tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30764622763433710052024-02-21T08:33:15.406-05:00LUKE MITCHELLEssays, letters, posts, reviews, etc.Luke Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08968715243704059643noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076462276343371005.post-14638848886762804532014-05-05T13:34:00.000-04:002014-05-07T10:13:11.276-04:00[London Review of Books] WHAT KILLED THE NEANDERTHALS? The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert, 336 pp, US $28 <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjGDKTtnqcwPIUkzgAZv546M0Ik7rdZPOdUs8hzWFxi87vX_L9cTfzdGbpLfYCtyTtb5Do8wa_zpHzIuWVe6Oe-TzE_Yw8fcukJtLRPTbiljKHu6zl8kD0uCW75zWQgkMCF7kVoIAu7XWG/s1600/2001_Final.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjGDKTtnqcwPIUkzgAZv546M0Ik7rdZPOdUs8hzWFxi87vX_L9cTfzdGbpLfYCtyTtb5Do8wa_zpHzIuWVe6Oe-TzE_Yw8fcukJtLRPTbiljKHu6zl8kD0uCW75zWQgkMCF7kVoIAu7XWG/s1600/2001_Final.jpg" /></a></div><br />
In 1739, Captain Charles Le Moyne was marching four hundred French and Indian troops down the Ohio River when he came across a sulphurous marsh where, as Elizabeth Kolbert writes, ‘hundreds – perhaps thousands – of huge bones poked out of the muck, like spars of a ruined ship.’ The captain and his soldiers had no idea what sort of creatures the bones had supported, whether any of their living kin were nearby and, if so, what sort of threat they presented. The bones were similar to an elephant’s, but no one had seen anything like an elephant near the Ohio River, or indeed anywhere in the New World. Perhaps the animals had wandered off to the uncharted wilds out west? No one could say. The captain packed up a massive circular tusk, a three-foot-long femur and some ten-pound teeth, carried them around for several months as he went about the difficult task of eradicating the Chickasaw nation, and finally delivered the relics, after a stopover in New Orleans, to Paris, where they confounded naturalists for several decades.<br />
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A contemporary reader might guess, correctly, that the bones belonged to a species of animal that had long since ceased to exist – in fact, they came from <i>Mammut americanum</i>, the American mastodon – but at the time such an imaginative leap would have been very difficult, because it hadn’t yet occurred to anyone that an entire species <i>could</i> cease to exist. ‘Aristotle wrote a ten-book <i>History of Animals</i> without ever considering the possibility that animals actually had a history,’ Kolbert writes, and in Linnaeus’s <i>Systema Naturae</i>, published four years before Le Moyne’s discovery, ‘there is really only one kind of animal – those that exist.’ The French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc thought the bones might belong to a species that, uniquely in history and for reasons unknown, had disappeared from the Earth, but his conjecture was widely rejected. Thomas Jefferson put forward the consensus view in 1781, in his <i>Notes on the State of Virginia</i>: ‘Such is the economy of nature, that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.’<br />
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In 1796, Georges Cuvier presented a new theory: nature did permit links to be broken, sometimes a lot of them all at once. Cuvier, just 27, was teaching at the Paris Museum of Natural History, one of the few institutions to survive the Terror, and had spent many hours studying its collection of fossils and bones. He noticed that the teeth of Le Moyne’s <i>incognitum</i> had unusual little bumps on them, like nipples. He became convinced these were not elephant teeth. He called their owner <i>mastodonte</i>, ‘breast tooth’. Other remains were similarly unmatched to the contemporary world: the elephant-sized ground sloth, called megatherium, bones of which had been discovered near Buenos Aires and reassembled in Madrid (Cuvier worked from sketches); the meat-eating aquatic lizard (now called mosasaurus), whose massive fossilised jaw had been picked out of a quarry near Maastricht; the woolly mammoth, whose frozen remains were everywhere in Siberia. Such creatures must have populated a lost world. ‘But what was this primitive earth?’ Cuvier asked. ‘And what revolution was able to wipe it out?’<br />
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These were interesting questions, but Cuvier’s contemporaries were slow to consider answers. More and more they were coming to accept that occasionally species might disappear – Darwin would soon propose that ‘the appearance of new forms and the disappearance of old forms’ were procedurally ‘bound together’ by natural selection – but evolution was a gradual process. Mass extinction, ‘revolution’, was something else. The claim that nature could undergo a sudden radical shift seemed not just historically unfounded but scientifically (and perhaps politically) untenable. Charles Lyell countered Cuvier’s anarchic ‘catastrophism’ with stately ‘uniformitarianism’. All change, geological or biological, took place gradually, steadily. Any talk of catastrophe, Lyell admonished, was ‘unphilosophical’.<br />
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The evidence of catastrophe accrued nonetheless. Geologists have understood since the 17th century that sedimentary layers of rock and soil mark the passage of time, the youngest layers at the top, the oldest at the bottom, and that sometimes geological forces will push up a slice of the world that contains several aeons’ worth of fossil-rich strata, which we can read like the lines of a census report. The fossils in most layers did indeed demonstrate a uniform degree of biodiversity, but some indicated a massive decline. Where once there were many different forms of life, suddenly there were few.<br />
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Palaeontologists and geologists now generally agree that the Earth has endured five major extinctions, and more than a dozen lesser ones. The first took place 450 million years ago, during the late Ordovician period, and the most lethal 200 million years later, during the Permian-Triassic – ‘the great dying’, when nine out of ten marine species vanished. The most terrifying of the mass extinctions, though, was surely the fifth, the Cretaceous-Palaeogene incident, which began 65 million years ago when an asteroid the size of Manhattan smashed into the Yucatan Peninsula with the explosive impact of a hundred million hydrogen bombs, triggering what the palaeobiologist Peter Ward, <a href="http://nautil.us/issue/0/the-story-of-nautilus/ingenious-nautilus-and-me">writing last year</a> in <i>Nautilus</i>, called "life’s worst day on Earth, when the world’s global forest burned to the ground, absolute darkness from dust clouds encircled the earth for six months, acid rain burned the shells off of calcareous plankton, and a tsunami picked up all of the dinosaurs on the vast, Cretaceous coastal plains, drowned them, and then hurled their carcasses against whatever high elevations finally subsided the monster waves."<br />
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The lesson that mass extinction is normal is hard to accept. Scientists are beginning to recognise that we’re in the middle of another event, perhaps the sixth mass extinction, but that recognition too has been slow in coming. In 1963, Colin Bertram, a marine biologist and polar explorer, warned that human expansion could destroy ‘most of the remaining larger mammals of the world, very many of the birds, the larger reptiles, and so many more both great and small’, and in 1979 the biologist Norman Myers published a little-read book called <i>The Sinking Ark</i>, showing with statistics that Bertram had been correct. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that large numbers of biologists began to take such concerns seriously. In 1991, the palaeobiologist David Jablonski published a paper in <i>Science</i> that compared the present rate of loss to that of previous mass extinctions. Other papers followed and by 1998 a survey by the American Museum of Natural History found that seven out of ten biologists suspected another mass extinction was underway. In 2008, two such biologists, David Wake and Vance Vredenburg, asked in a widely discussed paper, ‘Are We in the Midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction?’ The answer arrived in 2012 from a large team of biologists and palaeontologists writing in <i>Nature</i>: we almost certainly are. If we continue at the current rate of destruction, about three-quarters of all living species will be lost within the next few centuries.<br />
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Theories about what caused the earlier extinctions have varied – droughts, methane eruptions, volcanic ash, the ongoing problem of asteroids, the orbit of an invisible sun, our motion through the spirals of the Milky Way – but there’s little doubt about the culprit behind the sixth extinction. Wake and Vredenburg list the proximate causes: ‘human population growth, habitat conversion, global warming and its consequences, impacts of exotic species, new pathogens etc’. What most of these causes have in common isn’t just that they are the result of human activity, but that they have been going on for a very long time. In an elegant tracing, Kolbert demonstrates how precisely the human wake matches the millennial waves of extinction:<br />
<blockquote>The first pulse, about forty thousand years ago, took out Australia’s giants. A second pulse hit North America and South America some 25,000 years later. Madagascar’s giant lemurs, pygmy hippos and elephant birds survived all the way into the Middle Ages. New Zealand’s moas made it as far as the Renaissance. It’s hard to see how such a sequence could be squared with a single climate change event. The sequence of the pulses and the sequence of human settlement, meanwhile, line up almost exactly.</blockquote><br />
Despite the clear trend, it’s hard to say with any precision how many species are dying, or have died, or will die. One reason, as Darwin said, is that species come and go. The ordinary ‘background’ rate of extinction for mammals is about one every seven hundred years, and for amphibians a little higher. A second reason, not unrelated to the first, is that biologists have no real baseline for the current number of species. They can make good guesses, but the world is a big place, and biologists are getting better and better at finding new species. They may discover dozens in a day, but half of them will be in the process of dying out: it’s as if the biologists were going from room to room flicking on the lights in a house from which much of the life was rapidly scurrying.<br />
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They have seen enough, though, to draw a bleak picture. The historical record shows that the European lion, the Labrador duck and the passenger pigeons that once darkened the American prairie have all gone the way of the dodo (and the Pallas cormorant and the white-winged sandpiper and the Carolina parakeet). We know too that in recent years amphibians seem to have become especially endangered. (A 2007 study suggested that the current amphibian extinction rate was 45,000 times greater than the expected background rate.) And we also know, Kolbert writes, that ‘one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all freshwater molluscs, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles and a sixth of all birds are headed towards oblivion.’ E.O. Wilson calculated that the current rate of extinction for all animals was ten thousand times greater than the background rate, a loss of biodiversity that is helping to create what the nature writer David Quammen memorably described as a ‘planet of weeds’, a simple world where ‘weedy’ animals – pigeons, rats, squirrels – thrive and little else remains.<br />
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Most of <i>The Sixth Extinction</i> is about dead or dying animals: the great auk, little brown bats, Neanderthals, sea snails, the Sumatran rhino. Such a book should be depressing, but Kolbert’s isn’t, largely because our attention is drawn not just to the work of destruction but also to the work of discovery. The asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, for instance: how did we come to know about such an unlikely event? In the 1970s, Walter Alvarez, a geologist, was studying the Gola del Bottaccione, a gorge in Perugia where tectonic activity had lifted and tilted the ancient Italian limestone 45 degrees, and visitors could hike past a hundred million years of strata in just a few hundred yards. About halfway up, which is to say about 65 million years ago, was a puzzling half-inch clay stratum – the exposed Cretaceous-Palaeogene (K-Pg) boundary. In the limestone below was evidence of bountiful Cretaceous life; in the limestone above, quite a lot less Palaeogene life. A good uniformitarian would argue that the clay marked the passage of a very long period of time, enough for a stately adjustment of the census. Alvarez was a good uniformitarian but he was also curious: how long? He took some samples home to California and mentioned the mystery to his father. Luis Alvarez, a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, had won the Nobel Prize in 1968 for discovering (in his son’s apposite description) ‘a whole zoo of subatomic particles’. He liked interesting challenges. He had just probed one of the pyramids at Giza with cosmic rays in the hope of finding secret chambers. (There were none.) Why not determine how much time was compressed into the clay layer by using another radiometric technique? Fine meteorite dust, which could be identified by its high concentration of iridium, settles on the Earth at a steady rate. A layer with more iridium would be a layer that had accumulated over a longer period. Detecting such infinitesimal traces wouldn’t be easy, but Luis had a former student who could do it. They sent the samples out for testing and the results were startling. The clay contained much more iridium than anyone expected: much more than would ordinarily be found anywhere. Now father and son were really interested. They studied other samples from the K-Pg boundary, from Denmark and New Zealand. The results were the same. A hypothesis occurred to them: asteroid impact. They wrote it up for <i>Science</i>, which published ‘Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction’ in 1980. The world was interested, but unconvinced. More data needed. The Alvarezes realised that an impact would leave a kind of fingerprint, in the form of ‘shocked quartz’, a pressure deformation that geologists had first noticed around the sites of underground nuclear tests. They looked for that fingerprint in the records of thousands of core samples from around the world, and were able to zero in on a possible centre of impact on the Yucatan Peninsula, where geologists had previously discovered, then forgotten, a hundred-mile-wide crater hidden under a half-mile of sediment: Chicxulub. This time scientists were more persuaded. The last to get on board was the press. ‘Astronomers should leave to astrologers the task of seeking the cause of earthly events in the stars,’ the editors of the <i>New York Times</i> wrote. ‘Complex events seldom have simple explanations.’ Walter Alvarez wrote back to the editors and told them their claim was contradicted by the entire history of physics.<br />
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The evidence of the sixth extinction has been more direct. In the 1960s, David Wake studied the toads that densely populated the Sierra Nevada in Panama. ‘You’d be walking through meadows, and you’d inadvertently step on them,’ he told Kolbert. In the 1980s, his students in the field began to report that toads were nowhere to be found. Wake assumed they were looking in the wrong places. He went down to see for himself and ‘found like two toads’. Other herpetologists were reporting similar amphibian crashes: the golden toad of Costa Rica, the southern day frog of Australia, even the blue poison-dart frogs raised in captivity at the National Zoo in Washington DC. What was happening? The culprit, veterinary pathologists discovered, was <i>Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis</i>. The fungus, which makes it difficult for amphibians to soak up the electrolytes they need to prevent their hearts from stopping, was spreading by way of the ships that connect all the watery parts of the world. On any given day, the ballast water of the global fleet may contain as many as ten thousand different species, any one of which might, once blasted from the bilge, make war on some new world.<br />
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The fifth extinction was caused by an asteroid, the sixth by man. The comparison is unflattering. One doesn’t wish to be revealed as unthinkingly, irredeemably murderous. Balzac suggested that Cuvier’s discoveries made him the greatest poet of the century, because he had ‘reconstructed worlds from a whitened bone; rebuilt, like Cadmus, cities from a tooth’. But Cuvier’s greater achievement, perhaps, was simply to recognise so subtle a disruption in the pattern of existence. We have long been aware of our own mortality, and now we are waking to the existence of another, longer chain of life. It’s an important recognition. Palaeontologists have found Neanderthal bones everywhere from Israel to Wales, and agree that the species died out suddenly, about thirty thousand years ago, which is suspiciously close to the time that <i>Homo sapiens</i> began its expansion from Africa. One theory is that clever man simply murdered his stronger cousin. But there are other theories. Maybe we simply outhunted our cousins, or carried a disease that was novel to them. Or maybe our contribution to their demise was even more indirect; animals with a long reproductive cycle are vulnerable to even the slightest of disruptions. John Alroy, an American palaeobiologist, has run computer simulations that suggest it would take just a tiny bit of interference with the Neanderthal birth rate, over the course of a few thousand years, to drive it to extinction. Alroy called this a ‘geologically instantaneous ecological catastrophe too gradual to be perceived by the people who unleashed it’. Such imperception is no longer possible. ■Luke Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08968715243704059643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076462276343371005.post-34356851843633061422013-02-10T14:46:00.000-05:002013-03-27T10:21:24.550-04:00We should track attitudes about human rights at least as well as we track attitudes about presidents<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlMu9672n9Nf79-XXhM5MOYUYQQIeJ5MiNsw7hyO-zt5nWTUX_9Klpvkwo7PFZIaqlMfQ31xe3YLfnOlHmIizJ9OzCWiXMdmeCzgeT8UD79hohXPHWLCZGw0FYnrJcizabuqblua-huiBq/s1600/pew.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlMu9672n9Nf79-XXhM5MOYUYQQIeJ5MiNsw7hyO-zt5nWTUX_9Klpvkwo7PFZIaqlMfQ31xe3YLfnOlHmIizJ9OzCWiXMdmeCzgeT8UD79hohXPHWLCZGw0FYnrJcizabuqblua-huiBq/s540/pew.png" /></a></div>The fact that torture appears to have grown more popular in recent years is disturbing, but it's also worth knowing. Indeed, we should be doing a lot more to understood American attitudes about human rights. Unfortunately, we’re not asking the same questions often enough to draw any meaningful conclusions about trends. (Pew's polling is so infrequent that <a href="http://www.people-press.org/2011/09/01/united-in-remembrance-divided-over-policies/">any given trend</a> could be an outlier, and we can’t check Pew against other polls because <a href="http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/torturetoplines.pdf">other pollsters are phrasing the questions differently</a>.) So here's what should happen: Pew or some other non-profit group should launch a wide-ranging poll of attitudes about human rights, including torture, and repeat it monthly until the end of time. We do it for presidential approval ratings. Opinions about human rights are at least as important as opinions about presidents!Luke Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08968715243704059643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076462276343371005.post-21689180877162749302012-11-15T12:26:00.000-05:002014-05-05T14:35:36.408-04:00[London Review of Books] BURNING UP THE WORLD Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, by Steve Coll, Penguin, 704 pp, US $36 <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEWeEQlgC9Jx_4y7Sk8FLHMbtDapXpGO80xL5Ghy4866HBhF731EkMbm6z5c6YCDfk1WCPLBuGKCLLmE4Z7jgljqZFidJWW3aRyDa7q-b7I0-qNrIw26YOZSJW2X2MNIKT6gHx8xu2aJzf/s1600/titusville.jpg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:0em"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEWeEQlgC9Jx_4y7Sk8FLHMbtDapXpGO80xL5Ghy4866HBhF731EkMbm6z5c6YCDfk1WCPLBuGKCLLmE4Z7jgljqZFidJWW3aRyDa7q-b7I0-qNrIw26YOZSJW2X2MNIKT6gHx8xu2aJzf/s540/titusville.jpg.jpg" /></a><font size="1"></div><b>Titusville, Pennsylvania, 1865</B></font size="1"><br />
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In November 1902, Ida Tarbell published ‘The Birth of an Industry’, the first of 19 reports for <i>McClure’s Magazine</I> about the organisation that had come to control 90 per cent of the business – still new at the time – of producing oil. Collected two years later in her <i>History of the Standard Oil Company</I>, the series did little to celebrate the company or its founder, John D. Rockefeller. ‘It is doubtful if there has ever been a time since 1872 when he has run a race with a competitor and started fair,’ Tarbell wrote. But she didn’t call for an end to the corporate form Rockefeller had done so much to invent. Instead, she saw in his creation an ideal case study. ‘The perfection of the organisation of the Standard,’ she wrote, ‘the ability and daring with which it has carried out its projects, make it the pre-eminent trust of the world, the one whose story is best fitted to illuminate the subject of combinations of capital.’ Tarbell grew up in Pennsylvania oil country, and admired the ingenuity and ambition of the independent oilmen (her father among them) who had ‘peopled a waste place of the earth’ and ‘added millions upon millions of dollars to the wealth of the United States’. She admired Rockefeller’s genius and discipline as well, but for Tarbell, and eventually for the US government, Standard’s long record of collusion, espionage and predatory pricing was too much. ‘I was willing that they should combine and grow as big and rich as they could,’ Tarbell later wrote. ‘But they had never played fair, and that ruined their greatness for me.’ In 1911, the Supreme Court, influenced in part by Tarbell’s disappointed muckraking, split Rockefeller’s company into 34 ‘baby Standards’. In 1973, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, largest of the babies, changed its name to Exxon Corporation. And in 1998 Exxon recombined with the Standard Oil Company of New York, which had by then changed its name to Mobil. The new company, with eighty thousand employees in nearly two hundred countries, remains our ‘pre-eminent trust’, but – as Steve Coll argues in his fine bookend to Tarbell’s masterpiece – it has also become something more.<br />
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Coll picks up the story in 1989 with the wreck of the <i>Exxon Valdez</I>, which dumped 240,000 barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Alaska. He goes on to recount, among other sensational episodes, the lethally bungled kidnapping in 1992 of an Exxon division president from the driveway of his New Jersey mansion; an abortive rebel siege of an ExxonMobil outpost in Aceh in 2001; the failed coup (funded in part by Mark Thatcher) against the ExxonMobil-backed president of Equatorial Guinea in 2004; and the unsteady rise in 2006 of Nigerian oil pirates, whose ‘picaresque criminality – their head scarves, bandoliers and speedboats; their bank robbery techniques, which included using massive charges of dynamite to blast away reinforced steel doors – seemed increasingly inspired by Hollywood’. Like Tarbell, Coll has constructed a narrative around the oilmen’s extraordinary efforts to stay a step ahead of anyone who might get between them and some new patch of crude. Where kidnappers, rebels, conspirators and (for the most part) pirates failed, ExxonMobil succeeded. But <i>Private Empire</I> is no boy’s own adventure for middle managers.<br />
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The pivotal event in the history of ExxonMobil, as Coll sees it, wasn’t the wreck of the <i>Exxon Valdez</I>, important though that was, but the fall of the Berlin Wall. ‘The Cold War’s end,’ he writes, ‘signalled a coming era when non-governmental actors – corporations, philanthropies, terrorist cells and media networks – all gained relative power.’ The title of Daniel Yergin’s history of the oil industry, <i>The Prize</I> (1991), came from a similar argument made by Winston Churchill in 1911, when he was First Lord of the Admiralty. The best way to prepare for war with Germany, Churchill believed, would be to upgrade the Royal Navy so that it used oil as fuel rather than coal. It would be risky, in large part because ‘the oil supplies of the world were in the hands of vast oil trusts under foreign control.’ But if ‘we overcame the difficulties and surmounted the risks, we should be able to raise the whole power and efficiency of the navy to a definitely higher level; better ships, better crews, higher economies, more intense forms of war power – in a word, mastery itself was the prize of the venture’. As Yergin noted, winning such a prize ‘inevitably meant a collision between the objectives of oil companies and the interests of nation-states.’ This clash is the real subject of Coll’s book. A single nation, the United States, once had the power to break apart the mighty Standard Oil Company. But in the post-Soviet era, ExxonMobil prevailed.<br />
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The oil age began with two mid-19th-century inventions. In 1849, a Canadian physician developed a method for refining petroleum into a clear liquid, ‘kerosene’, that cost less than whale oil and burned more brightly in lamps. And in 1859, Edwin Drake, realising that subterranean pools of oil could be tapped like water in a well, drilled a pipe seventy feet down through the granite beneath a creek near Titusville, Pennsylvania, and was soon counting profits at 25 barrels a day. Within months, an army of entrepreneurial chemists, coopers, drillers, engineers, geologists, pipefitters, surveyors and teamsters had transformed the rugged forestland of Western Pennsylvania into a pipe-infested oil works, the horizon crowded with derricks and rivers clogged with barrel-packed barges. In 1859, they produced two thousand barrels of oil. By 1879, it was twenty million.<br />
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Producing oil is far more difficult today than it was when Rockefeller made his fortune. For every barrel of oil it sells, ExxonMobil has to discover another, otherwise its total reserve would diminish and with it the overall share price. By the time Lee Raymond became CEO in 1993, the company had to replace more than a billion barrels a year just to stand still. (When an oil industry analyst asked him what disturbed his sleep, Raymond answered: ‘Reserve replacement.’) The era of ‘easy oil’, when domestic deposits of light sweet crude all but leapt to the surface, was long past. The material problem – of discovering and extracting a resource that is hidden under miles of rock or ocean or both, often in a form that is not amenable to easy pumping or shipping – was challenging enough. But that challenge had in recent years been exacerbated by ‘resource nationalism’: oil-rich nations were creating their own oil companies. And as Exxon struggled to sign and maintain lease agreements that could last for up to forty years with the variously dictatorial or failing governments of nations that happened to find themselves in control of newly discovered oil deposits, it was also called on to have opinions about local politics. The oil it needed, Coll writes, ‘was subject to capture or political theft by coup makers or guerrilla movements, and so the corporation became involved in small wars and kidnapping rackets that many other international companies could gratefully avoid’. It also inserted clauses into its contracts with national oil companies and foreign governments guaranteeing its rights to arbitration at, say, the World Bank if the host country tried to alter the terms of their agreement.<br />
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As the scope of the business grew, so did the scope for disaster: bigger ships to sink, longer pipelines to leak, more complex refineries to explode. Spills meant losing oil. They cost a lot to clean up. They drew notice from regulators. Lawsuits could be extremely expensive. And there was also the price of bad publicity. The wreck of the <i>Exxon Valdez</I> made Exxon ‘the most hated oil company in America’. Being hated might not make it harder to sell oil, but it did make it harder to recruit the very best engineers, which amounted to the same thing. ExxonMobil met the challenge with rigid purposefulness. The engineer charged with overseeing worldwide safety argued, in Coll’s paraphrase, ‘that a fanatical devotion to safety in complex operational units such as refineries could lead to greater profits because the discipline required to achieve exceptional safety goals would also lead to greater discipline in cost controls and operations’. He may have been right. ExxonMobil still causes serious disasters – in 2006, for instance, an underground storage tank at one of its service stations in Jacksonville, Maryland leaked 24,000 gallons of gasoline into the local groundwater supply – but it keeps track of every mishap, all the way down to (literally) bee stings and paper cuts. The corporation requires employees to back into parking spots, so that in an emergency they can speed away more quickly, and rewards those who have low incident rates with customised safety vests or Walmart gift cards. The corporate motto, posted everywhere, is: ‘Nobody gets hurt.’ By 2006, ExxonMobil had an incident rate well below the industry norm, and was consistently turning record-breaking profits.<br />
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ExxonMobil has thrived because it has never lost sight of its purposes. Find oil, sell oil, make money. Meanwhile, as Coll notes near the conclusion of <i>Private Empire</I>, the United States has been heading in the opposite direction. In 2011, Standard & Poor’s downgraded US bonds to AA-plus. The downgrade, Coll notes, ‘meant that ExxonMobil, one of only four American corporations to maintain the AAA mark, now possessed a credit rating superior to that of the US’. ExxonMobil also had better cash flow – a positive $493 billion between 1998 and 2010, versus a negative $5.7 trillion for the US. Bond ratings and cash flow are far from the best or only indicators of wise governance, but nonetheless, as Coll observes, ‘in an era of terrorism, expeditionary wars and upheaval abroad, coupled with tax cutting and reckless financial speculation at home,’ ExxonMobil ‘navigated confidently’, while the US ‘foundered’.<br />
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What is the source of ExxonMobil’s confidence? Part of it is simply the expertise of the professional engineer. ‘From the beginning the Standard Oil Company has studied thoroughly everything connected with the oil business,’ Tarbell wrote. ‘It has known, not guessed at, conditions. It has had a keen authoritative sight. It has applied itself to its tasks with indefatigable zeal.’ A century later, little has changed. ‘They’re all engineers, mostly white males, mostly from the South,’ one former ExxonMobil board member told Coll. ‘They shared a belief in the One Right Answer, that you would solve the equation and that would be the answer, and it didn’t need to be debated.’ The attitude gained them respect but little love. Executives from other oil companies, Coll writes, ‘tended to regard their Exxon cousins as ruthless, self-isolating and inscrutable, but also as priggish Presbyterian deacons who proselytised the Sunday school creed Rockefeller had lived by: “We don’t smoke; we don’t chew; we don’t hang with those who do.”’ One executive, Coll writes, was startled to learn that ‘the corporation’s top five leaders, all white males, were the fathers, combined, of 14 sons and zero daughters.’ He had no explanation for this statistical fluke.<br />
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When Raymond took over as CEO, he had already overseen the company’s move from Manhattan to Irving, Texas, a blank suburb of Dallas that was more in keeping with his sensibility. He had a PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota and quizzed his engineers in great detail about their work. If he didn’t like their answers, he dismissed them as ‘stupid shits’. Raymond was born with a cleft palate, and on bad days employees sometimes referred to him as ‘the Lip’. His only hobby was golf. His protégé, Rex Tillerson, who took over in 2006, was literally a boy scout. His father was an assistant district executive for the Boy Scouts of America, and Tillerson made the top rank, eagle scout. Scout language soon ‘found its way into ExxonMobil promotional materials’. Tillerson’s favourite book was Atlas Shrugged.<br />
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Raymond, whose private jet crew was instructed to make sure that his favourite drink, milk with popcorn in it, was always in reach, did not lack confidence. ‘I’m never going to say that we are always doing everything exactly right,’ Raymond testified at an <i>Exxon Valdez</I> deposition. ‘I would be naive to do that: but if you are asking me, are there any major decision points that we faced in how to respond to that spill, that in hindsight we go back and say we were wrong … I don’t think there are any.’ That phrase – ‘decision points’ – was the title of George W. Bush’s memoir. Bush and Dick Cheney both worked in the oil industry, and took on some of the tics of their colleagues’ behaviour. Both are ostentatiously blunt and ‘candid’. Both present themselves as ‘results-oriented’. But this was mostly for show. (Bush’s 11-year run as a Texas oilman, in which he lost his investors millions of dollars, ended when he was bought out by friends of his father.) Actual oilmen do seem more appealing by comparison. Certainly Tarbell would have approved. Unlike Standard before it, ExxonMobil achieved a reputation for operating, just barely, within the letter of the law. ‘Exxon made a fetish of rules,’ Coll reports, because they thought they were smart and disciplined enough to win without rigging the game. They were hardnosed, rigid, but, as one former Republican staffer told him, ‘honest as the day is long’.<br />
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Tarbell, recalling her youth in the <i>New Yorker</I> in 1937, remembered one of her neighbours struggling with the changes wrought by the invention of the modern oil well. The ‘countryside was turned topsy-turvy’, she wrote.<br />
<blockquote>Less than twenty miles away a man drilled a hole some seventy feet into the earth and began pumping up large quantities of petroleum. The news spread, and overnight men from all directions came hurrying into the country to try their luck. They even hauled their engines and tools over his hilltop, cutting up the roads, tearing down his fences. Many of his neighbours turned teamsters or drillers. He thought the whole business impious and applauded when the preacher declared that taking oil out of the Earth was interfering with the plans of the Almighty, because He had put it there to use in burning up the world on the last day.</blockquote><br />
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In 1997, Raymond travelled to China to address the 15th World Petroleum Congress on the subject of climate change. The bulk of his speech was devoted to three points: the climate was not changing; even if the climate was changing, our demand for fossil fuels was not the cause; and even if our demand for fossil fuels was the cause, we should continue to demand them. ‘The most pressing environmental problems of the developing nations are related to poverty, not global climate change,’ he said. ‘Addressing these problems will require economic growth, and that will necessitate increasing, not curtailing, the use of fossil fuels.’<br />
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Raymond could have been quoting Rockefeller, who would often say to his board members: ‘Give the poor man his cheap light, gentlemen.’ It’s a legitimate point. Even Coll, who does not shy away from cataloguing ExxonMobil’s sins, and has been careful to chronicle the company’s long and shameful history of funding climate-change denialism through its various PACs and research groups, is philosophical about the need to keep the oil flowing: ‘85 per cent of the world’s energy – to fuel cars and trucks, to run air conditioners, to keep iPhone-tapping legions fully charged – still came from taking fossil fuels out of the ground and burning them.’ He could as well have added a note on world hunger: people need fossil fuels not just to fuel the combines that harvest food and the trucks that deliver it, but also to create the fertiliser that grows it. Fritz Haber’s invention – right around the time of the break-up of Standard – of a technique for manufacturing ammonia using hydrogen derived from methane, effectively transforming fossil fuels into rich fertiliser, is the reason food production has kept pace with population growth; the best argument for cheap fuel is that it means cheap food.<br />
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But as Coll acknowledges, these are all short-term arguments. Much of <i>Private Empire</I> focuses on war and specific incidents of manmade disaster: the <i>Exxon Valdez</I>, various pipeline spills, Deepwater Horizon, dirty wars in Africa and Indonesia, the wars in Iraq. The largest oil-company related disaster, though, is climate change, which will destroy not just life in the Gulf of Mexico, but life in all of the oceans and on much of the land as well. The smaller disasters happened when the oilmen failed, but climate change is happening because they are successful.<br />
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Forecasters in ExxonMobil’s strategic planning department predicted in 2005 that the only thing that would prevent growing demand for oil (and, not incidentally, growing profits for ExxonMobil) would be an unprecedented global carbon tax, and for that to happen, in Coll’s summary of their findings, ‘the world’s governments would have to reach a unified conclusion that climate change presented an emergency on the scale of the Second World War – a threat so profound and disruptive as to require massive national investments and taxes designed to change the global energy mix.’ The forecasters assumed this would not happen. But a decade after Raymond made his speech against taking any kind of action on climate change, his successor was making headlines by calling for just such a tax. Some environmentalists suggested that Tillerson made his move in order to sabotage a more ‘realistic’ plan to pass a cap-and-trade bill (which did in fact end up going nowhere). But Tony Kreindler, the national media director of the Environmental Defense Fund, suggested a theory that seemed more in keeping with the ExxonMobil mindset: ‘They took a very hard look at their business model and decided they could simply out-compete everyone else if the policy were a carbon tax.’<br />
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Last June, Tillerson spoke before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Alan Murray, an editor at the <i>Wall Street Journal</I>, introduced the forum by citing Coll’s book, which, Murray noted, describes ExxonMobil as a corporate state with its own foreign policy. After making some comments about the opportunities that hydraulic fracturing (fracking) afforded, in terms of exploiting North America’s vast reserves of natural gas, Tillerson began to answer questions from the audience. Eventually, a white-haired man in a blazer asked him about the potentially devastating effects of climate change. ‘The seas will rise, the coastlines will be unstable for generations, the price of food will go crazy. This is what we face, and we all know it,’ the man said, calmly but obviously with great concern. And yet ‘if we burn all these reserves you’ve talked about, you can kiss future generations goodbye. And maybe we’ll find a solution to take it’ – carbon dioxide – ‘out of the air. But, as you know, we don’t have one. So what are you going to do about this? We need your help to do something about this.’<br />
