Double Bind – Moon of Alabama

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November 17, 2004

Double Bind

CIA Director Goss criticizes in a memorandum to CIA employees:

Intelligence-related issues have become the fodder of partisan food fights and turf-power skirmishes.

and states in the same memo:

As agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies.

Gregory Bateson in "Steps To an Ecology of Mind" cited in The Double Bind remarks:

We hypothesize that there will be a breakdown in any individual’s ability to discriminate between Logical Types whenever a double bind situation occurs. The general characteristics of this situation are the following:

When the individual is involved in an intense relationship; that is, a relationship in which he feels it is vitally important that he discriminate accurately what sort of message is being communicated so that he may respond appropriately.

And, the individual is caught in a situation in which the other person in the relationship is expressing two orders of message and one of these denies the other.

And, the individual is unable to comment on the messages being expressed to correct his discrimination of what order of message to respond to, i.e., he cannot make a metacommunicative statement.

Employees(1) of the CIA reading this memo(2) and criticizing(3) it would most probably get fired. So the main international security agency of the United States now collectivly goes into schizophrenia? That means trouble for the country and unfortunatly also for others.

Bateson:

Finally, the complete set of ingredients is no longer necessary when the victim has learned to perceive his universe in double bind patterns. Almost any part of a double bind sequence may then be sufficient to precipitate panic or rage.

Posted by b on November 17, 2004 at 09:59 UTC | Permalink

Comments

Salon has an overview piece on the CIA trouble: Killing the messenger

Posted by: b | Nov 17 2004 10:35 utc | 1

The following analysis of the CIA shuffle and its effects was posted on another site by a former deputy director of the KGB’s American Division (in the late 1980s).
Presumably he knows what he’s talking about, right down to the standard abbreviations.

IMHO, what’s going on now in the CIA is not a “bureaucratic reshuffling”. It’s a political purge. Every purge creates openings. But simultaneously it poisons the atmosphere and
brings forward mediocrity.
The Russian experience is a good example. And I do not mean the bloody purges of the Stalin era that also created lots of openings.
Back in 1991 a party hack Vadim Bakatin was put in charge of the KGB with a broad mandate “to reform it”. Very soon he came to a conclusion that the system was unreformable and should be scrapped
(much the same as Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas has proposed). Bakatin stayed at his post a couple of months but the damage was considerable, morale plummeted and high caliber professionals
were leaving in disgust creating openings no one needed. Bakatin’s case was a good example of a poor dancer whose performance was hampered by his own balls.

You certainly can’t fault him for being colorless.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Nov 17 2004 14:00 utc | 2

Hannah,
good one!

Posted by: MarcinGomulka | Nov 17 2004 16:18 utc | 3

Even Molly Ivins seems to be loosing her humor.
White House to ‘gut’ CIA – Purging for disloyalty makes us sick to our stomachs
and OT – but I think it is important to see the good things happening too. Here a little light in the darkness – an article and a link by Monford.
Dear World: Sorry About Bush
No, seriously. Very, very sorry. How sorry? Well, let America show you … in pictures

Posted by: Fran | Nov 17 2004 16:21 utc | 4

Brilliant, Bernhard, and Hannah too. At best, the Bush Administration’s insistence on total loyalty will cause brainlock inside the CIA. At worst, the agency will simply start telling the Administration what it wants to hear. Either way, the simple fact is that President Bush is gutting his main source of objective intelligence at the very time that objective intelligence is most necessary. The Red Army in 1938 indeed! I just wonder, who’s the CIA’s Tukhachevsky?

Posted by: Aigin | Nov 17 2004 16:23 utc | 5

Bush doesn’t need and doesn’t want objective intelligence. It only gets in the way, makes trouble, muddies the issues.
He rode slipshod over every sensible and/or attested fact, and did nothing but put forward fake intell (indirectly, certainly – Powell obliged..) about Iraqi WMD, mobile labs, aluminum tubes, Niger Yellowcake, nuclear factories, bio missiles, Saddam-Atta links, and so on.
All this was total BS. The CIA knew it and tried to stem the flow of merdre (sh*t), like they still thought reality counted, and some knowledge of facts on the ground would contribute to intelligent planning. But how can an intell (and other..) agency furnish secret or sensitive info. to people who don’t even pay attention to what is published in newspapers, contemporary encyclopedias, or on the internet?
The CIA is not needed. Or rather, the CIA, can be, at best, an agency publicly presented as intell. It is incredibly expensive, and the many tens of thousands of people (BIG GVMT must reign supreme) – who work for the CIA, the NSA, and others, cannot be fired.
Let loose they would be dangerous, and they are needed for the future. They will of course be called on to play an internal role. That is already a done deal.
Those hundreds of thousands of Gvmt. personnel have to be slowly convinced that things have changed and that their absolute loyalty to the Leader is the only thing that will ensure them keeping their jobs.
Therefore, changes at the top are necessary, as all those people are trained to obey, to function in a clear chain of command. Those employees will have to perform, get in line, ever more than before. Dissidence (facts) will not be tolerated. But they cannot leave…or not in any consequent numbers.
On a dark desert highway,
Cool wind in my hair,
Warm smell of colitas
…shimmering light…stop for the night… mission bells…
etc.

