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The Mumbai Attack Evidence
Jane Perlez and Somini Sengupta write for the NY Times:
Mounting evidence of links between the Mumbai terrorist attacks and a Pakistani militant group is posing the stiffest test so far of Pakistan’s new government, raising questions whether it can — or wants to — rein in militancy here.
Hmmm – evidence is defined as:
a: an outward sign : indication b: something that furnishes proof : testimony ; specifically : something legally submitted to a tribunal to ascertain the truth of a matter
So what mounting evidence is there? Perlez and Sengupta list three points:
– A former Defense Department official in Washington, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that American intelligence analysts suspect that former officers of Pakistan’s powerful spy agency and its army helped train the Mumbai attackers.
Someone who is no longer active in the game has heard that some people active within the game suspect something …Who is this? Wolfowitz? Rumsfeld? Perle?
– According to the Indian police, the one gunman who survived the terrorist attacks, Muhammad Ajmal Kasab, 21, told his interrogators that he trained during a year and half in at least four camps in Pakistan and at one met with Mohammad Hafeez Saeed, the Lashkar-e-Taiba leader.
According to The Australian India uses ‘truth serum’ on Mumbai gunman (h/t Al):
The method was widely used by Western intelligence
agencies during the Cold War, before it emerged that the drugs used –
typically the barbiturate sodium pentothal – may induce hallucinations,
delusions and psychotic manifestations.
May we then doubt what the alleged Kasab is alleged to have said?
– And according to a Western official familiar with
the investigation in Mumbai, another Lashkar leader, Yusuf Muzammil,
whom the surviving gunman named as the plot’s organizer, fielded phone
calls in Lahore from the attackers.
‘A Western official familiar’ with Iraq’s WMD program … Oh sorry, strike that, that was just a mistake. The intelligence we are now told to believe is of course very reliable.
The New York Times again gives itself away to some powers in the U.S.,
who this time, want to incriminate Pakistan over the attacks in Mumbai.
I for one do not believe this evidence. Yes, the attacks might have originated in Pakistan. But there are other possible sources.
There are lots of interests involved in the current rumoring that
want to blame Pakistan for this or that purpose. To jump to conclusions
on such thin sourced disinformation is irresponsible.
But it is of course not the first time that the NY Times is pitching a war to its readers. That sells well.
Great post, Uncle $cam #2.
Story, meme, narrative. A matter of scope and function.
Narrative: A narrative is an explanation or series of justifications linking a series of individual events into a chain of accepted meaning. There are small individual narratives: for instance, why we never finished college, how we found our ideal mate, etc.; and there are larger collective narratives: Why Americans are, in general, richer than Africans, why one side won or lost a war, etc.
Let’s start first with the larger collective narratives, those particular to a whole society. We humans understand life itself based upon these narratives, or grand explanations which explain the reason for, and give meaning to, our temporal existence. This is the realm of the ancient myths of indigenous people.
We (in the USA) currently operate under two Grand Narratives (GN):
One, that industrial growth is sustainable and that science will find solutions to ever-occurring man-made problems, along with the consequent ramifications of those solutions. Destruction of Earth’s biosphere lies within the realm of nay-sayers, conspiracy theorists, depressives who should be on Prozac, and out-and-out fruitcakes. Let’s keep it chipper here, as they do on NPR. Degradation is a PR issue, which scientists are supremely unqualified to address.
The second GN is American Exceptionalism. Its tenets are as follows: We are one nation undivided. Our history as a Democracy makes us the highest evolved people — the very apotheosis of civilization upon the planet — rendering us uniquely qualified to solve the rest of the world’s problems. Due to our unparalleled benificent and charitable nature, we always mean the best for the world and all of its (lesser non-American) inhabitants, so any criticism when our inveigling inevitably goes wrong, or hurts others, is uncharitable at best, if not downright evil. We could make the entire world happy is only people would stop resisting us and do what we say, already. Sheesh!
Below that there are numerous lesser collective narratives which operate under the framework of the two GNs, but remain subordinate (and hence generally corroborating) to them, for instance: Europe as a continent sharing interests; the so-called “third world” as a kind of purgatory which all new nations inevitably pass through on the way to “development heaven”; People as being inherently evil until they are “civilized”; Moslems as being fundamentally different from us (inferior, the Muslim Mind – like the inscrutable Oriental mind before it — and all that, and hence jealous of our “freedoms”); Blacks being dumb and violent; Jews being rich and greedy, etc. down the line.
Individual narratives function in much the same way, but because their scope is personal, or familial, or clannish in nature, their effect upon society in general is similarly limited.