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Tillerson, after a long preamble about the uncertainty of climate models in general, and the imprecision of sea-level rise estimates in particular, got to the point. ‘We believe those consequences are manageable,’ he said. ‘As a species, that’s why we’re all still here. We have spent our entire existence adapting, OK? So we will adapt to this.’ ExxonMobil, the greatest corporation in human history, would do nothing to address the greatest crisis in human history. Certainly nothing remotely on the scale of the endeavours that it regularly undertook in its century and a half of inventing and dominating history’s most powerful and consequential industry. ExxonMobil remains ‘the pre-eminent trust of the world – the one whose story is best fitted to illuminate the subject of combinations of capital’. Coll does illuminate it, and what we see is tragic: smart people doing their best to deliver what the world most wants, and in so doing destroying it. ■Luke Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08968715243704059643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076462276343371005.post-66722530346085441302009-12-04T21:58:00.000-05:002013-02-09T10:41:03.704-05:00[Harper's Magazine] UNDERSTANDING OBAMACARE To reform a system, first capture it<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx5YE2A_-kmF125LZIAsCbK6aNYFuJM1TefMCV32anLpYJvNWVwzHH-BNkZz-Q_X_95QtO61M5_T12VXhKzrgHmdaVHZFem4saWaQMPRoIX1yXwTSN4ocIYTJ84TjARqvX2pnDelyrEhu6/s1600/photo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:0em"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx5YE2A_-kmF125LZIAsCbK6aNYFuJM1TefMCV32anLpYJvNWVwzHH-BNkZz-Q_X_95QtO61M5_T12VXhKzrgHmdaVHZFem4saWaQMPRoIX1yXwTSN4ocIYTJ84TjARqvX2pnDelyrEhu6/s540/photo.jpg" /></a></div><font size="1"><b>Signing the Affordable Care Act, March 22, 2010<br />
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The idea that there is a competitive "private sector" in America is appealing, but generally false. No one hates competition more than the managers of corporations. Competition does not enhance shareholder value, and smart managers know they must forsake whatever personal beliefs they may hold about the redemptive power of creative destruction for the more immediate balm of government intervention. This wisdom is expressed most precisely in an underutilized phrase from economics: regulatory capture.<br />
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When Congress created the first U.S. regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission, in 1887, the railroad barons it was meant to subdue quickly recognized an opportunity. "It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of railroads at the same time that that supervision is almost entirely nominal," observed the railroad lawyer Richard Olney. "Further, the older such a commission gets to be, the more inclined it will be found to take the business and railroad view of things. It thus becomes a sort of barrier between the railroad corporations and the people and a sort of protection against hasty and crude legislation hostile to railroad interests." As if to underscore this claim, Olney soon after got himself appointed to run the U.S. Justice Department, where he spent his days busting railroad unions.<br />
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The story of capture is repeated again and again, in industry after industry, whether it is the agricultural combinations creating an impenetrable system of subsidies, or television and radio broadcasters monopolizing public airwaves for private profit, or the entire financial sector conjuring perilous fortunes from the legislative void. The real battle in Washington is seldom between conservatives and liberals or the right and the left or "red America" and "blue America." It is nearly always a more local contest, over which politicians will enjoy the privilege of representing the interests of the rich.<br />
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And so it is with health-care reform. The debate in Washington this fall ought to have been about why the United States has the worst healthcare system in the developed world, why Americans pay twice the Western average to maintain that system, and what fundamental changes are needed to make the system better serve us. But Democrats rendered those questions academic when they decided the first principle of reform would be, as Barack Obama has so often explained, that "nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have."<br />
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This claim reassured not just the people who like their current employment benefits but also the companies that receive some part of the more than $2 trillion Americans spend every year on health care and that can expect to continue receiving their share when the current round of legislation has come to an end. The health-care industry has captured the regulatory process, and it has used that capture to eliminate any real competition, whether from the government, in the form of a single-payer system, or from new and more efficient competitors in the private sector who might have the audacity to offer a better product at a better price.<br />
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The polite word for regulatory capture in Washington is "moderation." Normally we understand moderation to be a process whereby we balance the conservative-right-red preference for "free markets" with the liberal-left-blue preference for "big government." Determining the correct level of market intervention means splitting the difference. Some people (David Broder, members of the Concord Coalition) believe such an approach will lead to the wisest policies. Others (James Madison) see it only as the least undemocratic approach to resolving disputes between opposing interest groups. The contemporary form of moderation, however, simply assumes government growth (i.e., intervention), which occurs under both parties, and instead concerns itself with balancing the regulatory interests of various campaign contributors. The interests of the insurance companies are moderated by the interests of the drug manufacturers, which in turn are moderated by the interests of the trial lawyers and perhaps even by the interests, of organized labor, and in this way the locus of competition is transported from the marketplace to the legislature. The result is that mediocre trusts secure the blessing of government sanction even as they avoid any obligation to serve the public good. Prices stay high, producers fail to innovate, and social inequities remain in place.<br />
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No one today is more moderate than the Democrats. Indeed, the triangulating work that began two decades ago under Bill Clinton is reaching its apogee under the politically astute guidance of Barack Obama, "There are those on the left who believe that the only way to fix the system is through a single-payer system like Canada's," Obama noted (correctly) last September. "On the right, there are those who argue that we should end employer-based systems and leave individuals to buy health insurance on their own." The president, as is his habit, proposed that the appropriate solution lay somewhere in between. "There are arguments to be made for both these approaches. But either one would represent a radical shift that would disrupt the health care most people currently have. Since health care represents one-sixth of our economy, I believe it makes more sense to build on what works and fix what doesn't, rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch."<br />
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With such soothing words, the Democrats have easily surpassed the Republicans in fund-raising from the health-care industry and are even pulling ahead in the overall insurance sector, where Republicans once had a two-to-one fund-raising advantage. The deal Obama presented last year, the deal he was elected on, and the deal that likely will pass in the end is a deal the insurance companies like, because it will save their industry from the scrap heap even as it satisfies the "popular clamor for a government supervision."<br />
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The private insurance industry, as currently constituted, would collapse if the government allowed real competition. The companies offer no real value and so instead must create a regulatory system that virtually mandates their existence and will soon actually do so.<br />
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A study by the McKinsey Global Institute found that health insurance cost the United States $145 billion in 2006, which was $91 billion more than what would be expected in a comparably wealthy country. This very large disparity may be explained by another study, by the American Medical Association, which shows that the vast majority of U.S. health-insurance markets are dominated by one or two health insurers. In California, the most competitive state, the top two insurance companies shared 58 percent of the market. In Hawaii, the top two companies shared the entire market. In some individual towns there was even less competition—Weilmark, for instance, owns 96 percent of the market in Decatur, Alabama. "Meanwhile, there has been year-to-year growth in the largest health insurers' profitability," the AMA reports, even as "consumers have been facing higher premiums, deductibles, copayments and coinsurance, effectively reducing the scope of their coverage." And yet no innovating entrepreneurs have emerged to compete with these profitable enterprises. The AMA suggests this is because various "regulatory requirements" provide "significant barriers to entry." Chief among those barriers, it should be noted, is an actual congressional exemption from antitrust laws, in the form of the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945.<br />
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Insurance companies aren't quite buggy-whip manufacturers. But they are close. In the past, one could have made an argument that in their bureaucratic capacities—particularly, assessing risk and apportioning payments—insurance companies did offer some expertise that was worth paying for. But all of the trends in politics and in information technology are against insurance companies offering even that level of value. Insurance is an information business, and as technology makes information-management cheaper, technological barriers to entry will fall, and competition will increase. (People who relied on the cost of printing presses to maintain a monopoly should be able to relate.)<br />
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At the same time, the very idea of assessing health risk is beginning to be understood as undemocratic, as was revealed by the overwhelming support for the 2008 Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act, which bars insurers from assessing risk based on genetic information. Over time, more and more information will be off-limits to underwriters, so that insurance ultimately will be commoditized—every unit of insurance will cost about the same as every other unit of insurance. Managers know that one must never allow one's product to become a mere commodity. When every product is like every other product, brand loyalty disappears and prices plummet.<br />
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Which perhaps is one reason why the insurers themselves have always favored the central elements of the Democratic plan. As long ago as 1992, when Hillary Clinton was formulating her own approach to reform, the Health Insurance Association of America (now America's Health Insurance Plans, or AHIP) announced that insurers would agree to sell insurance to everyone, regardless of medical condition (guaranteed issue) if the government required every American to buy that insurance, and used tax dollars to subsidize those who could not afford to do so (universal mandate). Carl Schramm, the president of the association, said this was the "only way you preserve the private health-insurance industry. It's plain-out enlightened self-interest." The deal collapsed nonetheless, in part because Congress wanted to introduce a "community rating" system that would have put an end to underwriting by making insurers sell insurance to everybody in a given community for the same price. Insurers wanted to maintain the profitable ability to charge different prices to different people.<br />
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Last December, though, AHIP said it would support community rating as well, and since then the real negotiation has been all about details. The insurance companies would agree to sell their undifferentiated commodity to all people, no matter how sick, if the government agreed to require all people, no matter how healthy, to buy their undifferentiated commodity. Sick people who need insurance get insurance and healthy people who don't need insurance cover the cost. A universal mandate would include the 47 million uninsured—47 million new customers.<br />
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The Democratic plan looks to be a huge windfall for the insurance companies. How big is not known, but as BusinessWeek reported in August, "No matter what specifics emerge in the voluminous bill Congress may send to President Obama this fall, the insurance industry will emerge more profitable." The magazine quoted an unnamed aide to the Senate Finance Committee who said, "The bottom line is that health reform would lead to increased revenues and profits."<br />
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Democrats have crafted a plan full of ideas that almost certainly will help a lot of people who can't afford insurance now. It also happens to be the case that some of those ideas will significantly benefit the corporations that at one time or another have paid Democrats a lot of money.<br />
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The framework for reform, for instance, was authored not by Max Baucus, the Democratic senator who chairs the Finance Committee, but by his senior aide, Liz Fowler, who also directs the committee's health-care staff. She worked for Baucus from 2001 to 2005 but then left for the private sector. In 2008, reports the Washington gossip paper Politico, "sensing that a Democratic-controlled Congress would make progress on overhauling the health care system," she returned to Baucus's side. Where had she retreated to recover from her Washington labors? Politico does not say. In fact, she had become the vice president for public policy and external affairs at WellPoint, one of the nation's largest health-insurance corporations.<br />
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Pretty much everyone involved in health-care reform has been on the payroll of one health-care firm or another. Howard Dean, the former head of the Democratic National Committee and, heroically, a longtime proponent of a single-payer system, nonetheless recently joined McKenna Long & Aldrich, a lobbying firm with many clients in the industry. Nancy-Ann DeParle, the so-called health czar who is overseeing reform at the White House, is reported to have made as much as $6 million serving on the boards of several major medical firms. Tom Daschle, who was set to be Obama's secretary of health and human services until it emerged that he had failed to pay taxes on his limousine and driver, now earns a $2 million salary as a "special public policy advisor" for the lobbying firm of Alston & Bird, which represents, among many other clients, HealthSouth and Aetna. Asked to describe his current role, Daschle said, "1 am most comfortable with the word resource."<br />
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Most illustrative of the clever efficiency with which the Democrats have allowed themselves to be captured, though, is the strange journey of Billy Tauzin. He spent his first fifteen years in Congress as a "conservative" Democrat, struggling mightily to make his fellow party members more amenable to the needs of the healthcare industry. In 1994 he founded the "moderate" Blue Dog coalition, whose members continue to deliver the most reliably pro-business vote in the Democratic caucus. But the Blue Dogs of 1994 did not go far enough for Tauzin, so in 1995 he became a Republican, and by 2003 he finally had mastered the system to the degree that he could personally craft one of the largest corporate giveaways in American history: Medicare Part D. After that bill was made into law, he took the natural next step—he became president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the lobbying arm of the drug industry.<br />
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Now the circle is complete. The Democratic president of the United States, the candidate of change, the leader of the party Billy Tauzin deserted so long ago for failing to meet the needs of business, must "negotiate" directly with this Republican lobbyist, and rather than repeat this entire tortured journey himself, all Obama has to do is agree to Tauzin's demands—which he has. The Democratic deal for the drug companies is, if anything, even sweeter than the Democratic deal for the insurance companies. After one of Tauzin's many visits to the White House, he told the Los Angeles Times that the president had decided Medicare Part D would not be touched. "The White House blessed it," Tauzin said, assuring his clients that billions of government dollars would continue to flow their way. Democrats, meanwhile, must have been almost equally assured by the subsequent headline in Ad Age: "Pharma Backs Obama Health Reform with $150 Million Campaign."<br />
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What can Republicans do against opponents like that? They are trying to win back their friends in industry, but the effort is a bit sad. In September, for instance, Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky proposed an amendment that would, among other things, require a "cooling-off period" of seventy-two hours once the bill was completed. His colleague, Pat Roberts of Kansas, said such a pause would provide "the people that the providers have hired to keep up with all of the legislation that we pass around here" the opportunity to say, "Hey, wait a minute. Have you considered this?"<br />
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But of course "the people that the providers have hired"—having actually already written the legislation—are quite familiar with the details. The only hope for Republicans right now is if the insurers themselves decide they can get an even better deal by turning on the Democrats, which no doubt they eventually will. Just because competition has moved from the marketplace to the legislature does not mean it is any less intense. Even as various cartels and trusts compete for the favor of the parties, so too must the parties continue to compete for the favor of the cartels and the trusts. In October, for instance, the insurers appeared to turn against the Democrats when AHIP released a study that claimed the Democratic approach to reform would radically increase the cost of insurance. Obama, meanwhile, hit right back. In his weekly radio address, he said the study was "bogus," noted that the insurance companies had long resisted attempts at reform, and even called into question the validity of the industry's antitrust exemption. The New York Times reported that such attacks indicated a "sharp break between the White House and the insurance industry," but this was better understood as a negotiating gambit—perhaps insurers believed drug manufacturers were getting a better deal and saw an opening, or perhaps they simply wanted to revise a specific term of the bill, which at the time, according to the Wall Street Journal, would have increased their industry's tax burden by $6.7 billion a year.<br />
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As Democrats negotiate such impasses, the Republicans, no longer the favored party of corporate America, are left to represent nothing and no one but themselves. They are opposing reform not for ideological reasons but simply because no other play is available. They have lost the business vote, and even their call for "fiscal responsibility" is gestural at best. The "public plan" so hated by Republicans, for instance, would have reduced the cost of reform by as much as $250 billion over the next decade, yet the party universally opposed it because, as Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa explained, "Government is not a fair competitor. It's a predator."<br />
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Such non sequiturs have opened the way to the darker dream logic that of late has come to dominate G.O.P. rhetoric. Nothing remains but primordial emotion—the fear, rage, and jealousy that have always animated a significant minority of American voters—so Republican congressmen are left to take up concerns about "death panels" and "Soviet-style gulag health care" that will "absolutely kill seniors." Republicans, having lost their status as the party of business, have become the party of incoherent rage. It is difficult to imagine anything good coming from a system that moderates the will of corporations with the fantasies of hysterics. ■Luke Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08968715243704059643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076462276343371005.post-16325265177895069462009-07-04T22:41:00.000-04:002013-02-09T10:41:20.389-05:00[Harper's Magazine] WE STILL TORTURE The new evidence from Guantánamo<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiGW5eBkcJ-dJXdanqDwBIeIE1QDB_0IAOKnCvrxmF7DDe-1Gos-SGAOowezXUHLoWwN0-XQTJkAIa_9V-gK-cmPv5AVZtRrUA95NV5a-lV4Kld7OpFKRA9FEieN3TJIoImMsTCSbOQgwV/s1600/torture.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:0em"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiGW5eBkcJ-dJXdanqDwBIeIE1QDB_0IAOKnCvrxmF7DDe-1Gos-SGAOowezXUHLoWwN0-XQTJkAIa_9V-gK-cmPv5AVZtRrUA95NV5a-lV4Kld7OpFKRA9FEieN3TJIoImMsTCSbOQgwV/s540/torture.jpg" /></a></div><font size="1"><b>Untitled #2/07, ink on paper, by Sandy Walker</B></font size="1"><br />
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We face the temptation to believe that an election can “change everything”—that the stark contrast between Barack Obama and George W. Bush recapitulates an equally stark contrast between the present and the past. But political events move within a continuum, and they are driven by many forces other than democratic action, including the considerable power of their own momentum. Such is the case with the ongoing American experiment with torture.<br />
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The release in April of documents from the International Committee of the Red Cross, from the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Legal Council, and from the House Armed Services Committee gave further credence to what had long been known about CIA and military interrogation techniques. They are brutal and, despite the surreal claims of the Bush Justice Department, they are illegal. The assumption underlying coverage of “the torture story,” however, has been that U.S.-sponsored torture came to a halt on January 21. The culpability of the previous administration remains to be determined, we are told, and in terms of ongoing criminal liability, the worst Obama himself could do is obstruct an investigation. Regarding the launch of that investigation, we must be patient.<br />
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We cannot be patient, though, and not simply because justice must be swift. We cannot be patient because not only have we failed to punish the people who created and maintained our torture regime; we have failed to dismantle that regime and, in many cases, even to cease torturing.<br />
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This last charge is the least heard. Although it is true that waterboarding is once again proscribed, it is equally true that the government continues to permit a series of “torture lite” techniques— prolonged isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation, forcefeeding—that even Reagan appointee Judge Susan Crawford had to acknowledge amounted to torture when she threw out the government’s case against one accused terrorist. Like waterboarding, these techniques cause extreme mental anguish and permanent physical damage, and, like waterboarding, they are not permitted under international law. But unlike waterboarding, they remain on the books, in detailed prison regulations and field-manual directives, unremarked by anyone except a few activists.<br />
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The United States has always tortured. But our approach to torture has evolved over time. In the past, we preferred to keep the practice hidden. During the Cold War, we exported most of our torture projects to client regimes in Latin America, the Middle East, and South Asia, while at home we worked to perfect a new form of “no touch” interrogation that would achieve terror and compliance without leaving scars, even as we denounced similar practices employed by our enemies. This was the age of hypocrisy—our secrecy was the tribute war crimes paid to democracy.<br />
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The hypocritical period ended, of course, with the attacks of September 11, the national flinch, the chestthumping of George W. Bush, and the grim pronouncements of Dick Cheney, who loudly advertised his willingness to take the United States to “the dark side.” This, as we have all come to understand, was the time of open torture. It was the “shameful era,” when we put the techniques we had developed during the Cold War to use in the new “war on terror.”<br />
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Now we have entered what we may wish to call the post-torture era, except that it is not. Indeed, we cannot even revert to the easy hypocrisy of the Cold War. We have returned to our traditional practice of torturing and pretending not to, but the old routine is no longer convincing. We know too much. We know that we are still imprisoning men who very likely are completely innocent. We know that we still beat them. We know that we still use a series of punishments and interrogation techniques—touch and “no touch”— that any normal person would acknowledge to be torture. And we know that when those men protest such treatment by refusing to eat, we strap them to chairs and force food down their throats. We know all of this because it is well documented, not just by reporters and activists but by the torturers themselves.<br />
<br />
It is this very openness that suggests why this new age—let’s call it the era of legitimized torture—is so perilous, not just to the men who are tortured but to liberal democracy. The moment is rapidly approaching when President Obama will cease to be the inheritor of a criminal regime and instead become its primary controlling authority, when the ongoing war crimes will attach themselves to his administration. And when they do attach themselves, Obama’s administration will be forced to defend itself, as all administrations do. And it will defend itself by claiming that what we call crimes are not in fact crimes.<br />
<br />
This process has already begun. Rather than end illegal torture, we are now solidifying the steps that we have taken to make these activities legal. By failing to change the underlying problem even as we celebrate its supposed “solution,” we actually further entrench the past, the “bad” Bush era, into the present, the “good” Obama era. We will return to the rule of law, but within that rule will remain a rule of torture, given all the greater authority by our love of the new regime.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
We have a tendency in the United States to judge actions not by their intrinsic merit but by the stylishness with which they are executed. Although the ostentatious lawlessness of the previous administration was pleasing to some, it ultimately frightened the majority of Americans. It was far too flamboyant. Obama and the Democrats seem to have rejected ostentation and lawlessness, and are all the more popular for that rejection. But they have not rejected torture itself.<br />
<br />
As we learned from the Office of Legal Counsel memos, it is possible to parse “torture” to a considerable degree. What is the allowable incline for a waterboard? How many calories will suffice to avoid starvation? Which insects are permitted to be used in driving a man insane? The correct answer, according to those who parse, is the difference between a war crime and a heroic act of patriotism.<br />
<br />
The OLC memos have been discredited but not the thinking behind them. We are still parsing, still weighing, still considering the possibilities. Whereas once we understood torture to be forbidden—something to be hidden and denied—now we understand it to be “complex.” We are instrumental in our analysis, and that instrumentality is held to be a virtue. We don’t torture not because it is illegal or immoral or repugnant to democracy but because “it doesn’t work,” leaving the way clear to torture that does “work.”<br />
<br />
The combination of complexity and instrumentality creates the potential for a new inversion. We enter the “complex” realm of torture and draw a new line, and the logical consequence—the unavoidably intended consequence—is that whatever is on the “good” side of that line, the “useful” side, can no longer be called torture. And since it is no longer torture, it must be something else. In this way we arrive at the strangest and most absurd conclusion. What was once a crime becomes a sensible approach to law enforcement. And in becoming sensible it also becomes invisible.<br />
<br />
It is our evolving understanding of force-feeding that most clearly demonstrates this process of inversion and invisibility—not because it is the most horrifying form of torture, though it is horrifying, but because it has been so completely mainstreamed. Indeed, as it is practiced at Guantánamo, forcefeeding is understood not only to not be torture but in fact to be a form of mercy. It is understood, above all, as a way to “preserve life.”<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
As of this writing, at least thirty men are being force-fed at Guantánamo. They are being force-fed despite the departure of the administration that instituted force-feeding, despite the current administration’s order to shut down Guantánamo, and despite its even more specific order requiring prisoners there to be treated within the bounds of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which—by every interpretation but that of the U.S. government—clearly forbids force-feeding.<sup>1</sup><br />
<br />
Most of these prisoners are not facing imminent death. In fact, force-feeding is itself a risky “treatment” that can cause infections, gastrointestinal disorders, and other complications. The feedings begin very soon after prisoners begin a hunger strike, and continue daily— with military guards strapping them to restraint chairs, usually for several hours at a time—until the prisoners agree to end the strike. This hunger striker is not an emaciated Bobby Sands lying near death after many weeks of starvation. He is a strongman bound to a chair and covered in his own vomit.<sup>2</sup><br />
<br />
If force-feeding does not save lives, then what does it do? What makes it useful? From the perspective of the prisoner, there can be only one answer: Pain makes force-feeding useful. The pain makes the strike unbearable, and therefore it prevents further protest.<br />
<br />
This is not just a logical inference. The first experience many Guantánamo prisoners had with being forced to eat was not when they went on hunger strikes but rather when they underwent interrogations at the secret CIA bases where they were held prior to their arrival at Guantánamo. At these “black sites,” we now know from the ICRC and OLC reports, CIA interrogation teams used “dietary manipulation” as a “conditioning technique” to help gather “intelligence.” These techniques, in other words, were a form of torture, no different from other, more infamous techniques outlined in the same reports, including “walling,” “cramped confinement,” and “water dousing” (now better known as waterboarding).<br />
<br />
A 2005 memo signed by Steven Bradbury, then the acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel, explains the method. Dietary manipulation “involves the substitution of commercial liquid meal replacements for normal food, presenting detainees with a bland, unappetizing, but nutritionally complete diet.” The CIA interrogation team would strap the prisoners to chairs and feed them bottles of Ensure Plus—cited by name—for weeks on end. As Bradbury noted, it was hoped that this would cause the prisoners to become compliant.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>The interrogation team believed [redacted] “maintains a tough, Mujahidin fighter mentality and has conditioned himself for a physical interrogation.” The team therefore concluded that “more subtle interrogation measures designed more to weaken [redacted] physical ability and mental desire to resist interrogation over the long run are likely to be more effective.” For these reasons, the team sought authorization to use dietary manipulation, nudity, water dousing, and abdominal slap. In the team’s view, adding these techniques would be especially helpful [redacted] because he appeared to have a particular weakness for food and also seemed especially modest.</blockquote><br />
In imposing dietary control, safety was always a concern. “While we do not equate commercial weight-loss programs and this interrogation technique,” Bradbury wrote, “the fact that these calorie levels are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.” Bradbury even anticipated the almost sentimental patina of caregiving that informs the presentday discussion of force-feeding at Guantánamo, noting that “a detainee subjected to the waterboard must be under dietary manipulation, because a fluid diet reduces the risks of the technique”—by reducing the risk of choking on undigested vomit. The force-feeding, in other words, was for the good of the prisoner.<br />
<br />
Forcing a man to drink a diet shake may seem like a minor affront, far removed from the rack or even from waterboarding. But actual prisoner testimony from another set of documents, the Red Cross interviews acquired by Mark Danner and published in <i>The New York Review of Books</I> in April, suggests that the dietary manipulation was traumatizing:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>During the first two weeks I did not receive any food. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. A guard would come and hold the bottle for me while I drank....<br />
<br />
During the first month I was not provided with any food apart from on two occasions as a reward for perceived cooperation. I was given Ensure to drink every 4 hours. If I refused to drink then my mouth was forced open by the guard and it was poured down my throat by force....<br />
<br />
I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by [the] hands and feet [and] given no solid food during the first two or three weeks, while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit, but this became less with time....</blockquote><br />
That is how we treated prisoners at CIA black sites, back in the shameful era. It is by no means the worst instance of man’s inhumanity to man. But dietary manipulation clearly was not a technique meant primarily to preserve life.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
Compare now the shameful and repudiated practice of dietary manipulation under Bush to the sensible, life-preserving practice of “involuntary feeding” at Guantánamo today, in the post-torture era.<br />
<br />
In February, Lieutenant Colonel Yvonne Bradley, a U.S. military lawyer representing Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who was recently released from Guantánamo, described a now-familiar situation to the <i>Guardian</I>. “Binyam has witnessed people being forcibly extracted from their cell,” she said. “SWAT teams in police gear come in and take the person out; if they resist, they are force-fed and then beaten.”<br />
<br />
Bradley continued,<br />
<br />
<blockquote>It is so bad that there are not enough chairs to strap them down and forcefeed them for a two or three-hour period to digest food through a feeding tube. Because there are not enough chairs the guards are having to force-feed them in shifts. After Binyam saw a nearby inmate being beaten it scared him and he decided he was not going to resist. He thought, “I don’t want to be beat, injured or killed.” </blockquote><br />
That same month, Ahmed Ghappour, an attorney with the human-rights group Reprieve, which represents thirty-one detainees at Guantánamo, told Reuters that prison officials were “over-force-feeding” hunger strikers, who were suffering from diarrhea as they sat tied to their chairs. He said in some cases officials were lacing the nutrient shakes with laxatives. And the situation was getting worse. “According to my clients, there has been a ramping up in abuse since President Obama was inaugurated,” Ghappour said, speculating that guards there wanted to “get their kicks in” before the camp closed.<br />
<br />
David Remes, an attorney who represents fifteen detainees at Guantánamo, wrote in an April petition to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that one of his clients, Farhan Abdul Latif, had been suffering in particular. When the nasogastric tube “is threaded though his nostril into his stomach,” it “feels like a nail going into his nostril, and like a knife going down his throat.” Latif had in recent months resorted to covering himself with his own excrement in order “to avoid force-feeding and that, when he was finally force-fed, the tube was inserted through the excrement covering his nostrils.”<sup>3</sup><br />
<br />
Another prisoner, Maasoum Abdah Mouhammad, told his lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights that he and fifteen other men had also refused to eat:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Mr. Mouhammad described that men were vomiting while being overfed. Some of the striking detainees had kept their feeding tubes in their noses even when not being force-fed just to avoid having the tubes painfully reinserted each time. Mr. Mouhammad reported that interrogators were pressuring and coercing the men on hunger strike to eat, making promises that they would be moved to the communal living camp if they began eating. Mr. Mouhammad described these experiences as “torture, torture, torture.”</blockquote><br />
What was torture at the black sites remains torture today at Guantánamo. It is perhaps ironic that what began as a method for making men talk—in fact, as we are now learning, in order to make them lie, about ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq—is now a method of preventing men from “talking,” of preventing them from registering protest at the injustice of their condition. But that irony should not prevent us from recognizing the simple fact of the torture itself.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
Every U.S. institution that could prevent force-feeding has failed to do so. Congress has failed to act, as have the courts, as has the president. Today the American Medical Association refuses even to sanction the doctors employed at Guantánamo.<br />
<br />
District Judge Gladys Kessler had the opportunity to address forcefeeding in February, when lawyers for Mohammed Al-Adahi and four other prisoners at Guantánamo sought an immediate injunction against the practice. Kessler denied the injunction on the unconvincing grounds that her court lacked not just the jurisdiction but the competency to dispense justice. “Resolution of this issue requires the exercise of penal and medical discretion by staff with the appropriate expertise,” she wrote, “and is precisely the type of question that federal courts, lacking that expertise, leave to the discretion of those who do possess such expertise.” Once again, complexity prevents intervention. (Kessler, it should be noted, began her career working for Democrats in Congress.)<br />
<br />
