Author Archives: Paul Woodward

Assad tests Obama’s ‘red line’ on the use of chemical weapons

Foreign Policy‘s blog, The Cable, reports: A secret State Department cable has concluded that the Syrian military likely used chemical weapons against its own people in a deadly attack last month, The Cable has learned.

United States diplomats in Turkey conducted a previously undisclosed, intensive investigation into claims that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons, and made what an Obama administration official who reviewed the cable called a “compelling case” that Assad’s military forces had used a deadly form of poison gas.

The cable, signed by the U.S. consul general in Istanbul, Scott Frederic Kilner, and sent to State Department headquarters in Washington last week, outlined the results of the consulate’s investigation into reports from inside Syria that chemical weapons had been used in the city of Homs on Dec. 23.

The consul general’s report followed a series of interviews with activists, doctors, and defectors, in what the administration official said was one of the most comprehensive efforts the U.S. government has made to investigate claims by internal Syrian sources. The investigation included a meeting between the consulate staff and Mustafa al-Sheikh, a high-level defector who once was a major general in Assad’s army and key official in the Syrian military’s WMD program.

An Obama administration official who reviewed the document, which was classified at the “secret” level, detailed its contents to The Cable. “We can’t definitely say 100 percent, but Syrian contacts made a compelling case that Agent 15 was used in Homs on Dec. 23,” the official said.

The use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would cross the “red line” President Barack Obama first established in an Aug. 20 statement. “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation,” Obama said.

James S Ketchum MD and Frederick R Sidell MD describe the effects of BZ*. In the 1960s, Ketchum, a psychiatrist, was the U.S. Army’s leading expert and investigator in the use of chemical weapons. Although BZ was weaponized, it was later determined it could have no value in the battlefield and the U.S. stockpile was destroyed. A Soviet version was developed and also one in Iraq, known as Agent 15.

When delirium is present in its full-blown state, the individual seems to be in a “waking dream,” often staring and muttering, sometimes shouting, as simple items in the environment are variably perceived as elaborate structures, animals, or people. These hallucinations may arise from some trivial aspect of the surroundings, such as a strip of molding, a pillow, or an irregular spot on the floor. A total lack of insight generally surrounds these misperceptions.

Another striking characteristic of delirium is its fluctuation from moment to moment, with occasional lucid intervals and appropriate responses. An individual might answer “Shakespeare” when asked who wrote Hamlet, but when asked the same question 5 minutes later, might get down on the floor and attempt to remove an imaginary manhole cover, or become absorbed in a miniature World Series game being played out before his eyes.

“Phantom” behaviors, such as plucking or picking at the air or at garments, is characteristic (whence the old term “woolgathering”). This “carphologia,” as it was known in the 19th century, can be comical at times. When two individuals are both delirious they may play off of each other’s imaginings. A subject was once observed to mumble, “Gotta cigarette?” and when his companion held out an invisible pack, he followed with, “S’okay, don’t wanna take your last one.”

Recovery from drug-induced delirium is gradual, with a duration presumably determined by the pharmacokinetic persistence of the causative agent. The more spectacular and florid hallucinations are gradually replaced by more modest distortions in perception. (Instead of large animals, mice and insects are described by the subject.) Awareness gradually returns and with it comes the subject’s partial insight that his mental faculties are not what they should be. Ironically, paranoid tendencies often emerge at this stage, as the individual senses that something is amiss but cannot carry out the reality testing required to rule out malevolent manipulation of the environment by others. A period of restorative sleep generally precedes the return to normal cognitive function.

The Cable spoke to two doctors who treated victims in Homs on December 23:

Both doctors said that the chemical weapon used in the attack may not have been Agent 15, but they are sure it was a chemical weapon, not a form of tear gas. The doctors attributed five deaths and approximately 100 instances of severe respiratory, nervous system, and gastrointestinal ailments to the poison gas.

If the Assad regime wanted to test President Obama’s resolve in laying down a “red line” on the use of chemical weapons, then an obvious way to pose such a challenge would be to employ a weapon whose effects might mostly be non-lethal. This would then leave Washington with the dilemma it now seems to face. Should it now make good on its earlier commitment that unspecified consequences would follow the use of chemical weapons, or does it fudge its “red line” and thus invite a more extreme test?

So far, each test of Obama’s boundaries has indicated that they are quite elastic.

*It’s important to note that descriptions of the effects of BZ as provide through research in which carefully measured amounts of the drug were administered, cannot reliably indicate the effects of the drug released in a battle where levels of exposure will vary widely. However, one symptom the doctors in Homs described observing in the victims — “They all had miosis — pinpoint pupils” — does not correspond with the effects of an anticholinergic such as BZ, which causes pupil dilation.

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Obama’s ‘light footprint’ masks a war fueling deep hatred of the U.S.

Since President Obama was re-elected on November 6, there have been 15 drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, including five strikes since New Year’s Day. This is the White House’s definition of a “light footprint” — a euphemism designed to imply that if the United States refrains from sending armies of occupation to foreign lands, then its military impact on the rest of the world is fundamentally benign.

Neoconservatives who seem to prefer the blunt force of American power and have a nostalgia for “shock and awe” are not impressed with light footprints. The idea that Obama employs a light touch seems designed to appeal to mainstream Democrats who like to believe that if America’s military actions pose no risk to American troops, then America is not at war. Drone strikes can continue, largely ignored by the press, and a public happy to remain ignorant can delude itself that the only people getting killed are “bad guys” and that Obama has a smarter approach to national security than his predecessor.

