DeLong: The Reign of George the Feckless

Doesn't Anybody Read Max Weber Anymore?: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal

Things that were known in the reign of Anne the Protestant should not be forgotten in the reign of George the Feckless.

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The reign of George the Feckless. I like that.

The Soviets had Pravda, the GOP has it all

Salon.com Books | The mighty windbags

The mighty windbags
Thirty years ago, conservatives embarked on a plan to subvert journalism and skew America to the right. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
By David Brock

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Salon excerpts sections from David Brock's book. He's the "journalist who came in from the Right". My own reading is identical. What annoys me is how the New York Times and The Economist bought into this propaganda. Gore was savaged by the Right, but it was the craven incompetence of mainstream, respected, journalists that won the day for Bush. Whether through laziness, greed, incompetence, or corruption, journalists who knew better stayed quiet. I don't blame Limbaugh for spreading lies, I blame Safire and the NYT Editorial page for not exposing the lies.

I confess wondered about Hilary's "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy". I thought she was making excuses. I'm sorry Hillary, you were right.

The billionaires of the extreme right have seized control of American dialog. We need the billionaires of the rational middle to step down from Olympus and balance the rabid right.

Kaplan too is done with Bush

The Buck Stops … Where? - Stop blaming your henchmen, Mr. President. By Fred Kaplan

In the two years since the Pentagon's first attack plan, Zarqawi has been linked not just to Berg's execution but, according to NBC, 700 other killings in Iraq. If Bush had carried out that attack back in June 2002, the killings might not have happened. More: The case for war (as the White House feared) might not have seemed so compelling. Indeed, the war itself might not have happened.

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Another one turns against Bush.

The other heroes: those who refuse orders to do evil, those who intervene

The New York Times > International > Psychology: Pressure to Go Along With Abuse Is Strong, but Some Soldiers Find Strength to Refuse

Pressure to Go Along With Abuse Is Strong, but Some Soldiers Find Strength to Refuse
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR
Published: May 14, 2004
The images of prisoner abuse still trickling out of Iraq show a side of human behavior that psychologists have sought to understand for decades. But the murky reports of a handful of soldiers who refused to take part bring to light a behavior psychologists find even more puzzling: disobedience.

Buried in his report earlier this year on Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba praised the actions of three men who tried to stop the mistreatment of Iraqi detainees. They are nowhere to be seen in the portraits of brutality that have touched off outrage around the world.

Although details of their actions are sketchy, it is known that one soldier, Lt. David O. Sutton, put an end to one incident and alerted his commanders. William J. Kimbro, a Navy dog handler, 'refused to participate in improper interrogations despite significant pressure' from military intelligence, according to the report. And Specialist Joseph M. Darby gave military police the evidence that sounded the alarm...

...The power to resist coercion reflects what psychologists call internal locus of control, or the ability to determine one's own destiny. People at the other end of the scale, with external locus of control, are more heavily influenced by authority figures. They prefer to put their fate in the hands of others.

"If they fail a test, it's the teacher's fault; if they do poorly at a job, it's the boss's fault," said Dr. Thomas Ollendick, a professor of psychology at Virginia Tech. "They put the blame for everything outside of themselves. They are high in conformity because they believe someone else in charge."

The average person, research shows, falls somewhere in the middle of the scale. People who voluntarily enlist in the military, knowing they will take orders, Dr. Ollendick suggested, may be more likely to conform. "These are people who are being told what to do," he said. "The ones who are conforming from the outset feel they can't change the system they're in. Those who blow the whistle can go above the situation and survive. They can basically endure whatever negative consequences might come from their actions."

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Six years ago three heroes of the My Lai massacre were finally honored. Perhaps 30 years from now these three will be honored. They are true heroes.

Friedman: Finally gives up on Bush altogether

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Dancing Alone

My mistake was thinking that the Bush team believed it, too. I thought the administration would have to do the right things in Iraq — from prewar planning and putting in enough troops to dismissing the secretary of defense for incompetence — because surely this was the most important thing for the president and the country. But I was wrong. There is something even more important to the Bush crowd than getting Iraq right, and that's getting re-elected and staying loyal to the conservative base to do so.

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Next the Economist will admit it made a terrible mistake. They've been coming close to an apology ...

Medal winners

INTEL DUMP

While leading his platoon north on Highway 1 toward Ad Diwaniyah, Chontosh's platoon moved into a coordinated ambush of mortars, rocket propelled grenades and automatic weapons fire. With coalitions tanks blocking the road ahead, he realized his platoon was caught in a kill zone.

