​By Scott Shane
Feb. 17, 2018

The long arm of Vladimir Putin? No, just a small sample of the United States’ history of intervention in foreign elections.

On Tuesday, American intelligence chiefs warned the Senate Intelligence Committee that Russia appears to be preparing to repeat in the 2018 midterm elections the same full-on chicanery it unleashed in 2016: hacking, leaking, social media manipulation and possibly more. Then on Friday, Robert Mueller, the special counsel, announced the indictments of 13 Russians and three companies, run by a businessman with close Kremlin ties, laying out in astonishing detail a three-year scheme to use social media to attack Hillary Clinton, boost Donald Trump and sow discord.

Most Americans are understandably shocked by what they view as an unprecedented attack on our political system. But intelligence veterans, and scholars who have studied covert operations, have a different, and quite revealing, view.

“If you ask an intelligence officer, did the Russians break the rules or do something bizarre, the answer is no, not at all,” said Steven L. Hall, who retired in 2015 after 30 years at the C.I.A., where he was the chief of Russian operations. The United States “absolutely” has carried out such election influence operations historically, he said, “and I hope we keep doing it.”

Loch K. Johnson, the dean of American intelligence scholars, who began his career in the 1970s investigating the C.I.A. as a staff member of the Senate’s Church Committee, says Russia’s 2016 operation was simply the cyber-age version of standard United States practice for decades, whenever American officials were worried about a foreign vote.

“We’ve been doing this kind of thing since the C.I.A. was created in 1947,” said Mr. Johnson, now at the University of Georgia. “We’ve used posters, pamphlets, mailers, banners — you name it. We’ve planted false information in foreign newspapers. We’ve used what the British call ‘King George’s cavalry’: suitcases of cash.”

The United States’ departure from democratic ideals sometimes went much further. The C.I.A. helped overthrow elected leaders in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s and backed violent coups in several other countries in the 1960s. It plotted assassinations and supported brutal anti-Communist governments in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

But in recent decades, both Mr. Hall and Mr. Johnson argued, Russian and American interferences in elections have not been morally equivalent. American interventions have generally been aimed at helping non-authoritarian candidates challenge dictators or otherwise promoting democracy. Russia has more often intervened to disrupt democracy or promote authoritarian rule, they said.

Equating the two, Mr. Hall says, “is like saying cops and bad guys are the same because they both have guns — the motivation matters.”

This broader history of election meddling has largely been missing from the flood of reporting on the Russian intervention and the investigation of whether the Trump campaign was involved. It is a reminder that the Russian campaign in 2016 was fundamentally old-school espionage, even if it exploited new technologies. And it illuminates the larger currents of history that drove American electoral interventions during the Cold War and motivate Russia’s actions today.

A Carnegie Mellon scholar, Dov H. Levin, has scoured the historical record for both overt and covert election influence operations. He found 81 by the United States and 36 by the Soviet Union or Russia between 1946 and 2000, though the Russian count is undoubtedly incomplete.

“I’m not in any way justifying what the Russians did in 2016,” Mr. Levin said. “It was completely wrong of Vladimir Putin to intervene in this way. That said, the methods they used in this election were the digital version of methods used both by the United States and Russia for decades: breaking into party headquarters, recruiting secretaries, placing informants in a party, giving information or disinformation to newspapers.”

His findings underscore how routine election meddling by the United States — sometimes covert and sometimes quite open — has been.

The precedent was established in Italy with assistance to non-Communist candidates from the late 1940s to the 1960s. “We had bags of money that we delivered to selected politicians, to defray their expenses,” said F. Mark Wyatt, a former C.I.A. officer, in a 1996 interview.

Covert propaganda has also been a mainstay. Richard M. Bissell Jr., who ran the agency’s operations in the late 1950s and early 1960s, wrote casually in his autobiography of “exercising control over a newspaper or broadcasting station, or of securing the desired outcome in an election.” A self-congratulatory declassified report on the C.I.A.’s work in Chile’s 1964 election boasts of the “hard work” the agency did supplying “large sums” to its favored candidate and portraying him as a “wise, sincere and high-minded statesman” while painting his leftist opponent as a “calculating schemer.”

C.I.A. officials told Mr. Johnson in the late 1980s that “insertions” of information into foreign news media, mostly accurate but sometimes false, were running at 70 to 80 a day. In the 1990 election in Nicaragua, the C.I.A. planted stories about corruption in the leftist Sandinista government, Mr. Levin said. The opposition won.

Over time, more American influence operations have been mounted not secretly by the C.I.A. but openly by the State Department and its affiliates. For the 2000 election in Serbia, the United States funded a successful effort to defeat Slobodan Milosevic, the nationalist leader, providing political consultants and millions of stickers with the opposition’s clenched-fist symbol and “He’s finished” in Serbian, printed on 80 tons of adhesive paper and delivered by a Washington contractor.

Vince Houghton, who served in the military in the Balkans at the time and worked closely with the intelligence agencies, said he saw American efforts everywhere. “We made it very clear that we had no intention of letting Milosevic stay in power,” said Mr. Houghton, now the historian at the International Spy Museum.

Similar efforts were undertaken in elections in wartime Iraq and Afghanistan, not always with success. After Hamid Karzai was re-elected president of Afghanistan in 2009, he complained to Robert Gates, then the secretary of defense, about the United States’ blatant attempt to defeat him, which Mr. Gates calls in his memoir “our clumsy and failed putsch.”

At least once the hand of the United States reached boldly into a Russian election. American fears that Boris Yeltsin would be defeated for re-election as president in 1996 by an old-fashioned Communist led to an overt and covert effort to help him, urged on by President Bill Clinton. It included an American push for a $10 billion International Monetary Fund loan to Russia four months before the voting and a team of American political consultants (though some Russians scoffed when they took credit for the Yeltsin win).

That heavy-handed intervention made some Americans uneasy. Thomas Carothers, a scholar at the Carnegie Institute for International Peace, recalls arguing with a State Department official who told him at the time, “Yeltsin is democracy in Russia,” to which Mr. Carothers said he replied, “That’s not what democracy means.”

But what does democracy mean? Can it include secretly undermining an authoritarian ruler or helping challengers who embrace democratic values? How about financing civic organizations?

In recent decades, the most visible American presence in foreign politics has been taxpayer-funded groups like the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, which do not support candidates but teach basic campaign skills, build democratic institutions and train election monitors.

Most Americans view such efforts as benign — indeed, charitable. But Mr. Putin sees them as hostile. The National Endowment for Democracy gave a $23,000 grant in 2006 to an organization that employed Aleksei Navalny, who years later became Mr. Putin’s main political nemesis, a fact the government has used to attack both Mr. Navalny and the endowment. In 2016, the endowment gave 108 grants totaling $6.8 million to organizations in Russia for such purposes as “engaging activists” and “fostering civic engagement.” The endowment no longer names Russian recipients, who, under Russian laws cracking down on foreign funding, can face harassment or arrest.