Assuming their nominations are confirmed, the two new pillars of Obama’s national security policy, John Brennan and Chuck Hagel, will likely further reinforce Obama’s approach which has much more to do with method than doctrine. Hagel will ensure that the troops stay at home while Brennan sends the drones overseas, effectively placing a light footprint on American consciousness and fostering an illusion of peace.

In an interview with Reuters, retired General Stanley McChrystal, who devised the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, voiced his concerns about the Obama administration’s practice of remote warfare.

“What scares me about drone strikes is how they are perceived around the world,” he said in an interview. “The resentment created by American use of unmanned strikes … is much greater than the average American appreciates. They are hated on a visceral level, even by people who’ve never seen one or seen the effects of one.”

McChrystal said the use of drones exacerbates a “perception of American arrogance that says, ‘Well we can fly where we want, we can shoot where we want, because we can.'”

Drones should be used in the context of an overall strategy, he said, and if their use threatens the broader goals or creates more problems than it solves, then you have to ask whether they are the right tool.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports: CIA drones killed up to 12 people near Mir Ali, North Waziristan, hours after President Obama announced his nominee for Director of the Agency was John Brennan, his chief counterterrorism advisor and a leading proponent of the drone programme. It was the fourth CIA drone attack in 2013 and the fifth in 12 days. If reports are correct it is the third consecutive attack on a TTP compound. However there were conflicting accounts of the strike. Several agencies said a single target was hit, with Associated Press reporting several missiles ‘slammed into a compound near the Afghan border’ killing eight. However multiple sources said targets in different villages were hit in quick succession. The first strike hit Khasso Khel shortly after midnight, according to Xinhua. Five were killed when eight missiles ‘completely levelled’ a building that subsequently caught fire. Witnesses said the casualty count could rise as they feared people were trapped in the rubble.

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Jewish groups showed cavalier disregard for the welfare of American troops

Advice from Defense Secretary Dick Cheney to American troops stationed in Saudi Arabia in 1990: keep quiet about the "Jewish lobby."

In 1990, American troops deployed to Saudi Arabia in advance of the Gulf War against Iraq, were advised by the Pentagon — then under Dick Cheney’s control — that they should not make pro-Israel, anti-Arab remarks while stationed in the Islamic kingdom.

That might sound like a no-brainer — clearly it was advise crafted for the purpose of making sure that young American soldiers lacking knowledge about the Middle East might avoid getting themselves in trouble or alienating themselves from their hosts.

But that’s not how organizations such as the American Jewish Committee, the World Jewish Congress, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center responded to the advice laid out in the Defense Department’s “Troop Information Handbook.”

In a letter to Cheney, Sholom Comay, AJ Committee president, and David Harris, its executive vice president, made it clear that they regarded the presence of American troops in the Gulf as being primarily to serve the interests of Israel.

The Jewish Telegraph Agency reported:

“No one can be under the illusion that our presence in Saudi Arabia is intended to protect a fellow democracy,” Comay and Harris wrote, dismissing the kingdom and its neighbors as “current allies” of the United States.

Perhaps the most egregious element in the Pentagon handbook — the part that most offended these Jewish organizations — was that they were included as one of the taboo topics of conversation and referred to as the “Jewish lobby.” Troops were advised not to discuss the “Jewish lobby” or “U.S. intelligence given to Israel.”

The Associated Press reported:

Writing to Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, the World Jewish Congress said it wishes to convey “our sense of distress at what appears to be a capitulation to bigotry and a surrender of our democratic values…”

The letter, from WJC Vice President Kalman Sultanik, urges that the material be withdrawn from circulation.

The American Jewish Committee, expressing to Cheney its “deep sense of hurt and anger,” says U.S. troops should not be asked to “submerge entirely those values of tolerance, pluralism, and open-mindedness that have made the U.S. a unique democratic society.”

Cheney neither withdrew the handbook nor apologized for its contents.

During the current hullabaloo over Chuck Hagel’s use of the term “Jewish lobby“, it’s reasonable to ask: given the level of loyalty to Israel which so many members of the Senate seem to expect from America’s top civilian defense official, would Dick Cheney also face strong opposition from his own party if he was once again nominated as defense secretary?

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Hagel’s independence will serve Obama as the Israel lobby pushes for war on Iran

Politics rewards creeps — individuals whose desire to please others makes them willing to sacrifice any principal in the pursuit of power. The more pliable the politician, the more useful he is to the lobbies he serves.

This is why Chuck Hagel has made enemies in Washington — not because of any specific views he holds, but because he lacks the servile disposition that has become the norm. As former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage puts it: Hagel “doesn’t care if people like him or not.”

Bloomberg reports: If Hagel wins confirmation, he will face challenges such as the increasing threat of cyber warfare, readying military contingency plans for the volatile Middle East and jockeying with China for naval influence in the Asia-Pacific region.

The former enlisted combat veteran is uniquely equipped to take on four-star generals over how fast to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and how to cut forces and weapons in a time of restricted defense spending, according to friends such as Richard Armitage.

“He’s got proven guts,” Armitage, who was deputy secretary of state in the Bush administration, said in an interview before the appointment. “He doesn’t care if people like him or not. He knows who he is.”

Hagel, whose father died when he was 16, dropped out of college and worked as a radio disc jockey before going to serve in Vietnam with his brother Tom. When their armored personnel carrier hit a mine in 1968, Chuck, suffering burns to his body, dragged his brother from the vehicle to safety.

