history: January 2008 Archives

from The Spymaster, a report on the US Intelligence Community by Lawrence Wright for The New Yorker (January 14, 2008).

Ed Giorgio, a security consultant who worked at the N.S.A. under [current Director of Intellgence Mike] McConnell, and who is the only person to have been the nation's chief code breaker and its chief code maker, said, "Early on, Mike had what many directors of the N.S.A. have near the end of their tenure -- that is, an info-sec epiphany.

Giorgio warned me [reporter at large Lawrence Wright], "We have a saying in this business:

'Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.' "

I [Wright] asked McConnell if he believed that Al Qaeda was really the greatest threat America faces.

"No, no, no, not at all," he said. "Terrorism can kill a lot of people, but it can't fundamentally challenge the ability of the nation to exist. Fascism could have done that. Communism could have. I think our issue going forward is more engagement with the world in terms of keeping it on a reasonable path, so another ism doesn't come along and drive it to one extreme or another. And we have to have some balance in terms of equitable distribution of wealth, containment of contagious disease, access to energy supplies, and development of free markets. There are national-security ramifications to global warming."

Friends of my friend were kidnapped in Colombia over the weekend.

Maria Claudia popped up in chat Monday, "Today is a weird day," she wrote.
"Why?"
"Two of my best friends were kidnapped last night."
"Oh my god."

It is real. Violence creeps closer, no matter how hard we try to keep it at bay, no matter how thickly we deny that it could happen to us or those we love.

They were on vacation at a calm, quiet community along the coast of Colombia - their homeland - and took a boat ride with other tourists (a total of six were taken). Maria Claudia sent me a photo of the young couple, they look So Happy Together!

I've been keeping their faces in mind, envisioning them safe, imagining processes that will lead to their release. A pastiche of memories and associations float in and out of consciousness. The young man in Qabatiya, Palestine, who argued there is no solution for the Palestinians except to increase the violence until the world forces Israel out; the apparently base "human" instinct of aggression and need for power/control - and how this is exacerbated by constant and unrelenting exposure to the prosperity of others, and how we, the others, persist with our pleasures: intent upon our own islands of happiness amidst great suffering.

FARC. Sure, I know the acronym. Well, I've read it. Heard it. The Spanish acronym translates to Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The history of the group is complicated - associated with a communist movement and the illegal drug trade. FARC has been around since 1964; they are strong and organized enough to run an internal government (called a secretariat) with large-scale organizational strategy conferences, and have been involved in international peace processes. In other words, they are not just going to go away.

Their tactics are abominable, but their ideological goals are not - at least, if they intend to live what they say they seek, then they are in a weird bedfellow relationship with many contemporary peace activists and anti-neoliberal-capitalists. As I say, IF they are primarily motivated by "fighting against privatization of natural resources [and] multinational corporations," then these are aims shared widely. That they use paramilitary violence (while ostensibly arguing for its end), is qualitatively - but not necessarily substantively - different from the official uses of military (and other) violence sanctioned by democratic and communist governments worldwide. The "other violence" is less overtly horrific, but the violences done by policy are part of what FARC ostensibly says they are against. I'm hedging, here, for a couple of reasons.

1. I am just learning the blunt outline of the conflict, let alone any of its nuances.
2. If Ana and Alf are to be released, it will be because there are ways to talk with FARC, not only against them.
3. To talk with them means to allow them some benefit of doubt.
4. What kind of doubt? That there is a nobility buried somewhere underneath the deliberate and active use of physical, mental, and emotional terrorizing.
5. On the chance that those honorable intentions can be surfaced and given life in ways that alter the contours of the opposing sides,
6. with the hope that the conflict can actually shift, in order that
7. others may be saved through the prevention of future acts of violence and
8. the aspirations of the FARC community can be legitimately satisfied.

I cannot help but draw parallels to the situation in Palestine. Israel must withdraw. This is the physical and institutional fact. Israelis must move out of the only-always-temporary comfort of The Bubble, must surrender their attachment to the story/history of their own horrific victimization. We in the US must do the same regarding our intent to bolster our status regardless of the fate of others - especially those we know are different; those who think, feel, believe, and perceive the world on other terms than those with which we are most familiar.

We - humanity - must find a way for difference, plurality, and heterogeneity to coexist.

"Obama received Secret Service protection early in the campaign after unspecified threats. It is not a subject his wife likes to talk about. "She doesn't allow herself to go there," says Valerie Jarrett, Michelle Obama's close friend, who says Michelle has not raised the subject with her. "It would paralyze her to think like that." Michelle's brother, Craig Robinson, who is the head basketball coach at Brown University, says the potential danger was one of the things he discussed with her when Obama began his campaign. "That's always in the back of everybody's mind," he told NEWSWEEK. "There are a lot of crazy people out there. But you can't live your life worrying about them."

"Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men (sic) do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world… we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty… We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak…A few years ago…it seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty programs. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube…I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government…we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered…True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes necessary to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring…A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death…We are now faced with the fact , my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now… We must move past indecision to action."