A political deal in a deeply divided Tunisia as Islamists agree to yield power

The New York Times reports: Compromise has been in short supply since Tunisia sparked the Arab Spring nearly three years ago. But this small North African nation has once again broken new ground with a political deal between longtime enemies among the Islamists and the secular old guard.

The deal, announced over the weekend, aims to put in place an independent caretaker government until new elections next year, marking the first time Islamists have agreed in the face of rising public anger to step back from power gained at the ballot box.

Tunisia had been careening toward chaos and political paralysis after two assassinations this year and an inability to finalize a new constitution, and it remains fragile and divided. But months of laborious back-room haggling led by two political leaders helped, at least for now, to avoid the kind of zero-sum politics that have come to define the post-Arab Spring tumult in Egypt, Libya and the battlefield of Syria.

Beji Caid Essebsi, a former prime minister who leads a new secular-minded political party, Nidaa Tounes, and Rachid Ghannouchi, the leader of the Islamist party Ennahda, have starkly different visions of the country’s future. But since Tunisia’s political crisis flared this year, the two men have met one on one at least five times to try to find a political solution. [Continue reading…]

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The Snowden franchise

Reuters reports: A tale that could rival any spy novel is about to be told by three writers who are working on potentially rival books on the revelations and travails of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

Glenn Greenwald, a former columnist for Britain’s The Guardian, has a book likely to come out in March. Greenwald received classified spy documents from Snowden in clandestine meetings in Hong Kong after he fled the United States last spring.

The book is “about my time with Snowden in Hong Kong and reporting the story, but mostly about the surveillance state based on the documents I have (that The Guardian doesn’t) and my reasons why the surveillance state is menacing,” he said in an email.

His publisher is Metropolitan Books, a unit of Henry Holt and Co. Greenwald has also been discussing a movie deal.

The New York Times reported in October that 20th Century Fox , Sony Pictures Entertainment and cable TV network HBO had all considered an on-screen project. But Greenwald said that no movie deal had yet been struck.

Potential competitor books are being prepared by Barton Gellman, a blogger and former Washington Post reporter, and Luke Harding, a journalist for The Guardian.

Gellman, principal author of The Washington Post’s Snowden’s stories but no longer on the paper’s staff, said his project pre-dates the emergence of Snowden.

“I had already started work on a book about the surveillance industrial society when Edward Snowden came my way. He has certainly enriched my reporting, but I am not racing anyone to do a quick hit on current events. My narrative will cover a broader landscape and a wider cast of characters,” Gellman said in an email.

Neither Harding, author of The Guardian book (and co-author of an earlier Guardian book about WikiLeaks and its controversial founder, Julian Assange), nor a spokeswoman for The Guardian would comment on Harding’s book, which is being published under a joint imprint The Guardian set up with British publisher Faber and Faber.

A person familiar with the Guardian project, who asked to remain anonymous, said that at the time Greenwald left the newspaper, the two parties tentatively agreed that to ensure neither party would have a marketing advantage, the books would be published simultaneously. [Continue reading…]

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NSA goes on 60 Minutes: the definitive facts behind CBS’s flawed report

The Guardian reports: The National Security Agency is telling its story like never before. Never mind whether that story is, well, true.

On Sunday night, CBS’s 60 Minutes ran a remarkable piece that provided NSA officials, from director Keith Alexander to junior analysts, with a long, televised forum to push back against criticism of the powerful spy agency. It’s an opening salvo in an unprecedented push from the agency to win public confidence at a time when both White House reviews and pending legislation would restrict the NSA’s powers.

But mixed in among the dramatic footage of Alexander receiving threat briefings and junior analysts solving Rubik’s cubes in 90 seconds were a number of dubious claims: from the extent of surveillance to collecting on Google and Yahoo data centers to an online “kill-switch” for the global financial system developed by China.

Reporter John Miller, a former official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and an ex-FBI spokesman, allowed these claims to go unchallenged. The Guardian, not so much. Here’s our take: [Continue reading…]

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Federal judge questions legality of NSA phone records

The New York Times reports: A federal district judge ruled on Monday that the National Security Agency program that is systematically keeping records of all Americans’ phone calls most likely violates the Constitution, describing its technology as “almost Orwellian” and suggesting that James Madison would be “aghast” to learn that the government was encroaching on liberty in such a way.

Judge Richard J. Leon of the District of Columbia ordered the government to stop collecting data on the personal calls of the two plaintiffs in the case and to destroy the records of their calling history. But the judge, appointed to the bench in 2002 by President George W. Bush, stayed his injunction “in light of the significant national security interests at stake in this case and the novelty of the constitutional issues,” allowing the government time to appeal it, a matter that he said could take at least six months. The case is the first in which a federal judge who is not on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which authorized the once-secret program, has examined the bulk data collection on behalf of someone who is not a criminal defendant.