He came back from that war with two Purple Hearts and a conviction that, as he put it in a 2002 interview, “War is the last resort that we, a nation, a people, call upon to settle a dispute.”

“The horror of it, the pain of it, the suffering of it — people just don’t understand it unless they’ve been through it,” Hagel said in the interview for the Veterans History Project of the American Folklife Center. “There’s no glory, only suffering in war.”

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Assad offers no room for negotiation

Reuters reports: A defiant President Bashar al-Assad called on Sunday for national mobilization in a “war to defend the nation”, describing rebels fighting him as terrorists and agents of foreign powers with whom it was impossible to negotiate.

Appearing in an opera house in central Damascus packed with cheering supporters, the Syrian leader delivered his first speech to an audience since June last year, and his first public comments since a television interview in November.

He unveiled what he described as a peace initiative to end the 21-month-old uprising. But the proposal, including a reconciliation conference that would exclude “those who have betrayed Syria”, was certain to be rejected by enemies who have already said they will not negotiate unless he leaves power.

He spoke confidently for about an hour before a crowd of cheering loyalists, who occasionally interrupted him to shout and applaud, at one point raising their fists and chanting: “With blood and soul we sacrifice for you, O Bashar!”

At the end of the speech, supporters rushed to the stage, mobbing him and shouting: “God, Syria and Bashar is enough!” as a smiling Assad waved and was escorted from the hall.

“We are now in a state of war in every sense of the word,” Assad said in the speech. “This war targets Syria using a handful of Syrians and many foreigners. Thus, this is a war to defend the nation.”

A few days ago, Charles Glass wrote: The rebels, with the concurrence of their outside backers in Riyadh, Doha, Ankara and Washington, have steadfastly rejected jaw-jaw in favour of war-war. The leader of the newly created Syrian National Coalition, Moaz Al Khatib, rejected the latest call by UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi and Russian Foreign Sergei Lavrov to attend talks with the Syrian government. Mr Al Khatib insists that Bashar Al Assad step down as a precondition to talks, but surely Mr Al Assad’s future is one of the main points for discussion.

The rebels, over whom Mr Al Khatib has no control, have not been able to defeat Mr Al Assad in almost two years of battle. Stalemate on the battlefield argues for negotiation to break the impasse through acceptance of a transition to something new. Is it worth killing another 50,000 Syrians to keep Mr Al Assad out of a transition that will lead to his departure?

When the First World War ended with nearly 9 million soldiers killed and European civilisation poised for the barbarity of Nazism, the struggle did not justify the loss. The bloody aftermath was little better. [Stefan] Zweig wrote: “For we believed – and the whole world believed with us – that this had been the war to end all wars, that the beast which had been laying our world waste was tamed or even slaughtered. We believed in President Woodrow Wilson’s grand programme, which was ours too; we saw the faint light of dawn in the east in those days, when the Russian Revolution was still in its honeymoon period of humane ideals. We were foolish, I know.”

Are those who push the Syrians to fight and fight, rather than to face one another over the negotiating table, any less foolish?

At this point, to look at the war in Syria and say, it must stop, a negotiated end must be found, is nothing more than an ineffectual sentiment. It is a way of saying war is terrible and can bring no good.

Indeed — but that observation will do nothing to hasten the end of the fighting.

The adversaries must face each other over the negotiating table. OK. But when during the last two years has the Assad regime shown the slightest interest in negotiation?

Assad’s line has always been that he is up against an effort by foreign powers to take over Syria. He asserts that this is a war for the defense of the nation. He denies the existence of a revolution.

Assad’s offer of a peace initiative and a reconciliation conference is a vacuous gesture since he would exclude the very people he is fighting against. To portray his opponents and their backers as obstinate — as Glass does — is itself a willful denial of the regime’s own intransigence.

All that Assad promises now is what his armed forces have delivered relentlessly for the last two years: more bloodshed.

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Obama allowed to keep his murder memos secret

Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi, a sixteen-year-old American citizen killed by a U.S. military strike in Yemen, October 14, 2011.

A federal court judge has ruled that President Obama does not need to reveal the legal grounds on which he claims he can make a unilateral and unreviewable decision to kill an American citizen.

Last year Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. contrived the notion that a citizen’s constitutional right to due process can be protected even in the absence of any judicial process.

In essence, the Obama adminstration’s answer to those who question its application of the law is: trust us, we abide by the law.

Yet if so much trust could be invested in a president’s legal authority, why bother with written laws? Why not simply say what in effect we are being told: the president’s word is law.

Conor Friedersdorf writes: To be clear, the legal fight isn’t about whether Obama can kill American citizens in secret without presenting any charges or evidence of guilt or conducting a trial. At issue is whether Americans are entitled to know what he regards as the legal justification for that power.

So far, President Obama has refused to release that legal reasoning, as prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel. He is effectively denying us the ability to know what laws we live under, and stifling an informed debate about whether the powers he is exercising are in fact proper.

Judge McMahon seems to think it is technically legal for Obama to keep mum. She nevertheless delivered a scathing rebuke. Characterizing his national security policy as an “ill-defined yet vast and seemingly ever-growing exercise,” she began by explaining that in this case he hasn’t actually run afoul of freedom of information laws, and thus cannot be compelled to explain why his controversial actions are permitted by the Constitution and do not violate the law.

But as Friedersdorf further notes, the judge’s own decision is wrapped in secrecy.

