The disappearing river
▻http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/the-disappearing-river
#Colorado #USA #irrigation #sécheresse #drought #eau #water
The disappearing river
▻http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/the-disappearing-river
#Colorado #USA #irrigation #sécheresse #drought #eau #water
Shakeup in the Saudi Royal Family - The New Yorker
▻http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/saudi-shakeup
The U.S.-Saudi alliance is a self-enriching bargain between the two countries’ élites, sustained without mutual understanding or sympathy between their publics. Wall Street bankers fly to Riyadh regularly, seeking cash for private equity and hedge funds. U.S. arms manufacturers profit from Saudi anxiety about Iran by selling the kingdom planes, missiles, radar systems, and spy gear. Last October, the Administration announced another big deal: a $1.75 billion missile contract. Meanwhile, Obama’s envoys negotiated in secret with Tehran, without looping in the Saudis. It’s not very surprising that princes who are regularly lobbied by Lockheed Martin Corporation salesmen about the Iranian threat would be displeased.
The Saudis buy American F-18s for the same reason that bank owners hire Brinks guards: to protect their loot—in this case, huge pools of oil sitting in a region that is descending into what looks to be a long, intimately violent war. Obama has introduced novel honesty into U.S.-Saudi discourse, though the younger royals present the same dilemma as their elders. They show no sign that they are willing to embrace democratic values, act compliantly, or become less sectarian, but, to secure promises of protection from the world’s most powerful military, they likely will accommodate American bases and arms sales, up to a point. For now, the alliance remains a strange pact of mutually complicit, resentful #hypocrisies.
America’s Epidemic of Unnecessary Care - The New Yorker
▻http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/overkill-atul-gawande
Millions of Americans get tests, drugs, and operations that won’t make them better, may cause harm, and cost billions.
Tears of the Sun
From almost anywhere in #La_Rinconada, you look up and you see her: La Bella Durmiente, Sleeping Beauty, an enormous glacier beetling above the town. “Look, there are her eyes, her face, her arm, her hip, there,” Josmell Ilasaca said, his hand drawing and caressing the glacier’s snowy features against a deep-blue sky. We were standing at the precipice of a trail, known as the Second Compuerta, that tumbles into a narrow valley north of town. Yes, now I could see the feminine outline, a mile long, possibly two. It was magnificent. And when the snow melts, exposing more rock, I said, the glacier turns into a skinny old hag called Awicha.
#Uniqlo Gets Arty
▻http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/tee-time
now Uniqlo is so ubiquitous in Japan that there’s an expression, unibare, which is slang for “We all know you’re wearing Uniqlo, and it’s really lame.”
The Pentagon plan to ‘divide and rule’ the Muslim world
▻http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/pentagon-plan-divide-and-rule-muslim-world-1690265165
Davidson points out that there is precedent for this: “There have been repeated references in the Reagan era to the usefulness of sectarian conflict in the region to US interests.”
One post-Reagan reiteration of this vision was published by the Jerusalem-based Institute for Strategic and Political Advanced Studies for Benjamin Netanyahu. The 1996 paper, A Clean Break, by Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and Richard Perle – all of whom went on to join the Bush administration – advocated regime-change in Iraq as a precursor to forging an Israel-Jordan-Turkey axis that would “roll back” Syria, Lebanon and Iran. The scenario is surprisingly similar to US policy today under Obama.
Twelve years later, the US Army commissioned a further RAND report suggesting that the US “could choose to capitalise on the Shia-Sunni conflict by taking the side of the conservative Sunni regimes in a decisive fashion and working with them against all Shiite empowerment movements in the Muslim world… to split the jihadist movement between Shiites and Sunnis.” The US would need to contain “Iranian power and influence” in the Gulf by “shoring up the traditional Sunni regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan”. Simultaneously, the US must maintain “a strong strategic relationship with the Iraqi Shiite government” despite its Iran alliance.
