Category Archives: US Elections 2008-9/11

The Path to 9-11

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Er, something to do with an ABC TV prog about 9/11 that has had to be re-edited ’cause it got some serious people real mad (thanks Shaun..); sorry for the tone of voice, just been watching the classic film, the Last Picture Show:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 (UPI) — ABC Television is to make changes to its
controversial mini-series “The Path to 9-11″ before it airs next week,
following a barrage of criticism from former Clinton administration
officials.

“No one has seen the final version of the film, because the editing
process is not yet complete, so criticisms of … specifics are
premature and irresponsible,” ABC said in a statement Thursday.

The statement is the first confirmation that the version which was shown
at a press launch in Washington, D.C., a few days ago — and distributed
to hundreds of reporters, media organizations, and TV reviewers — is
not the one that will air.

There was no indication in the statement of what changes might be made
or how significant they will be, and ABC did not provide anyone to
answer questions.

The move follows complaints to Robert Iger, the chairman of Disney
Corp., ABC’s parent company, from former President Bill Clinton and two
senior officials from his administration, criticizing the film’s
portrayal of their efforts to capture or kill al-Qaida leader Osama bin
Laden.

“The content of this drama is factually and incontrovertibly inaccurate
and ABC has a duty to fully correct all errors or pull the drama
entirely,” wrote Clinton lawyer Bruce Lindsey. “It is unconscionable to
mislead the American public about one of the most horrendous tragedies
our country has ever known.”

The liberal blog ThinkProgress.org says that 25,000 people have used
their site to send letters of complaint to ABC about the film, a five
hour-long examination of the origins of the Sept. 11 plot, which is
scheduled to air over two nights next week on the fifth anniversary of
the attacks.

“I find it quite amazing that a former president would try to intimidate
a TV network into sanitizing a dramatization of the events leading up to
Sept. 11,” Roger Aronoff, a media analyst with the conservative watchdog
group Accuracy in Media, told United Press International. He accused ABC
of “buckling under the Clinton pressure,” and warned “we will be
watching closely.”

“The Path to 9-11″ is billed as a dramatization based in part on the
report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United
States, which investigated the events of Sept. 11 and circumstances
leading up to it.

A disclaimer ABC plans to show at the beginning of each episode, which
will air commercial free, states the film “is not a documentary,” adding
that: “For dramatic and narrative purposes,” it “contains fictionalized
scenes, composite and representative characters and dialogue, as well as
time compression.”

Nonetheless, in promotional materials accompanying the film, ABC
Entertainment President Steve McPherson said: “When you take on the
responsibility of telling the story behind such an important event, it
is absolutely critical that you get it right,” and many Democrats are
angry about portions of the film.

In one scene, CIA operatives working with Ahmed Shah Masud, the
charismatic Afghan mujahedin leader who fought al-Qaida and their
Taliban sponsors, are assembled on a hillside above bin Laden’s
residence at Tarnak Farms. “It’s perfect for us,” says “Kirk,” a
composite character representing several of the CIA operatives and
analysts involved in the hunt for the terrorist leader.

But the team is forced to abort the mission when National Security
Adviser Samuel “Sandy” Berger hangs up on them in the middle of a
conference call, after telling them he cannot give the go ahead for the
action.

“I don’t have that authority,” he says.

“Are there any men in Washington,” Masud asks Kirk afterwards in the
film, “or are they all cowards?”

“No such episode ever occurred — nor did anything like it,” wrote the
real Berger to Iger.

In an interview yesterday with a Los Angeles radio station, Cyrus
Nowrasteh, the film’s screenwriter, acknowledged that the scene did not
depict actual events.

“Sandy Berger did not slam down the phone,” Nowrasteh said, according to
the New York Times. “That is not in the (Sept. 11 commission) report.
That was not scripted. But you know when you’re making a movie, a lot of
things happen on set that are unscripted. Accidents occur; spontaneous
reactions of actors performing a role take place. It’s the job of the
filmmaker to say, you know, maybe we can use that.”

The other scene depicts then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
insisting that the Pakistani government be forewarned about a cruise
missile strike against bin Laden — and then issuing the warning over
the objections of the military.

“Neither of these assertions is true,” writes Albright in her letter to
Iger, calling the scene “false and defamatory.”