The Pentagon, so richly empowered by the circuit court, has failed as well. Dr. Ward Casscells was appointed assistant secretary of defense for health affairs in 2007 and thus far has survived in his role as the Pentagon’s top health official. I asked his spokesperson, Cynthia Smith, why he was continuing the previous administration’s policy of force-feeding even after the new president had ordered prisoners to be treated within the bounds of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. “The policy does save lives,” Smith wrote back (a week later, stipulating that I attribute quotes to her instead of to Casscells). “Idly watching detainees for whose care we are responsible engage in self-starvation to the point of permanent damage to health or death is not required by U.S. law, Common Article 3, or medical ethics.” <sup>4</sup><br />
<br />
Smith went on to note that some strikers may be protesting because they feel pressured to do so by other prisoners. In such cases, forcefeeding was a way to help them resist that pressure. This was a strange argument. Given that the prisoners are separated from one another and are under constant surveillance, such pressure could come only in the form of appeals to conscience. Smith’s logic was reminiscent of the claim by Marc Thiessen, a former Bush speechwriter, in the Washington Post in April: “The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely”—which itself brings to mind the case of Alvaro Jaume, who was tortured under medical supervision in Uruguay in the 1980s, and who recalled, “These doctors are saving lives, but in a perverse way. The aim of torture is thwarted if the victim cannot support the interminable ordeal. The doctor is needed to prevent you from dying for your convictions.”<sup>5</sup> All of which, in any case, suggests that the Pentagon has no intention of changing its policy.<br />
<br />
President Obama, to date, has done nothing either. In February, Ramzi Kassem, a Yale law professor who represents one of the hunger strikers, sent a formal letter to Gregory Craig, the new White House counsel, outlining the legal concerns about forcefeeding and recommending in detail how to bring the treatment of hunger strikers in line with the Geneva Conventions (for instance, by prohibiting the use of restraint chairs). Obama could simply order these changes, but he has not.<br />
<br />
Obama did ask Navy Admiral Patrick Walsh to visit Guantánamo and report back on conditions there. Walsh found the practices in question, including the use of restraint chairs, to be perfectly acceptable. When Reuters asked Walsh about specific incidents of abuse, he was evasive. “We heard allegations of abuse,” he said. “What we found is that there were in some cases substantiated evidence where guards had misconduct, I think that would be the best way to put it.”<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
Force-feeding is an especially egregious example of legitimized torture, but it is far from the only example. Just one percent of the prisoners held offshore by the United States are held at Guantánamo, and many other techniques remain legally available to their jailers. The Army Field Manual still permits solitary confinement, sensory deprivation, and sleep deprivation, as well as so-called emotional techniques such as “fear up,” which involves terrifying prisoners into a state of “learned helplessness.”<br />
<br />
It is difficult to know the degree to which these practices are employed, though, because President Obama has adopted not only much of the Bush Administration’s torture policy but also its radical doctrine of secrecy. The Obama White House has sought to prevent detainees at Bagram prison in Afghanistan from gaining access to courts where they may reveal the circumstances of their imprisonment, sought to continue the practice of rendering prisoners to unknown and unknowable locations outside the United States, and sought to keep secret many (though not all) of the records regarding our treatment of those detainees.<br />
<br />
The result is that what would at first seem to be something positive— a “national conversation about torture”—has instead become a form of complicity. We know that torture occurred, and we know that it continues to occur. Yet we allow ourselves to pretend otherwise because we don’t know <i>enough</I>. The secrecy allows us to transform a taboo into an “issue,” and most voters seem to desire, as Judge Kessler did, to leave the resolution of that issue to the “penal and medical discretion” of “a staff with the appropriate expertise.” In one recent poll only 35 percent of Americans called for the closing of Guantánamo, whereas 45 percent wanted to keep it open and 20 percent weren’t sure what we should do.<br />
<br />
As ever, Democrats are attempting to split the difference. A major claim by Obama is that he does not want people in the CIA “to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders”— presumably because he does not want to prejudge their “appropriate expertise.” A more persuasive means of preventing torture would be to say precisely the opposite, that people in the CIA <i>should</I> spend all their time looking over their shoulders. But that is not what Obama has said. Now those who would speak against torture in a crisis situation face a strong deterrent. They will be understood as taking a side on an issue—a <i>complex</I> issue—rather than simply upholding well-established legal (and at one time political) precedent.<br />
<br />
We have seen too much in the past eight years to pretend any longer that the United States is incapable of criminal abuse or to trust the “experts” to act secretly in what they believe, sincerely or not, to be our best interests. We have seen too much to permit ourselves the luxury of ambivalence. Indeed, now that we have seen what our nation has done in the depths of a panic, we should also be able to recognize the larger, longer-term crimes of our leaders. We have for many years imprisoned a greater proportion of our own people than any other nation on earth, kept many of those prisoners in the kind of prolonged solitary confinement that is shown in study after study to drive people insane, and countenanced the rape of those who aren’t in solitary confinement as part of a system of “rough justice.” We have known this about ourselves for a very long time and done nothing.<br />
<br />
Now we have a choice. We can continue our experiment with torture or we can harness the obvious horror of the last eight years to rectify the more discreet horrors of the distant past and the darkening present, and in so doing at last become a nation whose actions embody its pretensions. ■<br />
<br />
<i><sup>1</sup> The conventions forbid “humiliating and degrading treatment,” and doctors who advise the Red Cross, which in turn has considerable oversight in interpreting the conventions, have repeatedly made clear that force-feeding is humiliating and degrading. See, for instance, the judgment of Red Cross adviser Hernán Reyes, in a 1998 policy review: “Doctors should never be party to actual coercive feeding, with prisoners being tied down and intravenous drips or oesophageal tubes being forced into them. Such actions can be considered a form of torture, and under no circumstances should doctors participate in them, on the pretext of ‘saving the hunger striker’s life.’”<br />
<br />
<sup>2</sup> Dr. William Winkenwerder, who served as Bush’s assistant secretary of defense for health affairs and was therefore responsible for the forcefeeding policy at Guantánamo, explained this peremptory approach to me three years ago with an almost poignant question: “If we’re there to protect and sustain someone’s life, why would we actually go to the point of putting that person’s life at risk before we act?”<br />
<br />
<sup>3</sup> Latif, who is now being held in Guantánamo’s “Behavioral Health Unit,” has quite clearly been broken by his many years of confinement. Remes reports that his client has made several suicide attempts, the most recent of which was in his presence. “Without my noticing, he chipped off a piece of stiff veneer from the underside of the table and used it to saw into a vein in his left wrist,” he said. “As he sawed, he drained his blood into a plastic container I had brought and, shortly before our time was up, he hurled the blood at me from the container. It must have been a good deal of blood because I was drenched from the top of my head to my knees.” Latif survived this attempt as well. <br />
<br />
<sup>4</sup> Smith is one-third right. Force-feeding is indeed permitted under U.S. Bureau of Prison guidelines. But as previously noted, the Geneva Conventions are well understood to forbid the practice, and the guidelines of the World Medical Association are even more unambiguous: “Forcible feeding is never ethically acceptable.”<br />
<br />
<sup>5</sup> The historian A. J. Langguth recalled some similar thinking many years ago in the</I> New York Times, <i>drawing from the memoirs of a CIA asset in the Uruguayan police force who was trained in the 1960s by Dan Mitrione, of the U.S. Office of Public Safety (which was founded to facilitate the training of officials in states believed to be threatened by Communist subversion).<br />
<br />
“Before all else,” Mitrione explained to his Latin American protégé, “you must be efficient. You must cause only the damage that is strictly necessary, not a bit more. We must control our tempers in any case. You have to act with the efficiency and cleanliness of a surgeon and with the perfection of an artist.”<br />
<br />
Mitrione was a bureaucrat at heart. “It is very important to know beforehand whether we have the luxury of letting the subject die,” he said, adding that a “premature death means a failure by the technician.”<br />
<br />
Compare Mitrione’s claims with the words of the top lawyer at the CIA’s CounterTerrorism Center, Jonathan Fredman, at a 2002 strategy meeting (the minutes for which were released in 2008 by Carl Levin as part of an investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee, which he chairs). Fredman was similarly professional, emphasizing that “techniques that lie on the harshest end of the spectrum must be performed by a highly trained individual. Medical personnel should be present to treat any possible accidents.” He also discussed the strong requirement of a bureaucracy for documentation: “If someone dies while aggressive techniques are being used, regardless of cause of death, the backlash of attention would be severely detrimental. Everything must be approved and documented.” And he brought the same dark, almost humorous, perception of his task to bear, declaring that torture “is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies you’re doing it wrong.”<br />
<br />
Fredman, it should be noted, claims that he was “paraphrased sloppily and poorly.” The prudent degree of specificity may vary from regime to regime, but the mind of the torturer remains the same at all times and in all places.</I>Luke Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08968715243704059643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076462276343371005.post-86548294232436340232009-02-04T12:04:00.000-05:002013-02-09T10:41:32.745-05:00[Harper's Magazine] SICK IN THE HEAD Why America won't get the health-care system it needs<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghHmLrSXvbfCLanMVVe32KQdO8ZkhVYkqWRhfsbdxJeaABcxIL1xBf8ptx7CVYJnIpQVvtFT7FOkGVEkLM85E6ARWzwGDW79bT9SNOBCf4i90fLhh0-JLeL8KeLrkQTgv9fp6ylsS3jXBg/s1600/sickillo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghHmLrSXvbfCLanMVVe32KQdO8ZkhVYkqWRhfsbdxJeaABcxIL1xBf8ptx7CVYJnIpQVvtFT7FOkGVEkLM85E6ARWzwGDW79bT9SNOBCf4i90fLhh0-JLeL8KeLrkQTgv9fp6ylsS3jXBg/s540/sickillo.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<b>The Government Sector</b><br />
<br />
When Congress is in session, Michigan Congressman John Conyers holds a regular public meeting at the Rayburn House Office Building, where, if you happen to be interested in health policy, you are welcome to join like-minded citizens in considering the merits of HR 676, also known as The National Health Insurance Bill. If signed into law, HR 676 would require a single payer (the government) to provide health insurance to every American, which is likely why most Americans have never heard of it. Nearly every other wealthy nation has a single-payer system, but in the United States—or at least in Congress—single payer generally is understood to be too utopian, too extreme, and certainly too socialist for domestic consumption.<br />
<br />
I was surprised, therefore, when I went to one of the meetings in July and found a hundred or so people stuffed into a stately conference room. Everyone had a notebook, but no one had the bored look of a political reporter. These were activists, young and mostly black or Hispanic. Conyers, along with several guest speakers, sat behind balusters on a low platform that crossed the width of the room. At the other end, near the door, someone had arranged a banquet table potluck style, with tins of homemade brownies and cupcakes. I pushed my way to one of the few remaining chairs in the back as Conyers, now at the lectern and speaking softly into a microphone, asked whether anyone would like to address the gathering.<br />
<br />
The first to speak was a large man in an immaculate green suit. “My name is Kenny Barnes,” he said in a raspy whisper, “and I’ve got an organization called ROOT, Reaching Out to Others Together. It deals with the—my son was murdered, by the way—and it deals with the epidemic of gun violence that’s taking place in the United States of America.” Barnes quickly explained this striking interjection. Children in Washington were being traumatized by a culture of gun violence, and they had little access to mental-health services. A lot of them were being labeled as learning-disabled when in fact what they probably had was post-traumatic stress disorder. They needed help and they weren’t getting it.<br />
<br />
Conyers thanked Barnes, and then more people spoke. Each of them told a similarly compelling story. A group of people had been forgotten; they needed help and they weren’t getting it. Some of the groups fit within familiar bounds—minorities with AIDS, for example—but others were parsed to an almost surreal degree of precision. One woman spoke, persuasively, about the special problem of black men who don’t floss. Another addressed the challenge stoplights present to old people who cannot walk across the street in the amount of time it takes for a green light to turn red. Conyers’s aides, watching from seats next to the lectern, would occasionally stand and walk over to someone, whisper in an ear, shake a hand. I wondered what the speakers thought would happen as the result of their varied petitions.<br />
<br />
Then two doctors began to put all the divisions and inequities into context. Dr. Walter Tsou, well-fed and graying, first gave a PowerPoint presentation brimming with data about health disparities between various groups in America. We learned that the black infant-mortality rate is still double the white infant-mortality rate, that many doctors are strangely reluctant to recommend cardiac catheterization for elderly black women with chest pain, that Asian Americans had a significantly higher occurrence of hepatitis B than non-Asian Americans until 1993, when doctors began vaccinating all newborns against the disease. Remedying these disparities, Dr. Tsou said, was not a matter of repairing the health-care system. It was a matter of repairing <i>everything.</i> Your health is determined not only by your genes, after all, but also by your environment. And that environment is determined by the rules society itself sets up—rules about who lives in what place, who goes to what school, who gets what job. “Until we actually address the social determinants of health,” Dr. Tsou said, “we will not truly eliminate health disparities.”<br />
<br />
The next speaker, Dr. Robert Zarr, continued the line of thought. “The single most important reason why we see these disparities is <i>lack of health insurance,”</i> he said, with staccato confidence. “That is the truth. It’s the truth for those of us who have gone periods of our lives without health insurance. It’s the truth for my patients.” Dr. Zarr explained that he is the director of pediatric medicine for a group of community health centers that process more than 60,000 pediatric visits a year, and that most of the children who come through have a shaky connection at best to any kind of benefits. Without insurance, he said, there was not much he could do for these kids. “What good is it if I write them a prescription for the antibiotic if they don’t have money to go to the pharmacy to get it? What good is it that I diagnose dysplasia of the hip of a baby if I can’t get him in to a specialist to get seen?”<br />
<br />
A natural salesman, Dr. Zarr then asked his audience some leading questions. “What if I told you there’s an answer right now, right here and today? There is an answer to getting rid of this single most important barrier. Can anybody tell me what that answer is?” Several people in the audience, anticipating what would become a Dem ocratic campaign mantra, shouted out: “Universal health care!” But Dr. Zarr was indignant. “Not <i>just</i> universal health care—even President Bush talks about universal health care!—<i>single-payer</i> universal health care.” Then he lowered his voice. “Now let me tell you why. HR 676 clearly is going to give lifetime, comprehensive, quality access to care to every single American. Keep it simple. That’s what it is going to do.”<br />
<br />
This was a strong claim, of course. Single payer would not end racism. Poor people would still be poor and sick people would still be sick. There was no doubt, though, that in a single-payer system the whole idea of “forgotten groups” simply could be eliminated. Instead of separating the healthy from the sick, the high-risk from the low-risk, the rich from the poor, a single payer would unite all Americans into a single system. There would be no tiers, no ghettos, no red lines, at least not in terms of access to health insurance, because a single payer—the government—would cover everyone.<br />
<br />
There was one phrase we had to remember, Dr. Zarr said, and it was this: Everybody in, nobody out. “Say it with me. <i>Everybody in, nobody out.</i>”<br />
<br />
<b>A Preference for Markets</b><br />
<br />
The argument for single payer is straightforward. When everybody is in, you don’t have to spend a lot of time and money deciding who to keep out. You also don’t have to worry about what to do with the people you’ve kept out when they get sick anyway. (Uninsured sick people cost insurers nothing, but since they often end up seeking expensive emergency-room treatment, they cost taxpayers a lot.) If you want to quit your job and work someplace else, you can do so without fear of losing your health insurance, which means that labor is more mobile. And employers don’t have to carry the burden of benefits, which means that capital is more mobile. If you get sick, you don’t have to worry about losing your coverage or your house. Your insurance is paid for through taxes. And your taxes don’t go up just because you have a preexisting condition; under single payer, there is no such thing as a “preexisting condition.” Moreover, your provider—the single payer—has an incentive to keep you healthy your entire life, rather than just getting you to age sixty-five and then dumping you into Medicare. And if the experience of most other countries is any indication, the whole thing would cost a lot less than our current bloated mess of a system.<br />
<br />
The benefits of single payer were at one time if not a matter of consensus then at least a topic considered worthy of discussion, at least among Democrats. “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer health-care program,” Barack Obama said in 2003. “As all of us know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, we have to take back the House.” And yet as Democrats began to take all of those things back, Obama began to reconsider. In 2007, he recast the debate in terms that were more reflective than prescriptive. “If you’re starting from scratch,” he told <i>The New Yorker,</i> “then a single-payer system would probably make sense. But we’ve got all these legacy systems in place, and managing the transition, as well as adjusting the culture to a different system, would be difficult to pull off.” And now that Democrats have the White House, the Senate, and the House, it is clear that a single- payer program is not a part of their agenda.<br />
<br />
<i>Something</i> is going to happen, though. That much is certain. And it probably will be similar to the approach set forth in a white paper this November by Montana Senator Max Baucus, who is chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance. The plan borrows ideas from (among many others) Hillary Clinton, incoming Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Daschle, and Obama himself. The details are vague, but the outline is clear. It achieves universal coverage by requiring Americans who do not already receive health benefits to purchase insurance from a private company. (Obama has proposed that such a mandate should cover only children, but Daschle—whom Obama has charged with overseeing the reform process—has called for the mandate to be universal.) In turn, most employers would be required either to provide benefits to all of their employees or to pay into a fund that would be used to subsidize the purchase of private insurance by those who could not afford to pay for it themselves. This approach is designed not only to assuage the concerns of the many Americans who do not want to change their present arrangements but also to keep America’s health-insurance plans—which employ half a million people, and which saw a major decline in profits in 2008—in business.<br />
<br />
It would not be unfair to describe the Baucus approach as “market-oriented.” This may, in fact, be why it has emerged as an acceptable locus of reform. In Washington, there is little that is considered wiser or more bipartisan than a preference for markets. And that preference can even be expressed in terms that are surprisingly far from the standard Cato Institute talking points. Jill Quadagno and Brandon McKelvey, researchers at Florida State University, for instance, report a widely held vision of so-called consumer-directed health care, which would inject an almost Naderite devotion to consumer awareness into discussions about health care. The goal, they write, “is to transform patients into informed consumers by making medical care into a commodity that is purchased in the same way as other market goods.”<br />
<br />
This preference for markets is common, but it is not wise. The health-care system is not at all like other markets, because health, for obvious reasons, is not at all like other goods. (The demand for not dying, to give just one example, is pretty much unlimited.) And in America, market-based solutions very often end up involving the government anyway, as has been made evident most recently in the aftermath of the failed deregulation of Wall Street. Thus far, as Quadagno and McKelvey note, the consumer-directed health-care vision actually has “been implemented through obscure changes in tax law, technocratic provisions added to bills designed for other purposes, experiments with Medicaid ‘waivers’ and a new option, Medicare Advantage,” which introduces supplementary private insurance into the Medicare system. Which is to say that no matter what happens this year, the dead hand of government will continue to direct the flow of health-care dollars in the United States.<br />
<br />
Nonetheless, Democrats clearly do not want to discuss the role of government in terms that could be understood as unfriendly to the market. “We all have to keep an open mind on all this stuff, figure out how to get to yes. Everything is on the table,” Baucus had cautioned. “The only thing that’s not on the table is a single-payer system. That’s going nowhere in this country.”<br />
<br />
Which is why I was in Washington. Even the new president, with a near landslide victory and a huge congressional majority, sees an intraversable divide between what he himself has claimed to understand as the best approach and what can actually be done. I wanted to know what defined that divide, and why single payer fell on the far side.<br />
<br />
<b>Rationing</b><br />
<br />
No one doubts that fixing the health-care system is going to require someone to make difficult choices. In 2006, Americans spent $2.1 trillion on health care—at $7,026 per person, more than any other nation—and yet we lag far behind other nations in such measures as infant mortality, life expectancy, and early detection of life-threatening illnesses. This bad bargain is irritating, of course, but, more important, it is also unsustainable. Aging baby boomers will increase their demands on the Medicare system even as the government faces the revenue shortfall that will result from their retirement. Employer-based health care, meanwhile, is increasingly unaffordable, causing many companies financial distress. And even as the cost of the system goes up, a growing number of Americans are being left out of it entirely.<br />
<br />
The word for making such choices, so often unsaid in American politics, is “rationing.” All health-care systems, no matter how wealthy, require some form of it, because advances in technology always outpace the ability to pay for them. But there are (at least) two ways to decide who gets what in a health-care system. One of them is to let the market sort it out: those with the most money get the most care. The other is through triage: society seeks to determine, within a given budget, the most effective treatment for the greatest number of people. The difference between these two approaches is significant.<br />
<br />
We tend to think about systems in terms of our personal motivations. But systems have their own logic. A market system may be driven by individuals or corporations seeking profits, but the primary function of the market itself is to grow. That is why growth, not profit, is the conventional measure of economic health. Similarly, a health-care system may be driven by individuals seeking to improve their own health, but the primary function of the health-care system itself is (or ought to be) to ensure the overall health of society. Within each realm, these goals can sometimes be in conflict. The success of banks at maximizing profits for a time by extending shaky loans to prospective homebuyers, for instance, has resulted in a recession (i.e., negative growth). Similarly, individuals acting on various beliefs about health care—say, that vaccination leads to autism—can cause the health of society as a whole to decline. More important, though, is that these two realms themselves be understood as independent. Societal health and economic growth are not mutually exclusive, but they are in tension, and when we confuse one with the other, problems occur.<br />
<br />
In <i>Overtreated,</i> Shannon Brownlee argues that the major problem of health care in the United States is not that there is too little but that there is too much. “We know that people who don’t get enough care have a higher risk of death,” Brownlee told me. “About 20,000 Americans die prematurely each year from lack of access. But getting unnecessary care isn’t any better for you. In fact, about 30,000 Medicare recipients die each year from overtreatment. This sounds counterintuitive until you think about the fact that practically any medical treatment you can name poses some risk.” For instance, doctors regularly test prostate-specific antigen levels in men to see if they have early signs of prostate cancer. As Maggie Mahar, the author of <i>Money-Driven Medicine,</i> explained it to me, this sounds like due diligence, but in fact the National Cancer Institute does not recommend routine PSA testing, because the majority of older men diagnosed with this slow-growing cancer will die of something else before they experience any overt symptoms, whereas if they are treated for prostate cancer, many will experience such side effects as erectile dysfunction, incontinence, and sometimes even death. “When I was at a conference in Berlin last spring, doctors from other countries were shocked that we still do routine PSA testing,” Mahar said. Why do we do it then? “Urologists stand to gain. The prostate-testing market is worth $200 million to $300 million annually. And no doubt many urologists believe they are saving lives.”<br />
<br />
Overtreatment, of course, is another word for growth, and it is the natural consequence of a market-driven system. A triage approach, meanwhile, would save money, both by removing some (though not all) of the incentive to overtreat and by simply eradicating the massive bureaucracy that currently is required just to figure out who is paying for what. Physicians for a National Health Care Program notes that “private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume one-third of every health care dollar” and that going to a single-payer system “would save more than $350 billion per year.”<br />
<br />
So the mystery remained. Why is single payer off the table? At Conyers’s meeting, it was Dr. Zarr who presented what at first seemed to be the most plausible theory. “You’ve got to get rid of the middleman,” he said, “and that middleman is the private health-insurance industry. And they <i>have got to go.</i>”<br />
<br />
<b>The Insurance Sector</b><br />
<br />
America’s health-insurance plans are represented in Washington by an organization that is called, plainly enough, America’s Health Insurance Plans. Its headquarters happened to be a very short walk from the Rayburn House Office Building, and I had managed to convince its president and CEO, Karen Ignagni, to spend a few minutes with me. When we sat down in AHIP’s sleek conference room, I mentioned that I had just been at a meeting on the Hill where people were discussing how to enact a single-payer system.<br />
<br />
“Oh good,” she said. “That’s great!”<br />
<br />
Ignagni, who is brisk and extraordinarily attentive, had worked for a time at Walter Reuther’s Committee for National Health Insurance, a background that might strike some as pretty distant, philosophically speaking, from AHIP. I asked if she was surprised to have ended up representing insurance companies. She said it was not something she had planned on. She seemed, however, to have adapted well to the role.<br />
<br />
I explained that I had been thinking a lot about information. The profit in the current system, after all, comes not from acquiring as many customers as possible but rather from creating two classes of possible customers—good risks and bad risks—and avoiding the latter class entirely. As we get better at understanding why people get sick, we will also get better at deciding whether or not to insure them. Ultimately, the entire nation could be reduced to two perfect circles: the people who pay for insurance and don’t need it, and the people who need insurance but can’t pay for it. “I mean, asymptotically,” I said, “you will slowly approach perfect knowledge . . .”<br />
<br />
“Which will be a <i>terrific</i> thing for patients, a terrific thing for clinicians,” Ignagni leaped in. “It’ll be a terrific thing in terms of actually improving health.” Which is true. Genetic medicine, everyone agrees, will likely help millions of people enjoy longer, healthier lives. But Ignagni was not addressing my concern about groups. Doctors can use evidence to achieve their ends, I proposed, which presumably are to improve the health of their patients. But insurance companies can also use it to achieve <i>their</i> ends, which presumably include reducing medical losses. “But that’s not true in the health-care arena,” Ignagni said, “because they passed the genetic nondiscrimination bill.”<br />
<br />
Ignagni was referring to the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, or GINA, which was made law last May. Under GINA, it is illegal for employers or insurers to deny anyone health coverage on the basis of genetic data. If people feared losing their insurance because their very genes could be understood as a preexisting condition, they might avoid seeking information that could help them stay healthy. Ignagni said that the health plans had thought about the law a great deal. They didn’t want to lose a powerful underwriting tool, but ultimately they decided that the benefit, in terms of long-term health, outweighed the cost, in terms of inefficiency of pricing. My concerns, therefore, were unfounded. “We would have, I think, a very different conversation today if the legislation hadn’t been passed,” Ignagni said, but “this perfect information that you’ve talked about is, I think, a marvelous opportunity to actually reduce health-care costs.”<br />
<br />
Her reasoning seemed humane and, for the moment, economically sound. Genetic information still makes up only a very small proportion of what underwriters examine to determine health risks. But the trend is clear. What will health- insurance plans do as larger and larger categories of health information are determined to be off limits? As the database grows, so too will the temptation to revise GINA, to use some <i>part</i> of the data, perhaps, to make decisions about who to insure and who not to insure, just for the sake of efficiency. What else are insurance companies for, after all, other than apportioning risk? How could AHIP support a law that logically concludes in the demise of underwriting?<br />
<br />
Ignagni’s answer was not what I expected. In fact, she echoed precisely the words I had heard Dr. Zarr chanting just a few hours earlier. “In the new market,” she said, “<i>everybody’s going to be in.</i> And then—and I don’t want to be an irresponsible Pollyanna about it—but if you have everybody in, you have the large numbers working for you.”<br />
<br />
In retrospect, I should not have been surprised. The preference for markets is more often claimed than felt; the preference for profit is far more sincere, and the method by which it is achieved—competition, bribery, lobbying—is a secondary concern. After Ignagni and I met, when the Obama transition team had made clear that some form of universal health care was forthcoming, she announced that AHIP would support a law requiring private insurers to provide insurance to all people regardless of their medical condition—a form of insurance known as “guaranteed issue”—if Congress would in turn require all Americans not covered by government insurance programs to buy some form of private insurance. This combination of guaranteed issue and individual mandates would add up to a system wherein the government requires healthy people who do not want insurance to buy it anyway, in order to subsidize unhealthy people who need insurance but can’t afford it—which sounds like what most people would call “socialized medicine.”<sup>1</sup><span class="inline-footnote"><b>1. </b>In a notably succinct press release, Rose Ann DeMoro, the executive director of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, called the AHIP proposal a “Marshall Plan for the health insurance industry” that “fully privatizes profit while socializing the health-care risk. The public systems could be bankrupted by their responsibilities to care for the sickest while guaranteeing huge new profit streams” to insurance companies, which would continue to avoid selling insurance to anyone who actually needed it. “Rather than subsidizing these industries,” she concluded, “we would be better off either letting them fail, or simply taking them over, as we have been forced to do with other obsolete sectors.”</span><br />
<br />
<b>A Preference for Invention</b><br />
<br />
If the insurance companies themselves were openly endorsing a non-market solution—albeit one that required millions of new customers to buy their products—then what else could be preventing Americans from embracing single payer?<br />
<br />
Another possibility is that Americans believe technology itself will be their salvation. If nothing changes in the next decade, at least one fifth of our economy will end up devoted to health care. And most of that money will be spent not on basic care or preventative treatment but on expensive new technologies such as thallium heart scans. One report, from the Center for Studying Health System Change, suggests that new technology may account for as much as two-thirds of spending growth.<br />
<br />
So here was another clue. One of the major trends in U.S. health care is “evidence-based medicine,” which calls for making medical choices by comparing empirical evidence about an individual patient’s condition to a larger body of best practices. This may sound like common sense, but medicine for most of history has been imprecise, decentralized, and as much an art as a science. With extremely complex and expensive genetic and proteomic procedures increasingly defining the future of medicine, however, doctors—and insurers—will come to rely on the same industrial practices that previously made it possible to manufacture jet fighters or set up an international retail operation. At least that is the hope.<br />
<br />
Americans put a considerable amount of faith in their nation’s industrial capacity. A 2001 study found that 45 percent of Americans “disagree that it is impossible for any government or public or private insurance to pay for all new medical treatments.” That is to say, they believe that the U.S. health-care system has the potential to pay for <i>every single new treatment</i> that someone invents. The only nation with a more positive outlook is France, where 51 percent believe this and where socialized medicine is considered a birthright. (The European average is 36 percent.) This apposition may not be as odd as it seems at first. Many Americans appear actively to desire socialized medicine, even by that name. In one recent survey, a 45 percent plurality of Americans claimed to prefer a system of “socialized medicine.” And another survey found that 59 percent of American <i>physicians</i> now support some form of national health insurance, up from 49 percent in 2002. Here was evidence, contrary to the Washington consensus, that in the American faith, markets were an easily discarded icon—our preference was for something far deeper and stranger.<br />
<br />
<b>Rationalizing</b><br />
<br />
There is a great deal of literature available on health reform, and most of it is just as colorful as you might expect. Every once in a while, though, you come across something unusual. One recent such exception is <i>Skin in the Game,</i> which was written by John Hammergren, the chairman, president, and CEO of McKesson, a health-services corporation in San Francisco. The title suggests that Hammergren is making another boilerplate argument for consumer-directed health care. He is a fan of evidence-based medicine, believes that health care can be understood as a commodity, and his argument builds from the claim that people don’t currently have enough “skin in the game” because the current structure of health-care delivery hides from them many of the costs of the decisions they make. What is fascinating about Hammergren’s argument, though, is what he proposes as the <i>means</i> by which consumers will be made to understand those hidden costs.<br />
<br />
Hammergren shares with his Silicon Valley neighbors an abiding faith in the power of technology to improve the world, and that technology would apply not only to the treatment but to the system itself. A smarter system of health care would first recognize itself as a system, and then it would attempt to perfect itself. This would require a kind of scientific management of the human body, in which health providers analyze every part of the patient’s interaction with the system. The mortal coil would be, as much as possible, shuffled into a controllable digital component. Hammergren’s prescription has the flavor of the early twentieth century—what he calls the “golden age of management and operational efficiency”—when Frederick Taylor and other corporate philosophers began to equate rationality with profitability. A hopeful time.<br />
<br />
Hammergren first argues that technology will revolutionize specific forms of treatment. Heart surgeons, for instance, will deploy “caterpillar robots” that crawl through a small incision into your heart. No rib cracking, no collapsing of the left lung, no hands inside the chest cavity. It is an expensive technology, Hammergren writes, but one that is only a few years away. Eventually, molecule-sized robots may be able to repair individual cells and even strands of DNA, with the result that people will be able to live two hundred years “without showing any signs of aging.”<br />
