How Many Of Bin Laden's English Language Books Have You Read?

The Office of the Directory of National Intelligence has a page called Bin Laden's Bookshelf.

"On May 20, 2015, the ODNI released a sizeable tranche of documents recovered during the raid on the compound used to hide Usama bin Ladin. The release, which followed a rigorous interagency review, aligns with the President’s call for increased transparency–consistent with national security prerogatives–and the 2014 Intelligence Authorization Act, which required the ODNI to conduct a review of the documents for release.

The release contains two sections. The first is a list of non-classified, English-language material found in and around the compound. The second is a selection of now-declassified documents.

The Intelligence Community will be reviewing hundreds more documents in the near future for possible declassification and release. An interagency taskforce under the auspices of the White House and with the agreement of the DNI is reviewing all documents which supported disseminated intelligence cables, as well as other relevant material found around the compound. All documents whose publication will not hurt ongoing operations against al-Qa‘ida or their affiliates will be released."

I've highlighted the list of "English Language Books"  but each category has a list on the ODNI website.   I've only read one of the books on the list  and posted about it early on when few people read this blog. 

Here's the list: 

Now Declassified Material (103 items)
Publicly Available U.S. Government Documents (75 items)
English Language Books (39 items)

• The 2030 Spike by Colin Mason
• A Brief Guide to Understanding Islam by I. A. Ibrahim 
• America’s Strategic Blunders by Willard Matthias
• America’s “War on Terrorism” by Michel Chossudovsky
• Al-Qaeda’s Online Media Strategies: From Abu Reuter to Irhabi 007 by Hanna Rogan
• The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast
• The Best Enemy Money Can Buy by Anthony Sutton
• Black Box Voting, Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century by Bev Harris
• Bloodlines of the Illuminati by Fritz Springmeier
• Bounding the Global War on Terror by Jeffrey Record
• Checking Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions by Henry Sokolski and Patrick Clawson
• Christianity and Islam in Spain 756-1031 A.D. by C. R. Haines
• Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies by Cheryl Benard
• Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins
• Conspirators’ Hierarchy: The Committee of 300 by John Coleman
• Crossing the Rubicon by Michael Ruppert
• Fortifying Pakistan: The Role of U.S. Internal Security Assistance (only the book’s introduction) by C. Christine Fair and Peter Chalk
• Guerilla Air Defense: Antiaircraft Weapons and Techniques for Guerilla Forces by James Crabtree
• Handbook of International Law by Anthony Aust
• Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky
• Imperial Hubris by Michael Scheuer
• In Pursuit of Allah’s Pleasure by Asim Abdul Maajid, Esaam-ud-Deen and Dr. Naahah Ibrahim
• International Relations Theory and the Asia-Pacific by John Ikenberry and Michael Mastandano
• Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II by William Blum
• Military Intelligence Blunders by John Hughes-Wilson
• Project MKULTRA, the CIA’s program of research in behavioral modification. Joint hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, United States Senate, Ninety-fifth Congress, first session, August 3, 1977. United States. Congress. Senate. Select Committee on Intelligence.
• Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies by Noam Chomsky
• New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 by David Ray Griffin
• New Political Religions, or Analysis of Modern Terrorism by Barry Cooper
• Obama’s Wars by Bob Woodward
• Oxford History of Modern War by Charles Townsend
• The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy
• Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower by William Blum
• The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly Hall (1928)
• Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins
• The Taking of America 1-2-3 by Richard Sprague
• Unfinished Business, U.S. Overseas Military Presence in the 21st Century by Michael O’Hanlon
• The U.S. and Vietnam 1787-1941 by Robert Hopkins Miller
• “Website Claims Steve Jackson Games Foretold 9/11,” article posted on ICV2.com (this file contained only a single saved web page)

Material Published by Violent Extremists & Terror Groups (35 items)
Materials Regarding France (19 items)
Media Articles (33 items)
Other Religious Documents (11 items)
Think Tank & Other Studies (40 items)
Software and Technical Manuals (30 items)
Other Miscellaneous Documents (14 items)
Documents Probably Used by Other Compound Residents (10 items)
 

I have to wonder what Bin Laden thought about his access to all this material - that the US was crazy to have this all available, or was there some admiration that a society would allow all this to be read by anyone?  

Replacing Jon Stewart

When a teacher has a 'problem' student in class, the easiest response is to get him (or her) out of the class.  But experienced teachers know that another one will take his place.  The real answer is to analyze your teaching and find if there is a different way to get your message across or find out what the underlying problems are that the kid has and find help.

I thought about that when I watched this video of John Oliver over on Immoral Minority.  People have been lamenting the departure of Jon Stewart from the Daily Show.  And Stewart does have a knack for getting right to the issue and nailing it.  Of course it helps to have a great staff of researchers and production folks to back you up.

But my thought was, when one leaves, another one will pop up to take his place.

We are a country of 300 million people.  1% of 300 million equals 3 million.  Half of that is still 1.5 million.  So there's a pool of 1.5 million Americans in the top one half percent of the funniest/smartest Americans.  Surely among that group we can find plenty of talent to not only replace Jon Stewart, but to find new and amazing ways to expose the corrupt and crazy among the powerful.  We  have the talent to put on 100 different Daily Shows if we look and nurture the very best.

Jeff the Diseased Lung and John Oliver

So, here's the segment that inspired that thought.  John Oliver takes on the tobacco industry for suing nations over tobacco restrictions.  Yes, nations.  They lost in Australia's supreme court, according to Oliver, but then they appealed it over technical issues in trade treaties.  And for Uruguay and Togo, two more countries they sued over restrictions on cigaret packaging, the threat of a huge lawsuit is more than such a country can handle.

The whole segment is definitely worth watching  to

1. see how truly evil the tobacco companies are
2. think about how we empower these companies so they can violate the health interests of independent nations
3. consider what they are doing to us in the US (think "global warming hasn't been proven")
4. realize that there are plenty of other Jon Stewarts waiting out there to take his place, and then some.
5. have a good laugh or three at Phillip Morris' expense
   
   

On The Difference Between Al Qaeda and ISIS

Most of us know almost nothing about ISIS.  There's a name, news reports, and photos and we each create our own story to explain them.  My friend Jeremy linked to an Atlantic article which gives us more.  Of course, we take the author's words with a grain of salt.  But it's evidence to put into the record to compare with the other evidence that is gathered.  I recommend reading it. 

