Srsly?

This is from the new Time cover story about Zero Dark Thirty (not online):

Virtually everything about Zero Dark Thirty is debatable, according to [Mark] Boal. "Even simple factual questions are being debated and litigated at the highest levels of government…even among those agencies. I've spoken to two people in the CIA who worked with the same prisoner, who had two totally different views of what got him to talk and of the value of a particular piece of intelligence in the overall puzzle."

This is the famous National Security Council Directive 11, issued in 1950:

The departments and agencies of the Government engaged in intelligence activities shall take steps to prevent unauthorized disclosure of information on United States intelligence sources and methods.

This is George W. Bush on September 14, 2001:

...let me condition the press this way: Any sources and methods of intelligence will remain guarded in secret. My administration will not talk about how we gather intelligence, if we gather intelligence and what the intelligence says. That's for the protection of the American people. It is important, as we battle this enemy, to conduct ourselves that way.

And this is Barack Obama last June:

The notion that my White House would purposely release classified national security information is offensive. It's wrong. And people I think need to have a better sense of how I approach this office and how the people around me here approach this office.

Could there be any clearer disclosure of "sources and methods" than people at the CIA telling the screenwriter for a $40 million movie about who they interrogated, what they were told, and why? Obviously the U.S. government has always used classification to cover up embarrassing facts, while simultaneously leaking like the Titanic whenever it's to their advantage. But man, they're getting even more in your face than usual these days. Hopefully they'll have this issue of Time at whatever jail where they're sticking John Kiriakou so he can read all about it.

—Jon Schwarz

This Is the Enemy

— John Caruso

Violent Idiots the Same All Around the World

Steven Metz is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute. He's a big supporter of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan – not because he likes them, but because we just have no alternative:

I'd pay closer attention to critics of drone strikes if they explained their recommended alternative.

Faisal Shazad is the Pakistani man who wanted to set off a car bomb in Times Square in retaliation for U.S. drone strikes. He didn't want to, but he just had no alternative:

Friends with peaceful protest! Can you tell me a way to save the oppressed? And a way to fight back when rockets are fired at us and Muslim blood flows?

In previous violent idiot news, the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign and Saddam Hussein joined forces to warn of the constant threat of wolves, while William Kristol and Saddam explained why the first step on the road to peace is being heavily armed.

—Jon Schwarz

An Almost Word-for-Word Endorsement of al Qaeda's Worldview

Earlier today Glenn Greenwald wrote about the French intervention in Mali. This made Joshua Foust, a writer for the Atlantic and fellow at the American Security Project, very angry:

This quickly devolves into an almost word-for-word endorsement of al Qaeda's worldview. m.guardiannews.com/commentisfree/…

— joshuafoust (@joshuafoust) January 15, 2013

Back in 2007, an Egyptian Islamist named Sayid Imam Sharif wrote "Rationalizing Jihadist Action in Egypt and the World," which strongly criticized al Qaeda. Al Qaeda's second-in-command and chief propagandist Ayman al-Zawahiri then wrote a long screed in response. It turned out "Rationalizing Jihadist Action in Egypt and the World" was an almost word-for-word endorsement of the worldview of the crusaders and Jews (and their puppets the Egyptian Interior Ministry and security services):

A document called "Rationalizing Jihadist Action in Egypt and the World" became public and was accompanied by much attention and furor. When I carefully examined it, I found--regrettably as I had expected--that it served, in the best possible way, the interests of the alliance that the crusaders and Jews have with our rulers, who act in contradiction of Shari'ah. This document is an attempt to sedate their mujahidin enemies, make them doubt their methods, and drive them from the battlefield...It sounds like a [Egyptian] security services' pamphlet...This document was written in the spirit of the Interior Ministry…

Meanwhile back in America, there's something else wrong with Greenwald:

@bpsycho1 @ck_macleod @eliasisquith worst of all he tries to downplay the horrific behavior of Malian rebels as the west being anti-Muslim