The Justice Department has said that 15 separate judges on the surveillance court have held on 35 occasions that the calling data program is legal. It also marks the first successful legal challenge brought against the program since it was revealed in June after leaks by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden.

“I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary’ invasion than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval,” Judge Leon wrote in a 68-page ruling. “Surely, such a program infringes on ‘that degree of privacy’ that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment,” which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. [Continue reading…]

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

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

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

So who is right? Is Waters guilty of antisemitism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Far right in Eastern Europe makes gains as Syrians arrive

The New York Times reports: After spreading turmoil and desperate refugees across the Middle East, Syria’s brutal civil war has now leaked misery into Europe’s eastern fringe — and put a spring in the step of Angel Bozhinov, a nationalist activist in this Bulgarian border town next to Turkey.

The local leader of Ataka, a pugnacious, far-right party, Mr. Bozhinov lost his seat in the town council at the last municipal elections in 2011 but now sees his fortunes rising thanks to public alarm over an influx of Syrian refugees across the nearby frontier.

Membership of the local branch of Ataka, he said, had surged in recent weeks as “people come up to me in the street and tell me that our party was right.” Ataka, which means attack, champions “Bulgaria for Bulgarians” and has denounced Syrian refugees as terrorists whom Bulgaria, the European Union’s poorest nation, must expel. An Ataka member of Parliament has reviled them as “terrible, despicable primates.”

With populist, anti-immigrant parties gathering momentum across much of Europe, Ataka stands out as a particularly shrill and, its critics say, sinister political force — an example of how easily opportunistic groups can stoke public fears while improving their own fortunes.

The influx of Syrian refugees has sown divisions across the European Union as the refugees add burdens on governments still struggling to emerge from years of recession. But Bulgaria is perhaps the most fragile of all the European Union’s 28 members. Modest as the numbers of refugees are here, the entry of nearly 6,500 Syrians this year has overwhelmed the deeply unpopular coalition government and added a volatile element to the nation’s already unstable politics.

The arrival of the refugees and public fury over the stabbing of a young Bulgarian woman by an Algerian asylum seeker “has opened the floodgates” for far-right nationalists, said Daniel Smilov of the Center for Liberal Strategies, a policy research group in Sofia, the capital. “They see this as their big chance.” [Continue reading…]

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Refugee stories from the Syrian exodus

Dania-Amroosh

The Washington Post reports: Dania Amroosh wears a Hello Kitty shirt, tiny heart-shaped earrings and her hair in cute little pigtails. She looks like any other 7-year-old, except for the jagged scars on the bridge of her nose and across her chin.

There is much worse beneath her blanket on the third floor of the Kilis State Hospital in southern Turkey. A huge seeping wound on her stomach is closed with an angry grid of stitches. The casts are finally off her broken right leg and right hand, but her fingers are still black and blue and she can barely walk. Her lower body is covered with shrapnel scars.

Five months ago, Dania and her family were sitting in their home in Aleppo, Syria, about 60 miles south of here, when a bomb dropped from the sky. Her grandmother, aunt, uncle and two cousins were killed instantly. Another cousin lost his legs. Dania was mangled.

Mohammad Amroosh, her father, says that after what Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s military did to them, he can’t go back. When Dania is ready to leave the hospital, the family will stay in Turkey, joining nearly 700,000 other Syrians who have taken shelter in the country.

“This is our home now,” he says.

One of the world’s largest forced migrations since World War II is transforming the Middle East.

The United Nations and governments in the countries where the refugees have taken shelter estimate that between 2.3 million and 2.8 million Syrians have fled their homeland. The United Nations says that number is rising by nearly 3,000 people a day, with no end in sight for a conflict that has lasted nearly three years. [Continue reading…]

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Is the NSA trying to blackmail Snowden?

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

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

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

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

Rick Ledgett: Many more than one.

John Miller: Many more than one?

Rick Ledgett: Yes.

John Miller: How many of those are there?

Rick Ledgett: About 31,000.

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

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

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

Rick Ledgett: It is the keys to the kingdom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Officials say U.S. may never know extent of Snowden’s leaks

The New York Times reports: American intelligence and law enforcement investigators have concluded that they may never know the entirety of what the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden extracted from classified government computers before leaving the United States, according to senior government officials.

Investigators remain in the dark about the extent of the data breach partly because the N.S.A. facility in Hawaii where Mr. Snowden worked — unlike other N.S.A. facilities — was not equipped with up-to-date software that allows the spy agency to monitor which corners of its vast computer landscape its employees are navigating at any given time.

Six months since the investigation began, officials said Mr. Snowden had further covered his tracks by logging into classified systems using the passwords of other security agency employees, as well as by hacking firewalls installed to limit access to certain parts of the system.