He had his driver move the vehicle through a breach along his flank, where he was immediately taken under fire from an entrenched machine gun. Without hesitation, Chontosh ordered the driver to advanced directly at the enemy position enabling his .50 caliber machine gunner to silence the enemy.

He then directed his driver into the enemy trench, where he exited his vehicle and began to clear the trench with an M16A2 service rifle and 9 millimeter pistol. His ammunition depleted, Chontosh, with complete disregard for his safety, twice picked up discarded enemy rifles and continued his ferocious attack.

When a Marine following him found an enemy rocket propelled grenade launcher, Chontosh used it to destroy yet another group of enemy soldiers.

When his audacious attack ended, he had cleared over 200 meters of the enemy trench, killing more than 20 enemy soldiers and wounding several others.

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Two football fields. I can't imagine what this guy is like in person. There are more awards described in the same posting.

National electronic Library for Health - United Kindgom

National electronic Library for Health

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This looks potentially interesting. I don't think we have anything quite like it in the US.

BBC NEWS | Americas | CIA interrogations 'too brutal' -- The Joy of Torture

BBC NEWS | Americas | CIA interrogations 'too brutal'

Current CIA officers are said to be worried that public outrage at the treatment of detainees in Iraq might lead to a closer examination of their treatment of al-Qaeda prisoners.

'Some people involved in this have been concerned for quite a while that eventually there would be a new president, or the mood in the country would change, and they would be held accountable,' one was quoted as saying.

'Now that's happening faster than anybody expected.'

The whereabouts of high-level al-Qaeda detainees is a closely guarded secret, and human rights groups have been denied access to the prisoners.

Officials say some have been send abroad.

'There was a debate after 9/11 about how to make people disappear,' a former intelligence official told the paper.

The government was advised that if the CIA was considering procedures which violated the Geneva Convention or US laws prohibiting torture and degrading treatment, it would not be held responsible if it could be argued that the detainees were in the custody of another country.

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Maybe Sadaam could get a job with the new improved CIA. Maybe this is why Tenet can't be fired, he has dangerous "goods" on Bush. Rumsfeld's job security might come from the same place.

How very charming. Maybe we can be a bit more humble about our moral superiority now? Does anyone still ever say "it can't happen hear" when they read of the rise of the Nazi party? Imagine what we'll do when terrorists devastate a major city.

Servicing and refurbishing defective complex consumer devices: is it cost-effective any longer?

Macintouch: Apple Technical Support Issues

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I too have experienced a replacement device that was "non-functional out of box" -- aka DOA. In my case I returned a working 9 month old iPod with a one hour maximal battery life and received a refurbished device with a dead firewire port. Apple's somewhat dysfunctional AppleCare service didn't help.

Of course I'm mad at Apple. There are too many stories of this problem for it to be pure coincidence. I think this is the same story as the refurbished laptops Apple sells on its web site, which Macintouch has noted are often trouble prone.

I suspect Apple has contracted out device service and refurbishment, and that there are significant economic penalties for doing too good a job servicing devices. The combination of outsourcing, then providing perverse incentives without honorable oversight, has caused worse problems than defective replacement iPods.

Apple, however, while no saint, is probably not the worst service department in the world. I've heard similar tales about Canon digital cameras. I wonder if modern consumer electronic devices are becoming too complex to service cost-effectively. They are difficult to fully evaluate, so even if a primary defect is fixed a secondary defect may be missed. They are too complex to easily disassemble, so repair may induce new problems. Hardware is increasingly coming to resemble software; it's well known that fixing a software bug is a risky and complex business.

Maybe we need to move to more of a classic "insurance" system to deal with expensive high tech devices that die quickly.

A better system might guarantee replacement of a defective device with a brand new device for about 3 months. After that one would receive a credit for the depreciated value of the device that could be applied to purchase of a brand new device. The rate of depreciation might depend on how much one pays for insurance. There might be business opportunities here for an insurance company that's ready to take this on.

Science fiction idea: we all get stupider because ...

"The Cookie Monster" by Vernor Vinge is an online short story that's up for a Hugo award. I had to read it, thought it kept me up late. Vinge is one of the smartest and deepest thinkers I know of.

