Patterns in the white noise, and our decisions

Can you see the patterns in the white noise of so-called news? Do you understand the consequences of our decisions that we base upon what we are willing to read and see in this white noise?

BBC did not know of 9/11 film’s link to religious right

The BBC broadcast a controversial docu-drama, The Path to 9/11, this week without realising that it had been made by a member of the US religious right.

The three-hour programme, shown over two nights on BBC2 to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the attack on the twin towers, was purchased from ABC, a subsidiary of Disney. At the last minute the US television company was forced to re-edit sequences after claims of distortion from former president Bill Clinton and members of his administration.

A BBC spokesman said the organisation did not vet film-makers on their political or religious beliefs.

The film’s director, David Cunningham, is active in Youth With a Mission (Ywam), a fundamentalist evangelical organisation founded by his father, Loren Cunningham. According to its publications, the group believes in demonic possession, spiritual healing and conservative sexual morality.

Last month David Cunningham addressed a conference in England organised by the group at its UK headquarters in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, on the making of the film. His talk was entitled Christ-like Witness in the Film Industry.

Diebold Brushes Off Yet Another Damning Security Report

Just a day after Avi Rubin discussed many of the real world problems of some Diebold e-voting machines in action, Ed Felten has come out with his quite damning independent review of the machines — noting just how problematic the security is and how easy it was to upload malicious programs (including a virus that could spread dangerous software from machine to machine). This is hardly the first time we’ve seen such a report, but it seems like each report is progressively worse. By this point, you’d have to have lived in a hole to believe e-voting machines are secure. Diebold, in typical fashion, has responded not by admitting to any problems, but by attacking Felten’s report — claiming that his test (done on a machine acquired just a few months ago) was based on older software.

Tony Snow says Colin Powell is confused: So was every other reporter

Olbermann had a good round up on Countdown last night. Tony Snow seems to think that Colin Powell is just a little bit confused over Article 3. He might have been used in the run up to the war, but I think he understands this issue quite well. The rest of the gaggle was just as perplexed. Olbermann also talks about Bush’s new approach to Osama-Just “fuggetabouthim” and threw in a little IAEA to boot. Michael Stickings writes about the IAEA: Yes, it looks “like prewar Iraq all over again,” in the words of one former nuclear inspector.

A Defining Moment for America
The president goes to Capitol Hill to lobby for torture.

PRESIDENT BUSH rarely visits Congress. So it was a measure of his painfully skewed priorities that Mr. Bush made the unaccustomed trip yesterday to seek legislative permission for the CIA to make people disappear into secret prisons and have information extracted from them by means he dare not describe publicly.

At Last, the Issue is Publicly Joined . . . and When All the Smoke has Cleared, the Central Question is Quite Simple

And it is this: Should the CIA be legally authorized to breach the Geneva Conventions by engaging in the following forms of “cruel treatment” prohibited by “common” Article 3(1)(a) of those Conventions?:

– “Cold Cell,” or hypothermia, where a prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees, during which he is doused with cold water.

– “Long Time Standing,” in which a prisoner is forced to stand, handcuffed and with his feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours.

– Other forms of “stress positions” and prolonged sleep deprivation, perhaps akin to “Long Time Standing.”

– Threats of violence and death of a detainee and/or his family.

(These are the CIA techniques that have been widely reported, including in this ABC News Report and in Ron Suskind’s book. To the extent some of these techniques are not among those that the President is now euphemistically designating “alternative,” or to the extent the Administration is attempting to preserve other techniques currently prohibited by Common Article 3, the burden is on the Administration to clarify the record. They have resolutely refused to disclaim any of these reported techniques, and so I think it’s fair for Congress and the public to assume, absent contrary evidence, that these are among the techniques at issue in the current debate. If we’re going to authorize conduct currently prohibited by the Geneva Conventions, we ought to know just what we’re signing on for.

Bush Pushes for Terror Legislation

Warning that “time’s running out” for Congress to act, President Bush urged lawmakers today to pass legislation that would create special military tribunals to try terrorist suspects and allow the CIA to continue a program in which captured al-Qaeda leaders have been held and interrogated in clandestine prisons abroad.

NSA Bill Performs a Patriot Act

A bill radically redefining and expanding the government’s ability to eavesdrop and search the houses of U.S. citizens without court approval passed a key Senate committee Wednesday, and may be voted on by the full Senate as early as next week.

By a 10-8 vote, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved SB2453, the National Security Surveillance Act (.pdf), which was co-written by committee’s chairman Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) in concert with the White House.

The committee also passed two other surveillance measures, including one from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), one of the few senators to be briefed on the National Security Agency program. Feinstein’s bill, which Specter co-sponsored before submitting another bill, rebuffs the administration’s legal arguments and all but declares the warrantless wiretapping illegal.

In contrast, Specter’s bill concedes the government’s right to wiretap Americans without warrants, and allows the U.S. Attorney General to authorize, on his own, dragnet surveillance of Americans so long as the stated purpose of the surveillance is to monitor suspected terrorists or spies.

Lisa Graves, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, called the bill “stunning.”

Ultimately…

There Is No Tomorrow

One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress.

For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. The offspring of ideology and theology are not always bad but they are always blind. And that is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

One-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup Poll is accurate, believes the Bible is literally true. This past November, several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in what is known as the “rapture index.”

These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans. Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre: Once Israel has occupied the rest of its “bibli-cal lands,” legions of the Antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.

—

I read all this and then look at the pictures on my desk, next to the computer - pictures of my grandchildren: Henry, age 12; Thomas, age 10; Nancy, 7; Jassie, 3; Sara Jane, nine months. I see the future looking back at me from those photographs and I say, “Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do.” And then I am stopped short by the thought: “That’s not right. We do know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling their world.”

And I ask myself: “Why? Is it because we don’t care? Because we are greedy? Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain indignation at injustice?”

What has happened to our moral imagination?

The news is not good these days. I can tell you that as a journalist I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free - free to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk.

What we need is what the ancient Israelites called “hocma” - the science of the heart, the capacity to see, to feel and then to act as if the future depended on you. Believe me, it does.