Archive for the ‘law’ Tag
In the shadowy trenches of the Tea Party
Filed under: culture, media, politics | Tags: economy, foreign affairs, guns, health, law, media, national security, politics, recession, terrorism, Wall Street
Leave a Comment America’s so-called Tea Party movement has been a fixation of pundits both left and right for many months now. It got considerable credit for one of the biggest electoral turnabouts in a long time. But elusive, it seems, is who or what exactly constitutes this gathering storm of grassroots rage. And is it worthy of serious attention?
If a recent spate of coverage digging deeper is an indication, the answer is yes, although nobody has quite been able to say what the movement portends. Angry populism is an age-old theme in American politics. What is intriguing about the contemporary manifestation is that it seems to be as incoherent as it is alarming.
A Tea Party rally in Washington in September. (Photo: Amanda Lucidon/New York Times.)
In a lightning rod of an Op-Ed this week, Robert Wright pondered whether Joseph Stack, the anti-tax crusader who piloted a suicide mission into a Texas office building, could be considered “the first Tea Party terrorist.” He also wondered about how “purely conservative” the Tea Party movement actually may be. “Yes, it mobilized against a liberal health care bill and the stimulus package, but it also opposes corporate bailouts,” Wright noted. “Sure, Tea Partiers hate taxes, but that alone doesn’t distinguish them from many Americans. On social issues the Tea Partiers include some libertarians along with a larger number of family-values conservatives. And when you move to foreign policy, things don’t get more coherent. Though some Tea Partiers are hawks, many follow Ron Paul’s lead, combining a left-wing critique of military engagement with a right-wing aversion to the United Nations and other multilateral entanglements.”
A lengthy dispatch from New York Times investigative reporter David Barstow earlier this month cast light on the rising fringe of the movement: “Urged on by conservative commentators, waves of newly minted activists are turning to once-obscure books and Web sites and discovering a set of ideas long dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists, interviews conducted across the country over several months show. In this view, [President] Obama and many of his predecessors (including George W. Bush) have deliberately undermined the Constitution and free enterprise for the benefit of a shadowy international network of wealthy elites.”
Maybe it’s just that tough times in America call for a tough kind of paranoia. As Barstow further considered:
A popular T-shirt at Tea Party rallies reads, “Proud Right-Wing Extremist.”
It is a defiant and mocking rejoinder to last April’s intelligence assessment from the Department of Homeland Security warning that recession and the election of the nation’s first black president “present unique drivers for right wing radicalization.”
“Historically,” the assessment said, “domestic right wing extremists have feared, predicted and anticipated a cataclysmic economic collapse in the United States.” Those predictions, it noted, are typically rooted in “antigovernment conspiracy theories” featuring impending martial law. The assessment said extremist groups were already preparing for this scenario by stockpiling weapons and food and by resuming paramilitary exercises.
(Photo: Lucian Read/MoJo.)
“In the months I’ve spent getting to know the Oath Keepers,” she reports, “I’ve toggled between viewing them either as potentially dangerous conspiracy theorists or as crafty intellectuals with the savvy to rally politicians to their side. The answer, I came to realize, is that they cover the whole spectrum.”
Cambridge cop accidentally arrests Gates again
Filed under: media, politics | Tags: comedy, law, media, politics
Leave a Comment The beer summit, it turns out, was a huge waste of time — it seems Obama had it right about Crowley all along. This just in, from America’s Finest News Source:
WASHINGTON — Upon arriving late to his meeting with President Barack Obama and famed African-American intellectual Henry Louis Gates, Cambridge police officer James Crowley once again detained the distinguished Harvard scholar after failing to recognize the man he had arrested just two weeks earlier, White House sources reported Thursday. “When I entered the Oval Office, I observed an unidentified black male sitting near Mr. Obama, and in the interest of the president’s safety, I attempted to ascertain the individual’s business at the White House,” Crowley said in a sworn statement following the arrest. “The suspect then became uncooperative and verbally abusive. I had no choice but to apprehend him at the scene for disorderly conduct.” Witnesses said that Sgt. Crowley, failing to recognize Gates on their flight to Logan Airport, arrested the tenured professor in midair, once again at the baggage claim, and twice during their shared cab ride back to Cambridge.
