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The prisoners who kicked Harvard’s ass: Only people who think Ivy Leaguers are smarter than felons were surprised

When prisoners from Eastern New York Correctional Facility beat Harvard University in an exhibition debate last month, it made national headlines. It had all the elements of a classic underdog story, with a motley trio made up of violent offenders adjudged to be society’s worst, going up against a fresh-faced team made up of America’s best and brightest. Yet in this most civilized of battles, where words were the only weapons, the prisoners won. What happened, Harvard? Was the match fixed? Nearly every report on the story explored the niggling question that the judges were biased against the Ivy League team. To the Wall Street Journal, lead judge Mary Nugent defended their decision for Eastern New York Correctional, stressing: “I don’t think we can ever judge devoid of context or where we are, but the idea they would win out of sympathy is playing into pretty misguided ideas about inmates. Their academic ability is impressive.” To educators and advocates who work with vast and varied prison populations, the win was perfectly plausible on a generalized and specific level. (This same debate team had won a match against West Point in 2014.) As of last official count, the United States currently boasts a federal and state prison population of just over 1.5 million, of which 106,000 were female. Per numbers crunched in 2008, approximately 1 per 100 adults in the U.S. is incarcerated. As far as these prison advocates are concerned, it’s the general public that needs to be educated regarding the systemic socioeconomic asymmetries feeding the dismal growth of rates of incarceration in a this country. The contemporary prison is no longer a penitentiary, a place of penitence and reflection, but an industry that requires demeaned and docile bodies off which it can profit. Correspondingly, there has been an alarming strengthening of the preschool-to-prison pipeline, as well as the reappearance of debtors’ prison, which makes being poor a crime in itself. Deborah Jiang-Stein is the author of the memoir "Prison Baby" and founder of the unPrison Project. In an email to me, she writes: “What’s so surprising about the triumph of a prison debate team over Harvard’s team? When I read the subtitle, '...In a surprising turn of events, a debate team comprised of prisoners from Eastern New York Correctional Facility beat Harvard’s debate team,' my first thought was: This is close to: ‘S/he’s pretty articulate for a (fill in the blank).’ And often the blank isn’t filled in. It’s implied about race, dialect, nationality.” She explains that a raft of prejudices make it too easy to dismiss “a bunch of inmates” as being incapable of debate skills and logical thinking. “The tide might be turning about mass incarceration,” she concludes, “but it’s time to look inside the humanity and abilities of the people inside prisons.” Boria Sax agrees with her. That inmates won a debate against Harvard “should not be surprising," he comments to me. "The inmates think and study intensely, and without distractions of the Internet. They are probably the most engaged students I have ever had.” The author of several books focusing on animal-human relations, Sax teaches at Sing Sing and Taconic prisons with a program called Hudson Link, which provides a college education and imparts life skills to incarcerated men and women. It is similar to the Bard Prison Initiative, which had fostered the Eastern New York Correctional debate team. The underlying rationale for these programs is that they prevent recidivism by generating self-respect while imparting critical thinking skills. There is respect for these programs inside prison, as there are very few spots and the inmates have to compete for admission by writing an essay and going for an interview, just as they would to get into a regular college. Notably, the Hudson Link program focuses on the traditional disciplines of a classical liberal arts education. Sax teaches philosophy, history, English, art and religion. The stuff of an Ivy League education, usually taught at institutions where the sons and daughters of the moneyed elite go to sing the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock: “In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo.” It is too easy to mock, and yet the program is working: Out of 300 men who graduated from Bard’s program, fewer than 2 percent returned to custody within three years; and Hudson Link’s rates are at 3 percent. Without education, 40 percent of prisoners end up incarcerated again. In an oddly backhanded way, the success of these programs reveals the importance of the humanities—those “useless” subjects such as literature, philosophy, and history--which educate the whole person instead of training a worker. For some inmates, Sax writes, their situation may compel them “to think about things more intensely than most people. A crisis like going to prison can move people to question everything in their lives.” As for providing a liberal arts education to inmates, he posits the question: “Are we doing it for the prisoners or for society? Both, but helping the prisoners is a more tangible and immediate goal.” He wants to remind those who have never experienced life behind bars that prison is not like how it is portrayed in films and television. It is, above all else, “terribly bleak.” In recent years, perhaps no one has done more than Rene Denfeld to simultaneously illuminate the grinding despair of prison life while humanizing the condemned. Her gorgeously written, brutal tale about an inmate awaiting execution, "The Enchanted," was one of the most critically acclaimed literary works of 2014. What did she think of the fact that Eastern New York Correctional beat Harvard? It’s “an indictment of both our prison economy and our higher education system,” she says to me, for whether our children end up in prison or in the Ivy League has far “less to do with their potential than the color of their skin and economic background.” And luck, too, I would add. Growing up in rural Maine, I often heard adults comment that smart kids in school would either end up in jail, or getting into Harvard. There but for the grace of God go I. So I will end by quoting T. S. Eliot again, whose words take on solemn resonance in light of the profitable prison industry that is now hoovering up the poor: “There will be time to murder and create/ And time for all the works and days of hands/That lift and drop a question on your plate/ Time for you and time for me.”When prisoners from Eastern New York Correctional Facility beat Harvard University in an exhibition debate last month, it made national headlines. It had all the elements of a classic underdog story, with a motley trio made up of violent offenders adjudged to be society’s worst, going up against a fresh-faced team made up of America’s best and brightest. Yet in this most civilized of battles, where words were the only weapons, the prisoners won. What happened, Harvard? Was the match fixed? Nearly every report on the story explored the niggling question that the judges were biased against the Ivy League team. To the Wall Street Journal, lead judge Mary Nugent defended their decision for Eastern New York Correctional, stressing: “I don’t think we can ever judge devoid of context or where we are, but the idea they would win out of sympathy is playing into pretty misguided ideas about inmates. Their academic ability is impressive.” To educators and advocates who work with vast and varied prison populations, the win was perfectly plausible on a generalized and specific level. (This same debate team had won a match against West Point in 2014.) As of last official count, the United States currently boasts a federal and state prison population of just over 1.5 million, of which 106,000 were female. Per numbers crunched in 2008, approximately 1 per 100 adults in the U.S. is incarcerated. As far as these prison advocates are concerned, it’s the general public that needs to be educated regarding the systemic socioeconomic asymmetries feeding the dismal growth of rates of incarceration in a this country. The contemporary prison is no longer a penitentiary, a place of penitence and reflection, but an industry that requires demeaned and docile bodies off which it can profit. Correspondingly, there has been an alarming strengthening of the preschool-to-prison pipeline, as well as the reappearance of debtors’ prison, which makes being poor a crime in itself. Deborah Jiang-Stein is the author of the memoir "Prison Baby" and founder of the unPrison Project. In an email to me, she writes: “What’s so surprising about the triumph of a prison debate team over Harvard’s team? When I read the subtitle, '...In a surprising turn of events, a debate team comprised of prisoners from Eastern New York Correctional Facility beat Harvard’s debate team,' my first thought was: This is close to: ‘S/he’s pretty articulate for a (fill in the blank).’ And often the blank isn’t filled in. It’s implied about race, dialect, nationality.” She explains that a raft of prejudices make it too easy to dismiss “a bunch of inmates” as being incapable of debate skills and logical thinking. “The tide might be turning about mass incarceration,” she concludes, “but it’s time to look inside the humanity and abilities of the people inside prisons.” Boria Sax agrees with her. That inmates won a debate against Harvard “should not be surprising," he comments to me. "The inmates think and study intensely, and without distractions of the Internet. They are probably the most engaged students I have ever had.” The author of several books focusing on animal-human relations, Sax teaches at Sing Sing and Taconic prisons with a program called Hudson Link, which provides a college education and imparts life skills to incarcerated men and women. It is similar to the Bard Prison Initiative, which had fostered the Eastern New York Correctional debate team. The underlying rationale for these programs is that they prevent recidivism by generating self-respect while imparting critical thinking skills. There is respect for these programs inside prison, as there are very few spots and the inmates have to compete for admission by writing an essay and going for an interview, just as they would to get into a regular college. Notably, the Hudson Link program focuses on the traditional disciplines of a classical liberal arts education. Sax teaches philosophy, history, English, art and religion. The stuff of an Ivy League education, usually taught at institutions where the sons and daughters of the moneyed elite go to sing the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock: “In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo.” It is too easy to mock, and yet the program is working: Out of 300 men who graduated from Bard’s program, fewer than 2 percent returned to custody within three years; and Hudson Link’s rates are at 3 percent. Without education, 40 percent of prisoners end up incarcerated again. In an oddly backhanded way, the success of these programs reveals the importance of the humanities—those “useless” subjects such as literature, philosophy, and history--which educate the whole person instead of training a worker. For some inmates, Sax writes, their situation may compel them “to think about things more intensely than most people. A crisis like going to prison can move people to question everything in their lives.” As for providing a liberal arts education to inmates, he posits the question: “Are we doing it for the prisoners or for society? Both, but helping the prisoners is a more tangible and immediate goal.” He wants to remind those who have never experienced life behind bars that prison is not like how it is portrayed in films and television. It is, above all else, “terribly bleak.” In recent years, perhaps no one has done more than Rene Denfeld to simultaneously illuminate the grinding despair of prison life while humanizing the condemned. Her gorgeously written, brutal tale about an inmate awaiting execution, "The Enchanted," was one of the most critically acclaimed literary works of 2014. What did she think of the fact that Eastern New York Correctional beat Harvard? It’s “an indictment of both our prison economy and our higher education system,” she says to me, for whether our children end up in prison or in the Ivy League has far “less to do with their potential than the color of their skin and economic background.” And luck, too, I would add. Growing up in rural Maine, I often heard adults comment that smart kids in school would either end up in jail, or getting into Harvard. There but for the grace of God go I. So I will end by quoting T. S. Eliot again, whose words take on solemn resonance in light of the profitable prison industry that is now hoovering up the poor: “There will be time to murder and create/ And time for all the works and days of hands/That lift and drop a question on your plate/ Time for you and time for me.”

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Published on October 06, 2015 16:01

Secrets of “Saturday Night Live” at 40: “There would never be anything like this again”

It’s highly doubtful that anyone associated with the premiere of Saturday Night Live in 1975 imagined that the show would still be around ten, fifteen, or twenty-five years later. Some of those present at the creation, however, were definitely still around on February 15, 2015, and they, along with dozens of other alumni from TV’s longest-running comedy show, returned to Studio 8H to celebrate its epochal fortieth anniversary. The special, which spanned more than three and a half hours of prime time on NBC, truly had something for everybody who’d ever loved or even liked the program, and it also, true to form, had something for everybody to bitch about. Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator and its producer for all but five of those forty years, was determined to invite everybody associated with SNL in any significant way to attend the TV special and a splashy after-gala, and he gave orders to the producers and writers of the special to include as many celebrated or notorious highlights from four decades of SNL as possible. Blocks of memory-stirring moments were interlaced with new versions of SNL classics, all of them combined in an astonishing whirlwind ride—one that demonstrated how SNL could sail through myriad changes in American trends, fads, fashions, attitudes, institutions, social realities, political movements, and technology and manage to remain young, even as the rest of us grew older. The show had begun, actor Robert De Niro noted, “back when TV was still watched on TV,” when if you missed the show on Saturday night, then you missed the show. The special was divided loosely into thematic blocks (“Forty Years of Politics on SNL,” hosted by Jack Nicholson; “Forty Years of Sports on SNL,” hosted by Derek Jeter and Peyton Manning) and even included a new rap song, by Andy Samberg and Adam Sandler, to accompany a montage of “breaks”—times when actors broke up laughing. In reviewing the special, Internet writers and bloggers and social-media practitioners dubbed it “uneven,” a charge that the series has faced since its inception. The show was always bound to be uneven, partly because it envelops and displays so many different kinds of comedy, intermingling political satire with shameless slapstick and ribald or just plain dirty farce. On the fortieth anniversary show, the clips whizzed by with once-familiar sayings and catchphrases popping back into the collective consciousness . . .

