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A Short Story For Saturday

This week’s short story, Kafka’s “The Bridge,” is very short indeed – but that just means you should read it more than once, really pondering what the strange tale might mean. Here’s how it begins:

I was stiff and cold, I was a bridge, I lay over a ravine. My toes on one side, my fingers clutching the other, I had clamped myself fast into the crumbling clay. The tails of my coat fluttered at my sides. Far below brawled the icy trout stream. No tourist strayed to this impassable height, the bridge was not yet traced on any map. So I lay and waited; I could only wait. Without falling, no bridge, once spanned, can cease to be a bridge.

Read the rest here. The story also can be found in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories. Check out all our previous SSFSs here.

John Brennan Is Still Lying, Ctd

[Re-posted from earlier today.]

The CIA director made one small concession yesterday. Here is his Rumsfeldian rumination on whether torture gave the US any actionable intelligence that “saved lives”:

I have already stated that our reviews indicate that the detention and interrogation program produced useful intelligence that helped the United States thwart attack plans, capture terrorists and save lives. But let me be clear: We have not concluded that it was the use of EITs within that program that allowed us to obtain useful information from detainees subjected to them. The cause and effect relationship between the use of EITs and useful information subsequently provided by the detainee is, in my view, unknowable.

The key word there is “subsequently.” He’s arguing that some useful intelligence was later acquired from prisoners who had been tortured. What’s he’s conceding is that torture gave us no real intelligence – against the claims of his predecessors and Cheney. But he wants the broader question of whether torture played a role in prepping prisoners to give information in traditional, humane and legal interrogations to remain an open one. Well, let’s go through the report to see if he has a leg to stand on.

The Senate’s report lists the plots the CIA has relied most heavily on when making the case for the efficacy of torture:

The report goes on to debunk torture’s role in each of these cases. Here are the key points:

So in this case, all the intelligence necessary to thwart a barely existent plot by utterly unserious criminals was discovered before torture was instigated at all.

Another claim eviscerated by the CIA’s own evidence.

Again: torture was utterly irrelevant to this amorphous plot far from being operational.

Another phantasm of a plot revealed by sources independent of the torture program.

So this canary sang without any torture at all.

And so it goes. Notice that all of this evidence is taken from the CIA’s own internal documents. This is not the Senate Committee’s conclusion; it is the CIA’s.

Yet another dud. And therefore yet another lie.

Look: if every single one of the CIA’s own purported successes evaporates upon inspecting the CIA’s own records, what’s left?

Does Brennan know of other cases of alleged plots disrupted by intelligence procured through torture? You’d think in all its strenuous efforts to prove that its program worked, the CIA would have mentioned other plots. But if they don’t exist, Brennan’s claim of “unknowability” evaporates into thin air. It’s total bullshit. As for the need to interview the torturers, why? When the CIA’s own documents show that these mainly unserious plots were foiled by other means entirely, what is left for the torturers to say? That some things discovered by legal means were also blurted out – among countless untrue things – after torture sessions? As for the details of all these cases, I recommend reading all the footnotes. They flesh out the summaries above.

This seems to me to be a crucial issue of truth and falsehood.

What Brennan said yesterday was, in contrast, spin: some kind of sad attempt to square a circle that is adamantly circular. There is no evidence in the entire CIA archive that shows that any prisoner provided truthful information “subsequently” to being tortured. None. All the information necessary to foil every single plot cited by the CIA was recovered by legal, moral and humane means. All of it. This is not an opinion, a judgment … but a fact.

And that means that on this critical, foundational question, one that gets to the heart of Western civilization, John Brennan is a liar. And his lies and deceptions matter. That a CIA chief can get up and tell us that something is unknowable when it is already fully known is someone who has forfeited the public trust in a profound way. He’s lying to protect what’s left of the reputation of the CIA. He refuses to discipline any war criminal in his ranks, and defends the bulk of them. And let us be perfectly clear: all of this is criminal activity. Committing war crimes and then refusing to acknowledge them as such violates the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention of Torture and domestic law.