Warning: Do not attempt to launch nuke using your MacBook
Just got a sparkling new MacBook Pro 13. This thing is smokin’. It handles like 007’s ride next to the ancient PowerBook G4 laptop with which I was barely coasting into yesterday. But this morning I stepped on the brakes when browsing the pocket-sized user booklet. While Apple’s branding gurus seem to have perfected the slickster-yet-friendly tone, buried in one of the snappy little chapters (e.g. “Ready, Setup, Go”) was quite a disclaimer. From “Last, but Not Least,” on page 68:
“High-risk activities – This computer is not intended for use in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communications systems, air traffic control systems, or for any other uses where the failure of computer could lead to death, personal injury, or severe environmental damage.”
For real? I reckon the folks in Cupertino know too well that we dwell in an absurdly litigious society. Or maybe they’re just still haunted by Matthew Broderick’s fateful dalliance in 1983.
Sharp turn on Wall Street
Filed under: culture, media, politics | Tags: economy, globalization, law, media, politics, recession, television, Wall Street
Leave a Comment My cover story for the July/August issue of Arrive is now riding the northeastern rails, a look at the nation’s economic crisis and the role of the financial media. CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo, the Wall Street Journal’s David Wessel and others ponder the end of days on Wall Street and what the American economy will look like on the other side of its most vicious hangover in decades.
CNBC has taken some big lumps this year for the behavior of some of its on-air personalities, perhaps deservedly so. But during a lengthy chat for the story earlier this year, after pushing past a bit of canned stuff, I found Bartiromo to be quite knowledgeable, engaging and forthright. And I happen to agree with her take on Jon Stewart’s big beatdown of Jim Cramer and CNBC back in March.
Will America’s investment banking sector soon be a miniature of its turn-of-millennium self? (And would that be a good thing?) Who are the most deserving villains in the blame game? Read on… Meanwhile, during a quick ATM stop at a Chase bank branch yesterday I witnessed an exchange that seemed in some small way encouraging — perhaps an indication that America has started to move beyond the denial/anger stage, and into the acceptance/change stage.
A bank employee was walking out just as a long-time customer was walking in. The customer asked the bank employee if in the past few weeks it had gotten any easier to get a loan. (The specific type wasn’t clear, though it was obviously either a home mortgage or small business loan.) “No, it hasn’t gotten any easier,” the bank employee said, with a cheery smile. “As you know, they’re asking a lot more questions now.” The customer smiled back, unfazed, and headed into the bank, paperwork in hand.
Black clouds over Tehran
Filed under: culture, media, politics | Tags: foreign affairs, globalization, Iran, journalism, law, media, national security, politics, technology, Twitter
Comments (1) There will be blood — much more of it, if need be — was the implicit message from Ayatollah Khamenei at Friday prayers in Tehran. “Struggling on the streets after elections is not acceptable,” the Iranian Supreme Leader said. “If they do not stop these actions, then any consequences will be their responsibility.”
Khamenei emphasized that the Islamic republic would never “commit treason” by manipulating votes, that the country’s legal system does not allow vote-rigging. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s large margin of victory — supposedly by 11 million votes — proved that the election could not have been fixed, Khamenei said.
Many Iranians, and people around the world, understand that’s a lie. As Stanford University’s Abbas Milani noted on CNN Thursday night, numerous towns across Iran had reported vote totals for Ahmadinejad amounting to more than 100 percent of their resident populations.
But in Iran the fist, not the facts, likely will prevail.
Neil MacFarquhar reports on the violence unleashed in Iranian cities at night since last Friday’s election, with the vigilante thugs known as Basijis beating, looting and sometimes gunning down protesters they tracked during the day. Says one Iranian exile who helped found the Revolutionary Guards during the 1979 Islamic revolution: “It is the special brigades of the Revolutionary Guards who right now, especially at night, trap young demonstrators and kill them.”
If mass protests continue, as seems almost certain, more violence will spill into broad daylight, whether or not any foreign media is left inside the country to document it.