“I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverines.” —Michael O’Donoghue to John Belushi, and vice versa, from the first episode ever aired “Guess what: I’ve got a fever. And the only prescription is more cowbell.”—Christopher Walken, as the Bruce Dickinson, to Will Ferrell, Jimmy Fallon, and others in a classic sketch from April 2000 “Wow! That’s good bass!”—Laraine Newman to Dan Aykroyd in a reenactment of Aykroyd’s Bass-O-Matic commercial spoof from the first season “Remember when you were with the Beatles?...That was awesome.”—Chris Farley, as an inept but lovable interviewer, to Paul McCartney in February 1993 “I can see Russia from my house!”—Tina Fey as vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in 2008

“It was my understanding that there would be no math.” —Chevy Chase as Gerald R. Ford in a presidential debate from the first season “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.” — Jon Lovitz as Michael Dukakis in response to a burst of gibberish from Dana Carvey as George Bush, in a presidential debate from 1988 “Well, it got a big laugh—but did it get the right laugh?” —Mike Myers as Lorne Michaels in a “Wayne’s World” reunion (with Dana Carvey) written for the fortieth anniversary special And, yes, Generalissimo Francisco Franco was “still dead,” as Chevy Chase had regularly reported in the first season of “Weekend Update” mock-newscasts, back when the cast was known as the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. “There they are—all my friends,” said John Belushi, made up to look like the old man he would never live to be and pointing to headstones on a cemetery hill in Tom Schiller’s poignant 1977 short film Don’t Look Back in Anger. All his old cohorts from SNL had preceded him in death, Belushi said, scoffing at suspicions that he would be the first to go.

Even SNL detractors would have to admit that the range represented on the special verged on awe-inspiring; it was that breadth of scope and style that helped explain the forty-year run in the first place. That, and the fact that the show perpetually replenished itself onstage and in the writer’s room, launching the careers of many an extraordinary performer in the process. The assembled glitterati watching the special in Studio 8H represented a cross section of the pop-culture elite, just as the performers constituted a remarkable roll call of comedy royalty. They came together to honor a program that had started in the minor tributaries of television and soon became a torrent in the mainstream. Among those seated in the audience that February night was Al Franken, once a Peck’s Bad Boy of television on SNL, now grown up with a vengeance. As a writer and performer, he had maliciously insulted network president Fred Silverman in a sketch for a 1979 episode of the show, and now he was serving his second term as a U.S. senator from Minnesota. How things change. Bill Murray, as lounge singer Nick Ocean, sang new and gratuitous lyrics to the theme from Jaws, with Paul Shaffer at the piano (“Jaws! You took me and made me part of you...you bastard, Jaws”). Eddie Murphy, who’d refused to take part in the show’s twenty-fifth anniversary, made a noncomic appearance to say that all was forgiven and that “I will always love this show” (though he refused to do an impression of scandalized Bill Cosby). Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin paid tribute to Tracy Morgan, former cast member suffering through a long recuperation following a traffic accident. And, in a selection of clips, viewers saw the ancient auditions of performers who did make the cast and a few — Jim Carrey, Kevin Hart — who didn’t. “I’m just glad it’s over” was one of Michaels’s comments a few days after the complex, spectacular, exhaustive, and exhausting show had aired. He was saluted at various points in the program, lampooned at others, and was called up onto the very crowded stage for good nights. And it was clear, however much he and the show he created have tried to avoid sentimentality over the decades, that even Michaels was fighting back tears. Afterward, at the Plaza Hotel, worlds collided in a way that only Michaels could probably engineer. With all due respect to Vanity Fair’s fabled Oscar bashes, no one else could have summoned the array of musicians, comedians, actors, politicians, and corporate big shots that Michaels brought together that night. Music was in the center ring, starting with Dan Aykroyd summoning onstage the likes of Paul McCartney, Jimmy Buffett, Taylor Swift, Debbie Harry, Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, the B-52s, and Michael Bolton. That was hardly that. Jimmy Fallon later called on Prince to take the stage and bring the evening to the proverbial “next level.” What was being celebrated that night was a phenomenon that — through the endlessly morphing and recharging organism that Michaels had created — had made not only television history but also played a role in the political and social direction of the nation. Born in an age dominated by three TV networks and a smattering of independent stations, Saturday Night Live had survived into the Internet era and was still rolling powerfully along. The SNL special drew an impressive 26.5 million viewers according to Nielsen ratings, ranking it as the most-watched NBC Entertainment program in a decade, and also setting a record, according to Entertainment Weekly, for the largest number of tweets ever prompted by a single program—9.1 million people interacting via 1.3 million tweets, by the Nielsen Social count. It would be all but inarguable to declare the night not only a success but also a milestone. One had to concede—considering the innumerable earthquakes and sea changes that had already occurred in American media and all the others undoubtedly lurking in the future — that, no, there would never be anything like this again. No, not ever. Excerpted from "Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of 'Saturday Night Live' as Told By Its Stars, Writers and Guests" by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales. Published by Back Bay Books. Revised 40th anniversary paperback edition copyright September 2015. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. It’s highly doubtful that anyone associated with the premiere of Saturday Night Live in 1975 imagined that the show would still be around ten, fifteen, or twenty-five years later. Some of those present at the creation, however, were definitely still around on February 15, 2015, and they, along with dozens of other alumni from TV’s longest-running comedy show, returned to Studio 8H to celebrate its epochal fortieth anniversary. The special, which spanned more than three and a half hours of prime time on NBC, truly had something for everybody who’d ever loved or even liked the program, and it also, true to form, had something for everybody to bitch about. Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator and its producer for all but five of those forty years, was determined to invite everybody associated with SNL in any significant way to attend the TV special and a splashy after-gala, and he gave orders to the producers and writers of the special to include as many celebrated or notorious highlights from four decades of SNL as possible. Blocks of memory-stirring moments were interlaced with new versions of SNL classics, all of them combined in an astonishing whirlwind ride—one that demonstrated how SNL could sail through myriad changes in American trends, fads, fashions, attitudes, institutions, social realities, political movements, and technology and manage to remain young, even as the rest of us grew older. The show had begun, actor Robert De Niro noted, “back when TV was still watched on TV,” when if you missed the show on Saturday night, then you missed the show. The special was divided loosely into thematic blocks (“Forty Years of Politics on SNL,” hosted by Jack Nicholson; “Forty Years of Sports on SNL,” hosted by Derek Jeter and Peyton Manning) and even included a new rap song, by Andy Samberg and Adam Sandler, to accompany a montage of “breaks”—times when actors broke up laughing. In reviewing the special, Internet writers and bloggers and social-media practitioners dubbed it “uneven,” a charge that the series has faced since its inception. The show was always bound to be uneven, partly because it envelops and displays so many different kinds of comedy, intermingling political satire with shameless slapstick and ribald or just plain dirty farce. On the fortieth anniversary show, the clips whizzed by with once-familiar sayings and catchphrases popping back into the collective consciousness . . .

“I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverines.” —Michael O’Donoghue to John Belushi, and vice versa, from the first episode ever aired “Guess what: I’ve got a fever. And the only prescription is more cowbell.”—Christopher Walken, as the Bruce Dickinson, to Will Ferrell, Jimmy Fallon, and others in a classic sketch from April 2000 “Wow! That’s good bass!”—Laraine Newman to Dan Aykroyd in a reenactment of Aykroyd’s Bass-O-Matic commercial spoof from the first season “Remember when you were with the Beatles?...That was awesome.”—Chris Farley, as an inept but lovable interviewer, to Paul McCartney in February 1993 “I can see Russia from my house!”—Tina Fey as vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in 2008

“It was my understanding that there would be no math.” —Chevy Chase as Gerald R. Ford in a presidential debate from the first season “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.” — Jon Lovitz as Michael Dukakis in response to a burst of gibberish from Dana Carvey as George Bush, in a presidential debate from 1988 “Well, it got a big laugh—but did it get the right laugh?” —Mike Myers as Lorne Michaels in a “Wayne’s World” reunion (with Dana Carvey) written for the fortieth anniversary special And, yes, Generalissimo Francisco Franco was “still dead,” as Chevy Chase had regularly reported in the first season of “Weekend Update” mock-newscasts, back when the cast was known as the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. “There they are—all my friends,” said John Belushi, made up to look like the old man he would never live to be and pointing to headstones on a cemetery hill in Tom Schiller’s poignant 1977 short film Don’t Look Back in Anger. All his old cohorts from SNL had preceded him in death, Belushi said, scoffing at suspicions that he would be the first to go.

Even SNL detractors would have to admit that the range represented on the special verged on awe-inspiring; it was that breadth of scope and style that helped explain the forty-year run in the first place. That, and the fact that the show perpetually replenished itself onstage and in the writer’s room, launching the careers of many an extraordinary performer in the process. The assembled glitterati watching the special in Studio 8H represented a cross section of the pop-culture elite, just as the performers constituted a remarkable roll call of comedy royalty. They came together to honor a program that had started in the minor tributaries of television and soon became a torrent in the mainstream. Among those seated in the audience that February night was Al Franken, once a Peck’s Bad Boy of television on SNL, now grown up with a vengeance. As a writer and performer, he had maliciously insulted network president Fred Silverman in a sketch for a 1979 episode of the show, and now he was serving his second term as a U.S. senator from Minnesota. How things change. Bill Murray, as lounge singer Nick Ocean, sang new and gratuitous lyrics to the theme from Jaws, with Paul Shaffer at the piano (“Jaws! You took me and made me part of you...you bastard, Jaws”). Eddie Murphy, who’d refused to take part in the show’s twenty-fifth anniversary, made a noncomic appearance to say that all was forgiven and that “I will always love this show” (though he refused to do an impression of scandalized Bill Cosby). Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin paid tribute to Tracy Morgan, former cast member suffering through a long recuperation following a traffic accident. And, in a selection of clips, viewers saw the ancient auditions of performers who did make the cast and a few — Jim Carrey, Kevin Hart — who didn’t. “I’m just glad it’s over” was one of Michaels’s comments a few days after the complex, spectacular, exhaustive, and exhausting show had aired. He was saluted at various points in the program, lampooned at others, and was called up onto the very crowded stage for good nights. And it was clear, however much he and the show he created have tried to avoid sentimentality over the decades, that even Michaels was fighting back tears. Afterward, at the Plaza Hotel, worlds collided in a way that only Michaels could probably engineer. With all due respect to Vanity Fair’s fabled Oscar bashes, no one else could have summoned the array of musicians, comedians, actors, politicians, and corporate big shots that Michaels brought together that night. Music was in the center ring, starting with Dan Aykroyd summoning onstage the likes of Paul McCartney, Jimmy Buffett, Taylor Swift, Debbie Harry, Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, the B-52s, and Michael Bolton. That was hardly that. Jimmy Fallon later called on Prince to take the stage and bring the evening to the proverbial “next level.” What was being celebrated that night was a phenomenon that — through the endlessly morphing and recharging organism that Michaels had created — had made not only television history but also played a role in the political and social direction of the nation. Born in an age dominated by three TV networks and a smattering of independent stations, Saturday Night Live had survived into the Internet era and was still rolling powerfully along. The SNL special drew an impressive 26.5 million viewers according to Nielsen ratings, ranking it as the most-watched NBC Entertainment program in a decade, and also setting a record, according to Entertainment Weekly, for the largest number of tweets ever prompted by a single program—9.1 million people interacting via 1.3 million tweets, by the Nielsen Social count. It would be all but inarguable to declare the night not only a success but also a milestone. One had to concede—considering the innumerable earthquakes and sea changes that had already occurred in American media and all the others undoubtedly lurking in the future — that, no, there would never be anything like this again. No, not ever. Excerpted from "Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of 'Saturday Night Live' as Told By Its Stars, Writers and Guests" by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales. Published by Back Bay Books. Revised 40th anniversary paperback edition copyright September 2015. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

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Published on October 06, 2015 16:00

Thomas Friedman, read your Chomsky: The New York Times gets Putin/Obama all wrong, again