It is easy to understand why Mr. Putin sees such American cash as a threat to his rule, which tolerates no real opposition. But American veterans of democracy promotion find abhorrent Mr. Putin’s insinuations that their work is equivalent to what the Russian government is accused of doing in the United States today.

“It’s not just apples and oranges,” said Kenneth Wollack, president of the National Democratic Institute. “It’s comparing someone who delivers lifesaving medicine to someone who brings deadly poison.”

What the C.I.A. may have done in recent years to steer foreign elections is still secret and may not be known for decades. It may be modest by comparison with the agency’s Cold War manipulation. But some old-timers aren’t so sure.

“I assume they’re doing a lot of the old stuff, because, you know, it never changes,” said William J. Daugherty, who worked for the C.I.A. from 1979 to 1996 and at one time had the job of reviewing covert operations. “The technology may change, but the objectives don’t.”

Correction: February 17, 2018
An earlier version of this article stated incorrectly that Aleksei Navalny, a political opponent of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, had received grants from the National Endowment for Democracy. In fact, an organization employing him received one $23,000 grant from the endowment in 2006.

Scott Shane is a national security reporter for The Times and a former Moscow correspondent.

​https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/sunday-review/russia-isnt-the-only-one-meddling-in-elections-we-do-it-too.html

​Everyone hates government waste. President Trump believes it is “our moral duty to the taxpayer” to “make our government leaner and more accountable,” and his political opponents seem to agree.

And yet, when called to vote on an extra $80 billion a year for the most profligate public agency in the country, the overwhelming majority of U.S. senators asked no questions. The Pentagon not only escaped serious budget cuts while everything from national parks to Meals on Wheels has been squeezed, but it actually almost got more than it asked for in the spending bill the Senate approved on September 18.

The Pentagon’s latest increase alone—never mind its base budget, which runs hundreds of billions higher—is a sum large enough to make public colleges free across the country, and by itself is worth well over 80 percent of Russia’s entire military budget.

It’s worth asking: Where does the money go?

​Consider the reaction if the Environmental Protection Agency buried evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste. At the very least, we would see congressional inquiries with Republicans foaming at the mouth and Democrats solemnly stating their commitment to safeguarding your tax dollars. At most, we would hear calls for some kind of criminal investigation.

This whole situation is mathematically impossible for the EPA, with its annual budget of around $8 billion, but not for the Department of Defense. In 2015, it both found and hid $125 billion of wasteful spending.

As a Washington Post investigation revealed, the Pentagon did not like the findings of its internal spending review. Its own investigators found that a quarter of the annual budget was spent on overheads like human resources and logistics. It counted over a million desk jobs, and nearly 200,000 full-time contractors in the Army alone. That exceeds “the combined civil workforce for the Departments of State, Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development,” the Post notes—all with the fewest number of active troops on duty since 1940.

​If “inefficiency” is a suitable word for the Pentagon bureaucracy at home, it doesn’t come close to describing how military money is spent abroad.

In the six years from 2009 to 2015, the Special Inspector General for Reconstruction in Afghanistan tallied around $17 billion in “questionable spending” throughout the country by the Pentagon, the State Department, and USAID, while the comparable office for Iraq suggested that $8-$10 billion (of $60 billion total) in reconstruction money was wasted as a result of corruption and mismanagement.

Although these numbers clearly matter, specific cases convey the depth of the absurdity. A few examples:

​This is a small sample. When asked about the Pentagon’s Task Force for Business and Stability Operations in Afghanistan, which was effectively dismantled in 2011, Inspector General Sopko told Defense News that “the money has basically been wasted.” “In all likelihood,” he continued, “we’ll never recover a dollar.”

​For some officials and commentators, the solution is outsourcing. The Center for a New American Security’s Daniel Straub even argues in a recent article that “private contractors can help win the war in Afghanistan,” because “profit is incentive to do a job right.” Contractors, he suggests, can bring flexibility and efficiency, perhaps saving the taxpayer as much as $35 billion.

The evidence from the Pentagon’s great outsourcing experiments suggests the complete opposite: Profit is an incentive to overcharge, mislead, and defraud.

The bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting provided the most comprehensive assessment of this in 2011. It concluded that “at least $31 billion, and possibly as much as $60 billion, has been lost to contract waste and fraud in America’s contingency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The Justice Department sued the contractor Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR) for overcharging in 2012; Custer Battles was found guilty of $3 million worth of fraud in Iraq as early as 2006; and although DynCorp was accused in federal court of knowingly inflating costs throughout a four-year contract for the State Department in Iraq, it maintains its Pentagon contract for “training and mentoring” the Afghan National Police and Interior Ministry.

​Much of the Pentagon’s new handout will go where it usually goes: into the pockets of military contractors, or else get lost altogether.

Most Americans won’t discover this, and it’s hard to blame them. Their political leaders are united in their determination to protect the world’s largest bureaucracy from serious scrutiny.

However, as Afghanistan war veterans watch their children go off to fight the same war they began fighting 16 years ago, the Pentagon won’t be immune forever. Then, it will have a heavy account to settle.

This article originally appeared on Foreign Policy in Focus.

​By Harry Blain
Posted on October 16, 2017

Harry Blain is a PhD student in political science at the Graduate Center, CUNY (City University of New York).

​http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/22394

​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m9nvdo-25w

​Already overstretched Special Operations forces facing growing demands as their rates of mental distress and suicide rise. Proxy armies in Iraq and Afghanistan that are unreliable, often delivering American-provided weaponry to black markets and into the hands of various enemies. All of this and more coming at a time when defense spending is once again soaring and the national security state is awash in funds to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars a year.

What gives? Why are highly maneuverable and sophisticated naval ships colliding with lumbering cargo vessels? Why is an Air Force that exists to fly and fight short 1,200 pilots? Why are U.S. Special Operations forces deployed everywhere and winning nowhere? Why, in short, is the U.S. military fighting itself — and losing.

After 16 years of a never-ending, ever-spreading global war on terror, alarms are going off in Asia from the Koreas and Afghanistan to The Philippines, while across the Greater Middle East and Africa the globe’s “last superpower” is in a never-ending set of conflicts with a range of minor enemies few can even keep straight. As a result, America’s can-do military, committed piecemeal to a bewildering array of missions, has increasingly become a can’t-do one.

Too few ships are being deployed for too long. Too few pilots are being worn out by incessant patrols and mushrooming drone and bombing missions. Special Operations forces  — the “commandos of everywhere,” as Nick Turse calls them — are being deployed to far too many countries and are involved in conflicts that hold little promise of ending on terms favorable to Washington.

