Sony, Korea and Millions of Shoes

Movies can be dangerous things. Comedy and satire too mingle with danger, tyrants and dictators aren't powerful due to their great sense of wit.

Yesterday, fearful of a promise of violent attack on movie theaters showing "The Interview", Sony Pictures pulled the movie from release. The movie's comic misadventures in a silly CIA plot to assassinate an actual, living human dictator in North Korea catapulted it from obscurity to infamy and history in record time.

Immediately too, cries that removal of the movie from distribution was giving terrorists control followed Sony's decision.

Sadly, caving in to demands of supposed terrorists seems more a rule than an exception.

Millions upon millions of shoes being removed at airports seems proof of that. Nation after nation has embraced a grim surveillance society since 2001. Haven't we already caved?

As for the movie -- did North Korean hackers acting on behalf of the state attack Sony? Some say no way:

"It's not possible. It would have taken months, maybe even years, to exfiltrate something like 100 terabytes of data without anyone noticing. ... Look at the bandwidth going into North Korea. I mean, the pipelines, the pipes going in, handling data, they only have one major ISP across their entire nation. That kind of information flowing at one time would have shut down North Korean Internet completely."

"Monsegur thinks it's also possible this was an inside job, that an employee or consultant downloaded all the information from Sony's servers and then sold it to someone else."

The potential of lawsuits against distributors and theater owners seems large, given they had been "warned" ahead of time of an attack on theaters.

The screenwriter of "The Interview" is beyond amazed by all this.

Cranky Defenders of Torture Rise Again

Anyone strapped down will say anything, absolutely anything to get the torture to stop. Torture. Does. Not. Work." (Source)

Really? We're back to the topic of a systematic torture of prisoners?

Dick Cheney, former VP and longtime cheerleader for tactics from "the dark side", as he called it, makes no room for doubt - "I'd do it again in a minute!" -- "It" being torture.

Going back to Nov. 2007, a previous post shows Americans decry torture but reserve the right to use it, and such a contradiction carries a heavy price for Democracy ....

"I am pretty sure if the technique, often lumped into the phrase "enhanced interrogation techniques" (a grisly tortured used of language), if such an act were used on you, you would consider it torture. It has been a part of military training for some time, as reported by Malcolm Nance, former Master Instructor and Chief of Training at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) school in San Diego. He writes extensively about the tactic in this essay, which makes compelling arguments on what it is - torture - and that torture is a useless way to get information, and that even watching such interrogations is beyond the ability of most people: 

"Most people can not stand to watch a high intensity kinetic interrogation. One has to overcome basic human decency to endure watching or causing the effects. The brutality would force you into a personal moral dilemma between humanity and hatred.

"It would leave you to question the meaning of what it is to be an American. We live at a time where Americans, completely uninformed by an incurious media and enthralled by vengeance-based fantasy television shows like “24”, are actually cheering and encouraging such torture as justifiable revenge for the September 11 attacks. Having been a rescuer in one of those incidents and personally affected by both attacks, I am bewildered at how casually we have thrown off the mantle of world-leader in justice and honor. Who we have become?"

The original post is here. 

On The Anniversary of Sept. 11th 2001 and The Rise Of Online Writers

This week I received an invitation from Michael Silence of the Knoxville News Sentinel for some thoughts about the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, about how that event influenced those of us writers who have created and maintained blogs over the years.

I of course had a story - so many Americans and others around the world do. And I tend to write rather long essays, which Mike kindly excerpted and included in today's KNS newspaper along with some online heavyweights from East Tennessee, R. Neal at KnoxViews, Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, and the creator of SayUncle - all very prolific, noted writers and bloggers. Mike's roundup of what we had to say can be read here - But my comment was from much longer response, which had to be cut due to size limitations and all, so I wanted to give readers all the context for my part of this tale, one still being told ten years on.

Here is my full response to his Mike's question (and I have to rib Michael at little here, as he has always been a very supportive reader of my blog and often links to me and quotes things I write for the KNS, but today he wrote that I blog from Green County and I don't, I live in Hamblen County, plus Green needs another "e" at the end of it, and my blog's full name is "Cup of Joe Powell" - Mike has confused me a few times with other Joe's on the internet, but he has to wade through tons of material daily, so I am just happy he points folks to my direction.):

"I was actually the host of a radio talk show in Morristown the morning of the attack - the show, which I called "Cup of Joe Powell" on WMTN-AM, ended at its usual time, at 9 am.