A lot of good people are asking a lot of good questions these days, and this is an excellent thing. On the foreign policy side, it happens the best of these questions are posed by non-Americans, for the simple reason most Americans are not ready to think clearly about our moment and how we have come to it. We do not ask because we cannot answer. My three favorite questions of late, it also happens, have to do with Syria. And let there be no doubt: It is all over for the Obama administration, the Pentagon, the spooks and all others still pretending there is a “moderate opposition” that will carry the day in the many-sided Syrian conflict. Washington has slipped its grip. Others are in charge now, and as they pursue a solution to this crisis the only choice open to the U.S. is whether or not to join in the effort. It will be interesting to see which alternative the White House and the State Department choose. “I cannot help asking those who have caused the situation, Do you realize now what you’ve done?” This is the first good question. Vladimir Putin posed it in his speech to the U.N. General Assembly 10 days ago. Sensibly, the Russian president added, “But I am afraid no one is going to answer that.” To offer modest assistance, Mr. Putin, the U.S. leadership knows exactly what it has done, and this is why you are correct: Your query will go without reply. The second and third good questions came from Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister. For my money Zarif is among the ablest diplomats now on the scene. He addressed the U.S. on the Syria crisis during a conference in New York on Monday, and he asked, “Why are you there? Who gave you the right to be there?” Wow, wow and wow. I love these questions. The subtext in the three of them together is that the Obama administration’s failure in Syria is now complete. Washington is no longer in charge. If there is a better example of language as power, I cannot think of what it is. Putin forces us to consider the Syria crisis as history. This is the equivalent of dropping a neutron bomb on our nation’s capital: All the Greek facades are intact, but the narrative incessantly spun behind them is dead. Read Putin’s U.N. speech here. Read a few others and you recognize that the Russian leader has long understood history’s potency, especially when deployed against the messes resulting from America’s imperial adventures. As to Zarif’s line of inquiry, both parts are of interest. To ask why the U.S. is in Syria is to brush aside all the customary bunkum about Washington’s humane outrage over the Assad regime’s brutalities. Underneath we find an obsession with “regime change” in Damascus so as to convert Syria from outlier to another Middle Eastern client. Left to the U.S., Assad’s successor, as in the case of al-Sisi in Egypt, would be welcome to all the brutalities he may find necessary. Almost certainly he would enjoy an arms package similar to Egypt’s now-restored $5 billion annually—most of which is now deployed against Egyptians. “Who gave you the right to be there?” What a simple, pithy question. I have not heard any American other than people such as Noam Chomsky ever consider such a thing. Throughout Washington’s long effort to arm anti-Assad militias on the ground and more recently to drop bombs on Syrian soil—roughly 4,000 sorties to date—the illegality of U.S. policy simply never comes up. Zarif thus forces two bitter truths upon us. One, we have been breaking the law from the first. We may not have anything to say about this, as we have not to date, but the silence will be conspicuous from here on out, given that others are now prepared openly to challenge the U.S. on the point. Two, whatever one may think of the Assad government, those now committed to backing it as part of their strategy to defeat radical Islamists in Syria do so in accordance with international law. Like it or not, this counts. Speaking strictly for myself, I like the idea of a global community that proceeds lawfully. It tends to reduce the incidence of disorder and anarchy created by such entities as the Islamic State and the Pentagon. * It is now several weeks since Russia let it be known that it would reinforce its long-standing support of Bashar al-Assad with new military commitments. First came the materiél. Bombing runs began a week ago. On Monday, a senior military official in Moscow announced that Russian troops are to join the fight against the Islamic State. We are always encouraged to find anything Putin does devious and the outcome of hidden motives and some obscure agenda having to do with his pouting ambition to be seen as a first-rank world leader. From the government-supervised New York Times on down, this is what you read in the newspapers and hear on the radio and television broadcasts. I urge readers to pay no attention to this stuff. It is all about Washington’s agenda to obscure. Russia’s favored strategy in Syria has long been very clear. It is a question of distinguishing the primary and secondary contradictions, as the Marxists say. The Assad regime is to be kept in place so as to preserve those political institutions still functioning as the basis of a reconstructed national government. Once the threat of Islamic terror is defeated, a political transition into a post-Assad reconstruction can be negotiated. For a time it appeared that Washington was prepared to buy into this set of expedients. This impression derived from the very frequent contacts between John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, with whom the American secretary of state has often worked closely. Then came the fateful encounter between Obama and Putin at the U.N. Obama spoke first, Putin afterward. Then the two met privately. A few days ago a source in Moscow with good lines into Kremlin thinking wrote a long note on the Obama-Putin encounter in New York. Here is some of what this source said:

The meeting with Obama in New York did not go well. It was extremely contentious, and Obama did not engage. Putin made the case that the important first priority had to be to eliminate Daesh [the Islamic State], and that after more than a year of the U.S. campaign there has been no significant success. Indeed, the contrary is the case. Putin’s point was that air power alone will not succeed, and that now the only real boots on the ground are the Kurds and the armies of Syria and its supporters—Hezbollah and some Iranians, but the Iranians troops involved in the struggle with Daesh are operating mostly in Iraq. Putin proposed creating a coalition, the equivalent of the anti-Hitler alliance, to focus on Daesh, and then focusing in Round 2 on the transition of Syria into a form of decentralized federation of highly autonomous regions—Kurdish, Sunni, Alawite-Christian and a few others—which all work together now. Putin had been led to believe through the Lavrov /Kerry channel… that there would be a broader agreement to work together. So he was surprised that Obama did not seize the opportunity to engage the battle in a coordinated way…. In the end they agreed only on coordination between the two militaries to avoid running into each other. Putin left New York with the view that it is now much more important to support the government in Syria than he had thought before he went, because he came convinced that the U.S., left to its present course, is going to create another Libya, this time in Syria. Israel has a similar view, as does Egypt, Iran, and, increasingly, countries in Europe. With Daesh already so deeply implanted, this would lead to vast crisis—military, political, economic, humanitarian—that would spread across all of the Middle East, into the Caucasus and across North Africa, with millions of refugees….

There are four things to say about this account straight off the top. One, the subtext is that Putin reached the point in New York when he effectively threw up his hands and said, “I’m fed up.” Two, Obama went into that meeting more or less befuddled as to what to say. In a word, he was outclassed. Three, the strategy Putin presented to Obama is clear, logical, lawful and has a good chance of working. In other words, it is everything the Obama administration’s is not, Kerry’s efforts to work with Lavrov notwithstanding. Four and most important, the history books may well conclude that the U.N. on Sept. 27 was the very place and the very day the U.S. ceded the initiative to Russia on the Syria crisis. This is my read as of now, although in circumstances this kinetic it is too perilous to anticipate what may come next. The American press has been slightly berserk subsequent to the U.N. encounter, putting more spin on the new Russian policy than a gyroscope has in space. Putin is weak and desperate, he is making Syria more violent, Russian jets are bombing CIA-backed “moderates” and not ISIS, this is Russia’s second Afghanistan, nothing can work so long as Assad remains in power. “Putin stupidly went into Syria looking for a cheap sugar high to show his people that Russia is still a world power,” Tom Friedman, a standout in this line, wrote in the Times last week. “Watch him become public enemy No. 1 in the Sunni Muslim world. ‘Yo, Vladimir, how’s that working for you?’” I read all this with a mirror: It is nothing more than a reflection of how far below its knees the Obama administration’s pants have just fallen. Who went stupidly into Syria, Tom? Yo, Tom, your lump-them-together prejudices are showing: Most of “the Sunni Muslim world” is as appalled by the Islamic State as the non-Sunni Muslim world. * What a weird sensation it is to agree with Charles Krauthammer, one of the Washington’s Post’s too-numerous right-wing opinion-page writers. It is like traveling in a strange, badly run country where something always seems about to go wrong. “If it had the wit, the Obama administration would be not angered, but appropriately humiliated,” Krauthammer wrote in last Thursday’s paper. “President Obama has, once again, been totally outmaneuvered by Vladimir Putin.” It is a lot better than Tom Friedman’s driveling defense of the president. Somewhere, at least, a spade is still a spade. But with this observation the common ground with Krauthammer begins and ends. Obama has got it radically wrong in Syria—and indeed across the Middle East—but not in the ways we are encouraged to think. Where lie the errors, then? The first and biggest of them is his willingness to inherit the vision bequeathed by 117 years of American ambition abroad. In the American imperium it is all about us, always. Syria is not Syria, a land of 23 million people (before the exodus we prompted) just as Egypt as it aspired to democracy during the Arab Spring was not Egypt. These are squares on the geopolitical game board. In the Syria case, Russia has a strategy that is prima facie rational and right, but we must object because it is Russia’s. Certainly we cannot join Moscow to make common cause. Putin and Zarif and others now posing questions are telling Washington something it will have to hear if it is to get off the destructive course of American foreign policy: This is not about you, as many things in the world are not. This is about a political, social and cultural crisis that requires the disinterested attention of those capable of contributing to a solution. Think about the united front Putin proposes and Obama declines to join. It is already in motion, in case you did not notice. Moscow, Tehran, Baghdad and Damascus are all now committed to cooperating—not least by way of intelligence sharing, which is a big one—in the fight to subdue the Islamic State. But isn’t it true that Russia is bombing targets other than the Islamic State, some of which are rebel groups the CIA has backed? Possibly, although I have not taken the Pentagon’s word for anything since 1966 or so. In my read Russian jets are probably hitting those groups most immediately threatening Damascus—no surprise, given the stated mission is to keep Assad in the presidential palace until the fighting stops. Why, in any case, should Russia discriminate between one rebel group and another, when “moderate opposition” is nothing but a fantasy out of the Reaganists’ old “freedom fighter” narrative? But isn’t Putin about to reclaim influence in the Middle East that the Soviet Union lost long ago? This may be, but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar: Putin sees the Syria crisis spinning out of control and wants it resolved before it spreads just as the Kremlin now fears. In my read, reclaimed influence in the region will be a follow-on consequence. To the extent it materializes, we will have to get used to calling it multipolarity. If you think the record of American primacy in the Middle East is something worth preserving at the exorbitant cost it exacts, please use the comment box and enlighten all of us. Obama’s second big mistake has to do with his response to the problem of American exceptionalism. One had a sense late during his first term and into his second that he understood it was time to lance this boil on the American consciousness, but in the breach he seems to have demurred. The result has been his commitment to keep American troops out of conflict zones but to maintain the posture by way of Air Force bombers and supposedly surgical drone attacks. He thus altered only method, not purpose, the desired outcome—as, again, he inherited it. Not only has it failed to achieve any result in Syria; the grotesque bombing of a Médicins sans Frontière hospital in Kanduz, Afghanistan, last weekend reveals the strategy to be a bust on any kind of life-saving, humanitarian grounds, as well. There is no having your cake and eating it, in short. We are now going to get earfuls as to how the answer in Syria now is to make greater military commitments, all on our own—Obama’s sin being his gingerly thinking. It is upside down. A good president—and this is why one finds it hard to line up behind Hillary—needs to take on America’s intentions as well as its tactics. In my read, Russia and Iran have just popped open the door to a solution in Syria. All the pieces are in place but one: Washington’s capacity to acknowledge the strategic failure now so evident and to see beyond the narrowest definition of where its interests lie. This brings us to the paradox embedded in those questions Putin and Zarif and a few others now pose: American primacy is no longer in America’s interest. Get your mind around this and you have arrived in the 21st century.A lot of good people are asking a lot of good questions these days, and this is an excellent thing. On the foreign policy side, it happens the best of these questions are posed by non-Americans, for the simple reason most Americans are not ready to think clearly about our moment and how we have come to it. We do not ask because we cannot answer. My three favorite questions of late, it also happens, have to do with Syria. And let there be no doubt: It is all over for the Obama administration, the Pentagon, the spooks and all others still pretending there is a “moderate opposition” that will carry the day in the many-sided Syrian conflict. Washington has slipped its grip. Others are in charge now, and as they pursue a solution to this crisis the only choice open to the U.S. is whether or not to join in the effort. It will be interesting to see which alternative the White House and the State Department choose. “I cannot help asking those who have caused the situation, Do you realize now what you’ve done?” This is the first good question. Vladimir Putin posed it in his speech to the U.N. General Assembly 10 days ago. Sensibly, the Russian president added, “But I am afraid no one is going to answer that.” To offer modest assistance, Mr. Putin, the U.S. leadership knows exactly what it has done, and this is why you are correct: Your query will go without reply. The second and third good questions came from Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister. For my money Zarif is among the ablest diplomats now on the scene. He addressed the U.S. on the Syria crisis during a conference in New York on Monday, and he asked, “Why are you there? Who gave you the right to be there?” Wow, wow and wow. I love these questions. The subtext in the three of them together is that the Obama administration’s failure in Syria is now complete. Washington is no longer in charge. If there is a better example of language as power, I cannot think of what it is. Putin forces us to consider the Syria crisis as history. This is the equivalent of dropping a neutron bomb on our nation’s capital: All the Greek facades are intact, but the narrative incessantly spun behind them is dead. Read Putin’s U.N. speech here. Read a few others and you recognize that the Russian leader has long understood history’s potency, especially when deployed against the messes resulting from America’s imperial adventures. As to Zarif’s line of inquiry, both parts are of interest. To ask why the U.S. is in Syria is to brush aside all the customary bunkum about Washington’s humane outrage over the Assad regime’s brutalities. Underneath we find an obsession with “regime change” in Damascus so as to convert Syria from outlier to another Middle Eastern client. Left to the U.S., Assad’s successor, as in the case of al-Sisi in Egypt, would be welcome to all the brutalities he may find necessary. Almost certainly he would enjoy an arms package similar to Egypt’s now-restored $5 billion annually—most of which is now deployed against Egyptians. “Who gave you the right to be there?” What a simple, pithy question. I have not heard any American other than people such as Noam Chomsky ever consider such a thing. Throughout Washington’s long effort to arm anti-Assad militias on the ground and more recently to drop bombs on Syrian soil—roughly 4,000 sorties to date—the illegality of U.S. policy simply never comes up. Zarif thus forces two bitter truths upon us. One, we have been breaking the law from the first. We may not have anything to say about this, as we have not to date, but the silence will be conspicuous from here on out, given that others are now prepared openly to challenge the U.S. on the point. Two, whatever one may think of the Assad government, those now committed to backing it as part of their strategy to defeat radical Islamists in Syria do so in accordance with international law. Like it or not, this counts. Speaking strictly for myself, I like the idea of a global community that proceeds lawfully. It tends to reduce the incidence of disorder and anarchy created by such entities as the Islamic State and the Pentagon. * It is now several weeks since Russia let it be known that it would reinforce its long-standing support of Bashar al-Assad with new military commitments. First came the materiél. Bombing runs began a week ago. On Monday, a senior military official in Moscow announced that Russian troops are to join the fight against the Islamic State. We are always encouraged to find anything Putin does devious and the outcome of hidden motives and some obscure agenda having to do with his pouting ambition to be seen as a first-rank world leader. From the government-supervised New York Times on down, this is what you read in the newspapers and hear on the radio and television broadcasts. I urge readers to pay no attention to this stuff. It is all about Washington’s agenda to obscure. Russia’s favored strategy in Syria has long been very clear. It is a question of distinguishing the primary and secondary contradictions, as the Marxists say. The Assad regime is to be kept in place so as to preserve those political institutions still functioning as the basis of a reconstructed national government. Once the threat of Islamic terror is defeated, a political transition into a post-Assad reconstruction can be negotiated. For a time it appeared that Washington was prepared to buy into this set of expedients. This impression derived from the very frequent contacts between John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, with whom the American secretary of state has often worked closely. Then came the fateful encounter between Obama and Putin at the U.N. Obama spoke first, Putin afterward. Then the two met privately. A few days ago a source in Moscow with good lines into Kremlin thinking wrote a long note on the Obama-Putin encounter in New York. Here is some of what this source said:

The meeting with Obama in New York did not go well. It was extremely contentious, and Obama did not engage. Putin made the case that the important first priority had to be to eliminate Daesh [the Islamic State], and that after more than a year of the U.S. campaign there has been no significant success. Indeed, the contrary is the case. Putin’s point was that air power alone will not succeed, and that now the only real boots on the ground are the Kurds and the armies of Syria and its supporters—Hezbollah and some Iranians, but the Iranians troops involved in the struggle with Daesh are operating mostly in Iraq. Putin proposed creating a coalition, the equivalent of the anti-Hitler alliance, to focus on Daesh, and then focusing in Round 2 on the transition of Syria into a form of decentralized federation of highly autonomous regions—Kurdish, Sunni, Alawite-Christian and a few others—which all work together now. Putin had been led to believe through the Lavrov /Kerry channel… that there would be a broader agreement to work together. So he was surprised that Obama did not seize the opportunity to engage the battle in a coordinated way…. In the end they agreed only on coordination between the two militaries to avoid running into each other. Putin left New York with the view that it is now much more important to support the government in Syria than he had thought before he went, because he came convinced that the U.S., left to its present course, is going to create another Libya, this time in Syria. Israel has a similar view, as does Egypt, Iran, and, increasingly, countries in Europe. With Daesh already so deeply implanted, this would lead to vast crisis—military, political, economic, humanitarian—that would spread across all of the Middle East, into the Caucasus and across North Africa, with millions of refugees….

There are four things to say about this account straight off the top. One, the subtext is that Putin reached the point in New York when he effectively threw up his hands and said, “I’m fed up.” Two, Obama went into that meeting more or less befuddled as to what to say. In a word, he was outclassed. Three, the strategy Putin presented to Obama is clear, logical, lawful and has a good chance of working. In other words, it is everything the Obama administration’s is not, Kerry’s efforts to work with Lavrov notwithstanding. Four and most important, the history books may well conclude that the U.N. on Sept. 27 was the very place and the very day the U.S. ceded the initiative to Russia on the Syria crisis. This is my read as of now, although in circumstances this kinetic it is too perilous to anticipate what may come next. The American press has been slightly berserk subsequent to the U.N. encounter, putting more spin on the new Russian policy than a gyroscope has in space. Putin is weak and desperate, he is making Syria more violent, Russian jets are bombing CIA-backed “moderates” and not ISIS, this is Russia’s second Afghanistan, nothing can work so long as Assad remains in power. “Putin stupidly went into Syria looking for a cheap sugar high to show his people that Russia is still a world power,” Tom Friedman, a standout in this line, wrote in the Times last week. “Watch him become public enemy No. 1 in the Sunni Muslim world. ‘Yo, Vladimir, how’s that working for you?’” I read all this with a mirror: It is nothing more than a reflection of how far below its knees the Obama administration’s pants have just fallen. Who went stupidly into Syria, Tom? Yo, Tom, your lump-them-together prejudices are showing: Most of “the Sunni Muslim world” is as appalled by the Islamic State as the non-Sunni Muslim world. * What a weird sensation it is to agree with Charles Krauthammer, one of the Washington’s Post’s too-numerous right-wing opinion-page writers. It is like traveling in a strange, badly run country where something always seems about to go wrong. “If it had the wit, the Obama administration would be not angered, but appropriately humiliated,” Krauthammer wrote in last Thursday’s paper. “President Obama has, once again, been totally outmaneuvered by Vladimir Putin.” It is a lot better than Tom Friedman’s driveling defense of the president. Somewhere, at least, a spade is still a spade. But with this observation the common ground with Krauthammer begins and ends. Obama has got it radically wrong in Syria—and indeed across the Middle East—but not in the ways we are encouraged to think. Where lie the errors, then? The first and biggest of them is his willingness to inherit the vision bequeathed by 117 years of American ambition abroad. In the American imperium it is all about us, always. Syria is not Syria, a land of 23 million people (before the exodus we prompted) just as Egypt as it aspired to democracy during the Arab Spring was not Egypt. These are squares on the geopolitical game board. In the Syria case, Russia has a strategy that is prima facie rational and right, but we must object because it is Russia’s. Certainly we cannot join Moscow to make common cause. Putin and Zarif and others now posing questions are telling Washington something it will have to hear if it is to get off the destructive course of American foreign policy: This is not about you, as many things in the world are not. This is about a political, social and cultural crisis that requires the disinterested attention of those capable of contributing to a solution. Think about the united front Putin proposes and Obama declines to join. It is already in motion, in case you did not notice. Moscow, Tehran, Baghdad and Damascus are all now committed to cooperating—not least by way of intelligence sharing, which is a big one—in the fight to subdue the Islamic State. But isn’t it true that Russia is bombing targets other than the Islamic State, some of which are rebel groups the CIA has backed? Possibly, although I have not taken the Pentagon’s word for anything since 1966 or so. In my read Russian jets are probably hitting those groups most immediately threatening Damascus—no surprise, given the stated mission is to keep Assad in the presidential palace until the fighting stops. Why, in any case, should Russia discriminate between one rebel group and another, when “moderate opposition” is nothing but a fantasy out of the Reaganists’ old “freedom fighter” narrative? But isn’t Putin about to reclaim influence in the Middle East that the Soviet Union lost long ago? This may be, but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar: Putin sees the Syria crisis spinning out of control and wants it resolved before it spreads just as the Kremlin now fears. In my read, reclaimed influence in the region will be a follow-on consequence. To the extent it materializes, we will have to get used to calling it multipolarity. If you think the record of American primacy in the Middle East is something worth preserving at the exorbitant cost it exacts, please use the comment box and enlighten all of us. Obama’s second big mistake has to do with his response to the problem of American exceptionalism. One had a sense late during his first term and into his second that he understood it was time to lance this boil on the American consciousness, but in the breach he seems to have demurred. The result has been his commitment to keep American troops out of conflict zones but to maintain the posture by way of Air Force bombers and supposedly surgical drone attacks. He thus altered only method, not purpose, the desired outcome—as, again, he inherited it. Not only has it failed to achieve any result in Syria; the grotesque bombing of a Médicins sans Frontière hospital in Kanduz, Afghanistan, last weekend reveals the strategy to be a bust on any kind of life-saving, humanitarian grounds, as well. There is no having your cake and eating it, in short. We are now going to get earfuls as to how the answer in Syria now is to make greater military commitments, all on our own—Obama’s sin being his gingerly thinking. It is upside down. A good president—and this is why one finds it hard to line up behind Hillary—needs to take on America’s intentions as well as its tactics. In my read, Russia and Iran have just popped open the door to a solution in Syria. All the pieces are in place but one: Washington’s capacity to acknowledge the strategic failure now so evident and to see beyond the narrowest definition of where its interests lie. This brings us to the paradox embedded in those questions Putin and Zarif and a few others now pose: American primacy is no longer in America’s interest. Get your mind around this and you have arrived in the 21st century.

