Science Guardian

Railroaded onto Devil’s Island, Dreyfus was without doubt an innocent patriot

Army officers used anti-Semitism, manufactured evidence to keep him there regardless

Intellectuals finally freed him, but truthfinding whistleblower was persecuted, Zola exiled, Dreyfus nearly shot dead

Modern science twisted by like irrationalities, especially in HIV(not)/AIDS

Anyone who thinks the Dreyfus Affair is an irrelevant episode which has no bearing on modern life should read today’s well executed summary of this shameful story in the New York Times Book review, where Leo Damrosch boils down Ruth Harris’s large new tome, Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion and the Scandal of the Century to its essence.

An entirely innocent man was convicted of espionage and suffered four years of hell on earth on the notorious Devil’s Island before his brother enlisted Emile Zola and other intellectuals to reverse the monstrous injustice, with the Army and conservatives resisting all the way with lies, manufactured evidence and persecuting the whistleblower who discovered the real culprit, not to mention attacking Zola for libel and hounding him out of the country. Even then a zealot nearly killed Dreyfus with a pistol after he was freed.

Sound familiar? There are parallels in every facet of the appalling story of how HIV(not)/AIDS zealots have managed to maintain their entirely irrational paradigm in the face of an avalanche of books, article, contrary scientific papers and critics of all stripes, from both inside and outside the system – in this case, Big Science, rather than the French Army.

Nothing could be more obvious than the innocence of this harmless wisp of retroviral RNA of all charges of harming humans brought against it, yet the bulk of the world’s population has been led to believe it a very damaging and ultimately fatal threat to their health, and that the antibodies they form to it which repel it from their bodies somehow much later will ruin their immune system and kill them, and anyone they have miraculously transferred those antibodies to, in a sequence of reasoning which is irrational in every step and which contradicts the basic premises of infectious disease as demonstrated throughout the rest of medicine and its science.

Have a look at Damrosch’s review and you will get a very clear picture of what happened to Dreyfus, and how human behavior in the leading civilizations of this planet has not changed one iota from over a century ago.

July 15, 2010
At War With Itself
By LEO DAMROSCH
DREYFUS
Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century
By Ruth Harris
Illustrated. 542 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $35
The scandal known as the Dreyfus Affair still resonates after more than a century, though it has been blurred for most Americans by time and distance. It is the goal of the Oxford historian Ruth Harris to extricate the story from the myths it has generated, on both the left and the right, and to trace its tortuous evolution from 1894 to 1906 in all of its human complexity. Combining an even-tempered tone with generosity of imagination, she has achieved that goal, charting a steady course through the voluminous literature that the affair inspired and exploring the reactions of scores of soldiers, politicians, journalists, salonnières and ordinary citizens. A helpful “Dramatis Personae” at the end of the book lists nearly 150 people, all of whom are given substantial treatment during the course of the narrative.

Alfred Dreyfus grew up in a wealthy Jewish family in Alsace, a disputed eastern territory that many French people regarded as covertly German. He was 10 years old at the time of the Prussian invasion in 1870, when the French Army suffered a humiliating defeat, and he remained fiercely patriotic ever after, which motivated his choice of a military career. Intent on improving its leadership, the army began to promote officers on the basis of success in examinations rather than through the old-boy network, and Dreyfus was one of those selected for special training. The old-boy network was predictably resentful, especially when beneficiaries of the new policy were Jews, who numbered fewer than 100,000 in a nation of 38 million and were regarded by many as an insidious “enemy within.”

On Oct. 14, 1894, a few days after his 35th birthday, Captain Dreyfus spent the evening in his Paris apartment with his wife, Lucie, and their two young children. The next morning he was summoned unexpectedly to headquarters, subjected to a bewildering interrogation and placed under arrest. During the star-chamber trial that followed, he was never permitted to know the actual charges against him, which were based entirely on a torn-up bordereau, or memorandum, that a cleaning woman had retrieved from the wastebasket of the German military attaché. It was clear that someone was offering to sell low-level secrets to the Germans, and a chain of flimsy circumstantial evidence was said to point to Dreyfus. He wasn’t short of money and wasn’t entangled with women, two of the most frequent motives for espionage at the time, but his superiors decided that the handwriting on the bordereau was his, and an Alsatian-Jewish scapegoat was convenient.

Early in 1895 Dreyfus stood at attention in the courtyard of the École Militaire while an officer publicly broke his sword in two (Harris mentions that it had been broken and soldered together in advance to preclude any embarrassing difficulty). He was then condemned to solitary confinement in the ferocious tropical heat of Devil’s Island in French Guiana. He spent four appalling years there, forbidden to speak with his guards and with no knowledge of what was happening in France. As Harris comments, “Dreyfus, in fact, was one of the few French alive who knew nothing of the Dreyfus Affair.”

Alfred’s brother Mathieu, tireless in support despite constant threats, managed increasingly to attract the attention of politicians and journalists who suspected that in its zeal to defend its honor, the army had perpetrated a monstrous injustice. The “Dreyfusards” appealed to Enlightenment ideals of truth and justice, while conservatives, with the support of the Roman Catholic Church, argued for nationalist traditions that the army was held to embody. As Harris shows, allegiances were often complicated and illogical. Some important Dreyfusards were personally anti-Semitic, and some conservatives who believed that Dreyfus was innocent nonetheless were convinced that defending the army, and hence its persecution of Dreyfus, was more important than justice.

The case against Dreyfus, such as it was, began to unravel when Lt. Col. Marie-Georges Picquart stumbled on evidence that the real spy was Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, a commandant whose handwriting did indeed match that of the bordereau, and who did indeed need money to cover huge debts. In the tragedy of errors that followed, paranoid army leaders punished the whistle-blower Picquart and did everything in their power to protect Esterhazy. They even abetted the forging of a letter by a commandant, Hubert Joseph Henry, that allegedly confirmed Dreyfus’s guilt. Amazingly, after the forgery was exposed, the anti-Dreyfus press claimed that Henry had acted out of patriotism to defend his nation’s honor, and when he slit his throat in prison they proclaimed him a martyr.

In fact, the forces of reaction proved impervious to argument and evidence. The novelist Émile Zola became fascinated by the case and ignited a huge protest by analyzing its details in “J’Accuse,” a celebrated open letter to the president of the Republic. Zola was thereupon convicted of libel in a trial whose judge ruled nearly all the relevant evidence inadmissible and was forced to go into exile in England.

Dreyfus himself was brought back to France in 1899, a broken man after four years on Devil’s Island, and put on trial once more. His prosecutors claimed, as more recent governments have done, that national security forbade them to reveal secret evidence that would have been decisive if known, and he was convicted all over again. To forestall further controversy he was immediately granted an official pardon, which did nothing to clear his name. It was not until 1906 that a court finally declared him innocent. In 1908, after he had retired from the army, a would-be assassin wounded him slightly with a pistol; the attacker was tried and acquitted. Dreyfus died in 1935.

The story is clearly a very rich one, exposing the determination of military and political leaders to cover up their errors at all costs and, still more profoundly, the bigotry that foreshadowed the genocidal horrors of the 20th century. It was apparently at this time, too, that the word “intellectual” assumed its modern connotations, with writers and thinkers acquiring a prestige in public debate that they have retained in France to this day.

In the splendidly terse “Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters” (2009), Louis Begley brought a lawyer-novelist’s insight to untangling the deceptions through which Dreyfus was framed, and he suggests explicit parallels with post-9/11 legal abuses by the United States. More spacious, and also more densely detailed, is Frederick Brown’s “For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus” (2010), which traces the development of racist nationalism and reactionary Catholicism from the mid-19th century onward until they culminated in the Dreyfus Affair.

For readers who want a concise account of what Harris calls “the most famous cause célèbre in French history,” Begley’s book and Brown’s chapter will appeal. For the story in depth they should turn to Harris’s excellent “Dreyfus,” which deserves a wide audience for its patient, fair-minded exploration of human ideals, delusions, prejudices, hatreds and follies.

Leo Damrosch’s most recent books are “Tocqueville’s Discovery of America” and “Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius.”

Anyone who remains innocently skeptical that today’s leaders of science and society and their unthinking followers can behave like braying asses in intellectual matters should read “Dreyfus” through for a good understanding of human folly, and how easy it is to mislead the faithful, even in science, when it turns political, and fights over its truths in the media rather than in peer reviewed journals.

Greg Mortenson teaching Army new tactics of winning hearts and minds as both lose on the ground

Female power takes over US Army policy in history’s biggest quicksand, but can it overcome male doubledealing in millions to trillions of dollars?

If Army wives can redirect a juggernaut, why can’t Michele?

UPDATE: Wikileaks sends heat missile into US policymaking

The NYTimes sees fit today (Jul 18 Sun) to carry on the top left front page of its presumably well read Sunday edition a story by Elizabeth Bumiller on an Unlikely Tutor Giving Military Afghan Advice.

Turns out the tutor is Greg Mortenson, author of “Three Cups of Tea”, and builder of more than 130 mostly girl schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the US Army under McChrystal has been paying a lot of attention to his ideas for the past year. The story gives the impression that “Three Cups of Tea” is now the unofficial army manual on how to achieve victory in Afghanistan ie how to leave it to the Afghanis without the Taliban taking over again. Mortenson’s answer, as we noted in an earlier post, is to educate the better half of Afghanistan, its women. And who is the group behind this sudden enlightenment after eight years of floundering in a military quicksand which has swallowed every other conqueror in history? Army wives:

“We will move through this and if I’m not involved in the years ahead, will take tremendous comfort in knowing people like you are helping Afghans build a future,” General McChrystal wrote to Mr. Mortenson in an e-mail message, as he traveled from Kabul to Washington. The note landed in Mr. Mortenson’s inbox shortly after 1 a.m. Eastern time on June 23. Nine hours later, the general walked into the Oval Office to be fired by President Obama.

The e-mail message was in response to a note of support from Mr. Mortenson. It reflected his broad and deepening relationship with the United States military, whose leaders have increasingly turned to Mr. Mortenson, once a shaggy mountaineer, to help translate the theory of counterinsurgency into tribal realities on the ground.

In the past year, Mr. Mortenson and his Central Asia Institute, responsible for the construction of more than 130 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, mostly for girls, have set up some three dozen meetings between General McChrystal or his senior staff members and village elders across Afghanistan.

The collaboration, which grew in part out of the popularity of “Three Cups of Tea” among military wives who told their husbands to read it, extends to the office of Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Last summer, Admiral Mullen attended the opening of one of Mr. Mortenson’s schools in Pushghar, a remote village in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountains.

Cont:

Mr. Mortenson — who for a time lived out of his car in Berkeley, Calif. — has also spoken at dozens of military bases, seen his book go on required reading lists for senior American military commanders and had lunch with Gen. David H. Petraeus, General McChrystal’s replacement. On Friday he was in Tampa to meet with Adm. Eric T. Olson, the officer in charge of the United States Special Operations Command.

Mr. Mortenson, 52, thinks there is no military solution in Afghanistan — he says the education of girls is the real long-term fix — so he has been startled by the Defense Department’s embrace.

“I never, ever expected it,” Mr. Mortenson, a former Army medic, said in a telephone interview last week from Florida, where he had paused between military briefings, book talks for a sequel, “Stones into Schools,” and fund-raising appearances for his institute.

Mr. Mortenson, who said he had accepted no money from the military and had no contractual relationship with the Defense Department, was initially critical of the armed forces in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as “laptop warriors” who appeared, he said, indifferent to the civilian casualties inflicted by the American bombardment of Afghanistan.

In its early days “Three Cups of Tea,” the story of Mr. Mortenson’s efforts to build schools in Pakistan, was largely ignored by the military, and for that matter by most everyone else. Written with a journalist, David Oliver Relin, and published in hardcover by Viking in March 2006, the book had only modest sales. Most major newspapers, including this one, did not review it.

But the book’s message of the importance of girls’ education caught on when women’s book clubs, church groups and high schools began snapping up the less expensive paperback published in January 2007.

Sales to date are at four million copies in 41 countries, and the book’s yarn is well known: disoriented after a 1993 failed attempt on Pakistan’s K2, the second-highest mountain in the world, Mr. Mortenson took a wrong turn into the village of Korphe, was nursed back to health by the villagers and, in gratitude, vowed to build them a school.

He returned to Pakistan a year later with a $12,000 donation from a Silicon Valley benefactor and spent most of it on school construction materials in the city of Rawalpindi — only to be told he could not get his cargo to Korphe without first building a bridge.

The story of that bridge, Mr. Mortenson’s relationships with Pakistanis, and the schools that followed appealed so much to one military spouse that in the fall of 2007 she sent the book to her husband, Christopher D. Kolenda, at that time a lieutenant colonel commanding 700 American soldiers on the Pakistan border.

Colonel Kolenda knew well the instructions about building relationships with elders that were in the Army and Marine Corps’ new counterinsurgency manual, which had been released in late 2006. But “Three Cups of Tea” brought the lessons to life.

“It was practical, and it told real stories of real people,” said Colonel Kolenda, now a top adviser at the Kabul headquarters for the International Security Assistance Force, in an interview at the Pentagon last week.

Colonel Kolenda was among the first in the military to reach out to Mr. Mortenson, and by June 2008 the Central Asia Institute had built a school near Colonel Kolenda’s base. By the summer of 2009, Mr. Mortenson was in meetings in Kabul with Colonel Kolenda, village elders and at times President Obama’s new commander, General McChrystal. (By then at least two more military wives — Deborah Mullen and Holly Petraeus — had told their husbands to read “Three Cups of Tea.”)

As Colonel Kolenda tells it, Mr. Mortenson and his Afghan partner on the ground, Wakil Karimi, were the American high command’s primary conduits for reaching out to elders outside the “Kabul bubble.”