The missiles narrowly missed bin Laden — according to some reports,
because he was warned of the forthcoming strike and left the Afghan
training camp at which it was aimed.

The Sept. 11 commission report records that because the missiles had had
to cross Pakistani air space, the vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs
of Staff met with Pakistani military officials “to assure (them) the
missiles were not coming from India. Officials in Washington speculated
that one or another Pakistani official might have sent a warning to the
Taliban or bin Laden.”

There are no statistics

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Good to read from Shaun @ UPI on a bill to support the mental health needs of homecoming US service personnel, on the day it was reported in the UK that executed WW1 soldiers, often suffering from ‘shellshock’, are to be pardoned.

A bill named after a young soldier who killed himself after returning from Iraq seeks better tracking of psychological trauma among veterans.

The Joshua Omvig Veterans Suicide Prevention Bill, HR 5771, currently before the U.S. House of Representatives, mandates the establishment of a comprehensive screening and counseling referral program for all returning veterans that would identify and track at-risk individuals, and provide more help for those with emotional or spiritual wounds.

Spc. Joshua Omvig left Iraq on his 21st birthday, Nov. 18, 2004 after an 11 month tour. “Five days later he was having Thanksgiving dinner with us,” his father Randy told United Press International in a telephone interview. “A week after that he was back at work” at his civilian job.

But his son never got over the experiences he had in Iraq. The young soldier “came back a different person,” his father said.

Spc. Omvig was depressed and uncommunicative. His family encouraged him
to seek counseling but he was reluctant. “He believed very strongly that
if he sought help it would adversely affect his military career,” said his father.

On Dec. 22, 2005, 13 months after returning from Iraq, Omvig took his own life. It would be a commonplace to say that in doing so, he became a statistic. But it would also be wrong. There are no statistics.

The figure commonly cited for veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan who have killed themselves is 79. But, as Omvig’s family are keen to point out, that count starts only in March 2003, and includes only those who were receiving care within the federal Veteran’s Administration healthcare system.

“There’s Joshua and lots of others who aren’t counted” because they never sought help, said his father.

And therein lies the problem.

A study published in July 2004 in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded that there was likely significant under-reporting of mental health problems among returning soldiers and marines.

Of those in the study’s sample who were screened positive for a mental disorder, “only 38 to 45 percent indicated an interest in receiving help, and only 23 to 40 percent reported having received professional help in the past year.”

“The subjects reported important barriers to receiving mental health
services, particularly the perception of stigma among those most in need
of such care,” concluded the study.

“Not all wounds inflected in combat are visible,” said Rep. Leonard Boswell, D-Iowa, one of the bill’s sponsors. “A simple screening and tracking process could have provided Joshua with the counseling he needed, saving his life.”

Omvig’s family stress the importance of a proactive approach. “What provision there is supposed to be at the moment… it’s mainly left up to the soldiers themselves or their families to diagnose,” said his father.

The bill would provide suicide prevention training for all Veterans’ Administration staff, contractors, and medical personnel.

“The same way swift triage care can save a soldier on the battlefield,” said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, “accurate diagnosis and delivery of quality mental health care can do the same once the fighting ends.” With his fellow Iowan, GOP Sen. Charles Grassley, Harkin has introduced a senate version of the bill, S 3808.Supporters say they hope the legislation can be fitted in to the crowded legislative schedule of both chambers after the August recess.

In February 2006, there were more than 555,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, just over half of them from the National Guard or Reserve.About 168,000, or 30 percent of them, have so far sought help from theU.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs healthcare system, which offers former troops free treatment for a wide range of ailments that might be
related to their service. Of those, 168,000 — almost exactly one third — had an initial diagnosis that included some form of mental illness, according to figures provided to lawmakers.

The bill would also try to engage the families of returning veterans, creating an education program help them understand the readjustment process for returning troops and recognize the signs and symptoms of mental illness.

“We spend a great deal of time and money training our troops to survive their deployment,” said Omvig’s father, “But we spend nothing when they return, making sure they can transition back… making sure they survive the peace.”

He said the problem was especially acute for guard and reserve veterans, especially in rural areas, who might live miles from their base and even further from the nearest Veteran’s Affairs Department facility. “There needs to be more outreach,” he said. “They need to get out there to where people are, to work with them there.”