Around the same time as this RAND report was released, the US was covertly coordinating Saudi-led Gulf state financing to Sunni jihadist groups, many affiliated to al-Qaeda, from Iraq to Syria to Lebanon. That secret strategy accelerated under Obama in the context of the anti-Assad drive.
The widening Sunni-Shia sectarian conflict would “reduce the al-Qaeda threat to US interests in the short term,” the report concluded, by diverting Salafi-jihadist resources toward “targeting Iranian interests throughout the Middle East,” especially in Iraq and Lebanon, hence “cutting back… anti-Western operations”.
By backing the Iraqi Shiite regime and seeking an accommodation with Iran, while propping up al-Qaeda sponsoring Gulf states and empowering local anti-Shia Islamists across the region, this covert US strategy would calibrate levels of violence to debilitate both sides, and sustain “Western dominance”.
Le rapport de la Rand : Unfolding the Future of the Long War, 2008 :
►http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG738.pdf
Nafeez Ahmed avait déjà cité longuement ce document en août 2013 dans le Guardian (repris à l’époque sur Seenthis par Kassem) :
►http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/aug/30/syria-chemical-attack-war-intervention-oil-gas-energy-pipelines
(via Angry Arab)
Ca, que les Etats-Unis aient aidé l’Arabie et les autres émirats à financer des groupes djihadistes, y a-t-il de véritables preuves ?
“Around the same time as this RAND report was released, the US was covertly coordinating Saudi-led Gulf state financing to Sunni jihadist groups, many affiliated to al-Qaeda, from Iraq to Syria to Lebanon. That secret strategy accelerated under Obama in the context of the anti-Assad drive.”
#Israël – Palestine – Liban : Le chemin le plus long vers la paix-
Auteur(s) :
Pailhe Caroline
08 Août 2006
▻http://www.grip.org/fr/node/296
Cette nouvelle guerre contre le Liban [2006] correspond en effet à la deuxième phase d’ un plan stratégique rédigé en 1996 au sein de l’ Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies de Jérusalem, par un groupe d’ experts sous la direction de #Richard_Perle, qui deviendra conseiller du Pentagone dans la présente Administration et jouera un rôle majeur dans la conception de la guerre en Irak.
Soumis à l’ époque au Premier ministre israélien Benjamin #Netanyahu, le document, intitulé « A Clean Break : A New Strategy for Securing the Realm » (Un changement radical : Une nouvelle stratégie pour sécuriser le territoire), préconise un revirement de la stratégie israélienne[28].
Au niveau des concepts, le plan prône l’ abandon de la stratégie « terre contre paix » poursuivie jusqu’ alors et plaide pour « #la_paix_par_la_force », une politique fondée sur le rapport de force (balance of power). Il recommande également l’ instauration du principe de #préemption, à côté de celui de #punition, dans la doctrine stratégique israélienne.
Plus concrètement, le changement de stratégie visait à rompre avec le processus de paix d’ Oslo et fournir à Israël la possibilité d’ étendre une fois pour toutes son empire au-delà des frontières actuelles. Certaines des recommandations sont déjà des faits acquis : changement de régime en Irak, durcissement vis-à-vis des Palestiniens et affaiblissement d’ Arafat. Pour assurer la sécurité d’ Israël à sa frontière nord, le rapport recommande de « prendre l’ initiative stratégique » afin de combattre le Hezbollah, la Syrie et l’ Iran. C’ est ce qui se joue actuellement.
A la base de ce document, le groupe d’ experts chargé d’ étudier la « Nouvelle stratégie israélienne pour 2000 » n’ était pratiquement constitué que d’ Américains qui, depuis, ont occupé des positions clés dans l’ Administration Bush et singulièrement dans la définition de sa politique étrangère au Moyen-Orient.
Plus récemment, #Robert_Satloff, directeur d’ un autre think tank néoconservateur influent sur la politique moyen-orientale de Washington, louait la stratégie américaine d’ « #instabilité_constructive » au Liban et en Syrie[29].
