Remember, kids: when you’re trying to slime an ideology you don’t agree with, it’s a Shock Doctrine, but when it’s your side, then it’s a “potent combination of a serious crisis and a clear progressive democratic mandate for change.”
Unrequired Reading: Aug. 21, 2009
Outsourcing is a Hit!
Three weeks ago, I wrote about CIA Director Leon Panetta’s “I’m not here to talk about the past” op-ed piece, in which the agency was just following orders for the previous 8 years. Mr. Panetta was writing because of an uproar over a secret “jihadist” assassination program that had been devised during a previous regime. He canceled the program the day after he found out about it, and reported it to Congress, noting that it had never been put into operation and had not been used to assassinate members of Al Qaeda.
It always felt like a piece of the story was missing, and now we might have that missing piece. According to the NYTimes, the program also employed an outside contractor, Blackwater USA, for “planning, training and surveillance.” And, well . . .
It is unclear whether the C.I.A. had planned to use the contractors to actually capture or kill Qaeda operatives, or just to help with training and surveillance in the program. American spy agencies have in recent years outsourced some highly controversial work, including the interrogation of prisoners. But government officials said that bringing outsiders into a program with lethal authority raised deep concerns about accountability in covert operations.
Now, the main point of my day job is that organizations should stick to their core competencies. You know: “If there’s a function that you can’t do well in-house, then you should look to outsource it.” Still, I can see where a privatized hit team getting captured on foreign soil might create some problems. Fortunately,
Blackwater’s work on the program actually ended years before Mr. Panetta took over the agency, after senior C.I.A. officials themselves questioned the wisdom of using outsiders in a targeted killing program.
So, good for Mr. Panetta for ending the program the day he found out about it, but I’m afraid this (or programs like it) is going to be like Pete Rose’s slow-motion confession about gambling on baseball: the admissions will keep getting a little worse and a little worse.
Unrequired Reading: Aug. 7, 2009
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F*** You, You Whining F***: Don’t Look Back edition
In an op-ed in today’s Washington Post, CIA Director Leon Panetta pulls a Mark McGwire and asks Congress to stop looking into the CIA’s role in running secret torture prisons and planning political assassinations:
I’ve become increasingly concerned that the focus on the past, especially in Congress, threatens to distract the CIA from its crucial core missions: intelligence collection, analysis and covert action.
Why should we look to the future? Well . . .
The CIA no longer operates black sites and no longer employs “enhanced” interrogation techniques. It is worth remembering that the CIA implements presidential decisions; we do not make them.
That’s right! They were just following orders! Even the “enhanced” ones!
Nowhere in Mr. Panetta’s piece is there a “we learned our lesson” moment, because he hands responsibility for the agency’s actions to the office of the President. The closest we get is
[After 9/11] Judgments were made. Some of them were wrong. But that should not taint those public servants who did their duty pursuant to the legal guidance provided. The last election made clear that the public wanted to move in a new direction.
The thing is, without investigating those actions, we’ll never understand the processes that led to them, how that “legal guidance” was formed, and how people who should have been nowhere near the levers of power managed to put grotesque policies like this into place.
Unrequired Reading: July 31, 2009
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Rewrite
This article by Robert Kaplan in the Atlantic discusses the lessons of the Sri Lankan government’s victory over the Tamil Tigers, and bizarrely tries to use them to explain why the U.S. shouldn’t engage in the same practices against the Taliban in Afghanistan (and Pakistan).
The thing is, Sri Lanka’s government (representing the ethnic majority, which is not an excuse for its behavior) was engaged in a civil war, while the war in Afghanistan is an invasion by the U.S. To equate Tamil Tigers :: Sri Lanka to Taliban :: U.S. Marines is to somehow imply that the Taliban are trying to secede from the United States. Or it’s an effort to fill a column on deadline. Either way, please re-write.
Unrequired Reading: June 26, 2009
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Unrequired Reading: June 12, 2009
Move Along. No Internet To See Here
To me, the most fascinating aspect of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre is that China’s government has blocked a number of western websites and services — Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and more — to keep its people from reading anything about the historical event.
Can the absence of something speak more loudly than the thing itself? It sounds like something out of a Samuel Delany novel, in which the very language of protest is subtly excised from a people.
One problem with wiping out history like this is that subsequent generations have so little idea of what happened that they inadvertently let the truth out simply because they don’t even know something was suppressed, as happened on the 18th anniversary.
I also wonder how “the people” will interpret the week-long shuttering of their favorite social networking sites “for maintenance”. If this becomes an annual occurrence, will the week of June 4 eventually become known in China as Dark Internet Week? Will they start to develop conspiracy theories as to why this keeps happening? Will they infer motivations more sinister than the Tiananmen Square Massacre itself?
Anyway Here’s a neat New York Times piece on That Guy Who Stood In Front Of The Line Of Tanks, which still ranks as the greatest f*** you moment ever caught on film.
And here’s a post about the anniversary in Beijing from James Fallows, the Atlantic’s correspondent in China. You can go check out his excellent blog for a bunch of posts about how arbitrary China’s media censorship has been this week.
(UPDATE! Maybe the original Tiananmen Square Protests were meant as an anniversary celebration for ten-cent beer night.)