I want to move past this as much as Brennan does. But you cannot move past it without reckoning with it, without facing up the the facts, and bringing accountability to government. Obama and Brennan refuse to do it. And by refusing to come to terms with the facts, they have left this as some kind of open debate, when it is, in fact, closed. And that opening is all we need to see torture return.

On this one, the war criminals meep-meeped the president. And he didn’t even seriously try to stop them.

(Photo: CIA Director John Brennan takes questions from reporters during a press conference at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia on December 11, 2014. By Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images.)

Emails Of The Day

A reader writes:

From early 2006 to late 2009, I was a part of the post-9/11 corporate-security state serving as an intelligence analyst. This is not a fact in which I take much pride. When the Abu Ghraib scandal became augmented with the information that CACI contractors were involved – CACI being known where I’m from primarily as a tech services contractor – I started to question the incentives and structure of the intelligence contracting field in which I’d become enmeshed.

Over those years I followed the torture and spying revelations closely and I took the same position then that I do now: this is plainly illegal, immoral, and the result of caustic fear, overreaction, and hysteria. Though I was not involved with anything remotely connected to torture, one of the best days of my life was the last time I walked out of that office.

I’m attaching an image that’s been making the rounds on my Facebook feed and receiving a sobering amount of likes. The reason I’m sending it along is because the people posting it are my former coworkers, people who, as far as I know, are still involved in intelligence analysis work either through some contracting company or for the government directly.

It’s important to understand how, at least where I worked, the atmosphere was one of an assumed political stance – that 9/11 was an existential threat and perhaps the greatest faced ever in the country’s history, and that we were involved in this apocalyptic battle as foot soldiers. The views of many of my coworkers at the time were, to my mind, rather extreme.

I can see now that this hasn’t changed for many of them, despite all the evidence put forth this week. Yet unlike the rest of the American public, these are people doing the work for the government. They are the people down in the trenches, generating analysis and reports. They work for companies under contracts whose primary incentive is to get bigger, longer, more expensive contracts, and one way to do this is to constantly remind people how terrified we should all be.

And here’s the kicker: many of them came into this kind of work directly out of college and were paid pretty well for it. Their entire adult lives have been based on this type of work. They’ve known nothing else. One can’t expect that such a situation wouldn’t have an effect on their political views. A subset of an entire generation has been profoundly affected in ways we don’t discuss enough. To get a full understanding of this period of torture, surveillance, and bungled wars, one must consider the contracting aspect of it and the people for whom such work created the prosperous upper-middle class life that many Americans have come to expect but which fewer and fewer can achieve.

Another insider perspective:

In my personal assessment, the reason Brennan and Obama have fought this report is to protect the promise of legal protection for lawful actions upon which every employee depends. I believe my assessment has some value, as I work at the CIA.

I can tell you that the recently-remodeled exercise facility OHB is closed for cleaning from 10 to 11. I can tell you that the Dunkin’ Donuts is more popular than the Starbucks. I can tell you that for weeks after the portrait of Tenet was unveiled, his ashtray and cigar were left untouched.

What I cannot tell you about is the torture program, because I do not know anything more about this program than an other American. And by revealing this information I reveal little of my identity because this characteristic of me is shared by the vast majority of the “blue badged” and “green badged” individuals who work here.

The CIA is composed of four directorates, which each consists of many offices, divisions, and branches. The people who work here all do very different things. This includes everything from keeping worldwide, secure, communication-systems working, to digging through old copies of Iranian technical journals, to developing tiny chemical sensors, to writing hundreds of briefings for policy makers. The opinions of those I work with regarding the torture program probably reflect that of the general American public. Many, like me, are horrified. Many think folks got what they had coming.

What everyone does understand, though, is the fundamental importance of legal protection. They have been assured that if they, in good faith, seek and receive legal guidance from the Inspector General that what they are doing is legal, they can rest assured that they will not be help responsible even if this legal ruling is incorrect.

