Posts tagged journalism

Snubbing Teach for America

My wonderful friend wrote this. 

Attack Dog

New Yorker piece on the nature of negative political ads and the Super-pacs that are now able to fund them. 

When you read something like this it really is tough to have much hope for the republic. 

The Obama Memos

An incredibly fascinating article from the New Yorker. But how on earth do they get this kind of information? It’s like they’re spying on the Oval Office….

Are they spying on the Oval Office?  

Also, there’s this line.. 

“Obama was learning the same lesson of many previous occupants of the Oval Office: he didn’t have the power that one might think he had. Harry Truman, one in a long line of Commanders-in-Chief frustrated by the limits of the office, once complained that the President “has to take all sorts of abuse from liars and demagogues… . The people can never understand why the President does not use his supposedly great power to make ’em behave. Well, all the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.”

There’s this pollyannish notion that the most important thing to do when working together is stay positive and get along, to not hurt anyone’s feelings,” she says, “Well, that’s just wrong. Maybe debate is going to be less pleasant, but it’s always going to be more productive. True creativity requires some trade-offs.

From the Article “Group Think” in this week’s New Yorker. 

And let me add an “amen” to that. 

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.
Stephen Cobert, who is quickly becoming my personal hero. 
thesyllabi: (Image via shilkpatel) The FBI’s Informant Network Tom Junod has a feature about the so-called Waffle House terrorists in February’s Esquire. According to news reports around the time this was news, the Waffle House terrorists were four senior citizens plotting a killing spree against government officials. It wasn’t clear at the time how advanced these plans were, but they were busted by an FBI informant, apparently present and wired from the group’s very first meeting. Junod’s feature paints a more complete picture of the group and their informant. Overall, he makes a fairly unconvincing case for their innocence — it seems to boil down to “these men are way too old, no way.” But more interesting is the informant, Joe Sims. In 2010 he was charged with a string of sexual offenses, including molestation of minors, dissemination of child pornography, and incest. He signed on as an informant to keep himself out of jail, conveniently having information about a terrorist plot. However, as Junod tells it, the plot Sims supposedly had information on would never have progressed past kitchen table shit-talk without assistance from Sims, who provided money and weapons. The men involved were too self-incriminating for a credible entrapment argument, but the fact remains that their plan was likely going nowhere without Sims’, and by extension, the FBI’s help. This narrative, of the FBI luring wannabe terrorists into terror plots, has been increasingly common in the FBI and Department of Homeland Security’s post-9/11 push for uncovering and stopping terrorists before they have a chance to become terrorists, and the Waffle House terrorists are only the most recent high-profile story to make print. There was the Liberty City Seven, accused of plotting to blow up the Sears’ Tower in Chicago and liberate Muslims from a nearby jail. An FBI informant posing as an al-Qaeda associate supplied the men with surveillance equipment, cellphones, a meeting place, and money. Documents later showed the seven men were nowhere near being capable of executing a terrorist plot, and the informant was paid $10,500 for his services in incriminating them. There was also the Newburgh Four, painted as anti-American terrorists plotting to fire Stinger missiles at planes and plant car bombs. Shahed Hussain, an FBI informant, organised all of this. He got them the missiles, did the reconnaissance missions, taught them about Islam, and offered the men $250,000, free holidays, and expensive cars as incentive. The truth, it later came out, was that the four men involved struggled with drug addiction and poverty, one had severe mental issues, and the supposed ringleader later claimed he was just trying to scam Hussain for money. Most recently was the case of Jose Pimentel. As in most of these cases, there’s little doubt that he wanted to kill Americans, but without the aid of an NYPD informant he would have been too poor and mentally unstable to build the pipe bombs he was arrested for building. In what could be seen as a turning of the tide in these kinds of investigations, the FBI declined to pursue it, saying it raised questions of entrapment. Though that didn’t stop the NYPD continuing with their case, and they actually called it a tactical advantage, since they could charge Pimentel with conspiracy, which is something FBI wouldn’t have been able to. Over the course of a year Mother Jones and the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkeley examined the prosecutions of 508 defendants in terrorism-related cases. They found that every single high-profile domestic terror plot in the last decade, with only three exceptions, was an FBI sting. Nearly half of all prosecutions involved informants, and 49 defendants were prosecuted for their involvement in plots lead by an FBI informant. Despite the obvious question of entrapment in so many of these cases, terrorism-related charges are so hard to beat that few of the defendants risked a trial. Further Reading Junod’s piece mentions that the men planned to manufacture a poison called Ricin, but fails to mention — as most media publications that mention Ricin do — that the recipe easily found online was written by a teenager and will not work; it’s an urban legend that will probably never die He’s No Angel — the FBI informant who invented a murder plot against a federal prosecutor to scam the FBI for money Homegrown Terror — the story of one of the three legitimate terror investigations in the last decade, that almost resulted in Najibullah Zazi bombing the New York subway system The Triple Agent — Humam al-Balawi posed as a CIA informant in an elaborate plot that eventually lead to the death of 9 intelligence operatives