Meanwhile, insiders such as retired general David Petraeus speak calmly about “generational struggles” that will essentially never end. To paraphrase an old slogan from ABC’s “Wide World of Sports,” as the U.S. military spans the globe, it’s regularly experiencing the agony of defeat rather than the thrill of victory.

To Pres. Donald Trump and so many other politicians in Washington, this unsavory reality suggests an obvious solution. Boost military funding, build more navy ships, train more pilots and give them more incentive pay to stay in the military, rely more on drones and other technological “force multipliers” to compensate for tired troops, cajole allies such as the Germans and Japanese to spend more on their militaries and pressure proxy armies like the Iraqi and Afghan security forces to cut corruption and improve combat performance.

One option — the most logical — is never seriously considered in Washington. To make deep cuts in the military’s operational tempo by decreasing defense spending and downsizing the global mission, by bringing troops home and keeping them there. This is not an isolationist plea. The United States certainly faces challenges, notably from Russia and China. North Korea is, as ever, posturing with missile and nuclear tests in provocative ways. Terrorist organizations strive to destabilize American allies and cause trouble even in “the homeland.”

Such challenges require vigilance. What they don’t require is more ships in the sea-lanes, pilots in the air and boots on the ground. Indeed, 16 years after the 9/11 attacks it should be obvious that more of the same is likely to produce yet more of what we’ve grown all too accustomed to. Increasing instability across significant swaths of the planet, as well as the rise of new terror groups or new iterations of older ones, which means yet more opportunities for failed U.S. military interventions.

Once upon a time, when there were still two superpowers on Planet Earth, Washington’s worldwide military posture had a clear rationale: the containment of communism. Soon after the Soviet Union imploded in 1991 to much triumphalist self-congratulation in Washington, the scholar and former CIA consultant Chalmers Johnson had an epiphany. What he would come to call “the American Raj,” a global imperial structure ostensibly built to corral the menace of communism, wasn’t going away just because that menace had evaporated, leaving not a superpower nor even a major power as an opponent anywhere on the horizon.

Quite the opposite, Washington — and its globe-spanning “empire” of military bases — was only digging in deeper and for the long haul. At that moment, with a certain shock, Johnson realized that the United States was itself an empire and, with its mirror-image-enemy gone, risked turning on itself and becoming its own nemesis.

The United States, it turned out, hadn’t just contained the Soviets; they had contained us, too. Once their empire collapsed, our leaders imbibed the old dream of Woodrow Wilson, even if in a newly militarized fashion — to remake the world in one’s own image, if need be at the point of a sword.

Since the early 1990s, largely unconstrained by peer rivals, America’s leaders have acted as if there were nothing to stop them from doing as they pleased on the planet, which, as it turned out, meant there was nothing to stop them from their own folly

We witness the results today. Prolonged and disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Interventions throughout the Greater Middle East — Libya, Syria, Yemen and beyond — that spread chaos and destruction.  Attacks against terrorism that have given new impetus to jihadists everywhere.

And recently calls to arm Ukraine against Russia. All of this is consistent with a hubristic strategic vision that, in these years, has spoken in an all-encompassing fashion and without irony of global reach, global power and full-spectrum dominance.

In this context, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the full scope of America’s military power. All the world is a stage — or a staging area — for U.S. troops. There are still approximately 800 U.S. military bases in foreign lands.  America’s commandos deploy to more than 130 countries yearly. And even the world is not enough for the Pentagon as it seeks to dominate not just land, sea and air but outer space, cyberspace, and even inner space, if you count efforts to achieve “total information awareness” through 17 intelligence agencies dedicated — at a cost of $80 billion a year — to sweeping up all data on Planet Earth.

In short, America’s troops are out everywhere and winning nowhere, a problem America’s “winningest” president, Donald Trump, is only exacerbating. Surrounded by “his” generals, Trump has — against his own instincts, he claimed recently — recommitted American troops and prestige to the Afghan War.  He’s also significantly expanded U.S. drone strikes and bombing throughout the Greater Middle East, and threatened to bring fire and fury to North Korea, while pushing a program to boost military spending.

At a Pentagon awash in money, with promises of more to come, missions are rarely downsized.  Meanwhile, what passes for original thinking in the Trump White House is the suggestion of Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, to privatize America’s war in Afghanistan and possibly elsewhere.  Mercenaries are the answer to Washington’s military problems, suggests Prince.  And mercs, of course, have the added benefit of not being constrained by the rules of engagement that apply to America’s uniformed service members.

Indeed, Prince’s idea, though opposed by Trump’s generals, is compelling in one sense. If you accept the notion that America’s wars in these years have been fought largely for the corporate agendas of the military-industrial complex, why not turn warfighting itself over to the warrior corporations that now regularly accompany the military into battle, cutting out the middleman, that very military?

Prince’s mercenaries will, however, have to bide their time as the military high command continues to launch kinetic strikes against elusive foes around the globe. By its own admission, the force recent U.S. presidents have touted as the “finest” in history faces remarkably “asymmetrical” and protean enemies, including the roughly 20 terrorist organizations in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater of operations.

In striking at such relatively puny foes, the United States reminds me of the mighty Thor of superhero fame swinging his hammer violently against a cloud of gnats. In the process, some of those gnats will naturally die, but the result will still be an exhausted superhero and ever more gnats attracted by the heat and commotion of battle.

I first came across the phrase “using a sledgehammer to kill gnats” while looking at the history of U.S. air power during the Vietnam War.  B-52 “Arc Light” raids dropped record tons of bombs on parts of South Vietnam and Laos in largely failed efforts to kill dispersed guerrillas and interdict supply routes from North Vietnam.

Half a century later, with its laser- and GPS-guided bombs, the Air Force regularly touts the far greater precision of American air power. Yet in one country after another, using just that weaponry, the United States has engaged in serial acts of overkill. In Afghanistan, it was the recent use of MOAB, the “mother of all bombs,” the largest non-nuclear weapon the United States has ever used in combat, against a small concentration of ISIS fighters.

In similar fashion, the U.S. air war in Syria has outpaced the Russians and even the Assad regime in its murderous effects on civilians, especially around Raqqa, the “capital” of the Islamic State. Such overkill is evident on the ground as well where special ops raids have, this year, left civilians dead from Yemen to Somalia.

In other words, across the Greater Middle East, Washington’s profligate killing machine is also creating a desire for vengeance among civilian populations, staggering numbers of whom, when not killed, have been displaced or sent fleeing across borders as refugees in these wars. It has played a significant role in unsettling whole regions, creating failed states, and providing yet more recruits for terror groups.

Leaving aside technological advances, little has changed since Vietnam. The U.S. military is still relying on enormous firepower to kill elusive enemies as a way of limiting American casualties.  As an instrument of victory, it didn’t work in Vietnam, nor has it worked in Iraq or Afghanistan.