Posted by: Blackie | Nov 17 2004 20:53 utc | 6

I kind of like the comparing of this admin to an organized crime family. They have their judges and cops already. Now they will be using the CIA as their own Luca Brazzi.
wonder how long it will be until the families have a turf war?

Posted by: Dan of Steele | Nov 17 2004 22:06 utc | 7

dan of steele
have always though of rumsfield/rove as lucca brazzi
still steel

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Nov 17 2004 22:12 utc | 8

Bernhard: Thanks for the Bateson reference. Haven’t read “steps” in a few decades, yet “the double bind” chapter stays with me.

Posted by: maxcrat | Nov 18 2004 1:25 utc | 9

Bateson is always interesting, but the bit about this causing schizophrenia is dated. That’s a neurochemical problem in the brain. A psychiatrist did a huge cross-cultural study & discovered that it’s virtually non-existent in non-wheat eating cultures.
But to the meat of the problem – the Mob destroying any & probably all reality-based institutions, Buzzflash had interview today w/Jonathan Greenberg, author of new bk. “America 2014: An Orwellian Tale.”
Author begins w/these thoughts:
“As President Bush moves to implement what he proclaims to be his ‘mandate,’ millions of Americans find ourselves baffled that so many of our fellow citizens could have voted for a leader whose tenure has been marked by a series of failures and deceptions. For an answer, I suggest that we look to George Orwell’s 1984, and to the triumph, this election season, of a little known but essential component of the Republican right agenda known as ‘perception management.’
Perception management, in short, operates under the principle that truth is unessential. Truth simply becomes what the Party is able to convince the electorate is true. ”
Thus, having Reality available as an option, undercuts their ability to both implement their insane policies & maintain control over the populous.
Beyond all the monstrous things this Mob does, I find this the most terrifying – the destruction of the institutional basis for knowing reality.
No wonder, they wanted an Illiterate Delusional Idiot as their front-boy!!! He is remaking our Republic into an image of himself. A self-destructive irresponsible lout, who can’t face reality, but doesn’t have to ‘cuz his Daddy is so powerful that he can act any way he wants & everyone must simply tolerate it. No sane person could be doing what he’s doing. Even Nixon wasn’t this far gone. I feel like I’m caught in someone else’s nightmare.

Posted by: jj | Nov 18 2004 4:57 utc | 10

Look who else got fired today for being part of the reality-based community. Kevin Ryan, who just wrote for the WTC Underwriters:
“If steel from those buildings did soften or melt, I’m sure we can all agree that this was certainly not due to jet fuel fires of any kind, let alone the briefly burning fires in those towers.”
It ain’t just the CIA, kids!!

Posted by: jj | Nov 18 2004 5:25 utc | 11

@jj
There is a lot of disinformation out there. I have been trying to source some additional information regarding wtc7. It’s easy to say 2 is a coincidence, 3 is a conspiracy, but it’s is proving extremely difficult to find any possible (much less plausible) explanation for wtc7.
That statement by itself by Kevin Ryan is not entirely true, as there are cases of horizonal beams buckling by as much as 3 feet. But I can’t find any explanation for the wtc7 collapse. I am not a structural engineer. But of the tens of thousands of structural engineers in the world, I would dearly like one of them to explain it to me – in technical terms and in detail.

Posted by: DM | Nov 18 2004 5:50 utc | 12

“That statement by itself by Kevin Ryan is not entirely true, as there are cases of horizonal beams buckling by as much as 3 feet”
A beam or 3 buckling by 3 feet wouldn’t cause both buildings to collapse at almost free fall speed. I saw a clip of the demolition of a stadium in Seattle. They looked an awful lot alike.
What I found striking about the Underwriters Comment was that it sounded like an Open Secret among those in the know that the official story was a joke. Also note, author not fired by his company; he was fired by the Parent Co., which suggests his bosses were in agreement w/what he wrote.