<br />
But Hammergren’s real concern is much larger. The robot caterpillars will be wielded in service of what he and others call “personalized medicine,” a numbers-driven approach to treatment that tailors every decision to your individual genetic makeup. Personalized medicine “goes beyond the idea of genetic testing to an entirely new level of care, and in turn a higher quality of life,” he writes, and it will require its own entirely new system of data collection—its own aggregation of large numbers:<br />
<blockquote>When my oldest daughter has her first child, I believe that baby will get a genomic profile for roughly $800. The data obtained through that profile will be stored in a central information system, called an integrated delivery network (IDN), to which primary care physicians and specialists will have access throughout the course of my grandchild’s life. Within the IDN database there will be a kind of artificial intelligence search engine—based on the principles of semantic knowledge and driven by complex algorithms—that can support physicians in their decision-making and recommendations.<br />
<br />
My grandchildren’s doctors will know from the moment of birth the likelihood that they will develop some form of chronic condition, cancer, or other significant illness. This knowledge will shape and form their health care for the rest of their lives. Compared to today’s 40-year gap in treatment, my grandchildren will receive constant monitoring and prevention. Tapping the database’s artificial intelligence, their doctors will know which clinical interventions will be most effective, which cardiology or cancer drugs they will respond best to, and when care should be delivered.</blockquote>Hammergren’s culminating vision of an integrated delivery network is simultaneously deeply idealistic—indeed hopeful—and disturbing. With all its tender humanity and seductive hubris, the passage reads as the first chapter of a cautionary tale.<br />
<br />
<b>The Technology Sector</b><br />
<br />
McKesson, it turns out, is the eighteenth-largest corporation in the United States, and the largest corporation of any kind that is involved primarily in health care. In 2008, its various businesses—the distribution of drugs and surgical supplies, and the sale of information systems for all aspects of health care—generated nearly $94 billion in revenues. By comparison, revenues for UnitedHealth Group, the country’s largest health- insurance provider, were just over $75 billion. McKesson processes about 80 percent of all the prescriptions written in America, nearly 10 billion transactions a year—more than Amazon and eBay combined.<br />
<br />
The company cultivates a low profile. I lived about eight blocks from its world headquarters—a thirty-eight-story black slab on Market Street—at the time of the dot-com bubble, but until I read Hammergren’s book, I had no idea the place existed. Still, when I called the company to see if I could talk to someone about the integrated delivery network, they not only were receptive to the idea but also suggested that I tour the company’s Vision Center.<br />
<br />
Which is how, in August, I came to be standing with Tracy Webber, who oversees the Vision Center, and Randy Spratt, who is McKesson’s CIO, in front of a museum case filled with ancient bottles and advertisements. “This is where we honor our 175 years of history,” Spratt said. McKesson had entered the world as a distributor of imported worm seed, effervescent sodium phosphate, soap bark, and Russian oil, all on display. One yellowing flyer proclaimed that McKesson’s imported Russian oil “lubricates and aids excretion without harmful medicinal action.” I asked Webber, who was exceedingly friendly and well informed, if Russian oil had been a cure-all. “I’m sure,” she said.<br />
<br />
Webber pointed to several three-foot-thick stacks of dusty Post-It-sized slips of paper that had been pierced with a wire and now hung like sausages from hooks at the top of the case. “That’s one year’s worth of prescriptions from 1910. That’s the very first pharmacy-management system.” She then pointed to what looked like the handheld scanning device that UPS drivers carry to track their deliveries. “This is the Mobile Manager 100,” she explained. McKesson was the first company to use bar-code scanning technology for distribution. With the Mobile Manager 100, McKesson packers could fill orders for drugs with 99.98 percent accuracy. In <i>Skin in the Game,</i> Hammergren had suggested that doctors eventually would use similar devices to keep the integrated delivery network up to date on a person’s condition—they would be the nerves at the tips of the IDN’s fingers.<br />
<br />
Webber guided us to the next exhibit, a computer monitor that was displaying what appeared to be a simple email program. She explained that this system would allow me to interact with my physician when I had basic questions that didn’t require an actual visit.<br />
<br />
I said that sounded useful.<br />
<br />
“Well, physicians would never respond to you,” Webber said, “because they’re not being paid to respond to you.” Spratt explained the solution. “The trick to it was going out to the payers and getting them to reimburse the physician for an electronic visit, which we have done.”<br />
<br />
Payers would benefit because it would cost less than an office visit?<br />
<br />
“Right,” Spratt said. “The physicians make out because they can do ten of them in the time it took them to do one office visit. And the patients make out because of convenience. And the payers make out because it costs less to treat the patient in total.”<br />
<br />
McKesson, it turned out, also handles about a third of the nation’s health-care claims transactions. Indeed, as we wandered into the Vision Center, it was becoming obvious that the company had at some point traded up from the distribution of cure-alls to the far more profitable business of distributing information, though sometimes it was hard to tell which business was which. Pills certainly are amenable to information metaphors—little bits of data, distributed as efficiently as possible across the country, each with a discrete task and a clear profit margin; a rush of pills through the system, all of them marked, radio-frequency identified, and tracked perpetually like the packets that flow through the Internet. The process of distributing pills, like the process of distributing data, is non-intuitive, does not require the human touch, and is in constant peril of failure due to human error.<br />
<br />
I asked Spratt about this blurring of functions, and he nodded. “Some of the most critical processes in health care are the processes around safety,” he said. “And then there’s another set of processes that, essentially, surround the translation of you into information and then the reading of that information and the response to that by a caregiver.”<br />
<br />
This sounded familiar. In the 1990s, the process was called “bit-from-it,” and the idea was that solid matter was too difficult to manipulate, whereas bits—information—were much easier to control. Business consultants and futurists made their fortunes by explaining to executives that bits were the future and atoms were the past. I was a little embarrassed to be using decade-old pop-business jargon, so I asked Spratt if the company had a more modern term for bit-from-it. “Oh,” he said. “We would call it adoption.”<br />
<br />
McKesson, it was becoming clear, was serious. “Some people, fearing change, say we shouldn’t automate the process of health care because we will lose the human touch,” Hammergren had written. “I believe that the human touch can only be reclaimed by relying on automation.” Such claims seemed ambitious and even somewhat absurd in print. Spratt had been careful to point out, though, that everything at the Vision Center could be purchased and put to use today. The inventions I had seen thus far were just the beginning, a primitive sensory apparatus for an evolving system. I asked whether the information systems at the Vision Center were the prototype for an integrated delivery network.<br />
<br />
Spratt nodded again. “We think this is the most effective way to get there,” he said. There had been many experiments with regional databases, but nothing had yet caught on in terms of a large-scale adoption. The plan was to get the doctors and patients involved, such that they built the database from the bottom up with their own hands, by entering millions upon millions of queries, diagnoses, and prescriptions into various McKesson systems. “We don’t need to build giant databases in the sky,” Spratt said. The databases would simply emerge over time.<br />
<br />
I looked at the monitor again, and then asked Spratt where the information for the system in front of us resided.<br />
<br />
“This resides in servers that we own and operate,” he said.<br />
<br />
<b>Interlude: the Measure of Man</b><br />
<br />
We continue to invent devices that “translate us into information,” but we sometimes forget that such measurement itself was an invention, and a revolutionary one at that.<br />
<br />
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, the great Roman architect and engineer, for instance, considered the structure of the human body as a matter of qualities, not quantities; he saw not numbers but rather spectacular symmetries: “If a man be placed flat on his back, with his hands and feet extended, and a pair of compasses centered at his navel, the fingers and toes of his two hands and feet will touch the circumference of a circle described therefrom.” And so from this insight, Da Vinci painted his famous Vitruvian man, a picture of proportionality and health. A perfect specimen.<br />
<br />
But it is not the Vitruvian man that is stored in McKesson’s servers. Proportion is not the same as measure. Proportion relates one reality to another. Measure transports reality to a virtual realm. It allows us to translate a material fact into an idea, and ideas, in their Platonic perfection, are considerably more amenable to the strictures of rational analysis than the raw grit of nature. “What else can the human mind hold besides numbers and magnitudes?” asked Johannes Kepler in 1599. “These alone we apprehend correctly, and if piety permits to say so, our comprehension is in this case of the same kind as God’s, at least insofar as we are able to understand it in this mortal life.”<br />
<br />
It was by using this godlike ability to translate material qualities into abstract—and therefore controllable—quantities that the physician William Harvey was able to discover the circular nature of the flow of blood in humans, a discovery equivalent in physiology to Galileo’s claim of heliocentrism in cosmology. Caspar Hoffmann of the University of Altdorf reflected the beliefs of the day in a rebuke to Harvey. “Of a truth,” he chided, “you do not use your eyes or command them to be used, but instead rely on reasoning and calculation, reckoning at carefully selected moments how many pounds of blood, how many ounces, how many drachms have to be transferred from the heart into the arteries in the space of one little half hour. Truly, Harvey, you are pursuing a fact which cannot be investigated, a thing which is incalculable, inexplicable, unknowable.”<br />
<br />
Hoffmann was a man of the past, though. Even as Harvey introduced new techniques of measurement to medicine, others were already introducing them to commerce, notably with the invention of double-entry bookkeeping, which led shortly thereafter to the invention of the corporation. Indeed, the new truth, as Walter Burley of Merton College was quick to observe, was that “Every saleable item is at the same time a measured item.”<br />
<br />
These seem like ancient insights, but our preference for invention has only amplified their relevance. And when the measure of man and the measure of markets combine, the results are positively futuristic. The IBM Institute for Business Value, for instance, envisions a new age of “just-in-time insurance” in which “maximum efficiency in risk pricing” would be achieved by segregating the components of customers’ lives into measurable “spaces” through which they journey in a given day.<br />
<br />
Each step of the journey represents a different risk such as car-to-train-station, train-to-city-station, station-to-office, and so on. Each leg of the trip truly represents a varying amount of risk. A “pay-as-you-live” product would trade some location and time-of-day privacy data for lower insurance bills overall. And in the spirit of active risk management, the same network of sensors could also provide convenient information (such as advice on avoiding an overloaded expressway) relayed on the appropriate device such as the car audio system, a phone, and, then, in e-mail or as a phone call in the office.<br />
<br />
Pay as you live! Just so.<br />
<br />
<b>The Technology Sector</B><br />
<br />
As we continued our exploration of the Vision Center, it was becoming clear that McKesson had also considered the problem of transforming data back into action. At some point, the prescription would become a pill, and the pill would become a cure. A real person would really be healed or not. But the translation from the information realm to the physical realm is often highly flawed. One major breakdown is in the simple process of selecting a pill. A large hospital delivers thousands of doses a day, and each of those deliveries presents a chance for error. A 1994 study in the <i>Journal of the American Medical Association</i> found that patients in intensive care underwent an average of 178 “activities” per day, and that 1.7 of those activities were in error—a 1 percent failure rate, which is quite high compared to what engineers would find acceptable in assembling airplanes or nuclear power plants.<br />
<br />
The McKesson solution, as Spratt was now explaining to me, was to remove people from the process. We were standing in front of a six-sided device that looked like the game-show cage into which contestants are locked with a vortex of swirling loot and invited to grab all they can. This was a far more precise system, however. At the center was a robot arm. And on each of the six interior walls were two dozen spindles, each hung with UPC-labeled plastic bags full of candy, which stood in for pills. The entire contraption was “an automated inventory-management tool,” Webber said—basically, an extremely reliable vending machine.<br />
<br />
Webber pushed a button and the machine leaped to life with a series of <i>Star Wars</i> –type servo noises. “You see these little packets?” she asked. “We dump unit bar-coded inventory into the robot. It stocks it on the right spindle, and then it intercepts orders from the pharmacy, and picks those orders, plops them in a name board, labels it with the patient’s name, and that’s your medication for today.”<br />
<br />
This seemed like a fairly elaborate approach to selecting an item from a bin. I asked if it was popular. “To my knowledge,” Spratt said, “we have never had one uninstalled.”<br />
<br />
Just as a computer can be made to understand the contents of a roomful of pills, it also can be made to understand the contents of an entire hospital. Spratt pointed to another monitor, which displayed a floor plan. “This is a map that links into the systems that say, for example, ‘This guy’s meds are due,’ ‘This guy needs to be transported to get an X-ray,’ ‘This guy is due in the ICU in nine minutes,’ and so on.” It was another feeler for the future IDN. “We can take patients, we can take high-value assets like pumps or parts on wheels, and we can put tags on them that would tell you where they are in the hospital, so if I need a pump right away, I can find the closest one.”<br />
<br />
I asked if that meant hospitals would have to tag everything with some kind of radio-frequency identification device.<br />
<br />
“Everything of significant value,” Spratt said.<br />
<br />
What about at home? Was there a way that people at home could be similarly virtualized for more efficient analysis and treatment?<br />
<br />
Spratt nodded again, and Webber explained, “So the Health Buddy is our home monitoring device that would be placed in the homes of patients who are suffering from chronic ongoing diseases.” The Health Buddy looked like a clock radio. It had a very simple display—large letters and icons to make it easy for old people to comprehend—and, like a video-game console, it was capable of accepting various input devices, including a blood-pressure cuff, a scale, and a blood-glucose meter.<br />
<br />
“That’s all transmitting back to a caseworker or care coordinator who is trying to decide how often to send a nurse into the home,” Webber explained. What sort of data does it track? “I really think something interesting might be the fact that you got out of bed,” Webber said. “You have a sensor that shows that the patient is being active and has picked the phone up.”<br />
<br />
I asked if the Health Buddy would eventually be capable of actually treating people, for instance by taking genetic or proteomic data and simply manufacturing the appropriate prescription on the spot. “That would be very long range,” Spratt said. “But it would be, for example, very easy—we’re not there yet—to have it, with a caregiver intervening, electronically prescribe a new drug and have that delivered to you overnight.”<br />
<br />
In the meantime, there was our next stop: the automatic pharmacy machine. It looked like a regular ATM, only with a door flap like on a candy machine instead of a bill dispenser. Webber pushed a button and a robotic voice said, “Please enter your data first.”<br />
<br />
“One of the biggest problems is finding new pharmacists who are willing to count pills,” Spratt said. “If you have a prescription and a retail automation pharmacy system, this device here can automatically count the pills from a pretty good sized inventory of potential molecules.”<br />
<br />
The robot voice said, “Please enter your PIN.”<br />
<br />
Spratt continued, “So it will say, okay, you get thirty—in my case, maybe Xanax—and it’s going to dump thirty Xanax into here.”<br />
<br />
The robot voice said, “Please touch the boxes below to select your prescriptions.” Then it said, “Please sign your name to acknowledge that you are receiving medication that has been billed to insurance.”<br />
<br />
<b>A Preference for Ideas</b><br />
<br />
I had been, and remain, skeptical of Hammergren’s vision of data-driven salvation, but as I left the McKesson office, I did find myself unexpectedly drawn to the idea that our fallen world could be reborn within a system of our own creation. And as I considered my own strange compulsion, I began to suspect that the preference for markets and the preference for invention were just subsets of another, deeper preference—so deep perhaps that we were not even quite aware of it.<br />
<br />
Anyone who has spent any time fighting for the health of the disembodied entity known as a corporation knows that disembodiment is itself a primary advantage. The human body is frail, after all, and subject not only to the physical laws of life—somatic decay and other factors that cause life to require death—but also to the physical laws of all material, living or not. Newton and Yeats agree that everything must fall apart eventually. Corporations, on the other hand, are inventions of the mind. They exist as agreements, brands, and statements, none of which answer to any of the laws of thermodynamics. Corporations can live forever, because they are really just ideas.<br />
<br />
Of course, only the most outrageous West Coast transhumanists actually believe they can cast off the mortal realm of meatspace for the immortal realm of the virtual. Those of us who are not making plans to enter cryogenic storage, however, still are part of a culture predisposed to virtuality, a culture where in every realm of endeavor, from industry to politics to art, the word trumps the deed and the immaterial emotion trumps the material fact.<br />
<br />
In our culture, though, this will to dematerialize remains, perhaps somewhat ironically, unarticulated and inchoate. This may explain our strange, indeed neurotic, sense that the needs of the “system”—whether it is the system of governance or the system of markets or the system of technological innovation—are now more important than the needs of the individuals such systems once were assumed to serve. We are a nation of closeted Pythagoreans, ashamed of and enthralled by our secret desire to assume the eternal nature of numbers, and made powerless by that shame.<br />
<br />
<b>Rationalization</b><br />
<br />
Jonathan Simon, a sociologist who has studied the use of statistics in law enforcement, made a similar observation in a 1988 paper for <i>Law and Society Review.</i> “Over the last century there has been a significant growth within our society of practices that distribute costs and benefits to individuals based on statistical knowledge about the population,” he wrote. And these practices “are successful largely because they allow power to be exercised more effectively and at lower political cost.”<br />
<br />
The market price of maintaining or slightly modifying the current system is indeed quite low; the health-care lobby—which is to say, all of the people who benefit from the current system—gave just under $150 million to Congress and the presidential candidates last year. That is a terrific bargain for them, but it does not explain why the rest of us are willing to sell our health so cheaply.<br />
<br />
In the United States today, we can use our belief in numbers, which borders on the religious, to rationalize any amount of inequity. We can tell ourselves that we can’t have a system that guarantees health care to every American because such a system would be “inefficient.” We can tell ourselves that we must accept a world in which children suffering from post-traumatic stress don’t get any help because the numbers don’t support it. We can tell ourselves that we must trust our health to insurance companies, that markets are wiser than doctors, that we can afford every technology. We tell ourselves stories and we rationalize our prejudices, and, unless we are willing to more specifically address the “social determinants of health,” as Dr. Tsou said, we will continue to drift toward a change far more substantive than anything currently under consideration in Congress, a change suited to the few who care to exert their will. It may be a revolutionary system of corporate medical control, or a catastrophic financial collapse resulting from hubristic overtreatment, or a medical crisis stemming from some seemingly minor flaw in the heuristics of the integrated delivery network, or just a further increase in the massive inequities that already disgrace our current system. Whatever that change is, though, it will in the end be defined by the passivity of a people that has sacrificed its own, democratic power of large numbers on the altar of strange and unstated beliefs.<br />
<br />
<b>The Government Sector</b><br />
<br />
On the third morning of the Democratic National Convention, a few hundred delegates and a dozen reporters gathered around cloth-draped dining tables in a conference room at the Denver Performing Arts Center to listen to the leaders of the Democratic Party describe how they would fix the health-care system. Andy Stern, the stubby, exuberant head of the Service Employees International Union, outlined the aim of the conclave with a convention-style chant.<br />
<br />
Stern: <i>What do we want?</i><br />
<br />
Delegates: <i>Health care!</i><br />
<br />
Stern: <i>First hundred days?</i><br />
<br />
Delegates: <i>Yes!</i><br />
<br />
Stern: <i>First hundred days?</i><br />
<br />
Delegates: <i>Yes!</i><br />
<br />
Stern: <i>In the first hundred days of the Obama Administration we’re gonna solve this health-care problem!</i><br />
<br />
The speakers were notably specific, and they demonstrated genuine passion and intelligence. Michigan Congressman John Dingell, the longest-serving member of the House, made his way to the podium on crutches and explained that health care reform was needed because “a man ought not die like a dog in a ditch.” He added that a man has a right to an attorney when he commits a crime but no right to a doctor when he gets cancer. His anger—and his emphasis on “a man” as the relevant object of social consideration—were unusual. And yet, he concluded, “This is no longer a matter of social concern, or of humanity, but of economic salvation,” and thereby seemed, at least to my mind, to have upended the order of priority that once had informed the conscience of all thinking people.<br />
<br />
The room grew more and more crowded. Every speaker was receiving a standing ovation. And a theme was developing. The Democratic governors and congressmen, the labor leaders and community activists, all of the public figures on the very farthest outer-left fringes of the respectable health-care debate in the United States, knew this one thing: the U.S. was never going to get health-care reform until the big money decided that heath care reform was in its interest. And the good news—the amazing news—was <i>they have decided it is in their interest.</i><br />
<br />
Up next was Kathleen Sebelius, the governor of Kansas. Until just a few days before the convention, Sebelius had been a leading contender to be vice president of the United States. She was tall and leathery and practiced. Her father had been governor, too, and she had made her own start in electoral politics as the state insurance commissioner. In Kansas, she said, the insurance regulator could take contributions from the insurance company he or she regulated, and she had long seen this as a preposterous conflict of interest. She had tried and failed to change the law, so she ran for insurance commissioner herself, on a platform of refusing contributions from insurance companies. She won, and within a few years was governor herself. She said that health-care reform was on the way, to believe it, that this was <i>real.</i> “We are finally at a tipping point in this country,” she said, “when we have a lot of voices in private industry calling for change!”<br />
<br />
Then Ed Rendell, the Pennsylvania governor, with his bright orange tie and waxy block of a head, said, “If we control costs, the rest is easy.” Then Daschle, adding that “we’ve got a huge, huge cost problem.” And finally Hillary Clinton, whose husband asked America in 1993 to ask itself “whether the cost of staying on this same course isn’t greater than the cost of change.” Another standing ovation, longer and louder than all the rest. We cannot wait, she said. We have a plan—this current plan, this plan that represents the very best we can hope for—and it “is not only the moral approach, it is the economically sensible approach.” The crowd applauded again and again.<br />
<br />
“This will be the kind of transformational change,” Clinton finally promised, “that comes once in a generation.” ■Luke Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08968715243704059643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076462276343371005.post-82102806311003658152008-08-28T13:18:00.000-04:002013-02-09T10:41:47.383-05:00[Harper's Magazine] FREE SPEECH ZONE Another scene from the 2008 DNC<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjECmthU3Si0RmeVPKD2UGi9C0WWAxuiT2g80tL2hC1G3aAKwFQ9l5TaZAYVqmPn5La9pTaYiJMNOvYCloyO7aWUAcxUT2VM_vUyUACtMbVy7QGbCSrddnYCCFMEzxuR-xzSRZDUcuXTVHL/s1600/riot2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0"src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjECmthU3Si0RmeVPKD2UGi9C0WWAxuiT2g80tL2hC1G3aAKwFQ9l5TaZAYVqmPn5La9pTaYiJMNOvYCloyO7aWUAcxUT2VM_vUyUACtMbVy7QGbCSrddnYCCFMEzxuR-xzSRZDUcuXTVHL/s540/riot2.jpg" /></a></div><br />
I was making my way onto the convention grounds late Wednesday afternoon when I saw an unusually large congregation of black-clad riot police. I noticed as well that a technician had set up a TV camera such that it faced away from the “security zone” and onto the public street—in fact, just past the gates through which I had entered. I asked the technician what was happening and he said that there was going to be a riot.<br />
<br />
The rumor was that the rock band Rage Against the Machine had just finished a performance and then suggested to its 9,000 audience members that they all leave the concert together and march over to the convention. Another man, in army pants and carefully-tucked-in Hawaiian shirt, probably a reporter, closed his cell phone and said with some excitement that the marchers were just a few blocks away. I decided to wait and see what would happen.<br />
<br />
By then a second phalanx of riot police had coalesced and other reporters passing through the gates had begun to take notice. We all looked outward. The marchers were believed to be heading down Speer Boulevard, the very street on which we ourselves happened to be standing. Between us and them was a chest-high steel mesh barrier. There were more rumors: The marchers planned to rush the fence; they wanted to incite a police riot; they had stockpiled bags of their own urine to throw at delegates. The reporters waited.<br />
<br />
A tall officer in sunglasses told us, politely, that he might have to ask us to move away from the perimeter. A photographer wondered aloud about how to get up higher for a better shot, and another cameraman offered to boost him onto a stoplight, an offer the first photographer declined. “I don’t think the cops would like that,” he said. Other cameramen lounged in lawn chairs atop their satellite trucks, like picnickers before the Battle of Bull Run.<br />
<br />
Now no one was allowed to leave, not until more was understood about the potential danger. The riot police created a new security zone by stringing yellow police tape in a line parallel to the outer barrier but set back fifty yards. As promised, the polite officer asked us to step behind the line, for our own safety.<br />
<br />
A bucket-lift carrying two elaborately shielded men approached the mesh barrier, as did an armored truck encrusted with an even-more-elaborate hydraulic platform system, atop of which rode another six-man riot squad. A Secret Service man sped to the rear in a golf cart. It was like the flurry of cranes before a freighter pulled into dock.<br />
<br />
The protestors came into sight. I could make out a banner, held aloft by two men with flagstaffs, reading “No War on Iran.” More reporters made more cell phone calls. The leaders of the march, it turned out, were veterans of the Iraq war. There were hundreds of them, or dozens, or none. They were followed by all 9,000 members of the Rage Against the Machine audience, or maybe 3,000, or 5,000. The marchers, we heard, filled the entire boulevard for seven full blocks.<br />
<br />
And then, before anything could be confirmed, the marchers turned south. They had been persuaded, we learned from the tall officer, to demonstrate lawfully, and lawful demonstration required that they march another full mile, all the way down to the other end of the security zone, and conclude their protest in what the event organizers called the Free Speech Zone. This was a cage between the security zone and the public zone in which protesters were invited to demonstrate their concerns to the gathered delegates of the Democratic Party.<br />
<br />
The police pulled the tape back up and the crowd of reporters dispersed, most of them having given up on the prospect of a riot. Bill Clinton would be speaking soon, and it would take fifteen minutes to walk through the vast security zone, from the entrance to the inner security zone where the actual convention was being held, and another thirty minutes to wait in line to have their laptops X-rayed. No more time for protesters.<br />
<br />
I wanted to see what would happen at the Free Speech Zone from the inside, but that meant I would have to wait in line as well. I ended up standing next to a lanky, graying reporter whose security badge indicated he was from USA Today. I asked him if anyone had ever used the Free Speech Zone. He didn’t think so. But he had heard that the final location of the Zone was the result of considerable wrangling. The original location was almost completely inaccessible, and local activists had managed to ensure that the new location would be at least somewhat more visible.<br />
<br />
This may have been the case, but the new location did not seem to be much of an improvement. I asked several volunteers if they knew where it was located, and none of them did. I finally found it myself by following some riot police to the edge of the security zone.<br />
<br />
The Free Speech Zone, it turned out, looked liked the caged-in playground of a 1970’s-era housing project. It was made of the same kind of mesh barriers as the rest of the perimeter, only the barriers were much taller—maybe ten feet—and they had been doubled into parallel walls about four feet apart, like the twin battlements atop a medieval castle. To the right of this cage, which was about the size of three tennis courts, was a large gate, currently sealed. On one side were two dozen riot police, quite relaxed. On the other, just barely in view, the marchers. No one was in the cage. I asked one of the officers what was going on, and he said they refused to enter.<br />
<br />
It did seem futile. No delegates were anywhere to be seen. I was the only reporter there. Bill Clinton was about to speak. One young man with a press badge hanging from his neck did approach, but it turned out that he was simply trying to get to the Circle K convenience mart that had the misfortune of being located in the restricted zone. He wanted cigarettes, and so he decided to wait out the demonstration.<br />
<br />
I learned later, from a review of the show in the <i>Denver Post</I>, that Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello had called for a non-violent march to end the war. “We’re going right now,” he had said. “We’ll meet you outside.” Also present, according to the Post, was Ron Kovick, the Vietnam veteran who had written Born on the Fourth of July, who said to the audience, “We will bring the troops home, and we will do this nonviolently, in the spirit of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.”<br />
<br />
A volunteer driving a trash cart paused to consider the situation. His youth and shaggy demeanor suggested that he might be on the side of anarchy and/or peace, but in fact he was disdainful. He looked at the meandering crowd and said, “All of them should go out and try making some money and then do something.” Then he drove off.<br />
<br />
The protesters, for their part, seemed completely defeated. Someone had set up a microphone at a podium inside the cage and the protesters were invited inside to make speeches. I tried to listen, but I was kept so far back by the police that I couldn’t make out any of the words. The tone of the speeches became rambling, though, and at one point someone launched into a poor take on “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.”<br />
<br />
Things were falling apart. Two giant men wearing corrections officer badges and biker mustaches ambled by. I asked if the protest was over and one of them said he thought so. I asked what happened. The other one said he wasn’t sure, but he had heard that the organizers and the police had finally struck a bargain, involving bottled water and free passes on the light rail.<br />
<br />
And that was all that happened. At the beginning of this non-riot, however, I did overhear the following exchange between one of the reporters, who happened to be wearing a loud sports coat, and one of the black-clad riot officers—an exchange, I promise you, that was entirely sincere.<br />
<br />
Reporter: You look good today.<br />
<br />
Riot Officer: So do you.<br />
<br />
Pause.<br />
<br />
Riot Officer: Hey, I have that exact same jacket! ■<br />
Luke Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08968715243704059643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076462276343371005.post-78878992591057855562008-08-26T13:04:00.000-04:002013-02-09T10:41:59.335-05:00[Harper's Magazine] CLOWNS A scene from the 2008 DNC<iframe width="540" height="405" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/GDGhs_LN7Fk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
A drama from Fox News. The scene: the Pepsi Center, site of the Democratic National Convention, last Sunday afternoon.<br />
<br />
Fox News Reporter Griff Jenkins: (Wading into crowd of protestors) What’s your message? What are you upset about?<br />
<br />
Masked Protestor 1: I’m upset about everything.<br />
<br />
Masked Protestor 2: Fuck corporate media!<br />
<br />
Griff Jenkins: (Aside) Well, I guess they don’t believe in freedom of speech. Let’s just work this crowd and see who we can talk to.<br />
<br />
Griff Jenkins: (Reading sign) Defend Denver. Explain that to me. What does that mean?<br />
<br />
Man in Sunglasses: I’m not going to talk to you.<br />
<br />
Griff Jenkins: What’s that?<br />
<br />
Man in Sunglasses: I said I’m not going to talk to you.<br />
<br />
Griff Jenkins: Do you believe in freedom of speech?<br />
<br />
Junior Melendez: End the war!<br />
<br />
Griff Jenkins: What’s your name? Come here! What’s your name?<br />
<br />
Junior Melendez: My name is Junior Melendez and fuck war!<br />
<br />
Griff Jenkins: Come on, that isn’t necessary! If you have a message . . .<br />
<br />
Voice Offstage: Fuck you!<br />
<br />
Griff Jenkins: (Continuing) If you have a message . . . Do you have an actual message without cursing? What’s your message?<br />
<br />
Man with Goatee: Stop the torture. Stop the war.<br />
<br />
Griff Jenkins: Stop the torture. Stop the war. Do you not believe in freedom? Do you not believe . . .<br />
<br />
All, Except Jenkins: Fuck Fox News! Fuck Fox News! Fuck Fox News!<br />
<br />
(Curtain)<br />
<br />
These sorts of dramas happen all the time, of course. The Griff Jenkinses put on their make-up and taunt the candidates or the protestors or the guys-just-like-you into some kind of broadcast-quality entertainment and that’s the business.<br />
<br />
This particular moment is worth noting, though, because the protestors, organized by a group called Recreate 1968, seem to have decided that playing along with the clown act is not conducive to their own clearly stated goals. (“Stop the torture. Stop the war.”)<br />
<br />
They don’t offer the majestic dignity of other clown-show resistors, say from the era of civil rights resistance. But they do bring a rare contempt into play, which is its own form of dignity, one that must perhaps precede the calmer varieties.<br />
<br />
The Recreate 68 organizers note on their web site that they do not aim to recreate the police riot that took place at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. What they aim to recreate, rather, is a time when Americans forced their leaders, by way of protest and grassroots organization, to live up to their democratic rhetoric: “That in 2008 the two leading candidates for the Democratic nomination for president are an African American man and a woman – something unimaginable at the start of the sixties – is a direct result of the changes brought about in that decade.” Which seems indisputable, no matter how much the sixties themselves are portrayed now as a clown show.<br />
<br />
The first step toward that kind of participation, in fact, is to stop pretending politics is a clown show. That is a media conceit, after all, and one that is fairly easy to undermine.<br />
<br />
In 1967, for instance, a proto-Griff named Alan Burke invited the activist/prankster Peter Berg on to his talk show to explain his message to the folks at home. Instead, Berg decided to bring the viewers themselves into the drama. He had a plant in the audience, armed with a clownish pie, and when another audience member got up to ask “what young people stood for these days,” he creamed that questioning innocent square in the face.<br />
<br />
Having broken one version of the fourth wall, Berg then tried to break another. He began a lecture about the unreal nature of television itself, about the need for direct engagement. (This was nearly a decade before <i>Network</I> had come out.) “This is how you get out of the box,” he said. “You stand up – and you at home can join me in this – stand up, and start walking to get out of the box. Now here I go now. Just keep the camera on me and I’ll keep walking.” He walked to the studio exit, opened the door, and looked into the camera. Then he said, “Now turn off your television sets and go to bed,” and walked out the door.<br />
