Archive for September 2011
Whew. Oofta. Finally. Now I can stop trying to make it happen by staying tense and trying to use my own willpower. It looks pretty good, I think.
It’s too late for Labor Day, but order your Columbus Day copies now. 
I’m ordering the book discussed in this NPR story.
Very interesting article by Patti Neighmond at NPR:
We’ve all heard the theory that some students are visual learners, while others are auditory learners. And still other kids learn best when lessons involve movement.
But should teachers target instruction based on perceptions of students’ strengths? Several psychologists say education could use some “evidence-based” teaching techniques, not unlike the way doctors try to use “evidence-based medicine.”
Psychologist Dan Willingham at the University of Virginia, who studies how our brains learn, says teachers should not tailor instruction to different kinds of learners. He says we’re on more equal footing than we may think when it comes to how our brains learn. And it’s a mistake to assume students will respond and remember information better depending on how it’s presented.
For example, . . .
Continue reading. He does mention some things that have actually been proven to work.
Note that there are 7 previous collections of things like these.
Alex Pareene looks at the story and provides more links. Though, as Nick pointed out, the real story is why there is a story at all, and that’s not reported.
I’m making up a fresh batch of Worcestershire sauce, minus the high-fructose corn syrup that’s now a part of (it seems) every American prepared food. I follow this recipe from Saveur, with a few changes:
Malt vinegar rather than white vinegar: Wikipedia article suggests that this is the original.
Molasses: they don’t specify, so I used Barbados rather than Blackstrap
Curry powder: a teaspoon, combining Penzeys Hot Curry Powder and Penzeys Maharajah curry powder
8 cardamom pods instead of 5 – I used green cardamom pods from Penzeys
7 chilis de árbol instead of 4
6 large cloves garlic instead of 2
2″ stick cinnamon instead of 1″
5 anchovies chopped instead of 1
My advice: put a 2-qt sauce pan on the stove and simply add the ingredients in order. (First make sure you have all the ingredients, of course: I had to order the malt vinegar special, and the tamarind concentrate/paste had to be tracked down. (Gourmet grocery stores are probably your best bet.))
That way, by the time you reach the Intimidating Step, you’re in too far to back out. And the Intimidating Step, as is so often the case, not intimidating at all once you set about it.
Now my new batch of Worcestershire sauce will have to age, and then I’ll be restocked.
Getting time to make more pepper sauce, too.
UPDATE: Here’s a variation that includes horseradish, lemon, jalapeños, olive oil, etc.
They omit the name for that little thing at the tip of a shoelace that helps it go through the eyelet. It’s an aglet. But they did have some that were new to me—and perhaps to you as well. Here they are.
James Fallows has an excellent post with a criticism of Obama from a lifelong Democrat and a criticism of the GOP “by a recently retired Congressional staffer named Mike Lofgren. Lofgren’s name is barely known to the general public, but among people who have covered or worked in the national-security field, he is a familiar and highly esteemed figure. He spent 28 years as a Congressional staffer, mainly on budget matters, mainly in the defense-and-security realm, and mainly for Republican legislators.”
I highly recommend reading the post and watching the video. Here they await.
UPDATE: I urge all my readers to read Mike Lofgren’s piece. Very insightful and includes information such as this:
A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.
Wonder what sort of country we’ll have once the process of dismantling the Federal government is further along, with control now in the hands of businesses. (Obama’s dismissal of the environmental scientists regarding pollution, in which he heeded the dictates of his true masters, shows the direction we’re headed. You can look for dismissal and revocation of any law that impinges on corporate profits. Those are, after all, the only touchstone of excellence that businesses recognize.)
The Niece has blogged the Big Meal that we had at the Cachauga Store restaurant, complete with photos. Take a look.
The range and popularity of social media are staggering. It’s one thing to count how many blogs there are, but blogs are pretty much yesterday’s thing: now it’s twitter and texting and Facebook and community reviews and other user-generated content. Lots of people speaking out, certainly, and based on comment threads, quite a few taking it in.
