And so it came to this

In the year 2018 it is no longer insane to suspect that the Soviet Union Russia executed a successful multi-year campaign against the United States of America which included the subversion of the GOP and the election of an incompetent President who effectively obeys Russia’s supreme leader.

I’m not saying this is likely. I’m not saying this was entirely planned rather than, say, somewhat opportunistic and emergent.

I’m just saying it’s no longer insane to suspect that we lost a war we didn’t realize we were fighting.

American psychology and civil war in Egypt

An acquaintance from my Quebec High School is active in Egypt's secular resistance to Morsi's rule. She's frustrated by Obama's tolerance of the Muslim brotherhood; I think she would prefer the freedom rhetoric of Bush II. Personally, I prefer Obama.

That's not what's interesting though. The interesting bit is she seems genuinely confident that Egypt won't break down, like Syria and Iraq, into civil war. That confidence seems strange to an American, even an immigrant American like me. We believe in Civil War; we had a big one not long ago. There are still flare ups in old battlefields.

For an American it's easy to imagine Civil War in Egypt. There are many things that are strange to us, but not civil war.

Schneier: Security, technology, and why global warming isn't a real problem

In the Fever Days after September 2011, I wrote a bit about "the cost of havoc". The premise was that technology was consistently reducing the cost of havoc, but the cost of prevention was falling less quickly.

I still have my writing, but most of it is offline - esp. prior to 2004. As I said, those were the times of fever; back then we saw few alternatives to a surveillance society. Imagine that.

Ok, so that part did happen. On the other hand, we don't have Chinese home bioweapon labs yet. Other than ubiquitous surveillance, 2013 is more like 2004 than I'd expected.

The falling cost of offense/cost of defense ratio remains though. Today it's Schneier's turn to write about it… (emphases mine)

Schneier on Security: When Technology Overtakes Security

A core, not side, effect of technology is its ability to magnify power and multiply force -- for both attackers and defenders….

.. The problem is that it's not balanced: Attackers generally benefit from new security technologies before defenders do. They have a first-mover advantage. They're more nimble and adaptable than defensive institutions like police forces. They're not limited by bureaucracy, laws, or ethics. They can evolve faster. And entropy is on their side -- it's easier to destroy something than it is to prevent, defend against, or recover from that destruction.

For the most part, though, society still wins. The bad guys simply can't do enough damage to destroy the underlying social system. The question for us is: can society still maintain security as technology becomes more advanced?

I don't think it can.

Because the damage attackers can cause becomes greater as technology becomes more powerful. Guns become more harmful, explosions become bigger, malware becomes more pernicious...and so on. A single attacker, or small group of attackers, can cause more destruction than ever before...

.. Traditional security largely works "after the fact"… When that isn't enough, we resort to "before-the-fact" security measures. These come in two basic varieties: general surveillance of people in an effort to stop them before they do damage, and specific interdictions in an effort to stop people from using those technologies to do damage.

… Lots of technologies are already restricted: entire classes of drugs, entire classes of munitions, explosive materials, biological agents. There are age restrictions on vehicles and training restrictions on complex systems like aircraft. We're already almost entirely living in a surveillance state, though we don't realize it or won't admit it to ourselves. This will only get worse as technology advances… today's Ph.D. theses are tomorrow's high-school science-fair projects.

Increasingly, broad prohibitions on technologies, constant ubiquitous surveillance, and Minority Report-like preemptive security will become the norm..

… sooner or later, the technology will exist for a hobbyist to explode a nuclear weapon, print a lethal virus from a bio-printer, or turn our electronic infrastructure into a vehicle for large-scale murder...

… If security won't work in the end, what is the solution?

Resilience -- building systems able to survive unexpected and devastating attacks -- is the best answer we have right now. We need to recognize that large-scale attacks will happen, that society can survive more than we give it credit for, and that we can design systems to survive these sorts of attacks. Calling terrorism an existential threat is ridiculous in a country where more people die each month in car crashes than died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

If the U.S. can survive the destruction of an entire city -- witness New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or even New York after Sandy -- we need to start acting like it, and planning for it. Still, it's hard to see how resilience buys us anything but additional time. Technology will continue to advance, and right now we don't know how to adapt any defenses -- including resilience -- fast enough.

We need a more flexible and rationally reactive approach to these problems and new regimes of trust for our information-interconnected world. We're going to have to figure this out if we want to survive, and I'm not sure how many decades we have left.