— joshuafoust (@joshuafoust) January 15, 2013

@billbindc Notable, perhaps, but not surprising. Because in his universe, all descriptions of atrocity are meaningless unless directed at us

— joshuafoust (@joshuafoust) January 15, 2013

According to Zawahiri, this was very similar to what was wrong with Sayid Imam Sharif and "Rationalizing Jihadist Action in Egypt and the World":

[Sharif] neglected the crimes of the crusaders and their agents, abandoned the need to exhort the nation to fight and resist them, and occupied itself with what it alleged were the mujahidin's errors…

This is a question that we address to the brothers who use the term "terrorism" to describe what happened in America...

When the United States fired missiles on the medicine factory in Sudan, destroying it over the heads of the employees and workers who were inside, what do you call this?...Why did they condemn what happened in America but we heard no one condemn what America did to the Sudanese factory?...

What about starving the Libyan people? What about the almost daily starving of the Iraqi people and the attacks on them? What about the sieges and attacks on the Muslim state of Afghanistan?

I don't want to say Foust is exactly like Zawahiri; for instance, Zawahiri jabbers on for 268 pages, while Foust is thankfully using twitter. But there are a limited number of ways to be a hateful, tribalistic knob, so all the knobs all over the world eventually end up sounding pretty much the same. Everything they say is a kind of violent moron mad libs.

BONUS: This entire phenomenon is available in diagram form here.

—Jon Schwarz

Karl Kraus, Right Again

Almost everyone now has forgotten the story about how Iraq, after invading Kuwait in 1990, went to hospitals and threw premature babies out of incubators to die on the cold hospital floor. (Supposedly they wanted to steal the incubators and ship them back to Iraq.)

This was pretty crude, Huns-raping-Belgian-nuns level propaganda that almost certainly originated with the Kuwaiti royal family. But it worked extremely well: Bush Sr. cited it constantly, as did many U.S. politicians when voting for war that fall. And after Hill & Knowlton was hired by the Kuwaiti government, they discovered via focus groups that the incubators story really motivated Americans to back Bush's hardline.

After the war, of course, it turned out there was no evidence this ever happened.

What's interesting to me, though, is the evidence that many of the politicians involved genuinely believed the incubators story. I was just reading the declassified transcript of a meeting Bush Sr. had on October 9th, 1990 with the Saudi Foreign Minister in the Oval Office, and found this:

As you see, they weren't gloating about how they'd pulled the wool over the eyes of America's innocent citizens. Instead, Prince Saud al-Faisal seems to think lots of Kuwaiti babies had died in this way.

That's much more frightening than if these people were supervillains coolly plotting world domination. Instead, even in their top secret meetings, they generally spout the same crap they do in public. This suggests they can't even make decisions based on simple self-preservation, and could easily destroy the whole world by accident.

As the early 20th century Austrian writer Karl Kraus put it: "How is the world ruled and how do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read."

—Jon Schwarz

Coralie and Me

By: Aaron Datesman

I suffered some losses in 2012. The one I feel most keenly was my grandmother Miriam Urffer (née Miller), who passed away in June of this year. She's the second from the right in the picture below, taken with her family when she was about sixteen. Miriam, born in 1922, was the last of my grandparents to pass away.

Shortly after this picture was taken in 1938 or 1939, my great-grandmother perished in a house fire. According to the story as I understand it, she rushed into the burning house to save a rocking chair, was overcome, and died in agony with Miriam nearby. I was well into adulthood before it ever occurred to me to wonder how my grandmother's life might have unfolded absent this tragedy.

Miriam lived, I think, an average sadness.* When this picture was taken, she was probably already working as a seamstress in an underwear factory in Coopersburg, PA. (None of my grandparents graduated from high school; I think only my father's father, Ralph Datesman, remained in school past the eighth grade. His first job was working in a silk mill.) She smoked until quitting for good around 1980, was a member of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, and voted only twice in her life.