“They’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of man-hours trying to reconstruct everything he has gotten, and they still don’t know all of what he took,” a senior administration official said. “I know that seems crazy, but everything with this is crazy.”

That Mr. Snowden was so expertly able to exploit blind spots in the systems of America’s most secretive spy agency illustrates how far computer security still lagged years after President Obama ordered standards tightened after the WikiLeaks revelations of 2010. [Continue reading…]

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Lawsuit accuses IBM of hiding China risks amid NSA spy scandal

Reuters reports: IBM Corp has been sued by a shareholder who accused it of concealing how its ties to what became a major U.S. spying scandal reduced business in China and ultimately caused its market value to plunge more than $12 billion.

IBM lobbied Congress hard to pass a law letting it share personal data of customers in China and elsewhere with the U.S. National Security Agency, in a bid to protect its intellectual property rights, according to a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

The plaintiff in the complaint, Louisiana Sheriffs’ Pension & Relief Fund, said this threatened IBM hardware sales in China, particularly given a program known as Prism that let the NSA spy on that country through technology companies such as IBM.

The Baton Rouge pension fund said the revelation of Prism and related disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden caused Chinese businesses and China’s government to abruptly cut ties with the world’s largest technology services provider.

It said this led IBM on October 16 to post disappointing third-quarter results, including drops in China of 22 percent in sales and 40 percent in hardware sales.

While quarterly profit rose 6 percent, revenue dropped 4 percent and fell well below analyst forecasts.

IBM shares fell 6.4 percent on October 17, wiping out $12.9 billion of the Armonk, New York-based company’s market value. [Continue reading…]

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No more secrets

Nick Bilton writes: Anyone who can watch you will watch you.

In technology, that is one of the big lessons of 2013. The National Security Agency and who knows who else have been tracking this or hacking that. China has been breaking into our computers. Google has been sifting through our home networks. Facebook has been tinkering with its privacy settings.

No wonder outfits like Snapchat have exploded onto the scene. They seem to go against the grain, holding out the promise that all those selfies, texts and emails will simply vanish.

Whisper, an “it” app for teens, supposedly lets people share secrets anonymously via smartphone. Telegram is being pitched as the adult version of Snapchat.

But the fact is, many services that claim to offer that rarest of digital commodities — privacy — don’t really deliver. Read the fine print.

“Just because information is unavailable to you and you don’t see it doesn’t mean that it is not being captured, stored, or even seen by someone else in transit,” said Edward W. Felten, a professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton.

Snapchat’s privacy page explains that private images are stored on someone’s phone — and on its own servers. “Forensically, even after they are deleted,” Snapchat says, those images can be retrieved. Whisper’s privacy page says the company owns the intellectual property, both images and text, that people post; Whisper reserves the right to sell that stuff to third parties. And Telegram, while seemingly less innocuous with its claims, nonetheless leaves out something you might want to know: someone can just take a screenshot or picture of that “private” conversation. [Continue reading…]

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France broadens its surveillance power

The New York Times reports: For all their indignation last summer, when the scope of the United States’ mass data collection began to be made public, the French are hardly innocents in the realm of electronic surveillance. Within days of the reports about the National Security Agency’s activities, it was revealed that French intelligence services operated a similar system, with similarly minimal oversight.

And last week, with little public debate, the legislature approved a law that critics feared would markedly expand electronic surveillance of French residents and businesses.

The provision, quietly passed as part of a routine military spending bill, defines the conditions under which intelligence agencies may gain access to or record telephone conversations, emails, Internet activity, personal location data and other electronic communications.

The law provides for no judicial oversight and allows electronic surveillance for a broad range of purposes, including “national security,” the protection of France’s “scientific and economic potential” and prevention of “terrorism” or “criminality.”

In an unusual alliance, Internet and corporate groups, human rights organizations and a small number of lawmakers have opposed the law as a threat to business or an encroachment on individual rights. [Continue reading…]

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The society of microbes that make us what we are

Earth Island Journal: In your new book, Cooked, you explore the art of cooking through the elements of Fire, Water, Air, and Earth. I’m sure you love all your children equally, but of those four, which taught you the most?

Michael Pollan: Fermentation – without a doubt. I began this education about microbiology. I’ve always been interested in nature and other species, and this symbiotic relationship we have with them, and I have mostly paid attention to it in the plant world. I just had no idea of how rich our engagement with microbes was, and how invisible it is to us. I began it when I was doing the Air section and learning about sourdough cultures. But then I got into that last chapter and started learning about fermentation: how much of our food is fermented, the fact that you could cook without the use of any heat, and the fact that we are dependent on these microbes. They’re using us; we’re using them. For me that was most fascinating.

You point out that our feelings about microbes are an expression of our attitude toward the natural world.