As Mr. Mortenson tells it, the Afghan elders were often blunt with General McChrystal, as in a meeting last October when one of them said that he had traveled all the way from his province because he needed weapons, not conversation.

“He said, ‘Are you going to give them to me or am I going to sit here and listen to you talk?’ ” Mr. Mortenson recalled. The high command replied, Mr. Mortenson said, that they were making an assessment of what he needed. “And he said, ‘Well, you’ve already been here eight years, ” Mr. Mortenson recalled.

Despite the rough edges, Colonel Kolenda said the meetings helped the American high command settle on central parts of its strategy — the imperative to avoid civilian casualties, in particular, which the elders consistently and angrily denounced during the sessions — and also smoothed relations between the elders and commanders.

For Mr. Mortenson’s part, his growing relationship with the military convinced him that it had learned the importance of understanding Afghan culture and of developing ties with elders across the country, and was willing to admit past mistakes.

At the end of this month, Mr. Mortenson, who lives in Bozeman, Mont., with his wife, Tara Bishop, and two children, is going back for the rest of the summer to Afghanistan, where to maintain credibility he now has to make it clear to Afghans and a number of aid organizations that he has no formal connection to the American military.

Mr. Mortenson acknowledges that his solution in Afghanistan, girls’ education, will take a generation and more. “But Al Qaeda and the Taliban are looking at it long range over generations,” he said. “And we’re looking at it in terms of annual fiscal cycles and presidential elections.”

To turn the US Army in a new direction after eight years is quite a feat, and here we learn it was achieved by the wives atop the Army power structure ie the spouses of Christopher D. Kolenda, then commanding 700 American soldiers on the Pakistan border, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen and General David H. Petraeus, now the Army commander in Afghanistan. Note that the actual first names of only the last two, Deborah and Holly, are mentioned by the Times female reporter, which seems odd.

Why doesn’t Mrs Kolenda deserve respect as the initiator of a vast expansion of US Army objectives in Afghanistan? Colonel Kolenda certainly took her point, judging from his piece in the Weekly Standard in October, 2008, How to Win in Afghanistan:It’s time to adjust the strategy.. At least, he included a reference to “Local governments desperately need to draw on the expertise of civilian partners from the international community to develop durable systems relevant to everyday life” amid his hard nosed assessment of spoiler factors in “winning” in Afghanistan including a dysfunctional timber trade and tax system.

The $200 billion pork barrel

How to win the war in Afghanistan is none of the business of this blog, of course, though we celebrate any advance in releasing the energies of the better half of the population of the world, which Greg Mortenson’s school building is part of.

But the influence of money on the behavior of large systems is our business, in that the influx of money into science from the post World War II federal funding of scientific research to the Wall Street exploitation of breakthroughs in biotechnology and medicine seem to us to account for much of the misbehavior we witness today in scientific leadership, since funding has become the first order of business in almost every field.

How does Afghanistan look from this point of view? A lost cause, we would say, unless things change. According to David Samuels in Harpers August issue, Barack and Hamid’s Excellent Adventure: Afghanistan’s president visits the White House , gigantic sums are being pocketed and dispensed as the powers involved cooperate in a clandestine game that has little to do with the headline stories we read in New York:

“Is your brother a CIA agent?”

The question refers to Hamid Karzai’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who is regularly portrayed in the American press as a corrupt drug lord who charges huge fees for allowing trucks full of opium to cross the bridges over the Helmand River to Kandahar. Last fall, President Obama duly warned that he expected Karzai to establish tough new anti-corruption laws and remove his brother from the government of a country into which the United States would soon be sending 30,000 additional troops. Never mind that Afghanistan produces an estimated 90 percent of the world’s supply of opium; and that the Taliban pays Wali Karzai to ship opium through the territories he governs; and that the U.S. Army, under the ill-fated General Stanley McChrystal, relies on Wali Karzai for logistical support and subcontracts special tasks, which include killing people, to gunmen under his direct control; and that as a courtesy we no longer destroy the poppy crop; and that Wali Karzai happens to be the CIA’s landlord in Kandahar, renting them Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s old villa. After a few months of back-and-forth, the message got through, and on March 30 the New York Times reported that “Afghan and American officials have decided that the president’s brother will be allowed to stay in place,” quoting a senior NATO official as saying that Wali Karzai could be a big help to the ongoing American reconstruction effort. “One thing, he is a successful businessman,” the official said. “He can create jobs.”….

…an interview with former U.S. diplomat Peter Galbraith, an arrogant creep who was forced out of his job as deputy U.N. envoy to Afghanistan and chose to express his unvarnished opinion of Karzai. “He can be very emotional, act impulsively,” said Galbraith, who repeated the word “emotional” three times in the course of the interview. In case viewers didn’t get the gossip-page code, Galbraith explained that “some of the palace insiders say that he has a certain fondness for some of Afghanistan’s most profitable exports,” leading a reporter to ask State Department spokesman Philip Crowley the next morning whether the United States had any reason to believe that Karzai was “like, hiding out in the basement of the palace doing bong hits, or something worse.” …

Eikenberry, a tall man in a good suit who used to be a lieutenant general, was opposed to the surge, because the Afghan government—whose ministers he knows better than any other American in the room does—was corrupt and unable to run the country effectively. Having spent more than twenty hours on a plane with Karzai and his ministers circumnavigating clouds of volcanic ash, Eikenberry is now even better equipped to evaluate the men in whose pockets much of America’s $276-billion investment in Afghanistan now resides. Appearing at a news conference in the White House briefing room on Monday, Eikenberry was asked whether his opinion of Karzai had changed. “President Karzai is the—he’s the elected president of Afghanistan,” Eikenberry said, falling back on the military man’s necessary obeisance to the idiocy of legal authority….
The fact that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate has been supplying the Taliban and even helping to plan attacks on Afghan and American forces is another inconvenient fact of the war that the leader of the free world would prefer not to deal with….

Yet there can be little doubt that a major source of money for the insurgency comes from payments made by elected Afghan officials and Wardak’s army, meaning that America is funding both sides in what is very clearly an Afghan civil war.

Cont. (much more)
A case in point is a recent scandal involving the defense minister’s own son, Hamed Wardak, a Rhodes scholar and class valedictorian at Georgetown University; his transportation company, NCL Holdings, won a $360-million Pentagon contract despite the fact that it wasn’t registered with the Afghan government and didn’t own any trucks. “Those accusations are without merit,” the defense minister responds, adding, correctly, that his son’s company has received the highest possible marks from the Pentagon.

I ask the minister about whether, in general terms, the logistics systems shared by the U.S. Army and the ANA might be susceptible to some form of graft. I note that Watan Risk Management and Compass Security, the two major companies that escort supply convoys across the country, are known to pay large bribes to the Taliban and even to stage attacks on convoys in order to raise their rates. Although the fee varies according to the number of trucks and what they are carrying, the average bribe required not to get shot at is reportedly somewhere around $800 per truck. Both companies are owned by relatives of President Karzai. A report published last year by the Center on International Cooperation at New York University estimated that the United States and its allies spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on payments to private security and trucking companies.

“We have a very good logistics system,” Wardak answers. “It works exceptionally well. There is proper institutional control. Accusations to the contrary are without any merit.”

To make him feel better, I ask whether girls’ schools are still being burned down in Afghanistan. “That does happen very regularly,” he assures me. Over the past year, he says, there have been approximately 600 attacks on schools that have resulted in the partial or complete destruction of their facilities.

The interior minister, Haneef Atmar, a tall, ascetic-looking man who walks with a cane and is known as one of the few competent ministers in Karzai’s cabinet, tells me that although corruption is indeed a problem, he has instituted a “zero-tolerance” policy for payments from contractors to the Taliban. He gives me his email address so we can talk further and then introduces me to a no-nonsense-looking military type named Kevin. “Kevin is my adviser,” he says. It turns out that every member of the Afghan cabinet has a minder who “controls” that minister, a locution that the minders not only do not avoid but in fact seem eager to stress, as in, “I control the minister of mines.” I ask Atmar when this meeting was planned, and he tells me, “About three weeks ago,” confirming my impression that this visit was more or less arranged on the fly, after someone in the administration determined that Karzai had outfoxed them. As it turns out, Atmar’s announcement of a zero-tolerance policy on payments to the Taliban is premature: he will be unceremoniously fired by President Karzai shortly after the cabinet returns to Kabul.

The State Department desk man for Afghanistan informs me that if I want a meeting with the minister of mines, Wahidullah Shahrani, he will be appearing later at the Chamber of Commerce. Huge deposits of minerals including iron, copper, and lithium have been found in Afghanistan over the past few years. Last year, a contract for the Aynak copper deposit, thought to be worth some $88 billion, was awarded to a Chinese company in exchange for what American intelligence officials told the Washington Post was a $30-million bribe paid to Shahrani’s predecessor, Mohammed Ibrahim Adel, who was reported to be a close friend of Mohammed Karzai, one of the president’s brothers.

The problem with building anything in Afghanistan, the men tell me, is ensuring a consistent supply of fuel. There’s an eleven-inch pipeline that the Red Army built, and everything else needs to be trucked in, which means payoffs to the security companies and the local police, who are worse than the Taliban. I talk to a young American-born Afghan who grew up in Virginia and is now working in Afghanistan for an organization called SEIF, which was set up by CARE with funding from USAID. His job is to help small and mid-level entrepreneurs build packing plants in the countryside for dried fruit and nuts. I ask him how he thinks the war is going. “People in the rural areas are not happy with the last five or six years,” he explains. “They see billions of dollars being pledged for the reconstruction of Afghanistan. They don’t understand why they don’t see any of that money, why they don’t have roads, they don’t have schools, why they are still living in a mud hut.”…

I ask Ambassador Wayne how it is possible for the Chinese to pick up an $88-billion copper mine in the middle of a country in which America has spent more than $200 billion to no apparent purpose. “First is that the package that was put together was very massive,” he says, arching his eyebrows again. “Speaking frankly, there are all sorts of rumors about what else was happening.”

After the meeting, I ride with Minister Shahrani to the Willard Hotel, where we sit on pale yellow chintz-covered armchairs in a far corner of the lobby. In addition to the copper mine, he says, Afghanistan has the largest undeveloped iron-ore deposit in the world, for which bidding will soon ensue. “Everything will be done in the most transparent way possible,” he assures me. “We’re not Nigeria or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

I try to imagine how that conversation goes. “So, you have already stolen billions of dollars, and you’ve deposited it in Geneva,” I say out loud, playing the role of Shahrani. “Be content with what you’ve stolen already. Please don’t steal more or the international community will be mad at us.” Shahrani smiles. The State Department minder—who has been sitting three feet away while pretending not to listen to us—looks up, but the minister waves him off. “No, let him ask questions,” he says. “All contracts will be made perfectly transparent,” he repeats, before launching into a long disquisition on the procedures and the road show for the iron-ore contracts, which will happen sometime this fall. The total worth of the additional unexploited mineral resources in Afghanistan may be between $1 trillion and $5 trillion. Whatever the real number is, it will provide plenty of incentive to keep fighting.

Ann Gearan of the AP, who has covered the State Department for years in the old-fashioned way, stands up to ask the Afghan president a final question. Is it really appropriate for the United States to be launching a major operation in Kandahar when the president is unable to remove his brother from office? Karzai nods politely. “Fortunately, officials who are elected by the people cannot be removed by the president,” he explains. The issues raised by the American press have now been understood better, he concludes, before stating firmly, “the issue is resolved.” Hillary Clinton turns her face toward the bright, shining lights. “I have nothing to add,” she says. The vision is real and ineluctable. America will win the hearts of the Afghan people by defeating the Taliban and educating women to go to the moon, and our president will be reelected at a cost of $6 billion per month and tens of thousands more lives, Afghan and American.

Sobering stuff. Also, somewhat disillusioning to all those that wish Greg Mortenson and his girls schools well.

After all, he built no fewer than 130 schools over several years in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but the Taliban and other fighters have burnt down or crippled 600 in Afghanistan in the past year alone, so it would seem that the imagined transformation of Afghan society in support of the US Army might take a great deal longer than even a generation. Are the US Army prepared to stay the course? one might ask Colonel Kalenda.

Barack’s bedtime reading

So while we originally read the Times story as a heartening indication that perhaps our advice to the HIV/AIDS mythbusters to get to Michele somehow and let her insist that President Obama adjust US policy on AIDS in the right direction was not too wacky, we now realize that it may more difficult than it seems to actually change policy whatever success Michele has in getting Barack to make Peter Duesberg’s “Inventing the AIDS Virus” his bedtime reading.

After all, the amount invested so far in the totally spurious idea that HIV causes AIDS, a idea that is so scientifically silly it should be quickly rejected by any 14 year old who reads up on the topic, is calculated by some to exceed $400 billion, though the usual figure claimed in Vienna is half that.

UPDATE

WikiLeaks shoots heat seeking missile into Pentagon

Today (Jul 26 Mon) the Wikileaks release of 92,000 Army records, more than 200,000 pages of detailed description of battle events from January 2004 through December 2009, delivered a body blow to current Afghanistan war policy possibly equivalent to the Pentagon papers undermining of Vietnam, though the documents are not as secret. The texts make clear that the war has not been going even as well as claimed by the White House, and why after $300 billion spent by the US the Taliban are stronger than ever.

They confirm the corruption and incompetence of the Afghan government, its army and its police, probable Pakistani ISI (Interservices Intelligence) support for the Taliban, at least until recently, that insurgents of all kinds have continually multiplied beyond official estimates and are now apparently using heat seeking missiles (Manpads, not Stingers) successfully against US helicopters, as they did against the Soviets, police cruelty to civilians sometimes as sadistic as the Taliban, and Army disregard of the lives of civilians who may be in a target zone without any hope of fleeing.