The anthropological word for “narratives” might be myths. The mathematical term would be postulates: things we believe so deeply that they are automatically accepted without need for evidence. While myths can display of range of veracity, or truthfulness, their effect is felt primarily in the social and political arena. Therefore, it may be said as a reduction that myths are not primarily true and false in the scientific sense; they are belief systems in the social demographic and political sense, and it is most useful and effective to engage with them in that arena.
Such core beliefs powerfully bind — and separate — human beings and groups of human beings from each other. The importance of defining, controlling, framing and manipulating these core beliefs in controlling great masses of humanity is patently obvious.
But myths are a high level, or derivative, variable, and hence cannot be engaged with directly with much success. Therefore we must deal with their components: Stories and memes.
Stories: Are specific tales, or examples, purportedly taken from real life, of (generally) human experience. Because they are the main way in which humans receive information about the world and make sense of the world, they are examined critically on both the conscious and unconscious level, primarily in a pattern recognition sense for how they reinforce or weaken the collection of myths we believe in, as well as those which we don’t subscribe to. They are then accepted or rejected as valid or truthful and filed in the respective myth folders of our brain as corroborating or delegitimizing evidence. A story is a single snapshot placed in the vast mythic Picasa database of our mind.
The problem with stories from those we don’t know, or those we read about in the mass media, is that we have very little basis upon which to accept or reject the narratives set before us. A prime example is the current Mumbai bombings. What can a layman on the other side of the globe really know: He can trust the accounts of friends who are there, accepting the framing of their core myths, but what if he knows no one local? The mass media clearly serves the interests of those in power, but in this case, which group in power? And the stories in the press, as after 9-11, are contradictory, incomplete, and often downright ridiculous, beggaring all belief – indeed questioning the very competence of reporters and editors who are responsible for placing those stories in the papers. We, who have some education and skepticism, know that there can be all sorts of groups: official groups, splinter groups, covert groups, and sects, from at least a dozen – if not far more — different state and non-state actors
What can we do, how can we interpret this? One, we can make a chart of all of the actors we can identify and see how the evidence fits their individual motives. Two, we can see who benefits: qui bono? Three, we can follow official pronouncements. This is the most risky if one is looking for factual veracity as to what really happened, but can be very helpful in a structural analysis, where what actually happened is relatively unimportant, but observing how the players mold and deal with the story can be very useful in later determining who benefited or lost because of the purported actual “event.”
Even the credulous layman knows subconsciously how helpless he really is in figuring out what the real truth of a matter is. (And this is before, and directly explains the conservative revulsion with Post-modernism, which states that there can be many different truths, each of which has equal validity: Clearly not very useful to the caveman in us, much as it might be useful to the doctoral student.) Yet the mind – as part of its basic survival programming – feels compelled to analyze each story for its possible relevance to individual survival and the quality of that existence. This inability to treat indirect truth, or what we might call hearsay, in the same manner as we have always treated direct truth (I’m consciously staying away from technical philosophical terms here and throughout this post), our own experience, creates a certain basic tension in the mind of the layman. And this is where memes, or as George W. Bush truthfully and clearly called it, “catapulting the propaganda” comes in.
A meme is a building block, or short series of building blocks, in the greater edifice of myth, a strand of information in the DNA of our core belief system. Belief systems are very complex and long-evolved accretions. A meme is more like a single belief (or small set of related beliefs). Memes gain influence in the myths of our existence by repetition. They are repeated in the stories we hear which collectively make up a larger pattern myth or narrative. This has long been known, observed, and proved in fields like Cognitive Therapy and Hypnosis, so it should come as no surprise in Politics, Religion, and other realms of our belief systems.
The same meme can appear in many stories, and can be used to corroborate or refute many different myths. Its power is not in its veracity, but in its repetition. It works best, like currency, when it is kept in motion.
Memes are like viruses, and possess a certain elemental nature. They effect primarily the emotions, not the mind. Fear is a powerful emotion, and so directing the object of that fear at a target, say, religious Muslims or urban Blacks creates an effective meme. So is desire – and so it is easy to manipulate Americans into believing that they are richer than they are, or that Joe Shmoe, the night watchman at the local gas station could easily become a millionaire, and hence must be against the “Death Tax.’
In this way, the repetition of memes in the mainstream media (for instance in the Mumbai attacks we mentioned above) help us to resolve the tension over determining the veracity of events which we could never really know the truth about. They connect with our emotional, or limbic being, and in that way, convince us what to believe and disbelieve. Again, this is not a scientific sorting of facts, but a direct connection, or fix, into the emotional hardwiring of our brain.