The total volume and activity are staggering—and, of course, totally novel. We have never before had this kind of communications connection, which includes even things like on-site real-time video from cellphone cameras.
So what it looks like is a universal and almost desperate need to connect: to communicate, to be heard, to find others like yourself.
Certainly that cause is consistent with the effect described. But what could stimulate such a need?
Well, consider what you, presumably, already know: that the world’s climate is changing in a way that promises to be the greatest catastrophe the world has faced for a few thousand years—well, not even that long. Widespread famine through crop failure due to changing weather patterns, hitting at a time when oil is getting harder and harder to deliver as refined petroleum products, with all the carry-on impact of that. And, as if it already weren’t bad enough, most of the world’s population (I believe) is now urban: the old cultural knowledge of tools and procedures, practices and traditions that enabled living on the land are lost to most. Terrorism ain’t in it.
While people know that, they also know that they can’t really do anything about it except vote for politicians who promise to fix it and seem to mean it. After all, many have a job to do and others are struggling to find a way to live, people have bills to pay, many have kids on the way or already here, having to be picked up, educated, and so on: all the minutiae of daily life that do truly demand one’s immediate attention, effort, and planning.
Yet, at some level, the knowledge mentioned above is there, and some degree of worry and concern about it. It’s like watching in slow-motion the biggest tsunami of all time rising over the city of civilization, almost peaking to begin the crashing descent. It may take years to fall, but you can see what’s going to happen.
Well, it seems to me when virtually everyone has a worry of that sort, at whatever level of concern in each mind—whether right at the top, burning intensely into daily action, or down at the bottom with a vague thought that one should sign some sort of petition—regardless of the level, it’s the same knowledge and the same concern. I think commonality probably swamps level: added up, that much concern is going to become visible in some way. By affecting so many people simultaneously, and with the same issues, the concern pools the many drops into a mighty flood that must break out somehow.
I think the intense push to social media of all the sorts described above and others yet to come does indeed reflect a desperation to connect. I think people are scared and are trying to huddle down together. The social media is our mass attempt at a group hug of comfort and protection. It’s before the storm has begun, of course, but one that’s now on the visible horizon.
Unless my dictionary has misled me, in Spanish a long weekend es un puente. So have a good one.
I have broken free of the template meal. A 4.8 oz lamb chop (very thick) is roasting in the oven (broil fat-side-up for 5 minutes, then switch broiler off and oven on, close door, and roast at 300ºF for 30 minutes; let rest 10 minutes), a batch of black rice is already made, and the greens are cooking:
1 bunch scallions, chopped
8 large cloves garlic, minced and let sit 15 min
4 large domestic white mushrooms, cut in half, then sliced thick
Heated 1 Tbsp (living large) fiery chili olive oil in 3-qt saucepan, sautéed onions, then added garlic and mushrooms and sautéed those until the mushrooms released their juice. Then in went the dandelion greens, easily chopped since crosscuts are enough. The stalk part was cut finely.
Stirred that in, added a splash of dry Marsala to deglaze the pan (I cook with what I have on hand, you notice), then a glug of homemade pepper sauce (which includes vinegar and salt).
Brought heat low, covered, and it’s simmering toward tenderness.
I think I’ll open the half-bottle of Syrah…
UPDATE: Excellent meal, and I feel stuffed. And everything balanced just the way I like it, with the glass of wine a welcome extra and lots of rice and greens left over for tonight’s meal.
The greens were still cooking when I was ready to eat, but pretty much done, but a fair amount of liquid remained—water from having washed the greens, I expect. But instead of doing the 2-Tbsp-of-chia-seed trick, I decided this time that (a) concentrating the flavor would be good, and (b) more cooking would do the greens good and might help the onions and wouldn’t hurt the mushrooms. The garlic can fend for itself.
So I turned the temperature to high and cooked with the lid off, stirring occasionally with my wood spatula, until the greens burned and stuck to the bottom of the pan were ready.