Call this the Nuremberg defense if one wishes. However, it is the same legal protection that military snipers rely upon when they squeeze the trigger. And a key aspect of this protection is the protection of identity. A person legally authorized to do things is protected from the vengeance of those who might not agree.

My assessment is that upholding this promise to leave no man on the battlefield is so crucial to the bond of trust upon which all those who have sworn an oath to the government that it is worth fighting for.

Get Your Mug In Time For Christmas

[Re-posted from earlier today]

Our new coffee mug makes a great gift for your favorite Dishhead or pet – be it dog, cat, or parrot – but time is running out to receive it in time for Christmas wrapping, so order now. Full details here:

This navy-colored coffee mug is very high quality, holds a generous 15oz, and, during our caffeine-addled test phase, it proved very durable. So the sturdy mug should last a long time in any Dishhead’s kitchen or office (and yes, it’s microwave and dishwasher safe – we tested that too). As a serious coffee-addict, I love it. The Dish mug can be yours for $15 plus shipping and handling. Just click here and follow the simple prompts to order yours today. We only have a limited number of mugs for sale, so get yours before someone else does.

A reader just got his:

I received the mug the day before I left for Madbears in Madrid, and was unable to use it until this morning. Thank you for the obvious thought that went behind choosing the design.

Yes, I enjoy “throwing bombs,” so I’m going to go there.

This seems to be a decidedly masculine mug. It is the only cup in my collection wherein all my fingers actually fit inside the handle. Finally! But my mother, who always complained about the size of my furniture (I’m 6’4”), would have hated it. I can just imagine her saying, with the just the slightest of frowns, “It’s so big.”

I anxiously await the first accusation of mug patriarchy.

Not from this female Dishhead:

A good start to the day!

Amehrica

Aaron Blake passes along some downbeat news regarding the national mood:

1) A New York Times poll showed just 64 percent of Americans believe in the American Dream. That’s the lowest that number has been since at least 1996.

2) A Pew Research Center poll showed just under half — 49 percent — of Americans said they expect next year to be a better year than this year. That’s the lowest that’s been since the recession, and a couple years before, too.

3) An AP-GfK poll shows just 13 percent of Americans say they are confident that Republicans and President Obama can come together to address the country’s problems. (A similar question from Pew found just 20 percent expect Congress and Obama to “make progress” on important issues.)

So, to recap, Americans have hit low points on their belief in our country’s main economic principle, their general feelings about life and their faith in our government. That just about covers it.

Meanwhile, Paul Campos responds to a remark from the recent Chris Rock interview:

If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets. If the average person could see the Virgin Airlines first-class lounge,* they’d go, “What? What? This is food, and it’s free, and they … what? Massage? Are you kidding me? …

*Offers spa treatments, “expert mixologists,” and, at Heathrow, a “lodge and viewing deck” with an “après-ski vibe.”

Once a social system has moved all or nearly all of its members above the level of brute starvation, wealth and poverty soon become inherently relative concepts, but that doesn’t make them any less real. One of the consequences of living in an extremely rich country which features increasingly extreme wealth stratification is that people who would have been considered rich fifteen minutes ago are suddenly part of the “upper middle class.”

Take, for example, what has happened to economic relations within the American university.

It’s well known that American colleges and universities must increase their operating budgets every year at rates faster than inflation because of reasons, and therefore it becomes inevitable, given the contemporary economic structure of the country as a whole, that these institutions will spend enormous amounts of time and money currying favor with super-wealthy potential donors. Giving money to a “non-profit” educational institution provides the masters of the universe with sweet tax breaks, while allowing them to indulge in the ego-gratifying pleasures of plastering their names all over various buildings and centers and even whole schools and colleges.

Cillizza checks in on perceptions of social mobility:

It’s easy to believe there is direct correlation between people not believing in the American Dream and prolonged periods of economic struggle. Which would explain the downward trend of the numbers in the Times poll over the last decade as the economy has sputtered. The question is whether the slowness of the current recovery is what’s to blame for the extended pessimism about hard work achieving results or whether we, as a country, have simply entered a different stage in our relationship with the idea of the American Dream.