This repetition of emotional memes also accounts for the fanatical overwhelming hysteria surrounding the Obama campaign, and the belief in an identity which clearly belied the substantial evidentiary record.
Let’s take an example from the Obama files to understand how this works: Remember this past summer, when Obama seemingly could not stop attacking black fathers.
Here’s Ishmael Reed:
…Obama’s June 14th finger wagging at black men was a case of pandering to white conservative voters. This follows a pattern of using public perceptions of black men fanned by the media and Hollywood to win political favor…
The talking heads also concluded that Obama’s speech before a black congregation in which he scolded black men for being lousy fathers and missing in action from single parent households and being boys, etc. , was cleary aimed at those white male Reagan democrats, who, apparently, in Obama and the media’s eyes, provide the gold standard for fatherhood, which fails to explain why there are millions of destitute white women, “ displaced housewives”and their children whose poverty results from divorce, or why, according to one study, 90% of middle class white women have been battered , or have witnessed their mothers sisters, or daughters being battered. A smug John Harwood of The New York Times said that Obama was telling black men to “shape up. ” As long as men of Mr. Harwood’s class dominate the avenues of expression, who’s going to tell white men to “shape up?” Judging from my reading American men of all races, ethnic groups and classes need to shape up when it comes to the treatment of women.
Blaming black men exclusively for the abuses against women is a more profitable infotainment product. Hypocrisy is also involved. MSNBC host, Joe Scarborough, who welcomed Juan William’s latest demagogic attack on blacks, printed in The Wall Street Journal , still hasn’t addressed the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of his staffer, Lori Klaustis (http://www. whoseflorida. com/lori_klausutis. htm) who was found dead on the floor of his office or why he had to resign abruptly from Congress. And is Juan Williams, whose career has been marred by repeated sexual harassment complaints against him really one to criticize the personal morality of others? Is Bill Cosby?
According to the Census, a woman’s income on the average is reduced by 73% after divorce in a country in which 50% of marriages end in divorce. Moreover the Times revelation, shocking to some, that elderly whites are taking to cocaine and heroin, a genuine epidemic, hasn’t drawn a response from the legions of columnists and commentators and book publishers who profit from any signs of social”dysfunction” among blacks. Nor has Harwood, George Will, David Brooks, Pat Buchanan, who are always scolding blacks for whatever , commented on the rising incarceration rates of white women. Apparently, Lindsay and Paris are not alone, nor are the Barbie bandits.
Don’t expect Obama to bring up this rampant substance abuse before a white congregation. He had to just about whisper about the values of blue-collar whites, those whom he said clung to guns and religion;he was exposed by a woman who recorded his comments, furtively. Even though the media, which rank ratings above facts, continue to criticize him for these remarks and have made them a campaign issue, sixty percent of Pennsylvanians, according to an April 17, Zogby poll, agreed with him. (The media were also wrong to suggest that Hillary got the worst of it from the press during the primary. A Pew study from Harvard contradicts this. )
Predictably, Obama’s verbal flagellation of black men, who don’t have the media power with which to fight back, was cheered on the front page of The New York Times, which places a black face on every story about welfare, domestic violence and unmarried mothers, and uses Orlando Patterson to parrot these attitudes on the Op-ed page, yet a study published by the Times showed a steep decline in the rate of births to unmarried black women over the decade while the rate among Hispanic women has increased, contradicting what Cohen described as an “epidemic of illegitimacy” among blacks. An indication that the Op ed editors at the Times are so willing to believe the folklore perpetrated by such writers as Cohen that they don’t fact check a writer whose assumptions are at odds with the reports from The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention that they published on Dec. 6, 2007, and at odds with their token black columnist, Bob Herbert, who said on 6/20/08 that illegitimate births have “skyrocketed” over the decades.
Patterson, Williams and Herbert have to rough up the brothers and sisters from time to time in order to hew the editorial line set by their employers. This was the conclusion of a study (Times, 6/23/08) by Bob Sommer, who teaches public policy communications at Rutgers and John R. Maycroft, a graduate student in public policy. They examined 366 opinion articles published in The Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Star-Ledger. “At each newspaper” they found, ” 90 to 95 percent” of the published article agreed with the editorial page stance on the issue at hand. ”
Moreover, why aren’t Obama and other tough lovers acquainted with a study cited by Michael Eric Dyson in Time magazine, 6, 30, 08? In his Viewpoint piece, The Blame Game, in which he also takes Obama’s blame the victim speech, he refers to research by Boston College social psychologist that found “black fathers not living at home are more likely to keep in contact with their children than fathers of any ethnic or racial group?”