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Published on October 06, 2015 15:59

“(T)error” goes inside the FBI’s crappy, incompetent and thoroughly deceptive anti-terror campaign

If Saeed Torres were a fictional character, his story might have elements of heroism, or perhaps of comedy. But the guy we meet in the indie documentary “(T)error” – an aging African-American Muslim and former Black Panther widely known as “Sharrif,” who says he has been an FBI informant for many years – is much more a figure of pathos and tragedy and despair. Largely because he’s a depressed pothead with a big mouth, Shariff allowed filmmakers Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe to record his efforts to gather incriminating evidence on a man in Pittsburgh the feds saw as a possible terror suspect. To say that this undercover operation does not go well is an understatement, and the resulting portrait of the domestic anti-terrorism campaign, although it’s admittedly a portrait in miniature, could hardly be more disheartening. Since 9/11, more than 500 people have been arrested in the United States on various charges related to terrorism, a great many of them after investigations fueled by paid informants like Shariff. Civil liberties activists have raised concerns about this tactic all along, arguing that it enables, encourages and rewards entrapment. But to put it bluntly, hardly anyone noticed or cared. We have no idea how many of those 500 people were genuinely likely to commit acts of violence in the real world, or to run off and join ISIS or the Taliban. But the entire approach of law enforcement over the past 14 years, with the implied or explicit consent of the public, has been “better safe than sorry,” and I think it’s fair to say that the First Amendment rights of Muslims who are perceived to hold anti-American beliefs have not been a high priority. At first it seems entirely possible that Shariff is just a lonely and frequently baked geezer who’s trying to make himself sound important; it’s not like the filmmakers could call up the FBI and check on his employment status. Is he really getting late-night text messages from agents, and receiving paltry cash payments in cars on the back streets of working-class Pittsburgh? (Like so many glamorous-sounding jobs, this one pays a lot worse than you’d think.) But evidence keeps mounting up over the course of the film, and ultimately you can’t resist the conclusion that at least some of Shariff’s improbable-sounding tales are true. He won early release from prison after a felony conviction more than 20 years ago, and his release documents refer to a “confidential file” explaining the circumstances. Shariff says he was recruited by the FBI following the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 because he had previously worked with Omar Abdel-Rahman, aka the “Blind Sheikh,” who is now serving a life sentence for masterminding that attack. After the fall of 2001, with law enforcement granted nearly unlimited resources to pursue Islamic extremism wherever they could find it, Shariff was effectively upgraded to full-time status, along with thousands of other paid informants recruited within or around the Muslim community in America. Shariff offers Cabral and Sutcliffe various justifications for what he does, above and beyond the fact that he essentially has no choice, and no other obvious way to earn a living. He insists that he only provides information about Muslims who are giving Islam a bad name through their support of al-Qaida and other militant groups, and that he stops short of entrapment, engaging his “POIs” (or persons of interest) in conversation about jihad or the Taliban or the overall situation in the Middle East and opening the rhetorical door to more serious topics. Shariff is also an isolated single father in his 60s, raising a young son for unexplained reasons, who is in questionable health, appears to have few friends or social contacts (other than FBI agents) and has largely cut himself off from the world of New York black radicals and black Muslims who were once his community. It’s not like the use of paid and/or coerced turncoats to penetrate a criminal conspiracy is some brilliant new law enforcement strategy, to be sure – and the hazards of this approach are equally well understood. We can’t judge the overall efficacy of the FBI’s anti-terrorism strategy based on one sad-sack informant and a handful of cases, and I’m not suggesting otherwise. But everything we see in “(T)error” supports the arguably that the government has encouraged grossly incompetent sting operations, tried to gin up “terror cells” where none exist, and repeatedly sought to criminalize First Amendment activities that are both constitutionally protected and widely tolerated among virtually all non-Muslim Americans. Shariff’s most celebrated case resulted in the 2007 conviction of Tarik Shah, a New York jazz musician and martial-arts instructor who is currently serving a 15-year prison sentence on conspiracy charges. As a New York Times article at the time made clear, the whole thing pretty much stank of entrapment, whether or not it met the legal standard implied by that word. Shariff befriended Shah over a period of years and made numerous clandestine recordings that captured the musician as “a boastful, somewhat bumbling” man and a so-called terrorist plot that “was almost entirely talk … No weapons appear to have been bought, and no martial arts training took place.” Eventually, Shariff (in the article he is called Saeed, his actual Muslim name) persuaded Shah to swear an oath of loyalty to al-Qaida for a visiting recruiter named Ali, who was actually an FBI agent. That was it: Tarik Shah did not take up arms against anyone or build a bomb or make any vaguely plausible plans to do any such thing. In point of fact, he never had any contact with any real Islamic militant group. He has been in prison for eight years because he’s a hothead who said a lot of stupid stuff to a paid FBI informant who coached him and goaded him and encouraged him, and because he swore a fictitious oath to a fictitious al-Qaida operative. But if the Shah case sounds egregious, it’s like a blindingly efficient “Law & Order” episode compared to what happens with a man named Khalifah al-Akili, Shariff’s Pittsburgh POI in “(T)error.” In fairness, you can kind of understand why Akili got the government’s dander up, although that has nothing to do with the question of whether he was a terrorist in waiting or had committed any noteworthy crime. Akili is a white American with an unmistakable western Pennsylvania accent, who was born into a Protestant family and converted to Islam as an adult. (At least according to some metrics of threat assessment, such converts are especially vulnerable to extremist ideology.) His Facebook page was full of intemperate rhetoric about the monstrous evils of America and the greatness of the Taliban, and featured images of himself shooting at a rifle range. All of which comes 110 percent under the rubric of the First Amendment, as I understand it – but like I said earlier, we haven’t quite determined whether such rights extend to Muslims. Akili is also immediately suspicious of the African-American man he’s never met before and who is evidently new in town, the guy who aggressively befriends him and keeps showing up everywhere he goes. Shariff goes to the mosque every time Akili is there, keeps inviting him out for coffee and jihad chatter, and drops him little notes about how cool that Taliban freedom fighter was on a recent episode of “Homeland.” (No, I’m not kidding.) Akili consults with a local civil-rights lawyer, and the night before they’re about to go public with his allegations of federal harassment (and the official outing of Shariff as an FBI asset), Akili gets arrested on a firearms violation and presented to the media as a dangerous radical at the heart of a presumed terror plot. Except that no terror plot is ever outlined or alleged by the authorities, because there never was one. Since the filmmakers are present for Akili’s actual arrest, we know that the breathless story told later on local TV about the daring SWAT team raid that brought down a desperate fugitive is a flat-out, full-bore falsehood. Given the steady drumbeat of gruesome gun crimes I don’t want to sound cavalier about that issue, but if they arrested everybody in Pittsburgh who owns an illegal or unregistered firearm, there wouldn’t be enough people left to fill the stadium for a Steelers game. Khalifah al-Akili seems like kind of a weirdo. He holds to an extreme religious ideology that would strike most Americans as pretty unpleasant, and he appears to lack the common sense Allah gave an aphid. But he didn’t actually do a goddamn thing; he didn’t even make Tarik Shah’s mistake of assuming that Shariff was actually his friend. Now Aliki is in prison for an offense that was made to sound vaguely terror-related but wasn’t. His wife was evicted from public housing and deported to England. Saeed Torres or Shariff or whatever we want to call him is an unemployed former FBI informant, his cover permanently blown, looking for work as a short-order cook and smoking more weed than ever. Your tax dollars at work, keeping us safe. “(T)error” opens this week at the IFC Center in New York, with wider theatrical release and home video to follow.

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Published on October 06, 2015 15:58

“The bees are trying to tell us something”: We may want to listen to the animal our survival depends on

There is one masterpiece, the hexagonal cell, that touches perfection. No living creature, not even man, has achieved, in the centre of his sphere, what the bee has achieved in her own: and were some one from another world to descend and ask of the earth the most perfect creation of the logic of life, we should needs have to offer the humble comb of honey.”— Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee , 1924 What is the most important animal to humans? In prehistoric times, the dog helped transform early hunter-gatherers into apex predators. Later, human civilization was built on the backs of horses. But starting around 11,500 years ago, when humans began making permanent settlements and invented agriculture, bees emerged as the most critical animal to human survival. By pollinating crops around the world, honeybees feed more than 7 billion people today. Most of the food that we eat (and all of our cotton) is produced in part by the hard work of bees. In her 2011 book The Beekeeper’s Lament , journalist Hannah Nordhaus described honeybees as “the glue that holds our agricultural system together."

Worker bees on honeycomb cells (image: StudioSmart/Shutterstock) The importance of bees isn't limited to humans, of course. By promoting the reproduction of angiosperms, or flowering plants, bees are also central to the survival of countless other animal species that rely on those plants and their fruits to survive. In fact, Earth's entire planetary ecology has been shaped by bees. Since they first evolved from wasps some 100 million years ago, bees have driven the evolution of plant life. Sadly, in recent times, we have not treated our bee friends well. The use of pesticides — neonicotinoids in particular, which are commonly used on corn, soybean, canola and cereal, as well as many fruits and vegetables — have killed an estimated 250 million bees in a just a few years. Applied to plants, neonics travel through the plant's vascular system and appear in roots, pollen and nectar that then are tranferred to bees and their colonies, as well as other untargeted and vulnerable species, from earthworms to birds and even bats. In a 2012 interview, conservation biologist and bee expert Dr. Reese Halter, host of the PBS Nature television series "Dr. Reese's Planet," said, "The bees are trying to tell us something very clearly. The way we are operating ... isn't working. We've lost a quarter of a trillion honeybees, which have died prematurely in the last four years." This dramatic decline of the bee population has been ascribed to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a combination of deadly effects, including pathogens, parasites and pesticides that have been decimating beehives since at least 2006. Last month, the Bee Informed Partnership, an academic non-profit supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, released the results of its annual survey of more than 6,000 American beekeepers. They found that northern beekeepers lost almost half (48 percent) of their managed colonies between April 2014 and April 2015. Southern beekeepers lost 37 percent of their colonies over the same period.

Bee colony decline in the U.S. Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture Killing bees, killing ourselves A growing body of scientific evidence has pointed to one of the culprits of bee deaths: a nicotine-based class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, also called neonics. In January, an international multidisciplinary team of 30 scientists, the Task Force on Systemic Pesticides, reviewed 1,121 peer-reviewed papers published over the past five years, including those sponsored by industry. In their report, the Worldwide Integrated Assessment of the Impact of Systemic Pesticides on Biodiversity and Ecosystems (WIA), the scientists concluded that "current large-scale prophylactic use of systemic insecticides is having significant unintended negative ecological consequences." Specifically, they found that, "at field-realistic levels of pollution, neonicotinoids ... generally have negative effects on physiology and survival for a wide range of non-target invertebrates in terrestrial, aquatic, marine and benthic habitats." Put simply, neonics kill a whole range of species beyond bees that are necessary for healthy, functioning ecosystems, such as butterflies (which also act as pollinators), earthworms and snails (both of which help maintain soil health). Moreover, the scientists stated, "Imidalcloprid [a neonic, the most widely used insecticide in the world] and fipronil [an insecticide belonging to the phenylpyrazol family] were found to be toxic to many birds and most fish, respectively." They also concluded that imidacloprid, fipronil and clothianidin (a neonic) "exert sub-lethal effects, ranging from genotoxic and cytotoxic effects, and impaired immune function, to reduced growth and reproductive success, often at concentrations well below those associated with mortality. Use of imidacloprid and clothianidin as seed treatments on some crops poses risks to small birds, and ingestion of even a few treated seeds could cause mortality or reproductive impairment to sensitive bird species." We have clearly not learned the lessons of pioneering conservationist Rachel Carson, who wrote in her seminal 1962 book Silent Spring: "Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called ‘insecticides,’ but ‘biocides.’”

Bee colony decline in Europe. Source: Simon G Potts et al., “Declines of managed honey bees and beekeepers in Europe,” Journal of Apicultural Research 49(1): 15-22 (2010) Battle lines drawn Six months after the WIA report came out, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a nonprofit environmental advocacy group based in New York, filed a legal petition with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) asking the agency to withdraw its approval of neonics. The petition said:

Given mounting scientific evidence that neonicotinoids are toxic to bees and threaten both individual and population survival, the agency should also initiate cancellation proceedings for all neonicotinoid pesticide products, beginning with those for which safer alternatives are available. In the meantime, however, EPA should take immediate steps to protect bees and to prevent ongoing adverse effects on the environment. ... EPA should — at a minimum — immediately initiate interim administrative review to evaluate the serious threat that neonicotinoids pose to bees.

"Unlike traditional pesticides that are typically applied to a plant’s surface, neonicotinoids are systemic pesticides that are absorbed into plant tissue, turning a plant into a “tiny poison factory [10]” that emits toxins from its pollen down to its roots," writes toxicologist Jennifer Sass, an expert on U.S. chemical policy who serves as a senior scientist in NRDC's health program. "As non-selective pesticides, neonicotinoids do not discriminate between target and non-target insect species, including beneficial pollinators ." "We are still awaiting a response from EPA," Dr. Sass told AlterNet. "So far they have neither responded to our petition or taken any final action."