Here's a snipped that contrasts Al Qaeda with ISIS, says one is  modern and corporate while the other is 7th Century:

We are misled in a second way, by a well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature. Peter Bergen, who produced the first interview with bin Laden in 1997, titled his first book Holy War, Inc. in part to acknowledge bin Laden as a creature of the modern secular world. Bin Laden corporatized terror and franchised it out. He requested specific political concessions, such as the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia. His foot soldiers navigated the modern world confidently. On Mohamd Atta’s last full day of life, he shopped at Walmart and ate dinner at Pizza Hut.

There is a temptation to rehearse this observation—that jihadists are modern secular people, with modern political concerns, wearing medieval religious disguise—and make it fit the Islamic State. In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.

Is this accurate?  Time will tell.   Meanwhile this article offers much to chew on.  More than the simplistic coverage we mostly get. 

The Fog of Peace

"The trouble began at the end of the Cold War, when the collapse of a bankrupt  Communist ideology was complacently interpreted as the triumph of the market. As communism was discarded, so was the concept of the state as an agent around which our collective interests and ambitions could be organized.The individual became the ultimate agent of change – an individual conceived as the type of rational actor that populates economists’ models. Such an individual’s identity is not derived from class interests or other sociological characteristics, but from the logic of the market, which dictates maximization of self-interest, whether as a producer, a consumer, or a voter."

A friend from the other side of the world sent me a post at Project Syndicate   by

Jean-Marie Guéhenno, former Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping at the United Nations, is President and CEO of the International Crisis Group and the author of the forthcoming book The Fog of Peace: A Memoir of International Peacekeeping in the 21st Century.

The quote above is just an excerpt from the post, and, presumably, from the book The Fog of Peace.

I didn't know what the International Crisis Group was either, so I googled.  Here's part of a post by Tom Hazeldine at the New Left Review who doesn't think much of them:

On the face of it, the ICG represents a particularly successful NGO incursion into geopolitical affairs. A mid-nineties spin-off from US establishment think-tank the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Crisis Group purports to offer ‘new strategic thinking’ on conflict situations, aided by a global monitoring network it runs across sixty countries, with links to lobbying operations in Washington, New York, Brussels and London. Half of its annual budget of $16m comes from governments—mainly NATO members, including the US and Britain—while corporate donors include RBS, Chevron and BHP Billiton; billionaire financier George Soros is a leading patron. [3]The organization styles itself as independent and non-partisan, but has consistently championed NATO’s wars to fulsome transatlantic praise. Kofi Annan spoke for the entire House when he lauded the ICG as ‘a global voice of conscience, and a genuine force for peace’. The credulous Western media also has moments of sycophancy. The FT praises the group’s ‘hard-nosed realism’, the BBCits ‘masterful’ and ‘essential’ research. The Washington Post likens its ‘excellent reports’ to investor credit ratings for conflict-prone states. Noting with admiration that ‘there is nothing cut-and-paste about the research’, the Guardian enthuses: ‘Long may it continue to thrive.’ [4]
Such commendation would seem no mean feat, especially given the dubious makeup of the Crisis Group board—a rogue’s gallery even by the standards of international politics. Outgoing president Gareth Evans was the West’s principal apologist for Suharto in East Timor while Australian foreign minister. Co-chair Thomas Pickering was a Reagan point man in Central America’s dirty wars, asUS ambassador to El Salvador and one-time intermediary for Contra gunrunners. (This would become a habit: in retirement Pickering sold arms overseas for Boeing.) The Executive Committee includes among its number Mort Abramowitz, self-confessed ‘aggressive interventionist’ and former State Department fire-starter who obtained Stinger missiles for the Afghan Mujahidin; earlier on, while ambassador in Thailand, he had been instrumental in the US policy of backing Pol Pot against the Vietnamese-installed regime.  .   .

Despite the critique of predatory capitalism in the original quote above, Landdestroyer argues that ICG is after helping their corporate sponsors expand around the world.

"To explain why they are so eager to pry their way into sovereign nations, despoil, topple, and rebuild them, one only has to look at ICG's corporate supporters. They include such ignoble organizations as Chevron, Morgan Stanley, and Deutsche Bank Group with equally ignoble intentions that are confidently expressed through ICG's nefarious agenda."

Sourcewatch's report lists lots of people connected with ICG and they all seem to be alumni of high governmental office or international agencies.

This all goes to show what I repeat now and again here - everything is far more complicated than it first appears.  But it's also true that many things are much simpler than people make them appear.  Precisely so they can say, "But, you don't understand.  It's all very complicated."  The Fog of Peace could just as easily refer to all of this rhetoric aimed at confusing everyone.

[For those of you who saw this already, sorry.  Feed burner didn't send it to blogrolls.  I've gotten rid of a lot of junk html that came over with some of the quotes to see if that was the problem.]

Five Hours - Two Worlds

Five hours from Anchorage, non-stop, to LA.  Actually, it was about four hours and forty five minutes.  After getting the house-sitter settled, we took off a little before midnight Anchorage time.  And we landed just before six am LA time.   The LA picture is actually about seven hours later - after we got the bus, had breakfast, and then were walking the last mile to my mom's.

I hadn't planned on this order of the pictures, but when I looked at them, these two seemed so similar (long flat foreground, looking into the light) that they seemed a perfect pairing.  And a perfect contrast between the two worlds we've been bouncing back and forth between, as we visit my mom each month.

I've always been fascinated by how easy it is today to walk through a door in an airport in one part of the world and walk out another door into another part of the world.  I remember walking through the Brussels airport and seeing (to me) exotic African cities listed at the gates.  And the contrast between Anchorage and LA in January is pretty stark.

I contrast this with the ten days (in my memory anyway) it took to sail from New York to Le Havre in   1964 on the way to spending a college year in Germany.  Or to driving from Anchorage to Boston and back.  Overland (or oversea) one has time to feel the distance.  One's body has time to adjust to waking up closer or further from the sunrise.  One's brain has time to process the land or sea scape.  But planes abruptly fling one from one point on earth to another.  That's one reason I like window seats - so I can, when it's clear and light - get some sense of the topography I'm traveling through.

OK, enough musing.  Here are some shots as we got to enjoy the dawn.  (A positive side of the shorter days in Anchorage is that even people who sleep late get to see the dawn.)

Just off the plane in LAX terminal 6

Still dark waiting for the shuttle to the bus station

Just starting to get light as we get to the bus station

We then slept for half the day.

