Tag: Premium

Foley’s British Executioner

by Dish Staff

The unidentified jihadist who murdered James Foley in the video released yesterday spoke fluent English with a London accent, likely placing him among the hundreds of UK citizens who have traveled to Syria or Iraq to join up with ISIS. That revelation could motivate the UK to step up its involvement in the fight against the Islamic State:

“We’ve been saying for a very long time that there are significant numbers of British nationals in Syria, increasingly in Iraq, and one of the reasons why what is going on in Syria and Iraq is a direct threat to our own national security is the presence of significant numbers of our nationals who may at some stage seek to come back to the UK with the skills, the tradecraft that they’ve learned working with these terrorist organisations, potentially posing a threat to our domestic security here in the UK,” [Foreign Secretary Philip] Hammond said.

Hammond said Britain was committed to helping the Iraqi government fight Isis and that, although the Iraqi government “has made it clear that it does not need and actually wouldn’t welcome western boots on the ground”, it did want help with surveillance and technological equipment. Asked if Britain would send soldiers to Iraq to train Iraqi forces, Hammond said this was “certainly something that we would consider”.

Josh Halliday rounds up some expert analysis of why the killer’s nationality is significant:

Prof Peter Neumann, director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London, said the militant was chosen to front the video to cause maximum impact in the west.

“This is significant because it signifies a turn towards threatening the west. They are saying we’re going to come after you if you bomb us,” he said. Neumann said British fighters had been carrying out “horrific acts” like beheadings, torture and executions for a year and a half, but this appeared to be the first with a western victim. …

Dr Erin Saltman, a senior researcher at Quilliam Foundation, said the footage was geared towards disaffected Islamist extremists in the west who would be able to empathise with the British-accented militant. “The video is quite a shock mainly because the two characters are an American and a Briton. That’s done very deliberately,” she said. “As soon as you have a fighter with a Middle East accent it becomes very easy to disassociate with that and say they’re brutal, they’re barbaric. But when you have a British citizen, raised in the UK, this is somebody we can empathise with.”

Jihadism expert Shiraz Maher calls British jihadists “amongst some of the most vicious and vociferous fighters who are out there”:

Maher warned that the self-proclaimed caliphate was likely to carry out more atrocities because of western efforts to help people in the region. “Unfortunately, the way the Foley video is framed, it makes it very clear now that IS (Isis) will react against any western involvement or intervention into the conflicts either in Syria or Iraq and that, of course, given that we are now helping minorities in Iraq – the Yazidis, the Kurds, for example – they regard that not just as an assault on them but they regard that ultimately as a declaration of war against Islam itself.

“And therefore, that is the sort of narrative we have, of course, heard from al-Qaida in the past. That will license them to attack targets and individuals and western interests as they see fit.” Maher said British and other Sunni Muslims initially went to Syria because of an “existential threat” to their faith from Shia Muslims, and their presence has since swelled Isis ranks and allowed it to increase its territory and influence.

Ed Morrissey responds to the possibility that the executioner or his compatriots may be former Guantánamo Bay detainees:

The orange jumpsuits are obviously referencing Guantanamo Bay, but the British seem concerned that there’s more than just symbolism now in play with ISIS. The US began releasing British subjects from Gitmo during the Bush administration under international pressure to shut down the facility, as well as releasing other detainees to their home countries, all of whom pledged to ensure that they would not return to the fight. We’ve seen plenty of recidivism since then, and all to this same end — to rejoin the jihad against the West and the nations in this region, and to recruit others to do the same.

It won’t be a surprise if the jihadist turns out to be a former Gitmo detainee, but it is a bit of a surprise that the UK doesn’t keep a close enough watch on those former detainees to account for their whereabouts immediately. After all, they have already been identified as threats, picked up in the battle zones far from home, which is how they ended up in Gitmo in the first place.

To Be A Christian In Modern America

by Matthew Sitman

Benedetto,_Mauro_e_Placido

For awhile now I’ve been intrigued by Rod Dreher’s advocacy of the “Benedict Option” for contemporary Christians, which looks to St. Benedict, founder of a monastic order in the wake of Rome’s collapse, as inspiration for how Christians should respond to the current cultural situation. Here’s a good summary of the Benedict Option from Rod’s essay about it late last year:

Why are medieval monks relevant to our time? Because, says the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, they show that it is possible to construct “new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained” in a Dark Age—including, perhaps, an age like our own.

For MacIntyre, we too are living through a Fall of Rome-like catastrophe, one that is concealed by our liberty and prosperity. In his influential 1981 book After Virtue, MacIntyre argued that the Enlightenment’s failure to replace an expiring Christianity caused Western civilization to lose its moral coherence. Like the early medievals, we too have been cut off from our roots, and a shadow of cultural amnesia is falling across the land.