The bill would ensure 24-hour access to mental health care for veterans who are deemed at risk for suicide, including those in rural or remote locations.

Since their own tragedy, Omvig’s family have found some comfort in pressing for change in the system they feel failed their son. “We feel,” began Omvig’s mother, Ellen, “that if some good can come out of the worst thing that ever happened to us…” but she trailed off.

“There’s nothing we can do for Josh now,” his father said, “but we can help others. This isn’t a political thing. As Americans, we made a promise to those young men that of they went out there and risked their lives for our country, we would look after them… I don’t think we are keeping that promise.”

Oliver Stone’d>Stone Mountain>

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News of Oliver Stone’s new 9/11 film just in from our Shaun @ UPI. Funny, I recall trying to get an interview with Stone way back when I heard he was sniffing around a possible film about the assassination of Martin Luther King. I hassled a couple of his PR people but naturally being a stone-cold loser got nowhere. Stone says now it wasn’t gonna be a conspiracy movie, just so you know. But thanks to blogging, it’s now news! Anyhow, here’s the 9/11 week ahead:

Oliver Stone’s movie about Sept. 11, “World Trade Center,” is released Thursday. Ten percent of the gross take from the first five days of theatrical release will be donated to four New York-based charities that are working in different ways to memorialize the victims of the attack or provide ongoing support to their families. Several organizations (including this one and this one) have already indicated that they will use the movie to try and promote conspiracy theories about the attacks.

All-in-all, there’s likely to be quite a bit of Sept. 11 revisionism around this week, as the chairs of the blue-ribbon commission that investigated the attacks, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, are also due to publish their account of the commission’s behind-the-scenes-struggles with the administration and congress. In advance of the book, there’s already been one new revelation — that the commission considered a criminal referral over the way they were decieved by NORAD and the Department of Defense.
The extent of that deception is thrown into sharp relief for your humble correspondent by the audio tapes published on the Vanity Fair Web site by a producer of the last Sept. 11 movie, Flight 93.

Now Kean tells the Washington Post that the commission was never able to ascertain why NORAD had tried to hide the real sequence of events. The Jersey Girls say that this admission “puts into question the veracity of the entire Commission’s report.”
I think that’s a stretch, personally, but I do think it shows there’s a danger that in hyping the importance of the book, coverage of it could end up leaving question marks over Kean and Hamilton’s earlier work — the commission’s own report.

Come to think of it wasn’t it Shaun when at BBC R4 who got me the job of covering the MLK 30th anniversary.

Control of the Brazilian border

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On the day the film Miami Vice open’s in the UK it appears the US are eyeing one of the locations used – the border area between Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina – for terrorist activity.

Sounds implausible? Read on brother (thanks to Shaun at UPI):


 

As the conflict in Lebanon intensifies, U.S.officials are weighing the consequences of a possible strategic shift by the Islamic extremist group Hezbollah.

U.S. officials tell United Press International that intelligence
assessments indicate the group’s strategic posture up till now appears
designed to avoid direct confrontation with the United States.

But “whenever there’s an up-tick in tension (in the Middle East) there’s
a concern that the posture could change,” said one U.S. intelligence
official authorized to speak with the media. At that point, said the
official, attention switches to trying to work out what capabilities the
group might have. “Capacity is what is interesting people at the
moment.”

Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., chairman of the House subcommittee on terrorism and non-proliferation, told UPI he is concerned Hezbollah might be positioning itself for an attack against the United States.

We’re seeing a pattern of activities on the border and elsewhere,” he
said, indicating “a renewed operational focus by Hezbollah on getting
their people in over the border, between the ports of entry,” because
that way, U.S. authorities will not know they are in the country.

Royce said there was a rise in the number of ethnic Lebanese with
Brazilian nationality apprehended at the border. “We’re seeing a pattern
of (Hezbollah) operatives” from Latin American countries “attempting to come into the United States,” he said.

The tri-border region of South America, where the frontiers of Brazil,
Paraguay and Argentina all meet, has a large Lebanese-origin population
and has long been identified by some in U.S. intelligence as a hotspot
for Hezbollah activities

Royce referenced recent statements from militants linked to Hezbollah in Iran that said they had the capability to stage suicide attacks against
U.S interests around the world.