At the time of writing the Pentagon is fuming that this must have been the work of Bradley Manning, the 22 year old intelligence analyst they have in custody for releasing the video of the helicopter attack in which the Reuters correspondent got shot (see previous post, Bullets vs books: Greg Mortenson and the un-infowars), but Wikipedia isn’t saying, of course.

The fundamental lesson for science here may be that what is needed for systematic scientific outrages such as the maintenance of the HIV/AIDS paradigm two decades after its expert debunking in top journals is a whistle blower who can expose internal memos and other correspondence which can give the game away to the public.

Unfortunately the only instance we know of where such a text was exposed was the incriminating memo written by some functionary at HHS asking why Peter Duesberg’s Cancer Research article in 1987, the one which first shot down the prima facie absurd HIV=AIDS claim, was not headed off at the pass ie not stopped before publication by intervention from the NIH or its agents.

Shortly after the Cancer Research paper appeared, a memo was sent from the office of the secretary of Health and Human Services, (HHS) with the words “MEDIA ALERT” that castigated the NIH for allowing the paper to have been published in the first place. “The article apparently went through the normal pre-publication process and should have been flagged at NIH,” it read. “This obviously has the potential to raise a lot of controversy…. I have already asked NIH public affairs to start digging into this.” The memo listed the few media outlets that had covered Duesberg’s review – primarily the New York Native, a gay weekly that has since gone out of business – and cited a few journalists by name it promised to check up on.

The notion that the NIH expects to vet every scientific paper in every cancer journal is surprising to people who think of science in the old fashioned, soft-fuzzy way. But to anybody who knows the system it is no surprise at all. The NIH exerts a militaristic control over the ideas that emanate from US government science, and the control extends to the media, who are rewarded and punished in accordance with their suspension of curiosity.
The NIH and all its branches are not only part of the “government,” they are part of the US military. Public Health has its roots in the military; the NIH began during World War I as an organization that solely focused on the health of soldiers. This remained its core mandate through World War II, after which it expanded to a more sweeping public health institution. Still, top NIH scientists hold military rank – the only openly stated one being the Surgeon General.
The NIH, UC Berkeley, the respectable science press, and needless to say the world’s many thousands of AIDS organizations choked on Duesberg like a bone lodged sideways in its throat. Ironically though, his achievements and reputation had lodged him deep in the system and it would take a while for them to expel him. (Celia Farber, The Passion of Peter Duesberg, at AIDS Wiki.)

Despite the fact that this notorious page has been displayed or at least quoted on the Web for years it seems to have made no difference at all to the success of HIV propagandists in selling the world on their lucrative idea, and that any challenge to it must be “dangerous” to the welfare of the public.

What is needed is 90,000 pages of such admissions but Alas there seems no chance of that. Although perhaps we should get in touch with Julian, just in case. He is reportedly miffed, however, that the copter killing video didn’t enough of a dent in the politics of Afghanistan’s civil war – for that is what it is now exposed to be – and that is why he released the current material, which is only part of the total, he states.

Meanwhile BradAss87 faces 52 years in prison.

From Huffington Post:

Jon Stewart Mocks Media for Wikileaks Reaction (Video) Watch for the final shot of Afghan soldiers smoking hits of opium before going on patrol with American soldiers one of whom complains it is impossible to get them to stop giggling.

From the Guardian:
Biting column by Simon Jenkins, A history of folly, from the Trojan horse to Afghanistan – By recording failure in meticulous detail, the leaked war logs bear devastating witness to our incompetence

HIV mythbusters precede Global AIDS Confab with truthseeking pow wow

Facing army of millions, scientific idealists try to correct its idea of the enemy

Naive Obama is no help at all, and John P. Moore is still well funded

The world’s greatest HIV/AIDS gathering will cram Vienna next week, bonding over the latest ways attendees have worked out to milk the greatest funding cow any of them have ever encountered.

None other than Ambassador Eric Goosby, the US Global AIDS Coordinator, will lead the US delegation to the XVIII International AIDS Conference to join 25,000 other HIV/AIDS dogmatists “to discuss efforts to stop AIDS.”

From July 18 to 23, Ambassador Eric Goosby, U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, will lead the U.S. delegation to the XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna, Austria. The conference brings together an estimated 25,000 participants, including scientists, health care providers, political, community and business leaders, government, non-governmental and multilateral organization representatives, and people living with HIV/AIDS, to discuss efforts to stop HIV/AIDS. Reflecting America’s leadership in the fight against global AIDS through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the U.S. will use this opportunity to share data, best practices, and lessons learned from PEPFAR-supported programs with the global community of HIV/AIDS program implementers.

Truth on the sidelines

The only fly in the ointment will be the rather smaller, but more truthful AIDS Knowledge and Dogma – Discerning the Difference: Conditions for the Emergence and Decline of Scientific Theories, Congress, July 16/17 2010, Vienna, Austria running today (Jul 16 Fri) and tomorrow in the same city, announcing in innumerable ways that the whole basis for their work, the supposed science of HIV/AIDS, is hollow at the core, which is one reason why it has got nowhere in 26 years in explaining how AIDS works or curing it. (HIV/AIDS patients treated with the standard drugs in the US are dying at the same rate as ever, 20,000 a year, give or take three thousand (the CDC and the WHO estimates vary)).

Unlike the gargantuan main fair, the AIDS Knowledge and Dogma conference will be an excellent source of accurate information on HIV/AIDS. One might view it as nothing less than a celebration of truth and good science, as verified by the published record in the highest peer reviewed journals. Its basic theme – that HIV does not cause AIDS, and HIV/AIDS is not infectious – has been sounded since 1987 and 1989 in comprehensive reviews which have never been challenged in the same publications, Cancer Research and the Proceedings of the National Academy, let alone refuted there or anywhere else, contrary to the propaganda of all those living off the current dogma.

But will its message calling for a return to good science in AIDS penetrate the noisy ramparts of the celebration of the status quo? The sorry tale of how politics and propaganda have trumped the best published science over the last quarter century in HIV/AIDS bodes ill for the prospects of turning the direction in which the vast crowd of lemmings at the other gathering is running, which is over the cliff of destruction and into the sea of despair, albeit well funded despair.

Can truth prevail in the numbers game?

It really is quite extraordinary how successful the promoters of the established paradigm have been in protecting it from debunkers led by the best man in the field, which is what Peter Duesberg of Berkeley was and is, even now, despite the Nobels given to less deserving rivals which have been used to (a)ward off his critiques.

Remarkable, indeed, given that there are so many books out now, well over thirty at last count, describing this scandal in detail, books by very acute minds with a perfect understanding of the issue, such as Peter Duesberg himself (“Inventing the AIDS Virus, 1996″) the science editor Harvey Bialy (“Oncogenes, Aneuploidy and AIDS: A Scientific Life and Times of Peter H. Duesberg , 2004″), science critic Henry Bauer (“The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, 2007″ ) and the mathematician Rebecca Culshaw (“Science Sold Out, 2007″), two of whom (Duesberg and Bauer) will be speaking in Vienna.

Other distinguished speakers in the program include the worldly ex-Sunday Times investigative science and medicine journalist and author Neville Hodgkinson (AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science (Fourth Estate, 1996)), the sharp minded market researcher, author and drug critic John Lauritsen (Death Rush: Poppers and AIDS, “Poison by Prescription: The AZT Story (1990), and The AIDS War” and others), gynaecologist, obstetrician and AIDS in Africa expert Christian Fiala (author of “Do We Love Dangerously? – A Doctor in Search of the Facts and Background to AIDS”), the virus structure electron microscope researcher Etienne de Harven who has just published “Ten Lies About AIDS”, internal medicine specialist and co-author of “Virus Mania: How the Medical Industry Continually Invents Epidemics, Making Billion-Dollar Profits At Our Expense” Claus Kohnlein (video in French), molecular biologist and radiologist Marco Ruggiero (video) (site), and award winning British science and medicine documentary maker (“AIDS—The Unheard Voices”) Joan Shenton, author of “Positively False: Exposing the myths around HIV and AIDS”. The excellent full length 2009 documentary expose of the rot at the core of the HIV paradigm, “House of Numbers” will be shown, along with a shorter German film from 1996, “AIDS – die grossen Zweifel (AIDS -the huge doubts)”.

But is anyone else listening?

All this material is quite enough to convince anybody listening there in Vienna (or who follows the links above, and reads the fine page of abstracts of the HIV truth conference) that HIV is the Worldcom of science, but the likelihood of it being heard by anyone from the main AIDS event seems remote. For twenty six years the response of everyone in the vast world of HIV/AIDS has been to turn a blind eye to anything which might threaten the central place of HIV in their scheme, and the funding that flows from that idea. As Upton Sinclair once remarked, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Though the ruling idea that HIV causes AIDS is as vulnerable to debunking as a sucked egg is to a sharp stick, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men of reason and disproof have so far failed to dislodge the Humpty Dumpty of HIV from atop his wall, because none of them can get anywhere near him. No one who matters in the system will discuss the topic.

Of course, the naivete of Presidents, officials, editors, charity celebrities, health workers and the general public when it comes to paradigm battles within science is not helpful. Or perhaps it is not naivete. After all, what recourse do people even in high position normally have to a second opinion in scientific matters, which are beyond their own understanding?

Like even scientists expert in other fields, they have to ask Joe, or Bill, or whomever they know or trust, in the established ranks, and this chain of collegial agreement extends outwards from a very small group of insiders in the know. The number of people in HIV/AIDS who are fully aware of its ramshackle, unbolted theoretical underpinnings can probably be numbered on both hands, and half of them probably refuse to admit even to themselves the weakness of believing that HIV causes AIDS. And as Peter Medawar observed in Advice to a Young Scientist, “a scientist who habitually deceives himself is well on the way toward deceiving others”.

Where is the candidate for change?

In such conditions it is probably unfair to blame even President Obama for going along with this appalling boondoggle, although a case could be made for expecting more from a sophisticated politician. After all, it was not beyond South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki to realize that if such highly qualified scientists still disagreed over the issue. something must be going on, and to demand open public discussion, if not reconciliation of views. Having examined the issue for himself, it seems clear that he concluded like every other intelligent and objective outsider who comes upon it that there is no reason to believe in the unique absurdities of HIV/AIDS, which are legion.

Not to mention the stark giveaway that in established circles reexamination of the HIV faith is verboten, which is why HIV mythbusters have to hold their conference separately in Vienna, in the Imperial court stables, or Hoffstallungen.

For as any child should be able to see, censoring disapproval of questioning of a belief in science is the mark of vested interests anxious lest the paradigm they are living off get toppled, and a signal of its weakness. The lethal degree of counterattack on anyone who raises doubts in HIV/AIDS is notorious, and the most obvious flag that a can of worms will be exposed if it is opened.

A world where no one reads the science

In a modern world where no one has time to read beyond the headlines of journal articles, and even expert reporters are not paid to do any investigation in scientific disputes, the general public rarely tries to read up on a scientific topic hiding behind mounds of jargon on all sides, and so we have a world where a scientific paradigm can be maintained forever floating on general opinion, maintained by censorship and propaganda and the enthusiastic fellow traveling of activists, and the enormous momentum of tens of thousands of organizations and their need for funding.

The Web, which was meant to save us from institutions and systems which might conceal the truth, has now been exposed as ineffective, despite the growing pile of video clips and now even films on You Tube. The number of attendees tells the story: 25,000 versus probably more than a hundred times less. The chance of change at the grass roots level now seems remoter than ever.

But then, truth is not a numbers game, and science is not a democracy. When will a truth seeking leader look into the matter, and rescue the situation?

Calling Mr Goosby

Will Mr Goosby pass by the Imperial Court Stables, where the AIDS-Knowledge and Dogma congress is being held, despite the not very promising name of this venue, and grasp the baton? Will he report back to President Obama that things may be amiss? Will Michele take an interest, and be put in charge of a new White House AIDS Investigative Unit?

Perhaps the current trend led by New York State surreptitiously to test everyone on the country for HIV will turn up a positive somewhere in the White House power structure, perhaps Mr Goosby himself. Certainly that would provide a personal motivation to reexamine HIV skepticism on his part, at least, if he has heard of it at all.

Certainly if he ever troubled to read Peter Duesberg’s book or site, or Rebecca Culshaw’s slim but powerful book, Goosby would be privately persuaded, we feel. But who in this Blackberry era has time to read any book? And who in a world of overwhelming consensus would think that contrarian views are worth reading, especially one atop the pyramid of power, privilege and pay generated by that consensus for 26 years? Probably not Mr Goosby, even if his alternative was the drug regime that increasingly is used to attack the health of blacks here and in Africa.

Moore pipes down

Meanwhile, we note that lately John P. Moore of Weill Medical College at Cornell, the lead propagandist in HIV/AIDS science notorious for attacking HIV skeptics as viciously as he possibly can (by his own account), has kept out of the limelight, so we doubt that he will be in Vienna hosting a panel on why the media should be censored of any mention of doubts about HIV, as he did in Toronto.

After all, the NIH listing of grants in 2009 in HIV/AIDS has him busy as the grantee of some eight projects amounting to $2,171,570 (click on PIName heading, then seek page 14).

All of them seem to be related to microbicides, where his last major result was that his microbicide actually assisted the passage of HIV, as we recall.

We doubt that the funding of the alternative AIDS – Knowledge and Dogma conference amounts to anywhere near this sum. Were we in charge at NIAID, however, we would allocate $2 million to it, and $20 million immediately to Duesberg, whose line of research in cancer seems more promising that the entire oncogene industry put together.