Here's shorter Schneier, which is an awful lot like what I wrote in 2001 (and many others wrote in classified reports):

• Stage 1: Universal surveillance, polite police state, restricted technologies. We've done this.
• Stage 2: Resilience -- grow accustomed to losing cities. We're  not (cough) quite there yet.
• Stage 3: Resilience fails, we go to plan C. (Caves?)

Or even shorter Schneier

• Don't worry about global warming.

Grim stuff, but I'll try for a bit of hope. Many of the people who put together nuclear weapons assumed we'd have had a history ending nuclear war by now. We've had several extremely close calls (not secret, but not widely known), but we're still around. I don't understand how we've made it this far, but maybe whatever got us from 1945 to 2013 will get us to 2081.

Another bright side -- we don't need to worry about sentient AIs. We're going to destroy ourselves anyway, so they probably won't do much worse.

What's so bad about a bit of torture?

"... The Guardian newspaper unveiled the results of a year-long investigation purporting to show that U.S. military advisers, with the knowledge and support of many senior officials, including former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and disgraced Gen. David Petraeus, oversaw a vast program of torture inside Iraqi prisons..

..Col. James Steele and Col. James H Coffman, ran a high-level secret program inside Iraqi prisons to extract information from alleged insurgents and Al Qaeda terrorists...." (10 Years After the Invasion of Iraq, a World of Hurt )

I run into Republicans on occasion. There's my beloved Uncle D for one, and there are some at work and in my Facebook feed.

I run into them, but we don't discuss politics. Similarly I don't consume any GOP media; neither Murdoch's nor talk radio nor right wing blogs. So what I know of Republican thinking is filtered by the NYT, NPR, Ezra Klein, Paul Krugman and the rest of my 400 feeds.

Except for app.net. That's the one place where I get to correspond with intellectual Republicans. It was there that some of us worked through a discussion on the role of torture in modern warfare. During our conversation, I was challenged to defend my scorn for the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld (BCR) torture program. I was surprised -- it's been a long time since I've had to think about why the BCR program was a terrible idea.

It's good to have surprises like that, and good to use this blog to think through my position, starting with a contrary "pro-torture" perspective of my own. (I'm not trying to represent my correspondent's position, I'd likely distort it unfairly.)

My pro-torture argument has nothing to do with whether torture is effective or not. That's a red herring; for the sake of argument let us assume that a skilled torturer always breaks any resistance and hears whatever the victim believes to be true.

Instead I, playing the role of Dick Cheney, will argue that torture isn't so bad. After all, we Americans routinely kill combatants and civilians in our many wars, not to mention our domestic execution chambers. We, more than most nations, sentence vast numbers of citizens to particularly nasty prisons.

Those are nasty fates. Given the choice, many of us might opt instead for a bit of sensory deprivation, flogging, waterboarding, electric shocks, and thumbscrews.

So then why should we be particularly averse to torture? If torture is no worse than routine warfare, shouldn't we retroactively pardon the torturers we imprisoned after World War II? Should we apologize to North Korea and North Vietnam for the mean names we called them; and discard our meager loyalty to the Geneva Conventions once and for all?

These are strong arguments, but history tells me they are misguided. There's a reason that torture was slowly removed from the legal code, and that 'cruel and unusual punishment' was a part of the English Bill of Rights in 1689.

One reason is that people who inflict torment on prisoners, who are by definition helpless, are changed by their experience. Some are repelled by the work, but some are attracted to it. The historical record tells us the practice spreads quickly, from special circumstances to general circumstances. From a few isolated rooms to a vast network of American supported Iraqi torture chambers. From the battlefield to Homeland Defense, and from Homeland Defense to the Ultra-security prison, from the Ultra-security prison to the routine prison, from the prison to the streets ...

Torture, history suggests, is habit forming. If humans were machines we might be able to manage torture as readily as we manage prison sentences. We're not though. Our culture fares badly when we make torture acceptable.

Our military knew that in 2005.

We should remember that now.