Il constate que, si la recherche de la #stabilité a été un trait caractéristique de la politique des #Etats-Unis dans la région, « George W. Bush a été le premier président à considérer que la stabilité en tant que telle était un obstacle à l’ avancement des intérêts américains au Moyen-Orient. (...) A cet effet, les Etats-Unis ont employé un éventail de mesures coercitives ou non coercitives, allant de l’ usage de la force militaire pour changer les régimes en Afghanistan et en Irak, en passant par une politique de la carotte et du bâton (...) pour isoler Yasser Arafat et encourager une nouvelle et pacifique direction palestinienne, jusqu’ aux encouragements courtois à l’ Egypte et à l’ Arabie saoudite pour les engager sur la voie des réformes. » Sur cet échiquier, le Liban et la Syrie seraient, pour M. Satloff, « un premier test » de cette politique d’ ’ instabilité constructive car « Israël et l’ Iran, l’ Europe et les Etats-Unis, la Syrie et les Palestiniens, tous ces chemins convergent à Beyrouth ». Il reconnaît que les Etats-Unis et leurs alliés locaux devront certes subir « quelques défaites tactiques » mais « avec de la persévérance, des changements positifs continus ne manqueront pas de se produire ».
Jim Lobe, en pleine guerre 2006,
▻http://www.ipsnews.net/2006/07/mideast-sunni-shia-split-fades-as-israel-presses-campaign
Hopes by the George W. Bush administration for the emergence of an implicit Sunni-Israel alliance against an Iranian-led “Shia Crescent”...
The Redirection - Seymour Hersh, 2007
►http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/03/05/the-redirection
In the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The “redirection,” as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.
To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda
What Austerity Looks Like Inside Greece - The New Yorker
▻http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/what-austerity-looks-like-inside-greece
Excellent article du New Yorker sur la Grèce qui met l’accent sur les réseaux de solidarité parallèle et les initiatives d’auto-défense collective.
In Galatsi, near central Athens, I visited a social assembly based in a soap factory run by the unemployed. One of its members, Stergis Theodoridis, an accountant who lost most of his clients in the wake of the crisis, told me that after he’d fallen into arrears on his electricity payments, representatives of the utility company showed up to cut his service, with eight police officers in tow. He phoned a friend in the social assembly, and soon his front yard was crowded with supporters, some linking arms. After a tense standoff, Theodoridis agreed to pay a portion of what he owed, and the company reps backed off. They never returned.
Video: The Monster in the Mountains - The New Yorker
▻http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/video-the-monster-in-the-mountains?intcid=mod-latest
It’s been six months since forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School went missing in the town of Iguala, in Guerrero, one of Mexico’s poorest and most violent states. In the indigenous communities of La Montaña and the Costa Chica, where many of the students lived, the disappearances are only one example of the crime, corruption, and impunity that plague the region. As abel Herrara Hernandez, a human-rights activist, said, “Here in the mountains . . . you live with the demons.”
This short film, based on the work of the photographer Matt Black, shows how families of the missing are coping with the still unexplained loss of their loved ones, and how citizens are struggling to protect themselves, and to preserve hope.
Guerrero and the Disappeared
Slide show ▻http://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/guerrero-and-the-disappeared
Photographe Matt Black:
►http://www.mattblack.com
#photographie #Mexique #violence Guerrero #perte #familles
Letter from Vietnam MARCH 30, 2015 ISSUE
The Scene of the Crime
A reporter’s journey to My Lai and the secrets of the past.