Bee activists rally in Toronto, Canada, on May 25, 2013 (image: arindambanerjee/Shutterstock.com) Last year, Canadian beekeepers filed a class action lawsuit against pesticide giants Bayer and Syngenta, seeking $400 million in damages. The plaintiffs claim that the firms "were negligent in their design and development of the neonicotinoid pesticides." A 2013 study by Health Canada, the government health agency, detected the pesticides in 70 percent of dead bees. Beeline to right-wing money The agrochemical industry has poured millions of dollars into passing laws and managing public perception. In 2013, Bayer, the primary manufacturer of imidacloprid, spent nearly $5 million lobbying the U.S. federal government on a variety of legislative and regulatory matters impacting the food, pharmaceutical and biotech industries — including bee health and EPA regulatory actions regarding pollinator protection. In the same year, the German corporation BASF, the world's largest chemical producer, which holds the patent rights for producing and selling fipronil, spent $2.26 million lobbying the U.S. government, including efforts to make S. 1009, Modernization of the Toxic Substances Control Act, a bill regarding the EPA's regulation of chemicals, more industry-friendly. Bayer has also been fighting efforts to place a moratorium on neonics in the E.U. "Bayer Group has been shown up as a corporate bully [15], trying to silence campaigners who are standing up for bees," said Friends of the Earth, an environmental nonprofit. In addition to lobbying lawmakers and bullying activists, corporate interests are funding a propaganda machine that is working to discredit the science connecting neonics to bee deaths — the same machine that is propping up the pro-GMO, pro-pesticide agenda of Monsanto, Bayer, Syngenta and the other big players in the agrochemical industry. One of the most active cogs in this machine is the nonprofit Genetic Literacy Project (GLP), a GMO industry front group that is housed at the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) program at George Mason University (GMU). According to Sourcewatch, "It seems that with the affiliation of the group with this right-wing university, significant work and output is being financially supported by GMU," whose major funders include ExxonMobil, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and the Searle Freedom Trust. According to the STATS website, it is "funded by a grant from the Searle Freedom Trust … [and] does not accept industry funding or support." The Searle Freedom Trust is a conservative private foundation funded up by the inherited wealth of the pharmaceutical giant G.D. Searle & Co., now a part of Pfizer. Searle funds a wide range of conservative think tanks, including Americans for Prosperity, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Heartland Institute. Daniel Searle, the founder of G.D. Searle & Co., was the largest funder of the right-wing think tank the American Enterprise Institute.

image: Bee Informed In March, GLP founder Jon Entine wrote a vigorous defense of neonics, which was posted on the GLP website. As one commenter mentioned, Entine "grossly misrepresents" the findings of a USDA study he mentions in his piece. In addition, he points to stable colony populations in the U.S. but fails to mention that American beekeepers have been importing bees from Australia to maintain their colony numbers. He may dupe a casual reader, but to followers of the biotech propaganda machine, this attempt to deceive the public about the harsh reality of neonics should come as no surprise. "Jon Entine has professional ties to Monsanto, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Proctor & Gamble, and other similar corporations," writes Mike Adams, the founding editor of Natural News, a health news website. Adams goes on:

Entine is a key "attack operative" for the biotech industry, well known for authoring wildly defamatory character assassination articles to target GMO skeptics and scientists who disagree with the biotech industry’s contrived safety claims. With the help of Forbes.com and the American Enterprise Institute — both key players in attacking and smearing GMO skeptics and scientists — Entine has been instrumental in viciously smearing the reputations of numerous scientists, activists, independent journalists, and environmentalists, usually through the use of wildly fraudulent smear tactics and the wholesale fabrication of false "facts."

Complex clash The biotech industry, however, has tried to shift the battle over bees and pesticides away from the arena of public relations and frame it as a political issue. “It’s more a clash of ideologies than PR,” said Luke Gibbs, head of corporate affairs for northern Europe at Syngenta, the world’s largest agrochemicals company and a leading producer of neonicotinoids. “[Bee decline is] a complicated, multifactorial issue. But it’s become so polarized and politicized that it unfortunately prevents us working together, when it could be very mutually beneficial.” Environmentalists, food safety advocates and agribusiness working together? It may seem far-fetched, but considering the fact that the food system isn't going to be wrenched from corporate control any time soon, it may be an avenue worth exploring. “Both extremes are complete nonsense,” said conservation biologist Dave Goulson from the University of Sussex. “The science is pretty convincing that neonicotinoids are contributing to bees’ decline, but it’s by no means the worst factor. Most scientists agree it’s habitat loss that is the single biggest driver, with disease and pesticides contributing. Obviously, any pesticide is damaging to wildlife; it’s about finding the right balance between productivity and environmental impact.” "The greens and beekeepers probably have an argument," said John Haynes, the manager of a 3,000-acre farm on the border of Essex and Hertfordshire counties in southeast England who supports the use of neonics. "But if you want oil seed rape to be grown in this country rather than imported, we need a more intelligent approach to neonicotinoids than a total ban." The bee decline is more complex than simply pinning the blame on one class of pesticides. A three-year study by the University of Maryland published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE in March found that the neonic imidacloprid is "unlikely a sole cause of colony declines" in the U.S. over the past decade. The researchers did find that the pesticide is harmful to bees: Infestations of Varroa mites were significantly higher in exposed colonies. In addition, bees avoided honey stores that were contaminated with imidacloprid, leading to malnutrition. Still, the big takeaway from the study is that neonicontinoids are bad for bees. Fear of free Perhaps there is no need to find a "right balance" when it comes to neonics simply because they may not even be necessary. One of the arguments of the agrochemical industry is that there are no alternatives to neonics. That is simply not true. It's just that many of the alternatives do not enrich corporate coffers. On their Save the Honey Bees website, the Pesticide Action Network, an international coalition of NGOs, citizens' groups and individuals fighting pesticide use in around 60 countries, recounts an important story that farmers who are under the false assumption there are no options should note:

In 2008, when Italy discussed a possible banning of the use of seed coating on maize because of the spectacular honeybee colony losses, the industry made an impressive media campaign on the lack of alternatives to fight the Western Corn Rootworm and the economic damages such a decision would make: tens of millions of euros for farmers. After 4 years of maize harvest without neonicotinoids, no dropdown in maize production could be observed and an ancestral, simple and free technique replaced costly neonicotinoids: crop rotation. Such a technique can efficiently replace neonicotinoids for many plant predators.

One word in that story strikes fear in the hearts of agrochemical executives and their propagandist minions: free. They have a lot to lose if farmers turn to alternatives. (For a list of more sustainable alternatives to specific neonics, click here.) According to Statista.com, the worldwide agrochemical market generated $203.6 billion in 2013 and is on target to generate more than $242 billion in revenue by 2018. In 2012, insecticides and seed treatments (mostly neonic-based) comprised about 30 percent of Bayer CropScience’s revenues, and over six percent of Bayer’s overall sales. There is also a growing body of evidence that questions the benefit of neonics. A study conducted by Michigan State University and published earlier this year in theJournal of Economic Entomology examined the relationship between western bean cutworm infestation and damage in dry beans. Looking at the use of seeds treated with the neonicotinoid thiamethoxam and soil treated with the systemic insecticide aldicarb, the researchers concluded that neither pesticide reduced cutworm damage. In fact, untreated plots had a lesser percentage of defects compared to treated plots, which were eaten by pests, which the researchers believe encountered fewer natural predators in the untreated plots. Unsung and unpaid Bees are facing fights on multiple fronts. And their job is thankless. Not only do they have to contend with deadly parasites, pathogens, pesticides and propaganda, they aren't even rewarded for all their labor. "You can thank the Apis mellifera, better known as the Western honeybee, for 1 in every 3 mouthfuls of food you’ll eat today," writes Bryan Walsh, TIME's foreign editor who has covered environmental issues for the magazine. "From the almond orchards of central California — where each spring billions of honeybees from across the U.S. arrive to pollinate a multibillion-dollar crop — to the blueberry bogs of Maine, the bees are the unsung, unpaid laborers of the American agricultural system, adding more than $15 billion in value to farming each year." Pavan Sukhdev, an environmental economist who was appointed a Goodwill Ambassador in 2012 by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) for his work promoting the green economy, argues that we don't value the contribution of bees because that value hasn't been monetized. "Not a single bee has ever sent you an invoice," Sukhdev writes in the United Nations report "The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity." "And that is part of the problem — because most of what comes to us from nature is free, because it is not invoiced, because it is not priced, because it is not traded in markets, we tend to ignore it." Bee covered in yellow spheres of pollen (image: John Kimbler via Climate Kids, NASA) Even beyond putting a price tag on bees' work output, we should look to them as a model to emulate. "If you think about it, the honeybee beehive is the perfect paradigm for the ultimate food service industry," said Dr. Halter, the bee expert. "It begins before sunup. It closes shop after sundown. There is zero unemployment. And the bees are able to change their order of operations within a matter of minutes." “The way humanity manages or mismanages its nature-based assets, including pollinators, will in part define our collective future in the 21st century," said Achim Steiner, UNEP's executive director. "The fact is that of the 100 crop species that provide 90 percent of the world’s food, over 70 are pollinated by bees.” As the English poet William Blake observed in Proverbs of Hell, "The busy bee has no time for sorrow." And until we start to truly value the service they provide to us and nature as a whole, soon bees may have no time left for anything at all. And all the sorrow will be ours.

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Published on October 06, 2015 15:57

These murderers were made at home: The Oregon shooter’s mother armed her son — just like Adam Lanza’s did

In the days and weeks after mass shootings, the sense of pain and shock tends to give way to a bruised and desperate kind of curiosity: How did this killer become so interested in weaponry? How – especially if he was mentally ill -- did he get so many guns? How did his family not pick up any signs that something was wrong? In the case of the killer Christopher Harper-Mercer, who died in his attack on Umpqua Community College in Oregon, there’s plenty we still don’t know. But one of the most disturbing facts that’s come out is that his interest in guns seems to have been stoked by his mother, who was not only a gun user but a self-righteous one. Today’s New York Times reports:

Unlike his father, who said on television that he had no idea Mr. Harper-Mercer cared so deeply about guns, his mother was well aware of his fascination. In fact, she shared it: In a series of online postings over a decade, Ms. Harper, a nurse, said she kept numerous firearms in her home and expressed pride in her knowledge about them, as well as in her son’s expertise on the subject.

The killer’s mother, a divorced nurse named Laurel Harper, kept a small arsenal in the apartment she shared with her son, and often commented on both medical issues and handguns on Yahoo Answers. The Times again:

In an online forum, answering a question about state gun laws several years ago, Ms. Harper took a jab at “lame states” that impose limits on keeping loaded firearms in the home, and noted that she had AR-15 and AK-47 semiautomatic rifles, along with a Glock handgun. She also indicated that her son, who lived with her, was well versed in guns, citing him as her source of information on gun laws, saying he “has much knowledge in this field.”

As disturbing as this is on its own – a mother who connects with her son not through a shared love of hiking or soccer or music or books but rather discharging military weaponry – it has a frightening echo that’s not mentioned in the Times story: Adam Lanza, the mentally disturbed man who slaughtered children in Newtown, Conn., also seemed to connect with his mother most powerfully through handguns. Nancy Lanza, in fact, took her son shooting when he was only four. From The Progressive:

The late Nancy Lanza in Newtown grew up with firearms and had a pistol permit. She returned to shooting with more intensity, according to one family friend, after her 2009 divorce. She wanted to bond with her youngest son, Adam, especially, who five years before, at 13, had been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, and who, instead of getting better, had been showing signs of social dysfunction and anxiety. "Shooting was a pastime in which the family engaged," reads the Connecticut State's Attorney report of the Sandy Hook massacre released last month. "Both the mother and the shooter took National Rifle Association (NRA) safety courses. The mother thought it was good to learn responsibility for guns. Both would shoot pistols and rifles at a local range and the shooter was described as quiet and polite."