I asked for a correction of both Herbert and Cohen’s assertions and received an automatic reply from the Times. Since the CDC report indicated a higher rate per thousand of births to unmarried Hispanic women, why don’t the legion of politicians like Obama, writers like The Manhattan Institute’s John McWhorter, Fox New’s Juan Williams, Harvard’s talented tenthers, all of whom scold blacks under the guise of tough love, love Hispanics, the country’s largest minority group? No box office appeal? No publishing contracts? No votes from Reagan democrats?
A 2007 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed some alarming statistics. “Latino high school students use drugs and attempt suicide at higher rates than their black and white classmates.” In addition “Latino students were more likely than either blacks or whites to… ride with a driver who had been drinking alcohol, or use cocaine heroin or ectasy. ”
Other studies show that of the 300 gangs located in Los Angeles, over sixty percent of their members are latino. Most of the nation’s drive by shootings occur in Los Angeles. Over fifty percent of the nation’s school dropouts are Hispanic.
It’s been over a month since the 2007 report and I haven’t read a single tough love column about the conclusions…
366 stories, 90% of which were factually inaccurate and derogatory to Blacks. That’s a meme; that’s a “catapulting the propaganda” which even George Bush could be proud of.
In other words, Obama’s facts and emphasis were way out of line with reality, and this data was further skewed by filtered corporate media coverage.
But the stories he told, and which were retold over and over again by the media contained powerful memes: fear/Blacks, irresponsible/Blacks, drugs and crime/Blacks, the Black man as threatening to Whites. These stories contained powerful emotional memes which we have all heard an almost infinite amount of times in our lives. Whites found this very reassuring. These memes reinforced the two Grand Myths I enumerated above, as well as numerous other lesser myths believed by large segments of the American population: If only Black men would stop being criminals and get with the program, America could finally be looked at by the rest of the world as the Exceptional Nation it really is. In other words, Blacks are hindering Americans progress in the getting the respect and cooperation they deserve from the rest of the world to win the “War on Terror.” Without powerful beliefs like this – often held as subconscious shameful narratives — we could not incarcerate the number and percentage of Blacks that we do in our society, and ignore it as studiously as we do. Outside of a few “angry Back men” commenting upon this fact, it never came up in the election cycle. Think of it: our “Black” President studiously ignored the fate of his fellow Black American males, except to denigrate them – a fact which was endlessly cheered in both the mainstream and so-called “Liberal” press. Pathological, is all I can say. .
Even progressive whites – most of whom, while they may have had several black friends in their lifetime, have never lived in Black society, and hence do not really understand and are somewhat fearful of Black communal concerns and desires, and also fearful of Black advancement interfering with their limited privilege. What White of limited privilege would not feel a pang of fear when taking of reparations, or land in the case of Native Americans. (We just gave 7 trillion dollars to the banks, surely Blacks cannot believe that we have any more money to dole out for reparations to redress the vast difference in net wealth between Blacks and Whites in this country.) The tension between their liberal ideals and the shameful emotional reaction to their inability to just accept (necessary before coming to terms with it) their latent racism provides the ideal hook for reassuringly familiar, yet racist memes, coming from the mouth of a Black person to get a foothold in the subconscious. (“Hey, I like this guy! I don’t feel threatened by him like I did with Jesse Jackson, who was always asking for something for those Blacks – who always want handouts anyway.”)
Back to memes. Similarly, almost every crime story you read in your local paper, which never mentions the race of Caucasian assailants, but never fails to mention the race of Black assailants, generally in capital letters in the headlines contains a powerful emotional meme as part of its edificatory message.
Dr. Johnson, almost five hundred years ago, described the purpose of literature (stories) as the following: Instruct and delight. In other words, memes found in stories appeal to us by arousing our emotions, making the story memorable and insuring its inclusion in one of the narratives composing our mythic belief system.
Again, memes can be found in stories, and they can be components of a myth. But they gain their currency and power, not by truth but by repetition.
The infamous Göring quote dramatically links the elements of meme and story into a powerful collective narrative myth: “…the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
The fear meme pervades the attack story, which fed into German’s collective (and not altogether wrong at the time) victim myth.
So story, meme, and narrative or myth are different components which work together in helping humans understand the world. Together they compose people’s belief systems, and define their individual beliefs and actions. They determine the strength and cohesion of societies. By manipulating those beliefs, which by way of evolution are hardwired into our emotional system, vast groups of people can be controlled.
Posted by: Malooga | Dec 5 2008 0:20 utc | 21
Remember, the ruling class (of all countries) do not care about people. No one (not even our own Gandhi of Gab, Baby Buddha ‘Bam Bam’ himself, despite what the addle-brained liberals on this blog and elsewhere believe — or “hope”) cares about the people of Pakistan.
