him. Holy shit.
Everybody wanted him dead, but nobody wanted to say, Hey, you’re going to kill this guy. It was just sort of understood that’s what we wanted to do.
Climate change has resulted from unplanned geoengineering — for most of the last two centuries, we have been pumping vast quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere without pausing to consider the results. So geoengineering that would involve seeding the upper atmosphere with solar-reflecting sulfate aerosols might look like a technological fix for a technological problem.
Climate change, however, is not just a technical problem. It is a planetary crisis with a human cause. While the direct cause is human behavior, this behavior has psychological and philosophical roots. It is the expression of a worldview in which humanity has set itself apart from nature. It is the expression of a value system that respects the accumulation of wealth more than the cultivation of wisdom. It is the expression of lifestyles in which people have become increasingly dependent upon objects rather than themselves and each other.
“Solar radiation management” (SRM) far from offering a solution to climate change, seems much more like another expression of the mindset that brought us to this perilous juncture.
MIT Technology Review: Critics of SRM — and even its advocates — note that the technology has numerous limitations, and that no one is entirely sure what the consequences would be. Sulfate aerosols reflect sunlight in the upper atmosphere, thus directly cooling the planet. But greenhouse gases operate very differently, trapping long-wave infrared radiation escaping from Earth’s surface and thus warming it. While sulfates would be likely to offset warming, it’s not clear exactly how they would counteract some of the other effects of greenhouse gases, particularly changes in precipitation patterns. And SRM would do nothing to reduce the acidification of the oceans caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
“The term ‘solar radiation management’ is positively Orwellian,” says Raymond Pierrehumbert, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago. “It’s meant to give you a feeling that we really understand what we would be doing. It’s a way to increase comfort levels with this crazy idea. What we’re really talking about is hacking the planet in a case where we don’t really know what it is going to do.” In delivering the prestigious Tyndall Lecture at the annual American Geophysical Union meeting last December, he said the idea of putting sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere was “barking mad.”
Pierrehumbert also rejects the value of doing field experiments. “The whole idea of geoengineering is so crazy and would lead to such bad consequences, it really is pretty pointless. We already know enough about sulfate albedo engineering to know it would put the world in a really precarious state. Field experiments are really a dangerous step on the way to deployment, and I have a lot of doubts what would actually be learned.”
The fundamental problem with albedo engineering, says Pierrehumbert, is that once we start using it, we’ll need to continue indefinitely. Since it only offsets warming, once the process stops, temperature changes caused by greenhouse gases will manifest themselves suddenly and dramatically. “If you stop — or if you have to stop — then you’re toast,” he says. Even using it as a temporary Band-Aid doesn’t make sense, he argues: “Once you get to the point in terms of climate changes that you feel you have to use it, then you have to use [SRM] forever.” He believes that this makes the idea a “complete nonstarter.”
Besides, Pierrehumbert says, our climate models “are nowhere near advanced enough for us to begin thinking of actually engineering the planet.” In particular, computer models don’t accurately predict specific regional precipitation patterns. And, he says, it’s not possible to use existing models to know how geoengineering might affect, say, India’s monsoons or precipitation in such drought-prone areas as northern Africa. “Our ability to actually say what the regional climate patterns will be in a geoengineered world is very limited,” he says.
Alan Robock, meanwhile, has a long list of questions concerning SRM, at the top of which is: can it even be done? Robock, an expert on how volcanoes affect climate and a professor of environmental sciences at Rutgers University, cautions that while the Pinatubo eruption confirmed the cooling effect of sulfate aerosols, it injected a massive amount of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere over a few days. Solar geoengineering would use far less sulfur but disperse it continuously over an extended period. That could be a critical difference. The optimal way to achieve SRM is with sulfur particles only about half a micrometer in diameter. Sunlight reflects off the surface of the particles, and smaller particles have more surface area than larger ones, making them far more efficient at blocking the sun. Robock worries that as sulfur is continuously injected and concentrations build up, the small particles will clump together into large ones, necessitating far more sulfur than some current proposals assume.
These details of aerosol chemistry could help determine the viability of SRM. “David [Keith] thinks it is going to be easy and cheap, and I don’t agree,” says Robock. He estimates that several million tons of sulfur would have to be injected into the atmosphere annually to offset doubled levels of carbon dioxide, but if the particles clump together, “it could be many times that.”
Research so far shows that producing a cloud in the stratosphere — Robock’s preferred description of SRM — “could cool the climate,” he says. “But you would have a very different planet, and other things could be worse.” He points out, for example, that in the aftermath of Mount Pinatubo, rainfall decreased significantly in some parts of the world. Robock supports more modeling on solar geoengineering, but “right now, I don’t see a path in which it would be used,” he says. “I don’t see how the benefits outweigh the negatives.”