UPDATE: The Times’ Lede blog has a source in Tehran describing the use of Twitter — apparently less instrumental in organizing street demonstrations, while “primarily being used to communicate with the outside world.”
Regarding prospects for greater violence and ultimate political outcome, Steve Clemons shares an interesting dispatch from “a well-connected Iranian internationalist” who has been in Tehran during the post-election unrest. The source describes witnessing young Mousavi supporters in the streets at night, fighting back by “hunting” Basijis. He describes them as agile “militia style” groups, including “a surprising number of girls.”
Panetta ices Cheney, but CIA skates
Filed under: media, politics | Tags: CIA, Dick Cheney, FBI, foreign affairs, intelligence, law, media, national security, politics, terrorism, war
Leave a Comment 
A long article about CIA director Leon Panetta in the June 22 issue of the New Yorker has prompted a flurry of media attention for comments Panetta made in reaction to Dick Cheney’s latest fear mongering over terrorism and U.S. national security. “It’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point,” Panetta said of Cheney, according to the article. “I think that’s dangerous politics.”
Cheney pushed back on his “old friend Leon” on Monday, according to Fox News. John McCain also jumped in, defending Cheney’s motivations and playing up discord among rank-and-file spooks: “By the way, I hear morale is not at an all-time high over at the CIA under Mr. Panetta’s leadership,” McCain said. Joe Biden weighed in on the talk-show circuit.
The back and forth is politics in the wake of dueling speeches from Obama and Cheney, but it’s a sideshow. Perhaps the famously secretive Cheney’s inner thoughts can’t really be known, but his hand in brutal interrogation policy couldn’t be better known. As I wrote about here recently, paramount for Cheney is protecting his political legacy and seeing his national security policies vindicated. (The essence of Panetta’s point.) The real news in the New Yorker article, buried deep into its 7,600 words, is the continuing absence of accountability for those who carried out Cheney’s vision to horrific ends.
No criminal charges have ever been brought against any C.I.A. officer involved in the torture program, despite the fact that at least three prisoners interrogated by agency personnel died as the result of mistreatment. In the first case, an unnamed detainee under C.I.A. supervision in Afghanistan froze to death after having been chained, naked, to a concrete floor overnight. The body was buried in an unmarked grave. In the second case, an Iraqi prisoner named Manadel al-Jamadi died on November 4, 2003, while being interrogated by the C.I.A. at Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad. A forensic examiner found that he had essentially been crucified; he died from asphyxiation after having been hung by his arms, in a hood, and suffering broken ribs. Military pathologists classified the case a homicide. A third prisoner died after an interrogation in which a C.I.A. officer participated, though the officer evidently did not cause the death. (Several other detainees have disappeared and remain unaccounted for, according to Human Rights Watch.)
That’s just the tip of the black iceberg, if you add in the numbers involving U.S. military operations — entwined with CIA operations — under Bush and Cheney. As I reported for Salon back in 2005, by then 108 detainees were known to have died in U.S. military and CIA custody since the start of the so-called war on terror. At least 26 deaths were deemed criminal homicides. Who knows if additional bodies piled up since.
As was also reported long ago, medical doctors and mental health professionals were involved in the torture, too, although the extent of their roles remains buried. Citing recently declassified Justice Department memos, Nathaniel Raymond, who works with the advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights, says that medical personnel working for the CIA were “the designers, the legitimizers and the implementers” of interrogation using torture. “We still don’t know how many detainees were in the black sites, or who they were,” Raymond says in the New Yorker. “We don’t fully know the White House’s role, or the C.I.A.’s role … This is arguably the single greatest medical-ethics scandal in American history. We need answers.”
If the accountability picture remains grim (both in terms of the operators and the policy overlords) there is one positive development detailed in the New Yorker piece: Panetta has ambitious plans for a new kind of legally acceptable interrogation capability. A task force led by Harvard Law professor Philip Heymann has been advising Panetta on a proposal to create an elite U.S. government interrogation team, staffed by some of the best CIA, FBI and military officers in the country, and drawing on the advice of social scientists, linguists and other scholars. According to the New Yorker, Heymann describes it as an effort to create “the best non-coercive interrogation team in the world,” the equivalent of “a NASA-like, man-on-the-moon effort” for human-intelligence gathering.