But never mind the history lessons. Trump asserts that his “new” Afghan strategy — the details of which, according to a military spokesman, are “not there yet” — will lead to more terrorists being killed.

Since 9/11, America’s leaders, Trump included, have rarely sought ways to avoid those gnats, while efforts to “drain the swamp” in which the gnats thrive have served mainly to enlarge their breeding grounds.  At the same time, efforts to enlist indigenous “gnats” — local proxy armies — to take over the fight have gone poorly indeed.

As in Vietnam, the main U.S. focus has invariably been on developing better, more technologically advanced sledgehammers, while continuing to whale away at that cloud of gnats — a process as hopeless as it is counterproductive.

Incessant warfare represents the end of democracy. I didn’t say that, James Madison did.

I firmly believe, though, in words borrowed from Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower, that “only Americans can hurt America.”  So how can we lessen the hurt? By beginning to rein in the military. A standing military exists — or rather should exist — to support and defend the Constitution and our country against immediate threats to our survival.

Endless attacks against inchoate foes in the backlands of the planet hardly promote that mission.  Indeed, the more such attacks wear on the military, the more they imperil national security.

A friend of mine, a captain in the Air Force, once quipped to me: you study long, you study wrong. It’s a sentiment that’s especially cutting when applied to war — you wage war long, you wage it wrong. Yet as debilitating as they may be to militaries, long wars are even more devastating to democracies. The longer our military wages war, the more our country is militarized, shedding its democratic values and ideals.

Back in the Cold War era, the regions in which the U.S. military is now slogging it out were once largely considered “the shadows” where John le Carré-style secret agents from the two superpowers matched wits in a set of shadowy conflicts. Post-9/11, “taking the gloves off” and seeking knockout blows, the U.S. military entered those same shadows in a big way and there, not surprisingly, it often couldn’t sort friend from foe.

A new strategy for America should involve getting out of those shadowy regions of no-win war. Instead, an expanding U.S. military establishment continues to compound the strategic mistakes of the last 16 years. Seeking to dominate everywhere but winning decisively nowhere, it may yet go down as the greatest self-defeating force in history.

William Astore is a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel and history professor. He blogs at Bracing Views. This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.

​https://warisboring.com/the-american-military-uncontained/

By Craig McKee

For example, in his 2010 TED Talk “The pattern behind self-deception,” Shermer uses a joke to dispense with people who challenge the official 9/11 narrative:

The line gets a big laugh, as it is intended to do. But is the inherent argument rational? Or is it rhetorical manipulation? The audience members leave not only pleased with Shermer but with themselves. They get to feel superior to those incompetent government types who could simply never pull off a conspiracy this clever.

In his articles and presentations, Shermer offers colorful examples of “theories” that he claims have no credibility, and he deftly hints that these are typical of many or most “conspiracy theories.” Using one flimsy example or another, he guides the audience to pat dismissals of any challenges to mainstream narratives. After all, why go through the hard work of confronting real evidence when flippancy is so much more economical?

In the same TED Talk, Shermer points to the unsubstantiated theory that the Bush administration placed explosive devices in the levees around New Orleans so that the city would be flooded during Hurricane Katrina. He alleges that there are those who purport to have found some of these devices after the fact.

Why is this example typical? We never find out. We are just expected to accept that it is.

Rather than deal with the substance of arguments against any official story, Shermer will focus on why people believe the things that he insists are delusions, or he’ll push the idea that it would be too difficult for participants in a conspiracy to keep the secret. For him, it’s not about evidence, it’s about the psychological makeup of the people he is trying to discredit. He calls that science, though some would call it misdirection.

Both in Skeptic and in his monthly column in Scientific American magazine, Shermer tackles all manner of “controversial” topics: UFOs, paranormal events, alternative medicine, evolution and creationism, religion and miracles, psychology and the brain, and product scams. And he’ll tell you he stands on the side of rationality while those he investigates deal in fantasy and “bad ideas.” In fact, in his first Ted Talk, given in 2006 and titled “Why people believe weird things,” Shermer referred to himself and other “debunkers” as “the Ralph Naders of bad ideas.” I think he meant this to sound like a good thing.

When Shermer isn’t debunking a bogus marijuana dousing rod or a grilled cheese sandwich alleged to sport the image of the Virgin Mary, he’s telling us we should accept official accounts of world-changing events like 9/11 and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Not to do so, he contends, is to engage in illogical and delusional thinking.

For Shermer, it’s about patterns and how we often see them when they are not there. He has even invented his own words to describe the phenomenon. In his June 2009 article in Scientific American, “Why people believe invisible agents control the world,” Shermer defines his coined word “agenticity” as “the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents.” While that word is failing to catch on, he adds “patternicity,” which he defines as “the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise.” He imbues these conclusions with authority by making repeated references to the regions of the brain responsible for this erroneous pattern-seeking.

Shermer is forced to concede that it’s not all meaningless, that real conspiracies do exist (citing the Lincoln assassination), and that caution is required to avoid rejecting the patterns that really are there. But despite acknowledging this concern, he goes on to give it negligible weight. Too bad he hasn’t invented a word for those who ignore evidence of conspiracies to reach conclusions that official stories are almost always right. I propose “officialicity.”

There is no doubt that we humans sometimes do go beyond what actual evidence reveals and identify patterns that don’t really exist. But he uses this fact as a convenient catch-all to explain why most “conspiracy theories” are false.

The 9/11 Truth Movement has certainly not escaped Shermer’s attention, as we see in a January 2017 article he wrote for Scientific American with the headline, “How to convince someone when facts fail: why worldview threats undermine evidence.”

In it, Shermer starts with a statement that is true of many people, not just those who are open to conspiracies:

But isn’t this exactly what many self-proclaimed “skeptics” do? Not only do they reject out of hand the position that 9/11 was a false flag operation, but they won’t even look at the overwhelming evidence that the three World Trade Center towers were brought down in controlled demolitions. Here, he gets to 9/11 specifically:

Focus on minutiae? Like science? The laws of physics?

Further, Shermer is saying that members of the Truth Movement start with the conclusion that the government lies and conducts false flag operations and that its purpose is to create a New World Order. A package deal. They then seek out evidence to confirm their belief, he asserts. While he doesn’t use the term, he is saying this is simply the result of “confirmation bias,” not science. He does not, however, feel the need to support his claim. Just saying it makes it true.

Using this example and others, Shermer attempts to support his statement that “proponents' deepest held worldviews were perceived to be threatened by skeptics, making facts the enemy to be slayed.”

Get it? It’s the “skeptics” who have the facts. Those who challenge any official narrative only have deep world views and beliefs. According to him, it’s the “conspiracy theorists” who must slay the facts to prevent their beliefs from being contradicted.

Shermer’s brand of misdirection attempts to discredit those who challenge the government explanation for how the towers were brought down. And this is how he approaches any of the potential conspiracies he addresses.