McMahon offers a stark reminder of how ruinous government secrets are to the normal functioning of the legal system. “This opinion will deal only with matters that have been disclosed on the public record,” she notes. “The Government has submitted material to the Court ex parte for an in camera review. Certain issues requiring discussion in order to make this opinion complete relate to this classified material. That discussion is the subject of a separate, classified appendix to this opinion, which is being filed under seal and is not available to Plaintiff’s counsel.” There’s a secret opinion explaining why the government’s secret argument for being able to keep secret the argument for why it can kill in secret is valid! This during the tenure of a man who pledged his administration would be the most transparent ever.

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Time Warner Cable drops Current TV upon sale to Al Jazeera

The launch of Al Jazeera America following AJ’s acquisition of Current TV is good news for Americans who currently depend on the meager offerings from the cable news channels.

Time Warner Cable might have no corporate affiliation with Time Warner, owner of CNN, but its hard not to assume that AJ’s deeper penetration into the market is unwelcome news in many quarters of the industry.

As regular viewers of Al Jazeera English are already aware, the quality of news analysis and overall production standards at AJ are significantly superior to the crass product that has become standard fare on cable news.

The decision to stick with the Al Jazeera brand seems to me both bold and smart. To have adopted a new non-Arabic name would simply have offered new ammunition to those who regard the name as tainted or subversive. Much better will be for the audience to form its own views and discover that the Qatar-based broadcaster, far from posing a threat to America, has the potential to raise the abysmally low standards of American news television.

Huffington Post: Time Warner Cable pulled the plug on Current TV just hours after news of the cable channel’s sale to Al Jazeera became official.

“This channel is no longer available on Time Warner Cable,” read an on-screen message where Current TV used to be found.

Al Jazeera took a major step into the U.S. cable market Wednesday by acquiring beleaguered Current TV and announcing plans for a U.S.-based news network to be called Al Jazeera America. But while the new channel will soon be available in 40 million households, Al Jazeera faced a setback when Time Warner Cable — which reaches 12 million homes — announced it was dropping the low-rated Current, which occupied a spot that could have been switched to Al Jazeera America.

Joel Hyatt, who co-founded Current TV with former Vice President Al Gore, told staff in a Wednesday night memo that Time Warner Cable “did not consent to the sale to Al Jazeera.”

“Consequently, Current will no longer be carried on TWC,” Hyatt wrote. “This is unfortunate, but I am confident that Al Jazeera America will earn significant additional carriage in the months and years ahead.”

A Time Warner Cable spokesman said in a statement that “our agreement with Current will be terminated and we will no longer be carrying the channel.”

Some media observers interpreted the move as motivated by politics.

“Time-Warner cable shows abject political and journalistic cowardice by dropping Current because of Al Jazeera deal,” tweeted Dan Gilmor, a technology writer and founding director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University.

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Bearing witness to gun violence in America

A lot of gun owners indulge in childish fantasies about the ways in which weapons protect life. That’s hardly surprising when as an icon in American culture a gun’s power is invested in the finger on the trigger, not the kinetic force of metal ripping apart flesh. Thus when witnessing gun violence on the screen, we are much more often intended to identify with the shooter than the person being shot.

Doctors in emergency rooms, however, have no illusions about what guns do. David H. Newman, director of clinical research in the department of emergency medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and an Army veteran, describes their effects:

Here is just some of what I have seen over the years. In Baghdad, I saw a 5-year-old girl who was shot in the head while in her car seat. Her father, who knew she was dying before I said it, wept in my arms, as bits of her body clung to his shirt.

Much of the gun violence I have seen, though, I have seen on home soil, here in the United States. There was a 9-year-old girl, shot in the chest by an assault rifle during a “drive-by” gang shooting, in a botched retaliation for a shooting earlier that day. She was baffled, and in pain, with a gaping hole under her collarbone.

I have also seen an 8-year-old who found a shotgun in the closet while playing with a friend. The two boys pointed the weapon at each other a number of times before the gun accidentally discharged. The 8-year-old arrived in my emergency department with most of his face blown off. Miraculously, he survived.

Another child I will never forget was a 13-year-old who was shot twice in the abdomen by an older boy who mistook him for one of a group that had bullied and berated him a week earlier. Slick with sweat and barely conscious, he groaned and turned to look at me. Soon after, he died in the operating room. His mother arrived minutes later, wide-eyed and breathless.

I do not know exactly what measures should be taken to reduce gun violence like this. But I know that most homicides and suicides in America are carried out with guns. Research suggests that homes with a gun are two to three times more likely to experience a firearm death than homes without guns, and that members of the household are 18 times more likely to be the victim than intruders.

I know that in 2009, the most recent year for which data is available, nearly 400 American children (age 14 and under) were killed with a firearm and nearly 1,000 were injured. That means that this week we can expect 26 more children to be injured or killed with a firearm.

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‘We were part of each other’s fabric’

Daniel Levitin writes: Tom was one of those people we all have in our lives — someone to go out to lunch with in a large group, but not someone I ever spent time with one-on-one. We had some classes together in college and even worked in the same cognitive psychology lab for a while. But I didn’t really know him. Even so, when I heard that he had brain cancer that would kill him in four months, it stopped me cold.

I was 19 when I first saw him — in a class taught by a famous neuropsychologist, Karl Pribram. I’d see Tom at the coffee house, the library, and around campus. He seemed perennially enthusiastic, and had an exaggerated way of moving that made him seem unusually focused. I found it uncomfortable to make eye contact with him, not because he seemed threatening, but because his gaze was so intense.