Without a doubt, America would benefit much from recruiting more Ali Soufans, while throwing its “Big Steves” behind bars.
The coming war on Sonia Sotomayor
Filed under: media, politics | Tags: immigration, law, media, politics, Twitter
Comments (2) It’s already underway, of course. The attacks in fact began well before her nomination.
Barack Obama’s selection of Sotomayor for the Supreme Court weaves another bright strand into an epic of American political transformation — both a groundbreaking and politically shrewd move by the president. But don’t think for a minute that’ll stop opponents from fighting dirty and doing whatever they can to block her path to the nation’s top bench.
Since the announcement of her selection on Tuesday morning, many pundits have parroted the same silly theory: The tattered Republican Party, the reasoning goes, just can’t afford to attack the first Hispanic woman ever nominated to the court — not least because the GOP in recent years has screwed itself royally with the pivotal voting bloc she represents.
“Unless the vetting process missed something big that will turn sentiment against her,” wrote Chicago Tribune blogger Eric Zorn, “Republicans who try to stall or block the first Hispanic nominee to the high court will be stepping into what looks almost like a political trap — a way to further marginalize the GOP and identify it as the party of angry white people.”
Across the cable news networks on Tuesday, this same wishful thinking was flowing from liberal guests holding forth with Keith Olbermann and Larry King. The folly can also be seen in this post from blogger David Kopel at The Volokh Conspiracy, who points out the herd-like denial of lefty bloggers on the subject:
A special poll of bloggers from The National Journal asked “Would it be politically smart for Republicans to try to block the confirmation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor?” Among the Left bloggers, the unanimous answer was “No.” On the Right, 53% said “No” and 47% said “Yes.”
I voted “Yes,” and wrote: “The Democrats who tried to block Roberts and Alito appear to have suffered no adverse consequences. [And, I should have added, neither did the Dems. who filibustered Miguel Estrada, who, like Sotomayor, is a Hispanic with an impressive life story.] Sotomayor is on the wrong side of fairness, empathy, the Constitution and the American people in regards to firearms ownership (Maloney v. Cuomo; United States v. Sanchez-Villar); wealthy people using the government’s eminent domain power to extort money from small business (Didden v. Village of Port Chester); and a racial spoils system for government employees (Ricci v. DeStefano).
Conservatives know full well that the stakes with Sotomayor’s nomination go far beyond the next election cycle or perhaps a couple more years in the political wilderness. While her place on the Supreme Court’s political continuum (presumably somewhere left of center) wouldn’t be clear for some time, if confirmed, the 54-year-old judge is likely to serve for decades.
The battle began even before she was nominated. In a preemptive strike published in the right-wing magazine FrontPage in early May, John Perazzo played to racial fears in an article titled “The Next Token Justice?”
“Sotomayor considers her ethnicity of paramount importance,” he wrote. “She began consciously developing a sense of her ethnic identity as a young woman and has allowed identity politics to act as a lens through which she sees her jurisprudence. During her student years at Princeton University in the 1970s, Sotomayor became actively involved in two campus organizations devoted chiefly to the celebration of an ethnicity distinct from that of the white majority.”
While most Senate Republicans so far seem to be feigning polite caution about the nomination, former GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee isn’t holding back:
Sotomayor comes from the far left and will likely leave us with something akin to the “Extreme Court” that could mark a major shift. The notion that appellate court decisions are to be interpreted by the “feelings” of the judge is a direct affront of the basic premise of our judicial system that is supposed to apply the law without personal emotion. If she is confirmed, then we need to take the blindfold off Lady Justice.
Rush Limbaugh wasted no time, of course, calling Sotomayor a “reverse racist” and “hack.” Newt is also in on that act, via Twitter. Others are running with “socialist,” thanks to an obviously sinister Norman Thomas citation Sotomayor used — for a college yearbook photo in 1976.
Without a doubt the attacks, from low-down to laughable, are just beginning.