The Israel lobby made sure that this Saturday Night Live sketch on the Chuck Hagel hearings was dropped from the show…
Well, maybe the lobby didn’t need to intervene. More likely, the show’s writers had to reconcile themselves to the fact that their audience doesn’t pay too much attention to what happens in the U.S. Senate. It’s hard to satirize a particular form of behavior — in this case, shameless displays of slavish adoration of Israel — if the people who need to get the joke are ignorant about the thing being mocked. Still, thanks to SNL for giving it a shot.
Amy Davidson writes: “One of the problems is, once the drone program is so public, and one American is caught up, people don’t know much about this one ‘American citizen’ — so called,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein, in her questioning of John Brennan, President Obama’s nominee for C.I.A. director, on Thursday. (John Cassidy has more on the hearing.) She was referring to Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by a drone strike in Yemen, in 2011, and was a “so-called” American because he was an American, born in New Mexico. “They don’t know what he’s been doing,” Feinstein continued. “They don’t know the incitement he has stirred up. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about Mr. Awlaki and what he’s been doing.”
Brennan demurred at first, since the question was about an “operation.” Feinstein jumped in:
See, that’s the problem. When people hear “American,” they think someone who’s upstanding. And this man was not upstanding by a long shot.
BRENNAN: Yes.
FEINSTEIN: And maybe you cannot discuss it here, but I’ve read enough to know that he was a real problem.
Brennan agreed, saying that al-Awlaki “was intimately involved in activities that were designed to kill innocent men, women, and children, mostly Americans. He was not just a propagandist.” (He neglected to mention that al-Awlaki’s American teen-age son was also killed, in a separate strike.) Feinstein then led him through a number of incidents; in some cases, Brennan agreed that al-Awlaki was an organizer, and in others he spoke obliquely about “inspiring” and “inciting individuals.” Feinstein summed up the exchange with what may have been the most disturbing line in the three-hour hearing, worse, even, than the waterboarding joke that Senator Burr told a few minutes later:
“And, so, Mr. Awlaki is not an American citizen by where anyone in America would be proud.”
“Proud,” “upstanding,” “so-called American” — is this the basis on which the Senate is judging fundamental questions of American rights and due process?
It’s natural and appropriate the Americans should be concerned that the U.S. president has decided that he can at his discretion deprive U.S. citizens of their right to due process, but in considering the assassination of Anwar al Awlaki, we should not be alarmed merely because he was an American. Much more significant, it seems to me, is why he was killed.
At the time of his death, U.S. officials described Awlaki as an operational leader of al Qaeda, yet have never supported this claim with any evidence. Lack of evidence presumably explains why he was never indicted and never placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
What Awlaki was guilty of was being a charismatic preacher, capable of exerting great influence and quite possibly inspiring others to engage in acts of terrorism. In 2010, the Wall Street Journal reported:
A businessman in [Yemen’s capital,] San’a said he met the cleric two years ago, while Mr. Awlaki was hunting for real estate in the capital. The businessman said he was immediately struck by the charisma of the cleric. “It was like talking to [Bill] Clinton,” he said. “You felt like he understood everything about you.”
Awlaki represented a national security nightmare: a Bin Laden with an American accent. He was feared much less for what he had done than for what he might become.
The idea that he was killed because he posed some kind of imminent threat is an idea that can only be accepted on blind faith. What the preponderance of evidence shows is that this was a political assassination.
When the U.S. government starts executing people for political crimes, the nationality of those being killed should really be the least among our concerns.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged architect of the 9/11 attacks was arrested rather than being summarily executed. No doubt at the time he was regarded as being much more valuable alive than dead. The same can’t be said of Awlaki. Indeed, the difficulties the Obama administration might have faced imprisoning him and attempting to put him on trial, strongly suggest that he was killed as a matter of convenience. He was a problem that needed to be removed — snuffed out — and the choice to do that, turned the position of the president into that of a mobster.
Neil Macdonald, senior Washington correspondent for CBC News, writes: In 2001, when Israel started killing militant Palestinian enemies (and, often, innocent bystanders) with missiles fired from helicopters hovering so high you could barely see them, foreign reporters were urged by the Israeli government to call the practice “targeted killing.”
Most of us, including many of my American colleagues, preferred the term “extrajudicial assassination.” We felt we were in the news business, not the euphemism business.
Today, 12 years later, the Washington Post carries a front-page headline about the U.S. drone program titled, “Targeted killings face new scrutiny.”