Once Tom and I were sitting next to each other when Pribram told the class about a colleague of his who had just died a few days earlier. Pribram paused to look out over the classroom and told us that his colleague had been one of the greatest neuropsychologists of all time. Pribram then lowered his head and stared at the floor for such a long time I thought he might have discovered something there. Without lifting his head, he told us that his colleague had been a close friend, and had telephoned a month earlier to say he had just been diagnosed with a brain tumor growing in his temporal lobe. The doctors said that he would gradually lose his memory — not his ability to form new memories, but his ability to retrieve old ones … in short, to understand who he was.

Tom’s hand shot up. To my amazement, he suggested that Pribram was overstating the connection between temporal-lobe memory and overall identity. Temporal lobe or not, you still like the same things, Tom argued — your sensory systems aren’t affected. If you’re patient and kind, or a jerk, he said, such personality traits aren’t governed by the temporal lobes.

Pribram was unruffled. Many of us don’t realize the connection between memory and self, he explained. Who you are is the sum total of all that you’ve experienced. Where you went to school, who your friends were, all the things you’ve done or — just as importantly — all the things you’ve always hoped to do. Whether you prefer chocolate ice cream or vanilla, action movies or comedies, is part of the story, but the ability to know those preferences through accumulated memory is what defines you as a person. This seemed right to me. I’m not just someone who likes chocolate ice cream, I’m someone who knows, who remembers that I like chocolate ice cream. And I remember my favorite places to eat it, and the people I’ve eaten it with.

Pribram walked up to the lectern and gripped it with both hands. When they had spoken last, his colleague seemed more sad than frightened. He was worried about the loss of self more than the loss of memory. He’d still have his intelligence, the doctors said, but no memories. “What good is one without the other?” his colleague had asked. That was the last time Pribram spoke to him.

From a friend, Pribram had learned that his colleague had decided to go to the Caribbean for a vacation with his wife. One day he just walked out into the ocean and never came back. He couldn’t swim; he must have gone out with the intention of not coming back — before the damage from the tumor could take hold, Pribram said. [Continue reading…]

I remember as a child of 11 or 12 — somewhere around that age — falling and getting concussion. While dazed and frightened about possible brain damage, I started running through multiplication tables. This was a strange choice of neurological self-examination since I was never particularly good at mathematics, but my performance was sufficiently good that I quickly assured myself that aside from the thumping pain on the side of my head there was no lasting damage. (Who knows whether that was true since that was in the days before MRIs — I didn’t even see a doctor.)

There are all sorts of ways when, in response to a novel situation, we conjure up some ad hoc method to go in search of ourselves. It’s a strange undertaking since if we were truly lost, who could embark on such a quest?

The self lost in the form of amnesia Levitin describes is less self and more story. It is the construct of our inner biographer — a storyteller who compulsively assesses the quality of our life on a scale of accomplishments and failings.

But what the story of Tom tells after his biographical memories have been stolen by a tumor, is that personal development is much richer than the accumulation of memories.

Levitin is embarrassed to tell Tom that they had never actually been friends, and yet Tom is acutely attuned to the predicament of his well-intending visitor. He says:

“It’s okay. There’s often this . . . gray area, I guess you’d call it, in human relationships, isn’t there? We meet people, we see them every day, we say hello, but we don’t really know them. We say they’re our friends, but really, you can’t be friends with the hundreds of people you meet, can you? It’s enough that we had a shared history together. We were in the same places for a time. We were part of each other’s fabric.”

If the details of Tom’s past are now for him shrouded in darkness, he clearly remembers and continues to experience in a very nuanced way, what it means to connect with other people.

The self present is intact.

And as he invites visitors to take away with them possessions for which he no longer has any use, he also appears to be at peace with his future.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. (T.S. Elliot)

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Ode to a flower

Richard Feynman’s friend should have known better than to bait the scientist — yet Feynman’s response proves the point: an understanding of the flower’s cellular structure, its evolution, and the evolutionary function of its beauty are all steps away from the experience of beholding a flower’s beauty.

When Feynman says he might not be “quite as refined aesthetically” as his friend, he’s marginalizing the value of perception, yet a flower is irreducibly an object of perception.

Drill into the structure of a sunflower petal and you may discover the molecular form of the pigments which are the physical substrate of color but you won’t find the essence of yellow since this is only manifest as light, flower, eye, and sentient awareness intersect. Yellow is an experience.

What serves neither art nor science is to treat either as offering a superior method for the appreciation of nature. An artist can profit from a class in cellular biology and scientists can expand their awareness by finding out what it means to open the doors of perception — to be able to see as if seeing the world for the first time.

Science opens doors of exquisite conceptual detail and leads into fascinating fields of exploration, but it doesn’t embrace the full range of the human experience — an experience in which we can be invigorated by losing our selves.

That a scientist and an artist would even be having the argument Feynman describes, speaks above all to a failed educational system.

Who can look carefully at the photograph below and explain why art, poetry, geometry, and biology are not taught in the very same classroom?

We fragment our world into domains of expertise as though no one should be allowed the privilege of exploring the totality.

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Christmas for atheists

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes: [Darwin] was puzzled by a phenomenon that seemed to contradict his most basic thesis, that natural selection should favor the ruthless. Altruists, who risk their lives for others, should therefore usually die before passing on their genes to the next generation. Yet all societies value altruism, and something similar can be found among social animals, from chimpanzees to dolphins to leafcutter ants.