<br />
This may have been pretentious. In fact it <i>was</I> pretentious. But most attempts at dignity are pretentious, until they succeed. ■Luke Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08968715243704059643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076462276343371005.post-30408708030290390252008-03-17T12:36:00.000-04:002013-02-09T10:42:22.152-05:00[Washington Post] OIL RIDDLE Why are we in Iraq?In 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense, claimed that “the notion that the war was ever about oil is a complete piece of nonsense.” His boss, Donald Rumsfeld, agreed. The war “does not relate to oil,” he said. “I mean, it just plain doesn’t.”<br />
<br />
Such expansive claims might strike you as absurd. There is a lot of oil in Iraq, after all. But many in Washington – indeed at the <i>Washington Post</I> – seemed to find them credible. Columnist Richard Cohen wrote that the world “must bear in mind that the American and British troops in the desert are not fighting for oil.” The headline over a January 24, 2003 oped by Thomas Lippman proclaimed simply, “It’s Not a War for Oil.” And the <i>Post</I>’s own editorial board was able to make a 1,500-word affirmative case for invading Iraq without once mentioning Iraqi oil.<br />
<br />
Opinions change, though, and in his Sunday Outlook piece, “A Crude Case for War?,” Steven Mufson has found a more nuanced approach to understanding the role of oil in our Iraqi adventure.<br />
<br />
Mufson locates this new attitude in, among other places, the words of Zaab Sethna, the American who was Ahmed Chalabi’s closest aide in the run-up to the war. Sethna continues to aver that he never heard oil policy discussed at any of the Pentagon or State Department meetings he attended before the war. But he now notes as well that, of course, “Iraq is sitting on a very large portion of oil” and is, therefore, “important for U.S. security interests.”<br />
<br />
Similarly, Anthony Cordesman, a former national security assistant to Senator John McCain, continues to reject “the idea that the war was designed on behalf of oil companies.” But he is now also able to at least consider a few “what-if” scenarios. “If we went to war for oil,” for instance, then “we did it as clumsily as anyone could do.”<br />
<br />
Such admissions, no matter how grudging or even hypothetical, might strike fans of reality as progress. We may not agree on why the oil in Iraq is important, but we can at least agree that it is important. And from there, we might even be able to have an open and detailed debate about how to advance our interests in Iraq.<br />
<br />
Mufson comes away with a different conclusion. “[C]oncern about oil supplies is part of the architecture of U.S. foreign policy,” he writes. And who could disagree? In fact, readers might expect the next thought to be: therefore we ought to consider oil policy in all its considerable and complex detail.<br />
<br />
But that is not Mufson’s next thought. Instead, he makes the very surprising claim that “oil needn’t be mentioned.” And why needn’t oil be mentioned? Well, “because it’s self-evident.”<br />
<br />
That is a strong claim! Isn’t Mufson even just a little bit curious about the “architecture of U.S. foreign policy”? We never find out, alas, because, perhaps in keeping with his own views about self-evidence, he ends his piece a few words later.<br />
<br />
Mufson’s conclusion is disappointing, to say the least. It is depressing to have to say something so obvious, but the claim that our oil policy is “self-evident” and therefore beyond discussion is preposterous. That’s like saying Iowa policy makers don’t need to bother talking about corn anymore, because they already know how integral it is to the Iowa economy. It is not an ideological error. It is an empty set.<br />
<br />
You can be a hegemonist or a pacifist, a realist or a neo-con – without oil in the Iraq equation, nothing will add up.<br />
<br />
Should Iraq’s new government have strong central authority or cede power to regional officials? Well, if you are in a region with a lot of oil, as the Kurds and the Shia are, then you will favor regional power. If you are in a region with little oil, as the Sunni are, then you will favor central authority.<br />
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Why is Basra, which is predominantly Shia, so violent? In large part because warlords there are fighting a mafia war over oil-smuggling profits – profits that, in turn, are fueling the insurgency.<br />
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Who will rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure? China, which will have the greatest need for oil in the years to come, would very much like to help out. So would other oil-seeking nations. Yet some Iraqis would prefer that their country pay its own way and, thereby, retain control of its sole source of income.<br />
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America’s political leaders used to be capable of discussing oil like adults. Jimmy Carter, for one, had no problem admitting to “the overwhelming dependence of the Western democracies on oil supplies from the Middle East” and asserting a military interest in the Gulf region. In fact, that assertion is now called the Carter Doctrine.<br />
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Even Dick Cheney, at the conclusion of the first Gulf War, noted that one motivation for the war was that Saddam Hussein “was clearly in a position to dictate the future of worldwide energy policy.”<br />
<br />
And yet today we only have riddles. We are not in Iraq for the oil. It never even came up in the meetings! But of course we would not be in Iraq if it had no oil. That would be silly.<br />
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It is possible that no one at the White House discussed oil in the run up to this war. Such a shocking failure of leadership, however, would seem to be a very important news story. Indeed, I hope the <i>Post</I> will be looking into it. ■Luke Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08968715243704059643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076462276343371005.post-58728306280652890772007-12-04T17:51:00.000-05:002013-02-09T10:42:36.204-05:00[Harper's Magazine] THE BLACK BOX Inside Iraq's oil machine<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNBEl7xzUIyTjNK7nvcXTekPZs6-KdXQfDAu3R6e7qJphq8bUJ-eNztSc_bM3t4nXkELbV0kv8OrUamozruvhznAqyLPNs8DChU6zUQVJsfVNoh048UOqWfpP5NoU3Q7dhVWXRK-Mnyamq/s1600/blackboxlarge.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNBEl7xzUIyTjNK7nvcXTekPZs6-KdXQfDAu3R6e7qJphq8bUJ-eNztSc_bM3t4nXkELbV0kv8OrUamozruvhznAqyLPNs8DChU6zUQVJsfVNoh048UOqWfpP5NoU3Q7dhVWXRK-Mnyamq/s540/blackboxlarge.jpg" /></a><br />
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<i>“A gasoline engine is sheer magic,” he said to me once. “Just imagine being able to take a thousand different bits of metal – and if you fit them all together in a certain way – and then if you feed them a little oil and gasoline – and if you press a little switch – suddenly those bits of metal will all come to life – and they will purr and hum and roar – they will make the wheels of a motor car go whizzing around at fantastic speeds. . . ."</i><br />
<div align="right">– Roald Dahl, <i>Danny the Champion of the World</i></div><br />
The striking thing about the Rumaila oil field is that the land itself appears to be so completely dead. The hardpack plain is inorganic, barely even a desert. It had been marshland once, a refuge for night herons and water buffalo, but Saddam bled it dry so that he could more easily exterminate the rebels hiding in the reeds. It is hard to believe anything valuable remains. The engineers say there are at least 115 billion barrels of oil in Iraq, though, much of it right here beneath Rumaila. There could be more, too, maybe twice as much, but three decades of dictatorship and sanctions have slowed exploration, and the war has only worsened matters. Now it is dangerous even to extract the known quantities.<br />
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It was for this reason that we were driving across Rumaila late last winter in a convoy of four explosives-resistant SUVs, inside of which were ten employees of the British security firm Erinys, each of whom wore black double-plated body armor and carried, at minimum, a handgun and an assault rifle. The convoy had been arranged to transport a single engineer to inspect a single part of Iraq’s aging and frequently attacked oil infrastructure. Our driver had told us that Rumaila was “friendly-ish” but that there were still some concerns about kidnapping and roadside IED attacks. He drove defensively. Sometimes he would speed up to ninety or a hundred miles an hour in the left lane, against traffic. Sometimes he would pull off onto the hard dirt itself, driving across twin ruts or inventing an altogether new path. There were no towns or villages. In a few rare instances we would pass a low house made of cinder blocks, and sometimes we would see two or three kids running around in front. Our driver would always wave, even when the kids threw rocks at us.<br />
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The engineer, whom I will call Sam, was a “project delivery team leader” for Foster Wheeler, the Houston engineering firm the Army Corps of Engineers had hired to oversee much of the oil-field reconstruction. His title meant that he spent a lot of time in convoys like this, traveling from well to well, inspecting our progress. Sam was precise in his speech and in his dress. His purple button-down shirt was tucked neatly into his jeans, and his boots were dusty but otherwise immaculate. The rest of us had been required to wear Kevlar army helmets for the trip, but Sam, like most of the engineers in Iraq, wore a white hard hat with his name printed on the front. He had been working here almost since the war began, usually eight weeks on, three weeks off, but as of today he had not been home to Texas in thirteen weeks and still had another two weeks to go. When he did get home, he said, he would do nothing for three days but sleep and watch TV.<br />
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Sam demonstrated a sort of dry enthusiasm for his work. What makes Rumaila oil so great, he said, is that it is light – its predominant hydrocarbons lack viscosity, which means that you can push them through a pipe and onto a ship without much effort – and it is sweet, which means that it contains only trace amounts of sulfur, which is hard on refineries and expensive to extract. Sam said the best way to know if oil is sweet is to smell it. Sour oil smells like rotten eggs. Sweet oil has a satisfyingly bituminous scent, like hot pavement after a light rain.<br />
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The oil in Rumaila is especially sweet, and we could smell it everywhere. For the most part, though, we could not see it. The crude was carefully sealed within the surrounding pipelines, mile upon mile of rusty tubing and oil-blackened flanges perched above the corrosive soil like balance beams. Even the wellheads jutting out of their hardened concrete pillboxes were really just vertical pipes draped with gauges. Sam called them Christmas trees. He said there were no horse’s heads going up and down like you see in Texas and Oklahoma because the oil in Iraq is already under such intense pressure.<br />
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The oil remains hidden within this vast arterial matrix all the way from the reservoir to the Persian Gulf. It flows by way of overburdened degassing plants and pump houses and into main lines that parallel the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and then follows their confluence along the Shatt al-Arab Waterway until, a few miles south of the port city of Basra, it plunges into the sea, runs along the ocean floor for another twelve miles, and finally rises abruptly to the surface at a barnacle-encrusted catwalk structure called Al-Basra Oil Terminal. From there it goes everywhere, but mostly to the United States.<br />
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I was making that same journey from well to terminal, and yet in all my time in Iraq I would see the oil itself only once. This was in a particularly empty patch of desert, beyond even the lonely cinder-block houses and the rock-throwing kids. We had sped past dry concrete canals and abandoned oil drums and rocket-charred tanks, past mile upon mile of flat dirt and rust, and then we found ourselves driving between a series of mirror-black ponds. These pools crept along both sides of the highway, and through the scratchy ballistic glass of our SUV it was hard to tell at first if the liquid within was oil or water. There were no ripples, though – the pools were thick – and the hot asphalt smell was strong enough that it had become a taste. Sam said the oil came from leaky pipes, that there is no EPA watching over Rumaila. “You have to give the devil his due here,” he said, meaning Iraq. “On a good day, they export 60,000 to 70,000 barrels an hour. If 500 barrels of crude spill on the ground here, what is that? Not more than a half minute of export.”<br />
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Oil was selling for about $60 a barrel at the time, and so that half minute of potential export was worth at least $30,000. But Sam was right, of course. Any competent engineer would recognize that these particular pools of oil, already disappearing into the distance, existed within a degree of precision that was irrelevant to the success of the larger project. And, truth be told, seeing the oil was a relief.<br />
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I had come to think of Iraq as a kind of black box. Not the black box engineers analyze after a plane crash to determine how the disaster occurred – though such a device would have some metaphoric relevance to Iraq – but rather the black box engineers speak of in describing a mechanism with a known function and an unknown method. The pig goes in one end, the sausage comes out the other, and what goes on in between is no one’s business. More and more of what happens in the world happens inside black boxes. It was not very long ago, for instance, that an interested observer could look under the hood of a car and determine that, yes, gas flowed in through this line, and these ceramic plugs probably sparked that gas, and these tiny explosions – you could practically hear the individual pistons! – were probably what was spinning that shaft. Now, of course, the inside of an engine compartment is almost entirely sealed off. Gasoline goes in, motion comes out, and when that ceases to happen the engine’s innermost ailments are diagnosable only by a computer, which of course is another kind of black box.<br />
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Drivers seldom think about how engines work, just as they seldom think about where they get their power. The foot goes down and the car goes forward. Easy. Indeed, discussing the source of our power has become more taboo than discussing the source of our meat, likely for similar reasons. We say the oil is a commodity. That it could be from anywhere. That it is more appropriately understood as a number on a screen, as an idea. We have allowed ourselves to believe that Iraq is not a nation-sized infrastructure with intricate workings – indeed, with many leaky pipes – but a kind of philosopher’s stone, as if through our engineering prowess we had found a way to defy the laws of physics as easily as we defy the laws of war, as if we really could flatten the world with a wish or melt all that is solid into air. This is obviously not true, and it is a dangerous fantasy. The mechanism may become increasingly complex, indeed the accelerating system may blur to invisibility, but every system must be understood before it can be controlled. And here at last, in this oil made visible, was the beginning of understanding.<br />
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* * *<br />
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The oil, according to the Iraqi constitution, belongs to “all the people of Iraq,” but the people of Iraq have never fully been able to exploit their national patrimony. Even when Iraq was at its most extractive – in 1979, just as Saddam was taking full control of the ruling Ba’ath Party – the best it could do was to produce an average of 3.7 million barrels of oil per day. Now, after three decades of advances in extraction technology, it is able to produce about 2.1 million barrels per day. The invasion in 2003 briefly interrupted that flow, but output today is essentially the same as it was just before the war began. Everyone agrees that this is unacceptable. Saudi Arabia produces nearly five times as much oil each day, and even the United States, sucking at the dregs of its own dwindling reserves, manages to produce four times as much.<br />
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One of the oft-cited benchmarks for success in Iraq is the passage of a national hydrocarbon law. Even more than the Iraqi constitution, such an agreement would address the major fault lines of the war and of the nation itself, primarily because it would address how the oil money is distributed. But agreement on the law has proved elusive. The Shia in the south and the Kurds in the north happen to be sitting on two very large oil deposits, whereas the Sunnis are concentrated in the center of Iraq, where there is relatively little oil. This trick of geological fate underlies an ongoing political dispute. The Kurds would prefer oil revenue to be distributed on a local basis. The Sunni, who make up a minority of the nation’s population, prefer what they call a federal model, in which all of the oil revenue is shared more or less equally. The Shia, who now control the central government, appear for the most part also to favor a federal model, but some clans in the south have suggested they might prefer to make their own deals. There are other divisions as well. A lively labor movement has emerged since the invasion, and in June some 600 members of the Iraqi Pipelines Union went on strike in Basra, calling for a redistribution of profits. Some union leaders have taken to signing their communications, “Long live the Iraqi working class.”<br />
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Whether the disputes are based on geography or religion or class, the result has been constant violence, both against the system of extraction and against the people who maintain it. Since the war began, the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security has tracked “attacks on Iraqi pipelines, oil installations, and oil personnel.” They counted 148 such attacks in 2004, another 100 attacks in 2005, and 101 more attacks in 2006. Some of these were minor efforts: “two rocket propelled grenades fired at exposed and leaking valve,” for instance, or an “explosion apparently caused by homemade bomb thrown under oil and gas pipes.” Some attacks were deadly. The report notes, for instance, that a “bomb blast during changing of the guard at an oil storage facility south of Baghdad in Al Latifiyah killed six Iraqi National Guard soldiers and wounded five more” and also that a bomb on an “oil pipeline near Kirkuk killed an Iraqi oil security chief and eight of his men, who were in the process of defusing another explosive device.”<br />
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For this reason, and because they are rich enough to afford it, a great many of Iraq’s native oil professionals have fled the country. The <i>Wall Street Journal</i> in 2006 called this flight a “petroleum exodus” and reported that about a hundred oil workers had been murdered since the war began and that “of the top hundred or so managers running the Iraqi oil ministry and its branches in 2003, about two-thirds are no longer at their jobs.” Now most of the engineers in Iraq are from Texas and Oklahoma. They earn double what they would in the United States, but there is still a shortage of talent in Iraq. The inevitable result is that the oil flows a little slower.<br />
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* * *<br />
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The convoy was taking Sam to West Qurna 7, which was also the next stop for the oil after it left the ground. As we drove, Sam explained that West Qurna 7 was a gas-oil separation plant. Crude oil at the well contained a great deal of natural gas and water and salt. The gas-oil separation plant was where those impurities were removed. Raw crude would flow in one end, undergo a series of thermodynamic processes, and out the other end would come a commodity as consistent and interchangeable as a bag of soybeans.<br />
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The first sign of the plant was the flares, three massive plumes of orange flame that smudged black smoke across the horizon. This was the liberated gas. The plant itself was almost entirely out of doors, a football-field-sized complex of pipelines connected to three clusters of compression tanks. Everything had been painted gray, and there was nothing else for miles around but flat plains of strangely abraded dirt.<br />
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We pulled to a stop and our driver greeted the Iraqi guards in English. He had to shout over a constant screech, like steel cutting steel, and Sam, also shouting, explained that the screeching was the sound of the oil itself. The crude was under so much pressure that it rattled all the loose parts of the system, especially the valves, as if they were reeds or uvulas. The whole system vibrated in sympathy, the oil-gorged tubes acting like amplifying throats or pipes in a church organ. Sam said the oil would flow more silently once the gas had been removed and the pressure lowered to atmospheric level.<br />
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The inspection consisted of making sure that the equipment that needed to be installed – in this case, a desalting unit – had in fact been installed. But Sam also wanted to check the overall condition of the plant and seemed pleased to describe the function of its various components. We would walk and Sam would point to something and shout a brief explanation and then we would move on, surrounded at all times by our security team, half of them walking backward, all of them sighting their rifles into the distance.<br />
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We approached a rack of four submarine-sized compression tanks. “Basically, after the well,” Sam shouted, “the crude goes through one of these production trains.” We could hear the crude gushing into the first tank. Sam said the field manager controlled the relationship between the entry and exit valves such that the tank never quite got full. Per Boyle’s law, this increase in volume caused a decrease in pressure, and the decrease in pressure caused the “gas” – which at that point was in fact a liquid in solution – to boil to the surface. You could see the same principle at work by popping open a bottle of Coke. Under pressure the carbon dioxide would remain suspended in solution, but as soon as you decreased the pressure (by opening the bottle), it would boil to the surface. In the first tank, the pressure was lowered just a bit, which caused lighter gas, such as methane, to boil up and out. In the next tank, the pressure was lowered again, and heavier gas, such as propane, would rise from the mix. Finally, the pressure was reduced to atmospheric level, which caused even the heavy butane and pentane to separate. You do it in stages, Sam said, because big pressure drops tend to eat up the equipment.<br />
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The next step, as we had seen from the highway, was that the newly liberated gas was flared off. This was not the optimum engineering solution. A more elegant approach would be to send the liberated gas through another series of pipes to a natural-gas liquefaction plant, where it could be further refined and then sold. Some plants in Iraq did just that but many did not, for the simple reason that no one had ever gotten around to building the necessary infrastructure. The result, Sam said, was that Iraq burned away at least $10 million worth of gas every day. Indeed, due to its lack of domestic refinery infrastructure, Iraq is a long-time net importer not only of natural gas but also of gasoline, kerosene, fuel oil, and all of the other much-needed products that may be obtained from raw crude. (This is one reason Baghdad has so little electricity, which is generated in most Iraqi power plants by burning fuel oil or natural gas.) Rectifying this problem has proved difficult not only because of the war – and the looting and the years of sanctions – but also because the entire system had been allowed to collapse under Saddam. Every engineer I met in Iraq seemed to have a special loathing for the former dictator simply because he had taken what was, by the standards of the 1970s, a fairly good industrial infrastructure and run it into the ground.<br />
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Saddam’s legacy was everywhere around us at West Qurna 7. As we wandered past another production train, Sam pointed to a yellowing notice that had been glued to one of the tanks. The text was entirely in Russian. Other notices on other tanks were in English. This patchwork of documentation was possibly evidence of Cold War gamesmanship or perhaps just the switch to a new low bidder. Sam was pretty sure the company that built the plant itself was based in Ukraine, but it was hard to know because engineers working under Saddam were reluctant to keep detailed records, and many of the records that did exist were looted or destroyed after the invasion. The current contractors had spent several weeks trying to track down the Iraqi engineers who built the plant just to find out what worked and what didn’t.<br />
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We wandered further into the maze of pipes, and Sam paused in front of another tank. This was a desalting unit. Sam said the groundwater in Rumaila is so salty and alkaline that if you put it in your mouth you would gag and probably throw up. The crude that flowed into West Qurna 7 was full of this salty groundwater. Desalting the crude was a fairly low-tech process that also, conveniently enough, involved removing the water. The main problem at West Qurna 7 right now was that some of the desalters were not working, and replacing them had turned out to be a typically convoluted process. The Army Corps of Engineers had hired KBR – which at that moment was in the process of spinning off from Halliburton – to buy new desalters, which would in turn be installed by engineers from South Oil Company, or SOC, which itself was a part of Iraq’s many-tentacled Ministry of Oil. The good news was that SOC was just about finished, which is why West Qurna 7 was able to generate so much noise. It should be noted, though, that there are fifty-two gas-oil separation plants in Iraq, as well as three major and fourteen smaller refineries, fifteen major pump stations, and 1,600 wellheads, all of which are attached to 4,350 miles of rusty and ill-maintained pipeline. None of it works very well.<br />
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We continued through the maze. One of the Erinys men warned us to duck as we passed under some low pipes full of newly degassed oil. It was quieter now, and I could hear the static of his radio. Sam pointed to a cluster of concrete buildings in the distance and said they housed transfer pumps. Behind the pumps we could see a series of towers that carried high-tension lines off into the distance. After the oil had been degassed and depressurized it had no more natural momentum. Moving energy requires energy, though, and these pumps, driven by the equally embattled electrical infrastructure, would invest the dry crude with the power it needed to continue its journey to the Gulf.<br />
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* * *<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAEiPnfF3rBjEKN0x_MckzPEHFlZtNXGiAhBVJ8ZdGbBz23_G1OtDaEf2ktb4HRX_lw5Ey4Q8SOkM47T38PwfLVYJDGba_d6VQFY2FjKNtdIJnQG6Aud_blQ6hOoJN761JtAzSV1DAMwPO/s1600/gasplant.jpg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAEiPnfF3rBjEKN0x_MckzPEHFlZtNXGiAhBVJ8ZdGbBz23_G1OtDaEf2ktb4HRX_lw5Ey4Q8SOkM47T38PwfLVYJDGba_d6VQFY2FjKNtdIJnQG6Aud_blQ6hOoJN761JtAzSV1DAMwPO/s540/gasplant.jpg.jpg" /></a><br />
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The United States has committed less than $3 billion to repairing Iraq’s oil infrastructure, which is not very much money. The government of Iraq could reinvest its own oil income – just over $30 billion in 2006 – but oil and international aid are pretty much the government’s only sources of income, and the country has several other pressing concerns, including the need to rebuild its failing agricultural, educational, electrical, and medical infrastructures. Iraq also owes various creditors about $100 billion and owes Kuwait an additional $250 billion in reparations from the first Gulf War. (Some of that debt may be forgiven.) Meanwhile, the engineers I spoke to said it would take tens of billions of dollars just to get the oil infrastructure up to international standards and as much as $100 billion to fully exploit the nation’s potential oil wealth. The extent of that potential wealth is unknowable, but at 115 billion proven barrels times, say, $60 a barrel, it is in the neighborhood of at least $7 trillion and probably far more than that. (As of this writing, the price of oil has climbed to more than $80 a barrel.) All of this puts Iraqis in a situation familiar to anybody who has ever had a check on the way but needed a lot of money right now. They can get the money, but it will cost them.<br />
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I asked Sam about the reconstruction and he had fairly strong views on the matter. He said Iraq should use the best available technology, the expensive kind, and it should use that technology as quickly as possible. The Iraqis could probably upgrade the system on their own – they were smart enough and ambitious enough – but it would take them twenty years: “They need the horizontal wells, they need the secondary, tertiary recovery processes, they need access to capital, and all of those things rhyme with foreign oil companies.”<br />
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Sam seemed to understand that he was suggesting something controversial. The oil companies certainly have enough money. Six of the ten largest corporations in the world – ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Total – are in the oil business, and those six companies together earned $1.5 trillion in 2006. ExxonMobil, which last year made $40 billion in profits alone, could start drilling advanced wells within a few months of signing a contract. But no major oil company thus far has been able to strike any significant deal with the government of Iraq. The Kurds have made a kind of separate peace with several American and European oil companies in the past few months, but the central government in Baghdad says such deals will not be legitimate until Iraq’s parliament passes the draft hydrocarbon law. The law itself is foundering, however, in part because of disagreement over how such deals should be structured.<br />
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The current draft of the law calls for “production sharing agreements” between Iraq and its potential oil-company partners. Such agreements are rare – they divert an unusually large portion of oil wealth to the oil companies – and typically are struck only in unexplored regions where a large capital investment would represent a significant gamble on the part of the oil companies. Much of Iraq does remain unexplored, but no one doubts the country’s oil-producing potential. The risk in Iraq stems from the war itself and from the clear instability of the government, which at times appears to lack the support even of its American sponsors. Such a government could fall at any moment, and whatever entity replaced it could “nationalize” a company’s investment or require a new tax on exports or simply push the country further into genocidal chaos, all of which would be bad for business. The proposed agreements basically amount to a risk premium, and the proposed premium is steep. A 2005 joint study by the Global Policy Forum and the British research group Platform noted that any agreements signed “while the Iraqi state is very weak and still under occupation” would last twenty-five to forty years and ultimately cost Iraq between $74 billion and $194 billion.<br />
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The people of Iraq could wait for better terms, of course. Their oil is only going to become more valuable. Sam called this “the theory of saving stuff for the grandchildren.” When the East Texas field was developed, he said, there were a lot of operators who didn’t want to run their wells at capacity. They were in no rush to get the oil out of the ground because they thought: Hey, we’re already filthy rich – let’s save it for the grandchildren. Now, that might make sense from the perspective of achieving maximum value over time, Sam said, but achieving maximum value over time doesn’t always make sense. He had spent a few days working in the fields near Sadr City once, for instance, and a lot of the people up around there (“old boys,” in his Texas parlance) didn’t even have running water or indoor plumbing or really anything at all other than their tents. “So on the one hand they’re saving for the grandchildren,” Sam said. “But on the other hand, ask that old boy down there who only has two hours of electricity if he <i>wants</i> to save it for the grandchildren.” Sam’s guess was that he probably would not. And indeed in October the <i>New York Times</i> reported that Iraq’s electricity minister, Karim Wahid, had signed a $150 million contract with Sunir – an Iranian company – to construct a 160-megawatt power plant in Sadr City. “This is a free marketplace,” an anonymous U.S. military official explained, “so there’s not much we can do about it.”<br />
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* * *<br />
<br />
Many of the engineers in Iraq live at Basra Airbase, an immense interruption of the empty desert that is honeycombed by mile upon mile of precast concrete barriers. These barriers are everywhere in Iraq, and sometimes you can see a parade of eighteen-wheelers transporting a few hundred more of them to wherever someone or something needs to be stopped. I was told that whenever a rocket was lobbed over the top of the tallest of them a siren would go off and the security guards would announce that we were in condition red. This had happened 160 times in the previous three months.<br />
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The base itself began as a simple regional airport and has evolved into an intricate assemblage of functions, a literal military-industrial complex. The government of Iraq operated the commercial airport at its core, the British Royal Air Force operated a separate military airport, and several other military or quasi-military units, including the Army Corps of Engineers, had their own Quonset huts and white single-wide trailers, all of which had been configured, Lego-like, into hundreds of offices, bunkhouses, dining facilities, and latrines. KBR had a large camp there as well, which housed not only the KBR staff but also several Foster Wheeler engineers (including Sam) and two lone U.S. officers.<br />
<br />
One of those officers was Steven Loken, a youthful Air Force lieutenant colonel who had been transferred from Hawaii to manage the oil program in Basra. This morning I was sitting with him and Erich Langer, a public-affairs officer from the Corps of Engineers who was accompanying me as I traveled in Iraq, in a fluorescent-lit cubbyhole of an office and learning about how the reconstruction worked. Colonel Loken began by warning us that he himself had arrived here only six weeks ago and that he was learning most of what he knew from private contractors like Sam. Moreover, he was an electrical engineer, so he did not want to claim any special expertise in oil extraction. He had already learned a lot, though. Moving the oil from the ground to the ship involved billions of dollars in capital development and the ceaseless labor of thousands of accountants, electricians, engineers, pipe fitters, security guards, and others. The repairs alone involved hundreds of companies working under contract to dozens of agencies, all of them with varying degrees of access, expertise, and honesty – Axsia, BearingPoint, Boots & Coots, Eastern National Oilfield Services Company, Erinys, Gas Packing Company, Iraqi Drilling Company, KBR, North Oil Company, Oil Pipelines Company, Parsons Iraq Joint Venture, South Oil Company, Wild Well Control, Inc. – as well as the Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Energy, the State Department, soldiers and representatives from a dozen other coalition member countries, and, of course, the people of Iraq.<br />
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Colonel Loken pointed to a whiteboard behind his desk where he had written in Magic Marker the names and cost of the projects he oversaw. The list was divided into two columns. On the left were projects under contract with KBR and on the right were projects under contract with Parsons Iraq Joint Venture, or PIJV, an offshoot of the Pasadena-based construction firm Parsons. The projects were organized by Army task order. Task Order 11 was the $136.7 million upgrade of several natural-gas liquefaction plants, which would help reduce wasteful flaring and provide the country with significantly more cooking fuel. Task Order 12 was to repair desalters (including those at West Qurna 7), at a projected cost of $91.6 million. Task Order 22 was a series of well workovers: $69.6 million. Some projects were more mysterious. Task Order 28, for instance, would cost $7 million and was labeled simply “chemicals.”<br />
<br />
Erich, the public-affairs officer, was from Oklahoma, the son of a petroleum geologist, and he seemed as fascinated as I was by the inner workings of this complex bureaucratic mechanism. Loken continued to describe the chain of command, how the State Department intersected with the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office and how the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office intersected with the Army Corps of Engineers and how the Army Corps of Engineers intersected with dozens of private contractors – some American, some British, some even Iraqi – and how all of them, in turn, intersected with the government of Iraq, which had its own set of complex and evolving bureaucracies. Erich, who had been in Iraq almost from the beginning of the U.S. occupation, added that once all of the projects on the whiteboard had been completed, the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office would close up shop. All of the subcontractors would go home or, more likely, contract directly with the government of Iraq and continue their work. Most of the projects on the whiteboard were slated for completion within the year, but those projects did not by any means attempt to address the full extent of Iraq’s restructuring concerns. They were just stopgaps. Moreover, the war would continue. Some of the projects, once completed, would simply be re-destroyed. I had heard someone mention that the British would take over the KBR camp when KBR finished here and that the U.S. State Department would take over the PIJV camp. It would take one to three years to accomplish the turnover. But who knew? “It’s like building an airplane as you fly,” Erich said.<br />
<br />
About an hour into our conversation we heard what sounded like someone dropping something very heavy on the floor above us. Erich and Colonel Loken looked at each other and I remembered that we were in a one-story building. “Whoa,” Colonel Loken said. “That’s incoming.” A high alarm began to sound and Colonel Loken suggested we move to a bomb shelter. On the way out I noticed that the twin clocks in the hallway told Iraq time and Houston time.<br />
<br />