No honeymoon for gay marriage in California
Filed under: California, culture, politics | Tags: California, law, politics, San Francisco, sex
Comments (1) Everybody knew that Tuesday’s ruling on Proposition 8 from the California Supreme Court could only be another charged moment in a long and continuing battle. Even though the 18,000 marriages that followed a favorable court decision here last May will stand, Tuesday’s decision upholding the ban on gay marriage was a near-term victory for social conservatives.
The court had signaled back in March its reluctance to intervene in the ballot initiative process and overturn the will of the voters. But the lone dissenter in the 6-1 decision Tuesday, Justice Carlos Moreno, wrote eloquently (see pp.151-175) about just how much is at stake:
The rule the majority crafts today not only allows same-sex couples to be stripped of the right to marry that this court recognized in the Marriage Cases, it places at risk the state constitutional rights of all disfavored minorities. It weakens the status of our state Constitution as a bulwark of fundamental rights for minorities protected from the will of the majority.
If California invariably serves as America’s cultural vanguard, what seems odd now is how the state appears to be behind the times. Iowa, of all places, is looking more socially progressive. Moreno cited the recent decision striking down a ban on gay marriage by that state’s high court, whose justices pointed out “the long and painful history of discrimination against gay and lesbian persons” in many parts of the country.
Moreno continued: “I realize, of course, that the right of gays and lesbians to marry in this state has only lately been recognized. But that belated recognition does not make the protection of those rights less important. Rather, that the right has only recently been acknowledged reflects an age-old prejudice … that makes the safeguarding of that right by the judiciary all the more critical.”
Reactions on both sides of the ruling have been heated, to say the least, and San Francisco is abuzz with demonstrations.
“Well, looks like religiously inspired hatred has won the day over the values this formerly great nation was founded on,” said one of nearly 1,800 commenters on SFGate.com Tuesday afternoon.
“Its not about equality folks. It’s about bowing down to the homosexual agenda or being called a bigot,” said another.
And as another made clear, the costly battle is far from over: “As expected from a legal standpoint, but nevertheless disappointing from the larger view of justice for all. Back to the voters and if the trend continues Prop 8 will be repealed by a decent majority in 2010. Onward!”
Why Obama is right about the torture photos
Filed under: media, politics | Tags: CIA, FBI, foreign affairs, intelligence, law, national security, politics, terrorism, war
Comments (1) The president’s decision this week not to make public additional graphic photos from U.S. military investigations into torture was the right one. I say that as someone who had a hand in helping make public a large collection of such photos three years ago.
In early 2006, I was part of a team of reporters and editors at Salon that spent many weeks scrutinizing, reporting on and carefully assembling a cache of raw evidence from a classified Army investigation that had been obtained by investigative reporter Mark Benjamin. The culmination of our work was “The Abu Ghraib Files,” a groundbreaking report documenting the notorious Iraq war scandal and its aftermath.
One purpose then of our publishing nearly 300 disturbing images from the Army’s criminal investigation was to help deepen the American public’s understanding of what some members of its military had done. The other essential purpose of our report was to underscore that, two years after the scandal had come to light, nobody above the level of foot soldier in the U.S. military or government had been held accountable — even though it had become clear that the criminal acts sprang from policies crafted and directed at the highest levels of the Bush government.
That failure of accountability remains in place today, to our national discredit. And that should be the primary focus now: The continued pursuit of those responsible for the policies that gave rise to the war crimes.
That’s not to say Obama’s choice was an easy one, particularly given his vows of greater transparency, but I think his cost-benefit analysis here is wise. The nature of the crimes has been documented extensively and is known the world over. Publication of the additional images, based on the contours we have of them from news reports, is not likely to add “any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out,” as Obama put it on Wednesday. Allowing past if newly revealed images of intimidation and degradation to be splashed across the media in an explosive news cycle, on the other hand, would likely enrage legions worldwide and do fresh damage to America’s reputation.
Beginning to repair the grave damage done to America’s standing in the world under Bush was part of the great promise of Obama’s election. He’s been off to a strong start, with his gestures of respect for the Muslim world and his reaching out to political adversaries from Tehran to Havana. Perhaps it would be worth the risk of undermining that shift if the torture perpetrated by Americans at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere somehow remained obscure. But that’s not the case.