Neuroscientists have shown how this works. We have mirror neurons that lead us to feel pain when we see others suffering. We are hard-wired for empathy. We are moral animals.

The precise implications of Darwin’s answer are still being debated by his disciples — Harvard’s E. O. Wilson in one corner, Oxford’s Richard Dawkins in the other. To put it at its simplest, we hand on our genes as individuals but we survive as members of groups, and groups can exist only when individuals act not solely for their own advantage but for the sake of the group as a whole. Our unique advantage is that we form larger and more complex groups than any other life-form.

A result is that we have two patterns of reaction in the brain, one focusing on potential danger to us as individuals, the other, located in the prefrontal cortex, taking a more considered view of the consequences of our actions for us and others. The first is immediate, instinctive and emotive. The second is reflective and rational. We are caught, in the psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s phrase, between thinking fast and slow.

The fast track helps us survive, but it can also lead us to acts that are impulsive and destructive. The slow track leads us to more considered behavior, but it is often overridden in the heat of the moment. We are sinners and saints, egotists and altruists, exactly as the prophets and philosophers have long maintained.

If this is so, we are in a position to understand why religion helped us survive in the past — and why we will need it in the future. It strengthens and speeds up the slow track. It reconfigures our neural pathways, turning altruism into instinct, through the rituals we perform, the texts we read and the prayers we pray. It remains the most powerful community builder the world has known. Religion binds individuals into groups through habits of altruism, creating relationships of trust strong enough to defeat destructive emotions. Far from refuting religion, the Neo-Darwinists have helped us understand why it matters.

No one has shown this more elegantly than the political scientist Robert D. Putnam. In the 1990s he became famous for the phrase “bowling alone”: more people were going bowling, but fewer were joining bowling teams. Individualism was slowly destroying our capacity to form groups. A decade later, in his book “American Grace,” he showed that there was one place where social capital could still be found: religious communities.

While extolling the virtue of the altruistic tendencies of church- or synagogue-goers, Sacks misses an opportunity to make his message more ecumenically inclusive and include mosque-goers. That’s a strange omission given that charity is one of the pillars of Islam. Moreover, he seems to conflate religion and values — a distinction that is clear in most people’s minds since the drift away from organized religion much more often results from a rejection of religious beliefs than religious values.

The problem that we atheists face — and probably one of the many reasons religion survives — is that our disbelief gives us less to celebrate. Of course we can celebrate life, but we can’t so easily contrive occasions where, obedient to the passage of time, we come together and reaffirm our shared values. Religion provides such pretexts for social unity, without discussion, consensus building or the messy process of negotiation that secular, values-based, collective bonding would entail.

The virtue of ritual and celebration is that they invite a form of selfless participation. They are not burdened by association with individual inventors and thus remain untouched by the competing force of reinvention by innovators — those who might insist for instance that it really makes more sense to celebrate Christmas on December 21, the Winter Solstice.

Maybe at some point, secular traditions of celebration will emerge if, in accordance with Jeremy Rifkin’s hope, we succeed in constructing an empathic civilization — but I suspect that if this happens it will be the result of an incremental adaptation of religion and not because Richard Dawkins and others succeeded in persuading the religious to abandon their faith.

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Video: Richard Dawkins on religion

Al Jazeera describes this as an interview but it’s more of a debate — the New Statesman‘s Mehdi Hasan doesn’t give Dawkins an easy ride.

The world’s most prominent militant atheist suffers from the same disease that afflicts all other evangelists: a lack of curiosity about the very people they hope to change.

The mission of the new atheists seems akin to wanting to eradicate smallpox yet having little interest in studying the virus.

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American idolatry — misplaced faith in a piece of paper

Before I came to America in 1988, I’d experienced a lot of cultural diversity. Having grown up in England, traveled through much of Europe, lived in India and France, briefly witnessed the revolution in Iran, explored pre-war Afghanistan, lived in mud huts and slept in caves, I didn’t think I was susceptible to culture shock — until I came here.

This is the paradox the United States presents to so many non-Americans: no other country is so well-known to people from afar, yet upon being confronted with the reality, one discovers that what looks familiar turns out to be foreign.

No other country seems quite as obsessed with a self-defined vision of its uniqueness — an exceptionalism held onto by a population that is largely unfamiliar with other countries. In this glorified isolation the rest of the world is barely visible. At times, America seems less like a country and more like a religion.

From Britain, Jonathan Freedland writes:

We watch their movies, we eat their fast food. Their culture has become global culture. So it always comes as a shock to realise how different Americans are from everyone else. The massacre in Newtown horrified even those who thought themselves inured to horror – I know many who could hardly bear to look at those smiling family photographs of the children – but for non-Americans the subsequent discussion has also been shocking to watch.

To outsiders, the point seems so blindingly obvious: more guns equal more death. In Britain, where gun laws are strict, the annual number of gun-related murders stood, at last count, at 41. In the US the equivalent figure is just short of 10,000.

Whether it’s Britain, Japan or Australia, the evidence is the same: strict gun control means fewer people die. American unwillingness to face this basic arithmetic – preferring to blame the mental health system or videogames or the “feminisation” of the classroom, as one conservative pundit did, or the absence of religious prayer in schools – the explanation of former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee – rather than the most obvious culprit for all this gun violence, namely easy access to military-grade assault weapons, can drive outsiders to distraction. Witness Piers Morgan’s bad-tempered hosting of a CNN debate on guns this week, haranguing his guests for failing to admit what to him was obvious – a performance that few of his American colleagues would match.