Rod goes onto describe various communities – in places like Eagle Creek, Alaska and Clear Creek Abbey, Oklahoma – living out their faith in traditional ways, largely set apart from modern American culture. In the midst of our cultural catastrophe, the Benedict Option is a way for Christians to live virtuous lives uncorrupted by what’s around them, resisting any kind of assimilation into mainstream society.

Last week Samuel Goldman argued for an alternative, the “Jeremiah Option,” drawing on the experience of the Jews exiled in Babylon, and pitched as a corrective to Dreher’s ideas:

Without being rigorously separatist, these [Benedict Option] communities do aim to be separate. Some merely avoid morally subversive cultural influences, while others seek physical distance from mainstream society in rural isolation.

But a neo-Benedictine way of life involves risks. Communal withdrawal can construct a barrier against the worst facets of modern life—the intertwined commodification of personal relationships, loss of meaningful work to bureaucratic management, and pornographic popular culture—yet it can also lead to isolation from the stimulating opposition that all traditions need to avoid stagnation.

I think those hesitations are largely right, and as a Christian, I’d add that I have to wonder what these kinds of communities do to reach out to the poor, the sick, and the lonely in the world around them. I’m not sure hunkering down is what Jesus called us to, and when, for example, a member of the Alaska community I mentioned says that “If you isolate yourself, you will become weird,” I wonder how living in a remote Alaska village is not isolation. Christians are given the Great Commission, not the Great Retreat. I’m not trying to demean the people Rod profiled, but rather express that I can’t quite understand Christianity in the same way. Jesus always seemed to wandering around, telling strange stories, mingling with the kind of people Benedict Option types might prefer to avoid.

Given the above, you won’t be surprised that I nod along when Goldman elaborates on what distinguishes the Jeremiah Option from the Benedict Option:

The Benedict Option is not the only means of spiritual and cultural survival, however. As a Catholic, MacIntyre searches for models in the history of Western Christendom. The Hebrew Bible and Jewish history suggest a different strategy, according to which exiles plant roots within and work for the improvement of the society in which they live, even if they never fully join it.

This strategy lacks the historical drama attached to the Benedict Option. It promises no triumphant restoration of virtue, in which values preserved like treasures can be restored to their original public role. But the Jews know a lot about balancing alienation from the mainstream with participation in the broader society. Perhaps they can offer inspiration not only to Christians in the ruins of Christendom but also to a secular society that draws strength from the participation of religiously committed people and communities.

Goldman gets at something important here when he notes that adherents to the Benedict Option look forward to “a triumphant restoration of virtue,” rather than the simpler and more humble desire to help the society in which they live. I certainly harbor no longings for Christendom. There’s no golden age I’m trying to restore. While not being uncritical of modern life, I’m not in rebellion against it – and thus don’t seek to escape it. I also resist the notion that Christianity is fundamentally about morality, at least not in the ultimate sense. Christianity is premised on our inability to be moral, and it’s most important idea is that of grace, or God’s one-way love for us, which isn’t premised on how much we have our acts together. So I’m suspicious of religious movements that value purity above all else, which, in a way, I think the Benedict Option does. Withdrawal from mainstream culture can only mean that a desire for purity has trumped the risks of engagement.

But most of all, Christianity teaches us that God is love, that God loved the world and so should we – a notion that I find difficult to square with retreating into a remote community waiting for the world to burn. I actually am hopeful about Christianity’s place in modern life, and seeing the brutality, violence, and indifference to suffering all around us, I can’t help but think the message of Jesus will retain it’s power. But that hope is premised on living in the world, not apart from it, while also letting go of apocalyptic rhetoric and the acute sense of persecution so many Christians feel. One of my favorite passages comes from a letter written by the novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder, where he argued that “The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem — new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones.” I’m far more interested in that project, in finding ways to think and talk about Christianity, as well as live it, that avoid the well-worn tropes of American religious life, than I am in waiting out the supposed new Dark Ages.

(St. Benedict orders Saint Maurus to the rescue of Saint Placidus, by Fra Filippo Lippi, 1445, via Wikimedia Commons)

ISIS Murders James Foley

by Dish Staff

ISIS released a video yesterday purporting to show the beheading of American journalist James Foley and threatening to do the same to his colleague Steven Sotloff if the US does not immediately cease its air campaign against the militant group:

A propaganda video circulated on Tuesday showed a masked Isis fighter beheading a kneeling man dressed in an orange jumpsuit who is purported to be James Wright Foley, a photojournalist who went missing in Syria in 2012. The masked executioner spoke in English, with what sounded like a British accent, and said the slaying came in response to the air strikes ordered by President Barack Obama against Isis 12 days ago.

Isis, whose chief spokesman came under US state department sanctions on Monday, warned of further revenge – including on another man purported to be a captured US journalist, Steven Sotloff – and in the video the victim was made to read a statement blaming the US for his own murder. Foley has been missing in Syria since November 2012, where he went to report on the bloody struggle to overthrow dictator Bashar al-Assad. He was initially thought to have been captured by forces loyal to the Assad regime.