BY SEYMOUR M. #HERSH
▻http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/30/the-scene-of-the-crime
Guerre du #Vietnam : l’auteur du scoop de #My_Lai en 68 sur les lieux du #massacre
▻http://geopolis.francetvinfo.fr/guerre-du-vietnam-lauteur-du-scoop-de-my-lai-en-68-sur-les-lie
Dans l’article fleuve (comme toujours dans cette revue), le journaliste n’en reste pas qu’au massacre de My Lai. Il décrit à travers des personnes rencontrées les rapports complexes qui perdurent entre Américains et Vietnamiens, comme ce réfugié vietnamien retourné au pays ou ce combattant américain venu tenter d’expier les fautes américaines en s’installant chez l’ancien ennemi.
Si l’Amérique n’a jamais payé de réparations au Vietnam pour ses bombardements ou l’épandage d’agent orange, le gouvernement US, et des associations de vétérans ont commencer à financer des programmes de déminage (mines, qui selon Hersh, ont tué ou blessé quelque 100.000 personnes).
Aujourd’hui, note l’auteur de l’article, 70% de la population vietnamienne a moins de 40 ans et « les touristes américains sont une aubaine pour l’économie ». Sans compter que « diplomatiquement les Etats-Unis sont considérés comme un ami, un allié potentiel contre la Chine » avec qui le Vietnam a des relations tendues.
Comme pour symboliser le temps passé, un homme lui donne la philosophie qui semble régner au Vietnam, quelque 40 ans après la fin de la guerre. « Nous Vietnamiens, nous avons une attitude pratique : mieux vaut oublier un mauvais ennemi, si vous pouvez gagnez un ami nécessaire ».
Richard #Stallman ’s #GNU manifesto turns thirty
▻http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-gnu-manifesto-turns-thirty #free_software
“With software, either the users control the program, or the program controls the users”
Libya’s New Strongman - The New Yorker
▻http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/unravelling
In Paris recently, I asked Lévy why he’d adopted the Libyan cause. “Why? I don’t know!” he said. “Of course, it was human rights, for a massacre to be prevented, and blah blah blah—but I also wanted them to see a Jew defending the liberators against a dictatorship, to show fraternity. I wanted the Muslims to see that a Frenchman—a Westerner and a Jew—could be on their side.”
Une perle, relevée par Angry Arab
Un article du « New Yorker » sur la politique de la Silicon Valley
▻http://www.piecesetmaindoeuvre.com/spip.php?page=resume&id_article=699
Attendu que la Silicon Valley représente le stade le plus avancé du techno-capitalisme, et donc le modèle de nos métropoles provinciales, il vaut la peine de connaître la politique de la Silicon Valley. Longtemps, les barons du numérique se sont désintéressés des affaires gouvernementales parce qu’ils avaient conscience de faire la vraie politique, celle qui transforme le monde comme dit l’un d’entre eux. Il semble qu’en plus, ils veillent désormais à orienter directement les décisions politiques. Pourquoi et comment ? C’est ce que raconte cet article du New Yorker, que nous n’avons pas traduit. 1) parce que nous n’avons pas eu le temps. 2) parce qu’il est bien connu que nous sommes tous des gallo-ricains.
Service (...)
#Service_compris
▻http://www.piecesetmaindoeuvre.com/IMG/pdf/TThe_New_Yorker_SILICON_VALLEY-2.pdf
Why Greece and Europe Can Still Reach a Deal - The New Yorker
▻http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/greece-europe-will-reach-deal
In short, there still is room for a deal that benefits Greece and the rest of Europe, Germany included. Why, then, didn’t Schäuble and Varoufakis sit down and work out its main elements on the back of a napkin? Partly because the issue of interim financing and the role of the E.C.B. need to be resolved first. Partly because each side thinks it will get a better deal by playing a longer game. And partly because the leaders of Syriza and the euro zone both need to persuade their supporters that they didn’t give in too easily. So, this thing will go on for while. As long as reason prevails, though, it will surely be settled eventually.