There’s some reason to believe the latter explanation is more correct. Consider this, from the 2014 national exit poll: Almost half of all Americans — 48 percent — said they expected life for “future generations” to be “worse than life today,” while 22 percent said it would be better. Another 27 percent said life would be about the same. Do the math and you see that more than twice as many people are pessimistic about the future that they will leave their kids as those who are optimistic.

It’s easy to be downbeat about the state of the union this week, learning all of the horrific actions taken by the CIA in America’s name over the past decade. But this reader has it right:

I object to the Hong Kong newspaper’s characterization that “the report was a heavy blow to the credibility and global image of the U.S.” The Bush Administration’s actions described in the report are the disgrace. The Obama Administration’s unwillingness to investigate the torture program is a disgrace. But the Senate report is an affirmation of the credibility of the U.S. And hopefully it is just the first step in righting this horrific wrong.

Know hope.

Lumbersexuals, Ctd

“@GlobalEdmonton: What to get your lumbersexual now that Beard Baubles are sold out http://t.co/C4Z6Qebeg9 pic.twitter.com/xccfBPzNg6” GOOD LORD

— midnite (@123midnite) December 12, 2014

Willa Brown reflects on the phenomenon:

Americans are currently enduring another prolonged bout of unease, stretching back at least six years. Since the Great Recession began, there has been a general handwringing in the media about the state of men—even the End of Men. The economic downturn disproportionately affected men, and it is clearer than ever that the single-breadwinner family is finally dead. The “traditional” role of the man as the primary provider is now firmly out of reach for most Americans. Which is why it seems particularly apt that (mostly) white, young, urban, middle-class men have once again picked up a symbol invented in the early twentieth century by men very much like themselves, a symbol that has long been gathering dust. …

At the turn of the last century, middle-class white men were, everyone seemed to agree, in crisis.

They were effete, anxious, tired, and depressed. Magazines and advice books worried that they had lost their vigor—the industrial economy and urban life demanded too much time inside, too much brain-work. Clerical jobs in dingy offices provided few opportunities for advancement to the ranks of the industrial elite, much less for feats of bravery and derring-do. Men trapped in cities began suffering from neurasthenia, a new disease that skyrocketed to almost epidemic status in the 1880s and 1890s. Neurasthenia was the overtaxing of the nervous system, a sort of male hysteria. Some wealthy and educated urban men suffered from what historian T. J. Jackson Lears called “cultural asphyxiation … a sense that bourgeois existence had become stifling and ‘unreal.’”

While women were ordered to bed rest for hysteria, the cure for men seemed to be just the opposite: They had lost their vital force, and they needed it back by getting in touch with their primitive, masculine nature. To do so, they looked westward.

Erik Loomis responds:

I don’t know. Is a bunch of bearded hipsters dressing like loggers really a crisis of masculinity? Are these guys really worried about a suppressed manhood that needs to come out? I’m skeptical. I agree with Brown that this is a middle-class romanticizing of working-class culture but I don’t think it’s that comparable to the Progressive Era. I think it’s really more about a broader desire for individualized authenticity among a larger group of people under the age of 35 or so that revolves around working with your hands, semi-opting out of the traditional work norms, and seeing the products of your work. It seems to me that this phenomenon is more closely related with women and the knitting craze and having backyard chickens than TR-style masculinity assertion. After all, do you feel like young hipster men today are really worried about what it means to be a man? Is that a big part of their conversation? I don’t see it in the public realm.

My thoughts on the lumbersexual here.

Face Of The Day

Demonstrators take part in a mass “face-sitting protest” outside the Houses of Parliament in central London on December 12, 2014, as they protest against changes to pornography regulations. By Leon Neal /AFP/Getty Images. Dish alum Katie Zavadski has more:

Oh, and they’ll also be singing “Sit on My Face” from Monty Python. The restrictive legislation on the production of XXX videos was implemented last week, and effectively axed most kinds of BDSM porn production by prohibiting everything from spanking to water sports to [consensual] verbal abuse. But it also banned face-sitting, and, for some odd reason, footage of female ejaculation — because porn-consuming adults should be shielded from seeing naturally occurring physiological responses.