Yet another government document has been leaked, this time a so-called “white paper” in which the U.S. Department of Justice lays out the administration’s justification for killing American citizens it suspects of belonging to Al-Qaeda.
U.S. media outlets, it seems, are perfectly comfortable with the term “targeted killing,” now that it is a major tool for the Pentagon and CIA.
It’s also clear American media outlets are comfortable suppressing news the government does not want published. [Continue reading…]
A PublicMind poll published yesterday declares: “By a two-to-one margin (48%-24%) American voters say they think it is illegal for the U.S. government to target its own citizens living abroad with drone attacks”.
“The public clearly makes an assumption very different from that of the Obama administration or Mr. Brennan: the public thinks targeting American citizens abroad is out of bounds,” said Peter Woolley, professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson University and analyst for PublicMind.
The question is, among those who think that targeting Americans is out of bounds, how many are actually aware that Americans have indeed been targeted?
Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say that they’ve heard a lot about drones (45% compared to 29%) and overall, by a three-to-one margin, those polled support the CIA’s use of drone attacks abroad.
The way I would interpret these numbers is that they indicate that most Americans are unaware that drones have been used to kill Americans, most assume that these attacks help keep America safe and that on the basis of these two assumptions see no reason to investigate the issue more deeply.
The complicity is not simply between the media and the government; it also involves the broad-based indifference that Americans have for what happens outside this country. This is what makes drone warfare such a politically low-cost option for the Obama administration.
On April 29, 2003, two days before George Bush’s famous “mission accomplished” speech declaring the end to major combat operations in Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld announced that U.S. troops would be withdrawn from Saudi Arabia. The presence of these troops in the Islamic kingdom was one of the catalysts for 9/11.
An al Qaeda fatwa issued in 1998 had said: “for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.”
As we now learn that two years ago the Obama administration turned Saudi Arabia into a spearhead for its targeted killing operations across the region, it seems reasonable to wonder how long it might be before history repeats itself.
If two decades ago overseas military bases were the preeminent symbol of American domination, in much of the world now the most despised expression of American power is surely the drone.
The Washington Post reports: The Obama administration’s targeted-killing program has relied on a growing constellation of drone bases operated by the CIA and the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command. The only strike intentionally targeting a U.S. citizen, a 2011 attack that killed al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki, was carried out in part by CIA drones flown from a secret base in Saudi Arabia.
The base was established two years ago to intensify the hunt against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, as the affiliate in Yemen is known. Brennan, who previously served as the CIA’s station chief in Saudi Arabia, played a key role in negotiations with Riyadh over locating an agency drone base inside the kingdom.
The Washington Post had refrained from disclosing the specific location at the request of the administration, which cited concern that exposing the facility would undermine operations against an al-Qaeda affiliate regarded as the network’s most potent threat to the United States, as well as potentially damage counterterrorism collaboration with Saudi Arabia.
The Post learned Tuesday night that another news organization was planning to reveal the location of the base, effectively ending an informal arrangement among several news organizations that had been aware of the location for more than a year.
It’s easy for those of us living in so-called developed states to survey the turmoil across much of the developing or under-developed world and take a certain amount of comfort in our uneventful lives.
We might not consciously harbor conceits about the superiority of Western Civilization but nevertheless, the absence of social strife, relatively low crime rates, the abundance of material goods and services, well-funded university systems, access to advanced health care, relatively stable systems of government — all of these factors taken together evoke a sense that relative to much of the rest of the world, we live in reasonably healthy societies.
To the extent that we hold this perspective, we do so however while viewing society in a strangely skewed way. We treat the individual as the fundamental component out of which society is constructed and view the common good as the ability for the greatest number of individuals to fulfill their desires. But this isn’t what makes a society and it never will.
Consider instead another way of viewing the health of society: the way in which strangers relate to one another. By this measure one could argue — especially in America — that we don’t really live in a society.
More often than not, we are aggregations of individuals who minimize accidental interactions and for whom ‘stranger’ is a label that can be applied to most other people — people whose names we will never know and whose lives we only fleetingly glimpse. The stranger is the person who lives outside the sphere of our concerns.
There are other societies that don’t operate like this at all and where in a profoundly un-American way, the way in which strangers engage with one other is what makes society work.
The American anthropologist and Mali expert, Bruce Whitehouse cites an interesting anecdote recounted by another American living in Mali:
I was in a SOTRAMA (Mali’s take on the minibus, a green shell ringed with wooden benches, infinite division of space, unlimited passengers) the other day and I watched a guy scoop up a baby from the arms of a mother who was burdened with several bags and a large plastic bowl overflowing with toothbrushes and tubes of toothpaste.