A Massacre in Paris - The New Yorker
▻http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/19/satire-lives
The staff of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, massacred in an act that shocked the world last week, were not the gentle daily satirists of American editorial cartooning. Nor were they anything like the ironic observers and comedians of manners most often to be found in our own beloved stable here at The New Yorker. (Though, to be sure, the covers of this magazine have startled a few readers and started a few fights.) They worked instead in a peculiarly French and savage tradition, forged in a long nineteenth-century guerrilla war between republicans and the Church and the monarchy. There are satirical magazines and “name” cartoonists in London and other European capitals, particularly Brussels, but they tend to be artier in touch and more media-centric in concern. Charlie Hebdo was—will be again, let us hope—a satirical journal of a kind these days found in France almost alone. Not at all meta or ironic, like The Onion, or a place for political gossip, like the Paris weekly Le Canard Enchaîné or London’s Private Eye, it kept alive the nineteenth-century style of direct, high-spirited, and extremely outrageous caricature—a tradition begun by now legendary caricaturists, like Honoré Daumier and his editor Charles Philipon, who drew the head of King Louis-Philippe as a pear and, in 1831, was put on trial for lèse-majesté.
Le rapport des New-Yorkais au bruit, aux nuisances sonores.
Mapping New York’s Noisiest Neighborhoods - The New Yorker
▻http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/mapping-new-york-noise-complaints
#nuisances-sonores #pollution-sonore #cartographie #New-York
The Video-Game Invasion of Iraq - The New Yorker
▻http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-video-game-invasion-of-iraq
Mohammed believes that the friendships he has formed through online gaming have had a transformative effect on the way in which some people view his country. “Some people told me they were scared of Iraqis,” he said, “thinking that they are all terrorists. But in reality, we are victims. When they got to know me, they saw the truth and changed their minds about Iraqis. It removed the fear.” A twenty-two-year-old Norwegian, Michael Moe, is now one of Mohammed’s closest friends. The young men met online while playing Battlefield 3, and now speak on the phone or over Skype every few days. “I become worried about Mohammed if I do not hear from him for any more than two days,” said Moe. “I always check up on him when that happens.”
Abdulla almost seems to prefer friends he has made playing online video games. “Here in our home country, most of us have lost some, if not most, of our friends,” he said. “They were either killed or fled Iraq. And you can’t just trust anyone anymore. So a friend across seas who you can trust is better than a friend here who might stab your back any minute.”
Video games will not solve Iraq’s ongoing challenges. But for some young Iraqis, they do provide more than a mere distraction from the terrors of life in the country. The social connections that they encourage, both within Iraq and beyond, have built empathy in ways that may have a profound effect on the way some young people view their place in the world. For Amna, Mohammed’s mother, the effect has been less grand and more localized.
“I used to object about video games,” she said. “I wanted Mohammed to spend more time studying. But I’ve come to see the strange benefits. Video games have broadened his relationships outside of our borders, and formed new bonds. He loves his gaming friends and, from what I can tell, they love him, too.”
Susie Day, « Outing Torture Queen Bikowsky »
▻http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/day060115.html
Dear Alfreda Frances Bikowsky,
So many people want to be famous. Not you. You were content to let Jessica Chastain portray a more competent version of your waterboarding and bin Laden-stalking self in the film Zero Dark Thirty. You never asked for credit. But now, thanks to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s Report on CIA Torture, we know you’ve made more history than the average, anonymous schlub. Jane Mayer of The New Yorker calls you “The Unidentified Queen of Torture.” She says you:
dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks; . . . gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; . . . And then . . . falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked.
Of course, Jane Mayer doesn’t name you. Neither does Matthew Cole in his NBC News report, which was the basis for Mayer’s article. You are the “Unidentified Queen” because the CIA told the media not to reveal you. According to Mayer, you were the reason the Senate Intelligence Committee was not even allowed to use pseudonyms to identify you or any of the major players in its torture report, making it “almost impossible to . . . hold anyone in the American government accountable.”