There's an insider aside in the story. One of his characters recites a list of some of the most interesting "simulation" science fiction -- stories that explore the absurd and ridiculous idea that entities just like us would be living in a simulation (the Matrix popularized this theme.) Typically these simulations have odd properties that give them away -- such as a universe that's empty except for single sentient species.

That led me to think of a variant theme. In this theme the protagonists is reviewing data indicating not only a rising incidence of autism, but also increasingly stupid political leaders that are being consistently reelected -- irregardless of performance. She (of course) plots the data against population and notices a disturbing trend -- average world IQ is becoming inversely correlated to population. It's as though aggregate global sentience were limited by the processing capacity of a single incomprehensibly powerful computer, and population growth had run up against the limits of the machine. She begins to discover domains where contrained processing capability is causing the simulation to break down. Either population will crash or the simulation will end. Which will it be? As she begins to communicate her fears she disappears from the (short) story.

Science fiction is harmless fun, even though it's prone to silliness.

The corporation as psychopath

Economist.com | Face value

Unlike much of the soggy thinking peddled by too many anti-globalisers, “The Corporation” is a surprisingly rational and coherent attack on capitalism's most important institution...

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My Canopy Economics post connects with this. Corporations do behave like entities with their own self interestes. So do bureaucracies and other bounded collections of interacting humans. Understanding the relationships & interactions between these "meta-entities" is key to understanding Canopy Economics. (Shades of psychohistory! :-).

The Economist article is actually pretty weak in a fashion that's increasingly common in that once formidable publication. After conceding that the thesis of "corporation as psychopath" is surprisingly persuasive, the article concludes with a sniffy dismissal of the idea because "state bureaucracies are worse". The two statements are, of course, not mutually exclusive -- but the editor couldn't allow the article to conclude -- "corporations are psychopathic, but we don't know of a better alternative". Alas, the Economist is now what it once was.

Update 10/2/2010: The Economist review is now inaccessible, but it's reprinted here and I've copied it below. The 2004 book is still available on Amazon.

To the anti-globalisers, the corporation is a devilish instrument of environmental destruction, class oppression and imperial conquest. But is it also pathologically insane? That is the provocative conclusion of an award-winning documentary film, called "The Corporation", coming soon to a cinema near you. People on both sides of the globalisation debate should pay attention. Unlike much of the soggy thinking peddled by too many anti-globalisers, "The Corporation" is a surprisingly rational and coherent attack on capitalism's most important institution.

It begins with a potted history of the company's legal form in America, noting the key 19th-century legal innovation that led to treating companies as persons under law. By bestowing on them the rights and protections that people enjoy, this legal innovation gave the company the freedom to flourish. So if the corporation is a person, ask the film's three Canadian co-creators, Mark Achbar, Joel Bakan and Jennifer Abbott, what sort of person is it?

The answer, elicited over two-and-a-half hours of interviews with left-wing intellectuals, right-wing captains of industry, economists, psychologists and philosophers, is that the corporation is a psychopath. Like all psychopaths, the firm is singularly self-interested: its purpose is to create wealth for its shareholders. And, like all psychopaths, the firm is irresponsible, because it puts others at risk to satisfy its profit-maximising goal, harming employees and customers, and damaging the environment. The corporation manipulates everything. It is grandiose, always insisting that it is the best, or number one. It has no empathy, refuses to accept responsibility for its actions and feels no remorse. It relates to others only superficially, via make-believe versions of itself manufactured by public-relations consultants and marketing men. In short, if the metaphor of the firm as person is a valid one, then the corporation is clinically insane.

There is a tendency among anti-globalisers to demonise captains of industry. But according to "The Corporation", the problem with companies does not lie with the people who run them. Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, a former boss of Shell, comes across in the film as a sympathetic and human character. At one point, he and his wife greet protesters camped on the front lawn of their English cottage with offers of a cup of tea and apologies for the lack of soya milk for the vegans among them. The film gives Sam Gibara, boss of Goodyear, time to air his opinions, which are given a reasonably neutral edit. Ray Anderson, boss of Interface (which claims, with psychopathic grandiosity, to be the world's largest commercial carpetmaker) is given the hero treatment. Having experienced an "epiphany" about the destructive and unsustainable nature of modern capitalism, Mr Anderson has donned the preacher's cloth to spread the religion of environmental sustainability among his peers.