But is it scientific to focus more on who is making a particular argument than on the quality of that argument? Does this approach match up with his self-professed reliance on evidence and actual research?

On the web site Skeptical about Skeptics, a profile-piece that is critical of Shermer offers these insights:

Shermer has dealt with 9/11 in various forums. He and Richard Gage, founder Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, debated this very topic on Oakland’s KKGN radio station back in 2008. This required Shermer to go into more detail about his positions, but his arguments showed the extent to which he pays lip service to science. Clearly, his goal is to poo-poo conspiracy theories, not to get to the truth.

For example, he couldn’t rebut Gage’s evidence for the use of thermite in the destruction of the three WTC towers, so he just offered this:

What an extraordinary admission from someone who published an entire issue of his magazine on the 9/11 evidence. Of course, Gage never said that the whole case hinged on any one piece of evidence. But the evidence for the use of thermite is powerful, and Shermer could only deflect because he hadn’t bothered to do any research on the subject.

Let’s take a look at Shermer’s astonishing explanation for why the Twin Towers fell through the path of greatest resistance:

What? Was there some science in that explanation that I missed? If the towers “have to” collapse straight down, why haven’t other steel-framed skyscrapers done this after catching fire and burning for far longer? Why did this happen only on September 11, 2001? Shermer acts as if the only thing he has to explain about the destruction of the towers is why they didn’t fall sideways, as if swatted by Godzilla.

And this is because of all the air in the buildings?

Aside from this narrative being false, it’s an attempt to answer the wrong question. The issue for most in the 9/11 Truth Movement is not why the towers didn’t topple over, it’s why they came down at all.

Here is a typical chronicling of the WTC evidence by Gage that his opponent never adequately answered:

How does Shermer explain the free fall? He doesn’t.

Every time Gage cited evidence that Shermer could not account for, he simply dismissed it or denied its existence. When Gage brought up the pools of molten iron found under all three WTC towers, Shermer said he hadn’t heard anything to support this claim. Before Gage could cite some of the dozens of accounts confirming the molten iron, Shermer pivoted to the subject of who Gage thinks brought the towers down and how they could have planted the explosives without being discovered. Obviously the Skeptic publisher was much more comfortable looking at these broad questions than he was the scientific ones within AE911Truth’s area of concentration.

Shermer worked hard to remain in his comfort zone as he reached for the familiar debunker argument that there was so much chaos going on that day, and that one would expect “anomalies.”

Is that what our minds do? I wonder which part of the brain searches for anomalies and avoids evidence. Is it the pre-frontal cortex? The fusiform gyrus? The temporal lobe? And is it the left hemisphere or the right?

More to the point, I wonder which part automatically believes every official story and prefers glib one-liners to real evidence.

I bet Shermer could tell me.

January 21, 2016

In this episode of 9/11 Free Fall, host Andy Steele is joined by Dana Carson, an activist from the Northern California 9/11 Truth Alliance. They review a recent public exchange they had with "skeptic" Michael Shermer at a talk he recently gave in the Bay area.

Craig McKee is a journalist and the creator of the blog Truth and Shadows.

The Trump administration is moving to keep the lengthy Senate report on the CIA’s torture and detention program forever from the public eye, the New York Times first reported Friday.

That’s because the administration is returning to Congress copies of the over 6,000-page document, following through on requests made by Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the Senate Intelligence Committee’s current chairman. Laws requiring government records to eventually be made public don’t apply to congressional documents.

The Times, citing multiple congressional officials, writes that the “CIA, the office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the CIA’s inspector general have returned their copies of the report.”

Burr, who’s been a critic of the report, said in a statement to Reuters: “I have directed my staff to retrieve copies of the Congressional study that remain with the Executive Branch agencies and, as the Committee does with all classified and compartmented information, will enact the necessary measures to protect the sensitive sources and methods contained within the report.”

But countered Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project: “It would be a travesty for agencies to return the CIA torture report instead of reading and learning from it, as senators intended.”

Shamsi, whose organization has sought for years public release of the report, added: “The landmark investigative report documents horrific abuses and details of CIA lies to the White House, Congress, the courts, and the public about its torture program. This critically important investigation should have been made public and must not be buried or destroyed.”

Human rights organization Reprieve also criticized the move to totally bury the report.

“America’s lack of interest in history—even our own—has now gone from pathological to dangerous,” said Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, U.S. attorney at Reprieve specializing in counter-terrorism abuses. “For over a decade, our government has refused to reckon with U.S. torture, preferring to deny or suppress the facts. It is no surprise that we now have a president whose contempt for facts leads to dangerous decisions. We cannot learn from history unless we know what it is.”

When the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report, then under the chairmanship of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), was released in December of 2014, Ben Emmerson, United Nations Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, said that those “responsible for the criminal conspiracy revealed in [the] report must be brought to justice, and must face criminal penalties commensurate with the gravity of their crimes.”

Sullivan-Bennis also referenced that shorter document as well as the still-open Guantanamo Bay prison, where “[h]armless men are still languishing [ . . . ] without charge or trial, due entirely to mistakes and abuses detailed in the summary of that report—merely the tip of the iceberg. My clients and the American people are entitled to see the truth. Lawmakers should be ashamed of this disgraceful cover-up, and Americans should ask themselves what our government is so desperate to hide.”

By Andrea Germanos
Posted on June 5, 2017

​This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Andrea Germanos is senior editor and a staff writer for Common Dreams, where this was originally published. Email: andrea@commondreams.org.

​http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/21327

—James Madison

​Who designed the malware worm that is now wreaking havoc on tens of thousands of computers internationally by hackers demanding a king’s ransom? The U.S. government.

Who is the biggest black market buyer and stockpiler of cyberweapons (weaponized malware that can be used to hack into computer systems, spy on citizens, and destabilize vast computer networks)? The U.S. government.

What country has one the deadliest arsenals of weapons of mass destruction? The U.S. government.

Who is the largest weapons manufacturer and exporter in the world, such that they are literally arming the world? The U.S. government.

Which is the only country to ever use a nuclear weapon in wartime? The United States.

How did Saddam Hussein build Iraq’s massive arsenal of tanks, planes, missiles, and chemical weapons during the 1980s? With help from the U.S. government.

Who gave Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida “access to a fortune in covert funding and top-level combat weaponry”? The U.S. government.

What country has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting? The U.S. government.

Where did ISIS get many of their deadliest weapons, including assault rifles and tanks to anti-missile defenses? From the U.S. government.

Which country has a history of secretly testing out dangerous weapons and technologies on its own citizens? The U.S. government.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from terrorism.

The U.S. government is creating the terror. It is, in fact, the source of the terror.

Just think about it for a minute: almost every tyranny being perpetrated against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.

Cyberwarfare. Terrorism.

Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race.

Surveillance. The drug wars.

In almost every instance, the U.S. government has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers.