See also

Gordon's Notes

• Obama – leading us out of the darkness and the torture chamber 1/2009. Obama shut down the detention centers very publicly. The GOP blocked the closure of Guantanamo - with the help of some Dems.
• Inmate Kyle Foggo – Creator of the post-2003 torture facilities 8/2009. His Wikipedia entry is here. Contrary to my thoughts in 2009, Obama turned away from the torture trail.
• America's Inquisition 1/2012. The Inquisition followed the same time honored procedures.
• The Argentinian solution 3/2005. We should ask Argentinians about the impact of their torture program on their society.
• No, religion does not make you a better person 4/2009. Religious Americans tend to approve of torture. This makes a lot of sense given the concept of Hell.
• The right declares in favor of torture - responding to the ticking clock 11/2007. Clive Crook is often an ass, but he wrote very well about this topic.
• That which does not kill me is not torture 6/200. John Fredman - "If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong"
• CIA Torture tapes destroyed 12/2007. Destroying the evidence paid off.
• Bush didn't want to know the location of the CIA's torture facilities 12/2007. Plausible deniability.
• American torture - what's next 1/2009. Obama pledged to follow the Geneva convention. We're still waiting for the Truth Commission.
• The classification and heritage of American torture 3/2009. We're "Anglo-Saxon modern".
• Another Cheney fan rediscovers waterboarding really is torture 5/2009. Radio fruitcake discovers what torture is.
• Restoring American civilization: 12 steps NYT 3/2007. Still waiting.
• American fear and our shredded honor - two ringing voices against torture 5/2007. Retired military leaders "As has happened with every other nation that has tried to engage in a little bit of torture -- only for the toughest cases, only when nothing else works -- the abuse spread like wildfire, and every captured prisoner became the key to defusing a potential ticking time bomb."

Others

• Waterboarding is Torture... Period (Links Updated # 9) | Small Wars Journal 10/2007. A SERE graduate.
• What do the Bushies and the Khmer Rouge share? - Kristof 12/2008. Waterboarding.
• 183 - Krugman 4/2009. KSM was waterboarded 183 times in one month. Some people get to like doing torture. Cheney tortured and tortured until his victims told him Iraq had WMDs.
• Franken’s torture smackdown | MinnPost 7/2012
• U.S. Says Rendition to Continue, but With More Oversight - 8/2009 I'd like the NYT to f/u on what has happened over the past four years.
• Pentagon's link to Iraqi torture centres The Guardian 3/2013: Rumsfeld era, but ties torture program to Pentagon and to Petraeus.

Understanding the Middle East: Iran's 16th century Safavid Dynasty (IOT)

Around the time Spain and Portugal were swarming over the Americas and the European Renaissance was firing up, a semi-divine Sufi Ruler [2] created modern Shiism and reshaped Iran and its neighbors.

This was the time of the Safavid Dynasty (and empire).

I had no idea - until I listened to this excellent In Our Time podcast [1]:

BBC - BBC Radio 4 Programmes - In Our Time, The Safavid Dynasty 

... In 1501 Shah Ismail, a boy of fifteen, declared himself ruler of Azerbaijan. Within a year he had expanded his territory to include most of Persia, and founded a ruling dynasty which was to last for more than two hundred years. At the peak of their success the Safavids ruled over a vast territory which included all of modern-day Iran. They converted their subjects to Shi'a Islam, and so created the religious identity of modern Iran - although they were also often ruthless in their suppression of Sunni practices. They thrived on international trade, and their capital Isfahan, rebuilt by the visionary Shah Abbas, became one of the most magnificent cities in the world. Under Safavid rule Persia became a cultural centre, producing many great artists and thinkers...

The role of Armenian Christians in the dynasty puts the infamous Turkish genocide in a historical perspective. The Ottamans and Safavids were great rivals, and the Christian Armenians seem forever caught in the crossfire.

This history, and the myths that arose from it, explain a lot about modern Iran and the great Shia-Sunni struggles of the 21st century.

[1] This link is to the almost impossible to find archived podcast. Despite the BBC's stated podcast policy these are no longer discoverable from the primary In Our Time episode archives. You can find them on on the hidden BBC IOT Podcast archive. You may be able to also extract them from the iTunes archive or the BCC IOT Podcast feed. I blame it on Cameron.
[2] The last of the Iranian Shahs, prior to the latest revolution, was accused of favoring Zoroastrian ideas, including divine rule. The God-King is a worldwide tradition. (Aside, I met one on his sons when I was at Williams College in @ 1979/80.)

Victims of a mass murderer

A US Army sergeant murders16 men, women and children -- and all we hear about is his personal hardship.

This would be enlightened progress -- if Americans were routinely sympathetic to the stresses of adult mass murderers. Alas, I haven't noticed that. In Texas, for example, even mentally retarded or psychotic people are executed for murder.

It's getting so bad that even American journalists are starting to notice. Helpfully, Al Jazeera provides a corrective ...