thesyllabi:

(Image via shilkpatel)

The FBI’s Informant Network

Tom Junod has a feature about the so-called Waffle House terrorists in February’s Esquire. According to news reports around the time this was news, the Waffle House terrorists were four senior citizens plotting a killing spree against government officials. It wasn’t clear at the time how advanced these plans were, but they were busted by an FBI informant, apparently present and wired from the group’s very first meeting.

Junod’s feature paints a more complete picture of the group and their informant. Overall, he makes a fairly unconvincing case for their innocence — it seems to boil down to “these men are way too old, no way.” But more interesting is the informant, Joe Sims. In 2010 he was charged with a string of sexual offenses, including molestation of minors, dissemination of child pornography, and incest. He signed on as an informant to keep himself out of jail, conveniently having information about a terrorist plot. However, as Junod tells it, the plot Sims supposedly had information on would never have progressed past kitchen table shit-talk without assistance from Sims, who provided money and weapons. The men involved were too self-incriminating for a credible entrapment argument, but the fact remains that their plan was likely going nowhere without Sims’, and by extension, the FBI’s help.

This narrative, of the FBI luring wannabe terrorists into terror plots, has been increasingly common in the FBI and Department of Homeland Security’s post-9/11 push for uncovering and stopping terrorists before they have a chance to become terrorists, and the Waffle House terrorists are only the most recent high-profile story to make print.

There was the Liberty City Seven, accused of plotting to blow up the Sears’ Tower in Chicago and liberate Muslims from a nearby jail. An FBI informant posing as an al-Qaeda associate supplied the men with surveillance equipment, cellphones, a meeting place, and money. Documents later showed the seven men were nowhere near being capable of executing a terrorist plot, and the informant was paid $10,500 for his services in incriminating them.

There was also the Newburgh Four, painted as anti-American terrorists plotting to fire Stinger missiles at planes and plant car bombs. Shahed Hussain, an FBI informant, organised all of this. He got them the missiles, did the reconnaissance missions, taught them about Islam, and offered the men $250,000, free holidays, and expensive cars as incentive. The truth, it later came out, was that the four men involved struggled with drug addiction and poverty, one had severe mental issues, and the supposed ringleader later claimed he was just trying to scam Hussain for money.

Most recently was the case of Jose Pimentel. As in most of these cases, there’s little doubt that he wanted to kill Americans, but without the aid of an NYPD informant he would have been too poor and mentally unstable to build the pipe bombs he was arrested for building. In what could be seen as a turning of the tide in these kinds of investigations, the FBI declined to pursue it, saying it raised questions of entrapment. Though that didn’t stop the NYPD continuing with their case, and they actually called it a tactical advantage, since they could charge Pimentel with conspiracy, which is something FBI wouldn’t have been able to.

Over the course of a year Mother Jones and the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkeley examined the prosecutions of 508 defendants in terrorism-related cases. They found that every single high-profile domestic terror plot in the last decade, with only three exceptions, was an FBI sting. Nearly half of all prosecutions involved informants, and 49 defendants were prosecuted for their involvement in plots lead by an FBI informant. Despite the obvious question of entrapment in so many of these cases, terrorism-related charges are so hard to beat that few of the defendants risked a trial.

Further Reading

  • Junod’s piece mentions that the men planned to manufacture a poison called Ricin, but fails to mention — as most media publications that mention Ricin do — that the recipe easily found online was written by a teenager and will not work; it’s an urban legend that will probably never die
  • He’s No Angel — the FBI informant who invented a murder plot against a federal prosecutor to scam the FBI for money
  • Homegrown Terror — the story of one of the three legitimate terror investigations in the last decade, that almost resulted in Najibullah Zazi bombing the New York subway system
  • The Triple Agent — Humam al-Balawi posed as a CIA informant in an elaborate plot that eventually lead to the death of 9 intelligence operatives

thesyllabi

On Stephen Colbert- Absolutely a Must Read

This man is such a genius in so many ways. 