Previous Dish on the UK’s anti-porn insanity here.

Why Are There Fewer Abortions? Ctd

Marcotte isn’t convinced by Frum’s theory that the abortion rate has gone down thanks to the pro-life movement convincing more women to carry their pregnancies to term:

Yes, the abortion rate is down. But if that was due to women choosing childbirth over abortion, then we’d see a subsequent spike in the birth rate to go along with the abortion decline. But as Joerg Dreweke at the Guttmacher Institute pointed out in a 2014 analysis of the same abortion numbers Frum is looking at, “the decline in abortion between 2008 and 2011 coincided with a steep national drop in the birthrate”—13 percent and 9 percent, respectively. “By looking at abortion and birth numbers, this point becomes even more clear: Between 2008 and 2011, abortions declined by about 150,000, but births by roughly twice as much (down about 300,000),” he adds. Women aren’t “choosing life” more. On the contrary, they’re just getting pregnant less.

To be fair, Frum anticipated this objection and thought he had answered it: “At any given moment nearly 40 percent of women are using no birth-control method at all. Almost half of all American pregnancies are unintended.” An interesting point, but it doesn’t change the baseline fact that women just aren’t getting pregnant as often. So what’s going on? … The likeliest explanation is probably the most mundane one. It really is about the contraception.

A More Complex Picture Of College Rape

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, new data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics suggest that college women are actually less likely than their non-student peers to become victims of sexual assault:

The report estimates that 6.1 of every 1000 college students are raped or sexually assaulted every year; assault is slightly more common among college-age nonstudents (7.6 per 1000). Those rates are lower than other studies of college women, including federal studies, have found. The BJS says this is probably a difference of methodology: the crime victims study, which this report is based on, simply asks women about “unwanted sexual activity,” while other studies list specific behaviors or scenarios women might have experienced.

However, the BJS data also confirm that most rapes go unreported, as the above chart illustrates:

Sexual assault victims are typically much more likely not to go to the police than victims of other crimes … But reporting rates are especially low among college students.

Among young non-student women, according to the new report, 67 percent didn’t report their assaults to the police — that’s a little higher than the average for all sexual-assault victims (which is about 65 percent) but it’s about comparable. Among college students, however, 80 percent of victims didn’t go to the police.

Furthermore, it doesn’t look like college students are reporting assaults to college officials, either. 14 percent of nonstudents said that they didn’t report their assault to the police, but did report to another official (which the survey doesn’t define). But only 4 percent of students said they went to another official or administrator.

As Brandy Zadrozny observes, the data also show that college-aged men are significantly more likely to get assaulted than non-students in the same age group:

Though fewer college-age men are raped or sexually assaulted than women, it happens to about 9,400 men annually. Men ages 18 to 24 enrolled in college were more likely to become a victim. Men in college were raped or sexually assaulted at a rate of 1.4 per 1,000, almost five times the rate of non-students (0.03 per 1,000). Men made up 17 percent of rape and sexual assault victims in college and just 4 percent for nonstudents.

Libby Nelson explores why different surveys turn up such markedly divergent numbers on rape:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s study on intimate partner violence finds much higher rates of sexual assault in the general population than the crime victimization survey does. The difference lies in how the questions are worded. Researchers in other surveys, including the CDC’s, don’t necessarily use the term “rape” or “sexual assault” at all. Instead, they ask much more specific questions about what happened, such as “when you were drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent, how many people ever had vaginal sex with you?”

Christopher Krebs, the lead researcher on the Campus Sexual Assault Study, a study of two colleges that led to the widely cited “1 in 5″ statistic, says the term “rape” carries heavy baggage. “Women often think of rape as something perpetrated by a stranger, someone they don’t know, someone jumping out from behind a bush or behind a car,” he says. “They think of something that happens that’s violent: they had to be hit or kicked or threatened. They think of it as something that happens when you’re around people you don’t know.”