“We know that there are Hezbollah people here,” he said, adding that as
many as 300 “individuals doing work for Hezbollah” had been apprehended — arrested or convicted — “over the years.” He said they were involved in fundraising or other logistical support operations for the group.

“The question is, could these types of cells be given the green light”
to commit terrorist attacks within the United States?

Under these circumstances, he said “it would behoove the United States
to get some measure of control of the border.”

I’m off for dinner with a couple of Brazilian law officials (who also just happen to be Shirley’s uncle & aunt) this evening to get their views. At least it might distract them from interrogating me..

Homeland Hack

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Good to see Shaun Waterman’s has launched a blog as UPI’s Homeland and National Security Editor:

“I hope you will wish your humble correspondent luck as he steers uncertainly into the fast lane of the information superhighway.

“By all means laugh at his inevitable missteps (what would life be without the occasional, refreshing glass of schadenfreude) but please don’t allow your amusement to cloud your good opinion of the Hack’s virtues.

“My first posting, excerpted below, is a regular week-ahead — a look at the events, issues and people likely to be making homeland security news over the next seven days. I will post one every Sunday night. I’ll be posting links to all my UPI stories there, plus jottings, reflections and anything else that didn’t make it into the day’s output.”

Something nerdy I wrote post 9/11..

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It’s just one of those days when you feel like posting a paper about systems, al qaeda, and post-9/11. & thanks to Meg for keeping me company while I did this presentation. S.

An alternative model for approaching system theory, design and operation.
Stuart Glendinning Hall.

A paper for presentation during the 12th Annual International Conference of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences in Portland, Oregon, August 2002.

Abstract
Reporting a study into an alternative model for designing systems.. Of particular interest are the possible benefits the model provides over the current  “complicated/easy” model. For example the desk-top computer is more complicated  than the hand-held abacus, but not necessarily more complex. The former is designed with a hugely sophisticated back-end in order to provide an easy-to-use GUI front-end interface. The abacus conversely relies on a greater interaction between the user and the technology in order to provide value, it is therefore both complex and simple. However, analysis suggests that the current paradigm has a number of in-built weaknesses which the alternative model can help resolve, such as in the design of systems which require a high-degree of usability and stability for end users. It is based on an understanding of system design which formerly has put user and system outside each other, whereas the complex/simple model has the relationship as co-involved. Several practical suggestions about the value of the model for extracting greater value for organisational management will also be explored. Indeed it offers government bureaucracy a way out of its inefficiencies of thought and action, enabling an effective tackling of the global terrorist threat from top to bottom.

Keywords: alternative, current, complex, simple, system, complication, easy, organisation, change, terrorism, Al Qaeda.

Aim
I have designed my alternative system to be intelligible to technical people and the uneducated alike, and to function for both. The implications of this are true from start to finish. The need for such a fundamental re-think of system theory, design and operation is inspired by the attack of Sept 11. I hope therefore this discussion paper is providing some “specific answers to questions of widely shared concern”. (1) I may not be posing questions of the current system, but perhaps it may be of interest to individuals impressed by the particularly unique challenge of September 11. It’s not a case of more of the same, as I will go onto argue, but I readily accept that’s what most people will be looking for – an improvement in organisation’s ability to deal with such a challenge. In turn I am using the challenge to slowly start thinking about how organisations, particularly state-run organisations, can change to accommodate change in the 21st century and offer them a way out of their inefficiencies of thought and action.In essence my alternative system is based on a different conceptual framework from current systems in that it is from the start designed to be both simple, and complex.

For the sake of understanding lets say this is designed from the bottom up, whereas the current system tends to be designed from the top down, with a tendency towards complication of structures, and consequent weaknesses when faced with subversive threats or rapid changes in the environment generally. I might venture to be a little pretentious and say that my alternative system is, drawing on complexity science, based a little closer to how reality works than current systems, which implicitly still work on traditional maths and science models – in other words the structures change but the ‘dynamical key’ stays the same. Therein lie their strengths but also their weakness when faced with a player who refuses to play by the same rules of the game.