Obama did miscalculate with part of his rationale, emphasizing that releasing additional photos could endanger U.S. troops. As Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell reiterated in the Washington Post, “With 20,000 additional forces coming into Afghanistan, an election in August and the fighting season in full swing right now, the timing is particularly bad.”
The commander in chief wants to show support for the troops, especially at a time of escalation — but it’s a misguided emphasis, because on its face it aligns Obama too closely with tactics used at the outset of the torture scandal by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld as they sought to cover it up. (Unsurprisingly, some on the political left have used this point to pounce on Obama.) Moreover, it’s an unconvincing argument — U.S. troops are already in danger on a daily basis in Iraq, Afghansitan and elsewhere.
More important to consider in all this is the president’s courageous decision recently to declassify Justice Department memos and reignite a national debate, false dogma of Dick Cheney and all, about the policy origins of the disaster. The important development of the week, then, was not Obama’s about-face but the congressional testimony of Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent directly involved in the interrogation of crucial terrorist captives early in the war. Soufan, a highly authoritative source on the matter by most counts, barely stopped short of testifying that George W. Bush and his top officials peddled lies apparently fed to them by the CIA about the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. (Soufan called the former president’s statements “half truths.”)
Allegations that serious, atop further evidence concerning the authors of the brutal interrogation policy — and there are indications that other revealing memos may be forthcoming — seem to suggest real momentum toward greater accountability, possibly at a much higher level than we’ve seen. That of course is the goal here. Are more grim photos necessary to reach it?
I have friends in the human rights community, some of whom I worked with at length to help expose the troubling national security policies of Bush and Cheney. But I have to disagree with them on this one.
“This essentially renders meaningless President Obama’s pledge of transparency and accountability,” said the ACLU’s Amrit Singh this week, regarding the reversal on the photos. The Obama administration, she said, “has essentially become complicit with the torture that was rampant during the Bush years by being complicit in its coverup.”
It’s an advocacy group’s job to keep the heat on, but that’s rhetoric pretty far gone. It has long been clear that the torture debacle must be resolved to higher account. How best to do that remains up for debate. Meantime, what I see is a president working to navigate treacherous political waters, and doing it mostly with skill and conviction, in a prolonged and painful storm not of his making.
UPDATE 5/24/09: Heartening today to see that I’m in good company on the Op-Ed pages of the Sunday Times, where journalist Philip Gourevitch, who has explored the Abu Ghraib nightmare at great length, underscores why releasing additional photographs wouldn’t tell us anything we don’t already know. After all, as he points out, Dick Cheney has been glad to take credit lately for having terrorists under interrogation slammed against walls or waterboarded.
“Photographs can’t show us that the real bad apples were at the top of the civilian chain of command in Washington,” Gourevitch writes, “but that is what we need to know — or, rather, since we’ve known it and gone along with it for a long time, that is what we need to come to terms with now.”
Google, Kindle and The Library of Babel
Filed under: California, culture, media | Tags: books, California, future-of-journalism, journalism, language, law, media, poetry, San Francisco, technology, writing
Comments (1) Technological innovation seems almost strangely commonplace these days, from say, contact lenses that could layer data directly onto your view of the world to robots fighting far-flung wars to computer systems perhaps smart enough to compete on “Jeopardy!” All astonishing developments in their own right, and yet the most profound change of our times may yet be purely informative in nature: The digitization of all that we read.
At the University of San Francisco on Sunday I participated in a symposium on “Life after the MFA” for students graduating the writing program. Unsurprisingly, the technological upending of books, magazines and newspapers was a particular focus. Fellow panelist Patrick Dunagan, a poet who works as a specialist at the USF library, spoke with some alarm about the rate at which books and print periodicals there are going the way of the dodo. The idea is that many are being replaced digitally. I expressed a bit of surprise to him about this afterward, whereby he asked me when I last conducted any research in a library. Point taken. If only Borges were still hanging around and could rejoin the discussion.