It was great. Bac’Uns would have been redundant.
A friend commented in an email that I seemed to find great happiness in the small things of life. He’s right. As you know, at some point this time right now will be the good old days, and I don’t want to look back and feel like I failed to enjoy them fully.
UPDATE2: I got red raspberries for snacks today.
UPDATE3: The dish evolves for dinner. I looked and I had a good amount of dandelion greens left, but not really a meal by a long shot, even with 3.5 oz extra-firm tofu and 1/3 cup cooked black rice added. I needed to bulk it up with veg.
1/2 large onion, chopped
2 tsp duck fat
Put those in the pot with the dandelion greens and turn up the heat. Once they begin to sauté, turn head down to sweat the onion.
Meanwhile, chop and add to the pot as done:
1 serrano pepper
1 red bell pepper
1/2 head escarole (the other half from the other day), chopped fairly small
another good dash pepper sauce
the jar of dry-farmed canned tomatoes from happy girl kitchen co.
The last went in with all the juice except one swig I took to make sure I wanted to add it. Absolute nectar. Added it.
It looked good. I had some zehrgut brand red pepper appetizer, so I stirred in what was left of that (about 1/3 jar). I added:
2 Tbsp pine nuts
about a dozen pitted Kalamata olives
I liked the shape it was taking, but it needed depth and I am out of Worcestershire sauce—good project for tomorrow—and didn’t want to use soy sauce. (We’re obviously talking umami, right?) But I always have at the ready a jar of anchovies, so half a dozen of those little guys, chopped and added, will beef it up a lot.
I could also add a diced zucchini. And may yet.
But there’s already enough for 3 meals. I’m letting it simmer for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.
UPDATE4: The zucchini: Add it tomorrow, along with red kale and eggplant, for that day’s variant (and beef up protein by serving egg on top).
The US seems to love brutal dictators and often plays the role of friend and supporter. Indeed, quite a few dictators have been able to remain in power due mainly to US support. US politicians then act surprised when the people oppressed by the dictator include the US in their hatred. Here’s a NY Times report by Rod Nordland on our support of and cooperation with Qaddafi:
Documents found at the abandoned office of Libya’s former spymaster appear to provide new details of the close relations the Central Intelligence Agency shared with the Libyan intelligence service — most notably suggesting that the Americans sent terrorism suspects at least eight times for questioning in Libya despite that country’s reputation for torture.
Although it has been known that Western intelligence services began cooperating with Libya after it abandoned its program to build unconventional weapons in 2004, the files left behind as Tripoli fell to rebels show that the cooperation was much more extensive than generally known with both the C.I.A. and its British equivalent, MI-6.
Some documents indicate that the British agency was even willing to trace phone numbers for the Libyans, and another appears to be a proposed speech written by the Americans for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi about renouncing unconventional weapons.
The documents were discovered Friday by journalists and Human Rights Watch. There were at least three binders of English-language documents, one marked C.I.A. and the other two marked MI-6, among a larger stash of documents in Arabic.
It was impossible to verify their authenticity, and none of them were written on letterhead. But the binders included some documents that made specific reference to the C.I.A., and their details seem consistent with what is known about the transfer of terrorism suspects abroad for interrogation and with other agency practices.
And although the scope of prisoner transfers to Libya has not been made public, news media reports have sometimes mentioned it as one country that the United States used as part of its much criticized rendition program for terrorism suspects. . .
Continue reading.
Interesting story in the Washington Post by Lena Sun:
Like many memorable science fair projects, it began with a startlingly simple idea: Find out what chemicals remain in dry-cleaned clothing.
But the problem facing 15-year-old Alexa Dantzler was that she didn’t have access to the proper equipment to pull off the experiment.
So, like many teenagers, the sophomore at Bishop O’Connell High School in Arlington County went online. She e-mailed three or four chemistry professors across the country asking for help. Only Paul Roepe, then-chairman of Georgetown University’s chemistry department, seemed intrigued. He took on the research “for fun,” he said.