No one asked their names | Al Jazeera Blogs 

...The dead:
Mohamed Dawood son of Abdullah
Khudaydad son of Mohamed Juma
Nazar Mohamed
Payendo
Robeena
Shatarina daughter of Sultan Mohamed
Zahra daughter of Abdul Hamid
Nazia daughter of Dost Mohamed
Masooma daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Farida daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Palwasha daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Nabia daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Esmatullah daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Faizullah son of Mohamed Wazir
Essa Mohamed son of Mohamed Hussain
Akhtar Mohamed son of Murrad Ali

The wounded:
Haji Mohamed Naim son of Haji Sakhawat
Mohamed Sediq son of Mohamed Naim
Parween
Rafiullah
Zardana
Zulheja

Escape from North Korea's Camp 14

Life in the empire of the Kims:

How one man escaped from a North Korean prison camp | Books | The Guardian

... The South Korean government estimates there are about 154,000 prisoners in North Korea's labour camps, while the US state department puts the number as high as 200,000. The biggest is 31 miles long and 25 miles wide, an area larger than the city of Los Angeles. Numbers 15 and 18 have re-education zones where detainees receive remedial instruction in the teachings of Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung, and are sometimes released. The remaining camps are "complete control districts" where "irredeemables" are worked to death...

... One day, Shin joined his mother at work, planting rice. When she fell behind, a guard made her kneel in the hot sun with her arms in the air until she passed out...

.. in June 1989, Shin's teacher, a guard who wore a uniform and a pistol on his hip, sprang a surprise search of the six-year-olds. When it was over, he held five kernels of corn. They all belonged to a slight girl Shin remembers as exceptionally pretty. The teacher ordered the girl to the front of the class and told her to kneel. Swinging his wooden pointer, he struck her on the head again and again. As Shin and his classmates watched in silence, lumps puffed up on her skull, blood leaked from her nose and she toppled over on to the concrete floor. Shin and his classmates carried her home. Later that night, she died...

... Trust among friends was poisoned by constant competition. Trying to win extra food rations, children told guards what their neighbours were eating, wearing and saying...

... On the morning after he betrayed his mother and brother, uniformed men came to the schoolyard for Shin. He was handcuffed, blindfolded and driven in silence to an underground prison...

... chief's lieutenants pulled off Shin's clothes and trussed him up. When they were finished, his body formed a U, his face and feet toward the ceiling, his bare back toward the floor. The chief interrogator shouted more questions. A tub of burning charcoal was dragged beneath Shin, then the winch lowered towards the flames. Crazed with pain and smelling his burning flesh, Shin twisted away. One of the guards grabbed a hook and pierced the boy in the abdomen, holding him over the fire until he lost consciousness....

... Uncle nursed Shin, rubbing salty cabbage soup into his wounds as a disinfectant and massaging Shin's arms and legs so his muscles would not atrophy. "Kid, you have a lot of days to live," Uncle said. "They say the sun shines even on mouse holes."...

... The new teacher sometimes sneaked food to Shin. He also assigned him less arduous work and stopped the bullying. Shin put on some weight. The burns healed. Why the new teacher made the effort, Shin never knew...

... In the summer of 2004, while he was carrying one of these cast-iron machines, it slipped and broke beyond repair. Sewing machines were considered more valuable than prisoners: the chief foreman grabbed Shin's right hand and hacked off his middle finger just above the first knuckle...

... In December 2004, Shin began thinking about escape. Park's spirit, his dignity and his incendiary information gave Shin a way to dream about the future. He suddenly understood where he was and what he was missing. Camp 14 was no longer home; it was a cage. And Shin now had a well-travelled friend to help him get out...

... Without hesitation, Shin crawled over his friend's body. He was nearly through when his legs slipped off Park's torso and came into contact with the wire....

... Shallow and frozen, the river here was about a hundred yards wide. He began to walk. Halfway across, he broke through and icy water soaked his shoes. He crawled the rest of the way to China.

Within two years, he was in South Korea. Within four, he was living in southern California, an ambassador for Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), an American human rights group.

His name is now Shin Dong-hyuk. His overall physical health is excellent. His body, though, is a roadmap of the hardships of growing up in a labour camp that the North Korean government insists does not exist. Stunted by malnutrition, he is short and slight – 5ft 6in and about 120lb (8.5 stone). His arms are bowed from childhood labour. His lower back and buttocks are covered with scars. His ankles are disfigured by shackles. His right middle finger is missing. His shins are mutilated by burns from the fence that failed to keep him inside Camp 14.

I don't generally think that Hell is a good idea, but it is tempting to make an exception for the Kims.

North Korea is China's great shame. In a just world, for the sin of North Korea alone, China's leaders would join Dick Cheney in prison.

See also:

• You too can visit North Korea 1/2010
• The harshness of mortal life - hidden refugees from North Korea 3/2005
• North Korea 2/2011

What is Iran really afraid of?

Saddam Hussein, we are told, knew that his weapons of mass destruction were no longer effective. He might not have understood how completely historical they were, but he knew Iraq could pass a weapons inspection.