The main message of the film is that, through their psychopathic pursuit of profit, firms make good people do bad things. Lucy Hughes of Initiative Media, an advertising consultancy, is shown musing about the ethics of designing marketing strategies that exploit the tendency of children to nag parents to buy things, before comforting herself with the thought that she is merely performing her proper role in society. Mark Barry, a "competitive intelligence professional", disguises himself as a headhunter to extract information for his corporate clients from rivals, while telling the camera that he would never behave so deceitfully in his private life. Human values and morality survive the onslaught of corporate pathology only via a carefully cultivated schizophrenia: the tobacco boss goes home, hugs his kids and feels a little less bad about spreading cancer. Company executives and foot soldiers alike will identify instantly with this analysis, because it is accurate. But it is also incomplete.

The greater insanity

Although the moviemakers claim ownership of the company-as-psychopath idea, it predates them by a century, and rightfully belongs, in its full form, to Max Weber, the German sociologist. For Weber, the key form of social organisation defining the modern age was bureaucracy. Bureaucracies have flourished because their efficient and rational division and application of labour is powerful. But a cost attends this power. As cogs in a larger, purposeful machine, people become alienated from the traditional morals that guide human relationships as they pursue the goal of the collective organisation. There is, in Weber's famous phrase, a "parcelling-out of the soul".

For Weber, the greater potential tyranny lay not with the economic bureaucracies of capitalism, but the state bureaucracies of socialism. The psychopathic national socialism of Nazi Germany, communism of Stalinist Soviet rule and fascism of imperial Japan (whose oppressive bureaucratic machinery has survived well into the modern era) surely bear Weber out. Infinitely more powerful than firms and far less accountable for its actions, the modern state has the capacity to behave even in evolved western democracies as a more dangerous psychopath than any corporation can ever hope to become: witness the environmental destruction wreaked by Japan's construction ministry.

The makers of "The Corporation" counter that the state was not the subject of their film. Fair point. But they have done more than produce a thought-provoking account of the firm. Their film also invites its audience to weigh up the benefits of privatisation versus public ownership. It dwells on the familiar problem of the corporate corruption of politics and regulatory agencies that weakens public oversight of privately owned firms charged with delivering public goods. But that is only half the story. The film has nothing to say about the immense damage that can also flow from state ownership. Instead, there is a misty-eyed alignment of the state with the public interest. Run that one past the people of, say, North Korea.

The Washington Post digs deep into the CIA and military prisoner facilities.

Secret World of U.S. Interrogation (washingtonpost.com)

All told, more than 9,000 people are held by U.S. authorities overseas, according to Pentagon figures and estimates by intelligence experts, the vast majority under military control. The detainees have no conventional legal rights: no access to a lawyer; no chance for an impartial hearing; and, at least in the case of prisoners held in cellblock 1A at Abu Ghraib, no apparent guarantee of humane treatment accorded prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions or civilians in U.S. jails.

Although some of those held by the military in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo have had visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross, some of the CIA's detainees have, in effect, disappeared, according to interviews with former and current national security officials and to the Army's report of abuses at Abu Ghraib.

The CIA's "ghost detainees," as they were called by members of the 800th MP Brigade, were routinely held by the soldier-guards at Abu Ghraib "without accounting for them, knowing their identities, or even the reason for their detention," the report says. These phantom captives were "moved around within the facility to hide them" from Red Cross teams, a tactic that was "deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine, and in violation of international law."

CIA employees are under investigation by the Justice Department and the CIA inspector general's office in connection with the death of three captives in the past six months, two who died while under interrogation in Iraq, and a third who was being questioned by a CIA contract interrogator in Afghanistan. A CIA spokesman said the hiding of detainees was inappropriate. He declined to comment further.

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I still expect that most of this will be tragically forgotten, but the Washington Post is doing a great job of journalism. They may be compensating for neglecting to cover the early story.

The connection between these practices, and abuses that are common in American jails, has not yet been fully drawn.

Hersh's 2nd article on Al Ghraib

The New Yorker: Fact Seymour Hersh May 17th

Moving up the ladder ...

Al Ghraib: There are heroes still ...

Soldiers' warnings ignore

 By Todd Richissin, Baltimore Sun Foreign Staff

May 9, 2004

WIESBADEN, Germany - The two military intelligence soldiers, assigned interrogation duties at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, were young, relatively new to the Army and had only one day of training on how to pry information from high-value prisoners.

But almost immediately on their arrival in Iraq, say the two members of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, they recognized that what was happening around them was wrong, morally and legally.