So how did he end up in the hands of ISIS? Christopher Dickey wonders:

In Syria, he was picked up by gunmen from what the Federal Bureau of Investigation called an “organized gang” shortly after he left an Internet café on November 22, 2012. In May 2013, GlobalPost President Philip Balboni said that “with a very high degree of confidence, we now believe that Jim was most likely abducted by a pro-regime militia group”—that is, one loyal to President Bashar Assad—and that he was being held near Damascus by the Syrian Air Force intelligence service. “Based on what we have learned,” said Balboni, “it is likely Jim is being held with one or more Western journalists, including most likely at least one other American.”

Several groups fighting against Assad have claimed that there is—or was—a tacit collaboration, at least, between his intelligence services and ISIS, since it served the savage Assad regime well to claim it was fighting a terrorist enemy even more brutal than its own forces.

Uri Friedman remarks that Foley, before his capture, was part of a dwindling cohort of journalists reporting directly from Syria:

“We have never been prouder of our son Jim,” Foley’s mother posted on Facebook on Tuesday evening. “He gave his life trying to expose the world to the suffering of the Syrian people.”

That exposure is growing fainter by the day. Foley appears to have died while working in what is now the most dangerous place in the world to be a reporter—a country where dozens of journalists have been killed and kidnapped in recent years. As the Syrian conflict has grown more indiscriminately violent; as the Syrian government has targeted journalists, censored local news coverage, and barred foreign journalists from the country; as ever-stronger extremist groups have started seizing members of the press (and not even bothering to make demands for their release), news outlets around the world have pulled their staff from the country. Many Syrian journalists and citizen-journalists have been silenced.

Max Fisher knew him:

There will be many efforts in the coming days to derive meaning from Jim’s death. Some will say ISIS had him killed to punish the US for its recent air strikes against them in Iraq, some will say it was to egg the Americans on, and others will attribute it to simple madness. I would rather derive meaning from Jim’s life. As a journalist, I want to celebrate his dedication to truth and understanding. But that would sell him short. It is clear even just by secondhand accounts from the family that would do anything to help him, even when he insisted on returning to a war zone, and from the friends who were so enriched by knowing him, that Jim’s value was so much more.

Owen Jones is struck by the effectiveness of ISIS’s propaganda:

Everything about the video of Foley’s alleged murder was intended to chill. It is unlikely that Islamic State (Isis) selected an executor with a strong London accent for no reason. It was the Iraq war that first popularised the execution video but hearing the blood-curdling threats and dogma of Isis recited in tones that are all too familiar is itself a message.

Terrorism by definition aims to spread terror to achieve its political ends. One of the reasons Isis has outmanoeuvred its rivals is because it has embraced social media so effectively. By publicising its atrocities online, it tells would-be opponents what will happen if it is resisted, and this partly explains why so many have fled rather than confront Isis forces. The ruthless use of social media has proved instrumental in the toppling of entire cities. This operation is being gladly assisted by those in the west who portray Isis as a unique, undiluted evil that needs to be bombed out of existence, granting the militant group the mystique it clearly craves and relies on.

Shane Harris looks at how social media companies have tried to scrub references to the video:

Less than an hour after the video was first posted to YouTube, the company removed it. But the same video was soon posted by a different YouTube user, and it remained accessible for at least another half an hour. The company eventually removed the video from the user’s account, but it didn’t suspend the account itself, and within minutes, the user had posted it again. Twitter suspended the user’s account after he included a link to the video in his feed. …

But the social media companies are fighting a losing battle. They depend on users to flag offensive content or material that violates their terms of service — videos of murder undoubtedly do — but they don’t proactively police the photos, videos, and messages posted to their sites. The companies also have to determine whether posting violent rhetoric or messages constitutes promoting terrorists’ messages or is an act of free speech, and the distinction is not always clear.

How We Turned Our Cops Into Soldiers, Ctd

by Dish Staff

A reader with more than two decades of experience in law enforcement offers his perspective on police militarization:

For the record, I’m a supervisor with a medium-sized police department in Midwest who has also worked in a small town. I’ve been a patrol officer, a detective, and now a supervisor. At heart, I’m an old fashioned beat cop who enjoys walking down a main street and talking to people. I’ve never served in my department’s tactical team, nor am I a veteran.

I’ve seen a lot of changes in my career so far. One of the biggest is the nature of the threat that we face on the street. When I was in the police academy, we prepared for criminals who had cheap handguns and little training. The types of weapons that we face have changed dramatically; the police have simply evolved to meet those threats. I’ll give you a couple of examples:

Iexplore111 (1)During the 1997 North Hollywood shootout, bank robbers armed with illegally modified fully automatic weapons exchanged more than 2,000 rounds with responding LAPD officers. The robbers, who wore ballistic vests, were killed after a 44-minute exchange of gunfire. Seventeen LAPD officers and seven civilians were injured in the battle. The after-action review led to changes in the weapons carried by LAPD officers as well as departments around the country. The agencies moved away from shotguns in squad cars and toward military-style assault rifles that could penetrate body armor. Those rifles aren’t cheap – they often cost more than $2,500 each, plus $500 to $1,000 for the equipment to keep them secured inside of the squad car. If I were the head of a cash-strapped police department, I know I would love to get those weapons from a program that transitions D.O.D equipment to local law enforcement.