[Photo notes:I didn't bring the bigger camera on this trip.  Our flights are both in the dark, so no landscape shots, and I'm trying to travel as light as I can.  It would have been nice to have the polaroid filter Joe Blow suggested in comments to an early post, so the Good Bus Karma didn't have all the reflection.  I could have just cropped the picture to that sign, but I wanted the sense of being on the bus as well.  So I stretched the crop to keep the word bus and I included the driver and steering wheel.  The palm trees outside were pretty washed out, so I did play with brightness in photoshop for that part.]

Cuba and Marijuana - Strong Emotion And Political Power Have Too Long Trumped Reason

"President Obama on Wednesday ordered the restoration of full diplomatic relations with Cuba and the opening of an embassy in Havana for the first time in more than a half-century as he vowed to “cut loose the shackles of the past” and sweep aside one of the last vestiges of the Cold War."  (NY Times)

When Nixon, in 1970, announced he was going to China to reestablish diplomatic ties, it was 21 years after the Communists defeated the Kuomintang.

It's taken almost 65 years since Castro took over Cuba in January 1959, for the US to finally begin to reestablish diplomatic ties with Cuba.

Havana was both prosperous and corrupt before the revolution, and there was a huge economic gap between the cities and the rural areas. From PBS:

Between 1952 and 1958, Cubans from all walks of life -- students, businessmen, mothers, politicians -- united in opposition against Batista. Author Carlos Alberto Montaner describes the mood: "the talk was about democracy, freedom and respect for human rights; the... objective was to restore the rule of law that had been swept aside by Batista."

Cuba had been a Spanish colony and then, after the Spanish-American War essentially became a colony of the US.  Again from PBS:

Since achieving independence in 1902, Cuba had suffered what simply could be called bad government. A bloody and costly struggle to achieve independence from Spain had devastated Cuba's economy. The insurgent leaders, known as the  had been decimated. José Martí, Cuba's , was killed in battle in 1895. On May 20, 1902, the birth date of the first Cuban republic, no leader had the power to harness the passions and ambitions unleashed by independence. The U.S. Congress passed the Platt Amendment, granting the U.S. the right to intervene militarily in Cuba to protect its interests there. The U.S. position further undermined the legitimacy of the government, as it placed the United States at the center of Cuban affairs. Invoking the Platt Amendment, the United States would occupy Cuba between 1906 and 1909, and continue to intervene in later years.

If we hadn't been so consumed by the Cold War and still being lapped by the ripples of the McCarthy era, and had not been so blindly supportive of American business interests in Cuba, we might have worked with Castro from the beginning.  But CIA chief Allen Dulles and others were hostile.  His (and his brothers') strong support for US business interests can be seen in this discussion of the Dulles brothers and Nixon in 1948.  By 1959, John Foster Dulles was dead, but Allen was CIA chief,  presumably with the same interests of protecting US corporations. Castro's flirting with communism was a big problem for them.  Castro versus the Eisenhower Administration gives a sense of the competing interests and policies.

We don't know how all the wealthy, who fled Cuba for Miami, made their fortunes in Havana, but in many cases, I suspect they would not want their true stories exposed.  Other people had more legitimate gripes.  But the Cuban-Americans, bolstered by the US loss of face by having a Communist country 90 miles from its borders, have been able to hold the Castro regime and the people of Cuba hostage to US embargo for over 50 years.  Whatever evils Castro has committed, and he clearly did not live up to the revolution's promises of democracy, they aren't worse than other countries we have diplomatic relations with - China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, our WW II enemies Germany and Japan, and various South American dictatorships over the years.  The difference is an emotional difference fired up by an active Cuban refugee community.  Even the sting of losing a war to Vietnam only lasted 20 years before we had full diplomatic relations again.

In the same way, marijuana was emotionally linked with the hippies and  the anti-war movement of the 60's and 70's.  And a huge illegal drug smuggling business whose wealth is able to corrupt law enforcement officials, legislators, and private companies.   


In both the cases of Cuba and marijuana, US policy was twisted from reasonable and humane by strong, negative emotional reactions and the power of those with a vested interest in the status quo.  For many, marijuana represents lawlessness and the anti-government protests of the Vietnam war.

Cuba has had and continuous to have serious issues.  Moving toward normal diplomatic relations with Cuba ends a 55 year grudge.  It doesn't solve all the issues, but it's a step forward.

Legalizing marijuana also moves us to more reasonable and sensible approaches for dealing with the side effects of marijuana use.  It doesn't mean we'll adopt good policies.  Certainly the new Alaska law legalizing marijuana, is imperfect.  It gives away too much power and incentive to private sector businesses  to sell as much grass as they can.  The state needs to craft regulations to most sensibly implement the legalization, such as requiring more consumer protection in terms of quality of the products and labeling and limiting advertising.

But at long last we can stop the costly, ineffective wars against Cuba and marijuana users, and move on to more positive and productive relationships.

Just as Nixon's trip to China is seen as his greatest legacy, I'm sure that Obama's reopening our relationship with Cuba will be a big part of his legacy.

The Ebola Volunteer Watch Resort

Medical volunteers are desperately needed to help with Ebola patients.  But long quarantine periods are making it more difficult to get volunteers. From the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM):

"Médecins sans Frontières, the World Health Organization, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and many other organizations say we need tens of thousands of additional volunteers to control the epidemic. We are far short of that goal, so the need for workers on the ground is great. These responsible, skilled health care workers who are risking their lives to help others are also helping by stemming the epidemic at its source.

But many people and politicians are fearful that returning medical volunteers will spread Ebola in the US.   This worry is overblown as the NEJM article also says:

"Health care professionals treating patients with this illness have learned that transmission arises from contact with bodily fluids of a person who is symptomatic — that is, has a fever, vomiting, diarrhea, and malaise. We have very strong reason to believe that transmission occurs when the viral load in bodily fluids is high, on the order of millions of virions per microliter. This recognition has led to the dictum that an asymptomatic person is not contagious; field experience in West Africa has shown that conclusion to be valid. Therefore, an asymptomatic health care worker returning from treating patients with Ebola, even if he or she were infected, would not be contagious. Furthermore, we now know that fever precedes the contagious stage, allowing workers who are unknowingly infected to identify themselves before they become a threat to their community. This understanding is based on more than clinical observation: the sensitive blood polymerase-chain-reaction (PCR) test for Ebola is often negative on the day when fever or other symptoms begin and only becomes reliably positive 2 to 3 days after symptom onset. This point is supported by the fact that of the nurses caring for Thomas Eric Duncan, the man who died from Ebola virus disease in Texas in October, only those who cared for him at the end of his life, when the number of virions he was shedding was likely to be very high, became infected. Notably, Duncan's family members who were living in the same household for days as he was at the start of his illness did not become infected." [emphasis added]

The NEJM argues that adding lengthy quarantine periods for returning volunteers simply makes it that much harder to recruit volunteers.