They said in interviews Friday and yesterday that the abuses were not caused by a handful of rogue soldiers poorly supervised and lacking morals but resulted from failures that went beyond the low-ranking military police charged with abuse.

The beatings, the two soldiers said, were meted out with the full knowledge of intelligence interrogators, who let military police know which prisoners were cooperating with them and which were not.

"I was told, 'Don't worry about it - they probably deserved it,'" one of the soldiers said in an interview, referring to complaints he made while trying to persuade the Army to investigate. "I was appalled."

The two soldiers are the first from a military intelligence unit known to speak publicly about what happened at Abu Ghraib, and they are the first from such a unit to contend publicly that some interrogators were complicit in the abuses. The soldiers stressed that not all interrogators were involved.

The soldiers were interviewed together Friday in person and then separately yesterday by telephone. They said they had alerted superiors at Abu Ghraib and the Army's Criminal Investigations Division by November or early December of prisoners being beaten, stripped naked and paraded in front of other inmates.

Parts of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade were in Iraq from the start of the war, handling such duties as signal interceptions and identifying targets to be bombed. Only after the war did some members of the brigade end up as interrogators at Abu Ghraib.

What the soldiers spoke of, they know first-hand. They were inside the cramped wooden booths at the prison while Iraqis were interrogated, and they lived at the prison last fall and winter, when the worst abuses are thought to have occurred.

Their description of the prison and of the circumstances that helped it get that way indicate that troops stationed at Abu Ghraib were severely undertrained and were pressed into highly sensitive duties for which they had never prepared. Contributing to the problems at the prison, in their view, was the lack of soldiers to keep order and manage prisoners.

"We would see prisoners who had been sitting for months without being interrogated," one of the soldiers said. "We just didn't have anybody who could get to them, to get them out of there."

"There was like a big disconnect at every level," said the other. "Guys were given jobs they had never done, contractors [working as interrogators] are in there acting like they're in the movies. The whole operation was like a chicken with its head cut off."

The soldiers spoke on the condition that they not be identified because of concern that their military careers would be ruined, and because their unit was given a written directive not to speak to the press.

The Department of the Army at the Pentagon referred requests for comment on the military intelligence unit to Central Command in Baghdad. A person who answered the telephone there said nobody was available to comment.

"Everybody knew what was going on, but when we complained, we were ignored," said one of the soldiers. "We knew some [military police] were getting some blame, but what we were complaining about went way beyond them."

"We weren't at the other holding areas, so I don't want to say for sure the same thing was going on at them," said the other soldier, both of whom are in their 20s. "But it was going on there. The guys doing the interrogating, the MPs, they were all the same guys, going one place to the other. We were the standard on how to treat the prisoners."

The two soldiers hold the relatively low rank of specialist, which is more a reflection of their time in the Army - less than three years.

Though they entered Iraq with no training in interrogation, they were assigned to extract information from prisoners considered of high intelligence value - ranking Baath Party members and suspected insurgents, for example - and report on their findings.

They had access to prisoner files, they said, and interviewed several Iraqis who claimed they had been beaten by military police after being told by intelligence interrogators that they would be punished for their lack of cooperation.

"There would be the handoff from MI [Military Intelligence] to the MPs, and the word would be, 'Here you go, here's one who's not cooperating,'" one of the soldiers said. "Then - What do you know? - that prisoner ends up beaten or paraded around naked."...

"I have an obligation to the Army, and I have an obligation to follow my orders," one of the soldiers said. "I also have an obligation to be a decent person and do what's right and to do what I can to get the truth out."

The soldiers interviewed estimate that about 3,000 Iraqis were held by the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib prison, the most notorious of Saddam Hussein's torture facilities.

In the days after the fall of Baghdad, the prison was accessible to anybody, and former prisoners of the deposed regime visited their old cells, walked through the execution chamber where two nooses still dangled above open trapdoors.

Then the Army took over the facility, in part because soldiers had nowhere else to detain hundreds of looters being arrested on the streets.

The Iraqi prisoners were divided into two main categories: common criminals and "MI Hold," military shorthand for those designated as potential sources of intelligence information.

The MI Hold section, where it is believed many of the naked and abused Iraqis were photographed, was subdivided into two camps, Camp Vigilant and Isolation.