But what started out as something to “sponsor the kid’s curiosity” prompted a chain reaction in the university lab: an e-mail exchange, an invitation to collaborate and, this week, a paper published online in a peer-reviewed environmental journal. The paper gives new details about the amount of a toxic chemical that lingers in wool, cotton and polyester clothing after it is dry-cleaned.“At the end of the day, nobody, I mean nobody, has previously done this simple thing — gone out there to several different dry cleaners and tested different types of cloth” to see how much of the chemical persists, said Roepe, who supervised the study.
Dantzler, with help from her mother, sewed squares of wool, cotton, polyester and silk into the lining of seven identical men’s jackets, then took them to be cleaned from one to six times at seven Northern Virginia dry cleaners. The cleaners, who were not identified, had no prior knowledge of the experiment.
She kept the patches in plastic bags in the freezer — to preserve the samples — and went to Georgetown once or twice a week to do the chemical analysis with two graduate students, Katy Sherlach and Alexander Gorka. The research team found that perchloroethylene, a dry cleaning solvent that has been linked to cancer and neurological damage, stayed in the fabrics and that levels increased with repeat cleanings, particularly in wool. The study was published online Tuesday in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry.
Between 65 percent and 70 percent of the country’s estimated 25,000 dry cleaning facilities use the solvent, known as PCE or perc, industry representatives said. . .
Continue reading.
The Essence of Scotland Mountain Yew that I used today was a freebie, something unusual for me. The Gentleman’s Groom Roomsent me the tub above because of my enthusiasm for their Sweet Gale shaving soap, which has a fragrance very like a Rusty Nail, a drink I favored in my youth.
But the focus for now is the brush, and as a segue into next week’s badger festival, I end the horsehair-brush week with a badger-horse chimera: badger hair and horsehair combined. It’s very nice to use: the horsehair adds more backbone, but the brush is still quite flexible. GiftsAndCare.com actually has quite a selection of badger-horse chimeras.
And it does a terrific job. Who knows, this could be a new favorite. It feels quite good and works up a creamy lather in nothing flat. It built a fine (and fragrant) lather from the Mountain Yew. Extremely nice.
The Lord razor I just received yesterday. I thought I should try it because it’s the razor component of Bruce Everiss’s low-cost, high-luxury shave recommendation. I used a Zorrik blade, which I’ve not used for a while. As I recall, this is one of those brands where the second or third shave is better than the first (possibly through wearing off some coating from the cutting edge).
It’s a surprising good razor. The handle is light, possibly made of pot metal. The head is more carefully done and works well. I rather liked the lengthy handle, to my surprise: it seemed to provide excellent control.
Three passes, quite smooth, no problems—no nicks, weepers, or the like, just a fine shave. A pass of the alum bar, a final rinse, and a splash of Paul Sebastian, and I’m feeling pretty good.
Next week is badger week, and I have some surprises.
From the LA Times:
On the morning of Jan. 8, a gunman fired a 9-millimeter Glock semiautomatic pistol into a crowd that had come to meet Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords at a supermarket in Tucson. He killed six people, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl, and gravely wounded Giffords.
Nearly nine months later, the Tucson-area Republican Party is planning to raise money by raffling off a Glock handgun, the Arizona Republic reported. That has enraged some in a city still emotionally scarred by the massacre.
Jeff Rogers, Pima County Democratic Party chairman, told the newspaper that the raffle showed “incredibly poor judgment.”
James Kelley, a member of the county GOP executive committee, called it “insensitive and stupid.”
“Are there any rational adults left in Tucson’s GOP?” blogged Republic columnist Linda Valdez. “Maybe. Get a magnifying glass.” . . .
Continue reading.