The second incident that changed law enforcement profoundly was the 1999 Columbine school shooting. Previously, law enforcement dealt with situations like this by sealing off the area and waiting for special tactical teams to arrive. At Columbine, law enforcement realized that it’s not enough to simply lock down the area; rather it’s necessary to go in, find the killer or killers, and neutralize them before they kill any more. Since 1999, I and countless other police officers have undergone days and days of training in “active shooter response.” I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that the training involved would seem quite militaristic to the public. The skills and tactics we use are very different from what I learned in the academy, and along with that, we have specialized tools. For example, there is an M-4 assault rifle in each of my agencies’ squad cars.

I get that this is militaristic. Going through a school or mall looking for a shooter utilizes tactics any soldier would recognize from operations in Iraq or Afghanistan. We use them and the equipment because it works. The problem that we face in our field is that these tactics often creep into all aspects of our work. The more you become comfortable with the new reality, the more you need to recognize that it’s a reality you only rarely face.

This leads me to my biggest point regarding the Ferguson police department: We need to stop looking at the officers and start looking at the leaders. Everyone above sergeant has set the tone in this organization. They have done the hiring, and they were leading the efforts to deal with the protesters. There may very well be rogue officers causing issues, and if so, it should likely be no shock to the administration. Problem persons in law enforcement agencies fester for years because it can be challenging to fire an officer, especially if he or she is a military veteran. The one constant in every agency that I’ve been a part of is that the chief of police down to the lieutenants set the tone and direction of the department. The sergeants get the message out to the patrol officers and enforce the message. We haven’t heard the police chief of Ferguson say his officers are out of control – because they are doing what he wants them to do.

More Dish on the war zone that is Ferguson, Missouri, here.

(Image of a illegally modified automatic AR-15 used in the North Hollywood shootout via Wikipedia user YEPPOON)

Palestinians Live What Israelis Fear

by Freddie deBoer

Funeral of eight Palestinians from the al-Louh family in Gaza

The emails filling my box about Israel function as a remarkable document. They are a record of seemingly reasonable people who have completely lost track of basic moral reasoning. And that represents itself nowhere more consistently or powerfully than here: treating what could possibly happen to Israelis as more important than what already is happening to Palestinians. It’s such a profoundly bizarre way to think, that only this maddening issue could bring it about.

“Hamas denies Israel’s right to exist!”

Indeed– and Israel not only denies Palestine’s right to exist, it has achieved the denial of a Palestinian state in fact. What kind of broken moral calculus could cause someone to think that being told your existing state should not exist is the same as not having a state of your own?

“Israelis will become second class citizens!”

Arab Israelis already are second class citizens, and Palestinians in the territories no citizens at all. They are denied freedom of movement, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly. They are systematically discriminated against for jobs, especially in government. They lack adequate representation in government. Their leaders are kicked out of Knesset meetings for questioning the IDF. Racist, ultra-nationalist mobs marched through their streets, chanting “death to Arabs!” Their weddings to Jews are the subject of vicious protests. They live side-by-side with racist teenagers who unashamedly trumpet ethnic warfare. They must live in a society where men like Avigdor Lieberman, an explicit racist and literal fascist, serves in a position of power and prominence. Where Meir Kahane is memorialized by groups receiving state funds, where the JDL’s thugs march, where Lehava preaches against miscegenation. A society where the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset openly calls for ethnic cleansing. Palestinians live in a society where a tiny fraction of government funding is spent on their communities or their people. Where human rights organizations like B’Tselem are oppressed by the state. Where they have to endure Kafkaesque application processes to prevent their homes from being bulldozed, if they are given that opportunity at all. Where they live under fear of reactionary, fundamentalist Orthodox settlers who call for death to the Palestinian race.

“Israel is diplomatically isolated unfairly!”

Palestine is diplomatically isolated in a way Israel cannot imagine. The United States uses its veto power to unilaterally deny even the possibility of full membership status for Palestine in the United Nations. The US has used its foreign aid programs and incredible diplomatic leverage to marginalize Palestine and protect Israel. Israel enjoys the protection of the most diplomatically powerful country on earth; Palestine cannot even claw out formal recognition of its borders.

“Israelis will be rounded up and put into camps!”

Palestinians are already in camps, open-air prison camps like Gaza, tiny, beleaguered cantons that lack access to drinkable water or transportation infrastructure, blockaded from receiving food and essential supplies, prevented from fishing their own waters, their movements harshly restricted, forced to go through humiliating and threatening checkpoints to get to work. They travel in segregated buses. They are frequently denied access to Eastern Jerusalem, the center of Palestinian commercial and cultural  life. They endure constant calls for “Greater Israel,” the call for ethnic cleansing to establish a unitary ethno-nationalist state. They live in unrecognized villages in the Negev and the North which the Israel state provides no services for. They, unlike Israeli Jews, have no “right to return.” They endured the Nakba.