What exactly is America’s problem? Why does it stand so far apart, notching up more gun homicides than the rest of the world’s wealthy countries put together? People like to point the finger at the mighty National Rifle Association, which, to be sure, is a well-funded, effective lobby, especially in battleground congressional districts where NRA members can make the difference between victory and defeat. But big tobacco used to be a mighty lobby too; yet when the evidence linked smoking to lung cancer, they were steadily beaten back. Judging by its abysmal performance at a bizarre press conference today, the NRA could ultimately be defeated.

If you really want to know why the US can’t kick its gun habit, take a trip to the National Archives in Washington, DC. You don’t even have to look at the exhibits. Just study the queue. What you’ll see are ordinary Americans lining up, in hushed reverence, to gaze at an original copy of the United States constitution, guarded and under heavily armoured glass. It is no exaggeration to say that for many Americans this is a religious experience. [Continue reading…]

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Did the CIA almost let Osama bin Laden escape?

In late 2010, after the CIA had kept Osama bin Laden’s home under surveillance for several months, the agency was under increasing pressure to come up with conclusive proof that the Abbottabad house was indeed the location of the al Qaeda leader. CIA director Leon Panetta was running out of patience. Peter Bergen writes:

Over the next several months, Panetta became increasingly annoyed — some CIA officials even say “pissed” — about what he perceived as a lack of creativity among the bin Laden hunters.

They were directed to come up with 25 ways of getting inside the compound and encouraged to not be afraid of making some of them “kind of creative.” They came back with 38 proposals including one that sounds more comical than creative: set up loudspeakers outside the house from which could be broadcast the self-declared “voice of Allah” (speaking in Arabic I assume) saying to the inhabitants of the house, “You are commanded to come onto the street!”

One of the plans they decided to put into operation was to set up a phony vaccination program in the area in the hope that they could use this as a pretext for collecting blood samples from the house’s residents, thereby finding markers of bin Laden’s DNA in that of his children.

Matthieu Aikins describes what happened when this plan was put into operation:

[O]n April 21, 2011, a gray jeep pulled into town and parked in front of a property dealer’s shack a short distance from the Big House [where bin Laden and his family lived]. It was an official vehicle, with the logo of the provincial health department painted on the door, and from the passenger side stepped a doctor, here on business from the province’s capital, Peshawar. In his collared shirt and pressed trousers, the doctor stood out among the wheat fields and dirt paths of this semi-rural suburb: a handsome, imposing man with a thick head of black hair, his filled-out frame a point of pride in a country where stunted growth can be a mark of the lower classes. Leaving his driver behind, the doctor set off along a narrow gravel-strewn path, beside fields thick with grass and dusky cauliflower leaves, his gaze focused intently on the house ahead.

Waiting for him outside the compound’s forest-green metal gate were two nurses, Bakhto and Amna, their shawls drawn across their foreheads. All day, as part of a hepatitis B vaccination team that the doctor had assembled, the nurses had been canvassing the area, knocking on doors and looking for women ages 15 to 45 to cajole into taking the needle. First a drop of blood would be drawn from the patient and blotted on a rapid-test strip, which would show, within minutes, whether the patient had been infected with hepatitis. If the patient was negative, the nurses were instructed to administer the vaccination.

Normally a jovial man, the doctor seemed tense at the gate. Amna wondered why he was so interested in this house in particular, the only one whose vaccination he had bothered to personally supervise. She watched as he rapped sharply on the metal door. They waited. Again he knocked, but there seemed to be no one home. Amna shrugged. Did it really matter if they missed this one house? Undeterred, the doctor strode across the street to a low brick compound and roused a neighbor, whose son, as luck would have it, did the occasional odd job for the Big House. The man had the cell number of one of the Khan brothers [Arshad and Tariq, who owned the house]. The doctor dialed it and handed his phone to one of the nurses, but when the brother answered and said the family was away on a trip, the doctor took the phone back from her.

“Hello?” he said. “This is Dr. Shakil Afridi.” The doctor urgently explained the need for the hepatitis test. It was crucial that it happen soon. The vaccine, he said, would be very good for them.

Bergen says Afridi was unsuccessful in collecting DNA samples. No one has described the effect of Afridi’s unsolicited call on the bin Laden household.

We already know that the al Qaeda leader had spared no effort in maintaining a high level of security and it’s reasonable to assume that the doctor’s presence must have aroused considerable suspicion inside the compound.

Afridi’s CIA handlers must have been briefed on the doctor’s over-zealous effort to collect blood samples and thus surely feared their quarry would flee.

Bergen’s account of discussions in Washington at that time paints a picture of somber deliberation. He quotes Panetta saying:

“[W]e’re probably at the point where we have got the best intelligence we can get. It’s now time to make a decision not about whether or not we should do something about it, but what we do about it. We’ve come this far. There’s no turning back. We have enough information such that the American people would want us to act.”

It doesn’t sound like he imagined the next word on bin Laden might be that he had fled — which probably means he didn’t know that Afridi had come close to blowing the whole CIA operation.

Since Afridi’s arrest and subsequent imprisonment (he has been jailed for 33 years convicted of crimes unrelated to his work with the CIA), Washington has portrayed the doctor as a hero, but it’s hard not to wonder whether both the CIA and the White House are content to see him remain behind bars. Afridi may have come dangerously close to turning Abbottabad into Obama’s Tora Bora.