Yeah, and our drive for control, at all costs. Microbes are frightening for a couple reasons. One is, they’re invisible. They’re an unseen enemy. And they are pathogens, I mean some of them. You know, conquering infectious disease was a tremendous achievement for our civilization. But as so often happens, we cast things in black and white. So microbes are all bad because some microbes cause disease, and we fail to realize how dependent we are on them for our health. I think we’re going to get to a point where we will discover the unit in evolution and natural selection is not the species as an individual, but what is called the “holobiont,” the group of species that travel together. And that’s what selection is acting on very often, is the super-organism of humans or cats or plants.

Plants, you know, they, too, have their own microbiome; I didn’t talk about this in the piece, but their microbiome is outside their bodies. It surrounds their roots. It’s in what’s called the rhizosphere. There’s a little ecosystem around the root of every plant, and I think we’re going to come to learn that it’s as important to plant health as our flora is to us. I think we’re going to start looking at all species as collectivities, and microbes will be the part of that. And that changes a lot. It changes how you approach agriculture. It certainly changes how you approach health. So I think we’re really on the verge of a paradigm shift around that. [Continue reading…]

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Chas Freeman on Snowden and snooping

The former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas W. Freeman, said at MIT on Thursday: We live in what the National Security Agency [NSA] has called “the golden age of SIGINT [signals intelligence].” We might have guessed this. We now know it for a fact because of a spectacular act of civil disobedience by Edward Snowden. His is perhaps the most consequential such act for both our domestic liberties and our foreign relations in the more than two century-long history of our republic.

This past spring, Mr. Snowden decided to place his oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” and his allegiance to the Bill of Rights above his contractual obligations to the intelligence community and the government for which it snoops. He blew the whistle on NSA’s ruthless drive for digital omniscience. When he did this, he knew that many of his fellow citizens would impugn his patriotism. He also knew he would be prosecuted for violating the growing maze of legislation that criminalizes revelations about the national security practices of America’s post-9/11 warfare state.

Mr. Snowden does not dispute that he is guilty of legally criminal acts. But he places himself in the long line of Americans convinced, as Martin Luther King put it, that “noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.” As someone long in service to our country, I am upset by such defiance of authority. As an American, I am not.

Like Henry David Thoreau and many others in protest movements in our country over the past century and a half, Mr. Snowden deliberately broke the law to bring to public attention government behavior he considered at odds with the U.S. Constitution, American values, and the rule of law. One point he wanted to make was that we Americans now live under a government that precludes legal or political challenges to its own increasingly deviant behavior. Our government has criminalized the release of information exposing such behavior or revealing the policies that authorize it. The only way to challenge its policies and activities is to break the law by exposing them. [Continue reading…]

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The pharmaceutical industry and the fight against gun control

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mandela’s unfinished revolution

T.O. Molefe writes: For all his remarkable achievements, Nelson Mandela died with his dream for South Africa incomplete. Democracy and peace were attained, yet real racial harmony, social justice and equality seem, in some ways, further away than ever.

South Africa’s economy still stifles the aspirations of most of its black citizens — a situation that threatens the sustainability of the project of national reconciliation that is a central part of the Mandela legacy.

When I am able to detach myself from the anger I feel over this injustice, I see the South Africa that Mr. Mandela described in his 1994 inaugural address — “a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world” — as but the opening move of a master tactician. It represented the brief suspension of reality for the sake of an endgame Mr. Mandela knew he would not be around to play.

Mr. Mandela’s rainbow ideal of a multiracial country that had avoided civil war, where blacks had forgiven whites for apartheid and everyone had learned to live together, was great and necessary for its time. But it is an ideal that should be laid to rest with him. Today, an economic revolution is what is needed most if South Africa is to continue on the path to reconciliation.

Like many of the transitional steps on the road to democracy, the rainbow-nation ideal was needed to hold together a country that was on the verge of fracturing. It did this by assuaging white guilt and putting off the black majority’s demand for immediate social justice.

In the 1990s, together with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the chairman of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Mr. Mandela popularized a new national self-image that made it possible to focus mainly on racial reconciliation, strengthening democratic institutions and creating a free press — all prerequisites for turning a tentative peace into a more lasting one.

In pursuit of this rainbow ideal, Mr. Mandela and the African National Congress had to silence, mollify or sideline certain allies within the liberation movement who not only demanded a democratic revolution but an economic one, too. But the price of deferring the dream of true equality was to leave the country lurching dangerously toward an explosion.

For the poorer black majority of South Africans, the unheralded heroes who have sacrificed so much in the transition to democracy that Mr. Mandela led, social justice has been held in abeyance, ostensibly for the sake of peace, as though the maxim “justice delayed is justice denied” did not apply to them. [Continue reading…]

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