UPDATE: Russian English speaking TV has run segments featuring HIV Mythbusters during the week – see AIDS: questions remain unanswered – Jul 18 story with 8 video clips embedded. . (Thanks Carter and Questioning AIDS Forum where a couple more videos will be found of Neville Hodgkinson on YouTube from Russia Today and CrossTalk on the AIDS Industry – a TV news segment panel including Peter Duesberg.

Duesberg wins crossfire panel: The last one – Cross Talk – is a must see with Duesberg in a Crossfire type discussion where two stalwart defenders of the faith one from UNAIDS and one from the pharma side are pitted against Duesberg, who they try to repel as “dangerous” and a “murderer” 25 years out of date with his valid (they admit) complaints about AZT killing all the patients, but he is given adequate time to counter them by pointing out that his complaints are drawn from JAMA and the NEJ in the last few years where half the AIDS victims in the US are now dying of symptoms not of AIDS but of drug toxicity, and is given the last victorious word on the topic with that unanswerable point.

A creditable performance by the news host who did his research beforehand it is clear.

Riveting documentary exposes official misbehavior in suppressing cancer pioneer

NCI patented medicines while FDA tried to jail their Polish discoverer

Patients sob at their lucky escape from the forces which hold back progress

The fine, illusion busting, investigative cancer documentary “Burzynski”, whose limited, one week Oscar-qualifying run just ended at New York’s Cinema Village and in LA, is a must see for any intelligent observer of the politics of medicine in the US.

Readers should by no means credit the irresponsible reviews it suffered at the New York Times from freelancer Jeannette Catsoulis, the familiar Times’ pit bull for movies on unorthodox medicine or science, tho’ here able to complain only of the “visual aridity” of the documents presented which “destroy the film” and “trample the eyes”, while acknowledging that “director Eric Merola, presents Dr. Burzynski as a stoic victim of patent fraud, government harassment and scientific sabotage. No one appears to contest the efficacy of his treatment; the problem, the film suggests, is a pharmaceutical industry with nothing to gain — and much to lose — from the introduction of a highly successful, nontoxic competitor to chemotherapy and radiation”, or the Village Voice where Ella Taylor, evidently a tyro fresh to the vicious politics faced by alternative medicine pioneers, which is the topic of the movie, is so inattentive, seeing “no credible proof of the drug’s success” in this “conspiratorial rubbish”, that she had to edit her piece after publication, and raised a serious question as to whether negative reviewers actually sit through much of the movie.

More attentive takes listed at Movie Review Intelligence include Kevin Thomas at the Los Angeles Times and Ronnie Scheib at Variety, though we would choose James Van Maanen’s review and interview at TrustMovies as the best and brightest so far.

Reflex repression

Such flat dismissals of “Burzynski” are specimens of the same uninformed and possibly venal teacher’s pet hostility to novelty from outsiders that forms roadblocks to progress in every field, but especially medicine, where the media has a very bad track record in unfairly damning news of progress outside the dominant institutions – for example, the powerful expose of shoddy and unproven AIDS science in House of Numbers.

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All the major elements of what is wrong with modern medicine are present – the overwhelming official prejudice against novelty from outside the system, the distrust of independent unorthodox practitioners and the heartfelt testimony of their patients, the devotion of power to the defense of current treatment even though it achieves little and imposes its own horrendous torment on patients, and the immense influence of pharma on regulating officials who tend to end up with jobs in industry after they serve in government.
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This kind of unthinking resistance and counterattack is the theme of “Burzynski”, which exposes the irrational antagonism of FDA officials towards a successful maverick who has at the very least found a frequent cure for hitherto uniformly and rapidly fatal brain cancers.

Too many documents? The well arranged document-ary lives up to its description and proves its shocking and exhilarating case with documents more than personal interviews, it is true, and leaves out “balance” ie the standard defensive sources at the NCI and elsewhere. But this is either because those who stood up for him in the past wouldn’t talk any more (Petronas) or because Merola was discreetly avoiding the kind of vicious counterattack suffered by its hero by not alerting the vast and powerful opposition before his film could be released.

For “Burzynski” tells the tale of one of the most distinguished and successful pioneers of alternative medicine in cancer treatment, Stanislaw Burzynski MD PhD, his clinic, and the trials and tribulations faced by this sturdy optimist in fighting the vindictive, reflex hostility of FDA officials, self serving “quackbusters” paid by the insurance companies and other mindless servants of the status quo for over three decades.

Burzynski’s bright idea

The Polish born, West Houston based Burzynski had a bright idea early in his career, when he noticed that certain harmless peptides are seen in the blood and urine of cancer patients at less than normal levels, and wondered whether they might be involved in the body’s natural defenses against cancer.

The result, as covered in his over 200 articles in predominantly peer reviewed journals, is that he has been treating cancer in patients since 1977 with a novel protocol based on boosting these constituents (now about twenty varieties of small peptides and amino acid derivatives, synthesized since the early eighties and called antineoplastons by Burzynski) with signal success, judging from his carefully kept records, voluminous publications on his lab work which shows they interfere with cancer cells, and the fervent testimony of his patients cured of different tumors, and their families.

As the film spends its first half hour demonstrating, his results are promising enough to deserve the opposite of the political and legal attacks that have dogged him every step of the way to the Phase III trials now finally in view. The egregious assaults on his work (and it seems clear, the lives of his patients) have included confiscation of his entire records for 14 years, costly prosecutions by local authorities with a view to jailing him for several lifetimes, luckily all in vain, and a blatant attempt on the part of NCI staff (including a woman who earlier served as his consultant) to rob him of his patents by supplanting them with their own.

Fair and lovely, and not dead

The grand claim made at the start, that this MD, PhD physician and biochemist has “discovered the genetic mechanism that can cure most cancers,” may be over reaching, but one thing is certain: Burzynski’s potions serve notoriously deadly and untreatable brain tumor patients better than the standard expensive and medieval regime of radiation, surgery and chemotherapy with its horrendous side effects which do little except delay death by a few months, if that. The horrors visited upon children with brain tumors without hope of real benefit by the orthodox priesthood in cancer are vividly described by parents who turned to Burzynski in the hope, quite often realized, that he could do better with his non toxic remedies.

Some of the examples of his success are startling, with those diagnosed with fatal disease but lucky enough to come under the kind doctor’s care telling of their escape from the tortures of the damned years later, having won total remission and now flourishing in youth and beauty. When the current image of one condemned boy, now a handsome 18 year old, reached the screen the audience at the crowded penultimate showing at the Cinema Village burst out in applause.

The humorous twinkle in the stoic Burzynski’s eyes as he recounts the irrational but costly attacks of his enemies must reflect his utter certainty that he is on the right track, a confidence presumably bolstered when the official at NCI in charge of Phase II trials of his discovery, who went to the FDA (Michael Friedman), together with a consultant Burzynski once hired (Dvorit Samid) and a drug company which had offered to partner him (Elan Pharmaceuticals), paid him the compliment of trying to supplant his patents. Dvorit Samid was a believer in the promise of Burzynski’s method, but was banned by the NCI from mentioning Burzynski in her publications on the breakthrough, even as a reference.

An approach which makes sense

However unorthodox it may sound to the naive (and extracting useful products from urine is not as unusual as Ella Taylor the Voice reviewer seems to think – women all over have taken Premarin, an extract from horse urine, for years, for relief from symptoms of menopause) his protocol is officially recognized as promising both in these NCI patent applications and in the establishment of FDA approved Phase II and now soon (when the requisite millions are raised) Phase III trials.

The principle is prima facie sensible and the proposed mechanism makes sense, and the results seem now well established. According to his careful records of FDA licensed patient treatment and outcome, it typically results in permanent remission in about a quarter of his cases compared with zero remission for orthodox treatment, if separate studies on the outcome of each approach are compared. The urgent public need, clearly, is for Phase III trials to be done as soon as possible.

Exactly how his urine extracts (can you say “antineoplastons”? its last syllable should be short, though in the film it is emphasized in the French manner) work their wonders is not fully detailed, but is generally supposed to be action against cancer gene expression. What is made crystal clear is the mechanism by which progress in medical science is stultified. Unless you have the ideal lawyer as Burzynski does in Richard Jaffe, who has a degree from Stanford in the Philosophy of Science, and whose Congressional testimony is featured on camera, you will be shot down by the FDA and put out of business.

If you are outside the great institutions it is almost impossible anyway to get the entrenched old guard to look open mindedly at your novelty in medicine, however good your results. In fact, they will naturally treat it as a threat to their present style of life, and counter attack (the HIV/AIDS establishment is a perfect example of this attitude, even though after 25 years there is no mechanism for the reigning and unproven claim). The FDA acts as the palace guard keeping newcomers outside, the media act as their barking dogs, and all the while Big Pharma bankrolls the status quo.

Dining on the public grave

In carefully exploring how Burzynski himself is mistreated, the well developed expose takes the lid off what is nothing more than a disgusting can of political and mercenary worms dining off the corpse of the public interest in cancer.

All the major elements of what is wrong with modern medicine are present – the overwhelming official prejudice against novelty from outside the system, the distrust of independent unorthodox practitioners and the heartfelt testimony of their patients, the devotion of power to the defense of current treatment even though it achieves little and imposes its own horrendous torment on patients, and the immense influence of pharma on regulating officials who tend to end up with jobs in industry after they serve in government.

Such complaints have been widespread for many years but this film’s account is exceptional in its clear exposition of just how unjustified and automated are the official attacks on independents such as Burzynski. He is five times taken before grand juries even though they not only refuse to indict but jury members join in demonstrating with protesters in subsequent cases.

Abuse of power

The Texas authorities go after him at the bidding of the national office of FDA even though no law forbids his treatments locally (until 1995, when they changed the law), and eventually after losses in court the FDA begins to approve his work. Even so, his records remain confiscated for twelve years, preventing him from easily treating patients without laboriously Xeroxing his own records at the offices where they are held, which on the basis of past experience costs some patients their lives. A useless NCI trial conducted by the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center uses its own protocol, diluting the medication 170 times and evidently costing the nine patients their lives, according to Burzynski’s ignored protests. And why did it use patients who were so far advanced in their deterioration, that Burzinski’s medicine was unlikely to do much good? Was the renowned Mayo Clinic trying to sabotage his work?

All along the legal complaints do not suggest that his treatments are anything but harmless and beneficial (”the efficacy of antineoplastons in the treatment of human cancers is not of issue in these proceedings” – Texas State Board of Medical Examiners). In fact, by 1995 it is quite apparent and acknowledged by an expert at the Cleveland Clinic in the movie and other other establishment reviewers that the Burzynski treatment is both safe and evidently often stunningly beneficial, and will produce complete remissions in many more patients if they are not irradiated and drugged under the standard regimen beforehand, a regimen whose awful effects in at least one case produce a death even after Burzynski had erased the tumor completely.

Trail of stunning documents

A documentary maker cannot shoot film inside the minds of the actors in his drama, of course, but New York filmmaker Eric Merola powerfully suggests that money is at the root of all this evil as he takes filmgoers on a tour of the documents that expose all these horrid truths , bolstered with interviews mainly with Burzynski and Julian Whitaker MD, of the Whitaker Wellness Institute in Newport Beach, California. Nicholas Patronas MD who was chief of neuroradiology at the NCI is featured not on camera but in Congressional testimony being highly supportive, as well as in a report on Burzynski’s cases.

Only the most cynical will find the journey dull. It is high drama, with lives at stake. Merola uses an effective technique to clarify and dramatize written material which is usually safely fenced off from prying public eyes by medical and official jargon. He reads judiciously selected phrases out loud as the camera jumps from one to the next, leaving out the obfuscating Latin, but ensuring the audience gets it from the horse’s mouth, not from a voiceover summary.

The real criminality

The bottom line is that the film portrays an endemic vice of the current medical culture, the unthinking, lethal prejudice against potential cures which are Not Invented Here which motivates attempts to kill the messenger at the same time as appropriating the gifts he bears. Burzynski seems a sterling character who can see the absurdity of the criminally irresponsible tactics of his opponents even as he points out that his own experience indicates they are costing patients their lives.

But for public servants to admit on the one hand that his ministrations are effective against deadly cancers immune to current regimens, and on the other try to railroad him into jail and take him out as a leading competitor in the medical Olympics of curing cancer, as the film documents, is self evidently crooked.

At least one lawyer is telling the filmmaker that the miscreants in his case deserve jail, and has offered to put them there (see James van Maanen’s excellent review and interview at TrustMovies: Seek out BURZYNSKI (maybe its doctor, too) in Eric Merola’s new documentary; Interview with the filmmaker

In summary, no one who is touched by cancer should fail to look into Burzynski for themselves, and obtain the DVD immediately from Eric Merola’s movie website, Burzynski the movie, which also features upcoming showings, such as the ones in Asbury Park, New Jersey, June 23-26, where Merola will appear for a post film panel discussion and a current breast cancer patient of Burzynski’s.

Best good news in cancer for years

For the first time for many people, they will see that alternative medicine has been offering better treatments for cancer as in other diseases for thirty years, unremarked in the media except for special mention usually accompanied by disparagement, and enthusiastically repressed by the saviors of the status quo. In this case, however, Burzynski and his workers have overcome the counter army and achieved buildings that cover two city blocks, FDA permission to proceed with Phase III trials, and a growing population of sick made well from the deadliest of tumors.

Let’s hope that this thorough expose of both the bad news and the best good news in cancer in years is on its way to an Oscar, since its story should be disseminated as widely as possible.

Times exposes industry’s ploys to keep America salt-smitten

The cure: home cooking, sea salt, 2/3 tsp daily

But are the salt police scientifically correct?