One theme I hoped to suggest in my part of the talk was that print vs. digital isn’t a zero-sum equation. We can still love books and newspapers while getting charged about the possibilities of digital publishing. In many ways the latter remains a Wild West — and without a doubt has blown holes in some old ways of doing business. But in my view the rising digital infosphere is far more expansive and generative than it is destructive.
In a recent essay published in the Wall Street Journal, author Steven Johnson explores both the thrill and potential chill of electronic books, a fast-growing realm thanks to Amazon’s innovative e-book reader, the Kindle, and Google’s Book Search service, home to approximately 10 million scanned titles and counting. One exciting aspect Johnson flags with regard to ideas and research:
Before too long, you’ll be able to create a kind of shadow version of your entire library, including every book you’ve ever read — as a child, as a teenager, as a college student, as an adult. Every word in that library will be searchable. It is hard to overstate the impact that this kind of shift will have on scholarship. Entirely new forms of discovery will be possible. Imagine a software tool that scans through the bibliographies of the 20 books you’ve read on a specific topic, and comes up with the most-cited work in those bibliographies that you haven’t encountered yet.
But there will be pitfalls, too, especially with respect to evolving market forces. The all-powerful search engine that is Google, and the ways in which it guides users to digital content of all sorts, could impact how books actually get written:
Writers and publishers will begin to think about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google’s results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors.
Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers; chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank. Just as Web sites try to adjust their content to move as high as possible on the Google search results, so will authors and publishers try to adjust their books to move up the list.
What will this mean for the books themselves? Perhaps nothing more than a few strategically placed words or paragraphs. Perhaps entire books written with search engines in mind. We’ll have to see.
A strength of Johnson’s essay is that he doesn’t pass judgment on these possibilities; he concentrates on laying out in lucid terms what he sees coming. (Another recent piece of his, on how the web’s information ecosystem changes how we get our news, is also well worth reading.)
The latter segment above, under the subhead “Writing for Google,” got me thinking about a worn adage heard in MFA programs everywhere: “Write what you know.” If that advice translates fundamentally to writing from a place of experience and passion, it could take on fresh meaning in the digital future — when the suggestion to “Write what you can search engine optimize” may well become a growing temptation.
UPDATE: Some wonder if Google already has too much sway with its Book Search service, including the U.S. Department of Justice.
Why Dick Cheney keeps torturing us
Filed under: media, politics | Tags: CIA, Dick Cheney, FBI, intelligence, law, national security, politics, terrorism, war
Comments (6) Nobody should be surprised that the former vice president keeps returning from the political wilderness to defend the brutal treatment of suspected terrorists. Without providing any specifics, Cheney continues to intone that torturing Al Qaeda suspects yielded information vital to protecting America. Countless news reports have suggested strongly that claim is false.
Make no mistake: What Cheney is doing isn’t about protecting America, it’s about protecting political power. (Anyone who needs a refresher on his views of amassing and wielding that commodity should go back and read this Pulitzer Prize-winning series from the Washington Post.) With President Obama’s courageous decision to declassify Bush administration legal memos and return the unfinished torture debate to the headlines, Cheney and those who helped do his bidding in the Bush administration’s war on terror still have a lot to lose in terms of legacy and liability.
Once again we watch Cheney double down on an ugly bet: “I haven’t announced this up until now,” he said on Fox News on Monday, “but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country.” The U.S. government should declassify those reports, too, he said, so that Americans can see “how good the intelligence was.”
Obama is unlikely to do that, and Cheney knows it. That’s because the chances are that most if not all documentation of actual intelligence operations — as opposed to memos laying out the Bush administration’s legal justification for them — contains information too sensitive to disclose regarding sources and tactics. Obama should call Cheney’s bluff not only by noting that distinction, but also with a full-throated rejection of Cheney’s false argument: He should remind Americans that torture simply does not work.
That truth has been borne out in reams of media reporting on the war on terror, and has been reiterated time and time again by senior U.S. military and intelligence officials, several of whom I spoke with when covering the issue at length for Salon back in 2005. It was on full display again in late March, in a Washington Post report further examining the treatment of the terrorist Abu Zubaida, who was waterboarded by the CIA at least 83 times:
The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads. In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida — chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates — was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.