FDR got Miriam's vote in '44 - the first presidential election in which she could vote - because the union boss demanded it. Obama got her vote in 2008 because my mother and I demanded it. It pleased me that the woman who referred to African-Americans as "schvartze" (Pennsylvania Dutch and Yiddish coinciding in this case) in my presence pulled the lever for one later on.

I was, again, quite far into adulthood before I understood why she and her husband slept in separate beds in separate rooms. Probably I was always too young to determine whether she was bitter or simply resigned. She didn't drive, didn't work outside the home within my memory (I was born in 1971), and was totally dependent upon her husband and children. She did not enjoy a life with much independence or personal agency, nor any wealth.

But she was not plunged into more dire poverty when her husband predeceased her, and was able to enjoy a greater degree of dignity than I expected in the last years of her life. Social Security was entirely and solely responsible for this. The last years of Miriam's life would have been spent in true misery without it.**

And for that blessing, credit is mostly due to this tenacious and remarkable woman: Frances Coralie Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor and principal architect of the New Deal.

Without irony or reservation, I believe there should be a monument to Frances Perkins on the National Mall, as well as a federal holiday. Without much more than simple conviction, Perkins managed to turn the levers of power in the United States rather permanently toward compassion. The efforts intensifying today aimed at unwinding her accomplishments, including the singular achievement of Social Security, often drive me to the brink of despair.

On the other hand, in 2012 I also enjoyed a few sweet victories. The federal government (without even asking!) nicely sent me a card to celebrate the best of these. It's pretty good as an antidote to despair:

This is my daughter, Magnolia Coralie Thomas. She was born on May 19, 2012, after nearly 40 hours of labor. Although I fully intend to have all three of these things some day, for the moment she's better than a monument and a federal holiday all rolled together.

Thank you, Frances Perkins. I hope a few more people will learn about you in 2013.

— Aaron Datesman

* "An Average Sadness" is the title of the final essay in a collection edited by Paul Auster, called True Tales of American Life. I find the expression useful and think about it often. These are the final two sentences of the essay, which I love: "Sometimes it is good fortune to be abandoned. While we are looking after our losses, our selves may slip back inside."

** I could tell a similar story, harder and nearly as sad, for my father's mother, Violet Datesman (née Kooker). For instance, there's a family story about how she got caught stealing potatoes from a neighbor's farm so her younger brothers and sisters would have something to eat. This is so foreign from my experience that it might as well be a story from another planet. Violet's husband Ralph Datesman died young, in 1977, after which Social Security became her principal means of support.

Fred Burton: WikiLeaks-Hater and Dangerously Weird Person

Last February WikiLeaks began releasing a large collection of emails from Stratfor, a self-described "global intelligence company." The most important thing you learn from the emails is that the higher-ups at Stratfor are total bozos who sagely exchange completely wrong information with each other. If I were one of their big corporate clients I'd ask for all my money back.

It's also notable how much everyone at Stratfor, especially Fred Burton, their Vice President of Intelligence and a former member of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, LOATHES WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. According to Burton, Assange "needs to be water boarded" and "is going to make a nice bride in prison. Screw the terrorist. He'll be eating cat food forever, unless George Soros hires him." To make this happen, Burton writes, the U.S. should "Take down the money. Go after his infrastructure. The tools we are using to nail and de-construct Wiki are the same tools used to dismantle and track aQ. Thank Cheney & 43. Big Brother owns his liberal terrorist arse."

It's bracing to see how nutty people like Burton, who once had real responsibilities in the U.S. government, can be. But actually no leaked emails were needed to learn this about him; all you had to do is read his book Chasing Shadows: A Special Agent's Lifelong Hunt to Bring a Cold War Assassin to Justice.

I picked up Chasing Shadows because it's about a murder that took place on July 1st, 1973 in the Bethesda, Maryland neighborhood where I grew up. (My parents bought their house two days earlier, that June 28th.) Yosef Alon, an Israeli military attaché, was shot in the driveway of his home after coming back with his wife from a party, and, while everyone assumed his killers were Palestinian, they were never found and the case was closed in 1976.