In fact I was eager that day to air an interview I had made with a friend. I had called him on Sept. 10th and recorded a conversation with him via the phone as he sat in the stands at Wrigley Field, watching his beloved Cubs play. It was a great piece and it played just as the first plane crashed into the North Tower, though I could not see the studio's TV from my chair and knew nothing of the attack.

Just as the show ended, a staff worker came in the studio and said with a deathly pale face "Something horrible is happening in Manhattan"

I walked into the room where the TV was on, and we all watched in horror the repeated video footage of that first passenger plane slamming into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Stunned and confused, we saw suddenly another passenger plane curve out of the sky and crash into the South Tower and the giant fire ball that followed. An eerie quiet swallowed all our words.

I remember someone saying "This was no accident".

We stood transfixed, watching the news reports attempting to explain what was happening. A newsman said all air flights were immediately grounded.

Within about 30 minutes or so, a report came across that another plane had crashed into the Pentagon.

As my work was done for the day, I raced home, thinking I would find safety and some comfort there - but there was none, as the television kept rolling that footage and the aftermath. As I listened to an ABC radio station on the way home in my car, I heard that one of the towers had collapsed. The thought chilled me beyond definition.

Later that evening, the terrifying thought struck me - I would have to talk about this horror on my show in the morning. What could I possibly say? It seemed no words would offer solace to a single listener. That Sept 12th morning is still a blur in my memory, and I have never gone back to listen to the tape I made. The one memory I have is that I played the almost mournful instrumental version of "Star-Spangled Banner" by Bela Fleck often during that show.

One of the main reasons I began my blog and continue to blog day after day is my unshakable belief that American voices can and do make real differences in our world - I try and stay away from the endless strident denouncing of our world, preferring instead to present questions, and sometimes some add humor of all kinds.

I don't want my country to be defined by terrorism, which in my mind gives power to those who seek destruction.

In September of 2005, writer Bill Moyers offered an essay which I quoted on my blog on Sept 11, 2005 - it reads in part:

"But it is never only the number of dead by which terrorists measure their work. It is also the number of the living— the survivors— taken hostage to fear. Their mission was to invade our psyche; get inside our heads—deprive us of trust, faith, and peace of mind: keep us from ever again believing in a safe, just, and peaceful world, and from working to bring that world to pass. The writer Terry Tempest Williams has said "the human heart is the first home of democracy." Fill that heart with fear and people will give up the
risks of democracy for the assurances of security; fill that heart with fear and you can shake the house to its foundations.

Yes, we are vulnerable to terrorists, but only a shaken faith in ourselves can do us in."

POSTSCRIPT: It must be noted that the staggering loss of so many lives on that September morning is so large, as was the phenomenal efforts of rescue and survival, and all of the humanity which experienced suffering defies any one memorial or anniversary observances.

But one person I would like to highlight is Minoru Yamasaki, the architect who designed the Twin Towers. His life is uniquely American.

Born in 1912 in Seattle, a second generation Japanese American, his early years were spent in the poverty of a slum, but he pushed himself, and worked his way up from very humble origins to become one of the 20th Century's most acclaimed architects and designers. After high school, we worked at an Alaskan salmon cannery to pay his college tuition at the University of Washington, then later at New York University and earned a position with the firm of Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, the firm which designed the Empire State Building.

In 1941, he and his parents and family were almost sent to a Japanese internment camp during World War 2, but his employers worked hard on his behalf to insure Yamasaki remained free. He once spoke in an interview that neither poverty nor suspicion would deter his view of the world, saying that he would "not to let that be the pattern into which my life would fall." Awards for his work grew throughout the 1960s, and certainly it was his design of those towers which marked the American landscape as very few designers have done. He passed away from cancer in 1986, and his creations can be found in America and beyond.

On the day of the opening ceremony for the Twin Towers in 1973, he spoke about just what the project meant to him, and how he hoped the world would view it --

“The World Trade Center is a living symbol of man’s dedication to world peace … a representation of man’s belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his beliefs in the cooperation of men, and, through cooperation, his ability to find greatness.”

With sheer idealism and optimism in my part, my hope is that despite the efforts of a few murderous madmen, that location in Manhattan will utterly defeat all the negativity and stand instead on the values Minoru Yamasaki held highest.

The Dawn of a New Day?

