There was a saying popular among anti-war protestors of the 1960s. Just because you’re paranoid, don’t think they’re not out to get you.

We have even more reason to wonder about who is spying on our personal conversations today because technology can practically read our minds. For those of us exposed to the futuristic novels of the 1970’s and 80’s, the model is already in our heads. We just have to change the names and characters.

The reason I’m thinking about this right now is because I happened to hear a segment on NPR recently about the Russian composer Dmitry Shostakovich. He wrote a symphony during the Stalin era that mightily displeased those with the power to dictate what music should sound like. They preferred something rousing and militaristic. Dmitry was condemned and almost sent to a gulag.

So, very cleverly, he wrote another symphony more to the liking of the militarists in power but with a subtext recognizable as satire by lovers of great music. Saved from the gulag, he went on to greatness.

Do you believe in odd coincidences? They seem to jump out at me constantly. The day after I heard the story on NPR about Shostakovich, James Risen was on Jon Stewart’s show. Risen writes for the New York Times and has been researching topics that the militarists in our country would rather he didn’t. For that, he and other journalists have been harassed, forced to pay thousands of dollars in attorney fees, and might possibly end up in jail. Yes, there are people in power in our country who dictate how the music should sound.

Risen was on The Daily Show to talk about his new book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War.

One reviewer sums the book’s intent this way:
Still, his core message resonates. “We have scared the hell out of ourselves,” he quotes an expert on terrorism as saying. That conclusion is a fitting epitaph for the first decade of the current century. Mr. Risen certainly makes the case in this book that America has lost much in its lashing out against terrorism, and that Congress and the people need to wake up and ask more questions about the political, financial, moral and cultural costs of that campaign.

In another odd coincidence this past week, I happened to find in a pile of articles a review of Risen’s earlier work on how America was lied into war in 2003. He wrote in 2006 that there was plenty of evidence that Iraq had closed down its program to develop nuclear weapons, but the people who tried to get that information to the top level of decision-makers were silenced. None of that testimony was included in the National Intelligence Estimate that was used to convince Congress to vote for war in 2002. The demonstration of “evidence” by Secretary State Colin Powell at the UN in February 2003 was manufactured to fit a plan already written by Bush administration militarists.

We all know the expression “stretching the truth.” In Greek mythology, there is a character named Procrustes who offers travelers a meal and a bed for the night. If the wayfarer doesn’t fit the bed, Procrustes makes him fit by either stretching him on the rack or chopping his legs off. Hold that thought.

In a Fox News interview during the early days of the 2nd Iraq War, Vice President Cheney said that we would look back “ten years hence” and see that we had fundamentally changed the course of history in the Middle East. I think we can all agree that that life has changed for millions of families in Iraq as well as many other countries in that region. Most of us do not think the situation is much of an improvement for the vast majority of citizens in those war torn countries.

But, if the goal was to replace communism as the enemy which served the military so well during the Cold War with a new, equally difficult to define enemy, the opening of the tinder box in the Middle East has served its purpose.

President Obama inherited multiple foreign policy disasters. He has tried to wind down American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. But that doesn’t serve the purposes of the national security state and the war profiteers. Sen. Mitch McConnell set out to make Obama a one-term president. He couldn’t pull that off, so he set in motion the next best thing. Destroy the credibility of the man in the White House who wants to keep Americans out of other people’s wars.

Our democratic process has turned into what one writer for Salon calls kabuki theatre, a “pantomime: the fading shadow of a system that in essence, if not in law, has nearly reached a complete stop.” The writer concludes that the self-proclaimed oldest democracy in the world lacks the basics of real self-government: unfettered access to the polls, accountability to the voters by politicians, competition among candidates to discern the people’s will and real options for those who feel they are not being heard. (Salon, 11/4/14, Elias Isquith)

Examples abound of politicians ignoring the will of the people. Whether it’s raising the minimum wage, expanding Medicaid, making it easier for bright young people to afford post-secondary education, or facing the racial disparities in our culture, our appeals fall on deaf ears.

Power is so concentrated at the top and the oligarchy is doing such a good job of fencing off anyone who objects, we, the people, don’t stand a chance. When the 99% rose up in 2011-12, what happened? They were tolerated briefly until it became apparent that they might actually build an influential constituency. Their big mistake was to take on Wall Street. That had to be nipped in the bud, and so the “occupiers” were ridiculed in the media, made to look like bums and fools in the evening news, and eventually saw their encampments destroyed by the police. That wasn’t just in NYC’s Zuccotti Park either. Some of us attended events held at Kiener Plaza in St. Louis and brought food and blankets to the protesters camped out there. Under the guise of concern for the health and safety of the citizens, the City of St. Louis decision-makers ordered the encampment destroyed.