Burton was then sixteen and also lived near Alon's Bethesda house, and became obsessed with finding his killer. It's really worth reading his explanation of why:

That July morning became a turning point in my own life. It was the first time violence had intruded on the one place I felt most safe: home. I had a dim understanding that, outside Bethesda’s city limits, the world was on fire. Here in the quiet, leafy suburbs, however, we were supposed to be immune to such things. We were not, and it was a tough lesson to absorb at sixteen. The sense of vulnerability I felt at the time was one of the reasons I chose a career in law enforcement…

Why had I been so consumed by this case? Was it for Joe? He was a man who served his nation at a pivotal time in its history, only to die on the battlefield of terror. For years I had told myself I was doing it for him…

But that still did not explain the years I had spent trying to solve this crime. For that, I had to turn inward and look inside my own heart. When I was sixteen years old, a man was brutally murdered in my quiet world. All my life I had known nothing but the safety of my community and the security of my parents’ home and love. When I came downstairs and saw the headline that summer morning, something changed forever inside me. Violence had reached deep within the town I had known and claimed a schoolmate’s father.

Joe’s death had sent me in a search to reclaim that sense of safety, and my life became one devoted to protecting others. In the process, my narrow and naive worldview was shattered by the realities of hijackings, car bombings, murders, assassinations, and torture. In my years overseas and serving with the Diplomatic Security Service, I saw things average Americans would struggle to comprehend. I witnessed the low regard for human life common in many parts of the world. Over time, I came to realize that the violence that invaded my quiet suburban neighborhood in 1973 was not an aberration at all; the aberration was my community, my state, and my country. We were, and are, the last oasis in a world consumed by violence and human depravity. And for most of my adult life, I stood on the ramparts between the two. I was not just solving Joe’s murder. I was solving the riddle of my own life’s path. The choices I made, the career I chose, and the way I governed myself all were influenced by that July day in 1973.

It's hard to say whether this is more hilarious than terrifying, or more terrifying than hilarious. I'm going to call it a tie. I've mapped a short car trip below that will help you understand Fred's quiet, leafy suburb that until that dark day in 1973 was immune to violence and human depravity.

(BLUE) This is the location of the gas station that was then owned by Burton's father. I've been there many times myself.

(RED) Yosef Alon's 1973 home.

(GREEN) The 1973 home of Ted Shackley, then-head of the Western Hemisphere Division in the CIA's Directorate of Operations. Shackley was deeply involved in the U.S. attempts to overthrow Chilean president Salvador Allende, which came to fruition on September 11, 1973, about ten weeks after Yosef Alon was killed. About 3,000 Chileans were murdered by the new government, and ten times that many were arrested and tortured. Before his accomplishments in Chile, Shackley had been the CIA's station chief in Vietnam.

(YELLOW) The 1973 headquarters of the U.S. Defense Mapping Agency, where my father then worked. The Defense Mapping Agency helped produce maps for the 1965-1973 U.S. bombing of Cambodia, which reached its peak in 1973 just before and after Yosef Alon's murder. The U.S. dropped about 2.7 million tons of bombs on Cambodia, more than the 2 million tons dropped everywhere during World War II by the Allies. No one knows how many hundreds of thousands of Cambodians were killed, because who cares, but the bombing helped generate support for the Khmer Rouge, which went on to kill even more Cambodians.

I could add hundreds more little pins to this Bethesda map if I had time. And WikiLeaks exists to add even more, there and elsewhere. That's why Fred Burton calls them "terrorists"; he's terrified of reality and hates anyone who tries to get him to look at it.

View Fred Burton, Dangerous Weirdo in a larger map

P.S. You can donate to WikiLeaks via the Freedom of the Press Foundation here.

—Jon Schwarz