One aspect which struck me hardest last night as news unfolded that US forces had located and stormed the plush mansion compound where the Al Quaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was hidden, and that he had been killed in a firefight - the mostly youthful faces of those out in front of the White House and on the streets of Manahattan and around the nation.

So many celebrating the news were in the early to late twenties, and for that group most of all, Bin Laden has been the giant villain to end all villains. Since they have been children - nine, ten, eleven years old - the evil terrorist and his network of killers has held enormous influence. They essentially have grown up in a grim world terrorism and Bin Laden had created and on the evening of May 1st, 2011 that world changed again.

For many thousands of young people in the Middle East - in Egypt, Libya, and more - the terrorist was already irrelevant as the protests and demands of a younger generation pushed to end dictatorships and seek a more democratic and more free world.

Certainly, terrorism will remain a fact of life for far too many people. But for now, a brighter future has been seen and felt for the first time in nearly a decade and we all hope this is the future which flourishes.

Grim Realities: The Murder of Dr.George Tiller

Most American see much more to the tragic murder of Dr. Tiller, and how he and his staff had to endure some coordinated attacks for so very long as attacks which certainly appear to be very organized.

Hilzoy's post on Washington Monthly outlines the constant effort to create fear and intimidation:

"Here's an article on the kinds of things other than assassination attempts, vandalism, and break-ins that Dr. Tiller and his staff have had to endure for years. It's about Troy Newman, the head of Operation Rescue (once Operation Rescue West; the group split), who moved to Wichita in order to shut George Tiller's clinic down:

"There's only one problem: Tiller is a hard man to find, let alone intimidate. After more than a decade as one of the anti-abortion movement's favorite targets, he keeps a low profile, drives an armored car and lives in a gated community in a house with a state-of-the-art security system. More pointedly, he has made it clear that he's not susceptible to scare tactics. In 1993, Tiller was shot in both arms by an anti-abortion protester. He returned to work the next day.

Newman is well aware of Tiller's resilience. That's why Operation Rescue is going after clinic workers like Sara Phares. The employees have no guards posted at their homes, no cameras monitoring their yards. If Newman can provoke enough of them to quit, his job will be done. He'll effectively shut Tiller down."

Here's how he tries to get them to quit. Sarah Phares is an administrative assistant at the clinic:

"A week later, hundreds of Phares' neighbors received an anonymous postcard of a mangled fetus. This is abortion! read the big block letters. "Your neighbor Sara Phares participates in killing babies like these." The postcard implored them to call Phares, whose phone number and address were provided, and voice their opposition to her work at the clinic. Another card soon followed. It referred to Phares as "Miss I Help to Kill Little Babies" and suggested, in an erratic typeface that recalled a kidnapper's ransom note, that neighbors "beg her to quit, pretty please." The third postcard dispensed entirely with pleasantries: "Sara Phares is not to be trusted! Tell her to get a life!" (...)

Before long, protesters from Operation Rescue showed up at her house. They parked a tractor-trailer across the street, plastered with twenty-foot-long images of dismembered fetuses. From its speakers came the kind of sweet, tinkling music that lures children from their back yards in pursuit of Dreamsicles. One protester, a somber man in a tan windbreaker with a three-foot crucifix thrust before him, performed an exorcism on Phares' front lawn, sprinkling holy water on the grass to cast demons from the property. Phares, a small-boned woman with an irreverent sense of humor, joked about the exorcism. "Wish he'd held off on that holy water till after we'd put the fertilizer down," she said. But her husband wasn't amused. Since 1994, there have been five assassination attempts on abortion providers at their homes. A few days after the protest, Phares' husband got out his revolver, loaded it and taught Sara how to use it. (...)

After a brief prayer asking that Phares hear their message of "gentle rebuke," everyone caravans over to her neighborhood, five cars plastered with bumper stickers condemning abortion and extolling the Ten Commandments. Bringing up the rear is the Truth Truck. For maximum exposure, they stop on a busy street that funnels traffic toward the cul-de-sac where Phares lives. It's a treeless neighborhood, its fresh brick apartment complexes christened with optimistic names such as Cedar Lakes. The protesters display their signs for passing cars. "Phares' Choice," one proclaims, over a picture of tiny, bloody body parts. Another reads, "Sarah Phares, Abortion Profiteer," misspelling her name and giving her address. The image on Jeff Herzog's sign is particularly disturbing: a fetus being grabbed by forceps, its mouth open in a Munchian scream."