After she climbed into the SOTRAMA and arranged her merchandise, she did not ask for her baby back. Her baby remained in the arms of a stranger, who was now smiling and laughing with the woman’s daughter on his lap.
Passengers inside a Bamako sotrama.
To an American eye, such an expression of trust between strangers might seem unfathomable. Indeed, those who knew nothing about the way Malian society works might regard this kind of behavior as an indication that Malian mothers have a carefree and irresponsible attitude about the welfare of their children. As Whitehouse explains, however, what this vignette captures is a fundamentally different view of what it means to be human — an orientation for which in Mali’s dominant Bambara language there is a word, Mɔgɔya.
Mɔgɔya expresses itself as:
a spontaneous familiarity found even among strangers, an eagerness to engage with other people socially in almost any situation. The Bambara word mɔgɔ means “person,” and you could translate mɔgɔya as “personhood,” but that wouldn’t tell the whole story. In Mali, as in much of Africa, the person is not reducible to the individual; mɔgɔya is expressed through social relations, which exist prior to the person. “It is only by means of social ties that one can achieve personhood,” writes anthropologist Saskia Brand in her ethnography of Bamako, Mediating Means and Fate. An individual human being does not necessarily qualify as a person because, as Brand notes, someone who is anti-social may not be considered a mɔgɔ.
I think of mɔgɔya as a parallel of social capital, something that constitutes a public good, and the decline of which in American society has been noted by social scientists like Robert Putnam. Whatever you call it, Mali has it in spades. For outsiders like me, everyday displays of mɔgɔya can lift the spirits. For Malians, mɔgɔya is what holds society together.
While the familiarity between strangers that Whitehouse describes could be viewed as culturally bound and romanticized as a vestige of ancestral roots particular to societies that have not ‘advanced’ far from their source, there is a way in which we can see social bonds and their dissolution as a direct product of material wealth.
Wealth breeds insularity. The more we have for ourselves, the less we need others.
On a spiral of autonomy, the more we free ourselves from the constraints of space and time in our fully networked world, the more bound we become to the company we can never escape yet rarely examine: our own.
And therein lies the contradiction in our development: that as we lose ourselves in things, we lose our humanity in the process.
“Pleasure puts you to sleep and pain wakes you up,” an Indian sage once said, yet in the United States we live in a culture that prizes painlessness far more than wakefulness. Indeed, we are increasingly being encouraged to pathologize pain at moments when we would otherwise be called to wrestle with life’s meaning.
The latest edition of the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (due for publication in May) which is the bible of psychiatry, regards grief as a disease.
Following the death of a loved one, depression occurring within a few weeks can be treated as an illness in need of a pharmaceutical cure. The pain of loss can and supposedly should be chemically dissolved.
All too predictably, the support that was once provided by other people is coming instead to be provided by pills.
Instead of recognizing grief as an appropriate response to death and the profoundly difficult transitions that come in its wake, a human experience is being turned into a neurotransmitter imbalance and in the process a huge business opportunity is being opened up for companies like GlaxoSmithKline.
Late last year, the business section of the Washington Postreported:
For years, the official handbook of psychiatry, issued by the American Psychiatric Association, advised against diagnosing major depression when the distress is “better accounted for by bereavement.” Such grief, experts said, was better left to nature.
But that may be changing.
In what some prominent critics have called a bonanza for the drug companies, the American Psychiatric Association this month voted to drop the old warning against diagnosing depression in the bereaved, opening the way for more of them to be diagnosed with major depression — and thus, treated with antidepressants.
The change in the handbook, which could have significant financial implications for the $10 billion U.S. antidepressant market, was developed in large part by people affiliated with the pharmaceutical industry, an examination of financial disclosures shows.
The association itself depends in part on industry funding, and the majority of experts on the committee that drafted the new diagnostic guideline have either received research grants from the drug companies, held stock in them, or served them as speakers or consultants.
In March, 2011, my wife died and I experienced the physiology of grief. I felt greatly sad and yearned for her. I didn’t sleep well. When I returned to a now empty house, I became agitated. I also felt fatigued and had difficulty concentrating on my academic work. My weight declined owing to a newly indifferent appetite. This dark experience lightened over the months, so that the feelings became much less acute by around 6 months. But after 46 years of marriage, it will come as no surprise to most people that as I approach the first anniversary of my loss, I still feel sadness at times and harbour the sense that a part of me is gone forever. I’m not even sure my caregiving for my wife, who died of Alzheimer’s disease, ended with her death. I am still caring for our memories. Is there anything wrong (or pathological) with that?