“Israelis will be killed by terrorist violence!”

Palestinians are killed by terrorist violence. They are subject to spasms of outrageous violence, as the IDF kills them by the hundreds with bombs, tanks, and guns. The vast majority are civilians, many children. Their homes are destroyed, their neighborhoods demolished, their entire villages wiped out. Their hospitals and schools and universities and places of worship are bombed by Israel. Palestinians are subject to routine violence and degradation from IDF troops, who make light of this fact on social media. They are at risk from right-wing Israeli mobs who attack them at their protests and deny them their rights to protest. Their nonviolent protesters are thrown into prison. Their homes are bulldozed out of revenge.

Do I need to go on?

Everything that defenders of Israel insist will happen if Palestinians gain power, Palestinians are now enduring, or worse. Every humanitarian disaster that you imagine will occur with the creation of a Palestinian state is happening now. It’s just happening to the people of Palestine. And so this is the question for my many, many critical emailers: why do you shed more tears for what you imagine might happen to Israel than for what is happening to Palestinians?

Israel is one of the safest countries in the Middle East. Its people enjoy prosperity and security. The most powerful country on earth protects and enables it no matter what its behavior. In every meaningful sense– in terms of  physical security, in terms of functioning government and democracy, in terms of human and political rights, in terms of economics and employment, in terms of respect and protection for culture and religion, in terms of life expectancy and health, in terms of education and happiness, in terms of pure self-determination– Israel is one of the most well-off nations on earth, and Palestine, one of the most beleaguered. So then why calls for the defense of Israel so outnumber calls for the defense of Palestine? The only answer that makes sense is this: the belief, whether subconscious or knowing, that an Israeli life is worth more than a Palestinian life. That is the enduring, tacit, obvious belief that underlies this entire discussion, the thing people think but do not say.

(Photo: Palestinians stand over the bodies of eight Palestinians from the al-Louh family, who were killed when an Israeli airstrike hit their house, during a funeral in Deir al-Balah town of Gaza City on August 20, 2014. Eight members of the same family, including three young brothers and a pregnant woman, were killed early Wednesday by an Israeli strike in the town of Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip. By Mohammed Talatene/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Is Edward Snowden the World’s Dumbest Spy?, Ctd

by Freddie deBoer

Lots of reader objections on this one:

On Snowden’s motives and capabilities:

“I do know that he’s in Russia because he’s been trapped there by our government, and that if he’s a spy, he’s gotta be the world’s worst.”

Well, you’re half right. Snowden is in Russia because that’s where he chose to go, one day after his passport was revoked. I respect the whistle-blower argument, but Snowden did much more than leak evidence of crimes and overreach by the NSA. He took those documents and fled. Unlike Chelsea Manning, who seems to have far more personal integrity than Snowden, he did not remain here to face the consequences of his actions. If he truly believed he was doing a service for the country, or the world, and was not in flagrant violation of oaths he took, he should have stood his ground here in the US, or at the very least on neutral soil, NOT left to be succored by avowed international enemies of the US.

And his actions have shown that at the very least, he is extremely naive about international relations.

Any information that was on any digital device he took with him on his route to Sheremetyevo via Hong Kong was almost certainly compromised. If they were not (doubtful),  just how secure and careful have Greenwald and others who have access to those documents been in the intervening year? Surely you don’t think it is a coincidence that Aeroflot just happened to be willing to convey him to Moscow on a cancelled passport, do you? Putin loves having Snowden there to irritate the US, and has been playing him like a violin for over a year. Did you watch that pandering April  interview that Snowden claimed later was an attempt to catch Putin in a lie? If that was his aim, he has totally misunderstood both Putin and the nature of the personality cult he has been assiduously building in Russia. As events in Ukraine have shown, Putin *doesn’t care* if the West thinks (or knows) that he’s lying, and most Russians won’t believe the biased Western media even if presented with clear evidence. The West already suspected (and now knows) that Putin is an opportunist with no respect for international law or sanctions if they get in the way of what he wants. Snowden is just one more convenient tool in his arsenal of catspaws to use against what he considers to be a hostile coalition of Western powers.

I am not yet willing to brand Snowden an out-and-out traitor, but his actions are not nearly as blameless as you seem to think. He has repeatedly tried to trade off of information he stole from the NSA to secure asylum with several different governments. If he really wanted to expose US malfeasance while still protected US security interests, he should have left for neutral territory well before leaking any documents, established himself and submitted an asylum claim, THEN started leaking. Instead, his clumsy attempts at whistleblowing and evading responsibility for the same have resulted in him being in the power of an enemy state with no regard for world stability if it stands in the way of their interests.