A knockout piece about salt today (Sun May 30 2010) on the ever more investigative New York Times’ front page – The Hard Sell on Salt by Michael Moss – showing how intensely the salt industry is fighting to keep plenty of salt in the American diet, despite its proven depredations in the form of high blood pressure, heart attack and stroke.

Their solution: people can eat less, period.

That might be what they indeed have to do, since most (80%) of the salt Americans swallow is added to processed foods:

“Salt is a pretty amazing compound,” Alton Brown, a Food Network star, gushes in a Cargill video called Salt 101. “So make sure you have plenty of salt in your kitchen at all times.”

The campaign by Cargill, which both produces and uses salt, promotes salt as “life enhancing” and suggests sprinkling it on foods as varied as chocolate cookies, fresh fruit, ice cream and even coffee. “You might be surprised,” Mr. Brown says, “by what foods are enhanced by its briny kiss.”

By all appearances, this is a moment of reckoning for salt. High blood pressure is rising among adults and children. Government health experts estimate that deep cuts in salt consumption could save 150,000 lives a year.

Since processed foods account for most of the salt in the American diet, national health officials, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and Michelle Obama are urging food companies to greatly reduce their use of salt. Last month, the Institute of Medicine went further, urging the government to force companies to do so.

But the industry is working overtly and behind the scenes to fend off these attacks, using a shifting set of tactics that have defeated similar efforts for 30 years, records and interviews show. Industry insiders call the strategy “delay and divert” and say companies have a powerful incentive to fight back: they crave salt as a low-cost way to create tastes and textures. Doing without it risks losing customers, and replacing it with more expensive ingredients risks losing profits.

Scientific prescription: 2/3rds teaspoon daily if at risk

The science of salt is simple enough. The body needs a balance between potassium and sodium, with more potassium than sodium. The current balance for too many people is more sodium than potassium, mostly in the form of sodium chloride, common salt.

Normal intake should be around one teaspoon (2 grams) of salt, give or take half a teaspoon. But for thirty years the typical American has been using more, sometimes up to ten times that amount, mostly unwittingly. Currently the average adult figure is 3.5 grams daily, just about the world wide average according to the industry Salt Institute’s quite informative page Food, Salt and Health.

The Institute of Medicine recommends a teaspoon and a half as optimal. The CDC says 145 million US adults (69 per cent) are now oversensitive to salt – those with high blood pressure, African-Americans and everyone older than 40 – who typically use 3.4 grams daily. Only 1 in 10 restrict themselves to 2/3rds of a teaspoon of salt a day, 1.5 grams, which is what they should do to avoid heart attacks and strokes.

Unfortunately, with the taste and texture of so much manufactured food heavily dependent on its added salt all this will be hard to reverse as long as American tastes lean toward the appalling rubbish – sorry, nutritionally low caliber snacks – many are used to enjoying.

The power that salt holds over processed foods can be seen in an American snack icon, the Cheez-It.

At the company’s laboratories in Battle Creek, Mich., a Kellogg vice president and food scientist, John Kepplinger, ticked off the ways salt makes its little square cracker work.

Salt sprinkled on top gives the tongue a quick buzz. More salt in the cheese adds crunch. Still more in the dough blocks the tang that develops during fermentation. In all, a generous cup of Cheez-Its delivers one-third of the daily amount of sodium recommended for most Americans.

As a demonstration, Kellogg prepared some of its biggest sellers with most of the salt removed. The Cheez-It fell apart in surprising ways. The golden yellow hue faded. The crackers became sticky when chewed, and the mash packed onto the teeth. The taste was not merely bland but medicinal.

“I really get the bitter on that,” the company’s spokeswoman, J. Adaire Putnam, said with a wince as she watched Mr. Kepplinger struggle to swallow.

They moved on to Corn Flakes. Without salt the cereal tasted metallic. The Eggo waffles evoked stale straw. The butter flavor in the Keebler Light Buttery Crackers, which have no actual butter, simply disappeared.

“Salt really changes the way that your tongue will taste the product,” Mr. Kepplinger said. “You make one little change and something that was a complementary flavor now starts to stand out and become objectionable.”

Moving the goalposts

High blood pressure is an increasing concern worldwide and more recently the level of blood pressure considered healthy was lowered. As Jane Brody wrote last September, in Too Much Salt Takes a Blood-Pressure Toll ,

Once, the prevailing medical opinion was that lowering an elevated blood pressure was hazardous because it would deprive a person’s vital organs of an adequate blood supply. But a few pioneering medical researchers thought otherwise and eventually showed that lowering high blood pressure could prevent heart attacks, heart failure, strokes and kidney disease — and save lives.

Even then, it was long thought that the only important indicator was diastolic pressure — the bottom number, representing the pressure in arteries between heartbeats. Further studies showed that the larger top number, systolic pressure, representing arterial pressure when the heart beats, was also medically important.

And as the various studies reached fruition, it became apparent that the long-accepted numbers for desirable blood pressure were too high to protect long-term health.

Now the upper limit of normal blood pressure is listed as 120 over 80; anyone with a pressure of 140 over 90 or higher is considered hypertensive. Those with pressures in between are considered prehypertensive and should take steps to bring blood pressure down or, at least, prevent it from rising more.

The change mirrors what happened with serum cholesterol, for which “normal” was once listed as 240 milligrams per deciliter of blood and is now less than 200 to prevent heart disease caused by clogged arteries.

It was also long thought that blood pressure naturally rises with age. Indeed, the Framingham Heart Study showed that when 65-year-old people whose blood pressure was below 140 over 90 were followed for 20 years, about 90 percent of them became hypertensive because their arteries narrowed and stiffened with age, causing blood to push harder against artery walls.

But in many societies where obesity is rare, activity levels are high and salt intake is low, blood pressure remains low throughout life. This is the best clue we have for the lifestyle changes needed to prevent illness and premature death caused by hypertension.

Back to home cooking

The simple solution to all this is to prepare properly nourishing and tasty real food at home, such as potassium rich fruit and vegetables, added to buffalo or other lean meat, fish and chicken prepared from scratch, organic if possible. Walking a few miles a day helps too.

Dr. Claude Lenfant, who served as director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, is now 81 and has a blood pressure of 115 over 60, a level rarely found among older Americans not taking medication for hypertension. His secret: a normal body weight, four or more miles of walking daily, and no salt used to prepare his meals, most of which are made from scratch at home.

In an interview, Dr. Lenfant, who now lives in Vancouver, Wash., said the problem of hypertension was rising all around the world and added that by 2020 the number of people with uncontrolled hypertension was projected to rise 65 percent. One reason is that doctors today are more likely to diagnose the problem, so it is reported more often in population surveys. “But I’m much more concerned about the fact that so much high blood pressure is not controlled,” he said, and called “therapeutic inertia” an important reason.

It is not enough for doctors to write a prescription and tell patients to return for a check-up in six months, he said. Rather, a working partnership between health care professionals and patients is needed to encourage people to monitor their pressure, adopt protective habits and continue to take medication that effectively lowers pressure.

Of course, many people nowadays do not know how to cook even a boiled egg, so this may not be feasible without forced retraining.

But if you do this, you won’t have any problem with salt. We have this on the best authority (the live in critic at SG HQ). But there are many more details in the Times article which should be pored over, if the whole situation is to be fully understood.

The picture it draws of the endless wriggling of the industry to get out of its plain duty to reduce salt in its food processing is marvelous to watch.

Back in the 1980s, some companies began offering low-sodium products, but few sold well. Surveys by the Center for Science in the Public Interest have found little change in salt levels in processed foods.

Sugar and fat had overtaken salt as the major concern in processed foods by the 1990s, fueling the “healthy” foods market. When the F.D.A. pressured companies to reduce salt in those products, the industry said that doing so would ruin the taste of the foods already low in sugar and fat. The government backed off.

“We were trying to balance the public health need with what we understood to be the public acceptability,” said William K. Hubbard, a top agency official at the time who now advises an industry-supported advocacy group. “Common sense tells you if you take it down too low and people don’t buy, you have not done something good.”

Science provides a loophole

But are they wrong? When the scientific studies are sifted, it does seem that reducing salt intake does not reliably improve health even as it reduces blood pressure – the latter effect established since 2001 (Study: Reducing salt really does lower blood pressure).

As one of the few science reporters who takes official pronouncements with a pinch of salt, John Tierney, pointed out in the Times in February, there is plenty of room for skepticism here, however doubtful the motivations of industry might be in promoting it. In When It Comes to Salt, No Rights or Wrongs. Yet. he was able to note the following:

Suppose, as some experts advise, that the new national dietary guidelines due this spring will lower the recommended level of salt. Suppose further that public health officials in New York and Washington succeed in forcing food companies to use less salt. What would be the effect?

A) More than 44,000 deaths would be prevented annually (as estimated recently in The New England Journal of Medicine).

B) About 150,000 deaths per year would be prevented annually (as estimated by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene).

C) Hundreds of millions of people would be subjected to an experiment with unpredictable and possibly adverse effects (as argued recently in The Journal of the American Medical Association).

D) Not much one way or the other.

E) Americans would get even fatter than they are today.

Don’t worry, there’s no wrong answer, at least not yet. That’s the beauty of the salt debate: there’s so little reliable evidence that you can imagine just about any outcome. For all the talk about the growing menace of sodium in packaged foods, experts aren’t even sure that Americans today are eating more salt than they used to…….

In other words, if you do get people to try to reduce salt intake, they may not succeed. But worse, while it may reduce blood pressure, this may involve other consequences which are not necessarily so beneficial.

The salt solution

But even if people could be induced to eat less salt, would they end up better off? The estimates about all the lives to be saved are just extrapolations based on the presumed benefits of lower blood pressure.

(Tierney again:) If you track how many strokes and heart attacks are suffered by people on low-salt diets, the results aren’t nearly as neat or encouraging, as noted recently in JAMA (Reducing Dietary Sodium : The Case for Caution by Michael H. Alderman, MD – JAMA. 2010;303(5):448-449) by Michael H. Alderman, a hypertension expert at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. A low-salt diet was associated with better clinical outcomes in only 5 of the 11 studies he considered; in the rest, the people on the low-salt diet fared either the same or worse.

As the JAMA abstract puts it:

Authoritative recommendations, sometimes sanctioned by government, routinely call for reduced dietary sodium. However, when the strength of evidence is made explicit, it is generally acknowledged to be opinion or common “practice.”1 Advocates contend that the recommendation is justified because sodium restriction has been convincingly proven to lower blood pressure and that this will surely prevent stroke and myocardial infarction. Skeptics argue that modification of this single surrogate end point does not guarantee a health benefit as measured by morbidity or mortality. Instead, they note that salt restriction capable of reducing blood pressure also unfavorably affects other cardiovascular disease surrogates.

Diet is a complicated factor involving a multitude of interrelating nutrients. Genetic, behavioral, and environmental factors determine wide interindividual variation in sodium intake compatible with good health (end abstract).

Tierney continues:

“When you reduce salt,” Dr. Alderman said, “you reduce blood pressure, but there can also be other adverse and unintended consequences. As more data have accumulated, it’s less and less supportive of the case for salt reduction, but the advocates seem more determined than ever to change policy.

Before changing public policy, Dr. Alderman and Dr. McCarron suggest trying something new: a rigorous test of the low-salt diet in a randomized clinical trial. That proposal is rejected by the salt reformers as too time-consuming and expensive. But when you contemplate the potential costs of another public health debacle like the anti-fat campaign, a clinical trial can start to look cheap.”

So all in all, it seems that all the wise really need do is simply avoid processed foods for this and other nutritional reasons, stay with home cooking and add sea salt to taste.

This may involve unintended consequences of a benign nature, of course, such as stowing the Blackberry and switching off the screen and actually talking to the spouse and kids.

ADDENDUM: :

To heck with the salt police! Here’s a mildly amusing Time piece on America’s most outrageously non PC burger:

Hold the Bun by Joel Stein on the KC Bunless Burger

My first bite of KFC’s Double Down made me question why I ever used bread for sandwiches. By replacing the bun with two fried chicken breasts and putting bacon, cheese and glorified Thousand Island dressing in between, this culinary invention made me feel, for perhaps the first time in my sandwich-eating life, completely free — my fingers greasy, my mouth a mess, my testosterone pumping like Henry VIII eating a turkey leg and demanding a new wife to behead. It inspired me to plan a whole diet of breadless sandwiches: a hamburger that consists of two meat patties and an inner layer of condiments; a BLT that packs lettuce and tomato between crisscrossed pieces of bacon; a pastrami sandwich that entails my just shoving pastrami in my mouth…..

Tests at Mt Sinai counter current theory

Civility breaks out among surprised Beethoven experts

Would that HIV?AIDS, cancer and other fields of scientific inquiry could learn that lesson

James Barron in the New York Times today (May 29 Saturday) in Beethoven May Not Have Died of Lead Poisoning, After All reveals that Andrew C. Todd, a lead poisoning expert at Mt Sinai hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, has tested two skull fragments from Beethoven’s grave and found that the larger piece had only 13 micrograms of lead per gram, about average for a man of 56.

So although the smaller piece had more lead (48 micrograms) Todd appears to have toppled the long standing paradigm that his death in 1827 was due to lead poisoning, or at least called it into question.

Beethoven’s miserable ill health at the close of his life and the considerable pain he recorded in his letters (added to by the doctors who poured hot oil into his ears and drained fluid from his abdomen) were put down to lead poisoning after the lead content of his hair (click this link for technical discussion) and skull was found to be well above normal in tests thirteen and five years ago, at up to one hundred times the levels of modern urban man.