And:

"Newman and his small staff of zealous pro-lifers are buzzing with the news that the clinic's office manager has quit -- a result, they believe, of their name-and-shame campaign. The manager had been accosted by a neighbor in a grocery store who recognized her from an Operation Rescue flier that featured her photo. "You're that baby killer!" the neighbor screamed at her. Then Newman, through investigative methods he'd rather not reveal, discovered where the woman's husband works. "We think that's what clinched it," he says. "He probably realized we were going to picket his workplace. I imagine he's the major breadwinner in the family, and he didn't want to risk his job.""

If you read the whole story, you can find out how Newman threatened the Tillers' dry cleaner and a cab company that sometimes took patients to and from the clinic:

"Newman then tells him, in the most courteous tone imaginable, that he might see a few people outside the company holding signs. Just to let everybody know what he's participating in. "It's not personal," Newman says gently."

They also go through employees' trash, and offer rewards for incriminating information. They stop children on sidewalks and tell them their neighbors kill little babies.

Scott Roeder, who seems to be the suspect in Tiller's murder, posted on Operation Rescue's website. Operation Rescue has denounced the murder. They write:

"We are shocked at this morning's disturbing news that Mr. Tiller was gunned down. Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice. We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning. We pray for Mr. Tiller's family that they will find comfort and healing that can only be found in Jesus Christ."

I just thought it would be useful to clarify exactly which "peaceful, legal means" they had used, and what Dr. Tiller and his staff had had to live with.

I am strongly pro-choice, but I think it is perfectly possible to be opposed to abortion on principled grounds, and I think that it would be an enormous mistake to conflate all people who are opposed to abortions with either Dr. Tiller's killer or the likes of Operation Rescue. That said, large elements of the anti-abortion movement have never done nearly enough to distance themselves from the violent and/or crazy parts of their movement. I hope they start to now.

Since Tiller himself was shot in 1994 and his clinic bombed in the 1980s, the hatred and anger they endured was quite constant.

Following the murder, co-founder of the so-called Operation Rescue, Randall Terry offered the following editorial, in which he wrote:

"If abortionists were gunned down every week, it would gather no more attention than crack dealers who are gunned down every week."

More Tortured Logic Endorsing Torture Itself

"The first rule of Fight Club is you don't talk about Fight Club."

Conservative leaders like Karl Rove claim talking about whether or not the government sanctions torture is the worst thing ever. Yeah, Mr. Rove, talking about the evil one does in life sure brings about trouble, huh?

For me, when anyone has to educate an adult in this nation who is a political leader or advisor about why torture is bad, that is a sure sign that adult just does not need to be a leader or advisor to anyone. I've written before about the problems and inherent conflicts between use of torture and the basics of American democracy.

Now we get this defense of the indefensible:

"You see, where other human beings might just tell us anything under being tortured, the exotic Muslim requires torture for disclosure. Our legal obligations are nullified by the biological imperatives of "those people." First we had "torture works." Then we had "they deserve it." Now we have "they need us to do it."

Zubayda, of course, gave up all the useful intelligence he ever would before he was tortured. Which sort of puts a crimp in this whole theory.

The torture apologist thrives on secrets, on playing on your fear of the unknown. You don't know that waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) 183 times actually didn't prevent "a hole in the ground in Los Angeles." So Thiessen explains today that the redacted parts of the memos -- you know, the ones that were edited to protect the identity of CIA interrogators -- actually contain all the information that proves torture worked, which is why they were redacted.

The justifications for torture provided in the memos themselves are not a good faith evaluation of the torture program's effectiveness, since the writers of the memos are self-evidently trying to justify the use of torture. In other words, the memo writers have a reason to overplay the program's effectiveness, because they are conscious that what they are doing is illegal. There's only one way to know what happened, and that's through the release of the rest of the torture works memos. So let's do it.

But let's take a step back a moment. The Right has focused the torture debate on KSM because they are banking on the idea that KSM is so terrible that no one could possibly sympathize with him. As long as the torture debate is centered around whether or not we should torture one particular, terribly evil person, the right remains the sentimental favorite. But let's take a moment to consider what Thiessen and others are arguing in the long term: that we must torture and that for our own security, we must keep it secret. We currently live in a country where the president can detain anyone indefinitely without trial on suspicion of terrorism. Torture apologists want to add to that authority the ability to torture people that they detain without trial, without anyone actually knowing about it.