Snowden’s own words: “I blew the whistle on the NSA’s surveillance practices not because I believed that the United States was uniquely at fault, but because I believe that mass surveillance of innocents – the construction of enormous, state-run surveillance time machines that can turn back the clock on the most intimate details of our lives – is a threat to all people, everywhere, no matter who runs them.” Snowden doesn’t just think the NSA overstepped its legal bounds in surveilling US citizens; he doesn’t think the NSA should be spying on *anyone at all*, and neither should anybody else. Well, that’s fucking great, but that’s just. not. reality. It is this kind of attitude that lead to Sec of State Henry Stimson shutting down the American Black Chamber and dismissing much of its staff without a pension or NDA after World War I. The key figure behind the chamber, Herbert Yardley, went on to write his own expose of their activities, mostly out of financial need, but likely also out of pique. I still have more respect for Yardley and his motivations than I do for Snowden.

The NSA’s own commentary on Yardley’s memoir: “Yardley, with no civil service status or retirement benefits, found himself unemployed just as the stock market was collapsing and the Great Depression beginning. He left Queens and returned to his hometown of Worthington, Indiana, where he began writing what was to become the most famous book in the history of cryptology. There had never been anything like it. In today’s terms, it was as if an NSA employee had publicly revealed the complete communications intelligence operations of the Agency for the past twelve years-all its techniques and major successes, its organizational structure and budget-and had, for good measure, included actual intercepts, decrypts, and translations of the communications not only of our adversaries but of our allies as well.”

I’ll just say, briefly: I wish Chelsea Manning had escaped the way Snowden has. I see nothing noble about her being stuck in a cage for the next several decades.

Getting Out The Vote In Ferguson

by Dish Staff

Ferguson’s government is much whiter than its population. But Yglesias doubts that will be true for long:

Nobody who lives in the area could possibly think that local government doesn’t matter any more, and a community capable of organizing nightly protest marches should have relatively little trouble getting people to come out and vote. And if Ferguson’s African-American residents do vote, they should have relatively little trouble installing a government that hears their concerns and leans against the systemic inequities in the American criminal justice system.

In other words, the town at the center of this drama may well see a real improvement in political representation. The deeper problem is going to lie elsewhere — in the many towns large and small where people of color are a minority of eligible voters and the basis of white political power is firmer.

Friedersdorf wants recall elections:

A successful recall of Ferguson’s mayor and city council is the best outcome I can imagine from a protest movement that is justifiably angry, but uncertain about how to achieve its goals and at risk of losing public support if the streets turn more violent. Protesters want transparency in the investigation into Brown’s death, accountability for the police department, and an end to leadership that demonstrates such disregard and seeming contempt for the city’s black people. Perhaps existing pressure on city leaders, or appeals already made to the Department of Justice, will help advance those goals—but while more night protests would seem to offer scant hope for additional gains, replacing the city’s elected leadership would advance the protesters’ goals directly and dramatically. The effort would be nonviolent, it might well increase civic participation for years or even generations to come, and if successful, it would send an inspiring message to those who feel powerless: that a system very much stacked against them is still a far more powerful weapon than a molotov cocktail.

Jonathan Rodden points out that, “while St. Louis is indeed among the most segregated metropolitan regions in the United States, Ferguson and some of its North County neighbors are among the most racially integrated municipalities in Missouri and well beyond”:

Let us not learn the wrong lessons from recent events in Missouri. By no means does Ferguson prove the defeatist claim that blacks and whites cannot live together in peace as the inner suburbs transform. Those of us who grew up in the integrated Ferguson-Florissant area in recent decades know otherwise. It is not a post-racial paradise, but it is a functioning multiracial community. What we are seeing in Ferguson is not merely the latest manifestation of the age-old problem of segregation and housing discrimination. Rather, it is evidence that the best hope for a solution – -the creation of integrated middle-class neighborhoods such as Ferguson — cannot work without political inclusion and accountability.

Fred Siegel is much more pessimistic about Ferguson’s future:

Riots bring but one certainty—enormous economic and social costs. Businesses flee, taking jobs and tax revenues with them. Home values decline for all races, but particularly for blacks. Insurance costs rise and civic morale collapses. The black and white middle classes move out. Despite its busy port and enormous geographic assets, Newark, New Jersey has never fully recovered from its 1967 riot. This year, Newark elected as its mayor Ras Baraka, the son and political heir of Amiri Baraka—the intellectual inspiration for the 1967 unrest.

The story is similar in Detroit, which lost half its residents between 1967 and 2000. Civic authority was never restored after the late 1960s riots, which never really ended; they just continued in slow motion. “It got decided a long time ago in Detroit,” explained Adolph Mongo, advisor to the jailed former “hip-hop mayor,” Kwame Kilpatrick, that “the city belongs to the black man. The white man was a convenient target until there were no white men left in Detroit.” The upshot, explained Sam Riddle, an advisor to current congressman John Conyers, first elected in 1965, is that “the only difference between Detroit and the Third World in terms of corruption is that Detroit don’t have no goats in the streets.”