Posted by: jj | Nov 18 2004 7:00 utc | 13

I’ve got a video called “What a Blast,” which is all about the art and science of controlled demolition. got it well before any of this happened. it’s fascinating stuff. anyway, as I recall one of the WTC towers slumped sideways on its way down but the other fell almost in its own footprint, which to me seemed really fishy. it takes a lot of expertise to take a building straight down, neat and tidy — as I remembered from watching the vid.
the official explanation for the high temp fires which would be needed to burn steel, is not jet fuel but “office materials and building structural materials”, i.e. that the plastics, paper and whatnot in the offices burned hot enough to soften the steel. I remain somewhat skeptical — other big skyscrapers have had catastrophic fires, and they just sat there and burned, leaving the steel skeleton dirty but still standing.
the thing that bugs me (and I don’t follow this stuff closely as it seems like a bottomless pit of an obsession that could eat all my spare time if I caught the virus) — from what I’ve picked up casually it sounds like the WTC buildings were money-losers when they were bought by Whatsisname — and they are alleged to have been overdue for a major asbestos-abatement makeover which would have cost millions (my building at work went through that and it wasn’t much fun).
now, if I were an ordinary insurance adjuster and I heard about a guy who bought two white-elephant buildings that were money losers and were going to need a very expensive AA contract real soon, and then I heard that shortly thereafter the buildings just happened to be totally destroyed after being heavily insured… well, I’d be suspicious, that’s what insurance adjusters are for, to be suspicious about things like that. for some reason this seems to me the most likely thread to pick at in the whole story. it’s such a classic. it’s all just so bloody convenient. and then the wreckage being swiftly bundled off to — where was it, India? — for recycling, before a thorough forensic investigation could be completed — I mean that’s just plain shady.

Posted by: DeAnander | Nov 18 2004 8:08 utc | 14

@jj Can you give a link for the Kevin Ryan quote?
Anything along these lines, especially documents
of the WTC underwriters, would be of interest.
I believe the official explanation for the collapse of
WTC7 was the diesel fuel stored (illegally?) above
Mayor Giuliani’s “Command and Control Center” in that
building. It would be very intersting to have confirmation that this is viewed as an open joke in
insurance underwriting circles.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Nov 18 2004 8:29 utc | 15

DeAnander: Insurance companies should really aggressively pussh for serious enquiries, particularly since the weasely greedy guy who bought them less than a year before is arguing that the WTC attack qualifies not as *one* event but as TWO different catastrophes, and therefore should be reimbursed twice. Of course, any real court would send him packing or even ask for psychiatric expertise of such a loon, but with all the fishy dealings surrounding 9/11, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if he won. In this case, I would really expect and wish the insurance companies would make a media blitz promoting all the conspiracy theories of an inside job, in retaliation – in fact, if I were the head of such a company, and reasoning like the usual greedy CEO, I would actually push for it even if I had concrete proof that the official “OBL did it alone” version is 100% correct, just like Big Tobacco claiming for decades that smoking was healthy.

Posted by: Clueless Joe | Nov 18 2004 10:16 utc | 16

While searching for the greedy weasel mentioned above, I came across this site which has some interesting points of view. Probably tin foil hat stuff but interesting nonetheless

Posted by: dan of steele | Nov 18 2004 10:58 utc | 17

For what it’s worth, please be very cautious. That particular site is probably disinformation. I have some minor expertise in digital imaging – and (imho) some of these images are assuredly low quality, distorted images with all sorts of compression artefacts (i.e. – they are faked). This site and the “webfairy” are (imho) – designed to taint any serious investigation as a tinfoil hat conspiricy theory.
I thought *everybody* has seen all this stuff, but for my 2 cents, this is as good a place to start as any.
DeAnander’s caution is right again. This is a bottomless pit. You might not want to go there.

Posted by: DM | Nov 18 2004 12:52 utc | 18

Guai comune, mezzo gaudio, i.e. “misery loves company”.
According to this report from Jane’s
pay to see
site (3rd item down) the CIA is not the only Western Intelligence
Agency being purged.

According to Israeli sources, more than 200 Mossad operatives, including seven heads of department (a rank equivalent to major-general in the military) have left the organisation since General Meir Dagan, a longtime associate of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, took over as director in October 2002. The organisation’s morale was already low after a series of bungled operations in Jordan, Cyprus and Switzerland.

Those of us on the outside will hope that a new Ostrowsky or Ben Menashe appears.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Nov 18 2004 13:49 utc | 19

I don’t usually go to the JP website; but this is very interesting and appropriate to this thread:
Who Will Tell The Emperor He Wears No Clothes?

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Nov 18 2004 17:59 utc | 20

@ Cloned Poster
Agreed it’s very interesting. Still, I find the last line a “howler”. I was already depressed at the thought that in the presently dysfunctional American
democracy (and I don’t mean just the election that didn’t go “my way”, but also the complete surrender
of the Congress to AIPAC) the only real opposition seemed to be coming from disaffected elements in the CIA: now, apparently, I have to depend on disaffected elements in the Mossad. Well, at least they will probably get Congress’s attention.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Nov 19 2004 6:11 utc | 21

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