So why did he decline inspection, and give Bush the leverage he needed to launch a terrible war?

We are told he feared Iran. He was afraid that if Iran knew his WMDs were only a bluff, they'd destroy him.

Now we are told that Iran is working towards a nuclear WMD -- though it's not clear they've committed to building one.

Nuclear weapons are not usually considered useful offensive weapons. They are strategic deterrents. That's why India and Pakistan and Israel have them; they all face credible threats of significant military power.

So what is Iran so afraid of that they want a major strategic deterrent? [1]

iran - Google Maps

Clearly, it's not Israel they're afraid of. That's good for stirring up the electoral base, but Israel is not going to invade Iran. They may attack Iran's nuclear facilities, but that's not a reason to build nuclear weapons. Of course Israel is in a constant state of low-grade terrorist combat with Iranian proxies, but then so is Iraq, the US, Saudi Arabia and... really ... a lot of nations.

Historically Iran has feared Iraq. But Iraq is Shia now, and years from being ready to invade anyone.

Saudi Arabia - sure, but Saudi is on the verge of collapse. No invasion or military threat there. Turkey? I don't think so. And so it goes around the borders. Turkmenistan, Afghanistan ... no real threats there. Certainly nothing that would suggest a WMD strategic deterrent.

The US? No.

What's left? Pakistan? Well, Pakistan is Sunni dominated, and the leadership is at least as crazy as Iran's, and they have a WMD ... Still, relations are supposed to be good.

So what's Iran afraid of?

[1] Iran's leadership is unbalanced even by the standards of tyranny, and Iranians are no less crazy than Americans, but I think the reality is somewhere between Gwynne Dyer and Jeffery Goldberg. In other words, nasty, vicious, half-barking leadership, but not suicidal.

Another one of our victims speaks

Another victim of America's Inquisition:

Notes From a Guantánamo Survivor - Murat Kurnaz - NYTimes.com

… was taken to Kandahar, in Afghanistan, where American interrogators asked me the same questions for several weeks: Where is Osama bin Laden? Was I with Al Qaeda? No, I told them, I was not with Al Qaeda. No, I had no idea where bin Laden was. I begged the interrogators to please call Germany and find out who I was. During their interrogations, they dunked my head under water and punched me in the stomach; they don’t call this waterboarding but it amounts to the same thing. I was sure I would drown.

At one point, I was chained to the ceiling of a building and hung by my hands for days. A doctor sometimes checked if I was O.K.; then I would be strung up again. The pain was unbearable...

I'm hoping one of these victims will get their case heard in the World Court.

There's hope, as always, in the younger generation. Maybe, one day, they'll hold trials (via Doc Searls …)

Otherwise occupied: What price revolution? | Hal Crowther | Independent Weekly

… what I think I see, through the media fog of polarized America, is the return of the full-fledged idealists (as opposed to single-issue idealists) who seemed to go underground around 1980, possibly because the mass media abandoned them during the mudslide of self-celebration that began with Reaganism and culminated in Facebook.

I say God bless them, and God will if he still has any investment in the United States of America. The Goliath they challenge has crushed a thousand Davids. The good news is that "the kids" are right on target. Their diagnosis is bull's-eye correct, and the patient is critical. For this country to survive, it must find saner ways to pursue and multiply wealth, and find them quickly. The cannibal capitalism that produced a Goldman Sachs and a Bernie Madoff is subhuman and obscene. There's no form of government more inherently offensive than plutocracy—only theocracy comes close. When a citizen comes of age in a plutocracy, he has no moral choice but to slay Pluto or die trying...

America's Inquisition

The Atlantic doesn't have this article online yet ...

Torturer's Apprentice, Cullen Murphy Jan/Feb 2012

... The first technique used by the Inquisition was ... torture by suspension ... it has been employed in the interrogation of prisoners in US custody ...

... The second technique was the rack ...

... The third technique involved water ... fabric plugged a victim's upturned mouth ... upon wich water was poured ...

... the (Bush) administration's threshold for when an act of torture begins was the point at which the inquisition stipulated that it must stop...

To clarify the last excerpt -- the Bush administration interrogation policy was remarkably similar to the Inquisition's interrogation policy. Their torture and our non-torture had similar (theoretical) stopping points.

American torture dishonored us, but we can honor those who said No.

We have been doubly shamed over the past ten years. Once by our embrace of torture, a second time by our inability to prosecute.

We can't undo our past, but there are some things we can do. Even if, as Tracy Lightcap tells us, "Bush's C-in-C order of 13 November 2001 and the subsequent OLC memos (effectively DOJ opinions) make it virtually impossible to prosecute those involved in acts of torture..." we can still establish a truth commission to document what was done.