A New York Times report last weekend underscored that valuable intelligence gleaned from Zubaida did not come via torture:
His interrogation, according to multiple accounts, began in Pakistan and continued at the secret C.I.A. site in Thailand, with a traditional, rapport-building approach led by two F.B.I. agents, who even helped care for him as his gunshot wounds healed. Abu Zubaydah gave up perhaps his single most valuable piece of information early, naming Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, whom he knew as Mukhtar, as the main organizer of the 9/11 plot.
Lawrence Wright’s definitive volume about the 9/11 terrorist attacks, “The Looming Tower,” recounts in vivid detail another example of how the measured, savvy manipulation of a captured terrorist suspect — not the beating and simulated drowning of him — yielded critical intelligence. No doubt there are other such examples that have not been made public.
But in seven years, not a single example has emerged of specific information vital to U.S. national security that was obtained through torture — not even when protected from public view. As the Post reported late last month, “Since 2006, Senate intelligence committee members have pressed the CIA, in classified briefings, to provide examples of specific leads that were obtained from Abu Zubaida through the use of waterboarding and other methods, according to officials familiar with the requests. The agency provided none, the officials said.”
Of course, Cheney and his supporters will continue muddying the waters — including through leaks of nonspecific claims — in hopes of warding off political and legal vulnerability as the nation realizes the truth about torture.
UPDATE: More here on Dick Cheney’s defense of torture.
Could marijuana light up the economy?
Filed under: California, politics | Tags: California, economy, foreign affairs, law, Mexico, national security, recession, San Francisco
Comments (1) The debate about whether to legalize marijuana in the United States has never been a mainstream one. So it’s been fascinating to watch how much attention the concept has gotten lately, however viable it may or may not be.
Preoccupation with Mexico’s violent drug war is one factor; marijuana is the largest source of revenue for the cartels’ multibillion dollar business north of the border. Commodify the major cash crop through legalization, the idea goes, and its cost will plummet, putting a serious dent in the bad guys’ bank accounts.
But the larger issue lighting up the idea seems to be the battered American economy. In February, California state lawmaker Tom Ammiano proposed legislation that would regulate the cultivation and sale of marijuana, with a potential tax windfall of more than $1 billion to help bail out the state from a severe budget crisis.
On Thursday, the legalization concept wafted all the way up to the presidential level. In a live Internet “video chat” with Americans, President Obama found himself responding to a question that had been voted among the most popular of those submitted by the public: whether the controlled sale and taxation of marijuana could help stimulate the U.S. economy. “I don’t know what this says about the online audience,” Obama quipped. “The answer is no, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow the economy.” By Thursday night, CNN’s Anderson Cooper was jabbering at length about the idea with law enforcement officials.
The issue of taxation just cropped up in another intriguing way. The Drug Enforcement Administration caused a stir in San Francisco on Wednesday when it raided a locally permitted medical marijuana dispensary. In part there was outcry because just days prior U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder had announced that the feds would no longer prosecute medical marijuana dispensaries where they are allowed under state and local law. So why the bust now?
So far the DEA isn’t sharing any details, but according to the San Francisco Chronicle, “A source in San Francisco city government who was informed about the raid said the DEA’s action appeared to be prompted by alleged financial improprieties related to the payment of sales taxes.”
It’s difficult to gauge the Chronicle’s anonymous source, but if accurate, the explanation seems rather odd. Last I checked, there was no national sales tax in the United States, so why would the federal government be interested in that issue? Moreover, while I’m not sure whether it applies to medical marijuana, prescription drugs are exempt under the current California sales tax regime.
The federal government does oversee interstate commerce, and U.S. border security, of course — perhaps better clues to the DEA’s continuing interest in the case. (Was supply at the SF pot club the real issue?) Which takes us back to the headline-grabbing drug war. You don’t have to stare for long at this DOJ threat assessment map tracking the Mexican cartels to notice the densely covered trajectory that runs the length of I-5, from San Diego to San Francisco to Seattle.