Digital Breaks, or “Breaks”

by Freddie deBoer

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Exactly a year ago, David Roberts of Grist announced that he was taking an internet break, and would return on Labor Day of 2014. Roberts wrote at the time

I am burnt the fuck out.

I spend each day responding to an incoming torrent of tweets and emails. I file, I bookmark, I link, I forward, I snark and snark and snark. All day long. Then, at night, after my family’s gone to bed and the torrent has finally slowed to a trickle and I can think for more than 30 seconds at a stretch, I try to write longer, more considered pieces.

I enjoy every part of this: I enjoy sharing zingers with Twitter all day; I enjoy writing long, wonky posts at night. But the lifestyle has its drawbacks. I don’t get enough sleep, ever. I don’t have any hobbies. I’m always at work. Other than hanging out with my family, it’s pretty much all I do — stand at a computer, immersing myself in the news cycle, taking the occasional hour out to read long PDFs. I’m never disconnected.

It’s doing things to my brain.

So he elected to take a break from internet life. He’s not the first. Disconnecting from the internet has become a little genre onto its own. The most well-known of these disconnections, and the most emblematic, is that of The Verge‘s Paul Miller. And it’s emblematic precisely because of what Miller says didn’t happen– he didn’t get wiser, he didn’t get healthier. He writes,

One year ago I left the internet. I thought it was making me unproductive. I thought it lacked meaning. I thought it was “corrupting my soul.”

It’s a been a year now since I “surfed the web” or “checked my email” or “liked” anything with a figurative rather than literal thumbs up. I’ve managed to stay disconnected, just like I planned. I’m internet free.

And now I’m supposed to tell you how it solved all my problems. I’m supposed to be enlightened. I’m supposed to be more “real,” now. More perfect.

But instead it’s 8PM and I just woke up. I slept all day, woke with eight voicemails on my phone from friends and coworkers. I went to my coffee shop to consume dinner, the Knicks game, my two newspapers, and a copy of The New Yorker. And now I’m watching Toy Story while I glance occasionally at the blinking cursor in this text document, willing it to write itself, willing it to generate the epiphanies my life has failed to produce.

I didn’t want to meet this Paul at the tail end of my yearlong journey.

This, in my experience, is typical of people who have disconnected: they come back to report that in fact their online selves are more real and more fulfilling, and that really it was their doubts and dissatisfaction with the internet that had been misguided. Some go so far as to say that disconnecting is not actually possible. Miller cites Nathan Jurgensen, who has built a theory of pathology for those who advocate disconnecting. The message is clear: you can take your break, but there is no escape.

Miller is part of what I’ve called, in the past, the internet’s immune system. It’s a facet of online culture whereby even the mildest criticism of digital life attracts reflexive, defensive argument, even though the entire weight of capitalism pushes us to spend more and more time in that digital space. Alan Jacobs recently wrote about this weird fantasy world where Luddites are more  powerful than enthusiastic technologists, saying “Where you and I live, of course, technology companies are among the largest and most powerful in the world, our media are utterly saturated with the prophetic utterances of their high priests, and people continually seek high-tech solutions to every imaginable problem, from obesity to road rage to poor reading scores in our schools.” One of my favorite bloggers, Michael Sacasas, has written at length about the odd way in which one of the most powerful economic and cultural forces in the world has come to be defended as if  were a powerless underdog. Jurgensen acquits his arguments well, but I always am left wondering: where, exactly, is this perception of threat coming from? From a small handful of people who have disconnected from the internet, in comparison to the millions who spend most of their waking lives online?  It’s strange.

I will 100% cop to the fact that I am one of those IRL fetishists that Jurgensen derides. Because for me– for me– the internet is fun and useful but not nearly as moving or important as real life. And I think that, for most people, meeting someone face to face, enjoying their physical presence, is not replicable digitally. But that’s just my perception, and I have no interest in spreading that Gospel. Like Alan, I would like it if online triumphalism was not rendered compulsory by its avatars. What I want to say to others is that if you want to disconnect, you need to really disconnect– you can’t spend your offline time thinking about your old online self. When I read Miller’s piece, it’s unclear to me whether he ever went all the way in his disconnection. Of course the experience will disappoint you if you go offline but keep your online state of mind.

So that’s the real question for Roberts. Were I a betting man, I’d say he comes back and says something similar to Miller– it was cool, I lost some weight, played with my kids, but it wasn’t really a big deal and I better appreciate how the internet makes us “social” now. But the deeper issue is whether he’ll come back having spent that year thinking of all the funny stuff he’d be saying or cool stuff he’d be learning if he were online. If that’s the case, I’m afraid there’s no way disconnecting could ever have satisfied him.