(Or as Louie from the movie Casabanca might say, “I’m shocked, shocked, that the man we chose to run our Empire is behaving like an Emperor!“)
This conflict (Pakistan) essentially is composed of five primary objectives:
1) The push to control Central Asian oil resources.
2) The aim to neutralize Russian power and influence by surrounding it, and breaking its energy-supply network.
3) A proxy war with China, which includes surrounding it (remember Afghanistan shares a critical border with China, through which CIA/Soros/Gene Sharp Einstein Institute trained manufactured ethnic “independence” movements, similar to Tibet, can be infiltrated), and gaining control of the China-developed deep-water port and oil and gas transportation network.
4) The drive to gain control of Pakistan’s nukes, and put an end to semi-peripheral state defensive nuclear proliferation as a protective national strategy.
5) The long-term push to control world food supplies through GMO/terminator technology. Put in place last decade in South America (mainly Soya and Corn) during its engineered “financial crisis”, extended to Iraq recently, control of Pakistan’s wheat crop would put further leverage on the peripheral world, especially Africa (again working hand-in-hand with Africom).
It is important to point out that implementing Geo-Political strategy is a long-term process with many short-term gains and loses. Sometimes this is overlooked here, and on many liberal and progressive websites, where the outrage-du-jour takes precedence, or the Progressive approach is merely to run the Empire more efficiently (Kerry, Obama): the million articles over the last few years that we don’t have enough troops, or we have the wrong weapons, or we have “lost” Iraq or Afghanistan.
This is not to say that short-term tactics and current events are not important (the latest resistance movement, Afriscam basing, etc.), but to bear foremost in mind when making geo-political pronouncements that State planner horizons extend at least fifty years into the future.
For instance, the ubiquitous American Myth that “we lost Vietnam.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The goals in Vietnam were two-fold: To prevent the emergence of a successful redistributive example, and to open the country to foreign investment and markets. The first goal was achieved militarily before the US left: The country — and surrounding countries were completely destroyed. The second goal took an additional 15 or so years of IMF/World Bank shenanigans and core country unified trade policy to prize open the oyster. But the goals were, of course, achieved.
Similarly, both Bush and Rumsfeld spoke early on about 15-20 year counter-insurgency horizons. Why so long? CI, or “pacification” essentially means ending all “terrorism”, which is code for resistance, i.e. State-monoploy of power. This involves largely destroying an entire generation and starving the population, then providing limited opportunity to the next generation to co-opt them into the Imperial project. The jury will be out on the success or failure of this strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan for a long time to come.
While I’m on the topic of Emperor ‘Bam Bam’, it is noteworthy to observe the the world’s most heinous living war criminal, Henry Kissinger himself, believes that the young tyro “has appointed an extraordinary team for national security policy,” a real “Team of Heavyweights.”(No more links because of typepad, its in the Wash Post) It just warms the cockles of my heart to hear this and gives me hope that those who spent time and money campaigning for our new Emperor weren’t “identifying more with the guards than with the other inmates.” Oh yeah, Dr. K is not an inmate yet….
It should also be remarked upon that when our new “Disembler-in-Chief” talks tough about terrorism, considering the laws and precedents of the Bush regime, that means all opposition to State policy, including but not limited to: the grandmothers who were recently jailed for contributing to a charity, hippies against logging out west, my teenage friends in Boston who are against vivisection and are now spending 20 years to life in jail, etc. For them, for Leonard and Mumia, and for countless others, the new Emporer brings in no “Change” or “Hope;” merely the sternly articulated threat of escalation. All of these who I mention above are far more clear than starry-eyed liberals of privilege about the difference between guards and inmates in this society.
There is no meaningful Hope without true wisdom and incisive knowledge of the machinations of capitalism, and no chance of positive Change without confrontation. Power concedes nothing. Read your Howard Zinn and Michael Parenti.
Since you mentioned 9-11, Gaianne, for those who missed it, last month Alternet carried a three-part 14,000 word debate between liberal reporter icon Matt Taibi and David Ray Griffin. Highly recommended, if you are to read anything about 9-11, this is it. DRG just shredded Taibi to pieces with his rapier logic, masterful grasp of detail, and unshakeable composure. If ever there was an advertisment for the importance of studying logic and philosophy as an aid to developing critical thinking, DRG’s incisive, shall I say, bravado, performance was it.
Gaianne-
By the way, I will be in Hartford at the rally tomorrow.
Posted by: Malooga | Dec 7 2008 6:35 utc | 64
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