For those coming in late, I started Pilates last November. I recently took an enforced month off (sprained ankle) and for the past couple of weeks have been doing 3 sessions a week (one joint session with The Wife, two private sessions) at Lighthouse Pilates. “Pilates” classes are available inexpensively at the Monterey Sports Center, but they are classes of 20-30 and use none of the Pilates equipment.
While Joe Pilates said that everything can be done with mat exercises, he also spent considerable time, effort, and ingenuity in creating various apparatuses to isolate various muscle groups and/or enforce certain postures. As you can see at the link, LIghthouse Pilates is a fully equipped studio.
Moreover, form is everything, and the first few months I did my exercises the instructor would correct my form when that was needed. So I did my exercises accompanied by a more or less constant stream of corrections.
But lately that has changed, and more and more I’m starting to get it.
For one thing, as William James observed, we develop our habits and skills during fallow times—as he said, we learn to ice skate in the summer and to bicycle in the winter. After working hard to master a skill, taking a few weeks off and then resuming is highly enlightening. It’s as though the time off allows the movements and motions to be digested and integrated, so that when you return, things are better.
For another: Sometimes a chance remark will open a door, as it were, so through that small remark you enter into a vast new understanding. I blogged earlier that my instructor told me that, on ending an exercise, you do not simply relax and go loose: you instead maintain the control, muscle activation, and posture from the exercise. The point of the exercise is to teach you/your body something about how it should move and stand in daily life—that’s the point. The exercise is just a way to get there. So as you end the exercise, you enter the Real Deal: daily life. So use what you’ve just been exercising.
Man, those two things—the time off and the new understanding about the exercise (gained through the simple statement, “Don’t just relax when the exercise is over. Keep using it.”) have made a huge difference. Today I kept doing things right.
Not that I didn’t require correction. On the contrary, I still needed a lot of help. The big difference is that (a) I now understand the help, and (b) I can actually do some of the things the instructor tells me to do.
So: If you’re interested in Pilates, my advice is to find a highly qualified instructor with a well-equipped studio, take lessons at least twice a week, and better thrice a week for the first month or so, and after about 10 months, take four weeks off (spraining ankle is optional, and I advise against it) and then return to thrice a week for a while. And, from the outset, attempt to end each exercise with a continuing sense of control.
That’s my experience, at any rate. Amazing discipline. It’s not exactly fitness, but I don’t know what to call it. Pilates called it “Contrology.”
UPDATE: After writing the above, I continued to putter about the apartment, made dinner, and so on—always consciously trying to move and stand with posture and movement as learned on the equipment. I could really distinctly feel the difference when I was standing or moving correctly, in good alignment, with my spine stacked, arms hanging relaxed, shoulders relaxed instead of tense. (Like one huge category of people, I focus a lot on my upper body, keeping my shoulders tense, my chest raised, and so on—difficult to describe and difficult to feel until you feel an alternative through something like Pilates.)
So I sort of played with it, of course, slumping into my usual posture, then standing straight in good Pilates form. The differences in how it felt were, as I indicate, remarkable.
Later, sitting in my chair, I repeated a move from one of the exercises today: turning my head slowly from one side to the other without moving my shoulders: just turning my head on my spine.
I was able to do it, and I was observing how smooth the movement is. The idea is that the skull simply turns in its position atop the spin, with the neck turning but nothing else: no shoulder movement.
As I said, very smooth from side to side, so I added tilting it down and then back, then side to side, then sort of rolling it, visualizing still shoulders, skull moving at the top of the stacked spine.
And then I suddenly felt, in a strange, novel way, my skeletal structure: I could sort of feel (internally) the rigidity of the bones in there—skull, spine, clavicle, scapula, arms simply hanging at the sides. I was aware of the way I pulled, using muscle attachments, to move the framework.
I tell you, it was pretty weird. Once I had the feeling and could focus in on it, it became more distinct. I got up, stood, walked some—all while feeling this skeletal structure and how my muscles/ligaments would pull this way and that to keep the framework aligned and doing what I wanted.