“In 1974, when Colbert was 10, his father, a doctor, and his brothers Peter and Paul, the two closest to him in age, died in a plane crash while flying to a prep school in New England. “There’s a common explanation that profound sadness leads to someone’s becoming a comedian, but I’m not sure that’s a proven equation in my case,” he told me. “I’m not bitter about what happened to me as a child, and my mother was instrumental in keeping me from being so.” He added, in a tone so humble and sincere that his character would never have used it: “She taught me to be grateful for my life regardless of what that entailed, and that’s directly related to the image of Christ on the cross and the example of sacrifice that he gave us. What she taught me is that the deliverance God offers you from pain is not no pain — it’s that the pain is actually a gift. What’s the option? God doesn’t really give you another choice.”

More on Hitch

Still reading quite a bit about the life of Christopher Hitchens. This profile from 2006 is pretty entertaining. I really love this paragraph: 

At a dinner a few months ago in San Francisco with his wife, Carol Blue, and some others, Hitchens wore a pale jacket and a shirt unbuttoned far enough to hint at what one ex-girlfriend has called “the pelt of the Hitch.” Hitchens, who only recently gave up the habit of smoking in the shower, was working through a pack of cigarettes while talking to two women at his end of the table: a Stanford doctor in her early thirties whom he’d met once before, and a friend of hers, a librarian. He spoke with wit and eloquence about Iranian politics and what he saw as the unnecessary handsomeness of Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2006/10/16/061016fa_fact_parker#ixzz1gtGXBVbd

The Open Secret: Criticism of Kristof

This article was pretty tough to swallow since I’ve been a Kristof fan for a long, long time. I even tell people that I dream of becoming like him in some sort of way.  If you read this article, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the matter. For now, I am going to let it sit.  

My initial response is that the writer seems to put way too much blame on Kristof. Kristof is a journalist that is in need of selling newspapers. There are a million other things that Kristof could be, but this is what he’s chosen to do. He’s only one man and therefore can’t be the problem. I agree that there needs to be more work in presenting the structures of violence, the linkages between political systems and the horrors on the ground.  But I can’t see how Kristof is somehow to blame. Kristof knows that intimate stories are important for creating narrative and therefore need to be personal and direct. Refashioning his column into a policy research document twice a week will do nothing but draw away readers.  It’s like the writer of this article wants Kristof to be more than he is, or more than he could possibly be: which is to somehow be able to completely solve the problems for everyone else and at the same time be popular in doing so.  

Here is Kristof’s page over at the New York Times. 

Best Long Reads of 2011

Where Our Monsters Come From

A couple of nice quotations: 

“Jones argues that the image of the dragon—the salient elements of which were already hardwired into the primate brain—became a “pattern” or “template” that could be passed on genetically as well as culturally. He spends a considerable amount of space demonstrating how this process could have worked, but the upshot is that the “ brain-dragon” was stored in the human mind for hundreds of thousands of years, where it lay dormant or lurked in the dreams of ancient humans, to be released during times of great communal anxiety. It was only with the development of language and art, Jones argues, that the image of the dragon could be given full expression and a greater semblance of reality. It could be said, then, that the dragon — like other monsters and mythic figures — is a product of the cognitive fluidity that underlies the mythic imagination. The archetype of the dragon gave form to the fears engendered by humanity’s developing ability to imagine all kinds of new dangers and threats.”

And this one too: 

Because the image combined features from three dominant predators, it could quickly send the neural message very dangerous animal. Indeed, the derivation of the word monster seems to acknowledge this ancient function. Monster comes from the Latin word monstrare, “to show,” and monere, “to warn.” Monsters are warning signs, reminding us of the many threatening creatures lurking in the environment eager to gobble us up.

The 45 Most Powerful Images of 2011

The Broken Contract

By George Packer.

You’ll need to register for a free account with Foreign Affairs to view this entire article. 

The New Classics

Slate tries to break down what the new classics are in the first 11 years of our millennium. I clicked on the link thinking it would be a collection of books, but it’s really an attempt at piecing together the classics of culture. A little bit of everything seems to be represented. 

On the guy behind Pixar