We joined several other engineers in an open-ended concrete box known as a Scud bunker. The weather was perfect, a beautiful California afternoon, and the mood in our bunker was strangely upbeat. We crouched on our benches and analyzed the situation. The attacks, one of the engineers explained, rarely came more than one at a time. The bad guys would get their hands on a 105-mm mortar round or an old Russian Katyusha rocket or even an American rocket left over from the Iran-Iraq War, and they would lean it against a low wall and light it up like a Roman candle and then run like hell. They hardly ever hit anyone. All we had to do was wait for the all-clear siren.<br />
<br />
As we waited, our discussion, still in the analytical mode, turned to the strange ways of the Iraqis. One engineer, a Scotsman, recalled the Iraqi practice of sacrificing an animal anytime a new plant was opened. It was a hell of thing, he said. Blood everywhere. Erich nodded and said he’s seen a ceremony at a plant up north where the Iraqis had killed four sheep. They had dipped their hands in the blood and then walked through the industrial corridors, painting bright red streaks on the walls. It was all part of the blessing, he said. The bigger the plant, the more animals you sacrifice.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
Not all of the oil makes it to the Gulf. There is the spillage, of course, but there is also the matter of theft. The Ministry of Oil has a tradition of bribery that long predates the current war, and the American contractors too have seen their share of corruption charges, though their tendency is to steal money from Americans, not oil from Iraqis. Most of the smugglers, in fact, are local operators. Some simply drill a hole in the pipeline and fill modified pickups directly from the source. Others bribe officials to look the other way as they load eighteen-wheelers at inland terminals. The <i>Guardian</i> reported in June that one clan was netting $5 million a week selling stolen crude to local refineries, $250,000 of which went right back into paying gunmen to protect them from other smugglers in other clans. Many believe that smuggling profits are funding the insurgency. The underworld battle between various criminal elements has itself undoubtedly led to considerable violence, and certainly has added a not very well understood layer of political intrigue to the hydrocarbon-law negotiations. One Mahdi Army fighter told a researcher for the International Crisis Group that “All parties, without exception, steal and smuggle oil. I mean all of them.”<br />
<br />
No one knows how much oil the smugglers take from the system. The Iraq Study Group reported that “150,000 to 200,000 – and perhaps as many as 500,000 – barrels of oil per day are being stolen,” and that estimate has since been repeated in other news reports. It is a very large claim, and as I was eating lunch at an oil facility one day I overheard a Navy engineer ridiculing it. He said moving that much oil out of the system would require something like a thousand tank trucks every day to transport their loot to a refinery or across the border, and that they would have to do this without being detected in what is possibly the most heavily surveilled country on earth. The engineer seemed fairly confident in his scorn – he suggested that maybe the real culprits were little green men – but my own sense was that you could move a lot of trucks around in Iraq before someone figured out they weren’t part of someone else’s mission.<br />
<br />
There is another failure of accounting that may explain the massive smuggling estimates. Two U.S. agencies report on how much oil Iraq produces. The Department of Energy keeps track of production everywhere on earth and has a standard reporting method. The State Department, which is ultimately responsible for the reconstruction, also generates daily reports, but only about Iraq. The Government Accounting Office compared their data and found a large discrepancy. The State Department was consistently reporting higher production than the Department of Energy, often by as much as 300,000 barrels per day. When the GAO first announced its findings last spring, many news outlets saw this gap as evidence of smuggling and corruption. The Department of Energy noted in the GAO report, though, that the discrepancy could also be explained by a perhaps even more dispiriting phenomenon: the Department of Energy does not count as “produced” the significant amount of oil that Iraq extracts and then, for lack of an alternative, simply injects back into the ground.<br />
<br />
This might seem an improbably Sisyphean twist, but it is true that Iraq is now somewhat better at producing oil than at exporting it. The northern pipelines have been shut down by saboteurs for most of the year, and one of the country’s two off-shore terminals is barely functioning, while the other, Al-Basra Oil Terminal, has been operating at far below capacity for decades. Iraq also has very little oil-storage capacity, so any oil that cannot be exported or refined immediately must be returned to the reservoir. This is called reinjection. One engineer told me that Iraq is the only country in the world that still reinjects. The process is not only frustrating and wasteful; it is also bad for oil fields. Further complicating the accounting is the fact that some of the oil is partially refined before it is reinjected. Refiners strip the gasoline from the oil, sell it for local consumption, and put the remaining, now-cruder crude back in the ground, where it devalues the entire field.<br />
<br />
Plausible as this explanation for the accounting discrepancy is, it is impossible to know whether it is correct, or how much smuggling goes on, or even how much oil is pumped out of the ground or back into it, because – almost unbelievably – the entire system lacks meters. At no point is the flow of oil measured within Iraq. The GAO report notes that the United Nations “first cited the lack of oil metering when Iraq was under U.N. sanctions” in 1996 and that Iraq had in 2006 signed an agreement with Shell Oil Company, which was to “advise the ministry on the establishment of a system to measure the flow of oil, gas, and related products within Iraq and in export and import operations.” But still no meters. Measuring a flowing, transforming, regularly spilled, and often stolen product as it makes its way across a war-ravaged desert is not easy. The best Iraq could do was to track the oil as it left the terminal, but the meters there have not worked for years, and so the technique was not precise. A Navy lieutenant explained the method to the military newspaper <i>Stars and Stripes</i>. He said they “guesstimated” the output based on the displacement of departing ships: they would watch the waterline, and each centimeter the tanker sank represented another 6,000 barrels of oil. “So you can imagine,” the lieutenant said, “a couple of inches could equal 180,000 barrels of fuel.”<br />
<br />
There were improvements in the works, though. One of the projects on the whiteboard in Colonel Loken’s office was Task Order 16. The $42.6 million contract was in the PIJV column, and it had been awarded in 2004. The goal was to refurbish the terminal, improve worker safety, improve loading capacity – which, not incidentally, would help solve the problem of reinjection – and fix the meters. Progress had been slow, but as it happened, Colonel Loken and his boss and his boss’s boss were flying out from Basra Airbase to the terminal to inspect PIJV’s work, and he said Erich and I could fly along and see for ourselves what they had done.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
When Erich and I arrived at the Royal Air Force helipad, our Sea Hawk was already fired up, and the whack-whack-whack of the rotors made meaningful speech difficult. Colonel Loken gave us a shouted introduction to his boss, Captain Fritzley, who was noticeably short, wore rimless glasses, carried his cell phone in a holster, and, until the National Guard called him up, had run a fifty-man logistics team for Boise Cascade in Idaho. I noted the complexity of the contracts he must be negotiating right now, and he laughed and said, “I’m an engineer, not a lawyer.” Captain Fritzley’s boss was General Abt, who showed up just a few minutes later – leathery skin, shaved head, identical rimless glasses – and was accompanied by several silent aides, one of whom kept his dog tags twined into his shoelaces.<br />
<br />
The journey from oil field to terminal with a two-star general is somewhat less complicated than the same journey for crude in the pipe, but it is still difficult and dangerous and done in stages. We crowded into the Sea Hawk, bound up in our body armor and oddly constrictive Navy lifejackets, and before I could finish buckling everything together we were off. We flew fast at about a hundred feet, rising only to pass over the occasional power line, and the combination of low altitude and high speed caused the already indistinct landscape beneath us to blur into a reflective field. The brown-and-tan flux was so smooth that it created the illusion of a rippling desert ocean, an illusion that was dispelled only by the occasional set of tire tracks, and then the brown ripples turned a shade lighter and we really were over the Gulf. We could see rusty fishing boats and the occasional freighter, and the sea deepened to a steely gray and we lost sight of the shore. We flew in odd lines, rolling left then right, the better to confuse would-be missile attackers, and then – as abruptly as we had taken off – we landed. We were on the flight deck of an Australian frigate, the HMAS <i>Toowoomba</i>, rotors still whacking, and an Australian seaman was shouting a greeting and hustling us quickly to a lower deck, where we disentangled ourselves from our armor, and another seaman lowered an orange rope ladder over the side and we climbed awkwardly down, hanging under the high ship for the last few rungs, and onto a twelve-man rigid-hull inflatable boat, which, as soon as the last passenger had tumbled aboard, raced off across the open sea. Then it was all bouncing and waves, a dozen men in a rubber boat in the ocean, until – and this had all taken about ninety minutes – we could see the terminal.<br />
<br />
It was a spidery arrangement low on the horizon, a central platform about five stories tall with two long catwalks extending a half mile in opposite directions. At the end of each catwalk were two berthing stations, and attached to each berthing station was a very large oil tanker. As they loomed closer we could see their names: the <i>British Pride</i>, the <i>Tiara</i>, the <i>Front Crown</i>. The last of them, the <i>Universal Hope</i>, was low in the water and beginning, with the aid of two tugboats, to pull away. Captain Fritzley looked out at the oil-gorged tankers and said that if you wanted to shut down Iraq, this sure would be the place to do it.<br />
<br />
There were no concrete barriers here, just latticework catwalks and ladders and miles of pipe. The workers, from Texas and Oklahoma and also from Iraq and Kuwait, wore bright yellow coveralls and American-style goatees or bushy sideburns or handlebar mustaches. The security came in the form of four massive, twin .50-caliber machine guns, one on each corner of the central tower, manned by the men of Mobile Security Squadron Seven, a part of the U.S. Navy. A little plaque noted that the guns had a maximum effective range of 1,829 meters, which – along with several Navy warships just over the horizon – had been sufficient to defend the terminal since the war began. For all its intricate scaffolding, the terminal seemed solid. The dozens of lines that held the ships fast were thicker than my well-fed arm.<br />
<br />
As we walked along the catwalk in the direction of the departing <i>Universal Hope</i>, Captain Fritzley told us about the terminal’s past and future prospects. Saddam Hussein had hired KBR’s corporate predecessor Brown & Root to build it in 1973, six years before he took full control of the Ba’ath Party. Iran had bombed it several times in the ’80s, and it fell into further disrepair under U.N. sanctions in the ’90s. It was theoretically capable of loading 4 million barrels a day, but it had never operated at anywhere near that level. In the past couple of years PIJV had worked to improve the safety systems, train the workers in how to use them, update the power systems, fix the loading arms, and fix the meters. They had made some progress, but the meters still weren’t working. This was a concern. (“I’ll tell you what,” General Abt muttered to another officer as we wandered down the catwalk, “I’ve had more ass kicked in the last two weeks than in the whole rest of the time since I got here.”)<br />
<br />
I later learned that the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, or SIGIR, had just issued a report in January severely criticizing Parsons’s $75 million Baghdad Police College project – the inspectors found, for instance, that failed plumbing had somehow caused several overhead light fixtures to fill with urine and feces – and was about to issue another report criticizing the Parsons-built Iraqi Civil Defense Headquarters in Baghdad, citing faulty security systems and more leaky pipes. As a result of the investigations, the inspector general was considering barring Parsons from future contracts with the Army. SIGIR was investigating the terminal project as well, and in another report, issued just a few weeks after our visit, it would note deficient concrete pours, substandard plumbing installation, and unsafe electrical wiring. The more satisfying news, also noted by SIGIR, was that all four berths were in operation, which was a major breakthrough in Iraq’s export capability, and the meter project was on track for completion. (Erich later wrote to tell me that PIJV finally completed its part of the project in May, at which point it closed up shop and sent its engineers home.) Still, there was much to be done, and the work would likely continue only in fits and starts.<br />
<br />
Erich and I climbed a four-story spiral staircase to the crow’s nest, the highest point on the platform. Some of the stairs were loose and the railing did not seem entirely reliable. The view was worth the risk, though. The sun had come out and the sea lit up in a brilliant cerulean wash. The station itself had been painted in Tonka truck primaries: bright red, yellow, and blue. I could see at least two tankers near the horizon, high on the water and waiting their turn.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSTc0_-QbM8U6EYayyUsCUGJRHKltMz-4d7JdiAGW3MQ_N8QFfom1OMjPeCJz2SvVepX36xvGZYQySrduLHAvmIY8O4nLOMHF2CqemC4tQEtCSqJCuQUSBm9qalx7e1jHV2ng2NmS2FZo3/s1600/terminal.jpg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSTc0_-QbM8U6EYayyUsCUGJRHKltMz-4d7JdiAGW3MQ_N8QFfom1OMjPeCJz2SvVepX36xvGZYQySrduLHAvmIY8O4nLOMHF2CqemC4tQEtCSqJCuQUSBm9qalx7e1jHV2ng2NmS2FZo3/s540/terminal.jpg.jpg" /></a><br />
<br />
That the black box works at all is a significant achievement. Yes, the crude is impeded by friction and siphoned by thieves and thousands of barrels fall along the way, victim to leaky pipes and relentless saboteurs. But the machine, the vast engine of transformation, continues for the moment to function. The sparks ignite and the pistons pump and the desert crude is transformed into heat and light and motion, and also into money. All of this is the work of engineers. They overbuild and create backups and fail-safes, and after a while it seems as if their systems could never go awry, no matter how poorly maintained, no matter how overburdened, no matter how corruptly constituted. The engineers have made a machine, though – not a miracle – and a machine can always fail, or be made to fail, or simply be turned to some other purpose.<br />
<br />
This is how the last war began: Saddam invaded Kuwait, largely in order to control Kuwait’s superior oil-production system. He had overseen much of the construction of his own oil machine and likely believed he had an engineer’s understanding of its inner workings. He knew that Kuwait and Iraq both were part of OPEC, whose member nations had for many years controlled international oil prices by agreeing to limit how much oil they produced. And he knew that Kuwait was producing (and selling) far more than its quota. This meant more money for Kuwait and, because it drove down the price of oil, less money for everybody else, including Iraq. The invasion was meant to shift the gears, so to speak. With Saddam in control of Kuwait’s oil machine, Iraq not only would increase its oil holdings but also would considerably improve its refining and export capacity, and ultimately add billions of dollars to its national wealth. And it would do all of this even as it kept oil prices at OPEC-preferred levels, which would go a long way toward muting protests from Iraq’s oil-producing neighbors.<br />
<br />
Of course, Saddam was no more adept at manipulating the regional oil system than he was at maintaining his own infrastructure. The neighbors complained, the United States intervened, and Saddam had no choice but to retreat. But even in retreat he worked what levers he could. And here is where we see the violence that can spill forth from within the black box. Saddam ordered his retreating army to set each of his enemy’s 700 wells afire. Great jets of flame shot into the sky, and the oil that wasn’t turned into heat or light poured back down as black rain, a demonstration of thermodynamic transformation that seemed at first to be immeasurably more wasteful than the gas flares of West Qurna 7. And yet Saddam aimed to control the force of those fires just as a driver controls the force of the thousands of miniature explosions that occur every minute within the internal-combustion engine of his car. By destroying Kuwait’s oil machine, he would drive up the price of his own reserves.<br />
<br />
Saddam proved to be a poor engineer in this regard as well, however, and so came the inevitable ironic turn. He was forbidden to sell his nation’s oil until the United Nations established the Oil for Food Programme in 1995 – and by then Kuwait had managed to repair and indeed significantly improve its own infrastructure. In the end, Saddam had failed to appreciate the true complexity of the systems he was attempting to master, not an uncommon problem.<br />
<br />
Prometheus and the citizens of Babel discovered long ago that hubris generally is followed by disaster. In this land of lifeless desert clay, though, it is the tale of the golem that seems most fitting. A rabbi with knowledge of the secret name of God, the story goes, could transform an earthen statue into an unstoppably powerful ally. Every wish of the rabbi was answered by the strength of the golem, who in many instances would defend the rabbi’s village from outside danger. Sometimes the story ends well. In many golem tales, though, the inventor suffers for his knowledge. One such tale has the rabbi crushed by the weight of his collapsing creation.<br />
<br />
It seems to me that in this non-mythical world, this immutably Newtonian world, the golem turns on us not because we know too much but because we know too little. We are punished not by the gods or by fate but by our own willful stupidity. We make our machines and then forget they are our creations, there to be understood and controlled, perhaps because knowledge of their methods also brings knowledge of their purpose. We stand agog, self-paralyzed, even as all that is solid moves ever more quickly, blurring indistinguishably like the war-scarred desert beneath us, a golem drawn from the dying ground and running beyond our control.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
The trip back from the terminal was much faster. We passed over a town – the first inhabited place I’d seen in Basra – and the coastline was suddenly complex. Railroad depots, grain elevators, a gravel lot mysteriously gridlocked by a hundred identical brown pickup trucks. Freighters loitered along concrete ports, and the gradation between land and sea was perfectly sharp. Then we flew inland across the desert and, surprisingly, the sky filled with a light mist of rain. It was dusk now and I could just see the hazy outline of a refinery in the distance, pipelines extending in every direction, a dark tangle of oil and water and gas that flared bright orange smudges on the violet horizon.<br />
<br />
Later that night, back at the airbase, Erich asked me if I had noticed the rain. I told him I had. I thought it softened the desert to the point where it was almost beautiful. Sure, he said, but smell it. It doesn’t smell like rain, not like back home. I couldn’t see his face very well – the camp was kept dark at night to discourage snipers – so I couldn’t tell if he was taken aback by the perversity of the weather or simply alert to an unusual inversion of the natural order. Erich was the son of a geologist, though, and it was clear that he had considered the matter carefully. He said the rain down here smelled like <i>dirt</i>. And he was right. If such a thing was possible, the rain smelled dry. ■Luke Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08968715243704059643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076462276343371005.post-15449492873390138782007-08-01T11:02:00.000-04:002013-02-09T10:42:54.511-05:00[Harper's Magazine] THE ONGOING MEDICALIZATION OF TORTURE A conversation with the AMA<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2uDxjlyRw-31-ERmTyAySALvAo-xFSVRd5TUXZO7vBn1og9HpR7Lq_o4tLWfAWlOlyqqv92V-jiyzsDZsChbNBVWQ15Dlz9M7MtVWti1WH-rcM5Z2eNgGLbmKDh1zpOqyhbiRJWrd5rA4/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-11-21+at+10.54.23+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2uDxjlyRw-31-ERmTyAySALvAo-xFSVRd5TUXZO7vBn1og9HpR7Lq_o4tLWfAWlOlyqqv92V-jiyzsDZsChbNBVWQ15Dlz9M7MtVWti1WH-rcM5Z2eNgGLbmKDh1zpOqyhbiRJWrd5rA4/s320/Screen+Shot+2012-11-21+at+10.54.23+AM.png" /></a></div>On July 20, <a href="http://harpers.org/subjects/GeorgeWBush">George Bush</a> signed an executive order that clarified certain aspects of what his administration has come to call “enhanced <a href="http://harpers.org/subjects/Torture">interrogation</a> techniques.” It was <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/07/20070720-4.html">an extraordinarily detailed document</a> that reaffirmed the president’s claim that “members of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces” were “unlawful enemy combatants” and therefore were “not entitled to the protections that the Third Geneva Convention provides to prisoners of war.” It then outlined several protections unlawful combatants nonetheless would be privileged to enjoy. The order required, for instance, that that the interrogations not involve “forcing the individual to perform sexual acts or to pose sexually, threatening the individual with sexual mutilation, or using the individual as a human shield” and further stipulated that those being interrogated must “receive the basic necessities of life, including adequate food and water, shelter from the elements, necessary clothing, protection from extremes of heat and cold, and essential medical care.” It notes as well that subjects must be interrogated “without adverse distinction as to their race, color, religion or faith, sex, birth, or wealth.”<br />
<br />
Who could argue? All of this detail may seem an uncharacteristic bout of self-restraint from an administration reluctant to admit any limits to its power, but it actually has two functions entirely unrelated to protecting the health or dignity of our imprisoned combatants. The first, as <a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2007/07/hbc-90000639">Scott Horton notes</a>, is to normalize all of the techniques not mentioned—in essence claiming that all that is not forbidden is permitted. Water boarding, for instance, is mentioned nowhere within the text of the order. (The legal term is <i>inclusio unius est exclusio alterius</i>, “the inclusion of one is the exclusion of another.”) The second is to introduce the presumed institutional ethical weight of the medical profession.<br />
<br />
Two weeks ago, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Michael_McConnell">Michael McConnell</a>, the director of national intelligence, appeared on <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19850951/">Meet the Press</a> and confirmed the two-pronged strategy. He was clear about what was forbidden—but perfectly unclear about what was permitted. In particular, he would neither confirm nor deny whether water boarding was permissible. “If I announce what the specific measures are,” he said, “it would aid those who want to resist those measures.” (He did allow, however, that he “would not want a U.S. citizen to go through the process,” whatever it was.)<br />
<br />
That was step one. Step two was to claim that these unnamed and unnameable techniques had in fact been approved by unnamed and unnameable medical professionals. “When I was in a situation where I had to sign off,” he said, “I sat down with those who had been trained to do it, the doctors who monitor it, understanding that no one is subjected to torture.” Moreover, he added, all of the interrogations are performed “under medical supervision.” The executive order itself is explicit that the “interrogation practices” must be determined to be “safe for use with each detainee,” and that such determination is to be “based upon professional advice” and that, just to be perfectly clear, there must be “effective monitoring of the program, including with respect to medical matters, to ensure the safety of those in the program.”<br />
<br />
The administration was selling its measures like chewing gum. Four out of five doctors agree, so to speak, that enhanced interrogation is ethical. This did not strike me as plausible. In particular, McConnell had suggested on Meet the Press that suspects under interrogation are given to believe that further interrogation techniques might involve torture, and “because they believe these techniques might involve torture and they don’t understand them, they tend to speak to us, talk to us in very—a very candid way.” This conflicts with a long-established <a href="http://www.ama-assn.org/apps/pf_new/pf_online?f_n=browse&doc=policyfiles/HnE/E-2.067.HTM&&s_t=&st_p=&nth=1&prev_pol=policyfiles/HnE/E-1.02.HTM&nxt_pol=policyfiles/HnE/E-2.01.HTM&">AMA guideline</a> that forbids physicians to be “present when torture is used or threatened.” If physicians were present at interrogations that involved convincing subjects they were about to be tortured, they would of course be in clear violation of those guidelines.<br />
<br />
I called McConnell’s office to find out more, but his spokesman, Vanee Vines, told me the director had no further comment on the matter. In a follow-up e-mail I asked her if she could direct me to the physicians involved in McConnell’s conversations about the propriety of the techniques, or tell me what the physicians said that reassured McConnell, or if it was the policy of the administration to require the presence of medical doctors at interrogation sessions. Vines responded as follows: “I can’t elaborate on what the director said on Meet the Press. As I said earlier, the transcript speaks for itself.”<br />
<br />
I also called AMA spokesman Robert Mills to see if the organization would be investigating McConnell’s claims. His response was a bit surprising. He suggested that perhaps McConnell had meant psychologists. Psychologists do not have medical degrees, of course, and like all other people without medical degrees, they are barred from practicing medicine in the United States. Mills’s point, though, seemed to be that psychologists, unlike physicians, have a long history of involvement with enhanced interrogation. This was true and was <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/07/11/050711fa_fact4">reported in depth in 2005 by Jane Mayer in <i>The New Yorker</i></a>. Mills was also kind enough to send me a link to <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/07/torture200707">a more recent report on the subject</a> by Katherine Eban in <i>Vanity Fair</i>.<br />
<br />
Mills’s concern was fine as far is it went. But I found myself in the odd position of reminding a spokesman for the <a href="http://harpers.org/subjects/AmericanMedicalAssociation">American Medical Association</a> that psychologists are not doctors. McConnell had specifically said “doctors.” Was this really the sort of ambiguity that the AMA wanted to endorse? Shortly thereafter, I received this follow-up via e-mail: “The feds commonly refer to psychologists as doctors. Psychiatrists and other M.D.s are referred to as physicians. Medical supervision is a vague term that could refer psychologist, nurse, corpsman, podiatrist or any of hundreds allied health professionals.”<br />
<br />
The AMA seemed not to want to comment any further on the matter. Indeed, Mills concluded with this: “To avoid any speculation, the AMA needs absolute assurances that your sources are referring to physician oversight and participation in the interrogation process.” My sources!<br />
<br />
I called the American Psychological Association and asked for a clarification of <i>their</i> policy. Stephen Behnke, the APA’s director of ethics wrote back immediately and clarified two points, first that psychologists “do not provide ‘medical’ supervision” and second that the APA “strictly forbids the presence of a psychologist at an interrogation in which the subject is tortured or is threatened with torture.” He would not comment on sanctions, however.<br />
<br />
I called Mills again, read him Behnke’s note and reiterated the query.<br />
<blockquote>1. AMA guidelines forbids physicians to be “present when torture is used or threatened.”<br />
<br />
2. The director of nation intelligence said, on national television, that as a matter of policy doctors are present at sessions that involve the threat of torture.<br />
<br />
3. Will the AMA investigate or sanction those doctors?</blockquote>Mills said he was working on a statement and that he would have to get the approval of the board of trustees before he addressed these questions. Finally, Monday, he sent me this statement from Edward Langston, the doctor who chairs that board:<br />
<blockquote>Since the questions of detainee abuse first surfaced, AMA leaders have met on several occasions with high-ranking officials at the United States <a href="http://harpers.org/subjects/Pentagon">Department of Defense</a> (DoD) to advocate for the treatment of detainees that is consistent with AMA ethics policy. Representatives from the AMA have also visited the detention facilities at Guantánamo. These visits provided an opportunity for the AMA to tour the facilities, but our access was limited and at no time did we have a chance to speak with the detainees. Due to the limits placed on the AMA, we are unable to determine with any certainty if ethical policies prohibiting physician involvement in torture are being adhered to by the DoD. The AMA will continue to monitor the situation and advocate for treatment of all detainees in U.S. custody to be in accordance with our <a href="http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/2498.html">AMA Code of Medical Ethics</a> and the medical provisions of the <a href="http://harpers.org/subjects/GenevaConventions1949">Geneva Conventions</a>.</blockquote>In other words, nothing.<br />
<br />
One of the great insights of the founding fathers is that a single institution can easily be corrupted, but a great many institutions in opposition to each other may better achieve justice. The administration has failed in its treatment of prisoners, and the Congress has failed to check the administration, as have the courts. Doctors could protest, but thus far they have not. The founders were apparently wrong. ■Luke Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08968715243704059643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076462276343371005.post-51263964930928666682006-08-04T13:51:00.000-04:002013-02-09T10:43:07.448-05:00[Harper's Magazine] GOD MODE Force-feeding at Guantánamo<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPTOlRpHC1B4oNgniRG9Nqn0_QsgFiW0pRyBOBbo5oPdP8901o_fmVOp3wX8lV4jSwV6vH-5qUX3KEVd4paAF55TEx7ZatOPkiov3eMD7K8lx7W_tUw93YJ7GOGqT71qpH1S4R_aYeyzP_/s1600/Saturn+Devouring+His+Son+by+Peter+Paul+Rubens+1636.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:0em"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPTOlRpHC1B4oNgniRG9Nqn0_QsgFiW0pRyBOBbo5oPdP8901o_fmVOp3wX8lV4jSwV6vH-5qUX3KEVd4paAF55TEx7ZatOPkiov3eMD7K8lx7W_tUw93YJ7GOGqT71qpH1S4R_aYeyzP_/s540/Saturn+Devouring+His+Son+by+Peter+Paul+Rubens+1636.png" /></a></div><font size="1"><b>Saturn Devouring His Son, by Peter Paul Rubens</B></font size="1"><br />
<br />
<i>He has chosen death:<br />
Refusing to eat or drink, that he may bring<br />
Disgrace upon me; for there is a custom,<br />
An old and foolish custom, that if a man<br />
Be wronged, or think that he is wronged, and starve<br />
Upon another’s threshold till he die,<br />
The common people, for all time to come,<br />
Will raise a heavy cry against that threshold,<br />
Even though it be the King’s.</I> – W. B. Yeats<br />
<br />
Last August, seventy-six foreign nationals held at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, began what was likely the largest hunger strike ever to take place at an American-run prison. By September, when the protest reached its peak, more than a quarter of the prison’s nearly 500 inmates were refusing to eat. Pentagon officials were dismissive of the strikes, which they called “voluntary fasts.” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld even compared the process of starvation, in which the body, deprived of nutrition, eats its own organs, to going “on a diet.” But given the means by which the strike would be controlled, such nonchalance made a certain sense. Rather than let the men die, our government simply tied them to chairs and made them eat.<br />
<br />
There was no special art to it. Military guards bound the men to the chairs by their ankles, waists, wrists, shoulders, and heads, and military nurses forced flexible plastic tubes through their nostrils, down their throats, and into their stomachs. In went the food. Nor was the feeding necessarily sadistic. Lawyers for the prisoners say that the doctors sometimes used excessively thick tubes that caused internal bleeding and that they deliberately overfed the prisoners, causing them to vomit and to defecate in their clothing and on their chairs; but Pentagon officials deny these charges, and outside physicians who have witnessed the feedings support the official accounts. No, what was peculiar about the force-feeding was that the Pentagon seemed so perfectly convinced it had done something that was, for once, beyond criticism.<br />
<br />
When the first known instance of Guantanamo-sanctioned force-feeding took place, in 2002, a Guantanamo spokesman named James Bell explained that Naval doctors would put a feeding tube into any prisoners who threatened to succeed at dying. “Regardless of whether they were involved in killing thousands of innocent people in the World Trade Center attacks or not,” Bell said, “we have a responsibility to maintain their health and welfare, and that certainly includes taking actions to preserve their lives.” Four years later, Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr., who is the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs and the chief architect of the Guantanamo force-feed policy, told the <i>New York Times</I> that force-feeding was both ethical and necessary. “There is a moral question,” he said, “Do you allow a person to commit suicide? Or do you take steps to protect their health and preserve their life?” Winkenwerder added that he and his colleagues at the Pentagon had considered this question carefully and concluded that preventing suicide was ethical. “The objective in any circumstance,” he said, “is to protect and sustain a person’s life.”<br />
<br />
Most Pentagon officials, of course, are focused on objectives other than protecting and sustaining the lives of foreign nationals. But I was more bothered by Winkenwerder’s claim that he had decided upon the policy only after deliberately contemplating its ethical implications. The United States has force-fed many people – American slaves who hoped to escape servitude, American women who sought the right to vote – but the practice has been little utilized in modern times, primarily because most people find it repugnant. At a 1975 conference in Tokyo, members of the World Medical Association crafted an unambiguous ban on force-feeding, which was later endorsed by the American Medical Association. In 2000 a U.S. District Court judge found that a federal prisoner could not be force-fed, despite the fact that Federal Bureau of Prison guidelines allowed for it. (“I just don’t think the government has put forward any kind of compelling interest that would allow me to override a person’s last, ultimate means of protesting government,” the judge wrote.) And when county prison officials in Bangor, Maine, did manage to obtain a court order last October to force-feed a suicidal burglar on a hunger strike, the doctors at the Eastern Maine Medical Center refused to perform the procedure. Jill McDonald, a spokesman for the hospital, told the <i>Bangor Daily News</I> that the hospital could not operate without a patient’s consent, “We are not parties to court orders,” McDonald said. “We are under a different set of obligations.”<br />
<br />
Had Winkenwerder really engaged in a long dialogue with doctors and other specialists only to conclude, contrary to thirty years of established medical guidance, that binding people to chairs and forcing food down their throats was his only ethical option as a medical professional? I called the public affairs number at the Pentagon on the off chance that he would agree to an interview and, somewhat to my surprise, was told that he would.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
Winkenwerder was reasonably affable on the telephone but also clearly aware that what he said could have political implications. He was a health-insurance executive in Massachusetts before he took responsibility for the medical policies of the United States military; in the picture next to his online biography, he wears a two-tone broker shirt and a pocket square. Two publicists listened in on our conversation.<br />
<br />
Winkenwerder said that a physician’s obligations are complex. He cited the World Medical Association’s 1991 Malta Declaration, a follow-on to the Tokyo Declaration that more specifically addresses hunger-strike issues. The preamble notes that doctors treating hunger strikers are faced with a conflict between “a moral obligation on every human being to respect the sanctity of life” and “the duty of the doctor to respect the autonomy which the patient has over his person.” Winkenwerder read a passage aloud to me in order to underscore the ambiguity inherent to that conflict:<br />
<blockquote>This conflict is apparent where a hunger striker who has issued clear instructions not to be resuscitated lapses into a coma and is about to die. Moral obligation urges the doctor to resuscitate the patient even though it is against the patient’s wishes. On the other hand, duty urges the doctor to respect the autonomy of the patient.</blockquote>“So that’s the moral question,” he said. “That’s the moral issue.” And he was right, of course. Autonomy is the central question. The Malta Declaration, a notably sensible and humane document, despite its having been written by a committee, is quite clear about this. It turned out, though, that Winkenwerder had not read me the entire passage:<br />
<blockquote>However, the doctor should clearly state to the patient whether or not he is able to accept the patient’s decision to refuse treatment or, in case of coma, artificial feeding, thereby risking death. If the doctor cannot accept the patient’s decision to refuse such aid, the patient would then be entitled to be attended by another physician.”</blockquote>In short, the doctor should be allowed to practice medicine by the light of his or her own conscience, and the patient should have access to a doctor who can accept his or her decision to refuse artificial feeding. Had Winkenwerder really thought this through? Was he trying to trick me somehow? An AMA official later told me she had heard of four Guantanamo doctors who apparently did not think it was ethical to participate in involuntary feeding and so didn’t. The doctors were not punished, but nor could hunger strikers choose to be “treated” by them.<br />
<br />
Winkenwerder, though, was driving at a larger point. “So with the Malta Declaration,” he continued:<br />