Even before a truth commission, however, we can begin with a small step ...

Honoring Those Who Said No to Torture - NYTimes.com
Jameel Jaffer is a deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union. Larry Siems is the director of the Freedom to Write program at the PEN American Center

ON January 2004, Spec. Joseph M. Darby, a 24-year-old Army reservist in Iraq, discovered a set of photographs showing other members of his company torturing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison. The discovery anguished him, and he struggled over how to respond. “I had the choice between what I knew was morally right, and my loyalty to other soldiers,” he recalled later. “I couldn’t have it both ways.”

So he copied the photographs onto a CD, sealed it in an envelope, and delivered the envelope and an anonymous letter to the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command. Three months later — seven years ago today — the photographs were published. Specialist Darby soon found himself the target of death threats, but he had no regrets. Testifying at a pretrial hearing for a fellow soldier, he said that the abuse “violated everything I personally believed in and all I’d been taught about the rules of war.”

He was not alone. Throughout the military, and throughout the government, brave men and women reported abuse, challenged interrogation directives that permitted abuse, and refused to participate in an interrogation and detention program that they believed to be unwise, unlawful and immoral. The Bush administration’s most senior officials expressly approved the torture of prisoners, but there was dissent in every agency, and at every level.

There are many things the Obama administration could do to repair some of the damage done by the last administration, but among the simplest and most urgent is this: It could recognize and honor the public servants who rejected torture...

It's the very least we should do. We can start at the local level, then the state level, then the federal.

Does anyone know of an "honor role" of those who said No?

Perhaps man was not meant to fly after all

Most things do not end the way I once imagined. The buildings don’t collapse because the foundation is gone. They sag. They fade. For a long while nothing seems all that different. One day we realize they’re really gone.

I thought fax machines would be gone by 1990. This morning I explained to Emily how our never used Brother MFC fax function could be, in theory, receive a fax sent to our home number.

After the anthrax attack I though letters would go away; that PDF would replace both paper mail and, incidentally, fax. I still get letters.

I don’t get many letters though, and I don’t get many faxes. Postal stations are closing. Kinkos, where we used to send and receive faxes, is going away. Faxes, letters, pay phones, printers – they’re joining slide rules, typewriters and carbon paper.

In November of 2001 I thought the era of mass air travel would end. It seemed too expensive to secure planes given the psychology of fear and the limitations of human risk assessment. Havoc was simply too inexpensive, too easy. I thought the teleprescence market would take off. I didn’t expect Al Qaeda to spend 9 years being stupid. Alas, they seem to have gotten smarter lately.

Now, 9 years later, air travel is much more expensive and uncomfortable than it used to be. Now the poor sods doing TSA work are mocked and scorned. Now my employer rarely flies any worker bees anywhere. Now Apple markets FaceTime (though nobody actually uses it).

Popular aviation is looking rusty, and the Great-Recession-deferred 2011 $5/gallon gasoline I predicted in 2007 is still coming, albeit two years late. As gas prices rise, so will the price of aviation fuel.

Faxes may be gone by 2020. I think so will the air travel we once knew. The world is going to get much bigger.

See also:

Others

• 'Like a Full-Body Massage' Thinking About the TSA - James Fallows - National - The Atlantic
• 'Securo-crats' terrorizing travellers - Gwynne Dyer - Winnipeg Free Press
• The Safety Question, Pt.2 | Talking Points Memo
• Hi. I am now going to touch your junk - Morford
• Why Cavity Bombs Would Make the TSA Irrelevant - Jeffrey Goldberg - The Atlantic
• Where I draw the line - Roger Ebert's Journal

Mine

• Gordon's Notes- 2011- The year American life changes (7/18/2007 – I was off by two years)
• Gordon's Notes- Unintended consequences- DVRs & the death of broadcast tv, HDTV and massive hard: Perils of prognostication. In 2004 I thought DVRs would be disruptive, just as I once thought CDs would be disruptive. In both cases it all went to the net.
• Gordon's Notes- Pay phones join tape reels and broadcast TV (12/2007 – technology transition. Slide rules too.)

Torture and the constitution: The fury beings with the Ghailini trial

Now we get to the discussion we’ve long expected.

Civilian courts do not allow testimony obtained through torture. The GOP is the party of torture, so they are enraged.

Incidentally, this NYT article has one of the most misleading and lousy headlines of the past few months atop an article that buries everything that matters.