It’s time to wake up and stop being deceived by government propaganda.

We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness. Rather, these are the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.

Case in point: For years now, the U.S. government has been creating what one intelligence insider referred to as a cyber-army capable of offensive attacks.

As Reuters reported back in 2013:

As part of this cyberweapons programs, government agencies such as the NSA have been stockpiling all kinds of nasty malware, viruses and hacking tools that can “steal financial account passwords, turn an iPhone into a listening device, or, in the case of Stuxnet, sabotage a nuclear facility.”

And now we learn that the NSA is responsible for the latest threat posed by the “WannaCry” or “Wanna Decryptor” malware worm which—as a result of hackers accessing the government’s arsenal—has hijacked more than 57,000 computers and crippled health care, communications infrastructure, logistics, and government entities in more than 70 countries already.

All the while the government was repeatedly warned about the dangers of using criminal tactics to wage its own cyberwars.

It was warned about the consequences of blowback should its cyberweapons get into the wrong hands.

The government chose to ignore the warnings.

That’s exactly how the 9/11 attacks unfolded.

First, the government helped to create the menace that was al-Qaida and then, when bin Laden had left the nation reeling in shock (despite countless warnings that fell on tone-deaf ears), it demanded—and was given—immense new powers in the form of the USA Patriot Act in order to fight the very danger it had created.

This has become the shadow government’s modus operandi regardless of which party controls the White House: the government creates a menace—knowing full well the ramifications such a danger might pose to the public—then without ever owning up to the part it played in unleashing that particular menace on an unsuspecting populace, it demands additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threat.

Yet the powers-that-be don’t really want us to feel safe.

They want us cowering and afraid and willing to relinquish every last one of our freedoms in exchange for their phantom promises of security.

As a result, it’s the American people who pay the price for the government’s insatiable greed and quest for power.

We’re the ones to suffer the blowback.

As historian Chalmers Johnson explains, “blowback is another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows.”

Unfortunately, “we the people” are the ones who keep reaping what the government sows.

We’re the ones who suffer every time, directly and indirectly, from the blowback.

We’re made to pay trillions of dollars in blood money to a military industrial complex that kills without conscience. We’ve been saddled with a crumbling infrastructure, impoverished cities and a faltering economy while our tax dollars are squandered on lavish military installations and used to prop up foreign economies. We’ve been stripped of our freedoms. We’re treated like suspects and enemy combatants. We’re spied on by government agents: our communications read, our movements tracked, our faces mapped, our biometrics entered into a government database. We’re terrorized by militarized police who roam our communities and SWAT teams that break into our homes. We’re subjected to invasive patdowns in airports, roadside strip searches and cavity probes, forced blood draws.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

We can persuade ourselves that life is still good, that America is still beautiful, and that “we the people” are still free.

However, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the moment you tune out the carefully constructed distractions—the year-round sports entertainment, the political theatrics, the military’s war cries, the president’s chest-thumping, and the techno-gadgets and social media that keep us oblivious to what’s really going on in the world around us—you quickly find that the only credible threat to our safety and national security is in fact the government itself.

As science fiction writer Philip K. Dick warned, “Don’t believe what you see; it’s an enthralling—[and] destructive, evil snare. Under it is a totally different world, even placed differently along the linear axis.”

In other words, all is not as it seems.

The powers-that-be are not acting in our best interests.

“We the people” are not free.

The government is not our friend.

And America will never be safe or secure as long as our government continues to pillage and plunder and bomb and bulldoze and kill and create instability and fund insurgencies and police the globe.

So what can we do to stop the blowback, liberate the country from the iron-clad grip of the military industrial complex, and get back to a point where freedom actually means something?

For starters, get your priorities in order. As long as Americans are more inclined to be offended over the fate of a Confederate statue rather than the government’s blatant disregard for the Constitution and human rights, then the status quo will remain.

Stop playing politics with your principles. As long as Americans persist in thinking like Republicans and Democrats—refusing to recognize that every administration in recent years has embraced and advanced the government’s authoritarian tactics—then the status quo will remain.

Value all human life as worthy of protection. As long as Americans, including those who claim to value the sanctity of human life, not only turn a blind eye to the government’s indiscriminate killings of innocent civilians but champion them, then the status quo will remain.

Recognize that in the eyes of the government, we’re all expendable. As long as we allow the government to play this dangerous game in which “we the people” are little more than pawns to be used, abused, easily manipulated and just as easily discarded—whether it’s under the guise of national security, the war on terror, the war on drugs, or any other manufactured bogeyman it can dream up—then the status quo will remain.

Demand that the government stop creating, stockpiling and deploying weapons of mass destruction: nuclear, chemical, biological, cyber, etc. As long as the government continues to use our tax dollars to create, stockpile and deploy weapons of mass destruction—whether those weapons are meant to kill, maim or disable (as in the case of the WannaCry computer virus)—we will be vulnerable to anyone who attempts to use those weapons against us and the status quo will remain.

Finally, stop supporting the war machine and, as Chalmers Johnson suggests, “bring our rampant militarism under control”:

By John W. Whitehead
Posted on May 19, 2017
​
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.

Highly toxic heavy metals and chemicals (that are systematically sprayed into our atmosphere from jet aircraft as part of the geoengineering/SRM programs) are manipulated with extremely powerful radio frequency signals. These signals are transmitted from countless locations around the globe from various types of transmission platforms (ionosphere heater installations like HAARP, SBX radar, NEXRAD, etc.). The impact of the microwave transmissions on cloud formations is profound and highly visible (square cloud formations are created under some scenarios). 

In the series of NASA satellite images below, many variances of radio frequency cloud impacts can be observed. The degree to which the ongoing climate engineering/climate/intervention/weather warfare is disrupting Earth's atmosphere and life support systems is already beyond catastrophic and happening all over the globe.

Though some may feel that cyclone suppression is beneficial, such interference with Earth's natural rhythms and systems has a long list of catastrophic downstream effects. Available data indicates that in other scenarios the climate engineers are actually augmenting and steering cyclones to serve their own agenda. "Hurricane Matthew" may be an example of weather warfare on an unimaginable scale. Is hurricane Matthew being heavily manipulated and steered by the climate engineers? The evidence continues to stack up. Below is a satellite photo clearly showing atmospheric "waves" surrounding hurricane Matthew. SpaceWeather.com has labeled these as "gravity waves", but is that what these visible "waves" actually are? The satellite photos already shown in this post inarguably reveal heavy atmospheric manipulation from extremely powerful radio frequency/microwave transmissions and atmospheric aerosols. These transmissions leave a signature pattern on high level cloud formations that are saturated with electrically conductive heavy metal nanoparticles which are dispersed from jet aircraft as part of the ongoing climate engineering insanity.