Experience, including the experience of loss, is never neat: that is, out of context. It is always framed by meanings and values, which themselves are affected by all sorts of things like one’s age, health, financial and work conditions, and what is happening in one’s life and in the wider world. The collective and personal process we usually refer to as culture is one sort of framing: a kind of master framing. Historically, widows in many patriarchal societies were culturally framed as grieving for a lifetime or at least, a long time. The globalisation of our era has brought in its wake an expectation of serial marriages with much shorter periods of bereavement. Still, DSM-IV’s framing of normal grief as lasting only 2 months must stand out in global perspective as a shocking expectation. We can say the same about the APA’s [American Psychiatric Association] proposal for treating any grief as depressive disorder, which must be seen as a radical cultural framing peculiar to American academic psychiatric research.
Inasmuch as there is no compelling evidence that antidepressant drugs improve mood in normal people, the APA, if it wanted to authorise treatment for normal grief, had to make it over into a disease — ie, depression. Then psychiatrists could, as a routine practice, prescribe antidepressants for bereavement. This phenomenon of reframing a previously normal experience as a disease is called medicalisation and is quite far advanced in psychiatric practice, which already labels shyness as anxiety disorder and puts some people who are unskilled in negotiating social relationships in the Asperger’s syndrome end of the autism spectrum. These framings represent a cultural shift, now well along its way, to remake experiences formerly regarded as morally bad, religiously sinful, disturbing, or just different as medical issues of illness and disablement. The upshot is that unprecedented numbers of people with what was earlier regarded as the ordinary distress of living are taking psychotropic medication.
The increasing secularisation of our age with the dominance of biotechnology is one factor behind this shift to a new cultural frame, just as much as the political economy of the pharmaceutical industry, the transformation of American medicine into big business, and the infiltration of bureaucratic standards and regulations ever more deeply into ordinary life. All of which brings me back to the experience of grieving. Why not medicalise it? Why not deprive death of its sting for the survivors and make the experience of loss as painless as possible? Given the parlous state of global capitalism at the moment, maybe this would also help to fund health-care systems. Professor David J Kupfer, who chairs the DSM-5 Task Force making the revisions, is reported to have told The New York Times that making grief into a disease would allow psychiatrists to treat people who were suffering so that they would get the treatment they need for being depressed. And that’s the rub really. Is grief something that we can or should no longer tolerate? Is this existential source of suffering like any dental or back pain unwanted and unneeded?
My own experience, together with my reading of the literature, suggests caution is needed before we answer yes and turn ordinary grieving into a suitable target of therapeutic intervention. My grief, like that of millions of others, signalled the loss of something truly vital in my life. This pain was part of the remembering and maybe also the remaking. It punctuated the end of a time and a form of living, and marked the transition to a new time and a different way of living. The suffering pushed me out of my ordinary day-to-day existence and called into question the meanings and values that animated our life. The cultural reframing — at once subjective and shared with others in my life-world—held moral and religious significance. What would it mean to reframe that significance as medical? For me and my family, and I intuit for many, many others such a cultural reframing would seem inappropriate or even a technological interference with what matters most in our lives.
Before his wife’s death, Kleinman gave the following interview in which he talks about his experience of caregiving:
Lawyers have much more interest in constructing lines of reasoning than they do in clear communication. For that reason, the Justice Department’s white paper on the targeted killing of Americans was written not so much to articulate the policies of the U.S. government but rather as part of a legal process designed to ensure that President Obama and other U.S. officials can avoid being prosecuted for murder.
Stripped to its bare bones, the argument runs like this:
I can kill you if I think that you want to kill me. And I can kill you now or whenever I choose if I have no way of knowing when you might try to kill me.
This isn’t a basis for self-defense; it’s a justification for premeditated murder.
Spencer Ackerman writes: “Imminence” used to mean something in military terms: namely, that an adversary had begun preparations for an assault. In order to justify his drone strikes on American citizens, President Obama redefined that concept to exclude any actual adversary attack.
That’s the heart of the Justice Department’s newly-leaked white paper, first reported by NBC News, explaining why a “broader concept of imminence” (.PDF) trumps traditional Constitutional protections American citizens enjoy from being killed by their government without due process. It’s an especially striking claim when considering that the actual number of American citizens who are “senior operational leader[s] of al-Qaida or its associated forces” is vanishingly small. As much as Obama talks about rejecting the concept of “perpetual war” he’s providing, and institutionalizing, a blueprint for it. [Continue reading…]
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Multiple sources indicate that Ben Zygier was 