I admit that it freaked me out a bit. A totally novel body sensation, a body awareness of a type I had not experienced. I called The Wife to report this in case someone should be keeping an eye on me, and I was reassured to learn that she had had the same experience from time to time while doing Feldenkrais exercises: as you pay attention to posture and movement, doing specific exercises and working toward good form, you naturally strengthen and increase your awareness of what you’re doing as you bring your consciousness to bear on what normally are actions taken unconsciously. Doing this frequently seems to sort of expand the range of consciousness, to include some body control options that previously were handled totally by the unconscious, with no conscious awareness.
People who are more involved with their bodies and have practiced control may well be familiar with these sensations, and doubtless their consciousness has long since expanded to allow more conscious control of movement—I’m thinking here of dancers, athletes, practitioners of things like yoga, Feldenkreis, and (apparently) Pilates. But I’m not one of those people—at least I haven’t been. I’m bookish. Marching band rather than football. In fact, no sports participation at all until college, where I did some fencing. But, let’s face it, St. John’s is a bookish college.
So all this is highly novel to me. People experienced in this sort of thing are doubtless amused by the newcomer’s delight in things that have become common to them: I’m like the city boy on his first trip to a farm. “My God!” I shout, “That bird! It’s enormous!” The farmers turn to look and see a chicken. But I do want to report my journey and discoveries.
I feel a little embarrassed at how long it took me to grasp that the exercises are supposed to be put into practice. Obviously, in my daily life, I don’t lie on my back on a little carriage held in place by springs and push it back and forth using my arms pulling straps through pulleys, or my legs pushing on a bar. But that position and apparaturs is just to allow me to pay attention to (and develop) muscles and ligaments moving my body in a particular posture. Though I won’t have carriage, spring, and straps as I go about my daily life, I certainly will be using muscles and ligaments to arrange my body in particular postures, and part of the point of Pilates is to learn to do these correctly—all of it: muscles, movement, and posture.
I suppose I was viewing the sessions like band practice: go in, do it, and then you’re through until the next session. (I wasn’t much for practicing at home, even then.) But in fact, I finally realize, that sessions are instructions and all non-session time is practice time. When I’m not in sessions, I should be paying attention, with instructor corrections in mind, to my posture, movement, and body. I’m finally starting to do that, apparently, just by the accumulation of awareness from the sessions. Now that I grasp I can do this on purpose, as it were, things should improve faster.
[Update: I had a little insight this morning: My previous exercise routines in search of fitness included many exercises that were NOT directly related to daily activity: I don't occasionally find in my daily routine that it's necessary to do jumping jacks, push-ups, burpees, or the like. But the Pilates exercises all involve movements and movement patterns that occur in daily life: standing, bending, squatting, leaning, and the like. - LG]
If this catches your interest, I highly recommend A Pilates Primer: The Millenium Edition, by Joseph Pilates and William Miller. It includes a complete set of mat exercises and also discusses awareness of the sort I’m gradually developing.
Interesting article in The Scientist by Katherine Bagley:
Calling octopuses intelligent beings might seem like a stretch. After all, the eight-armed invertebrates count the everyday garden snail among their close evolutionary cousins. But octopuses are experts in camouflage, can deter predators with poisonous bites, engage in play, solve complex problems, and can squeeze themselves into tiny crevices when threatened. Such observations indicate that the octopus is without a doubt smarter than the average snail, but the nature of this intelligence remains unknown. Considering that our branches on the evolutionary tree are separated by more than half a billion years, can the intellect of an octopus bear any comparison to that of a human? City University of New York philosopherPeter Godfrey-Smith has begun a unique collaboration with a team of Australian marine scientists to examine this distinctly philosophical question using biological research.
Godfrey-Smith spends nearly every summer in his native Sydney. His love of diving in the city’s harbor bore scientific fruit when he captured a rare photograph of gloomy octopuses (Octopus tetricus) mating and published his observations of the event in a short paper with marine biologist Christine Huffard of Conservation International Indonesia (Moll Res, 30:81-86, 2010). Godfrey-Smith started teaching himself about octopus biology, focusing on their nervous systems and brains.