<blockquote>When the hunger striker has become confused and is therefore unable to make an unimpaired decision or has lapsed into a coma, the doctor shall be free to make the decision for his patient as to further treatment which he considers to be in the best interest of that patient ...” </blockquote>My own confusion deepened. The Pentagon was putting tubes into men so healthy they had to be bound to special chairs, and Winkenwerder was talking about the ethics of feeding people in comas. I asked him if “unable to make an unimpaired decision” or “lapsed into a coma” really were the relevant criteria for force-feeding the hunger strikers at Guantanamo.<br />
<br />
“That’s <i>their</I> criteria,” Winkenwerder said, acknowledging my confusion. “And here’s the distinction with ours. And this is not as wild a difference as some have made it out to be. And I’d ask you to think about this yourself.” What came next genuinely surprised me. “We would prefer not to have people lapse into coma or to be near death when we make that decision,” Winkenwerder said, meaning the decision to force-feed. “In other words, if we’re there to protect and sustain someone’s life, why would we actually go to the point of putting that person’s life at risk before we act? So I think we’re operating on a very similar set of ethical reasoning, but it’s applied at an earlier stage.”<br />
<br />
That is, Winkenwerder and his doctors were forcing perfectly healthy prisoners to eat <i>even before</I> they were at risk of starving. Absurd as it sounds, he was describing, with medical precision, the Bush doctrine of “forward deterrence,” in which potential enemies are confronted on their own territory before they become an actual threat. He was describing the same policy that was driving the entire war on terror.<br />
<br />
I asked Winkenwerder if his preemptive force-feeding policy was the same as forward deterrence. The analogy was obvious to me, but he seemed offended by the question.<br />
<br />
“Our intentions are good,” he said a moment later, not quite plaintively. “We are seeking to preserve life.”<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
There is a certain kind of video game, called a first-person shooter, in which you run through a maze and fire at whatever comes your way. These games are challenging because ammunition is limited, because every living thing is trying to kill you, and because (as a result) you can’t stop thinking, even for a minute. The first-person shooter exists in a nightmarish Hobbesian state of nature. In a computer game, though, the state of nature is eternally malleable. You can use cheat codes to remove gravity, add extra “lives,” increase the amount of gore, and so on. The most powerful cheat is called god mode. In god mode, you never run out of ammunition and nothing can ever kill you. You are free to turn your mind off for a moment and enjoy the synthetic beauty of the game.<br />
<br />
I mention this as a contemporary example of a longstanding opposition in the American psyche between liberty and death. In the old American religion we were supposed to be able to choose between one and the other. The basic premise, according to Patrick Henry, the state of New Hampshire, and countless Mel Gibson movies, was that the absence of liberty actually <i>required</I> death. The new American religion, however, insists that we choose life.<br />
<br />
“Life” in America is not a simple matter of cell division, though. It is an <i>issue</I>. When we think about life, we think about abortion or the recent trials of Terry Schiavo. We think about the <i>sanctity</I> of life. Indeed, our president celebrated the first anniversary of his inauguration by establishing a holiday called National Sanctity of Human Life Day, which, were it not for his involvement in what has come to be called the “culture of life,” might seem an odd move by a man who has launched two wars and vociferously supported the death penalty.<br />
<br />
It is easy to understand “culture of life” to mean “culture in which abortion is outlawed,” and in fact the phrase was invented by Pope John Paul II for a 1995 encyclical, <i>Evangelium vitae</I>, which addresses abortion in some depth. But the pope was at least as concerned with matters of power and control – and therefore of liberty – as he was with death itself. Suicide, for example, was not to be rejected because of the anguish it caused the survivors or because it was a needless squandering of a precious gift. It was to be rejected because this act of defiance was often committed specifically in the name of freedom. To John Paul’s way of thinking, that desire for freedom was the very essence of the sin. “In its deepest reality,” the pope wrote, “suicide represents a rejection of God’s absolute sovereignty over life and death.”<br />
<br />
In this light, Winkenwerder’s notion of protecting “life” begins to make sense. Consider the major national security initiatives of the last few decades, and especially the last few years: the doctrines of “overwhelming force” and “shock and awe,” in which massive technological superiority diminishes the chance of actual battlefield injury or death (on the part of our own forces); “missile defense,” which theoretically, if not actually, renders impotent all nuclear weapons but our own; unmanned Predator drones, whose focused air strikes put no American life in jeopardy; motion-detecting fortifications along our southern border to ward off threats both economic and martial; surveillance of our every utterance by computers carefully programmed to detect the words most preferred by our enemies; and, of course, force-feeding, in which we preempt even the prick to our conscience that is the essence of a principled suicide. Consider that the man in charge of medical ethics for the most powerful killing machine in history spent most of his professional career in the insurance trade, a business based on the premise that if we just spend enough money, we can reduce the level of risk in our lives to zero.<br />
<br />
We, as a nation, seem to be seeking a technological circumstance that allows the United States not just to dominate but to dominate so absolutely and effortlessly that we need not even think about our enemies, much less fear them – something that allows us to turn off our minds and enjoy the synthetic beauty of the game. The phrase the Pentagon uses is “Full-spectrum Dominance.” I call it god mode.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
“You have to understand,” Winkenwerder said. “Our policy is not to prevent people from hunger striking. Our policy is to sustain life, is to prevent people from dying as a <i>result</I> of hunger striking.”<br />
<br />
The doctor was becoming increasingly exasperated. It seemed to me that allowing people to hunger strike and preventing them from dying as a result were mutually contradictory aims. After all, if a hunger strike is the final attempt by the powerless to assert their autonomy – “a person’s last, ultimate means of protesting” – then force-feeding is the ultimate rejection of that autonomy. In that it reduces its subject to a state of total submission, powerless even within the bounds of his or her own flesh, force-feeding is no less violent an act than is rape.<br />
<br />
But Winkenwerder was sincere in his defense, if somewhat inconsistent, and the longer I spoke to him the more I came to realize that it was this very inconsistency that <i>allowed</I> him to be sincere. He spoke repeatedly of the complexity of the debate – “There are many issues in the world of medicine, in the world of health care,” he said, “about which good people with good intentions can have differing opinions” – and he seemed genuinely to believe that it was important to justify his policies in terms of ethics rather than in terms of discipline or punishment.<br />
<br />
“You know,” he said, “there are other parallels in medical practice. I can certainly recall earlier in my career attending to young women who were anorexics, who literally wouldn’t eat. And I think if we had stood by and respected their autonomy they would have died.”<br />
<br />
I was taken aback by the comparison. I asked if he meant to compare his prisoners to anorexic girls. He said, “No, no, no. I’m not. And don’t say that, because I didn’t do that. I’m just giving you an example of the fact that there are other situations in which people take actions that place their life or their health in serious jeopardy and medical professionals take actions to prevent them from harming themselves.” I tried to draw a distinction between mental pathology and political speech. I mentioned the case of Bobby Sands, the Irish Republican Army member who died after a sixty-six-day hunger strike in 1981. “Well, I don’t know what was going on with Bobby Sands,” Winkenwerder said. “I haven’t studied that case.”<br />
<br />
Winkenwerder never did make clear to me what was so complex about the decision to force a man to eat. Maybe he couldn’t. Or maybe he conceived of that complexity as a final form of defense, an imaginary “safe place” of the sort that psychiatrists advise their patients to escape to in times of crisis. A few weeks after I spoke to him, though, an anonymous official did explain to the <i>Toronto Star</I> that the death of a Guantanamo prisoner would be disastrous for the administration. “The worst case would be to have someone go from zero to hero,” the official said. “We don’t want a Bobby Sands.”<br />
<br />
At Guantanamo, the preemptive force-feeding continues, but, like shock and awe and missile defense and every other doomed attempt to remove fear and ambiguity from our fallen world, it has failed to achieve its end. In June, as we all know, three prisoners in that facility, all of whom had failed in their attempt to starve, managed instead to hang themselves with their own bed sheets. The test of god mode in America today is whether that fact, which men like Winkenwerder no doubt will call “complex,” is simple enough to prick your conscience. ■Luke Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08968715243704059643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076462276343371005.post-16460268659980833492005-11-21T12:19:00.000-05:002013-02-09T10:43:24.366-05:00[New York Times] ARMY OF THE NIGHT The Gang that Wouldn't Write Straight by Marc Weingarten, Crown, 336 pp, US $24 <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMaIW2FEVvTYHy_kRWBqFl3LE0oaLjTta_wZJyzxYrHlboSoCOBJBnQ_qCmJc2wtc9Tf3tQwIdnCkN-MmANG691VjLm0m-ixGVAtL_wHLNyC20xJHIDXesDSr02ckbEUgDZ4OacIRbwrM8/s1600/Wolfe+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:0em"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMaIW2FEVvTYHy_kRWBqFl3LE0oaLjTta_wZJyzxYrHlboSoCOBJBnQ_qCmJc2wtc9Tf3tQwIdnCkN-MmANG691VjLm0m-ixGVAtL_wHLNyC20xJHIDXesDSr02ckbEUgDZ4OacIRbwrM8/s280/Wolfe+2.jpg" /></a></div>In olden days, the Hearsts and the Pulitzers could deploy vast armies of shabby, anonymous reporters to find or invent whatever stories they pleased. We should not be surprised that we so easily recall the names of these dusty American lords and barons; we have always paid special attention to the wealthy and powerful among us. What is surprising is that at some point we began to remember the names of the reporters themselves: Jimmy Breslin, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe - an ever-expanding roster of vivid personalities. Wolfe branded them the “new journalists” in 1972, and so they remain today.<br />
<br />
Marc Weingarten presents his group biography of these writers (and a few editors) as the tale of “the last great good time of American journalism,” a discrete “golden era” in which the best reporters “burned with a Promethean flame.” The reading public was first made aware of this new development, Weingarten writes, when Wolfe Oedipally confronted the <i>New Yorker</I> in a 1965 feature - “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!” - for a supplement to the <i>New York Herald Tribune</I> edited by Clay Felker, an extraordinarily ambitious editor whose previous achievements included being fired from <i>Esquire</I>. The golden era came to an end in 1977, when that supplement - by then spun off into a stand-alone weekly called <i>New York</I> magazine - was sold to Rupert Murdoch, who remains an almost cartoonishly vivid throwback to the celebrity media barons of old. In between, Weingarten proposes in <i>The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight</I>, a generation of journalists became “literary rock stars, their bylines familiar to most, their lectures standing-room-only sellouts in universities across the country.”<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibf1ChItLWOVjHmwDbF4Mi2b68v9AbF4uSVNnupF2Z41MOzimlg8NaqY3d5iUmSeTfoVsm8rSxohWTCbYAuXtbC0zvFGMa14o2xOTD3TnKRNN-4_WlSX4gLI8-8C0S9cBtFavF1RvcLrGD/s1600/tumblr_lq8jz8Ngqh1qz9ytpo1_500.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibf1ChItLWOVjHmwDbF4Mi2b68v9AbF4uSVNnupF2Z41MOzimlg8NaqY3d5iUmSeTfoVsm8rSxohWTCbYAuXtbC0zvFGMa14o2xOTD3TnKRNN-4_WlSX4gLI8-8C0S9cBtFavF1RvcLrGD/s280/tumblr_lq8jz8Ngqh1qz9ytpo1_500.jpg" /></a></div>The story is romantic: Truman Capote, lost in Kansas, charming the locals and “inventing” the “nonfiction novel” (for the <i>New Yorker</I>!); Felker and Breslin unpacking their cardboard boxes at the new headquarters of <i>New York</I> magazine, the right to the name of which was Felker’s severance pay from the <i>Herald Tribune</I>; Wolfe sending his raw notes to <i>Esquire</I>, crazy punctuation and all, and his editor suddenly getting it (“I read it and thought, ‘Well, this is something new’ ”); Norman Mailer publishing almost an entire book - what would become <i>The Armies of the Night</I> - in a single issue of <i>Harper’s Magazine</I>; <i>Esquire</I> using that stark cover line for John Sack’s story of a Vietnam incursion gone wrong: “ ‘OH MY GOD - WE HIT A LITTLE GIRL.’ ”<br />
<br />
This was very good writing and editing, but to call the work of these talented, disparate writers and editors “the greatest literary movement since the American fiction renaissance of the 1920’s,” as Weingarten does, seems hyperbolic. Not just because attaching claims of literary merit to newspaper and magazine articles invites pretension, but also because these writers had so little in common. Indeed, Weingarten is quick to admit that their efforts did not constitute a coherent social or aesthetic movement “in the Kerouac-Ginsberg-Corso sense or in the Abstract Expressionist sense” and that there was nothing especially innovative about the writing itself, which borrowed from a bag of tricks stuffed over the years by everyone from Defoe to Flaubert to Orwell to Liebling. Weingarten cites the quality of the work, which is undeniable. But this, too, is an unconvincing basis for naming a trend. Good newspaper and magazine reporting began before 1965, and it continues (believe it or not) even up to this day.<br />
<br />
The new journalists were like any good reporters: they were interested in interesting things; they asked awkward questions and went odd places. They took the acid, they got stomped by the Hell’s Angels, they ran through the jungles of Vietnam. Although Thompson and Wolfe in particular are best known for their obscuring stylishness - the odd punctuation and hallucinogenic fantasies - it is their lucid prose that startled readers then and will continue to startle readers well into the future. “The only thing new and unusual about Wolfe’s journalism,” Thompson said, “is that he’s an abnormally good reporter; he has a fine sense of echo and at least a peripheral understanding of what John Keats was talking about when he said that thing about Truth & Beauty.”<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMRtCYFjD_NqYVSbv9dGtwIGr-PrAQO2j2FtY_S-KNtV3DPX5XGrpNLWo7njE0gXlZmL-bHTQiSr28RHBhO8tel4Ir_QfjGjQQVzymCvnkBwLf2S5Qt-LROVE5HoztmZWJum1KtOl3tHMI/s1600/20080702_thompsoncar_33.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMRtCYFjD_NqYVSbv9dGtwIGr-PrAQO2j2FtY_S-KNtV3DPX5XGrpNLWo7njE0gXlZmL-bHTQiSr28RHBhO8tel4Ir_QfjGjQQVzymCvnkBwLf2S5Qt-LROVE5HoztmZWJum1KtOl3tHMI/s280/20080702_thompsoncar_33.jpg" /></a></div>What was best about what the new journalists did was not new. And what was worst - the celebrity promotion on the parts of their editors, the trend-fetishism, the forced archetyping and false mythologizing - was not journalism. Wolfe, for his part, may have captured the most significant change to his profession in noting that when “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” was published in 1968, he “didn’t have enough money to be a celebrity.” Reporters still must count all their pennies, but the celebrity comes cheaper every year. If you want to know if this is good news, you need only say quickly - without thinking - the names of the first three reporters who come to mind.<br />
<br />
Weingarten, a thoughtful biographer, is a freelance reporter, and he has usefully gathered much of the recent lore of the profession. But the arbitrary grouping of such desperately individual souls as Hunter Thompson and Joan Didion is a surrender to the sort of trend-mongering that has come to define modern reporting. It is more evidence of the flattening lure of celebrity that in processing the singular lives of our best reporters, Weingarten also, in this instance, falls prey to the worst of their collective influence. ■Luke Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08968715243704059643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076462276343371005.post-48629020754897212572004-11-04T13:35:00.000-05:002013-02-09T10:43:43.396-05:00[Harper's Magazine] GRAND OLD INQUISITOR The Republican Party's gift of innocence<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNPMJuH5GXNVan2gQRw3CIQQmzJ03Fukiek81v9zaH3wqiebyooX2hnBkkYPtO6134iZFKGMbW-HVaRSZ7_gjmJuw72WCMhomL7SJEPO0jhxGWqaD10LSFSldlb9wGnX_iui77Vr3zBDDf/s1600/bruegel--tower-of-babel-granger.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNPMJuH5GXNVan2gQRw3CIQQmzJ03Fukiek81v9zaH3wqiebyooX2hnBkkYPtO6134iZFKGMbW-HVaRSZ7_gjmJuw72WCMhomL7SJEPO0jhxGWqaD10LSFSldlb9wGnX_iui77Vr3zBDDf/s540/bruegel--tower-of-babel-granger.jpg" /></a></div><br />
When I left the Republican National Convention in September, I was in awe and a little depressed, as if someone or something had told me to go fuck myself, and had told me with a kind of meticulous exactitude that was overwhelming and irrefutable. The feeling wasn’t ideological. No particular words had done it. It was their reckless profusion, the ceaseless tide of pointless language churning through Madison Square Garden, crashing against the walls, losing more meaning with every dyslogic wave. Politicians have spoken self-serving nonsense since the beginning of time, as the Democrats themselves had demonstrated a month before in Boston, hut this was different. It was larger, more calculated. Whereas Kerry had struggled to create meaning – no matter how stupid, dishonest, or clichéd that meaning was – Bush’s team seemed actively to be plotting its demise.<br />
<br />
Certainly the headline speeches meant nothing. Yes, the President, with his “calling from beyond the stars,” spoke in the coded language of the Rapture, but the code once broken contained only a single message, which was in fact a meta-message: “I am speaking in code to Christians.” Other combinations of words slipped the bonds of meaning entirely. Did Arnold Schwarzenegger somehow end the Cold War in Austria? Was George Bush a war hero? Did John Kerry want to destroy America? These were half-narratives, made up of questions so preposterous as to end discussion and possibly even subvert our understanding of what it means to mean something. The real message was not “I care,” or even “vote for me.” The real message, radiating from the podium and echoing through the rafters, was that there was no message.<br />
<br />
That soul-negating echo was terrifying to me, and all the more terrifying because it was clearly the result of so much effort. Witting or not, everyone there was a participant. The Garden and its surrounding streets had been converted into a monstrous echo chamber, ring upon ring of technology-laden humanity: protesters with their signs and their chants, New York City cops with radios Velcroed to their shoulders, Treasury agents talking into their sleeves, the crush of delegates with their cell phones and their BlackBerrys – and reporters, 15,000 of them, writers with their wireless laptops, radiomen serenading their outsized microphones, surly camera crews, bright lights in tow, all of them connected by winding cable to rows of idling vans outside on Seventh Avenue, the microwave dishes on top sending signals to satellites miles above only to be sent right back down again, back into countless thousands more speakers and screens, bouncing, reflecting, blending, an overwhelming vortex of absurdities. All of it had been orchestrated with ruthless precision, and you couldn’t say a word about it because if you did it wouldn’t mean a thing.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
I tried to describe the maddening echo of the place to another editor who, as it happens, had spent several years teaching the great books to high school kids in Texas. He put his finger on it right away. “It’s the Marabar Caves,” he said. “Go look at <i>A Passage to India</I>.<br />
<br />
So I looked. He was almost impossibly right. E. M. Forster had somehow captured, in 1924, the essence of the 2004 Republican National Convention – not just my reaction to the Garden but the terrible <i>feel</I> of the place. In the scene my editor friend had in mind, the elderly Mrs. Moore has found herself on a long day trip out of Chandrapore, her destination the famous Marabar Caves. Inside the darkened chamber, she is confronted by an extraordinary and disturbing echo:<br />
<blockquote>Whatever is said, the same monotonous noise replies, and quivers up and down the walls until it is absorbed into the roof. “Boum” is the sound as far as the human alphabet can express it, or “bou-oum,” or “ou-boum,” – utterly dull. Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce “boum.” Even the striking of a match starts a little worm coiling, which is too small to complete a circle but is eternally watchful. And if several people talk at once, an overlapping howling noise begins, echoes generate echoes, and the cave is stuffed with a snake composed of small snakes, which writhe independently.</blockquote>That was it precisely. It was more than just the sound, though. It was the sameness of the sound. And here Forster was prescient once again:<br />
<blockquote>The crush and the smells she could forget, but the echo began in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on life. Coming at a moment when she chanced to be fatigued, it had managed to murmur, “Pathos, piety, courage – they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.” If one had spoken vileness in that place, or spoken lofty poetry, the comment would have been the same – ”ou-boum.”</blockquote>That was the convention. It was all the same – not a single position or conflicting positions but every position and no position. The words at the convention were like every color of the color wheel, spinning into white.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
That spinning sensation – the whitening wheel, the whirling echo, the coiling snakes – was not merely symbolic. It was manifested in the very form of the Garden, itself a massive bowl of concentric rings, and in the constant circling of those rings by the thousands of reporters, politicians, and bagmen gathered there to do their work.<br />
<br />
The top ring, where the skyboxes are, is a sort of circular luxury hotel, along the lines of a Wichita Ramada Inn, only each room has a view of the rock concert or basketball game or presidential speech taking place below. During the convention the rooms were occupied by networks and big contributors, and when the skybox doors were open you could see right through to the netted balloons and light-show rigging above the podium. Outside along the dim perimeter, reporters circulated endlessly on cardboard-protected carpets, hoping some kind of narrative would ooze out of the agglomeration of celebrity, money, and cameras.<br />
<br />
In the weeks leading up to the convention, I’d formed an unconscious and somewhat naive conception of it as a theatrical performance in which some kind of story – likely offensive to me, but a story nonetheless – would unfold upon the center stage. Certainly that stage, surrounded as it was by thousands of enthusiastic Republicans and hundreds of cameras and microphones, was where a story ought to have taken place. There was the brightly lit podium, with its odd cruciform moldings; there was the massive video screen, a waving flag one minute, a gospel choir the next; there were the orators themselves, foreheads shining in the bright lights. But no story.<br />
<br />
There was, if anything, a resistance to narrative. For instance, we had Sara Pyszka, introduced by U.S. Representative Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia. “Though unable to speak without the aid of her DynaVox, a computerized voice aid, and confined to a wheelchair by disabilities including cerebral palsy,” Capito said, “Sara Pyszka still manages to share her hope and optimism with thousands.” That seemed promising. I expected that I would at some point learn what made Sara Pyszka optimistic. Had the local soda fountain taken up a collection in a cigar box to pay for the DynaVox? Had some Bush initiative allowed her to embrace the American dream at last? We never found out. Capito simply went on to say, “Please welcome Sara,” who wheeled in silently from the wings. After a pause, a mechanical voice, presumably that of the DynaVox, recited the Pledge of Allegiance, and then, after another pause, Sara Pyszka rolled back to whatever story she was living outside the airless realm of the Republican National Convention. The only narrative was that of exploitation, as if the producers couldn’t be bothered even to finish the cliché. (I later learned that Pyszka had found a way to use her DynaVox to sing, and that in July, in fact, she had performed the national anthem before a Cleveland Indians game.)<br />
<br />
The rest of the show was no different. Before I could process the meaning of one cheap symbol, the producers were on to the next. Even the biographical video, typically a narrative high point of political conventions – <i>A Place Called Hope, Morning in America</I> – lacked narrative momentum. Indeed, it was composed entirely of still images, panned in the manner of a Ken Burns documentary. Setup, climax, resolution – all of the elements of storytelling – had become superfluous.<br />
<br />
Up along the outer rings my thoughts turned naturally, if dismally, to Yeats and his “Second Coming,” with its rough beasts and its center that failed to hold. After a few constricted circuits of the sky-boxes with no real story in sight, I even began to envy the falcon his widening gyre.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
Yeats, of course, has informed the despair of reporters and editors at least since Joan Didion borrowed a line from him to title “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” her brilliant 1967 report for the <i>Saturday Evening Post</I> on the dark stink of the San Francisco counterculture. The tenuous center, for Didion, was language. In the culture of the hippies, she saw something terrifying to anyone who told stories for a living. It was a disdain for meaning itself, a nascent post-narrative culture made up of logophobes stacked up in old Victorian houses. They found the whole business of articulation beneath contempt, an ego trip at best, and possibly a plot by the Man. Didion wrote:<br />
<blockquote>They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words – words are for “typeheads,” Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips – their only proficient vocabulary is in the society’s platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for oneself depends upon one’s mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from “a broken home.” They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to he given the words.</blockquote>Didion later observed that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” and I think it is this larger sense of lost storytelling that bothered her the most about those children. How could they live without <i>stories</I>? There are two ways of thinking about stories, after all – the weak form, favored by young children and imbeciles, a shopping list of events (this happened, then that happened, then the other thing happened); and the strong form, of cause and effect, action and reaction (this happened <i>because</I> that happened). The Creation, which had no cause, is the first kind of story. The Fall is the second kind.<br />
<br />
The South African writer Breyten Breytenbach saw that narrative was the very basis for creating a moral order, that “to he aware of the moral implications of narrative” is “to know and respect the knowledge that we are all part of the same nothing.” Stories are how we who wish not to worship false idols create love and hate from the void. Without them, we become as innocent as Adam with all his ribs.<br />
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* * *<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKhKRCfstlSLCM-2jfuzSfyqIQ53_BzodhqK9MDNfb01ocuMG2Iwod_s0Nt53dcnlTfeMqaeNaIJJxCPCbYEDL8VRy9ZJ9s36hhh60rCbVCjJf_vXR58rnYEM-BymFWH5ZIYbdrjtW8l7w/s1600/vertical+babel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKhKRCfstlSLCM-2jfuzSfyqIQ53_BzodhqK9MDNfb01ocuMG2Iwod_s0Nt53dcnlTfeMqaeNaIJJxCPCbYEDL8VRy9ZJ9s36hhh60rCbVCjJf_vXR58rnYEM-BymFWH5ZIYbdrjtW8l7w/s400/vertical+babel.jpg" /></a></div>The convention, of course, was a huge hit. If the polls the following week were to be believed, the nothingness generated from within the Garden, or perhaps the innocence it inspired, was enough to turn the vote of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Bush had spoken to them on some level I’d failed to comprehend.<br />
<br />
It wasn’t until a few weeks later, when I read by chance a comment Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, had made on the third day of the convention, that I began to understand what happened. “It struck me as I was speaking to people in Bangor, Maine,” Card had said, “that this President sees America as we think about a 10-year-old child. I know as a parent I would sacrifice all for my children.” I had seen the convention as a “fuck you” to meaning itself, I had <i>felt</I> it that way. But the lack of meaning I had witnessed was not intended as an act of terror. It was an act of hope – perhaps even of misguided love.<br />
<br />
One of the wonderful odd facts about Laura Bush that reporters love to trade is that her favorite passage in all of literature is “The Grand Inquisitor” from <i>The Brothers Karamazov</I>. At first this might seem an odd choice, given that the inquisitor in question has promised to burn Jesus (or God, if you will) at the stake for the crime of giving man the knowledge of sin and then abandoning him to his own devices. The inquisitor saw this as a bad deal, and being a serious man he saw it as his own burden not only to remove that knowledge as best he could but also to take away the choices that such knowledge implied, for it was giving man the freedom to sin that was the worst crime of all. As he tortured Jesus, the inquisitor explained to him why his own system was far superior to that of the Father. “This is what we have done,” he said. “We have improved upon Your creation and founded it instead on <i>miracle</I>, <i>mystery</I>, and <i>authority</I>. And men were delighted that once more they were led like sheep, and that that terrible gift which had brought them so much suffering was lifted from their hearts at last.”<br />
<br />
This is typically understood as an ironic passage that in fact celebrates free will as God’s most profound and mysterious gift to humanity – Dostoevsky would have much to discuss with Didion and Breytenbach. But perhaps Bush himself had discussed all of this with his wife on some voluble night of his reckless youth and he had missed the joke. Or maybe he thought the inquisitor had a pretty good point. Either way, and although he couldn’t have meant to make such an awful pun, maybe he truly is, as Joni Mitchell once sang, trying to take us back to the garden. Maybe he sees this awful “boum” as a gift to the people – a gift of existential ignorance, freely given and freely taken.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
Card didn’t say any of this in so many words, but then how could he? Words could as easily be subsumed by such a project as describe it. That was the genius of the convention. It wasn’t the words that mattered. Madison Square Garden itself had been converted into an architect’s rendering of a vast work, an engineering marvel to rival the Hoover Dam or the Tower of Babel.<br />
<br />
It seems odd to think of a president, any president, running on a platform of existential negation, and perhaps I am being over-imaginative in my understanding of our current President’s plans. Again, though, I remember that “boum,” which was real enough, and I know that it could not have happened entirely by accident.<br />
<br />
George Bush calls himself a Christian, but I think he lacks the tragic sensibility required to worship a man who would allow himself to he crucified. Bush is a doer. He wants to solve problems, and he seems to believe that at some point all of the problems can be solved, even the problem of sin. Rather than find redemption in the blood of Christ, he seems to be groping toward some way of redeeming the sin of knowledge, his own and the world’s, all by himself. He sees that you are naked and ashamed, but rather than clothe you he has found the way at last – compassionately, his heart full of love – to pluck out your eye. ■Luke Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08968715243704059643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076462276343371005.post-2624216719926906502004-07-04T18:51:00.000-04:002013-02-09T10:44:00.223-05:00[Harper's Magazine] BLOOD FOR OIL! The only justification that makes sense We have occupied Iraq for more than a year now, in a campaign that has killed thousands of Iraqis and more than eight hundred Americans. The occupation has cost at least $187 billion, riven the NATO alliance, and provided the enemies of civilization an unprecedented locus of malevolent energy. Most of the world protested the invasion, few Iraqis support the occupation, and even Americans are beginning to doubt their nation’s course. Yet for all the great expense of this war, it is decreasingly clear what it was meant to achieve.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZXCqPAC_RZg/UKrIg8SkaCI/AAAAAAAABNw/ZLQzii7FmzI/s1600/oilblood2.jpg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCUio-8KB_kANDJqPftGolUNjMgaT7bXutPWkqHiOzVZp4s6HyQ0JN-s5uJUsR6KjVua5tqrEUwiDHOVubYRXtGd8ATFxokMQLBnHLQXaImMpFIh8y5zt_tBRePj-bw5RtfgQCUmlymHRn/s260/oilblood2.jpg.jpg" /></a></div>As the promised “regime change” has congealed into reality, its public purpose has become fluid, ungraspable. When one objective has proved nonsensical or politically inexpedient, another has emerged from the CNN ether to replace it. Secretary of State Colin Powell informed the United Nations that war was the only means by which that institution’s credibility could be maintained. Yet when the Security Council declined to endorse this position, its opinion was dismissed as irrelevant. George Bush told Americans that Iraq was a “grave and gathering threat” not just to the Middle East but to the homeland itself. Yet when we discovered that Saddam Hussein had no anthrax and no unmanned aerial vehicles with which to deliver it, the President, together with a crowd of enthusiastic nation builders from across the political spectrum, changed the subject to “freedom.” Now even sovereignty, which is the essence of freedom, is no longer an objective in any meaningful sense, as Powell made clear in April when he said that “we are giving sovereignty so that sovereignty can be used to say, ‘We invite you to remain.’’’<br />
<br />
Given such locutions, one can forgive conspiracists for understanding the occupation in darker terms. We hear that Halliburton is behind it all. That the big oil companies think they can somehow make more money in Iraq under a U.S. occupation than they did under a Baathist kleptocracy. That the invasion was designed to prop up Israel. And yet these theories, too, make little sense. It seems unlikely that U.S. oil companies would prefer an unruly Islamic democracy, let alone a war zone, to a stable authoritarian regime. Halliburton’s stock price, though up since the start of the war, is still at just over half its historic high in 2000. As for Israel, it’s hard to fathom the administration spending hundreds of billions of dollars to aid that troubled state purely out of personal or even eschatological conviction.<br />
<br />
As justification after justification has fallen away, nothing of any real value to Americans remains in Iraq besides the oil itself, nearly a ninth of the world’s proven reserves. Without that oil, all that remains is a terrifying landscape of sand and soldiers with nothing to fight for but their own existence. Although our desire for Iraqi oil may seem a distasteful explanation for war, it is the only explanation by which we may continue to believe that we live in a rational universe. Put another way: if this war is not about oil, then truly we stand poised at the abyss.<br />
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* * *<br />
<br />
Oil is perhaps the only justification for the war that the administration has consistently refused to avow, as in June 2003 when Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz reminded reporters that “the notion that the war was ever about oil is a complete piece of nonsense,” or when Donald Rumsfeld explained to the Hoover Institution in February 2003 that the approaching war “does not relate to oil. I mean, it just plain doesn’t.” And yet there is ample cause to hope that here, again, the administration is lying to us. We consume 25 percent of the world’s oil and produce only 8 percent of it. Changing that ratio would require radically reinventing the U.S. economy, an option no president has ever presented to his people. Maintaining that ratio, on the other hand, not only keeps the economy growing; it keeps Americans happy. This may not be the best part of what democracy is about, but neither is it an undemocratic goal. “Oil, enough oil, within our certain grasp seemed ardently necessary to greatness and independence in the twentieth century,” wrote the economist Herbert Feis in 1946, when it was becoming clear that the United States would soon be unable to produce from within its own borders all the oil it required. Ever since then, the story of the Middle East has been the story of one president after another attempting to maintain that “certain grasp.”<br />
<br />
One might hope that the market could sort out our ability to purchase oil, but, in fact, the sheer physicality of the business – all those vulnerable oil fields and pipelines and storage tanks in hostile neighborhoods – combined with our absolute dependence on the product means that the flow of oil is determined as much by political action as by market forces. This was the lesson of the 1973 Arab oil embargo, which not only traumatized the American economy and introduced the phrase “the oil weapon” into the nightmares of American politicians but also saw Iraq nationalizing Exxon’s and Mobil’s shares in the Basrah Petroleum Company and plans being made in the White House for an invasion of Saudi Arabia. Henry Kissinger described the proper balance of market forces and military forces to <i>BusinessWeek</I> just after the embargo was lifted. “It is one thing to use it in the case of a dispute over price,” he said of military force. “It’s another where there’s some actual strangulation of the industrialized world.” Business contracts are fine, but they are never enough. As Feis wrote presciently, “American interests must have actual physical control of, or at the very least assured access to, adequate and properly located source of supply.”<br />
<br />
In fact, our preferred method of assuring access to Gulf oil has been to “guarantee the sovereignty” of some oil-producing nation, thereby allowing us to treat any threat to the oil system as a threat to a state, which provides a useful political framework for our financial transactions. The history of American client states is well known. Harry Truman promised King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia – one of the largest producers of oil on earth then and now – that no threat to its sovereignty “could occur which would not be a matter of immediate concern to the United States.” Dwight Eisenhower expanded the pledge. “Our country supports without reservation the full sovereignty and independence of each and every nation of the Middle East,” he said, and would back it with the full force of the U.S. military.<br />