Scientists began speculating about what really killed Ludwig van Beethoven almost as soon as he was buried in 1827. He had complained of a “wretched existence,” with a long list of symptoms: abdominal pain, digestive trouble, colic, chronic bronchitis, foul body odors and extremely bad breath. And of course there was the hearing problem.

Thirteen years ago scientists, including one who had investigated whether Napoleon died of arsenic poisoning and whether the paint on the Shroud of Turin dated to the time of Jesus, tested strands of Beethoven’s hair and ruled out syphilis as the cause of death. Unexpectedly, they found signs of acute exposure to lead.,

Five years ago tests on different strands of Beethoven’s hair and a tiny piece of his skull again pointed to lead. That, Beethoven scholars said, could have explained his infamous temper and his occasional memory slips. Some figured he had drunk too much cheap wine that was sweetened — in the custom of the 19th century — with lead to hide the bitterness.

But last week a lead-poisoning expert at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York tested the same piece of Beethoven’s skull that had been examined in 2005, along with another, larger, fragment. The researcher, Dr. Andrew C. Todd, said that over all he had found no more lead than in the average person’s skull.

The hair was obtained from Ira F. Brilliant, a real estate magnate who bought it for $7300 in 1994 at Sotheby’s in London, and the two skull fragments from Dr Meredith were among those originally taken home by a friend of Beethoven’s when his body was exhumed from a Vienna cemetery in 1863, and kept in his bedroom.

As Russell Martin’s book Beethoven’s Hair : An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific Mystery Solved suggested in 2000, lead seemed a likely culprit for the ill health that wracked the supremely gifted composer in his tortured last years, which were so very different from his youth as a charming and sociable man.

Meek concession by ruling dogmatists

After all, there were plenty of other reasons to suppose that the composer suffered from lead poisoning, since the plum wine he drank to excess (a treat suggested by his doctors) was sweetened in the 18th Century with lead, and the pencils Beethoven uindoubtedly chewed on contained lead, which also filled the china and the plumbing of the time. His symptoms of irritability, lassitude, headaches and muscular weakness fitted the hypothesis.

So it is quite surprising and even heart warming to find (judging from the article) that the scientists and scholars who had adopted this attractive theory are being surprisingly gracious in conceding its debunking from this one test of one fragment. Todd’s methods, like those conducted earlier by Dr William J. Walsh of Illinois, whose tests at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, involved “multiple measurements with X-ray fluorescence”.

Walsh now notes that Todd has only tested skull fragments and not the hair samples, but “agrees with the notion that Beethoven’s exposure to lead was a short term problem that came toward the end of his life.”

Whatever happened to the famous tendency of scientists like all academics to cling like barnacles to current theory and fight any revision to the death? William R. Meredith, the Beethoven scholar who carried the skull fragments from California to Mt Sinai, is surprised by the findings but amiably concedes it is “back to the drawing board” for all those concerned with why Beethoven died.

Perhaps it is the influence of James Barron, the Times reporter, which accounts for the geniality of the discussion. Or perhaps he discreetly omitted the more combative comments made to him in researching the event. Certainly one can ask why the one large skull fragment reading is so decisive when the smaller one contained four times as much lead, and when the skull bone grows much more slowly than hair and naturally will not register high doses of lead that quickly.

Where we really need an antidote to poison in science

Is James Barron’s style is just so elegant that the scientists were influenced into civility, where they might otherwise have burst out with more indignant objections? If so, we would suggest to the Times editors that Barron might be assigned to look into the notoriously unsustainable paradigm in HIV/AIDS, the belief engendered by Robert Gallo, Anthony Fauci, Luc Montagnier and David Baltimore that HIV has anything to do with AIDS.

Perhaps his soothing manners might tone down the defensive alarm of defenders of this faith like the notoriously ungracious John Moore of Cornell, and the sinister Dr. Mark Wainberg, director of the McGill University Aids Centre in Montreal and a Toronto AIDS conference organizer, both enthusiasts for jailing if not hanging those who publicly question their fond funding paradigm.

Both these men have instigated poison pen letters to university administrations and other employers of those who ask awkward questions about HIV/AIDS lore, seeking to have them ejected from their positions for not believing HIV is the cause of AIDS, in one case at least resulting in the victim failing to gain tenure at her university, after writing one of the best argued and most realistic books on the topic.

The excessive zeal with which the defenders of HIV/AIDS and its indefensible paradigm rush to suppress its questioning could do with public exposure in the Times. That a scientific belief needs shoring up by personal attacks on its skeptics is a very telling indication of its weak intellectual foundation, and the current certainty that the vast funding now attached to it is being poured down a very large rat hole.

The antics of HIV believers in trying to pin responsibility for many African AIDS deaths on Peter Duesberg and to undermine his position at Berkeley have reached morally disgusting levels in recent months, and we will post on them shortly.

All those who believe in good science in the public interest can only dream that the civility and open minds of Beethoven scholars and the scientists who are helping them out could somehow be transferred to HIV/AIDS, cancer research and other areas where the internal politics of the science is so corrupted and rife with self serving, anti scientific nastiness.

US helicopter shooting of civilians shocks the world

Current wars in microcosm: a plague of fatal ignorance

How Greg Mortenson promotes peace better

The YouTube sensation of the past few days is the depressingly stark video record from 2007 of how easily US gunmen in helicopters can shoot unarmed Iraqis in flowing white robes, gathering in the street below in evidently friendly and relaxed fashion without a clue that they might be fired upon by the poorly trained soldiers sitting in the clattering machines overhead, who have imagined that a photojournalist’s camera lens is the barrel of an AK-47. The politically and morally labeled Collateral Murder – Wikileaks – Iraq has scored over 6 million hits now (April 17 update). It is not for the weak of stomach.

While the commenters (the Times stories have unusually articulate threads) quarrel over how culpable the US gunners are in their attitude that these were armed insurgents assembling to fight them, it seems very clear that they were under informed, to say the least, and taking lethal action partly because their imaginations filled in the gaps.

Here we have a tragic display of how dangerous it is to hand massive firepower to US soldiers of limited background and education (no fault of theirs, of course) without rigorous training in the modern problem of using an army in what is essentially a police action ie fighting rebels embedded in a civilian population in a foreign country, where there is no quick way to distinguish insurgents from innocent residents of the urban battlefield, in this case Baghdad, unless they actively use their weapons. Too often in the absence of good information the imagination rules:

“Let me engage,” the gunner demands, “can I shoot?”

A ground controller asks: “Picking up the wounded?” Seconds later the gunner asks again: “Come on, let us shoot.”

Permission is granted and a dust cloud envelopes a van and several Iraqis picking up bodies from a Baghdad square. Only afterwards do the crew of the American helicopter gunship realize that two children, now gravely wounded, are in the van. “Well,” one says, “it’s their fault for bringing kids into a battle.”

The sequence comes half way through 17 minutes of harrowing gun camera footage, authenticated by unnamed US military officials, in which the co-pilot of the Apache has already mistaken a Reuters photographer for an insurgent brandishing a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

In this case even given the noise that helicopters make overhead may be less than one imagines (though one informed blogger, Anthony Martinez, says “Up close helicopters are loud, the same isn’t necessarily true when they’re flying above you. You’d be surprised how quiet they can be in flight.”) there seems little doubt that the Iraqis must have known they were there and just assumed they would not be attacked, since they knew of no reason why they should be. As far as they were concerned they were acting peaceably out in the open and they were without weapons. Their behavior indicates no wariness at all.

As one commenter puts it:

DYORPEEPS Just to clear up for the idiots here.
There were NO weapons. At 3:40 you see a camera tripod. The other 2 have cameras, even Stevie Wonder can see those are not weapons.. They claimed they had AK47s. When did you see an AK47 that looked like a camera?
These guys wanted to kill and they were just making up anything they liked.
If you had an RPG, would you be standing? about casually in full view of a helicopter in a gang of 12 or so guys?

Gauging exactly what happened needs more than one viewing of this horror story (and as the Times story today reports WikiLeaks has a longer, 38 minute rather than 17 minute version at collateralmurder.com, which critics say makes clearer that clashes were ongoing in the neighborhood and that “one of the men was carrying a rocket-propelled grenade”), but it does seem that the sight of one man carrying a long lens camera or tripod in an apparently peaceful social assembly was far too easily transfigured into a gang of insurgents with multiple AK47s, and that the young US gunners were trigger happy, to say the least, apparently intent on acting out a video game in their heads rather than responsibly trying to hold back until they could be sure that what they guessed at was properly confirmed.

Particularly disgraceful is the followup after the shooting of the main group when a van enters the picture and the driver and his friend try to pick up a wounded man. No weapons are indicated and indeed it turned out later that the two children inside were being taken to school, but the gunners let fly a barrage of heavy ammunition which reduces it to an immobile smoking wreck. All the men were killed and the two children badly wounded (their scars, big as those after a heart transplant, were displayed in an interview on Democracy Now with the widow of the driver (video), conducted by Amy Goodman (also see Amy Goodman Conversation at Commonwealth Club (video):

(Comment): The wikileaks thing has two parts, the first part is debatable (they were not able to distinguish between civilians and combatants one way or another).

The second part is not, the man was identified as wounded, the vehicle as picking up dead and wounded. You can’t spin that to not be a war-crime. Denying medical attention to the children compounded it.

This was not a war-zone, this was a city, which under the rules of war America was obligated to secure from criminals. Using a helicopter unable to pick out children in a van constitutes a failure to make provision for identifying civilians and as such constituted a further possible war-crime.

Now this long clip is going to be viewed around the world and at the current rate may be seen by as many as 10 million people in the next month. The propaganda penalty could be greater than Abu Ghraib, since it offers such a long and convincing look at what collateral damage can really mean.

The 21 Century group think wars

And what is the key problem here? Surely it is the willingness to kill without sufficient information, in a striking parable of the fundamental problem in American actions in the Middle East for the last two decades. American policy and strategy in the Middle East in war and in diplomacy has suffered above all from lack of good information, from the inability to determine whether Saddam Hussein in fact had WMDs to our present inability to gauge Iran’s nuclear progress and intentions. Not to mention the inability to exploit good information when it does come in.

White House officials said later that no one had offered to resign at the meeting. However, it could prove harder to avoid either sackings or resignations when the outcome of a review into the intelligence handling is published later this week.

Former and serving officers are scathing about the way the operation in Afghanistan has been run and see it is part of an institutional weakness in the CIA and other intelligence-gathering agencies.

They said that the biggest US crisis in intelligence-gathering since 9/11 had been brought about mainly because no single agency is in charge, with a dozen agencies fighting for their own turf.

One of the most damning assessments came from a serving officer, Major General Michael Flynn, deputy head of military intelligence in Afghanistan. In a lengthy report published on Monday evening for a Washington thinktank, he and colleagues said the vast apparatus in Afghanistan was only marginally relevant. Analysts in Washington were so starved of information that “many say their jobs feel more like fortune-telling than detective work”, the report says.

Stepping back, one might see this tragic incident as one more example of how we have moved far into the new 21 Century Internet driven era of information/disinformation war, where physical battlefields are more and more irrelevant as they become more and more resistant to victory by force, given the inability to distinguish, defeat or root out the enemy. It is not just that the Army doesn’t serve well as a police force, though clearly it doesn’t adapt that well, with similar incidents (Civilians Killed as U.S. Troops Fire on Afghan Bus) causing havoc in Afghanistan now, leading even the Economist to wonder (When accidents stop seeming like accidents) if the nine year war there has amounted to any more than a “meaningless exercise of misguided violence”.

But how is it that good men go so far astray, so that hillybillies and homeboys from the backwoods and ghettos of America use civilians for target practice, having typed them as armed hostiles? Given the experience of this blog investigating the paradigm battlefields of science, where good and intelligent men and women seem to become hypnotized by their common ideology into losing all their professional skepticism and critical faculties, one obvious possibility is that they suffer from the social psychology of organized crowds and become unable to entertain any idea which conflicts with the shared assumptions.

Collateral alienation

Thus in the armed struggles now being played out where the US is actively seeking to change the political reality of faraway places by force, it seems that the individual soldier is behaving as if under this kind of hypnotic influence. Whether it is their fault is of course the great, Nuremberg question: Do the individual members of a modern social organization or ’system’ – a group united by common ideology, in whatever form, from army to bureaucracy to corporation to scientific field – bear total personal responsibility for their actions, or are they excused because they are under the influence of – permeated by – group think, induced by authority and social psychology, and may be completely unaware of how their minds have been compromised?

One thing is certain, the new era is one where one cloud of group think confronts another – battles are over tribal and mental boundaries now, not geographical ones. Instead of the great global melting pot we all hoped for with the fall of the Wall, we had the ingredients separating out all over instead. The trend continues without slowing. The Middle East confronts America and Israel, and fanatics imbued by radical distortions of Islam confront the US as the standard bearer of global capitalism, just as the Sunnis confront the Shiites, the Kurds confront the Iraqis, the Israelis confront the Palestinians and the Arabs at large, the Hutu killed their Tutsi brothers, etc etc.

Ideological mind games are now the important battlefield, a field of combat where too much ground has been lost over recent decades by a US political culture that still seems too often baffled by and at odds with the cultures it is trying to win over. Now the Internet is rocket boosting this trend by giving a global propaganda platform to every group on earth even as it transforms the world into one living room (For Web’s New Wave, Sharing Details Is the Point).

But there are brilliant exceptions to US failure in the case of individuals who adopt a non military approach, and try to bridge cultures rather than take them over.

Mortenson shows the way

One shining example of the latter is Greg Mortenson and his Stones into Schools program, which is winning over Afghans wholesale in a way which the billions spent on Army operations never will. As Mortenson (follow him on Twitter) told Bill Moyers recently, he was captured by the local Taliban who seemed likely to cut his head off, he thought, but after he asked for a Koran to learn about their ideology, and they found out about his work building hundreds of schools, they released him with a $100 contribution to his local project.

