|
Lack of Intelligence
When an administration is in dire need of an intelligence service does it mean it lacks intelligent people?
John Bolton, Neocon WMD hunter at the State Department, had the NSA spying on IAEA chief El Baradei’s phone calls with Iran (and others). This is not unexpected, but is it really intelligent to have the spying and its fruitlessness printed in the Washington Post?
The Bush administration has dozens of intercepts of Mohamed ElBaradei’s phone calls with Iranian diplomats and is scrutinizing them in search of ammunition to oust him as director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, according to three U.S. government officials.
…
The intercepted calls have not produced any evidence of nefarious conduct by ElBaradei, according to three officials who have read them. But some within the administration believe they show ElBaradei lacks impartiality because he tried to help Iran navigate a diplomatic crisis over its nuclear programs. Others argue the transcripts demonstrate nothing more than standard telephone diplomacy.
…
The officials said anonymous accusations against ElBaradei made by U.S. officials in recent weeks are part of an orchestrated campaign. One of the most commonly cited accusations is that ElBaradei has purposely concealed damning details of Iran’s program from the IAEA board. The charges are unproven and have been staunchly denied by the agency.
After this there is hardly a chance the US will be able have ElBaradei voted out of office. Each of the other 34 countries on the IAEA board will be pissed about the leaks and reluctant to vote against him now.
Meanwhile other administrations also lack intelligence
In 2001, the FBI discovered new, "massive" Israeli spying operations in the East Coast, including New York and New Jersey, said one former senior U.S. government official. The FBI began intensive surveillance on certain Israeli diplomats and other suspects and was videotaping Naor Gilon, chief of political affairs at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, who was having lunch at a Washington hotel with two lobbyists from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobby group. Federal law enforcement officials said they were floored when Franklin came up to their table and sat down.
Instead of spending $9.5 billion on useless stealth spy satellites adminstrations should use the money to hire some halfway intelligent people.
Where can we drop the CVs?
I visited old friends this weekend and had an interesting scrap of conversation with my buddy — “rootlesscosmo” as he is known at livejournal. for several years we have had an ongoing friendly wrangle over whether or not the “F word” (Fascism) can be legitimately used to describe what is happening in the US. I have tended to argue in favour, and he, more historically literate than I and more fussy about terminology, has consistently argued against. in support of his argument he has just lent me Paxton’s book on the roots of fascism, so perhaps that will convince me 🙂
but he did make a concession this weekend, which was to say that the US regime is currently experimenting with the tools and methods of fascism, specifically the suspension of the rule of law and the obfuscation of legal process, leading to a complete arbitrariness and unaccountability in the States relations with citizens. the “secret background check” BS reported above is a classic example.
my contribution to this conversation was to point out that arbitrariness itself is a tool used by abusers to break the spirit of detainees, be they citizens under a fascist regime, battered women in abusive marriages, political prisoners being brainwashed or interrogated, or prostitutes being “seasoned” by pimps. the method is to punish the victim arbitrarily and unexpectedly for violations of secret or nonsensical rules, to enforce the rules arbitrarily and inconsistently, and to make up new rules all the time.
this leaves the victim perpetually wrong-footed — in constant fear and uncertainty — and if successful, produces a state of eager, anxious self-censorship and hyper-attentiveness to the slightest sign or hint from the Authority Figure. the victim becomes obsessed with trying to figure out the rules so as to avoid further punishment. the victim becomes a self-enforcer, modifying his/her own behaviour in a vain attempt to second-guess the Authority.
I think that clinical psychologists (a bunch of not-sufficiently-repressed sadists if there ever was one) have done stuff like this to rats, giving some rats consistent punishment/success experiences and others a completely chaotic environment where the red button sometimes returns food and sometimes returns an electric shock, etc. iirc the rats are not made happy by the arbitrary treatment, and neither are people.
I forget whether I mentioned this earlier, but in the “security line” at LAX the TSA droids were making everyone take their shoes off and put them through the x-ray machine — except running shoes, which for some reason they allowed people to wear (hmmm, is Nike slipping the fix to TSA?). even sandals had to come off and be x-rayed, but running shoes were OK (see Arbitrariness, above). so the travellers were hopping about taking their shoes off and putting them on again, as well as all the other disencumbering and re-encumbering that goes on around the checkpoints.
behind me in line, a man growled to his female companion in a quite audible undertone, “They wanna x-ray our shoes?” she replied, more quietly, “It’s because of that guy who set fire to his shoe on the airplane, remember?” to which he responded testily, “Jeez. Well I sure hope no one ever sets fire to their f—ing underwear on the f—ing airplane!”
I thought this was moderately funny — any sign of revolt among the peasantry is cheering — and I had told the story to my buddy this weekend. later, during the conversation about the methods of fascism, he remarked that the Bush Regime’s methods were working.
I asked how this was, and he said that when I had told him the airport story, his first expectation was that I would then tell him how the guy was taken aside, frisked, and made to miss his flight (for daring to grumble out loud and challenge the local Authority Puppets).
I said that in fact, no one even appeared to notice his remark, and I thought I heard someone else in line chuckle. my buddy said, “Ah, but they have already managed to make me worry that he might suffer for making a casual remark. And that’s what I mean by ‘it’s working’. We are now living in an America where sometimes people get arbitrarily punished for making a joke, and learning to think that making a joke can be dangerous. So it’s working.”
Posted by: DeAnander | Dec 13 2004 1:01 utc | 6
|