Most invertebrates have ladderlike nervous systems with knots of neurons connected by nerve fibers. Vertebrate nervous systems are instead dominated by one big clump of neurons—the brain. Octopuses, along with their cephalopod cousins squid and cuttlefish, seem to be an evolutionary in-between. Their nervous system retains some knot architecture—more than half of their 500 million neurons are distributed throughout their eight arms—but they also have a large central brain.
“It is fascinating to think about cephalopod cognition, since they are mollusks,” says Jean Boal, a biologist at Millersville University in Pennsylvania.“Their ancestors are clams and snails and slugs, which are not very bright. The environment has pushed them toward evolving cognition that looks and functions a lot like vertebrate cognition.”
Godfrey-Smith decided to connect this biological concept with his interest in the philosophy of mind, particularly in nonhumans. In 2010, he began a project with Alexandra Schnell, a graduate student at Macquarie University in Sydney, to conduct behavioral observation studies that address whether octopus intelligence differs from that of other species. Do octopuses learn differently? Does the decentralization of neurons mean cephalopods have multiple minds or competing consciousnesses?“When you watch an octopus, it does look like the arms engage in independent exploration, they feel around individually,” says Godfrey-Smith. . .
Continue reading.
We have one, and it’s growing fast. Dana Priest (who broke the story on the CIA’s illegal black prisons) and William Arkin report in the Washington Post:
The CIA’s armed drones and paramilitary forces have killed dozens of al-Qaeda leaders and thousands of its foot soldiers [and hundreds upon hundreds of innocent bystanders, including women and children - LG]. But there is another mysterious organization that has killed even more of America’s enemies in the decade since the 9/11 attacks.CIA operatives have imprisoned and interrogated nearly 100 suspected terrorists in their former secret prisons around the world, but troops from this other secret organization have imprisoned and interrogated 10 times as many, holding them in jails that it alone controls in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, this secretive group of men (and a few women) has grown tenfold while sustaining a level of obscurity that not even the CIA managed. “We’re the dark matter. We’re the force that orders the universe but can’t be seen,” a strapping Navy SEAL, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said in describing his unit.
The SEALs are just part of the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command, known by the acronym JSOC, which has grown from a rarely used hostage rescue team into America’s secret army. When members of this elite force killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May, JSOC leaders celebrated not just the success of the mission but also how few people knew their command, based in Fayetteville, N.C., even existed.This article, adapted from a chapter of the newly released “Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State,” by Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, chronicles JSOC’s spectacular rise, much of which has not been publicly disclosed before. Two presidents and three secretaries of defense routinely have asked JSOC to mount intelligence-gathering missions and lethal raids, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in countries with which the United States was not at war, including Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, the Philippines, Nigeria and Syria.“The CIA doesn’t have the size or the authority to do some of the things we can do,” said one JSOC operator.
The president has also given JSOC the rare authority to select individuals for its kill list — and then to kill, rather than capture, them. Critics charge that this individual man-hunting mission amounts to assassination, a practice prohibited by U.S. law. JSOC’s list is not usually coordinated with the CIA, which maintains a similar, but shorter roster of names. . .
Continue reading. It’s amazing to watch a nation go down the toilet voluntarily.
Interesting that JSOC decides on its own whom to kill. Apparently, the military truly is in charge now.
The compliant and sycophantic of major news papers, the newspaper most cooperative in heeding government requests to bury or delay stories, the newspaper most willing to report bogus information from the government with no attempt to rebut or criticize, the newspaper that … well:
Judy Miller
Weapons of Mass Destruction and fixed “evidence”
Warrantless wiretapping (discovered and then held for months until after the 2004 election so that Bush could be re-elected—and finally reported only because the reporter who worked on the story had moved to another paper and was going to report)
And on and on and on. Bill Keller really wrecked that paper.
And even that paper is finally protesting.