His work has not been without difficulty. In 1996, he survived an eight day armed kidnapping by the Taliban in Pakistan’ Northwest Frontier Province tribal areas, escaped a 2003 firefight with feuding Afghan warlords by hiding for eight hours under putrid animal hides in a truck going to a leather-tanning factory. He has overcome fatwehs from enraged Islamic mullahs, endured CIA investigations, and also received threats from fellow Americans after 9/11, for helping Muslim children with education.

Mortenson is a living hero to rural communities of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he has gained the trust of Islamic leaders, military commanders, government officials and tribal chiefs from his tireless effort to champion education, especially for girls.

He is one of few foreigners who has worked extensively for sixteen years (over 72 months in the field) in rural villages where few foreigners go.

TV newscaster, Tom Brokaw, calls Mortenson, “one ordinary person, with the right combination of character and determination, who is really changing the world”.

Congresswoman Mary Bono (Rep – Cali.) says, “I’ve learned more from Greg Mortenson about the causes of terrorism than I did during all our briefings on Capitol Hill. He is a true hero, whose courage, and compassion exemplify the true ideals of the American spirit.”

Losing the information race

If winning the hearts and minds of the Middle East is the great objective, one wonders again how much progress will be made given the enduring cultural chasm and the ease with which the US has been vilified by Arab leaders and clerics, and the seeming inability of the US to curb collateral damage, some of it caused by insurgents, of course:

(Washington Post) But Abdul Ghani, an Afghan man who told The Washington Post in a telephone interview that he was the driver of the bus, said the soldiers “didn’t give me any kind of signal. . . . They just opened fire. No signal at all.”

(Reuters) The United Nations says new guidelines issued by the commander of NATO and U.S. forces last year have helped reduce the number of civilian casualties, but such incidents still cause deep anger among Afghans the foreign troops are meant to protect. While the United Nations says foreign and Afghan troops killed 25 percent fewer civilians last year than in 2008, civilian deaths rose overall, because the number killed by insurgents rose 40 percent.

More than 2,400 civilians were killed in 2009, making it the deadliest year of a war now more than eight years old. There are some 130,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, set to rise to 150,000 by the year’s end.

Likewise, where Al Qaeda is at work only good intelligence will prevent another 9/11 or worse, yet the record so far with the latest shoe bombing scares is not reassuring.

With the military taking up almost half of the budget’s discretionary spending and the US spending as much on force of arms as the rest of the world combined, the US achievement in recent military and foreign policy looks more and more like the creation of a vast headless monster which roams the globe blindly demolishing the lives of millions while its brain remains on the shelf.

Finally, however, we have a thoughtful President – someone who can talk, think and listen at the same time, as Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has put it (transcript and video), – who should know how to put this right, and is trying to do so (Analysts Say U.S. Intelligence System Overloaded, Out Of Date):

In a recent piece for “The Washington Post,” Hoffman (Bruce Hoffman, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University and a member of the government’s National Security Preparedness Group) argued that after 9/11, Al-Qaeda’s leadership adopted a new strategy against the United States, which he calls a “death by a thousand cuts” approach.

He says it involves overwhelming the country’s intelligence-gathering system with meaningless data to confuse it; striking U.S. allies (like Spain and Britain) for supporting the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; recruiting “lone operatives” from countries without U.S. visa restrictions; and expanding their operations into failed and lawless states, like Yemen, where the previously little-known group Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is based.

Hoffman argues that the systemic failure of intelligence analysis and airport security that occurred in the attempted airliner bombing on Christmas was, at its core, “a failure to recognize Al-Qaeda’s new strategy.”

He says the redundancy that was built into the system after 9/11 to act as a safety net that would catch mistakes “isn’t enough, and it really boils down to a changing mind-set, as well, that sees Al-Qaeda as it is: this very dynamic, very evolutionary adversary, and that mandates that we prepare not just for yesterday’s threat but we need a system that’s more anticipatory and that’s better at preempting, as well.”

Following last week’s security review, President Obama ordered several immediate changes implemented throughout the intelligence community.

Deja vu

The parallel with the science infowars in HIV/AIDS, global warming, particle physics and other battlefields in science where theory is disputed, information is spun for the public, and entrenched power represses free speech, will not be lost on readers of this blog. The unhappy converts to the current spurious paradigm which persuades the ignorant to accept HIV as the cause of AIDS are not very different from the foolish and imagination driven soldiers in their helicopters overhead, when they victimize innocents with their medical bullets against the wrong threat.

Might does not make right

The anachronistic US determination to exert influence through military might in unwinnable situations has been hard to understand since Vietnam. Military might cannot win a propaganda war. Military might cannot win a guerrilla war. Military might cannot win against terrorism and suicide bombers.

Military might is certainly not the right weapon to police an international criminal conspiracy, which is all that Al Queda is, as the thoughtful Andrew Bacevich, the great skeptic on Iraq and Afghanistan, whose latest book is The Permanent War, tells Bill Moyers in his latest interview:

We don’t learn from history….There is this inexplicable belief that the use of military force in some Godforsaken country on the other side of the planet will not only yield some purposeful result but will produce significant benefits for the United States. We’re now in the ninth year of this war, the longest in American history, with no end in sight… a war utterly devoid of strategic purpose….if we could wave a magic wand tomorrow and achieve all of the purposes General McChrystal would like us to achieve, would the jihadist threat be sustantially reduced as a consequence? Is jihadism centered or headquartered in Afghanistan? …you only have to think about it for three seconds…it is an international movement.. it could come from Brooklyn. ..the notion that because the 9/11 was concocted in this country, as it was, somehow it will guarantee there won’t be another 9.11 is absurd.. the notion that we can prevent another 9/11 by invading and occupying and transforming other countries is absurd… Al Queda is not Nazi Germany…Al Queda is the equivalent of an international criminal conspiracy, a Mafia that draws its energy or legitimacy from a distorted understanding of a particular religious tradition..and the proper response is a police effort…ruthless and sustained to identify the thugs, root out the networks and destroy it …an effort which will never fully succeed in eliminating the threat, just as the NYPD isn’t able to fully eliminate criminality in New York City. (Full transcript is at this page at Moyers Journal

).

The uselessness and tragedy of thinking otherwise has never been better encapsulated than in this outrage video.

So who really deserves the Nobel Peace prize?

Perhaps US policymakers should ask Greg Mortenson’s advice. On the basis of his record to date it is not too much to say that it should have been Mortenson who got the Nobel Peace Prize, not Obama.

“By replacing guns with pencils, rhetoric with reading, Mortenson combines his unique background with his intimate knowledge of the third-world to promote peace with books, not bombs, and successfully bring education and hope to remote communities in central Asia.

Three Cups of Tea is at once an unforgettable adventure and the inspiring true story of how one man really is changing the world—one school at a time.

In 1993 Mortenson was descending from his failed attempt to reach the peak of K2. Exhausted and disoriented, he wandered away from his group into the most desolate reaches of northern Pakistan. Alone, without food, water or shelter, he stumbled into an impoverished Pakistani village where he was nursed back to health.

While recovering he observed the village’s 84 children sitting outdoors, scratching their lessons in the dirt with sticks. The village was so poor that it could not afford the $1-a-day salary to hire a teacher. When he left the village, he promised that he would return to build them a school. From that rash, heartfelt promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of our time.

In an early effort to raise money he wrote letters to 580 celebrities, businessmen, and other prominent Americans. His only reply was a $100 check from NBC’s Tom Brokaw. Selling everything he owned, he still only raised $2,400. But his efforts changed when a group of elementary school children in River Falls, Wisconsin, donated $623.40 in pennies, and who inspired adults to begin to take action. The 283 foot Braldu Bridge was completed in 1995 and the Korphe School was completed in 1996. Since then, he’s established 78 schools. In pursuit of his goal, Mortenson has survived an armed kidnapping, fatwas issued by enraged mullahs, repeated death threats, and wrenching separations from his wife and children. Yet his success speaks for itself.”

Mortenson is the author of Three Cups of Tea, his autobiography, of which the above is part of a review, and last year of his Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Here’s part of the review in the Washington Post bv Jay Matthews:

…. few new books are as well-timed as “Stones Into Schools.” Mortenson is the author of the most popular recent account of a part of the world at the center of American foreign policy. His views will influence how voters react to President Obama’s efforts in Afghanistan. However distasteful he finds the word “terrorism,” Mortenson makes no secret of his disgust with the Taliban. The heroes of this book are 14 riders, loaded with AK-47s, their horses “short legged and shaggy and iridescent with sweat,” who came across the Irshad Pass to Pakistan in 1999 and begged Mortensen to build a school in their remote part of Afghanistan. The school was built, and at the end of that struggle the author saw their triumph as a path to peace for all. “They had raised a beacon of hope that called out not only to the Kirghiz themselves, but also to every village and town in Afghanistan where children yearn for education, and where fathers and mothers dream of building a school whose doors will open not only to their sons but also to their daughters,” Mortenson writes, “including — and perhaps especially — those places that are surrounded by a ring of men with Kalashnikovs who help to sustain the grotesque lie that flinging battery acid into the face of a girl who longs to study arithmetic is somehow in keeping with the teachings of the Koran.” After some initial reluctance, he embraces the U.S. military as part of the effort to bring education to children so unimaginably far from civilization. Soldiers provide personal donations and transportation of materials for some of his projects. But Mortenson puts most of his faith in the Afghans themselves, particularly those who persuaded him to build more schools. He says they can crush the Taliban and overcome the country’s old cultural biases against educating girls. Mortenson may be unrealistic, but the past decade of his life has been one improbability after another. It is unfair to expect him to lose hope now. He wants the United States to stay and help his friends save their country. He’s on a roll, and he doesn’t see why he can’t carry everyone with him.

We’re with you, Greg.

UPDATE: Were the American gunners to blame? Further discussion

The AtWar blog at the Times has excerpts from military blogs which evaluate the video and whether the gunners were justified in panting to open fire.

Here’s an excerpt from Anthony Martinez’s post at A Look Inside. Martinez is an experienced viewer of aerial footage and says he would not have recommended firing, even though he observes two weapons as well as the camera lens:

I have spent quite a lot of time (a conservative estimate would be around 4500 hours) viewing aerial footage of Iraq (note: this time was not in viewing TADS video, but footage from Raven, Shadow, and Predator feeds)…

Between 3:13 and 3:30 it is quite clear to me, as both a former infantry sergeant and a photographer, that the two men central to the gun-camera’s frame are carrying photographic equipment. This much is noted by WikiLeaks, and misidentified by the crew of Crazyhorse 18. At 3:39, the men central to the frame are armed, the one on the far left with some AK variant, and the one in the center with an RPG. The RPG is crystal clear even in the downsized, very low-resolution, video between 3:40 and 3:45 when the man carrying it turns counter-clockwise and then back to the direction of the Apache. This all goes by without any mention whatsoever from WikiLeaks, and that is unacceptable.

At 4:08 to 4:18 another misidentification is made by Crazyhorse 18, where what appears to clearly be a man with a telephoto lens (edit to add: one of the Canon EF 70-200mm offerings) on an SLR is identified as wielding an RPG. The actual case is not threatening at all, though the misidentified case presents a major perceived threat to the aircraft and any coalition forces in the direction of its orientation. This moment is when the decision to engage is made, in error.

(note: It has to be taken into consideration that there is no way that the Crazyhorse crew had the knowledge, as everyone who has viewed this had, that the man on the corner of that wall was a photographer. The actions of shouldering an RPG (bringing a long cylindrical object in line with one’s face) and framing a photo with a long telephoto lens quite probably look identical to an aircrew in those conditions.)

I have made the call to engage targets from the sky several times, and know (especially during the surge) that such calls are not taken lightly. Had I been personally involved with this mission, and had access to real-time footage, I would have recommended against granting permission. Any of the officers with whom I served are well aware that I would continue voicing that recommendation until ordered to do otherwise. A few of them threatened me with action under Article 15 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice for doing so. Better officers than they, fortunately, were always ready to go to bat for me and keep that from happening. That said, if either of the clearly visible weapons been oriented towards aircraft, vehicles, troops, or civilians I would have cleared Crazyhorse 18 hot in a heartbeat and defended my actions to the battle staff if needed….

The point at which I cannot support the actions of Crazyhorse 18, at all, comes when the van arrives somewhere around 9:45 and is engaged. Unless someone had jumped out with an RPG ready to fire on the aircraft, there was no threat warranting a hail of 30mm from above. Might it have been prudent to follow the vehicle (perhaps with a UAV), or at least put out a BOLO (Be On the Look Out) for the vehicle? Absolutely without question. Was this portion of the engagement even remotely understandable, to me? No, it was not.

All in all, the engagement clearly went bad. I would have objected when I was a private first-class pulling triple duty as an RTO, driver, and vehicle gunner. I would have objected when I was a sergeant working well above my pay-grade as the Brigade Battle NCO. My assessment is based on my experiences in that very theater of operations. I did not see a threat that warranted an engagement at any point. I did, however, see the elements indicating such a threat could develop at any moment.

Read the whole post and the informed comments there and the extraordinarily well expressed and fluent comments at the Times AtWar blog for a rounded out picture, but our own assessment of trigger happy, poorly trained US gunners acting on insufficient information remains. Be that as it may, the whole episode now stands as yet another example of how using an army to fight insurgents can create gigantic propaganda failures now that digital recording and the Web ensures that sooner or later we will have bad behavior leaks of enormous impact.

Esperanza says:
April 7, 2010 at 7:21 am
What a surprise. The US military kills reporters and covers it up!