Thus, I offer an alternative:  The Ebola Volunteer Watch Resort.

 Locate or build isolated resorts where Ebola volunteers will be sent to relax and enjoy a vacation while they are watched for symptoms before returning to their home country.  The resort will offer options for various outdoor and indoor activities while the volunteers' temperatures are checked regularly.

Those who get a fever would be immediately moved to an isolated medical ward so they do not infect the others at the resort and so they can be treated. 

Volunteers could work on personal Ebola volunteer observation reports and work together with other medical volunteers to develop plans, based on their experiences, for improving the response to the Ebola outbreaks now and in the future.  This would allow Ebola medical volunteers to get some needed rest AND to have time to reflect on their experiences alone and with others and develop programs that would help with the Ebola situation and future health emergencies.

I suspect that much of the work needed does not necessarily require highly trained Western experts and that much of the volunteer work should be spent on training Africans how to do their work, thus eliminating the need for so many out-of-country volunteers.  The resorts could also be used for this sort of training.

The costs of the Watch Resorts could be born by those states that would prefer not to have Ebola volunteers return without a strictly enforced quarantine.  Or the people of those states could just read the medical literature and be more rational. 

Notes:
I tend to be a skeptic about most things, including claims of medical science.  But skeptic doesn't mean rejecting out of hand.  It means asking for detailed explanations and then deciding.

The  pictures are original to this blog and are just examples. 

"A scene out of Dante" - Washington Post Ebola Must Read Story

Ebola news comes in bits and pieces and until it got to Dallas seemed far away.  The Washington Post has a good overview of what has happened and is happening.  This is a major issue of concern to everyone.  This is a good way to get up to speed. 

Out of control: How the world’s health organizations failed to stop the Ebola disaster 

The LA Times also has a long story, but I think the Washington Post did a better job. [Note:  These stories, like all stories, need to be taken with a grain of salt, but for now, they both try to pull together what's been going on and who the key players are.  We can judge how good these reports were in a year or two, maybe.]

Image from Dore's illustrations of Dante's Inferno from Sexual Fables*

While people tend to think of this as a health story, I think of it as an international public administration story.  It involves, directly, the governments of Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, Nigeria, the United States, and other countries around Africa and the world.  It involves the United Nations, the World Health Organization, Doctors Without Borders, Samaritans' Purse, the Centers for Disease Control, the US military.

It involves religion and science. Courage and fear.

It involves cultural beliefs about how to bury the dead.  The lack of trust in the aftermath of civil war and the arms trade.  The lack of infrastructure - roads, health care systems, sanitation systems, water systems.  It involves human emotions.

And most important, it involves human beings facing death from an invisible killer.

It requires people to have the understanding of all these complicated factors and the power to implement action that will curb this disease with the least loss of life, using the fewest possible resources, so that other problems can also be addressed.  

Trying to understand how we could send men to the moon, but couldn't keep people on earth healthy was a key reason I got into the field of public administration.  I learned there are no set answers, but a lot of processes and information, that allow us to adapt to the changing challenges public administrators face daily. 


*I have a copy of The Inferno with Dore's illustrations, but it's at home in Anchorage and I'm in LA, so I have to borrow this picture, at least for now.    

Dante's Inferno, widely hailed as one of the great classics of Western literature, details Dante's journey through the nine circles of Hell. The voyage begins during Easter week in the year 1300, the descent through Hell starting on Good Friday

Debt: The First 5,000 Years

"But,"  she objected, as if this were self-evident,"they'd borrowed the money!  Surely one has to pay one's debts."

This comes on page 2 in the book - Debt:  The First 5000 Years - as author David Graeber is describing an encounter at a London party with a woman who works for a non-profit that helps the poor.  [You can read the book online at the link.]

He then goes on to explain this misconception that people have to pay their debts and how this allows banks and international financial organizations to screw over developing nations to the advantage of big banks.  He goes on:

"Where to start?  I could have begun by explaining how these loans had originally been taken out by unelected dictators who place most of it directly in their Swiss bank accounts, and ask her to contemplate the justice of insisting that the lenders be repaid, not by the dictators or even by his cronies, but by literally taking food from the mouths of hungry children.  Or to think about how many of these poor countries had actually already paid back what they'd borrowed three or four times now, but that through the miracle of compound interest, it still hadn't made a significant dent in the principal!  I could also observe that there was a difference between refinancing loans, and demanding that in order to obtain refinancing, countries have to follow some orthodox free-market economics policy designed in Washington or Zurich that their citizens had never agreed to and never would, and that it was a bit dishonest to insist that countries adopt democratic constitutions and then also insist that, whoever gets elected, they have no control over their countries policies anyway.  Or that the economic policies imposed by the IMF (International Monetary Fund) didn't even work.  But there was a more basic problem:  the very assumptions that debts have to be paid."

 He then goes on to explain that banks charge interest based on the amount of risk of a debt and they expect many to not be repaid because of things like bankruptcy laws and LLC's. (limited liability companies.)

Then he goes on to talk about how the austerity polices forced onto the countries to force them to repay the debts caused the cut of basic services and infrastructure to deteriorate.  He gives the example of Madagascar, where he lived two years.  There was an outbreak of malaria

"It was a particularly virulent outbreak because malaria had been wiped out in highland Madagascar many years before, so that, after a couple of generations, most people lost their immunity.  The problem was it took money to maintain the mosquito eradication program, since there had to be periodic tests to make sure mosquitoes weren't starting to breed again and spraying campaigns if it was discovered that they were.  Not a lot of money.  But owing to IMF-imposed austerity programs, the government had to cut the monitoring program.  Ten thousand people died.  I met young mothers grieving for lost children.  One might think it would be hard to make a case that the loss of ten thousand lives is really justified in order to ensure that Citibank wouldn't have to cut its losses on one irresponsible loan that wasn't particularly important to its balance sheet anyway.  But here was a perfectly decent woman - one who worked for a charitable organization, no less - who took it as self-evident that it was.  After all, they owed the money, and surely one has to pay one's debts.