We only know you are Alfreda Bikowsky because of journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has problems with authority. Glenn defied the CIA to identify you in an article for The Intercept, an investigative news website that purposely operates outside the parameters of mainstream media. Thanks a lot, Glenn Greenwald.
I said that sarcastically, Ms. Bikowsky. Or, if I may: I said that sarcastically, Your Majesty. Glenn should not have “outed” you. After all, Glenn’s gay; he should know better.
Being a queer of the more sensitive variety, myself, I feel that people should not be forced out of the closet before they’re ready. There can be hard feelings. Like, I can only guess how you feel now. But if it’s even a little like being shackled and hung from the ceiling in freezing rooms, or forcibly hydrated and fed rectally, or stripped naked and deprived of sleep for a week, or put in stress positions for hours, you have my deep sympathy.
It’s not easy to be exposed as a war criminal. Now that you’re out, though, you may take a page or two from the Gay Rights movement. Here are some hard-won pointers to help you face an ignorant and uncomprehending world.
Say It Loud: War Criminal and Proud
According to NBC News, your name was redacted at least three dozen times from the declassified Senate Committee’s report on torture. This self-redacting tendency indicates that you are an extremely modest person, Your Majesty. Yet, like so many women, you may be sacrificing your self-esteem just to avoid “making a scene.”
Coming out allows you to proclaim your worth to society. Did you stop to think that maybe God made you this way? Much like God gave gay men, brain-wise, a small hypothalamus gland, He may have given you an abnormally tiny empathy-inducing anterior insular cortex. But whether your condition is biological or chosen, it’s time to step up and say, “Yes, America, I AM a war criminal. So what if all that torture did not yield useful information in finding bin Laden or anybody else — it was FUN!”
Back to the woman thing. Very few satanic creatures of note are women. Are you going to let Henry Kissinger and Beelzebub take all the credit? Isn’t it time Dick Cheney made coffee for YOU, for a change?
Out of the Black Sites and Into the Street
Contrary to myth, war criminals make good citizens. Like gay people, they boost property values and contribute to art and high culture. In fact, thanks to America’s more discerning war criminals, many prestigious U.S. museums are simply teeming with artifacts and masterpieces acquired from backward, terrorist-friendly countries that never fully appreciated them.
It’s often hard for prejudiced “normal” people to accept that war criminals are human. Part of being human is, of course, making mistakes. So stand up for your war criminal humanity, Your Majesty, by proudly defending your royal fuckups. Anybody in your CIA position could have goofed in snatching Khalid el-Masri, an innocent German citizen, off the street and torturing him for months in Afghanistan’s Salt Pit prison. Why, even most non-war-criminals mistake people with Muslim names for terrorists. It’s what unites us!
And be PROUD you testified to Congress that waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (about 183 times, but who’s counting?) led to the apprehension of a particular terrorist — despite the fact that this suspect was already in CIA custody.
You will encounter prejudice. Some people will assume you “got that way” by being waterboarded as a child or exposed to a war criminal teacher at an early age. Although this may well be true, it’s none of their business. When confronted with such war-criminal-o-phobe behavior, it is best to respond thusly: “I appreciate your concern, but I feel comfortable with who I am.” Then arrest this person and have them slammed repeatedly against a wall.
Accept Your Greatness
Bottom line, O Queen? If we anonymous schlubs can’t hold you accountable for anything you’ve done, the least you can do is become a celebrity.
See, you know all about us — our metadata is vacuumed up every second by your friends in the NSA — but we know nothing about you. Do you own a PC or a Mac? What’s your most embarrassing moment? Favorite brand of toothpaste?
Please tell us, Your Majesty: Who ARE you? If we knew that, we might know something more about who we are.