In order to try someone you've tortured, you'd have to make coerced confessions admissible in court. But of course, the reason we don't do that is because there's no way to know if a coerced confession is real, or if it's the result of being waterboarded or stuffed in a small box. So anyone you've tortured, you have to keep locked up forever, because if you release them, you risk that these methods -- which torture apologists explain must remain secret -- will get out.

You see where this is going. There's absolutely no way to reconcile the use of torture with a functioning, democratic society."

Disaster Capitalism and the Security-Industrial Complex

In the last few days I've discovered a new set of concepts and wordings designed to describe the modern world, and none of them are very comforting. Even considering them with the appropriate doubts of the intents of their creators and promoters, it still appears rather distressing and depressing. The populist banner cries of Freedom, Democracy and Liberty stand like antiquated oddities before them.

So let me share some of the things I've read with you and you tell me if they are valid or vapid or portents of a 21st century in which an individual is the Most Endangered Species.

First I read an excerpt from a new book, by author Naomi Klein, called "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism." Klein is a most vocal journalist and activist who has been in the forefront of opposition to the tenets of globalization. The Guardian presented this excerpt, which you can read for yourself. Here are some quotes:

"For weeks after the attacks, the president went on a grand tour of the public sector - state schools, firehouses and memorials, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention - embracing and thanking civil servants for their contributions and humble patriotism. He praised not only emergency services personnel but teachers, postal employees and healthcare workers. At these events, he treated work done in the public interest with a level of respect and dignity that had not been seen in the US in four decades. Cost-cutting was suddenly off the agenda, and in every speech the president gave, he announced some ambitious new public programme.

But far from shaking their determination to weaken the public sphere, the security failures of 9/11 reaffirmed in Bush and his inner circle their deepest ideological (and self-interested) beliefs - that only private firms possessed the intelligence and innovation to meet the new security challenge. Although it was true that the White House was on the verge of spending huge amounts of taxpayer money to launch a new deal, it would be exclusively with corporate America, a straight-up transfer of hundreds of billions of public dollars a year into private hands. The deal would take the form of contracts, many offered secretively, with no competition and scarcely any oversight, to a sprawling network of industries: technology, media, communications, incarceration, engineering, education, healthcare.

What happened in the period of mass disorientation after the attacks was, in retrospect, a domestic form of economic shock therapy."

SNIP

"Through all its various name changes - the war on terror, the war on radical Islam, the war against Islamofascism, the third world war, the long war, the generational war - the basic shape of the conflict has remained unchanged. It is limited by neither time nor space nor target. From a military perspective, these sprawling and amorphous traits make the war on terror an unwinnable proposition. But from an economic perspective, they make it an unbeatable one: not a flash-in-the-pan war that could potentially be won but a new and permanent fixture in the global economic architecture."

I know, as do most cognizant citizens, how much value and 'new meanings' which key words and phrases now in place to frame many, if not all debate, on the topic of security and patriotism seem to be shielded from scrutiny.

But a 'disaster capitalism' mindset? Who could believe or endorse such an idea? How about the Wall Street Journal, which is now offering opinions to support the "Security-Industrial Complex"? Writer Heather McDonald, of the Manhattan Institute, presents an enormous amount of "ifs" and "maybes" to justify radical changes in American life.

"How do we shore up the country's equally limitless vulnerabilities? There is reason to think, however, that we may have overestimated Muslim terrorists' reach. To find out whether this is true, the next stage of the homeland security enterprise should be oriented around one overriding goal: determining the actual capacity of jihadists to strike the U.S. That means ramping up our intelligence efforts and facing down privacy zealots and civil libertarian extremists, who continue to impede those efforts at every turn."

Klein and filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron ("Children of Men") have also presented a jarring and disturbing short video to advance their discussions, which you can see at Klein's website.

As for me, these concepts are some of the most dehumanizing ideas I've encountered in some time. If it all sounds too weird, too conspiratorial to hold any truths, then simply consider that despite what you or I might think, policy-makers and 'experts' are using this language and have been for some time.

Does US Response Empower bin Laden?

Congress voted last week to double the reward for information aiding the capture of terrorist Osama bin Laden.

But longtime newsman and commentator Ted Koppel says the checkbook is a lousy weapon and he is most correct.