This is a 391 page book (not counting the notes) that I first saw in a bookstore a year and a half ago and wanted to read.  I've got it now, thanks to my son, and I'm hoping to get well into on this trip - yet again - to LA to see my mom.  The good news is she's out of the hospital and back home.  I also get some between flights time in Seattle with my daughter and granddaughter.  The little one recharges my batteries even better than walking in the woods.

As I recall, the book looks into the history of debt and how the bible even had jubilee years where all debts were forgiven.  Not a bad idea.  But reading these first few pages and how banks forced nations into austerity measures that destroyed lives, made me think about all the austerity measures some Republicans are arguing for now because - we have to pay our debts.  Graeber says in this early part of the book - paying debts is not an economic issue, it's a moral one.

So for those of you who still feel strongly that everyone has to pay their debts - even in the kinds of situations like the ones above (which sounds a lot like a payday lender with killer interest rates that the borrower didn't understand) hold your breath and assumptions and check back.  Or even better, check out the book at your library.  

From Kiev to Crimea is about the same as from New York to ?

The Russians have moved into the Crimean Peninsula, but I'm guessing only about two or three Americans out of a thousand could point to Crimea on a map.  So here's a post to raise those numbers.

First, here's a map of Europe with Ukraine in the black box.

Basic map from Infoplease

The black square is enlarged below, with the Crimean Peninsula highlighted in the black box. 

Just to get a sense of things, Kiev is about 430* air miles from Sevastapol.  Here are some other cities that are about the same distance apart.

Paris to Munich New York to Detroit Mumbai to Bhopal St. Louis to Ann Arbor Hanoi to Chiengmai Seattle to Calgary*

I understand that Russia's action is a big deal.  But it's also, apparently, a common event in this region.  From Wikipedia:

Crimea, or the Crimean Peninsula, located on the northern coast of the Black Sea, currently under the jurisdiction of Ukraine, has a history of over 2000 years. The territory has been conquered and controlled many times throughout this history. The Cimmerians, Greeks, Scythians, Goths, Huns, Bulgars, Khazars, the state of Kievan Rus', Byzantine Greeks, Kipchaks, Ottoman Turks, Golden Horde Tatars and the Mongols all controlled Crimea in its early history. In the 13th century, it was partly controlled by the Venetians and by the Genovese; they were followed by the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire in the 15th to 18th centuries, the Russian Empire in the 18th to 20th centuries, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and later the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic within the Soviet Union. In 1991 it became part of independent Ukraine, as the Autonomous Republic Crimea.

And while there will be calls for the US President to take decisive action, it makes sense to look at the geography of the Crimean Peninsula first.  It's almost inside Russia. It's as close as Mexico to the US.  You know how the US would respond to a military incursion by Russia or China in Mexico.  Russians will respond the same way.  Realistically, there's not a lot we can do militarily that wouldn't cause far more harm than doing nothing.  (But then Iraq and Afghanistan are distant memories for many.)  Our response will have to be patient and more nuanced than missiles and bombs.  First we should look at maps and maybe read some history.  Diplomacy and economics will be far more effective weapons in the long term. 

We tend to remember a place first by our own involvement in it.  If Americans know anything about the region, it's from Yalta and from the Crimean War, whose lasting legacies through the English to the US, include  Florence Nightingale,  and the Charge of the Light Brigade, a terrible debacle for the British.

The Charge Of The Light Brigade
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson Memorializing Events in the Battle of Balaclava, October 25, 1854
Written 1854


Half a league half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred:
'Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns' he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismay'd ?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do & die,
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd & thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army while
All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro' the line they broke;
Cossack & Russian
Reel'd from the sabre-stroke,
Shatter'd & sunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
While horse & hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder'd.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred! - See more at: http://www.nationalcenter.org/ChargeoftheLightBrigade.html#sthash.cuFNI4jM.dpuf

The Charge Of The Light Brigade

by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Memorializing Events in the Battle of Balaclava, October 25, 1854
Written 1854

Half a league half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred:
'Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns' he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismay'd ?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do & die,
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd & thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army while
All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro' the line they broke;
Cossack & Russian
Reel'd from the sabre-stroke,
Shatter'd & sunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
While horse & hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder'd.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!

From the National Center.

*I got most of these from Time and Date's distance tables which are air miles.

Earth Null School Follow Up: Is Greenland Bigger Than Brazil? UPDATED For Images

[UPDATED:  I've redone the images, so they should be visible this time.  Sorry.]

Former Alaskan and aviation faculty member and a pilot, Bill Butler, offered some followup info and images to my Earth Null School post.  I asked if I could post his email as a guest post.  He graciously agreed.  So here's a little more on this topic, which because it deals very visually with distortions of "how we know," is very dear to this blog's underlying theme.
I'm told, that geography isn't taught much in school these days.  My sense is that there are people who really, really know this stuff, people like me who sort of know it, and then most other people who don't have a clue.

With GPS people don't even need to read maps at all any more.  But understanding this helps us understand other geo-political issues.  Plus maps are a good metaphor for other representations of reality that aren't as tangible - like words and theories. And this issue about Mercator projections and how they distort size is certainly important to Alaskans.  (Relax, even after undistorting us, we're still bigger than Texas.)

So, for those of you for whom this is a stretch,  I invite you to do a little mental yoga.   I'm also trying to use parts of my brain that usually don't have to move at all.  And so, you'll see at the end of this post, my questions to Bill, and his further response.  

Part I - Bill's Guest Post

Because Mercator "straightens" the meridians of longitude, making them appear parallel instead of converging at the poles, he needed to mathematically stretch the distance between the parallels of latitude to keep proper relations between two points in the same region and then slice open the resulting cylinder to make a flat surface.  Note how the squares (known as graticules) become rectangular toward the poles.  The distortions are huge and obvious when we hang a map of the world on the classroom wall, but if our object is to make an accurate map for a voyage from, say--Norway to Scotland--they are insignificant :

[Steve's note:  Greenland (green) is mostly between 0˚ and 60˚ W and between 90˚ and 60˚N.  Brazil (red) is between 30˚ and 60˚W and 0˚ and 30˚ S]


On Mercator's Projection, the only place where there is no distortion is along the equator.  The farther you move from it, the greater the distortion.  The traditional comparison is Greenland to Brazil.  Brazil is 2.5 times the size of Greenland, but if you are navigating from Thule to Godthaab, that doesn't matter.