The global power structure long ago made the choice to subject our planet (and the entire web of life that it supports, including the human race) to an unimaginably massive and destructive climate intervention/weather warfare assault. This decision was made without the knowledge or consent of global populations. If we stand by and allow the decimation from the climate engineering insanity to continue, very soon Earth's life support systems will be beyond any recovery. This is not speculation, but a mathematical certainty. Help us with the most critical battle to expose and halt the climate intervention/weather warfare assault, all of us are needed in this fight.

​http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/nasa-satellite-imagery-reveals-shocking-proof-of-climate-engineering/

Radio frequency signals leave a very clear and visible signature, this signature is extremely recognizable on the image above.  Radio frequency transmissions are utilized for manipulating weather systems, cloud formations, and jet stream patterns. The electrically conductive heavy metal nanoparticles (that are constantly being sprayed into our atmosphere by the the geoengineers) are manipulated with the global grid of radio frequency transmitters (which the weathermakers control).
​
Square cloud formations are not the only indication of the climate engineering insanity, voids in cloud canopies are also a telltale sign of the ongoing manipulation. Nature does not make 90 degree corners in weather systems. 

Its supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Churchill. It was approved by Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who ruled in its favor. The famous names who supported it included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; activist Margaret Sanger; botanist Luther Burbank; Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University, the novelist H. G. Wells; the playwright George Bernard Shaw; and hundreds of others. Nobel Prize winners gave support. Research was backed by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was built to carry out this research, but important work was also done at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins. Legislation to address the crisis was passed in states from New York to California.

These efforts had the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. It was said that if Jesus were alive, he would have supported this effort.

All in all, the research, legislation, and molding of public opinion surrounding the theory went on for almost half a century. Those who opposed the theory were shouted down and called reactionary, blind to reality, or just plain ignorant. But in hindsight, what is surprising is that so few people objected.

Today, we know that this famous theory that gained so much support was actually pseudoscience. The crisis it claimed was nonexistent. And the actions taken in the name of this theory were morally and criminally wrong. Ultimately, they led to the deaths of millions of people.

The theory was eugenics, and its history is so dreadful—and, to those who were caught up in it, so embarrassing—that it is now rarely discussed. But it is a story that should be well known to every citizen, so that its horrors are not repeated.

The theory of eugenics postulated a crisis of the gene pool leading to the deterioration of the human race. The best human beings were not breeding as rapidly as the inferior ones—the foreigners, immigrants, Jews, degenerates, the unfit, and the “feeble minded.” Francis Galton, a respected British scientist, first speculated about this area, but his ideas were taken far beyond anything he intended. They were adopted by science-minded Americans, as well as those who had no interest in science but who were worried about the immigration of inferior races early in the twentieth century— “dangerous human pests” who represented “the rising tide of imbeciles” and who were polluting the best of the human race.

The eugenicists and the immigrationists joined forces to put a stop to this. The plan was to identify individuals who were feeble-minded—Jews were agreed to be largely feeble-minded, but so were many foreigners, as well as blacks—and stop them from breeding by isolation in institutions or by sterilization.

As Margaret Sanger said, “Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good is an extreme cruelty ... there is no greater curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles.” She spoke of the burden of caring for “this dead weight of human waste.”

Such views were widely shared. H. G. Wells spoke against “ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens.” Theodore Roosevelt said that “Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind.” Luther Burbank: “Stop permitting criminals and weaklings to reproduce George Bernard Shaw said that only eugenics could save mankind.

There was overt racism in this movement, exemplified by texts such as The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, by American author Stoddard. But, at the time, racism was considered an unremarkable aspect of the effort to attain a marvelous goal—the improvement of humankind in the future. It was this avant-garde notion that attracted the most liberal and progressive minds of a generation. California was one of twenty-nine American states to pass laws allowing sterilization, but it proved the most forward-looking and enthusiastic—more sterilizations were carried out in California than anywhere else in America.

Eugenics research was funded by the Carnegie Foundation, and later by the Rockefeller Foundation. The latter was so enthusiastic that even after the center of the eugenics effort moved to Germany, and involved the gassing of individuals from mental institutions, the Rockefeller Foundation continued to finance German researchers at a very high level. (The foundation was quiet about it, but they were still funding research in 1939, only months before the onset of World War Il.)

Since the 1920s, American eugenicists had been jealous because the Germans had taken leadership of the movement away from them. The Germans were admirably progressive. They set up ordinary-looking houses where “mental defectives” were brought and interviewed one at a time, before being led into a back room, which was, in fact, a gas chamber. There, they were gassed with carbon monoxide, and their bodies disposed of in a crematorium located on the property.

Eventually, this program was expanded into a vast network of concentration camps located near railroad lines, enabling the efficient transport and killing of ten million undesirables.

After World War II, nobody was a eugenicist, and nobody had ever been a eugenicist. Biographers of the celebrated and the powerful did not dwell on the attractions of this philosophy to their subjects, and sometimes did not mention it at all. Eugenics ceased to be a subject for college classrooms, although some argue that its ideas continue to have currency in disguised form.

But in retrospect, three points stand out. First, despite the construction of Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory, despite the efforts at universities and the pleading of lawyers, there was no scientific basis for eugenics. In fact, nobody at that time knew what a gene really was. The movement was able to proceed because it employed vague terms never rigorously defined. “Feeble-mindedness” could mean anything from poverty and illiteracy to epilepsy. Similarly, there was no clear definition of “degenerate” or “unfit.”

Second, the eugenics movement was really a social program masquerading as a scientific one. What drove it was concern about immigration and racism and undesirable people moving into one’s neighborhood or country. Once again, vague terminology helped conceal what was really going on.

Third, and most distressing, the scientific establishment in both the United States and Germany did not mount any sustained protest. Quite the contrary. In Germany scientists quickly fell into line with the program. Modern German researchers have gone back to review Nazi documents from the 1930s. They expected to find directives telling scientists what research should be done. But none were necessary. In the words of Ute Deichman, “Scientists, including those who were not members of the [Nazi] party, helped to get funding for their work through their modified behavior and direct cooperation with the state.” Deichman speaks of the “active role of scientists themselves in regard to Nazi race policy ... where (research) was aimed at confirming the racial doctrine ... no external pressure can be documented.” German scientists adjusted their research interests to the new policies. And those few who did not adjust disappeared.

A second example of politicized science is quite different in character, but it exemplifies the hazards of government ideology controlling the work of science, and of uncritical media promoting false concepts. Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was a self-promoting peasant who, it was said, “solved the problem of fertilizing the fields without fertilizers and minerals.” In 1928 he claimed to have invented a procedure called vernalization, by which seeds were moistened and chilled to enhance the later growth of crops.