There are plenty of parents who hunt with their children perfectly safely. And it’s not fair to demonize single mothers, which may be why the Times did not mention the similarity between the two families. But in both the cases of Roseburg and Newtown, parents knew that their sons had serious mental problems – Nancy Lanza described her son as a “lost cause” -- and still heavily armed them and trained them to kill people. It’s enough to make you wonder: What the hell were they thinking? In one case, we’ll never know: Adam Lanza shot and killed his mother on his way out the door. But dozens of people and their families paid the price. A lot of the criticism from those advocating restrictions on gun ownership concentrates on bad laws and the nation’s culture of violence. We need to fix both. But the details of these stomach-turning cases remind us that these murderers were made at home. Until parents face up to what they’re doing when they give a dangerous person in their care weaponry and the skills to use it, this kind of horror will happen again and again.In the days and weeks after mass shootings, the sense of pain and shock tends to give way to a bruised and desperate kind of curiosity: How did this killer become so interested in weaponry? How – especially if he was mentally ill -- did he get so many guns? How did his family not pick up any signs that something was wrong? In the case of the killer Christopher Harper-Mercer, who died in his attack on Umpqua Community College in Oregon, there’s plenty we still don’t know. But one of the most disturbing facts that’s come out is that his interest in guns seems to have been stoked by his mother, who was not only a gun user but a self-righteous one. Today’s New York Times reports:

Unlike his father, who said on television that he had no idea Mr. Harper-Mercer cared so deeply about guns, his mother was well aware of his fascination. In fact, she shared it: In a series of online postings over a decade, Ms. Harper, a nurse, said she kept numerous firearms in her home and expressed pride in her knowledge about them, as well as in her son’s expertise on the subject.

The killer’s mother, a divorced nurse named Laurel Harper, kept a small arsenal in the apartment she shared with her son, and often commented on both medical issues and handguns on Yahoo Answers. The Times again:

In an online forum, answering a question about state gun laws several years ago, Ms. Harper took a jab at “lame states” that impose limits on keeping loaded firearms in the home, and noted that she had AR-15 and AK-47 semiautomatic rifles, along with a Glock handgun. She also indicated that her son, who lived with her, was well versed in guns, citing him as her source of information on gun laws, saying he “has much knowledge in this field.”

As disturbing as this is on its own – a mother who connects with her son not through a shared love of hiking or soccer or music or books but rather discharging military weaponry – it has a frightening echo that’s not mentioned in the Times story: Adam Lanza, the mentally disturbed man who slaughtered children in Newtown, Conn., also seemed to connect with his mother most powerfully through handguns. Nancy Lanza, in fact, took her son shooting when he was only four. From The Progressive:

The late Nancy Lanza in Newtown grew up with firearms and had a pistol permit. She returned to shooting with more intensity, according to one family friend, after her 2009 divorce. She wanted to bond with her youngest son, Adam, especially, who five years before, at 13, had been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, and who, instead of getting better, had been showing signs of social dysfunction and anxiety. "Shooting was a pastime in which the family engaged," reads the Connecticut State's Attorney report of the Sandy Hook massacre released last month. "Both the mother and the shooter took National Rifle Association (NRA) safety courses. The mother thought it was good to learn responsibility for guns. Both would shoot pistols and rifles at a local range and the shooter was described as quiet and polite."

There are plenty of parents who hunt with their children perfectly safely. And it’s not fair to demonize single mothers, which may be why the Times did not mention the similarity between the two families. But in both the cases of Roseburg and Newtown, parents knew that their sons had serious mental problems – Nancy Lanza described her son as a “lost cause” -- and still heavily armed them and trained them to kill people. It’s enough to make you wonder: What the hell were they thinking? In one case, we’ll never know: Adam Lanza shot and killed his mother on his way out the door. But dozens of people and their families paid the price. A lot of the criticism from those advocating restrictions on gun ownership concentrates on bad laws and the nation’s culture of violence. We need to fix both. But the details of these stomach-turning cases remind us that these murderers were made at home. Until parents face up to what they’re doing when they give a dangerous person in their care weaponry and the skills to use it, this kind of horror will happen again and again.In the days and weeks after mass shootings, the sense of pain and shock tends to give way to a bruised and desperate kind of curiosity: How did this killer become so interested in weaponry? How – especially if he was mentally ill -- did he get so many guns? How did his family not pick up any signs that something was wrong? In the case of the killer Christopher Harper-Mercer, who died in his attack on Umpqua Community College in Oregon, there’s plenty we still don’t know. But one of the most disturbing facts that’s come out is that his interest in guns seems to have been stoked by his mother, who was not only a gun user but a self-righteous one. Today’s New York Times reports:

Unlike his father, who said on television that he had no idea Mr. Harper-Mercer cared so deeply about guns, his mother was well aware of his fascination. In fact, she shared it: In a series of online postings over a decade, Ms. Harper, a nurse, said she kept numerous firearms in her home and expressed pride in her knowledge about them, as well as in her son’s expertise on the subject.

The killer’s mother, a divorced nurse named Laurel Harper, kept a small arsenal in the apartment she shared with her son, and often commented on both medical issues and handguns on Yahoo Answers. The Times again:

In an online forum, answering a question about state gun laws several years ago, Ms. Harper took a jab at “lame states” that impose limits on keeping loaded firearms in the home, and noted that she had AR-15 and AK-47 semiautomatic rifles, along with a Glock handgun. She also indicated that her son, who lived with her, was well versed in guns, citing him as her source of information on gun laws, saying he “has much knowledge in this field.”

As disturbing as this is on its own – a mother who connects with her son not through a shared love of hiking or soccer or music or books but rather discharging military weaponry – it has a frightening echo that’s not mentioned in the Times story: Adam Lanza, the mentally disturbed man who slaughtered children in Newtown, Conn., also seemed to connect with his mother most powerfully through handguns. Nancy Lanza, in fact, took her son shooting when he was only four. From The Progressive:

The late Nancy Lanza in Newtown grew up with firearms and had a pistol permit. She returned to shooting with more intensity, according to one family friend, after her 2009 divorce. She wanted to bond with her youngest son, Adam, especially, who five years before, at 13, had been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, and who, instead of getting better, had been showing signs of social dysfunction and anxiety. "Shooting was a pastime in which the family engaged," reads the Connecticut State's Attorney report of the Sandy Hook massacre released last month. "Both the mother and the shooter took National Rifle Association (NRA) safety courses. The mother thought it was good to learn responsibility for guns. Both would shoot pistols and rifles at a local range and the shooter was described as quiet and polite."

There are plenty of parents who hunt with their children perfectly safely. And it’s not fair to demonize single mothers, which may be why the Times did not mention the similarity between the two families. But in both the cases of Roseburg and Newtown, parents knew that their sons had serious mental problems – Nancy Lanza described her son as a “lost cause” -- and still heavily armed them and trained them to kill people. It’s enough to make you wonder: What the hell were they thinking? In one case, we’ll never know: Adam Lanza shot and killed his mother on his way out the door. But dozens of people and their families paid the price. A lot of the criticism from those advocating restrictions on gun ownership concentrates on bad laws and the nation’s culture of violence. We need to fix both. But the details of these stomach-turning cases remind us that these murderers were made at home. Until parents face up to what they’re doing when they give a dangerous person in their care weaponry and the skills to use it, this kind of horror will happen again and again.

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Published on October 06, 2015 13:48

Don’t look, but Jeb Bush just kinda-sorta praised Donald Trump

Jeb Bush appears to be doing to his best to not squander the rare glimpse of goodwill shown to him by Republican presidential rival Donald Trump this week and is returning the favor by reaffirming his pledge to support the party's nominee and applauding Trump for running as a right-wing Republican. "Trump’s views are evolving, at least, towards the right place," Bush reportedly offered during an interview on Fox Sports 1's "Countdown to Kickoff" today. When host Clay Travis asked the former Florida governor if he would support Democrat Hillary Clinton if Trump were to become the Republican presidential nominee, Bush referred to his earlier GOP loyalty pledge and reaffirmed his allegiance whichever eventual nominee. "I’m a conservative, I know Hillary isn’t. That’s one thing we know for sure. It’s not to say that she’s not capable of being president, but I think her world view is not the right one. And Trump’s views are evolving, at least, towards the right place," he said, adding that Trump held "views in the past that clearly put him right in the middle of the Democratic Party and now he’s transforming himself into something different." Bush's tone on Trump is markedly gentler than normal on the campaign trail, even crediting the blustery former reality TV star with boosting interest in the Republican presidential primary. "I’ll give him credit for one big thing, which is really important: 25 million people watched the first debate and 23 million watched the second, and that’s extraordinary. Those numbers are a lot to do with him and the interest that he’s brought to the campaign," he said during the interview. Bush's new attitude towards Trump comes after the frontrunner defended Bush's comments in support of the Washington Redskins not changing their name. “Honestly, I don’t think they should change the name, unless the owner wanted to,” Trump said on Monday after Bush came under fire for similar comments last week. "I know Indians that are extremely proud of that name," he said. "They think it's a positive." Let's see how long this latest peace treaty lasts on the campaign trail, after all, this is how Bush responded to Trump's own pledge of loyalty to the Republican party only last month: https://twitter.com/JebBush/status/63... Jeb Bush appears to be doing to his best to not squander the rare glimpse of goodwill shown to him by Republican presidential rival Donald Trump this week and is returning the favor by reaffirming his pledge to support the party's nominee and applauding Trump for running as a right-wing Republican. "Trump’s views are evolving, at least, towards the right place," Bush reportedly offered during an interview on Fox Sports 1's "Countdown to Kickoff" today. When host Clay Travis asked the former Florida governor if he would support Democrat Hillary Clinton if Trump were to become the Republican presidential nominee, Bush referred to his earlier GOP loyalty pledge and reaffirmed his allegiance whichever eventual nominee. "I’m a conservative, I know Hillary isn’t. That’s one thing we know for sure. It’s not to say that she’s not capable of being president, but I think her world view is not the right one. And Trump’s views are evolving, at least, towards the right place," he said, adding that Trump held "views in the past that clearly put him right in the middle of the Democratic Party and now he’s transforming himself into something different." Bush's tone on Trump is markedly gentler than normal on the campaign trail, even crediting the blustery former reality TV star with boosting interest in the Republican presidential primary. "I’ll give him credit for one big thing, which is really important: 25 million people watched the first debate and 23 million watched the second, and that’s extraordinary. Those numbers are a lot to do with him and the interest that he’s brought to the campaign," he said during the interview. Bush's new attitude towards Trump comes after the frontrunner defended Bush's comments in support of the Washington Redskins not changing their name. “Honestly, I don’t think they should change the name, unless the owner wanted to,” Trump said on Monday after Bush came under fire for similar comments last week. "I know Indians that are extremely proud of that name," he said. "They think it's a positive." Let's see how long this latest peace treaty lasts on the campaign trail, after all, this is how Bush responded to Trump's own pledge of loyalty to the Republican party only last month: https://twitter.com/JebBush/status/63... Jeb Bush appears to be doing to his best to not squander the rare glimpse of goodwill shown to him by Republican presidential rival Donald Trump this week and is returning the favor by reaffirming his pledge to support the party's nominee and applauding Trump for running as a right-wing Republican. "Trump’s views are evolving, at least, towards the right place," Bush reportedly offered during an interview on Fox Sports 1's "Countdown to Kickoff" today. When host Clay Travis asked the former Florida governor if he would support Democrat Hillary Clinton if Trump were to become the Republican presidential nominee, Bush referred to his earlier GOP loyalty pledge and reaffirmed his allegiance whichever eventual nominee. "I’m a conservative, I know Hillary isn’t. That’s one thing we know for sure. It’s not to say that she’s not capable of being president, but I think her world view is not the right one. And Trump’s views are evolving, at least, towards the right place," he said, adding that Trump held "views in the past that clearly put him right in the middle of the Democratic Party and now he’s transforming himself into something different." Bush's tone on Trump is markedly gentler than normal on the campaign trail, even crediting the blustery former reality TV star with boosting interest in the Republican presidential primary. "I’ll give him credit for one big thing, which is really important: 25 million people watched the first debate and 23 million watched the second, and that’s extraordinary. Those numbers are a lot to do with him and the interest that he’s brought to the campaign," he said during the interview. Bush's new attitude towards Trump comes after the frontrunner defended Bush's comments in support of the Washington Redskins not changing their name. “Honestly, I don’t think they should change the name, unless the owner wanted to,” Trump said on Monday after Bush came under fire for similar comments last week. "I know Indians that are extremely proud of that name," he said. "They think it's a positive." Let's see how long this latest peace treaty lasts on the campaign trail, after all, this is how Bush responded to Trump's own pledge of loyalty to the Republican party only last month: https://twitter.com/JebBush/status/63... Jeb Bush appears to be doing to his best to not squander the rare glimpse of goodwill shown to him by Republican presidential rival Donald Trump this week and is returning the favor by reaffirming his pledge to support the party's nominee and applauding Trump for running as a right-wing Republican. "Trump’s views are evolving, at least, towards the right place," Bush reportedly offered during an interview on Fox Sports 1's "Countdown to Kickoff" today. When host Clay Travis asked the former Florida governor if he would support Democrat Hillary Clinton if Trump were to become the Republican presidential nominee, Bush referred to his earlier GOP loyalty pledge and reaffirmed his allegiance whichever eventual nominee. "I’m a conservative, I know Hillary isn’t. That’s one thing we know for sure. It’s not to say that she’s not capable of being president, but I think her world view is not the right one. And Trump’s views are evolving, at least, towards the right place," he said, adding that Trump held "views in the past that clearly put him right in the middle of the Democratic Party and now he’s transforming himself into something different." Bush's tone on Trump is markedly gentler than normal on the campaign trail, even crediting the blustery former reality TV star with boosting interest in the Republican presidential primary. "I’ll give him credit for one big thing, which is really important: 25 million people watched the first debate and 23 million watched the second, and that’s extraordinary. Those numbers are a lot to do with him and the interest that he’s brought to the campaign," he said during the interview. Bush's new attitude towards Trump comes after the frontrunner defended Bush's comments in support of the Washington Redskins not changing their name. “Honestly, I don’t think they should change the name, unless the owner wanted to,” Trump said on Monday after Bush came under fire for similar comments last week. "I know Indians that are extremely proud of that name," he said. "They think it's a positive." Let's see how long this latest peace treaty lasts on the campaign trail, after all, this is how Bush responded to Trump's own pledge of loyalty to the Republican party only last month: https://twitter.com/JebBush/status/63...