Johann Lambert (1728-1777, an Alsatian) figured out that if instead of creating Mercator's cylinder, you built a cone, it could also touch the surface at some parallel other than the equator and that would be the circle of zero distortion, and by moving the apex of the cone up or down in theoretical space you could choose whatever parallel suited the cartographer's need.  The flattened shape is awkward, but if you are making a series of smaller charts, they can be made in the traditional square or rectangular formats :





Further, Lambert discovered that you could project your cone through the Earth's surface and "touch" at two reference parallels with very little distortion:




You just sort of "tamp down" the bulge of the earth between the "standard parallels" and ignore the very small distortions, as in this example (note the bottom of the legend):






Here's a common use of Lamberts.  The table at the bottom of the legend shows the series of charts, using a variety of "standard parallels" to assure  the minimal distortion.  The lack of distortion in the Lambert projection is especially important for aerial navigation because it permits us to draw a straight line on the chart which is truly represents a great circle on the spherical earth, and great circles are the true path of the radio waves we use to establish positions and courses:




Pedantically yours,

Bill Butler
Professor of Aviation Technology (retired)


PART II - Steve's Questions and Bill's Response

Steve:  Can you explain a little more about the Lambert Charts?  Like, what are they for?  Who uses them? 

Bill:  Actually, they are used for a lot of things, but aircraft navigation may be most common  They come in different scales and with differing levels of detail, but their use is universal, and even with electronic mapping in most airline cockpits, these are the charts which are digitized.  The curved parallels of latitude are a natural outcome of projecting a sphere onto a flat surface, but they are only obvious over a great distance.

Steve:  Why does it say north to the right and south to the left when the map looks like those should be east and west?  Could use a more current one?
 

Bill:  What you are looking at is the cover of an aeronautical chart, where the legend appears explaining what is inside.  "north/south" tells you that this is a two-sided document and if you unfold it from this edge... 

Steve:  Why does it say Seattle, when it has the whole northern part of the US on it?

Bill:    It [the map below] says "San Francisco", for reasons which seem obvious...at least to me [;->  It is one of a set covering the entire nation and the little map shows you what all the others are named.  Note that the Lambert standard parallels for this chart are different than the ones used for the Seattle chart.




Steve:  OK, this is the cover page of your map.  And the little map that is cross hatched - in this case San Francisco - is what is inside this cover.  And in the previous map, I now see that Seattle is also cross-hatched. And thus the north and south designations on the sides would make sense when I opened the map.  Right?

Bill:  Exactly


Bill:  Let me back up a bit to Mercator, who shows that any "great circle" can be projected without distorting it.  He did this mathematically, but graphically, it looks like a sphere within a cylinder.  Note that the when the sphere was inflated to contact all points of the cylinder, only the equator stays exactly where it was, i.e. undistorted.  Now the meridians, while bent, retain their spherical nature, just like the equator.  That is, if you draw a straight line from say Kodiak to Hilo, it is truly the shortest distance and undistorted because they are both on the 150th Meridian, but if you draw a line from Anchorage to Oslo on the map below, even they are both roughly on the 60th Parallel, the track is hugely distorted, because as we both know, the shortest way is over the north tip of Greenland:





This problem can be attacked by what is known as a Transverse  or Oblique Mercator, that is by rotating the sphere within the cylinder so that any line we choose is a "false equator, that is, the line of zero distortion.  This is actually how Pan American attacked the problem when they began flying long overwater routes in the mid-30s; they would make special charts specific to each route and the crew could plot out their course knowing that what was on the paper was the shortest line between two points on a sphere, i.e. a great circle:




This solution is unworkable in a system where tens of thousands of aircraft fly hundreds of routes every day, but Lambert, provides the solution because we can use his theoretical cone (cones, actually, because we choose the one which touches the surface in the zone we are interested in) to map the entire earth with parallels, meridians and course lines drawn to look straight on the flat paper.  This is what the inside of that Seattle aeronautical chart looks like.  I have drawn a line from Portland to Boise in this example:





Notice that the meridians and the parallels appear to be straight (well, the parallel does show a bit of bend, but the error induced is miniscule), although they are segments of a great circle.  Lambert's genius is that the cartographer can select any "standard parallel" for zero distortion, and when he makes the next map to the south or north, choose a different parallel (actually two are used for each chart with acceptable error).

Steve:  Let's see if I got this.  With the original Mercator charts, you're saying, if you just focus on a small portion, even though there is distortion away from the equator, the distortion is the same throughout that small portion, so it's still usable.  Is that right?

Bill:  Almost.  There is a difference between the drawn line and the great circle which truly represents the shortest distance, but an 18th century sailor who was going from Newcastle to Bergen, unless he understood the spherical geometry (unlikely) would be unaware of any error, except it would take him a bit longer than he thought it should.  If he was sailing from Cardiff to Cadiz, there would be almost no error at all because the north-south meridians drawn as straight lines are still great circles.  Generally speaking, these errors were inefficient, but harmless until we started navigating over great distances in short times and using radio to determine courses and positions.

Steve:  And Lambert, by changing the "equator" for each map, clears the distortion that way?

Bill:  Exactly.

And I'm sure Bill would be glad to answer further questions in the comments.

Earth Null School

I know that kids looking at these maps would have lots of questions.  This old kid certainly does.  And that is a teachable moment.  What are the moving lines? (When you go to the originals, the wind currents are moving)

Screenshot from Earth Null School

I started running my cursor over things until I found the magic button - the word 'earth' in the lower left.  I cut it out in the screenshot above because I hadn't discovered it yet.  Here it is in another view.

Screenshot from Earth Null School

And when you click on 'earth' you get this panel of controls.

Screenshot from Earth Null School  Need to click earth to get this view

And the residuals of my Chinese are good enough that I know the link on the lower right is to a Japanese version.  

Go have a look.  Play with it yourself.  Watch the wind currents flow.  The water currents don't move quickly enough to see.  At least I didn't see them moving.  The middle image is "Projection CE"  and when I tried to look that up, I kept getting civil engineering.  But when I got the URL it says conic equidistant.  ArcGis defines this as:

"This conic projection can be based on one or two standard parallels. As its name implies, all circular parallels are spaced evenly along the meridians. This is true whether one or two parallels are used as the standards."