The Unidentified Queen of Torture
By Jane Mayer
▻http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/unidentified-queen-torture
Had the Senate Intelligence Committee been permitted to use pseudonyms for the central characters in its report, as all previous congressional studies of intelligence failures, including the widely heralded Church Committee report in 1975, have done, it might not have taken a painstaking, and still somewhat cryptic, investigation after the fact in order for the American public to hold this senior official accountable. Many people who have worked with her over the years expressed shock to NBC that she has been entrusted with so much power. A former intelligence officer who worked directly with her is quoted by NBC, on background, as saying that she bears so much responsibility for so many intelligence failures that “she should be put on trial and put in jail for what she has done.”
Instead, however, she has been promoted to the rank of a general in the military, most recently working as the head of the C.I.A.’s global-jihad unit. In that perch, she oversees the targeting of terror suspects around the world. (She was also, in part, the model for the lead character in “Zero Dark Thirty.”)
Je ne suis pas de l’avis de Jane Mayer. J’ai l’impression que la divine Alfreda Frances Bikowsky ressemble plutôt à ça :
►http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/unmournable-bodies
Rather than posit that the Paris attacks are the moment of crisis in free speech—as so many commentators have done—it is necessary to understand that free speech and other expressions of liberté are already in crisis in Western societies; the crisis was not precipitated by three deranged gunmen. The U.S., for example, has consolidated its traditional monopoly on extreme violence, and, in the era of big data, has also hoarded information about its deployment of that violence. There are harsh consequences for those who interrogate this monopoly. The only person in prison for the C.I.A.’s abominable torture regime is John Kiriakou, the whistle-blower. Edward Snowden is a hunted man for divulging information about mass surveillance. Chelsea Manning is serving a thirty-five-year sentence for her role in WikiLeaks. They, too, are blasphemers, but they have not been universally valorized, as have the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo.
The killings in Paris were an appalling offense to human life and dignity. The enormity of these crimes will shock us all for a long time. But the suggestion that violence by self-proclaimed Jihadists is the only threat to liberty in Western societies ignores other, often more immediate and intimate, dangers. The U.S., the U.K., and France approach statecraft in different ways, but they are allies in a certain vision of the world, and one important thing they share is an expectation of proper respect for Western secular religion. Heresies against state power are monitored and punished. People have been arrested for making anti-military or anti-police comments on social media in the U.K. Mass surveillance has had a chilling effect on journalism and on the practice of the law in the U.S. Meanwhile, the armed forces and intelligence agencies in these countries demand, and generally receive, unwavering support from their citizens. When they commit torture or war crimes, no matter how illegal or depraved, there is little expectation of a full accounting or of the prosecution of the parties responsible.
The scale, intensity, and manner of the solidarity that we are seeing for the victims of the Paris killings, encouraging as it may be, indicates how easy it is in Western societies to focus on radical Islamism as the real, or the only, enemy. This focus is part of the consensus about mournable bodies, and it often keeps us from paying proper attention to other, ongoing, instances of horrific carnage around the world: abductions and killings in Mexico, hundreds of children (and more than a dozen journalists) killed in Gaza by Israel last year, internecine massacres in the Central African Republic, and so on. And even when we rightly condemn criminals who claim to act in the name of Islam, little of our grief is extended to the numerous Muslim victims of their attacks, whether in Yemen or Nigeria—in both of which there were deadly massacres this week—or in Saudi Arabia, where, among many violations of human rights, the punishment for journalists who “insult Islam” is flogging. We may not be able to attend to each outrage in every corner of the world, but we should at least pause to consider how it is that mainstream opinion so quickly decides that certain violent deaths are more meaningful, and more worthy of commemoration, than others.
►http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/unmournable-bodies
“We may not be able to attend to each outrage in every corner of the world, but we should at least pause to consider how it is that mainstream opinion so quickly decides that certain violent deaths are more meaningful, and more worthy of commemoration, than others.
France is in sorrow today, and will be for many weeks to come. We mourn with France. We ought to. But it is also true that violence from “our” side continues unabated. By this time next month, in all likelihood, many more “young men of military age” and many others, neither young nor male, will have been killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere.”