What is being tested here is not Obama’s strategy, but rather America’s care of its Constitution (emphases mine). America will fail …

Terror Verdict Tests Obama’s Strategy on Trials - NYTimes.com

… Ahmed Ghailani will face between 20 years and life in prison as a result of his conviction on one charge related to the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa. But because a jury acquitted him on more than 280 other charges — including every count of murder — critics of the Obama administration’s strategy on detainees said the verdict proved that civilian courts could not be trusted to handle the prosecution of Al Qaeda terrorists.

… the reason some Guantánamo cases are hard to prosecute is that under the Bush administration, evidence was obtained by coercion, creating a problem for prosecutors regardless of the legal venue…

… many observers attributed any weakness to the prosecution’s case to the fact that the Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the trial, refused to allow prosecutors to introduce testimony from an important witness apparently because investigators discovered the man’s existence after interrogators used abusive and coercive techniques on Mr. Ghailani…

… But the question of where Mr. Mohammed will be prosecuted has remained in limbo, and Mr. Holder has made no more referrals from the detainee population to either system.

While Judge Kaplan could still sentence Mr. Ghailani to a life sentence, even some proponents of civilian trials acknowledged that his acquittal on most of the charges against him was damaging to their cause because it was a stark demonstration that it was possible that a jury might acquit a defendant entirely in such a case…

“The paradox with these kinds of cases has always been that if these individuals are found not-guilty, will the American government let them go free, which is the construct of a criminal proceeding? And the answer is no. That is the reality. This case highlights that tension, and will complicate the political debate about how to handle more senior Al Qaeda figures, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.”

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed cannot be convicted in a constitutionally valid trial because he was abundantly tortured. That was one of the GOP’s gifts to America.

The GOP has been, and will be, the party of torture. That is the source of their rage; they love their vision of the Constitution, but they hate the reality of the Constitution.

The morality of markets - and a response to hunger

There is no Good in markets Krugman writes. It's short and good, and it should be read in every high school as an antidote to Marketarianism. Markets are not divine, theys are simply satisficing mechanisms for seeking local minima.

Krugman is responding to accusations that he favors war as a solution to the Great Waste (sequelae to the Great Recession).  He gives a smart response to dumb questions, but reading how major wars do Keynes better than politicians made me think about What Would the Market Do?

What do I mean? Well, consider this. Charlie Stross, one of my mind expanding writers included "Finance Economics 2.0" in the novel Accelerando. Economics 2.0 was what emerged when trading/Finance AIs remade the solar system in their own image. It wasn't a pleasant place. [1]

The story captured a sense I often have that the large, complex adaptive systems we live in are, seen from a certain angle in a certain world as real and unreal as our own, alive. Not smart like we are, but alive in a landscape dominated by very powerful amoebae.

In this worldslice Markets are entities with their own agenda -- mostly to eat and grow. Sometimes, though, the growing is slow. The Market has to find new food. It moves along a chemotropic gradient to a new source of nutrition.

War.

[1] I updated this paragraph thanks to a helpful comment.

Cable connections - now think about conflict

Fallows blogs (again) about the infowarrior global telecom map, which includes cables like C2C (emphases mine):

Greg's Cable Map: C2C

7.5Tbps

16 Cable Landings  

Changi (Singapore)
Nasugbu (Philippines)
Chung Hom Kok (Hong Kong)
Tanguisson (Guam)
Chikura (Japan)
Redondo Beach (USA)
Hawaii (USA)
Los Angeles (USA)
Hillsboro (USA)
Nedonna Beach (USA)
Toyohashi (Japan)
Shima (Japan)
Pusan (South Korea)
Nanhui District (China)
Tamusi (Taiwan)
Fangshan (Taiwan)

War would be very inconvenient in the modern world. James F sends us to Stephenson's classic Wired article on this topic, I learned some of that history from Stephenson's later Cryptonomicon.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Taliban and Patriarchy

Family and friends of a young Afghan couple stoned them to death. Did the girl's father throw a stone? Will his sleep be forever tortured?

Humans are revolting. We should really start over with dogs.

Pending a better sentient animal, however, while stonings, whippings, and mutilations of women are momentarily in the public eye, it is worth resurrecting the old question ...

What fraction of the Talib/Afghan/Saudi/Wahabi cross-gender resistance to the American agenda comes from a desire to maintain extreme patriarchy and male power?

There are, of course, many reasons for anyone to resist the (fungible) American agenda, and many reasons to question the value and expression of that agenda. Those are good discussions, but they don't change my question. (Note that the resistance I'm referring to is cross-gender; women in these cultures are often strident supporters of their current cultural milieu.)