If you want to know more go to the ArcGis link.  

My friend B knows how to distract me by sending links like this. 

[UPDATE Feb. 24, 2014 -  Retired aviation technology professor Bill Butler commented here and sent me a longer email which is now a follow up guest post here.  It goes into more detail on Mercator maps and Lambert's maps.]

Blog Invasion - Trying To Figure Out What's Going On

Yesterday I had, according to Sitemeter,  744 hits. (Google Analytics says 1,192 which is about normal for them).   Sitemeter had been showing around 225 to 300 individual hits a day, sometimes more, sometimes less. Here's what the last seven days look like.  There were already 33 hits in the first half hour after midnight today. 

That's a pretty noticeable spike.    Below is today at 12:30pm.  I already have more hits than all of yesterday.  (Yellow are discrete visits, orange are page views)

Normally, when I get a spike like this, it's because I've put up a post that gets a lot of hits from links on other blogrolls, or some high profile website(s) has linked to a post.   That's not the case here.

A lot of the hits were coming from Bulgaria, Romania, Venezuela, Poland, and Spain, but also Greece and Turkey.  They were going mostly to posts that haven't been looked at in months.  There would be spurts of three or four hits on the same  few post in a ten minutes, sometimes within two minutes, then it would be on to other posts.  

There are old posts that get hits everyday.  Usually ones I never expected would become so popular over time - Alaskan Seemantham, How to Grow Tamarind Seeds, Fruit fly or Fungus Gnat? for example.  But yesterday people were hitting posts that just haven't been visited very often since they were originally posted, and many would seem to have limited appeal to Bulgarians or Poles. 

What's going on?  I don't know, but I thought I'd post this in case others are experiencing things like this.  Or if someone knows what's happening.

• Has google changed its algorithm?
• Is my blog being taken over by hackers?  
• Has sitemeter started reporting differently?

One particular post will suddenly get hits.  Then it fades away and another post gets the action.  Posts that have lain there unviewed for months.  Why is this happening?  Why these little clusters for a short period on one post and then a new one on another post.  It's like bees coming to one flower and sucking out the nectar and then moving on to another.

Does this have anything to do with another puzzling sitemeter reading?  The user, Feb. 2, was identified as Carlson and Partners in New York.  But the time was Alaska time rather than Eastern time and the eight pages on my blog it went to were the same pages I had gone to at about the exact same time.  Did Sitemeter mix up my search and their info?  Or had they invaded my computer and somehow followed me?  They're an advertising firm, but there's not much available about them today.  The company's founder, from what I can tell, Sandra Carlson, was closely connected with Ralph Lauren and had that account until she died in a car crash in 2003.  After that, I can't find anything. Not even a company website. 

I noticed once before that an advertising agency, Edelman, that had Anglo-American as a client, had visited a Pebble Mine related post..  And I've read that Edelman monitors the internet for their clients and even post comments.  I got a comment on that post not long after the Edelman hit that sounded suspiciously like a company flack hit job.


Here's the kind of thing I'm seeing:

http://whatdoino-ste...to-tok-in-13000.html
Greece  1:45
Turkey   1:45
Indonesia 1:46 

Here's what things looked like between 2:02pm (Alaska time) and 2:32pm yesterday.  I've left out eight hits that looked normal (I could see search terms or the links that got them here and they were all US or Canadian time zones.)  I do get various foreign hits every day, but these patterns are strange. (I also added in a couple before 2:02 that went to the same pages.)

From 2:02pm  to 2:32 pm

http://whatdoino-ste...g-so-well-these.html\
Venezuela 2:02  200.8.58.216
(There had been one from a Polish computer at 1:51, one from Chile at 1:53, one from Spain at 1:53;)

 http://whatdoino-ste...14/01/1972-book.html
Venezuela 2:06  190.79.100.245
Venezuela  2:10pm
Romania  2:11pm

 http://whatdoino-ste...g-so-well-these.html
Thai  2:06pm


http://whatdoino-ste...w-year-of-horse.html
Greek language 2:02pm 
????  - 2:07  11 hour time difference

http://whatdoino-ste...rday-films-benz.html
Mexico 2:07pm
UK (Brighton) 2:10pm
(There'd been one from Brazil at 1:55, and a French language one at 1:58)

http://whatdoino-ste...3_07_01_archive.html
Italy 2:08


http://whatdoino-ste...errymandered_15.html
Italy 2:08
Italy 2:10
Romania 2:13
(there had been one from Spain at 1:47pm and Venezuela at 1:48  201.243.123.246 ^?)

http://whatdoino-ste...lks-race-at-uaa.html
Turkey 2:13pm
Brazil  2:22 


http://whatdoino-ste...cidental-racist.html
???  2:18  11 hour time difference

 http://whatdoino-ste...eeting-victoria.html
Venezuela 2:13pm  201.209.4.13
Venezuela 2:26   190.79.8.59 ^?

 http://whatdoino-ste...gs-at-off-chain.html
Bangkok  2:18
Says USA, but the computer language is Russian and there's an 11 hour time difference 2:25   
(There had been one from Spain at 1:51pm)

 http://whatdoino-ste...o-start-and-end.html
Serbia 2:23 
Tunisia 2:32

http://whatdoino-ste...n-back-we-go-to.html
????  2:12   9 hour time difference
Macedonia 2:29 
(There'd been a Spanish language (es 41) at 1:54pm)
  I did check the IP addresses of some from Venezuela and as you can see they don't match, though two are really close.

Am I just being paranoid?  Is it just a mistake at Sitemeter?  Should I just be happy that suddenly my blog was discovered?  Or is someone messing with my blog?  

So, anyone have any ideas what's going on?  As I post this at 3:22pm I already have 962 hits today.  
 

Why The Senator Who Opposed Torture, As President Says "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques"

In Obama's talk this morning he used the euphemism "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques."   What he means is torture.  This post speculates on why he uses that term.  I don't come up with a final answer (as if anyone ever does), but I wanted to think this one through a bit and maybe some people will be reminded not to be distracted by euphemisms. 

In an interview with Time magazine, Ralph Keyes, the author of  Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms, said people use euphemisms:

 "to deflect us — and maybe even themselves — about what they're doing. .  .

David Lloyd George — he was Prime Minister of Britain during World War I — once said that if we ever spoke plainly and clearly about what was going on on the battlefields, the public would demand that we bring an end to war."