Procedure dictated that prisoners in MI Hold had to be interrogated at least three times before being released, though the soldiers interviewed for this article said they quickly determined that at least 25 percent of those locked in this section had done nothing wrong and even fewer were of any intelligence value.

For months, though, prisoners languished, contributing to unrest at Abu Ghraib, which led to riots and the killing of several Iraqis by the Army.

"Some of these guys didn't even have paperwork or files for me to read before I could get them in the [interrogation] booth," one of the soldiers said. "I'm sorry if it sounds mean, but I wasn't there to do humanitarian work, so I wasn't going to take someone in just so I could get him released. There were other prisoners we thought had information that would help us save lives, so they were our priority. Those were the guys we took in the booth."

About 800 Iraqis were in the section the two soldiers were assigned to. To interview all of those prisoners, only about 20 two-person teams of interrogators - called "Tiger Teams" - were available, and they had access to even fewer interpreters.

Interrogations typically lasted three hours, often more, which led to the backup of prisoners.

"We were working 12-hour days, sometimes more, six days a week - and then catching up on the seventh day," one of the soldiers said. "It's not like we weren't working. We just didn't have enough guys."

As described by the soldiers, military intelligence was under enormous pressure to get "actionable intelligence" during this time. The soldiers were working from two lists of tactics to get Iraqis to talk.

The "A" list included directly asking for information as well as relatively mild interrogation techniques, such as becoming angry with the prisoner or threatening to withhold meals - but not actually doing so. The interrogators were free to use these techniques at their will.

The "B" list included harsher techniques, such as sleep deprivation and withholding meals.

These techniques were considered acceptable, but because they were also considered close to the line of abuse, the interrogators could not use them without permission from their commanding officer, Col. Thomas Pappas, or his designate.

Around November, with casualties among U.S. troops rising, Saddam Hussein still in hiding and solid intelligence becoming more urgent, Pappas issued an order that broadened acceptable interrogation methods.

"I think he was referring to any techniques on the A and B lists," the soldier said. "But there was kind of the third list, the unofficial list. Guys called that the 'made-up list.'"

'Wild, wild west'

The made-up list spawned a couple of other terms, the soldiers said: "going cowboy" and "wild, wild west."

"I don't know where they got this from, but the MPs would say it all the time," one of the soldiers said. "MI would drop off a guy who wasn't talking, and the MP would say, 'So looks like I'll be going cowboy on him' or 'Looks like he needs some wild, wild west.'"

The terms meant beatings, they said, and the military intelligence interrogators and private contractors did nothing to discourage them.

They do not believe, the soldiers said, that Pappas realized the extent of the abuses. A Pentagon source last week said that Pappas had received a severe letter of reprimand, which will most likely end his career. The letter was a result of an investigation by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba.

Pappas did not return several phone messages and an e-mail seeking comment.

The soldiers said they had nothing against the colonel and, in fact, that they feel sorry for him. Pappas, they said, was rarely seen in the prison; however, through orders by the American ground command, headed by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, he was assigned responsibility for Abu Ghraib.

"We never saw him," one of the soldiers said. "He ate, worked and slept in one room. So it's like nobody's in charge, but these guys didn't need someone in charge to tell them not to do the things they were doing."

Many of the military intelligence interrogators were paired with private contractors from CACI International and with linguists from Titan Inc. The soldiers said most of those employees seemed to operate with autonomy, seemingly answerable to nobody in the command.

"They would say it right out, that 'we don't answer to you,'" one of the soldiers said. The Taguba report recommended that two of the contractors employed by CACI be dismissed.

Yet another investigation by the Army, at least the fourth involving the abuses at Abu Ghraib, is now under way. It is being conducted by Maj. Gen George Fay, who is in Iraq interviewing some of those involved.

He is expected in Wiesbaden within the next couple of weeks.

"Here's my point," one of the soldiers said. "All this that's going on? All these pictures all over the place, the whole world hating even more the United States? If two specialists could see how serious it was, how come nobody else could?"

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These men are my heroes. Their peers are a select breed -- far more selective than the Delta Force. They will not receive honors or decorations in earth, save in the memory of historians. Throughout history there have been men and women, perhaps 1 in a thousand, who choose honor in the face of great pressure.

They speak up, while others remain silent. There were "bad apples" at Al Ghraib, but there was a lot of rot around them. Rot that extends to the very top.