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Published on October 06, 2015 13:44

Chrissie Hynde blows up at NPR interview: “Just don’t buy the f*cking book, then, if I’ve offended someone. Don’t listen to my records”

An interview between ex-Pretenders front-woman Chrissie Hynde and NPR interviewer David Greene went off the rails this morning when Greene asked Hynde about a controversial segment in her new memoir "Reckless: My Life as a Pretender” in which she takes responsibility for being sexually assaulted at the age of 21. After reading aloud Hynde's account of her violent altercation with a biker gang, Greene brings up Hynde's much-criticized suggested that she accepts "full responsibility" for the assault. Hynde suggests that yes, she still feels this way, and that "no one dragged [her] into the park in the middle of the night with a gun at my head and forced [her] to do anything." At this point, Greene continues to press her, and things turn ugly:

There was one comment that you made in an interview about the book, in the Sunday Times of London: "If I'm walking around in my underwear and I'm drunk, who else's fault can it be?" So what are you getting at? Why are you asking me this? I just think a lot of people — I don't understand why there's — You know what, I don't care what a lot of people want. You know? I'd rather say, just don't buy the f****** book, then, if I've offended someone. Don't listen to my records. Cause I'm only telling you my story, I'm not here trying to advise anyone or tell anyone what to do or tell anyone what to think, and I'm not here as a spokesperson for anyone. I'm just telling my story. So the fact that I've been — you know, it's almost like a lynch mob.

Hear the full interview over at NPR. Chrissie Hynde's Rich and Ragged Memoir

An interview between ex-Pretenders front-woman Chrissie Hynde and NPR interviewer David Greene went off the rails this morning when Greene asked Hynde about a controversial segment in her new memoir "Reckless: My Life as a Pretender” in which she takes responsibility for being sexually assaulted at the age of 21. After reading aloud Hynde's account of her violent altercation with a biker gang, Greene brings up Hynde's much-criticized suggested that she accepts "full responsibility" for the assault. Hynde suggests that yes, she still feels this way, and that "no one dragged [her] into the park in the middle of the night with a gun at my head and forced [her] to do anything." At this point, Greene continues to press her, and things turn ugly:

There was one comment that you made in an interview about the book, in the Sunday Times of London: "If I'm walking around in my underwear and I'm drunk, who else's fault can it be?" So what are you getting at? Why are you asking me this? I just think a lot of people — I don't understand why there's — You know what, I don't care what a lot of people want. You know? I'd rather say, just don't buy the f****** book, then, if I've offended someone. Don't listen to my records. Cause I'm only telling you my story, I'm not here trying to advise anyone or tell anyone what to do or tell anyone what to think, and I'm not here as a spokesperson for anyone. I'm just telling my story. So the fact that I've been — you know, it's almost like a lynch mob.

Hear the full interview over at NPR. Chrissie Hynde's Rich and Ragged Memoir

An interview between ex-Pretenders front-woman Chrissie Hynde and NPR interviewer David Greene went off the rails this morning when Greene asked Hynde about a controversial segment in her new memoir "Reckless: My Life as a Pretender” in which she takes responsibility for being sexually assaulted at the age of 21. After reading aloud Hynde's account of her violent altercation with a biker gang, Greene brings up Hynde's much-criticized suggested that she accepts "full responsibility" for the assault. Hynde suggests that yes, she still feels this way, and that "no one dragged [her] into the park in the middle of the night with a gun at my head and forced [her] to do anything." At this point, Greene continues to press her, and things turn ugly:

There was one comment that you made in an interview about the book, in the Sunday Times of London: "If I'm walking around in my underwear and I'm drunk, who else's fault can it be?" So what are you getting at? Why are you asking me this? I just think a lot of people — I don't understand why there's — You know what, I don't care what a lot of people want. You know? I'd rather say, just don't buy the f****** book, then, if I've offended someone. Don't listen to my records. Cause I'm only telling you my story, I'm not here trying to advise anyone or tell anyone what to do or tell anyone what to think, and I'm not here as a spokesperson for anyone. I'm just telling my story. So the fact that I've been — you know, it's almost like a lynch mob.

Hear the full interview over at NPR. Chrissie Hynde's Rich and Ragged Memoir

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Published on October 06, 2015 13:25

Guns are cuddly security blankets: How the media helps right-wing gun nuts push propaganda

Conservative politicians and pundits lie and distort far more than liberals do. At the same time, conservatives have a well-known persecution complex, frequently accusing the mainstream media of having some secret anti-conservative agenda. This puts mainstream media fact-checkers in an unenviable situation, trying to seem balanced in an environment where one side simply has more enthusiasm for lying than the other. Now the pressure to overemphasis or even exaggerate claims of liberal mendacity, in an attempt to seem more balanced, has infected Glenn Kessler's coverage of the gun debate in the Washington Post. Our tale begins with a speech by President Obama where he said, "We know that states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths. So the notion that gun laws don’t work, or just will make it harder for law-abiding citizens and criminals will still get their guns is not borne out by the evidence." This is, as Kessler's investigation demonstrated, a true statement. The statistics are complicated by demographic and social factors, but overall, the data shows a direct correlation between how easy it is to get a gun and how many people die from gunshot wounds. But Kessler gave Obama two "Pinocchios"---out of of four Pinocchio scale---to this claim. "Many readers requested a fact check of this statement, believing it to be untrue," Kessler writes. I'll bet they did! Conservative fetishization of guns is at a point where even suggesting that guns might be unsafe is treated like you're insulting their mother, so of course they're going to be outraged that Obama dare suggest that objects created for the sole purpose of killing might be very good at making people dead. It's understandable that, deluged by all that conservative outrage, one might give into the urge to show that you're not biased by giving them what they want. But unfortunately, Kessler, despite being a fact-checker, ends up heavily massaging the statistics to give conservative readers those Pinocchios they desperately want. To get to the conclusion that Obama fudged the facts, Kessler starts by manipulating the data that Obama used for his claim, by removing suicides from the number of overall gun deaths. He justifies this by arguing "the president’s policy proposals are aimed at mass shootings, not suicides." But that is, in and of itself, a false statement. While Obama did focus heavily on mass shooting in his speech, it's clear that he was making a larger point about how the proliferation of guns in our society leads to more gun deaths. "There is a gun for roughly every man, woman, and child in America," Obama said right before the sentences in question. "So how can you, with a straight face, make the argument that more guns will make us safer?" It's clear that he was speaking about how a gun-fanatical society is one where people get shot to death a lot, and not just in the context of mass shootings. In addition, while the president's proposed policy agenda on gun violence focuses heavily on preventing murder, many of the policies are about preventing gun deaths generally, including those from suicide. The White House policy proposal for reducing gun violence repeatedly mentions suicide. Many of the agenda items, including more funding for research and better mental health services, would have suicide prevention benefits as well as murder prevention benefits. There's no reason to exclude suicides from the gun death count, except to pander to opponents of gun control. For one thing, suicides are just as dead as people who are murdered. Suicide has major effects on families and communities. Plus, the gun suicide and gun murder rate are heavily intertwined. Laws aimed at reducing gun murders appear to lower the suicide rate. It's a myth that suicidal people will kill themselves no matter what. Most people who attempt it and survive don't try again. Easy access to guns makes suicide more likely because it means you're more likely to die than people who try through other, less deadly means. But what makes Kessler's article particularly frustrating is that all this quibbling over a couple of outlier states that defy the trend or whether or not suicides "count" ends up serving not the truth, but the Big Lie about guns: That they are not only safe, but that they somehow make people safer. Conservatives want to distract from the larger fact that soaking a society in guns means people are going to use them more, whether on themselves or on other people. So they claim, instead, that guns actually induce safety and if people keep getting shot, it's because they don't have enough items with which to shoot people with. The Big Lie is everywhere in the wake of this most recent shooting in Oregon. This week, Ben Carson argued that putting guns inside kindergarten classrooms is the best way to protect small children from guns. "Gun-free zones" are being blamed for the shooting all over conservative media. The message from the right is clear: Far from being deadly weapons, guns are cuddly security blankets! The Big Lie is what Obama was calling out in his speech. Conservatives keep pushing this notion that guns keep you safe, and Obama was, well, fact-checking them. Kessler should be applauding him for that instead of pandering to conservatives who want to deflect attention from the larger argument about the irrational enthusiasm some Americans have for arming themselves like they're the about to face the zombie apocalypse. All of which is why two eyebrows should be raised at the eagerness for conservatives to exclude suicides from the gun death rate. Of course they do, because, in a lot of ways, suicides prove exactly how dangerous it is to cultivate a gun-nut society. Take, for instance, the debate over gun-free zones on campus. Conservatives like to argue that allowing guns on campus will keep students safer, on the grounds that there might be someone around to stop a mass shooter in his tracks. Even if that were true---and there's no reason to think it is---it doesn't actually follow that stuffing college campuses, which are full of young people and alcohol, with guns is a great idea. Most gun deaths are, after all, the result of accidents, suicides, or interpersonal crime, not mass murder. Suicide rates for college-aged men are particularly high, in part because they have so much access to guns. Giving them more is not going to help. Look, conservatives are going to deflect, quibble, and use "liberal media" accusations to try to distort coverage of major issues like gun control. It's understandable to feel temptation to throw them a bone, even if you have to massage the facts, in hopes that they will shut up. But fact-checking ceases to be fact-checking when it's in service of distorting the truth instead of illuminating it.

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Published on October 06, 2015 13:22

Lily Salter's Blog, page 989

October 7, 2015

Hillary Clinton comes out against TPP — but leaves wiggle room: “As of today, I am not in favor of what I have learned about it”

October 6, 2015

The prisoners who kicked Harvard’s ass: Only people who think Ivy Leaguers are smarter than felons were surprised

Secrets of “Saturday Night Live” at 40: “There would never be anything like this again”

Thomas Friedman, read your Chomsky: The New York Times gets Putin/Obama all wrong, again

“(T)error” goes inside the FBI’s crappy, incompetent and thoroughly deceptive anti-terror campaign

“The bees are trying to tell us something”: We may want to listen to the animal our survival depends on

These murderers were made at home: The Oregon shooter’s mother armed her son — just like Adam Lanza’s did

Don’t look, but Jeb Bush just kinda-sorta praised Donald Trump

Chrissie Hynde blows up at NPR interview: “Just don’t buy the f*cking book, then, if I’ve offended someone. Don’t listen to my records”

Guns are cuddly security blankets: How the media helps right-wing gun nuts push propaganda

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