The euphemism is bad enough, but at the CIA it's been shortened to EITs. 


Am I exaggerating about this being torture?

From ABC News in 2005:

"The CIA sources described a list of six "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" instituted in mid-March 2002 and used, they said, on a dozen top al Qaeda targets incarcerated in isolation at secret locations on military bases in regions from Asia to Eastern Europe. According to the sources, only a handful of CIA interrogators are trained and authorized to use the techniques:

1. The Attention Grab: The interrogator forcefully grabs the shirt front of the prisoner and shakes him.

2. Attention Slap: An open-handed slap aimed at causing pain and triggering fear.

3. The Belly Slap: A hard open-handed slap to the stomach. The aim is to cause pain, but not internal injury. Doctors consulted advised against using a punch, which could cause lasting internal damage.

4. Long Time Standing: This technique is described as among the most effective. Prisoners are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are effective in yielding confessions.

5. The Cold Cell: The prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees. Throughout the time in the cell the prisoner is doused with cold water.

6. Water Boarding: The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt."

 But is that torture?   Remember, these are just the things they talked about openly. 

One of the CIA agents quoted in the story uses the word 'torture':

"It is "bad interrogation. I mean you can get anyone to confess to anything if the torture's bad enough," said former CIA officer Bob Baer." 

Judge for yourself with this example: 

"According to CIA sources, Ibn al Shaykh al Libbi, after two weeks of enhanced interrogation, made statements that were designed to tell the interrogators what they wanted to hear. Sources say Al Libbi had been subjected to each of the progressively harsher techniques in turn and finally broke after being water boarded and then left to stand naked in his cold cell overnight where he was doused with cold water at regular intervals"

The piece goes on to say the prisoner actually had no knowledge of what the interrogators wanted but made things up

  "because he was terrified of further harsh treatment"

An NBC investigative report on the movie Zero Dark Thirty which put American torture of terrorist suspects on the big screen for all to see, reports:

Working with Mitchell Jessen & Associates, the CIA soon developed a menu of 20 enhanced techniques – a list that was ultimately whittled down to 10, mainly because some of proposed techniques were considered too harsh even for terrorists.
“Not everything they proposed was part of the final menu,” said a former senior intelligence official, also speaking on condition of anonymity. “They came up with some stuff people didn’t like and were not approved. … There were legal tests. … Does it shock the conscience?  Does it lead to deep long-lasting injuries?”

I guess the question is whose conscience?  An average citizen or a psychopath?

But let's stop beating around the bush.  Here's what the UN Convention Against Torture, Part I, Article 1 says:  

For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions. 

There's no doubt that by international standards, "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" are torture.  


Why does Obama use this term?

It's depressing that the senator and presidential candidate who opposed  torture, now as president not only condones it, but he hides behind the euphemism "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques." 

I assume that his many security advisers have convinced him that certain activities are necessary, or at least have given him enough doubt that he hasn't outright banned torture.  And he's also been told, I'm sure, that he can't use the word torture or he will make the US and perhaps himself, vulnerable to international sanctions and perhaps

The US is a signatory to the UN Law Against Torture, but has a long list of official 'reservations.'  Perhaps we can call them quibbles about the meaning of 'torture.'  Thus, using Enhanced Interrogation Techniques is a way of saying that we are not using torture.  From the United Nations Treaty Collection:

       II. The Senate's advice and consent is subject to the following understandings, which shall apply to the obligations of the United States under this Convention:
       (1) (a) That with reference to article 1, the United States understands that, in order to constitute torture, an act must be specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering and that mental pain or suffering refers to prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from (1) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering; (2) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality; (3) the threat of imminent death; or (4) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality.
       (b) That the United States understands that the definition of torture in article 1 is intended to apply only to acts directed against persons in the offender's custody or physical control.
       (c) That with reference to article 1 of the Convention, the United States understands that `sanctions' includes judicially-imposed sanctions and other enforcement actions authorized by United States law or by judicial interpretation of such law. Nonetheless, the United States understands that a State Party could not through its domestic sanctions defeat the object and purpose of the Convention to prohibit torture.
       (d) That with reference to article 1 of the Convention, the United States understands that the term `acquiescence' requires that the public official, prior to the activity constituting torture, have awareness of such activity and thereafter breach his legal responsibility to intervene to prevent such activity.
       (e) That with reference to article 1 of the Convention, the Unites States understands that noncompliance with applicable legal procedural standards does not per se constitute torture.
       (2) That the United States understands the phrase, `where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture,' as used in article 3 of the Convention, to mean `if it is more likely than not that he would be tortured.'
       (3) That it is the understanding of the United States that article 14 requires a State Party to provide a private right of action for damages only for acts of torture committed in territory under the jurisdiction of that State Party.
       (4) That the United States understands that international law does not prohibit the death penalty, and does not consider this Convention to restrict or prohibit the United States from applying the death penalty consistent with the Fifth, Eighth and/or Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, including any constitutional period of confinement prior to the imposition of the death penalty.
       (5) That the United States understands that this Convention shall be implemented by the United States Government to the extent that it exercises legislative and judicial jurisdiction over the matters covered by the Convention and otherwise by the state and local governments. Accordingly, in implementing articles 10-14 and 16, the United States Government shall take measures appropriate to the Federal system to the end that the competent authorities of the constituent units of the United States of America may take appropriate measures for the fulfilment of the Convention.
       III. The Senate's advice and consent is subject to the following declarations:
       (1) That the United States declares that the provisions of articles 1 through 16 of the Convention are not self-executing.

I can't imagine that the US Congress would put up with external inquiries into US torture.  They simply would refuse to comply and start withdrawing support for international organizations that tried to enforce sanctions against the US.  The US is still powerful enough to do that. 

But it would be embarrassing and it would officially lower the status of the US world wide.  I'd note that most members of Congress seem to dismiss the opinions of people who oppose what they believe.

For more on this topic, the ACLU has a number of links.

Here's also a CATO Institute comment on torture. 

[This post is evidence of my blogging addiction.  I have other things to do today, but the President's euphemism wouldn't let go of me until I wrote this.  A (bigger?) issue that will have to wait til later is the unspoken acknowledgement that what Snowden did was important.   It's not as proofed and checked as most posts.  I'll check on it again when I get my to do list done.  Your help in fisxing things is appreciated.]