Two things are happening right now that deserve our attention. President Obama is insisting that Congress authorize spending billions more on the “war on terror” which will include sending a few thousand more Americans into harm’s way in Iraq. Nowhere in the discussion do we hear how we were misled into opening that Pandora’s box in 2003. Is the media forbidden to do historical analysis? Or do they choose to turn a blind eye to what a disaster our policies have been in that region? If people like James Risen are being harassed for documenting the lies that we were sold in 2003, how is that different from the kind of pressure applied to Russian dissidents during the Stalin era?

Locally the story to watch is a plan to eliminate Kiener Plaza as an amphitheater for rallies, protests and public meetings. The powers-that-be want to fill in the area below ground, cover it over with grass and, in truth, bury it. The “reasons” given are a real stretching of the truth. But that shouldn’t come as a surprise to those of us who have been watching the takeover of our democratic system by people as ruthless as Procrustes. Sadly, the majority of citizens prefer to ignore what is happening right under their noses. So Mitch McConnell, the man who vowed to destroy the Obama presidency and any hope we might have for some semblance of economic and social justice, will control the most important deliberative body in the world. Here in Missouri, we will be entertained by the puppets in Jefferson City who work for what a cartoonist in the Gilded Age called “malefactors of great wealth.”

A few of us will continue our attempts to explain to voters what is happening while they are not paying attention. It’s the least we can do for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. FDR said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. But it’s much more complicated than that.

The post When politicians dictate how the music should sound: Lessons from Shostakovich appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Republicans often like to see issues in black and white with no room for shades of gray. This means that they cannot accommodate luck or happenstance or even nuance in describing why or how something happens. One of the best examples of this myopic vision by Republicans is the way Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham responded to the unfortunate attack on Benghazi, Libya in September 2012. They took an event that literally occurred in the dark and to which there were no clear answers and then made an absolutist interpretation, with a paucity of facts to substantiate it.

Some Republicans have been trying to blame the Obama Administration for the recent Boston Marathon bombings. It’s possible that their accusations of an administration failure in gathering and utilizing intelligence is valid, if and only if, they support the near absolute suppression of our right to privacy. Republicans hate the government doing any kind of snooping, unless it helps them make an argument from which they may gain politically.

Washington Post journalists Greg Miller and Sari Horowitz recently wrote a most revealing article, Boston case highlights limitations of U.S. counterterror network. They outline many of the new steps that U.S. intelligence agencies have taken since 9-11 to coordinate retrieval of and access to information. However, they limit their investigations when the privacy rights of likely innocent citizens are at risk.  They are walking a tightwire, and they have to do it very delicately.  They state:

It has been more than a decade since the United States began building its massive counterterrorism infrastructure, an apparatus that has been reconfigured several times in recent years after a series of near-miss attacks.

The strike in Boston marked the first time that a terrorist bomb plot slipped past those elaborate defenses and ended in casualties in the United States. Whether that outcome represents an intelligence failure is already the focus of a multi-agency review as well as a heated political debate.

The details that have emerged so far suggest there are still institutional gaps that could be fixed to bolster the nation’s counterterrorism system. But the bombings also exposed a less-reassuring reality: Even when defenses function as designed, they can be undermined by factors beyond their control.

In Boston, some of those factors were as fundamental and elusive as timing and luck.

“When this happens, there’s sort of an automatic response to find a linkage to failure,” said Andrew Liepman, who served as deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center until last year. It’s perfectly reasonable to look into whether there were breakdowns, Liepman said. “But that massive counterterrorism infrastructure works amazingly well to protect the country. We need to get used to the idea that it isn’t foolproof.”

In the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the obstacles for U.S. authorities ranged from a misspelling on an airplane boarding pass to the apparent refusal of Russian authorities to go beyond their initial tip. Ultimately, however, perhaps the best chance to detect and disrupt the plot fell into a six-month span on the calendar, the near-empty space between when the FBI stopped watching Tsarnaev and when he is alleged to have begun laying the groundwork for the Boston plot.

The details that have emerged so far suggest there are still institutional gaps that could be fixed to bolster the nation’s counterterrorism system. But the bombings also exposed a less-reassuring reality: Even when defenses function as designed, they can be undermined by factors beyond their control.

As Miller and Horowitz say, sometimes it’s luck; sometimes it’s factors beyond intelligence officials’ control. These factors raise their heads as stopgaps when protecting the right to privacy is endangered without sufficient evidence to justify it.