(Photo by Michael Herfort)

A Better Set Of Lies

by Jonah Shepp

Rosie Gray flags Russia Today’s new ad campaign:

“The campaign will be comprised of several different posters, and we kicked it off with wild postings in the New York City,” RT spokespersongrid-cell-30824-1408370582-5 Anna Belkina said in an email. “Soon it will be extended to Washington, DC, and London.” … The ads feature a picture of Colin Powell with the tagline: “This is what happens when there is no second opinion. Iraq War: No WMDs, 141,802 civilian deaths. Go to RT.com for the second opinion.” Another poster says, “In case they shut us down on TV, go to RT.com for the second opinion.”

Asked whether RT believes it is in danger of being shut down on American television, Belkina provided a statement from RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan: “Alternative voices, however rare, are often met with fear, hostility and bureaucratic obstructionism in the attempt to stifle them — because they are inconvenient to the establishment. We want the viewers to know that no matter what, RT will remain THE place to go to for that second opinion.”

That’s a well-crafted message, and it illustrates one of the many ways in which the massive missteps of the Bush era are coming back to bite us.

Lies empower lies, and the lies that underpinned the neoconservative project, helped along by a cowed press that parroted them, were inevitably going to create an opening for foreign propaganda outlets and homegrown conspiracy theorists to tell a skeptical public what was “really” going on. When the establishment’s narrative is revealed to be false, that lends credibility to “alternative” narratives, whether they are true or not, and creates a market for anything that contradicts the official line. A deceitful government and a wimpy media make us vulnerable to propaganda. The Obama administration shares some blame for this, but, well, there’s a reason it’s Colin Powell on that poster and not Hillary Clinton.

The most disquieting feature of the poster is that its headline is correct. The foreign propaganda outlets masquerading before American liberals as objective news sources (RT and al-Jazeera in particular, but Iran’s Press TV also comes to mind) are enabled by the fact that when they tell us that our government has lied to us about matters of great magnitude, that thousands have died because of those lies, and that even well-respected mainstream media outlets failed to uncover those lies until it was far too late, whatever else they may be, they’re right about that.

How Do You Fix A Police Department?

by Dish Staff

Josh Voorhees has suggestions. The feds could step in:

If Holder concludes that there has been a pattern of misconduct by the police—either in the lead-up to Brown’s death or in its aftermath—the president has the ability to force widespread reforms within the department with the help of a law passed in the wake of the Rodney King beating. The provision in question, part of what was officially known as the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, is “one of the most significant” pieces of civil rights legislation passed in the latter part of 20th century, and also one of the most “overlooked,” according to Joe Domanick, the associate director of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s Center on Media, Crime, and Justice. The law gives the federal government two options: It can either formally pursue a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Ferguson Police Department by alleging a “pattern and practice” of misconduct or the administration and city officials can enter into what is known as a “consent decree” that would mandate a specific set of reforms that would then be overseen by an independent court-appointed monitor. Faced with the possibility of a costly court battle, most cities have historically taken the path of least resistance and signed on the decree’s dotted lines. Ferguson officials probably wouldn’t buck that trend.

According to Samuel Walker, the emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, such an outcome is “the best hope we have” for turning around the troubled department. The reforms that normally accompany a consent decree “really get at the critical issue here, which is the culture of the department,” Walker says. “Day in and day out, what do officers know they have to do and what do they know that they can get away with?”

He notes that this worked for the LAPD after the Rodney King beating. Cincinnati also successfully changed:

Officers are now trained in low-light situations, like confronting a suspect at night in an alley, as was the case in [Timothy] Thomas’s death. The agreement also created the Citizens Complaint Authority to investigate incidents when officers used serious force. Most importantly, it instructed officers to build relationships with the community by soliciting feedback with residents and using all available information to find solutions to problems before necessarily resorting to a law enforcement response. The ACLU of Ohio, which was one of the signatories of the agreement, hails it as “one of the most innovative plans ever devised to improve police-community relations.”

These new policies have not fixed all of the racial injustices in Cincinnati, but they have improved them.

Jonah Goldberg recommends hiring minority cops:

I am as against racial quotas as anyone, but the idea that police forces shouldn’t take into account the racial or ethnic make-up of their communities when it comes to hiring has always struck me as bizarre. A Chinese-American cop will probably have an easier time in Chinatown than a Norwegian-American cop. A bilingual Hispanic cop will have similar advantages in a mostly Spanish-speaking neighborhood. When my dad was a kid in the Bronx, it was not uncommon for a cop to give a teenager a well-intentioned smack as a warning and leave it at that. But forget the smack. Today, in many neighborhoods, if a white cop even talks harshly to a black kid, it might immediately be seen as a racial thing. If a black cop said the exact same things, it might be received differently.

But historian Heather Ann Thompson notes that integrated police forces don’t always solve the problem of racist policing:

Even if police departments are integrated — certainly this has been proven in Detroit, and in other cities where you have many, many more black police officers — the problem is that police are charged with policing the community and particularly policing the poor black community. The act of policing places the police in opposition to this community. Even if the officers are black, that does not guarantee that there’s going to be smooth police-community relations. Fundamentally, the problem is that there is so much targeted policing in these neighborhoods.