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Mind control: The CIA’s experiments on involuntary human subjects

On September 16, 2001, Dick Cheney warned that in order to deal with the terrorism threat: “We have to work the dark side, if you will. Spend time in the shadows of the intelligence world.” It was as though the CIA was being directed to venture into unfamiliar territory.

An ABC News report broadcast in 1979 detailing secret CIA programs conducting experiments on unwitting human subjects, testing the effects of LSD and other methods of mind control, serves however as a useful reminder that the agency has a long history of working the dark side.

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Pro-Israel/pro-war lobby’s latest attack on Hagel

The Kristol-Abrams cabal is on the war path again, concerned that the next United States secretary of defense might not be more loyal to Israel than he is to his own country. For the Emergency Committee for Israel, run by William Kristol, Elliot Abrams and their cohorts, placing the interests of Israel first should be the raison d’être of U.S. national security and foreign policy.

This is an ad the committee is now running on cable networks in the hope they can torpedo Chuck Hagel’s nomination for defense secretary — before the nomination has even been made.

President Obama faces a challenge: is he going to capitulate to the Israel lobby as he has so often before, or will he for once show he has a backbone?

If he bows to this pressure, not only will he be confirming that Washington remains Israeli occupied territory, but he will be signalling to all other interest groups, such as the NRA, that in spite of the fact that he never needs to win another election, he remains a pushover.

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A Jewish lobby for a Jewish state

In the bizarro world of political correctness, it’s better to say “Israel lobby” than “Jewish lobby” even though members of the lobby regard the use of either term as anti-Semitic. On the other hand, no one bats an eyelid at the term “Jewish state” even though most Jews choose not to live in Israel.

Marsha B Cohen:

AIPAC comes knocking with a pro-Israel letter, and ‘then you’ll get 80 to 90 senators on it. I don’t think I’ve ever signed one of the letters.’

When someone would accuse him of not being pro-Israel because he didn’t sign the letter, Hagel told me he responds: “‘I didn’t sign the letter because it was a stupid letter.” Few legislators talk this way on the Hill. Hagel is a strong supporter of Israel and a believer in shared values. “The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here,” but as he put it, “I’m a United States senator. I’m not an Israeli senator.”

— Chuck Hagel to Aaron David Miller, The Much Too Promised Land

The kerfuffle over Chuck Hagel’s use of the term “Jewish lobby” — and the implication that some members of Congress are intimidated by it — pervades the right-wing media and its echo chamber in the blogosphere. Since Hagel was floated as a possible Secretary of Defense, some American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) representatives, among them former spokesman Josh Block and former Executive Director Morris Amitay, have denounced Hagel’s characterization. Even progressives are not immune to debating its appropriateness. M. J. Rosenberg, also a veteran of the AIPAC but now one of its fiercest critics, writes:

It is true that it is impolitic to use the term “Jewish lobby” rather than “Israel lobby” although the very same people criticizing Hagel for using the former term objected just as vehemently when Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer used the latter in their book on the subject. In any case, the term Jewish lobby is accurate when one refers to organizations like the American Jewish Committee or the Anti-Defamation League, etc. They are Jewish organizations and not AIPAC, the registered Israel lobby.

AIPAC’s rebranding of itself as “America’s pro-Israel lobby” instead of the “Jewish lobby” is also relatively recent. The critiques of AIPAC from both the right and left overlook a long paper trail of AIPAC’s self-perception and self-description, which for much of its history — from the 1950s through the 1990s — has reveled in its role as the voice of “the Jewish community.” [Continue reading…]

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Enough with the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ — it’s time to stop talking and thinking like five-year olds

Adam Serwer writes: At the National Rifle Association’s first press conference since the Newtown massacre that killed 27 people, most of them elementary school children, the gun lobby’s CEO Wayne LaPierre said the solution is more guns.

“There exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people,” said LaPierre. He was talking about the entertainment industry, not groups such as the NRA that lobby for laws that allow people to get away with murder. Rolling out a list of 1990s-era conservative cultural shibboleths, LaPierre blamed a coarsening culture, and violence in movies, video games, and music for mass shootings — that is, everything but the deadly weapons the killers have used to slaughter people.

LaPierre’s “solution” is for Americans to arm themselves, and for the government to place armed guards at every public school in the country: “I call on Congress today to act immediately, to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school — and to do it now, to make sure that blanket of safety is in place when our children return to school in January.” LaPierre did not note that Columbine High School had an armed guard when two students went on a murderous shooting rampage there in 1999, and that Virginia Tech had an armed police force with its own SWAT team equivalent when one of its students killed 33 people in 2007.

The head of the nation’s most powerful gun rights organization laid out a vision of a paramilitary America, where citizens are protected by armed guards until they are old enough to walk around with their own firearms on the off-chance they might need to pump a few rounds into a fellow citizen. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said LaPierre.

Even if we don’t make a cognitive leap that few American leaders are willing to make — dispense with the cartoon imagery of a world populated by good guys and bad guys — the question, using LaPierre’s own terms, is: how to stop bad guys from getting guns?

As for LaPierre’s indictment of the American culture of violence, fed by movies and video games, this is a challenge not without merit. Even if effective regulations for gun control were put in place, one can still reasonably ask what kind of influence the media’s portrayals of violence have on the minds of young Americans who enter the military.

The blood shed in American schools is a small fraction of the blood shed overseas and whereas when it happens on this soil we are told that it was a bad guy who had his finger on the trigger, if it happens abroad the supposition is almost always that the bad guys got killed.

Sooner or later we will have to dispense with the good guy/bad guy narrative, and ask why killing people got so easy.

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