What happened in Boston was terrible. But with three people killed and hundreds injured, it was nowhere near the carnage of 9-11,  in which nearly three thousand people were killed and many more thousands injured. It is the only case since 9-11 of American citizens being killed in an act of terrorism that seemingly has foreign connections. We should be most thankful that we went eleven and a half years between such events. The many successes that our intelligence communities have are often invisible and also accomplished under considerable duress. Their work and bravery should not be demeaned by baseless Republican fishing expeditions, whose sole purpose is to place specious blame on the Democratic Party.

It is true that we must be vigilant with how our intelligence agents and policy-makers handle themselves in the fight to control terrorism. There are obviously a myriad of mistakes. The element of bad luck comes in when the universe of government mistakes intersects with the universe of attempted terrorist attacks (see image below). We do our best to minimize those intersections from happening. When they do, it is not an indictment of the whole intelligence network. Rather,  it is usually something that fell between the cracks at a most unfortunate time. We need to try to correct this, but also learn to live with it as we do with other misfortunes that are going to happen from time to time regardless of what we do.  It’s no time for Republican lame chatter.

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Remember back in 2007 when we were freaking out at Google Maps photographing our neighborhoods? We were worried, and rightly so, about the invasion of our privacy. What if an online stalker or a thief figured out where we lived, saw what our house looked like and scoped out which doors and windows were vulnerable? What if we were inadvertently photographed where we shouldn’t have been? Oops!  Needless to say, except for the demise of a few marriages, we survived the invasion of  Google cars with cameras and learned to love Google street view.

Fast forward to today: In February of this year, President Obama signed the The Federal Aviation Administration Re-Authorization Bill, which among other things, requires the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to make plans to integrate unmanned aircraft systems, or drones, into American airspace. Right now drones are being used on the U.S.-Mexico border, over military airspace, and around 300 public agencies located away from cities and airports. This is scheduled to change on September 30, 2015 when they will be allowed to fly at low levels over all of our airspace.

The FAA estimates that by 2020, 30,000 public and privately owned drones, (sent aloft by news media, police departments, the FBI, Homeland Security, the NSA, disaster rescue teams, scientists, real estate agents, corporations, private citizens, crazy people and, of course, paparazzi) will be flying or hovering silently overhead. And yes, they will have the ability to spy on us. Makes that Google car seem pretty quaint doesn’t it?

Needless to say, this new law was pushed through because there is a lot of money to be made in expanding drone use. To date, much of it has been from military contracts, and, even though the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are winding down, drone use in the military will continue to grow. According to June, 2011 article in the New York Times,

The Pentagon now has some 7,000 aerial drones, compared with fewer than 50 a decade ago. Within the next decade the Air Force anticipates a decrease in manned aircraft but expects its number of “multirole” aerial drones like the Reaper — the ones that spy as well as strike — to nearly quadruple, to 536. Already the Air Force is training more remote pilots, 350 this year alone, than fighter and bomber pilots combined.

But the drone industry is looking to expand beyond the military and has been lobbying congress to open up domestic markets. The Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus, otherwise known as the “Drone Caucus” made up of Republican and Democratic representatives from states where drones are made, is responsible for introducing and fast tracking the legislation to allow drones over American airspace. According to the Drone Caucus website, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been the most dynamic growth sector of the world aerospace industry this decade. It estimates that UAV spending will almost double over the next decade from current worldwide UAV expenditures of $5.9 billion annually to $11.3 billion, totaling just over $94 billion in the next ten years.

Are there legitimate domestic uses for drones? They are cheaper to operate than police helicopters. They are useful for monitoring urban traffic patterns, rescuing people lost in wilderness areas, surveying public lands and protecting public property, to name a few. But the energy behind opening up American airspace to drone use is being driven by the industry and their minions in DC rather than a thoughtful public policy debate. Concerns about the invasion of privacy are given lip service by  congressmen who represent the industry. The industry association that lobbied Congress for passage of this bill, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International refers to the concerns of the “privacy rights community” as obstacles to be overcome. And, then there are the safety issues. The FAA is freaking out about how to make the airspace safe with so many drones flying around.

When drones are unleashed in American skies on September 30, 2015, we will never know when the government, a corporation, or some weird person with deep pockets is monitoring us, or for what purpose.  We can avoid a surveillance camera mounted on a building, but how do we avoid a surveillance drone the size of a bird or an insect? These “microdrones” currently being developed by the military will most certainly be used for public and private domestic surveillance. And then, of course, with the skies being opened up to the proliferation of drones, what’s to keep someone from using a larger drone to drop a dirty bomb?

Drone use will only proliferate over time, as will government and corporate surveillance. Unfortunately, there is no going back. Technology has become a powerful tool for concentrating and expanding government and corporate power. But, as we know, technology can also be a powerful tool for confronting power and spreading democracy. Somehow, I don’t have a good feeling about drones.

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