Lurching towards wisdom: neurodiversity and the morality of abnormality

The New York Times > Week in Review > Neurodiversity Forever: The Disability Movement Turns to Brains

Although the text of this article is reasonably respectful, there's scornfulness in the titles, subtitles, and surrounding text. That's not surprising. This logic leads to some directions that will be challenging for most of humanity.

NEURODIVERSITY FOREVER
The Disability Movement Turns to Brains
By AMY HARMON

No sooner was Peter Alan Harper, 53, given the diagnosis of attention deficit disorder last year than some of his family members began rolling their eyes.

To him, the diagnosis explained the sense of disorganization that caused him to lose track of projects and kept him from completing even minor personal chores like reading his mail. But to others, said Mr. Harper, a retired journalist in Manhattan, it seems like one more excuse for his inability to "take care of business."...

But in a new kind of disabilities movement, many of those who deviate from the shrinking subset of neurologically "normal" want tolerance, not just of their diagnoses, but of their behavioral quirks. They say brain differences, like body differences, should be embraced, and argue for an acceptance of "neurodiversity."

And as psychiatrists and neurologists uncover an ever-wider variety of brain wiring, the norm, many agree, may increasingly be deviance.

... Science is beginning to clear up such questions, said Dr. Antonio Damasio, a neurologist at the University of Iowa Medical Center, by identifying distinct brain patterns and connecting them to behavior. But, he added, only society can decide whether to accommodate the differences.

"What all of our efforts in neuroscience are demonstrating is that you have many peculiar ways of arranging a human brain and there are all sorts of varieties of creative, successful human beings," Dr. Damasio said. "For a while it is going to be a rather relentless process as there are more and more discoveries of people that have something that could be called a defect and yet have immense talents in one way or another."

For example, when adults with A.D.D. look at the word "yellow" written in blue and are asked what the color is and then what the word is, they use an entirely different part of the brain than a normal adult. And when people with Asperger's look at faces, they use a part of the brain typically engaged when looking at objects.

... For patients, being given a name and a biological basis for their difficulties represents a shift from a "moral diagnosis" that centers on shame, to a medical one, said Dr. Ratey, who is the author of "Shadow Syndromes," which argues that virtually all people have brain differences they need to be aware of to help guide them through life...

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In the 1970s, if not earlier, psychiatrists, noting how common "neuroses" were, introduced the idea that perhaps "normal" was a statistical concept (which it is) rather than a categorization. Now we're studying neurophysiology and rediscovering the same idea.

It will take some time for this meme to propagate. Once upon a time Leprosy was a "moral diagnosis" -- the physical expression of depravity. In a just universe only the evil could be so accursed; the alternative was the acceptance of the universe as fundamentally "unjust" -- not a palatable prospect. In the 20th century we struggled to reframe schizophrenia as a disorder rather than a sin. In the 21st century will we one day see sociopaths and pedophiles as disabled?

Physicians, especially internists, who've grown up with the idea of critical diagnostic categories, will have a hard time getting their heads around a continuum of traits with variable degrees of adaptive advantage. This article falls into a similar trap by using the language of "disability". In truth disability is only meaningful in relation to environment. A blind person is disabled in the light, but may be more than able in darkness (relative to most sighted persons). A bit of autism may be a competitive advantage for an electrical engineer. Many writers are easily distracted, flitting from idea to idea. Schizophrenia is probably maladaptive in any conceivable environment, but I suspect the related genes are adaptive in some settings (Shamans and Saints?).

Some readers will intuitively recognize a slippery slope. The more we connect genetics and physiology to behavior, the more we struggle to redefine the closely related concepts of "free will" and "responsibility", and the more we would question our approaches to child rearing, "justice", and punishment. There are already some of us who think "responsibility", like "race", is a social rather than fundamental construction.

Alternatively, if one believes in souls, such research bounds or constrains that which is explained outside the soul; it narrows the range of unique "soulhood".

On the other hand, wisdom is perhaps the art of knowing oneself truly, and then applying one's strengths, friends, family and community to balancing internal weaknesses with internal and external strengths. Those of us who are prone to distraction learn to "work the plan" and "plan the day", we keep task lists and review tactics and strategies. Those who focus relentlessly keep few lists, but ought to set aside time to force exploration of new domains -- less they grow stale and dull.

Lastly, I have long felt that the human brain is a rather feeble construct; a patchwork of hacks and artifacts that barely sustains a shoddy sort of consciousness. If we begin to tweak the hacks, to refactor the cruftiest code, we may produce a qualitatively different entity.