I mean, what is there to say in defense of the obvious content of this footage? The people on the radio got hyped up after they saw the rifles and RPG and even more so when they saw the photographer crouching behind the wall and stupidly thought it was a man with an RPG. That was clearly a camera lens sticking out at 4:10 onward.

What needs to happen when events like this transpire is not a cover up, but a holding to account. Anyone involved with the mis-identification and subsequent murder of these people should have been relieved of their duties and discharged. It’s that simple. We cannot afford to have incompetent persons at the controls of such lethal measures with absolutely no accountability.

It’s clear that an Arab’s life and an Arab’s rights are not worth as much to the Pentagon as those of the homicidal incompetents heard on this video (they are the real “fuckin’ pricks”).

Of course we know this already – recall Abu Ghraib and the cover-up and the shelling of all those reporters in the Palestine Hotel and the cover-up, etc, etc, etc. So great, this blogger explains that WikiLeaks didn’t point out the weapons in the hands of some with whom the reporters were seen. So what? Does that alter the fact that these reporters were murdered? No.

“Keep shootin’” and wonder why we continue to be the #1 target for Muslim terrorists.

UPDATE 2: Psychologists explain Iraq airstrike Video: Stress of combat

New York Times finds psychologists to explain/excuse hillybilly target practice on defenseless civilians:

Experts Cite Conditioning and Heat of Combat to Explain Iraq Airstrike Video

Combat training “is the only technique that will reliably influence the primitive, midbrain processing of a frightened human being” to take another life, the colonel writes. “Conditioning in flight simulators enables pilots to respond reflexively to emergency situations even when frightened.”

The men in the Apache helicopter in the video flew into an area that was being contested, during a broader conflict in which a number of helicopters had been shot down.

Several other factors are on display during the 38-minute video, said psychologists in and out of the military. (A shortened 17-minute version of the video has been viewed about three million times on YouTube.)

Soldiers and Marines are taught to observe rules of engagement, and throughout the video those in the helicopter call base for permission to shoot. But at a more primal level, fighters in a war zone must think of themselves as predators first — not bait. That frame of mind affects not only how a person thinks, but what he sees and hears, especially in the presence of imminent danger, or the perception of a threat.

Among the 448 Comments so far:

C. Peter Herman
Toronto
April 7th, 2010
9:10 pm
The fact that these pilots are primed to see anyone as a potential threat is all the more reason why they should be trained to compensate for this bias. Police are trained to disambiguate threats, whereas soldiers,it seems, are trained to shoot first and count on getting exonerated by their superiors later.
Recommended by 158 Readers

Michael L.
New York
April 7th, 2010
9:10 pm
As a photographer and as someone who has combat photographers as friends, the mistaking of a camera for a weapon is disturbing enough, but this rationalization is appalling. No where in the video do the helicopter crew express concern that they are under attack. In fact they are so far away that the people on the ground seem completely unaware of them and even once the gunfire starts, they seem to have no idea where it is coming from. Tragic mistakes are made by cops and combat soldiers, but if technology is going to allow US soldiers to kill from such a distance, tighter rules of engagement are needed. And shooting up a minivan full of kids because it stopped to help injured people is not tight.
Recommended by 307 Readers

D Carter
Western NC
April 7th, 2010
9:39 pm
Anyone who watches the video while listening to the chatter of the pilots and gunners and then comes up with this kind of pseudo-scientific “psychological”/situational apologia is seriously lacking in any sense of ethical grounding. As other respondents have pointed out, the Apache crew members were clearly in no danger–the only adrenalin flowing was not fear, but the excitement of the kill.

Does “distancing” justify hoping that a dying man will pick up a gun so that he can be blown to bits with a 30 mm cannon? And forget about the children. Does the fear inherit in combat justify these crews pleading with their controller (and lying in the process) in order to be able to slaughter a wounded combatant and the two men who are trying to take him away to be treated?

And for those respondents who refer to “split second decisions,” look closely at the timeline. These men had ample time to assess the situation from a safe distance and then make their decisions.

Equally depressing is the fact that this video was reviewed at the time by military authorities who insisted that these action were justified by the rules of engagement. One can only assume that they regarded this kind of trigger-happy and reckless behavior standard operating procedure.

War is brutal, but–however tenuous–there are still rules that we can try and follow if for no other reason than that this kind of callous brutality–sanctioned by superior officers who should know better–will inevitably blow back on us abroad and at home.
Recommended by 245 Readers

R. Vega
Dallas, Texas
April 7th, 2010
9:42 pm
I agree we cannot simply condemn the soldiers for their callous remarks under the stress of combat. We can, however, condemn the system that led to that and many other instances of senseless deaths of civilians. We must also keep in mind that this was not your typical battlefield. Real people actually live in those neighborhoods. That helicopter was not under threat, in fact, the people on the ground seemed oblivious to its existence, and they did not even have an idea where the attack was coming from. They were gunned down even after being incapacitated and posing no real threat. Despite all the psychological mambo-jumbo, that is inexcusable. It may have looked like a video game, but that was no video game. A real leader, had there been one in that helicopter, would have known the difference. Commanders and their subordinates must have known that they could not go around indiscriminately shooting at anyone they thought could be threat. Instead of finding excuses, our leaders should be asking the hard questions, particularly as they pertain to the rules of engagement. Otherwise we are just providing more recruitment tools for the terrorism of years to come.
Recommended by 133 Readers

Michael A. Hoffman
Idaho
April 7th, 2010
9:26 pm
The New York Times furnishes a sophisticated psychological rationale for gunning down human beings from the air. Every possible excuse and alibi is offered to justify the carnage and dehumanization. The Times and the psychologists and academics its quotes omit one factor, however: the victims were not afraid of the helicopter gunship, they sauntered casually down the street. They obviously believed they were doing nothing wrong and had a considerable amount of faith in the decency of the US military. Moreover, your high falutin’ explainers failed to explain one aspect of the pilot’s depraved indifference to human life: when the pilot begged the wounded, crawling man to find a weapon and pick it up so the pilot could shoot him again. Ah yes, but that’s okay, he just a “soldier who is doing his job” –which is — to “destroy the enemy.” And what made these people enemies? Being Arab? I thought we settled all this at Nuremberg? Or perhaps Nuremberg does not apply to the USA? I’m going to file this article of yours under the heading, “Prima Facie Evidence of the War Fever that has Gripped the New York Times.” God help us all.
Recommended by 188 Readers

On the other side:

Robert Levine
Malvern, PA
April 7th, 2010
10:05 pm
This was no massacre. This was a combat situation. Armed insurgents in that area were killing Iraqi and American personnel. The reason the ground forces were in the area and prepared to show up in combat vehicles was because they had already been operating there against hostile forces. The smug presumptions of people responding here who have an obvious bias against anything the U.S. military is involved in is beyond stupid and dishonorable. As for the pilots, they did see side arms and these bad actors were armed because they are part of a continuing insurgency. We should never have initiated this second Iraq war, and the Bush administration prosecuted it with an incompetence that puts Katrina in a good light by comparison. The use of torture by amateur security consultants brought in from the outside was also stupid, ineffective, and ultimately damaging to the interests of the U.S, but make no mistake, the people we’re shooting at in Iraq want to see us dead, and they felt that way all over the Middle East before 9/11. When and wherever we send them in harm’s way, these brave American kids are defending the very jerks writing uninformed opinions on this page.
Recommended by 13 Readers

B. Bailey
Colorado Springs, CO
April 8th, 2010
12:34 pm
My initial reaction to this article was one of relief and gratitude. Gratitude that the NYT had the courage to speak on behalf of the war fighters who have been placed at ground zero in the war. After reading the comments here, the article seems only to have stirred the hornets’ nest. This has been a blood thirsty comment thread.

As an “old” Marine and the father of an active duty Marine infantryman who was deployed to Iraq and will soon return to Afghanistan, I’m angered and frustrated at the ignorant, myopic and narrow-minded pre-formed opinions regarding the men and women prosecuting our country’s war.

Here in Colorado Springs, we live with the war is a daily fact of life. Our familys and neighbors deploy. Our nightly news regularly parts the curtain of relative peace to reveal the memorials for the latest casualties (Ft. Carson’s 4th ID, 10th Special Forces Group and others have lost almost 300) from Iraq and Afghanistan. They also regularly give account of the psychological devastation wrought on young men and women pressed to kill (suicide, drug and alcohol addiction, spousal abuse, etc.). PTSD walks our streets. We know these people in their “real” lives back here in the U.S. and they are little different than any of you. They have families, they have hobbies, they have political opinions, and they also have morals and ethics. How dare you take a “snapshot,” a brief video clip viewed in isolation and lacking any real context other than what has been conjured by those rushing to judgement and condemn these men and women.

What no one here seems interested in is the fact that, when we enter the story and the WikiLeak posted video begins, this is an engagement already well underway with an unexplained backstory, these pilots had responded to a call for assistance from a ground patrol (the units variously identified by call signs “Hotel26″, “Hotel22″ and “Bushmaster26″ in the video) that had already been engaged by insurgents. The pilots seek clearance from “Hotel26″ to fire on the group they were surveilling so as not to inadvertently kill friendly troops. Hotel26 gives the Apaches the go ahead telling them that “We have no personnel east of our position.” The ground forces indicate where they last saw the insurgent, “Uh negative, uh, he was, uh, right in front of the Brad (Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle and presumably call sign “Bushmaster26″).” Once the Apaches fire, you can hear “Bushmaster26″ saying, “We need to move, time now!” follow shortly by, “26, this is 26, we are mobile (on the move).” We later hear the ground element ask the pilots, “Can you walk us onto that location (the scene where the Apaches engaged the men on the street), over (give us directions)?” There is obvious tension on the ground.

Granted, the chatter between the pilots sounds sanguinary today, but in 2007, the height of the war in Iraq (More U.S. casualties, 961, than any other year according to iCasualties.org), this 37 minute clip was a heartbeat in an ongoing bloody battle where a lot of U.S. ground troops were dying in ambushes just like this one. Context, people…

Neither helicoptor pilots nor soldiers on the ground are patrolling Iraq and/or Afghanistan looking for opportunities to kill and most would rather take a bullet, and many have, rather than risk hitting innocent civilians. You have no idea the day-to-day restraint these men and women demonstrate nor at what cost. When you and/or your comrades are in very real danger and you are constrained or unable to react, it tears at your psychological fabric. Killing an innocent, regardless of circumstances, shreds it. Just ask a vet. And, comparing soldiers under fire (whether the pilots felt directly threatened or were responding to calls for assistance from those on the ground who were) to police in the city is a convenient but utimately false simile. Viewed in context, the behavior of the men under surveillance by the Apache crews, peering around corners, presumably in the direction of the ground patrol, while wielding an RPG and AKs immediately following an ambush, is suspicious at best. The pilots’ responsed by characterizing them as hostiles on an existing and active urban battlefield. In that context, their actions and language, while discomforting to the average person sitting in the comfort of their home or their local coffee shop, are ultimately better understood…unless you’re predisposed to see war criminals anywhere there’s an American uniform and then there’s no understanding…

Ironically, one of the places you’ll hear chatter very similar to that of the pilots in the video is in a hospital…ask an ER Tech or ICU nurse or doctor. Gallows humor in these environments is a defense mechanism just as the “video game” analogy used in the article is for the pilots. Unfortunately, the infantryman can’t disassociate quite as easily as he can often see the white in the other man’s eyes.

“War is Hell!” W.T. Sherman
Recommended by 22 Readers

For 2 Grieving Families, Video Reveals Grim Truth (see pic in the HIDE/SHOW discussion section above left).

For Mr. Noor-Eldeen’s family, the video seemed to bring closure for an event that had left many questions unanswered.

“God has answered my prayer in revealing this tape to the world,” said the photographer’s father, who taught his son how to take pictures. “I would have sold my house and all that I own in order to show this tape to the world.”

Families of Victims of 2007 US Helicopter Killing React to Leaked Video – Democracy Now segment featuring the team from Iceland interviewing the family:

Journalists from the investigative team in Iceland that released the now-infamous US military video on WikiLeaks traveled to Baghdad recently to meet with the family members of some of the twelve people killed in the 2007 attack. Ahlam Abdelhussain, the widow of Saleh Mutashar who was killed when the gunship opened fire on a van, asks, “Why was he shot with his children in the car? They did nothing wrong. He was helping a journalist. What was his crime? What was the crime of our children who are left with no father and no support?”

UPDATES

Oops! Obama dropped the ball on intelligence says Daily Beast column

Obama’s Dangerous Spy Game by John Lehman (May 25)

With the coming of the Obama Administration and its view that everything Bush did should be reversed, there was hope the president would make a new start with the DNI, and perhaps even read our 9/11 report. Those hopes were dashed when he put his pal Leon Panetta at CIA and then reversed attempts by Negroponte’s successor, John McConnell—and Blair—to exercise some of the powers over the CIA, FBI, and Department of Defense that we had intended for the office.

While three successive DNIs have striven hard and accomplished some useful things, the intelligence community is now even more bloated and just as dysfunctional as it was before 9/11. The solution does not lie in yet another reorganization by a fourth powerless DNI. There will be no improvement until we have a president who gets it. Until then, the burden of keeping Americans safe from terrorism must rest outside the federal government, with individual centers of intelligence excellence like Ray Kelly’s NYPD Counterterrorism Office.

John Lehman was Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan Administration and a member of the 9/11 Commission.

Personal testimony (Videos):

From Media Sanctuary

Innocence Lost: Ethan McCord recounts aftermath of Iraqi civilian massacre | UNPC 7/24/2010 (video)

The Rules of Engagement in Iraq Are a Joke: Elaine Brower & Ethan McCord | UNPC 7/24/2010 (video)