Lysenko’s methods never faced a rigorous test, but his claim that his treated seeds passed on their characteristics to the next generation represented a revival of Lamarckian ideas at a time when the rest of the world was embracing Mendelian genetics. Josef Stalin was drawn to Lamarckian ideas, which implied a future unbounded by hereditary constraints; he also wanted improved agricultural production. Lysenko promised both, and became the darling of a Soviet media that was on the lookout for stories about clever peasants who had developed revolutionary procedures.

Lysenko was portrayed as a genius, and he milked his celebrity for all it was worth. He was especially skillful at denouncing his opponents. He used questionnaires from farmers to prove that vernalization increased crop yields, and thus avoided any direct tests. Carried on a wave of state-sponsored enthusiasm, his rise was rapid. By 1937, he was a member of the Supreme Soviet.

By then, Lysenko and his theories dominated Russian biology. The result was famines that killed millions, and purges that sent hundreds of dissenting soviet scientists to the gulags or the firing squads. Lysenko was aggressive in attacking genetics, which was finally banned as “bourgeois pseudoscience” in 1948. There was never any basis for Lysenko’s ideas, yet he controlled Soviet research for thirty years. Lysenkoism ended in the 1960s, but Russian biology still has not entirely recovered from that era.

Now we are engaged in a great new theory, that once again has drawn the support of politicians, scientists, and celebrities around the world. Once again, the theory is promoted by major foundations. Once again, the research is carried out at prestigious universities. Once again, legislation is passed and social programs are urged in its name. Once again, critics are few and harshly dealt with.

Once again, the measures being urged have little basis in fact or science. Once again, groups with other agendas are hiding behind a movement that appears high-minded. Once again, claims of moral superiority are used to justify extreme actions. Once again, the fact that some people are hurt is shrugged off because an abstract cause is said to be greater than any human consequences. Once again, vague terms like sustainability and generational justice—terms that have no agreed definition—are employed in the service of a new crisis.

I am not arguing that global warming is the same as eugenics. But the Similarities are not superficial. And I do claim that open and frank discussion of the data, and of the issues, is being suppressed. Leading scientific journals have taken strong editorial positions on the side of global warming, which, I argue, they have no business doing. Under the circumstances, any scientist who has doubts understands clearly that they will be wise to mute their expression.

One proof of this suppression is the fact that so many of the outspoken critics of global warming are retired professors. These individuals are no longer seeking grants, and no longer have to face colleagues whose grant applications and career advancement may be jeopardized by their criticisms.

In science, the old men are usually wrong. But in politics, the old men are wise, counsel caution, and in the end are often right. The past history of human belief is a cautionary tale. We have killed thousands of our fellow human beings because we believed they had signed a contract with the devil, and had become witches. We still kill more than a thousand people each year for witchcraft. In my view, there is only one hope for humankind to emerge from what Carl Sagan called “the demon-haunted world” of our past. That hope is science.

But as Alston Chase put it, “when the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power.”

That is the danger we now face. And that is why the intermixing of science and politics is a bad combination, with a bad history. We must remember the history, and be certain that what we present to the world as knowledge is disinterested and honest.
​
Michael Crichton
State of Fear
APPENDIX I

Lauren Hansen

On April 4, 2014, veteran Associated Press photographer Anja Niedringhaus was seated in the back of a guarded vehicle at a checkpoint near Khost, Afghanistan. The 48-year-old, who had photographed the region and its people for more than 20 years, was covering Afghanistan's presidential election. While the car sat idly, an Afghani policeman stepped out of the crowd and opened fire, killing Niedringhaus immediately.

This was one of her last photos:

The Anja Niedringhaus Courage in Photojournalism Award, created by the International Women's Media Foundation, honors the life and work of the Pulitzer Prize winner who spent more than two decades covering conflicts from Bosnia to Afghanistan. For the winners of this year's inaugural award, however, the acknowledgement is bittersweet.

"There's a lot of survivors guilt that goes into this," says winner Heidi Levine says. "They're very big shoes to fill."

Below, a look at the work of Levine and the two women who received honorable mentions, Rebecca Blackwell and Anastasia Vlasova. All three had either known Niedringhaus or were inspired by her work.

Heidi Levine, winner

Levine is an American freelance photographer based in Jerusalem. Over three decades, she has traveled the Middle East photographing such critical moments as the Israel-Lebanon war; the revolutions in Egypt, Libya, and Syria; and conflicts in the Gaza Strip.

"I cover a lot of conflict and war," she says. "But I don't like war or conflict. I'm driven to do it because my purpose and goal is to try to put a stop to what is happening."

While Levine finds herself a minority in the male-dominated field of war reporting and photojournalism, she says there are advantages to being a woman. "When, for example, I want to slip behind doors, especially in the Middle East where the sexes are so separated," she says. "In those cultures, not just any male can walk into a house without permission."

And while the opposite is also true — Levine has had to maneuver around her fair share of slammed doors — her work isn't about what makes her different. "I spent most of my career proving that I can do the same [as my male colleagues]. There are times when I try to fight against it and times when I'm more accepting of it. But I know what I can do."

Rebecca Blackwell, honorable mention

American Rebecca Blackwell had the itch to travel early on. A pivotal two-year trip across West Africa, the Middle East, and much of Asia not only introduced her to photography but also solidified her desire to search out worlds outside her own.

She eventually moved to West Africa where she stayed for 10 years, working as a freelancer and later for the Associated Press, covering the Somali famine, Sahel droughts, and the Ivory Coast as it spiraled into conflict in 2010 and 2011.

Anastasia Vlasova, honorable mention

When violence erupted between pro- and anti-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine in 2014, photojournalist Anastasia Vlasova didn't hesitate to venture into the war zone. "I felt that this is my place, my country, my duty," she says. "I really care about what's going on, and I want the world to care as well. These people deserve for their stories to be told in an objective, respectful, and sympathetic way."

What keeps her going is focusing on the people, not the guns. "Showing the life of civilians caught in war is one of the most important things during conflicts and one of the least reported by Ukrainian media."

Vlasova says that while being a woman initially held her back from the front lines, she has come to realize her strength is in searching out those who are struggling with grief and the chaos of living among constant conflict.

That eastern Ukraine is her home brings with it a particular burden that doesn't end when she puts her camera down. But Vlasova says, she is emboldened by a quote from Russian short-story writer Anton Chekhov:

"At the door of every happy, contended man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall him — illness, poverty, loss — and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn't hear or see others now." [Anton Chekhov, Five Little Stories]

Vlasova says with each image, she aims to be that little hammer tapping on the shoulders of the public. Or, she adds, "maybe I’m too young and idealistic."

**The Anja Niedringhaus Courage in Photojournalism Award was created in 2014 by the International Women's Media Foundation. It celebrates the courage of women photojournalists who risk their lives documenting conflict and war while capturing moments of humanity. The first award ceremony will be held in Berlin on June 25, 2015. For more information about the IWMF or any of this year's winners, go to their website.**


http://theweek.com/captured/553394/women-warriors-photojournalism