My guess is that maintenance of patriarchy is the strongest single reason for resisting American interventions including education and health care. If we could quantify contributing factors, I bet 2/3 would fall under patriarchy.

I wonder if there's any way to objectively measure this. It might be important to understand, as we enter Year 10 of the Long War.

The terror-industrial complex

Is this the last gasp of the Washington Post? At least they're going out in style.

Emphases mine. Clearly "top secret" is now meaningless.

A hidden world, growing beyond control | Top Secret America - washingtonpost.

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation's other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space...

Normally this would be a very sweet target for budget cutting, but now it's a form of bipartisan stimulus. Can't spend too much on security you know. (Of course this kind of Keystone Cops spending must actually reduce security).

WaPo has an online database summarizing what they learned from public records. The merely "secret" program was too vast to even consider.

The Afghan war - year 10

Kudos to Bob Herbert for actually paying attention to our soldiers in Afghanistan.

Bob Herbert - The Courage to Leave Afghanistan - NYTimes.com

.... What’s happening in Afghanistan is not only tragic, it’s embarrassing. The American troops will fight, but the Afghan troops who are supposed to be their allies are a lost cause. The government of President Hamid Karzai is breathtakingly corrupt and incompetent — and widely unpopular to boot. And now, as The Times’s Dexter Filkins is reporting, the erratic Mr. Karzai seems to be giving up hope that the U.S. can prevail in the war and is making nice with the Taliban.

There is no overall game plan, no real strategy or coherent goals, to guide the fighting of U.S. forces. It’s just a mind-numbing, soul-chilling, body-destroying slog, month after month, year after pointless year. The 18-year-olds fighting (and, increasingly, dying) in Afghanistan now were just 9 or 10 when the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked in 2001...

We may be in the all too common situation where, if there is any game plan, it's not one that can be spoken. For example, our game plan might be to divide Afghanistan into feudal baronies, and make each Baron responsible for their domain. Keep things quiet, or get a missile through the castle window. Not necessarily a bad idea, but not one that Obama can verbalize.

Radical notion - the missing al Qaeda A team

The eternal post 9/11 question. Hamas has an A team - despite a very high mortality rate. Why did one operation kill off al Qaeda's A team?

Daunting Question | Talking Points Memo: 

... Jon Stewart asks a genuinely worrisome question: what happens when the terrorists start sending in their A-Team, as opposed to the goofs who've tried the last couple operations?...

Why can't al Qaeda keep recruiting killers?

Maybe it's a problem with their ideology. Maybe there's something about it that doesn't appeal to murderous engineers. Maybe deeply religious Islamists really aren't all that in to murder.

How to end the orange alerts

In a response to the Times scare car bomb attempt [1] James Fallows comments on the alerts that have given orange a bad name ...

... for eight and a half years now, the dominant federal government response to terrorist threats and attacks has been to magnify their harm by increasing a mood of fear and intimidation. That is the real case against the ludicrous 'orange threat level' announcements we hear every three minutes at the airport. It's not just that they're pointless, uninformative, and insulting to our collective intelligence; it's that their larger effect is to make people feel frightened rather than brave...

Are alerts red today, now that there might have been yet another (one of ten since 2001) terroristic action in Manhattan?

No, I didn't think so.

I see the "orange alert" sign every time I drive by the MSP airport. I keep hoping some kids will have vandalized it, but of course that would be a federal crime probably punishable by summary execution. It is an endless reminder of how stupid we are.

The entire "orange alert" class of security theater is politically hard to undo. Fallows puts it well ...

... A politician who supports more open-ended, more thorough, more intrusive, more expensive inspections can never be proven "wrong." The absence of attacks shows that his measures have "worked"; and a new attack shows that inspections must go further still. A politician who wants to limit the inspections can never be proven "right." An absence of attacks means that nothing has gone wrong -- yet. Any future attack would always and forever be that politician's "fault." Given that asymmetry of risks, what public figure will ever be able to talk about paring back the TSA...

If Obama were to do anything obviously rational about these delusions, Cheney/Murdoch would be frothing at the mouth the next morning.

There is hope, however. Obama could use some terrorist act to declare that the nation must consider "orange" to the the new normal. We will never return to whatever the color below orange was. (That is likely true; the forecast is stormy forever). He can also say that cognitive science teaches us that unchanging things become invisible to us. So we will randomly make announcements and activate the orange alert signs to make them more perceptible, with an average frequency of once an hour. Over time the frequency will diminish.

The signs will dim. Some will fail. Repairs will slow. One day we will turn them off.

[1] I wonder if bomb instructions are harder to find now than they were fifteen years ago. I suspect so.