<br />
Jimmy Carter was more forthright about our interest in the region. After noting, in his final State of the Union address, “the overwhelming dependence of the Western democracies on oil supplies from the Middle East,” he put forth what is now called the Carter Doctrine: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”<br />
<br />
The Carter Doctrine is nonpartisan, and although the whole enterprise of premising U.S. security on access to foreign oil may be unwise, within the context of that goal it has been highly effective. It is our current President’s father, in fact, who most famously acted upon that doctrine, when Saddam Hussein moved from “friend” to dangerous aggressor by invading Kuwait, which itself possesses a tenth of the world’s proven reserves. Dick Cheney, then the secretary of defense, was able to sum up the situation quite clearly just after that brief and successful war. Saddam “was clearly in a position to dictate the future of worldwide energy policy, and that gave him a stranglehold on our economy and on that of most other nations of the world as well.” We stopped him, and the oil flowed for another decade, among the most prosperous in U.S. history.<br />
<br />
If we view the current occupation through the lens of fifty years of U.S. policy, we can begin to construct a rationale for war that is not charming but at least has the benefit of coherence. Our best client state, Saudi Arabia, is in danger of collapsing under the weight of a thousand fattened princes, and our friendship is further troubled by the fact that fifteen of its citizens killed nearly 3,000 of ours. Moreover, as is clear from the previous writings of Cheney and Rumsfeld, this administration sees China, Russia, and the European Union as potential superpower rivals on the order of the old Soviet Union. The three of them together have oil contracts pending in Iraq worth as much as $1.1 trillion. Those contracts will go into effect the moment the U.N. lifts its sanctions regime, giving our rivals unprecedented control over our economic health. What would seem to most observers to be a series of positive developments – the normalization of Iraqi politics, the privatization of the Iraqi oil business, the imminent collapse of a corrupt Saudi regime – is instead seen as a distinct threat to our “certain grasp” on the oil so vital to our “greatness and independence.” And so we must invade Iraq in order to ensure continued U.S. control over the flow of Middle East oil.<br />
<br />
* * * <br />
<br />
Although it would be unfair to ascribe such a provocative move to the doctrine of Jimmy Carter, the invasion of a territory in order to control its natural resources is a rational, albeit morally questionable, exercise with successful historical precedents (the founding of the United States, for example). And yet the current administration finds itself incapable of making its case. If indeed this war is about oil, though, then in many ways the most dangerous thing we could do is insist that it is not. As Army Colonel Paul Hughes, who was the first director of strategic planning for the Iraq war, told the <i>Washington Post</I> in May, “Unless we ensure that we have coherency in our policy, we will lose strategically.”<br />
<br />
Soon we will be at war with Iraq for no other reason than that the people there are shooting at our soldiers. Unwinnable wars are inevitably about themselves. It is not giving Bush the benefit of the doubt, then, to assume his war is not about oil. It is giving him the benefit of the doubt to assume it is. ■<br />
Luke Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08968715243704059643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076462276343371005.post-74562019308867496522004-03-04T03:00:00.000-05:002014-05-05T13:18:22.727-04:00[Harper's Magazine] A RUN ON TERROR The rising cost of fear itself<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWJUXs3sTdzEWFaHYKaPj6hVGxrXiG1VxCCJzoR87xmyksSGyNDpi-ch2fTsJiv6vfLnaQ0v47MwbVqT2eJXIBQAhgoO7n6mhWGkpdf-9pFlpKUK1NOH5NtNqCEwY3oEpgobZ5rMpfT96C/s1600/mabuse.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:0em"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWJUXs3sTdzEWFaHYKaPj6hVGxrXiG1VxCCJzoR87xmyksSGyNDpi-ch2fTsJiv6vfLnaQ0v47MwbVqT2eJXIBQAhgoO7n6mhWGkpdf-9pFlpKUK1NOH5NtNqCEwY3oEpgobZ5rMpfT96C/s540/mabuse.jpg" /></a></div><font size="1"><b><i>The Testament of Dr. Mabuse</I>, directed by Fritz Lang</B></font size="1"><br />
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Terror, like ecstasy, tends to magnify perceptions. Just as affection becomes adoration in the physical act of love, so too does vigilance sometimes become morbid obsession in the face of spectacular violence. To be effective, this normal function of survival must also be temporary. It is now more than two years since our own national incident of spectacular violence, however, and although the United States remains obsessed, it is not unfair, or even insensitive, to begin considering the events of September 11 from a more detached perspective. <br />
<br />
In 2001, terrorists killed 2,978 people in the United States, including the five killed by anthrax. In that same year, according to the Centers for Disease Control, heart disease killed 700,142 Americans and cancer 553,768; various accidents claimed 101,537 lives, suicide 30,622, and homicide, not including the attacks, another 17,330. As President Bush pointed out in January, no one has been killed by terrorists on American soil since then. Neither, according to the FBI, was anyone killed here by terrorists in 2000. In 1999, the number was one. In 1998, it was three. In 1997, zero. Even using 2001 as a baseline, the actuarial tables would suggest that our concern about terror mortality ought to be on the order of our concern about fatal workplace injuries (5,431 deaths) or drowning (3,247). To recognize this is not to dishonor the loss to the families of those people killed by terrorists, but neither should their anguish eclipse that of the families of children who died in their infancy that year (27,801). Every death has its horrors. <br />
<br />
Anti-terrorism nevertheless has become the animating principle of nearly every aspect of American public policy. We have launched two major military engagements in its name. It informs how we fund scientific research, whose steel or textiles we buy, who may enter or leave the country, and how we sort our mail. It has shaped the structure of the Justice Department and the fates of 180,000 government employees now in the service of the Department of Homeland Security. Nearly every presidential speech touches on terrorism, and, according to the White House, we can look forward to spending at least $50 billion per year on “homeland defense” until the end of time. <br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
Is any of this necessary? One of the remarkable things about September 11 is that there was no follow-up—no shopping malls were firebombed, no bridges destroyed, no power plants assaulted. This is, no doubt, partly the result of our post-2001 obsession with preventing just such disasters. We must at least consider the possibility, however, that this also represents a lack of wherewithal on the part of would-be terrorists. Although there may be no shortage of those angry enough to commit an act of violence against the United States, few among them possess the training, the financing, or the sheer ambition necessary to execute an operation as elaborate as that of September 11. The nineteen who have already done so are dead, and in the two and a half years that they have enjoyed their martyrdom and their virgins, few have stepped forward to join them. In the United States, none have. <br />
<br />
This may be because it is very hard to kill thousands of people at once. It turns out, for example, that the radioactive “dirty bombs” of Jose Padilla’s fantasies are in fact “not very effective as a means of causing fatalities,” according to Richard Meserve, who is the chairman of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Smallpox was eradicated from nature in 1978, is impossible to manufacture, and—if terrorists did somehow get hold of what little of the virus remains in Russian and U.S. hands—is exceedingly difficult to spread. It is safe to assume that many aspiring terrorists have killed only themselves, with prematurely dispersed sarin or perhaps an all-too-successful anthrax experiment. And contrary to their designation as “weapons of mass destruction,” anthrax and sarin, as well as mustard gas, VX, tabun, and a host of other high-tech horrors, are more accurately called simply “weapons.” Aum Shinrikyo—which had 65,000 members worldwide, $1.4 billion in assets, and a secret weapons lab run by scientists recruited from Japan’s best universities, and spent years underground during which no investigative body knew of them, much less was seeking them—managed to kill sixteen people in a Tokyo subway station. A boy with a machine gun could have done worse. <br />
<br />
Real nuclear weapons, of course, are a different matter, but they also are incredibly hard to make. Libya recently gave up on the project. North Korea has been at it since the late sixties and may now have as many as two. As for the much-feared loose Russian nukes, Aum Shinrikyo, with all its money, tried just after the Berlin Wall fell to buy one and failed. This is why Al Qaeda, despite all its well-financed malice, used planes. It was the best they could do. <br />
<br />
In the unlikely event that a terrorist organization did manage to steal or, more likely, build a nuclear weapon, smuggle it into the United States, and detonate it near a major population center, the predicted casualty rate starts at 10,000 and climbs, in some estimates, to as high as 250,000. This would be a singular crime. But it would be a horror not unlike many that this nation has faced before and many that this nation will face again, terrorists or no terrorists. The country would go on, just as it did after the influenza epidemic of 1918 (600,000 deaths) or during the current AIDS epidemic (500,000 deaths and counting). Attorney General John Ashcroft has called terrorists “those who would destroy America,” but a successful nuclear attack would not destroy America. It would not even come close. <br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhh8kBFNaaj2VRh62wpvgf9J5b0fdXhFPvDS1W2mhkJO_uDK3Z8NZp-APdIldJt6CacPaNW_h9zPnbFvWmrisocZHLJ9pFcz3GV7L3uvC8MUUNgfsXTlr6EH4TJi3rufVSsvzVWDQWgVy0l/s1600/goya-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhh8kBFNaaj2VRh62wpvgf9J5b0fdXhFPvDS1W2mhkJO_uDK3Z8NZp-APdIldJt6CacPaNW_h9zPnbFvWmrisocZHLJ9pFcz3GV7L3uvC8MUUNgfsXTlr6EH4TJi3rufVSsvzVWDQWgVy0l/s400/goya-2.jpg" /></a></div>In this coming election, as in every other, genuine differences of opinion will inform much of the political debate. A tax cut in a time of recession might make sense to you, or it might not. Perhaps we should build a moon colony instead of funding public schools. Reasonable people may differ. Terror, though, will not be argued on logic or ideology or even self-interest. It will be argued on the basis of emotion. It is an emotion. <br />
<br />
Moreover, it is a seductive emotion. Our current obsession with terrorism is premised on the fiction of an unlimited downside, which speaks darkly to the American psyche just as did the unlimited upside imagined during the Internet bubble. Indeed, this hysteria can be seen as a mirror image of the bubble, a run on terror. Whereas before we believed without basis that we could all be illimitably wealthy with no work, we now believe without basis that we will die in incalculable numbers with no warning or determinable motivation. Both views are childish, but the Internet bubble at least did not require calling out the National Guard. <br />
<br />
Contrary to the administration’s claims, the War on Terror is not “a challenge as formidable as any ever faced by our nation.” It is not the Cold War, in which our enemy did in fact have the ability to destroy the Earth. Nor is it the Second World War (405,399 dead Americans), nor the First (116,516). It certainly is not the Civil War, still the deadliest conflict in American history (364,511 dead on the Union side, and an estimated 258,000 dead in the South) and one that specifically threatened to end the American experiment. It is not even a war in the “moral equivalent of war” sense of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Fighting it does not make us a better people. It is much closer to the War on Drugs—a comic-book name for a fantasy crusade. We can no more rid the world of terror than we can rid it of alienation. This may sound like a splitting of linguistic hairs, but we made a similar category error in Vietnam by calling a U.S. invasion a Vietnamese “civil war.” That misidentification cost 58,200 American lives. <br />
<br />
As opposed to terror, murder, at the hands of Al Qaeda or anyone else, is a very real threat. But it is not a supreme threat, and by calling it what it is we can recognize that it does not require the wholesale reorganization of the American way of life. The prevention of murder does not require the suspension of habeas corpus, nor does it call for the distribution of national identity cards, nor does it require the fingerprinting of Brazilian tourists. Preventing murder certainly does not require war, which of course is quite murderous in and of itself. What preventing murder requires is patient police work. <br />
<br />
In New York City we have a program called Comstat, in which police carefully track various crime statistics, detect anomalies, and marshal their forces appropriately. It works. There were 596 murders here in 2003, down from 2,245 in 1990. This sort of effort lacks election-year grandeur, however, which may partially explain why the Department of Homeland Security does not bother to track the number of Americans killed by terrorists. (The FBI tracks terror fatalities within the United States and the State Department tracks the same abroad, but each uses a different definition of terrorism and neither has domestic numbers beyond 2001.) Similarly, there is no comprehensive watch list of likely terror operatives. What we have instead is a sophisticated public-relations system, the color-coded “Homeland Security Advisory System,” that works to terrify Americans without the grisly work of actual terrorism. <br />
<br />
Many desired activities, from shopping to watching television, have been cited as examples of what we must do, or else “the terrorists will have won.” This is debatable. What is not debatable is that if the American people are terrified the terrorists have won. And, in this regard, they will have been working with the full cooperation of the current administration. ■Luke Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08968715243704059643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3076462276343371005.post-14241234852940487271995-09-24T11:15:00.000-04:002013-02-09T10:44:25.533-05:00[Washington Post] LIFE IN THE FEZ LANE America’s biggest fraternity faces old age<b>By Danny Hakim and Luke Mitchell, Special to the Washington Post</b><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6lKX4xADlLWFHsYoO6exoeFVGNfPHVBXesJn5urwKMobbAixLaOd5qpMTIw53i4HKCqpu_QT66yZRdK-rl-sYnvgqJIboBKdUS_a34v0ILdvldntvf52t_d0sqNaB4hImd8NMZbjiT2vE/s1600/3b06755u.tif.tiff" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6lKX4xADlLWFHsYoO6exoeFVGNfPHVBXesJn5urwKMobbAixLaOd5qpMTIw53i4HKCqpu_QT66yZRdK-rl-sYnvgqJIboBKdUS_a34v0ILdvldntvf52t_d0sqNaB4hImd8NMZbjiT2vE/s400/3b06755u.tif.tiff" /></a></div>BURLINGTON, Vt. The Freemasons – the ancient fraternity whose members once included presidents and tycoons, whose arcane symbols adorn the very coin of the realm, whose leaders have been demonized as tyrants and lionized as humanitarians – are intent on raising some holy heck. The Shriners of Canada and the Northeastern United States, which is kind of a superstar Masons organization, have been arriving here for days. Now they are poised for their march down Main Street of this trendy college town on this crisp September afternoon. They are here to strut their stuff, to show that they are still formidable, vital, their message universal: that despite their dwindling numbers, they remain engaged, relevant, hip.<br />
<br />
So far, everything is hunky-dory.<br />
<br />
Here they come! They are coming the way they have always come, in fezzes and costumes, some in powdered wigs. The spectacularly ancient among them ride in huge convertibles, Delta 88s and Eldorados mostly, 1970s-era behemoth boatmobiles with commodious seats and fatted upholstery benevolent to bursitis. The merely old promenade themselves, some with canes; some have wigs and muskets; a phalanx of men with chowdery Boston accents are dressed in turbans, with scimitars, their faces painted a garish swarthy brown. The real whippersnappers – men in their fifties and sixties – ride on tiny go-karts, knees tucked under chins, executing spirited figure-eights in vehicles festooned to look like little boats and dwarf Model T’s and weensy monster trucks. A brass band of Masons plays “Hello, Dolly!” Men with kilts squeeze bagpipes. Men wear odd ceremonial aprons. Men wear plaid cutaway tuxes that are, to be frank, lost somewhat between spiffy and snazzy. Spazzy, let’s say.<br />
<br />
Amid all this aggressive fuddy-duddyism, joy reigns. It is only on the fringes of this happy homage to goodwill and bad taste that one detects a subtle unraveling. The streets are not lined as they used to be, during the heyday of Masonry. There was adequate advance publicity, but the crowd is a little disappointing, just one or two deep in places; half seem to be children, beguiled by the spectacle, the other half oldsters who one suspects are friends and spouses of the marchers.<br />
<br />
Heading into the millennium, Freemasonry is undeniably in decline. Other fraternal orders – Moose, Odd Fellows, Elks – are in decline, too: casualties, it is said, of an American society at war with no-longer-fashionable notions of community and fellowship. But for the Freemasons, the fall seems more precipitous. Once, they were so powerful that a major national political party arose simply to oppose them. They were second on Hitler’s hit list, after Jews and before Catholics.<br />
<br />
Masons still do fine and worthy things. They raise big money for good causes. They finance children’s hospitals and burn-injury clinics. They have been hemorrhaging membership, but are still almost 2 1/2 million strong. Still, the fear among the Mason elite is that the organization’s days are numbered, that to much of America they seem silly, secretive, hidebound, exclusionary, obsolete – a modern-day version of the sorry group of losers lampooned in Preston Jones’s “The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia.” In that devastating 1973 play, a Southern fraternal lodge very much like the Masons comes face to face with modernity and its own seedy irrelevance.<br />
<br />
The Masons are struggling fitfully to face difficult questions about themselves. The marchers here today are unnervingly homogeneous – all white, all men, mostly superannuated. Some of the informational placards they carry are open invitations to new recruits, but even these are oddly off-putting: “Shriners Are Masons,” declares one, mystifyingly. “Kora’s Past Potentates,” reads another. “The Shrine of North America has 191 Temples With Approximately 190,000 Members,” boasts a third.<br />
<br />
Temples? Potentates? Approximately?<br />
<br />
On the reviewing stand, a bearded young man tentatively approaches Shriner Richard Cornwell. Cornwell, 61, is a manufacturer’s rep. He wears a fez declaring him to be the Grand Rabban of the Aleppo Temple in Wilmington, Mass. He is a big shot.<br />
<br />
The stranger looks to be in his thirties. He is in black jeans and a T-shirt. He looks earnest.<br />
<br />
A possible recruit.<br />
<br />
A possible young recruit.<br />
<br />
The stranger asks what Shriners are, and Cornwell proudly explains that it is the top rung of a steep climb. Before you get there, he says, you must have attained a certain degree in the York Rite or Scottish Rite Masons. And before that you have to reach a certain degree in a Blue Lodge, and to do that you’ve got to go through all sorts of degrees and tests.<br />
<br />
What sort of tests, the man asks, reasonably.<br />
<br />
Cornwell gets a little squinty-eyed.<br />
<br />
It’s a secret, he says.<br />
<br />
Ah, the stranger says.<br />
<br />
Can’t exactly tell ya, Cornwell says.<br />
<br />
Ah, the stranger says.<br />
<br />
“Do I have to have money?” he asks. “I’m on welfare.”<br />
<br />
“That’d be a problem,” Cornwell says.<br />
<br />
The man turns to leave.<br />
<br />
“Start putting a few bucks aside,” Cornwell suggests.<br />
<br />
But the would-be recruit is already shambling away into the indifferent crowd.<br />
<br />
<b>THE CONSULTANT</b><br />
<br />
The Freemasons in 1995 are bedeviled by a fundamental paradox. The very things that have made them historically strong – their elitism, their predilection for secrecy, their corny theosophy, their reverence for tradition and ritual – now threaten to destroy them. Times are changing.<br />
<br />
That’s the message that Dudley Davis is trying to give 35 top Masons in this hearing room in a hotel in Tempe, Ariz. It is October 1994, and on this day, the Masonic Renewal Committee of the Free and Accepted Masons of North America are all business. No fezzes, no aprons. Davis is pacing in front of the lectern. His Baltimore-based management consulting firm, Davis Consulting Group, was hired to help the Masons figure out why no one is joining their fraternity.<br />
<br />
They have lost 1.6 million members in North America in the last four decades, mostly through attrition. New members are joining faster than old members are quitting, but old members are dying faster than new members are joining. A lot faster. The average Mason is 67 years old. That’s the average. Statistically, for every 45-year-old, there is an 89-year-old. Or two 78-year-olds. Any way you slice it, these are not good numbers.<br />
<br />
At a ruddy and trim 60, Davis looks to be one of the younger men in the room. He strides to an easel and draws three circles in the shape of a leaning snowman. His marker squeaks as he writes “89%” inside the largest one. “Eighty-nine percent of Freemasons haven’t been to their lodge in three years,” he says, leveling a Socratic gaze on his fellow Masons. He asks why this is.<br />
<br />
“They’re in nursing homes!” someone shouts.<br />
<br />
The room convulses in laughter.<br />
<br />
Davis is not amused. He has been at this now for six years, and it is a tough sell. Masons are joyful people, mindful of their problem but seemingly not consumed by it. Being Masons, they are consumed with having fun.<br />
<br />
To an image doctor, they can seem aggressively self-defeating – like aging spinsters who want very much to look youthful but will not stop dying their hair blue.<br />
<br />
Davis gathers up his papers and affixes the group with a steady, serious gaze. “In evolutionary terms,” he says, “the choice, starkly put, is to adapt or to become irrelevant.”<br />
<br />
Davis began this crusade as a paid consultant only, but eventually joined the Masons, he says, because of their selflessness. He is urging the Masons to unite the financial and intellectual resources of 2.4 million men behind a single, high-profile campaign: a basic reading program for children nationwide, with a goal of universal American literacy. But Davis’s primary concern in Tempe is more immediate. Without members, he warns them, there will be no money for such things, and no people to accomplish them. The Masons, he says, must improve their recruitment. Get new blood. He brandishes a company newsletter from the Nordstrom department store chain.<br />
<br />
“What image does this project?” Davis eyes his audience, the Masonic Renewal Committee, as they browse articles like “Nurturing a Culture That Cares” and “Our Return Policy: Making the Customer Happy.” Davis makes his point: “Nordstrom’s owns its customers.”<br />
<br />
Now he hands out a Masonic product. It is a promotional Sunday insert from an Ohio newspaper. On the cover is a painting of a man in a skirt-length Masonic apron, sandals, long wavy hair and a black beard. He wears a V-necked navy-blue medieval tunic and skirt, and holds an L-shaped ruler and a compass. It is bizarre. He looks like some dowdy 15th-century drag queen architect. Inside are snapshots of old men wearing fezzes, sandwiched between thick layers of text.<br />
<br />
“This is not what we want the public to see as a first impression,” says Davis. “It’s dark. It’s mysterious. It’s cultist.”<br />
<br />
(Such imagery may help explain why the Masons have been accused of heresy by popes, by the Southern Baptist Convention, and even by Pat Robertson, who claimed in his 1991 book “New World Order” that a shadowy cabal of Masons, among others, now controls the Federal Reserve, and possibly orchestrated the Lincoln assassination.)<br />
<br />
In the meeting room there are nods of agreement. This sort of cultish image must be stopped, everyone agrees. But soon the meeting breaks up without any grand battle plan consensus. The Masons join their wives in the parking lot, board a chartered bus and are off for good times at the Pinnacle Peak Patio for beer and steaks.<br />
<br />
Hovering over the meeting in Tempe is a question. It is never openly stated, but here it is: The Masons may be cornball, they may be too male and too pale, but they exist to promote the basic decent universal values of brotherhood and good fellowship. Their money goes to comfort the afflicted of all races and religions and social classes. So what are we to make of the fact that this particular organization, as old as America, seems to be dying because it has become, to our way of thinking, unacceptably uncool?<br />
<br />
<b>ONE MASON’S STORY</b><br />
<br />
Ernie Higgins is 91. He is driving, and it’s quite a ride. You ask him what it means to be a Mason, and between harrowing lane changes, he will tell you.<br />
<br />
His nickname, proudly displayed on his calling card, is “The Old Goat.” At the moment, he is careering down the confused one-way mesh of D.C. streets in a tiny Hyundai loaner like a man who’s seen most of the city built around him, which he has. The Crown Vic is in the shop.<br />
<br />
We are driving to the House of the Temple at 16th and S – the headquarters of Masonry’s largest branch, the Scottish Rite Freemasons, and one of local Masonry’s most imposing structures.<br />
<br />
For Ernie, the lodge is a place where men come together to drink coffee, to talk and to retreat together from the world.<br />
<br />
He’s been a Mason since – he summons the date effortlessly – Aug. 18, 1925. He has been master of Theodore Roosevelt Lodge 44 of Washington, D.C., three times. First in 1934, then in 1984 and once again in 1994.<br />
<br />
He was even Harry Truman’s bodyguard for a day when the president, a Missouri Mason, came to a service at a local lodge some 40 years ago. The real Secret Service boys weren’t Masons, so they couldn’t enter the lodge room. Even national security sometimes yields to Masonry.<br />
<br />
Seven years before he became a Mason, Higgins knew he would someday be one. He decided as a boy, at his father’s funeral.<br />
<br />
“My father had one hand,” explains Higgins. “To be a Mason then, you had to have a full body.”<br />
<br />
“They paid the doctor’s bill,” Higgins says about the Navy Yard, where his father worked. “But they didn’t give him any sick leave in those days. But they gave him permission to sell tools in the Navy Yard.”<br />
<br />
His father worked hard and gained the respect of the Navy men to such a degree that they accepted him as one of their own. “Papa died on Thanksgiving 1918. The war was on – men would work six or seven days a week and couldn’t take time off. But so many came from the yards anyway, the church was full, there was no room for them.<br />
<br />
“Men with white aprons and white gloves stood facing each other outside the church, in two facing lines, from church steps to the grave.”<br />
<br />
He pauses.<br />
<br />
“I asked Mama what it was, and she said they were Masons. And they thought of Papa as a Mason. He had learned to be such a good man he must’ve been.”<br />
<br />
From that moment, as a boy of 14, Higgins decided that he would be the Mason that his father couldn’t be.<br />
<br />
Being a Mason in those early years was filled with tradition, in an era when tradition was vigorously protected. Back then, nobody challenged why women couldn’t be Masons, or why black and white Masonic lodges were segregated, or why Masons had such elaborate ceremonies. They only wonder about that stuff today.<br />
<br />
Trailing him through the House of the Temple on 16th Street is like walking through Masonry’s well-storied past. The House is a limestone monument to hundreds of years of Masonic tradition, an approximated replica of the tomb of the 4th-century B.C. Carian king Mausolus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the origin of the word “mausoleum.” Inside is a crypt of Masonry’s departed brethren.<br />
<br />
Higgins can remember staring up at the entryway as a kid. Its double doors are the height of two men.<br />
<br />
Now Higgins knows every nook and cranny of the massively mysterious structure: the secret doors, the names of all the people in the fading portraits on the walls.<br />
<br />
Thirty-three 33-foot-high columns support the temple’s main pyramid. That’s no accident, according to Higgins, nor is it coincidence that the temple’s address is 1733 16th St. Thirty-three is a big number for Masonry, which is divided into 33 ranks known as degrees. The main staircase is flanked by large black marble statues of the Egyptian gods Osiris and Isis. Just left of Osiris, in a side hall, is a painting of million-dollar Masonic contributor Gene Autry, smiling next to his trusty steed Champion.<br />
<br />
Autry and Osiris. It is a startling juxtaposition, just one of many. Immediately beyond the main wall is a shrine of sorts to the very king of secrecy himself, a man of whom Ernie Higgins and other Masons here at the House speak in reverential terms: Brother Mason J. Edgar Hoover. He is wearing men’s clothing. To the Masons, he is a symbol of justice and machismo of a bygone era. To the Masons, his reputation remains unblemished.<br />
<br />
Hoover relics line the inner sanctum – his FBI desk, his boxing gloves, a snapshot of the director and Shirley Temple, newspaper clippings chronicling his heroics. And of course, set aside in a glass display case, his fezzes.<br />
<br />
The House of the Temple, to say the least, is an odd place.<br />
<br />
The origins of this heady swath of cultural kitsch are the subject of much speculation, but the tangible beginning is in London, where the first lodge was built in 1717 by a group of stonemasons. The “secrets” of masonry then were largely trade secrets for a thriving profession during a boom time of church building. Once the Masons lost their craft, they continued to embrace the secret rituals already in place. Masons won’t let you watch these rituals, which have been passed down over the years, occasionally reinvented, but always revered as the defining factor of Masonry. Even Dudley Davis, who seeks to modernize the Masons, stresses that the ritual must stay, even if it is scaled back.<br />
<br />
The secret rituals – required to advance in the 33 degrees of Masonry – usually involve tests or lessons performed by Masons wearing elaborate period costumes and acting out parables extolling basic values like honesty, bravery, loyalty.<br />
<br />
Non-Masons are not allowed to witness such events, but a trip to the basement of the 16th Street local Scottish Rite Temple tells part of the story. Rows of closets line the “costume room.” There are racks of swords and muskets on the wall. The outfits are arranged by period: stacks of Colonial garb, with ponytailed wigs and tricorn hats. Another sliding door reveals Arabian robes and headdresses. Still another beckons with medieval armor: chain mail, codpieces, that sort of thing.<br />
<br />
At the House of the Temple, the ceiling of the main meeting chamber soars a hundred feet overhead. The massive room is circled with wooden thrones and benches, glitteringly entwined serpents and, in the center, a large altar. Ernie Higgins lets us play the giant, swirl-toned organ. The sounds fill this neo-gothic chamber. It’s impressive. It’s like the setting of the world’s most bodacious game of Dungeons and Dragons. This could be Camelot, or a Deep Purple video.<br />
<br />
It’s all quite a hoot.<br />
<br />
<b>THE MORGAN AFFAIR</b><br />
<br />
Masons built our country – literally and figuratively. George Washington, Ben Franklin and other brothers laid the actual cornerstone of the Capitol, the White House and the Washington Monument. Colonial Masonic lodges were a refuge where men could talk revolution. They were hard drinkers. Wenchers. Scrappers. Then, in 1826, disaster struck.<br />
<br />
The honeymoon ended in Batavia, N.Y., when William Morgan, an ex-Army captain who fought for Gen. Andrew Jackson in New Orleans, disappeared, creating a national scandal. What actually did happen that summer is anyone’s guess, but varying media accounts render it something like this:<br />
<br />
Morgan arrived in Batavia in 1821 and petitioned the local lodge for membership. He claimed that he was already a Mason, which he most likely was not. At first embraced by local Masons, Morgan – as well as his credibility and character – over the next few years came into question. By 1826, the Masons threw him out of the Batavia lodge, saying he was a profligate drunk who had joined under false pretenses.<br />
<br />
To get back at them, Morgan resolved to publish the Masons’ secret rituals, and joined forces with another ex-Army officer and printer to publish an unauthorized account of Masonry. When Morgan was arrested for a minor offense, a contingent of Masons arrived at the jail and spirited him away. He was never seen again.<br />
<br />
Much of the public believed Masons had kidnapped and killed him. The response to the scandal devastated Masonry. The country’s first national third political party was formed, the Anti-Masonic party, its entire platform being to bash Freemasons. Thousands of members, horrified by the publicity and scandal, fled the brotherhood. By the 1830s, Masonic numbers had plummeted to some 40,000 nationwide.<br />
<br />
But the need for fellowship proved stronger than the stench of scandal. By the end of the 19th century, there were 750,000 Masons. The brotherhood was back in full swing. Masonry this time around, though, was different. Not so roguish or sexy. More conservative. Less dangerous. Never again would it be an instrument of change in America – instead it became an instrument of stability. That has lasted for 100 years.<br />
<br />
<b>CALL TO ORDER</b><br />
<br />
The members of Osiris-Pentalpha Lodge 23 meet on the first and third Wednesdays of the month in a plain three-story brick building at the corner of Carroll and Maple streets NW in Takoma. It is just down the street from Friedrich’s Modern Dry Cleaning and catercorner to Stein Hebrew Funeral Home. There are thousands of Masonic lodges just like this one across the country.<br />
<br />
On this drizzly night, the brethren gather in a small powder-blue anteroom on the second floor, about three dozen men in brown or blue business suits. This group is as heterogeneous as Masonry generally gets. Most are in their sixties, but a few are twentysomethings, and a few are black. (Though black men are admitted into the mainstream Mason organization, most black Masons belong to a separate organization, known as the Prince Hall Masons, which has an estimated 250,000 members nationwide. The segregation is not a hot issue. “We got our own charters,” says Fred Williams, Imperial Director for Publicity for the Prince Hall Shriners, “and just stayed separate.” He said it’s not a big deal.)<br />
<br />
This could be a meeting of any men’s club anywhere, except all of these men wear small, spotlessly white aprons.<br />
<br />
At 8, Barry Benn arises. He is the Tiler. He knocks once, twice, three times on the door to the main lodge room.<br />
<br />
Inside, the Worshipful Master, Chip Mahaney, asks the Senior Warden who is knocking.<br />
<br />
The Warden asks Tiler Benn, and Tiler Benn tells him. The Warden reports this to Worshipful Master Mahaney, who then instructs the Warden to tell Tiler Benn and the boys to come on in. The meeting is called to order.<br />
<br />
The main meeting hall is painted the same prom-tuxedo blue as the anteroom, and lit by overhead fluorescent lights. At one end of the room is a platform that supports a throne, flanked by two smaller seats. On the throne sits the Worshipful Master. He calls the meeting to order.<br />
<br />
In the center of the room is a waist-high altar, and on it are a Bible and a yellow mailing tube. The Bible is a reminder of the God-fearing (though strictly ecumenical) nature of Masonry. The tube contains the lodge’s charter. It is opened once a year, when a new Worshipful Master is announced. As it happens, at least half the men in the room have been Worshipful Masters – you can tell because they put the initials P.M., for Past Master, after their names on their business cards and official programs. The main order of business on this night is a visit of members from Theodore Roosevelt Lodge 44, and a formal meeting of two current Worshipful Masters, the boyish Mahaney and Roosevelt Lodge’s sixtyish Vince Hardwick. An appeal is made for aid to Masonic earthquake victims in Kobe, Japan.<br />
<br />
Mahaney welcomes Hardwick and the other representatives of Lodge 44 and asks the Warden to lead him to the podium. The Warden escorts Hardwick by the elbow. He makes a brief, earnest speech about brotherhood and its importance to Masonry. The point is that the two lodges should get together more often.<br />
<br />
Refreshments are served.<br />
<br />
The meeting is friendly, open and egalitarian. Its goal is to advance fellowship. You cannot help but be impressed with the good nature of the group, its happy adherence to ceremony, its gentlemanly respect for title and position, its quaintness and its overriding civility.<br />
<br />
It reminds you of a time long gone.<br />
<br />
<b>KNIGHTS IN TULSA</b><br />
<br />
L.D. Alexander: People got to where they didn’t want to join up any more. Can you imagine that? They didn’t want to be Knights of the White Magnolia. . . . They turned around and stabbed their granddaddies square in the back. . . . Little by little the lodges just sorter dried up. Nobody wanted to join. No new people. Jesus, but we was big once, Lonnie Roy. Hell, there was governors and senators that was Brother Knights. We had con-ventions and barbecues and parades. Took over a whole hotel there in Tulsa. Gawd, and it musta been somethin’ to see. Bands playin’ and baton girls a-marchin’ along. The Grand Imperial Wizard of the brotherhood rode in a big open carriage pulled by six white horses, and up above the whole shebang was this great old big blimp towin’ this here banner sayin’ TULSA WELCOMES THE KNIGHTS OF THE WHITE MAGNOLIA. Gawdamighty, now wasn’t that somethin’?<br />
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Lonnie Roy: Jeeezus, you mean to say that with all that great stuff, that people quit joinin’ up?<br />
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L.D. Alexander: That’s right, Lonnie boy.<br />
<br />
—From “The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia,” by Preston Jones.<br />
<br />
<b>ADJOURNMENT</B><br />
<br />
Here in Burlington, the parade is ending. The go-karts are being stowed onto semi trailers, the streets reclaimed by college types on in-line skates, yuppies with cell phones.<br />
<br />
At the end of the parade route, on College Avenue near market Square, the kilted highlanders from the Kora Temple are squeezing one last song out of their bagpipes. It’s not scripted, it’s just something that felt right. They play “Auld Land Syne,” and when the final, sad, inscrutable lines are played – We’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet, for auld lang syne – the pipes fall silent, and the drummers keep the beat a few seconds more, a steady, dignified, haunting dirge. ■Luke Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08968715243704059643noreply@blogger.com0