To reiterate this discussion paper is about changing organisations, but to make my point understood I have related much of the relevance of my argument to the fight against the Al Qaeda brand of highly mobile terrorism: “Because we the modernists place a vastly higher priority on education, science and technology, we have managed, in addition to being infidels, to become very powerful infidels, while they are left with being very weal impoverished believers – enraged, impoverished believers…but which (in the shape of Al Qaeda) has managed to find exceptional financing and to adapt itself surprisingly well to a shrewd if minimalist application of borrowed or stolen modern technology.” (2)

Current system theory, design & operation
The effectiveness of the current system involves an implicit theory, design and operational separation between ‘the system’ and ‘the system users’. The usability professional is one example of the current system approach trying to square its own circle in this respect. But fundamentally, as it is based on traditional mathematics which at crudest says complex effects have complex causes, the effective relationship is one between what I have termed complication/easy. Complication is the essential state of mind under the current system approach, easy is the user interface which is supposed to make it all OK. But it’s not OK, because we falsely confuse complication and complexity, easy with simple. Or to be crude once more, we misunderstand the difference between normality and reality – a cardinal sin for any budding scientific genius: “For our everyday experience has led us to expect that an object that looks complicated must have been constructed in a complicated way…(but) at least sometimes such an assumption can be completely wrong…unlike engineering nature operates under no such constraint.”(3)

As a result we have complicated organisations and complicated technology to meet aims which falsely appear simple – in contrast to Al Qaeda which spent just over $1m in its September 11 attack. (4). The risk is that if we simply persist with current system approach, more of the same, in the face of a global terrorism that is fighting not for nationhood but for belief that it will as with the war on drugs only make things worse, not better – a case of “push down, pop up” (5).

Alternative system theory, design & operation
Let me start with a little theory. From an essentially scientific point of view the struggle for survival for all living organisms can be boiled down to two fundamentals – adaptability and invasion. (6) In other words what is the relationship between internal (adaptation) and external (invasion) change? Is it merely a one-way process? Not according to Gaia scientist James Lovelock: ““The deepest error of modern biology is the entrenched belief that organisms interact only with other organisms and only adapt to their material environment. This is as wrong as believing that the people of a village interact with their neighbours but merely adapt to the material conditions of their cottages. In real life, both organisms and people change their environment as well as adapting to it.” (7)

So what does this mean for alternative system design? Current system design is typified until very recently by technology which necessitated for the user to adapt to it. We are seeing changes here though, from the emergence of personal user interfaces to the development of internet search engines designed to learn from your search approach to name just two mundane examples. In other words technology adapting to the user. And with the rise of Open Source software you are seeing the potential to create software systems to suit your corporate needs a lot cheaper than many proprietary systems (8).

The alternative system I am proposing in sketch form in this paper follows on from these developments in IT systems, where the user comes before the technology, and basic CRM business sense, where the customer comes before the product. While these developments largely exist within current thinking, they also provide a bridge to an alternative system which instead of putting system first and users second, involves design which has system and users as unified. After all the world as we know it does not exist apart from people who inhabit it. It’s a matter of working on the whole, and not the parts, of working the relationship between the simple and the complex, the users and the system.

This is nothing new, all I am doing here is simplifying complexity theory for the user: “If the parts of a complex system or the various aspects of a complex situation, all defined in advance, are studied carefully by experts on those parts or aspects and the results of their work are pooled, an adequate description of the whole system or situation does not usually emerge. The reason, of course, is that these parts or aspects are typically entangled with one another. We have to supplement the partial studies with a transdisciplinary “crude look at the whole,” and practitioners of plectics often do just that.” (9)As an operational system I believe my alternative system has advantages over current one. It is able to appreciate and respond to unpredictability without necessitates a complicated reaction – rather a response based on a complexity model, which equips people with mindsets to deal with it more flexibly and creatively because they can more clearly understand their relationship to the whole – objectives, process, outputs and outcomes are more efficiently produced.

Conclusion
I have focused this discussion paper on the need for organisation change, specifically as a result of the Al Qaeda threat. Wouldn’t US citizens like their intelligence community to be more fluid, self-organised and less bureaucratic?  But where’s the customer need right? And I admit that there is no need unless you understand that you are not fighting fire with fire, you are using in effect using the weapons and systems of ‘complication’ to fight complexity. For the fact is terrorism has to organise according to more complex/simple lines to ‘get round’ the sophisticated security systems of the West. And you know it: “Al Qaeda prefers simple, reliable plans and would not allow the success of a large-scale attack ‘to be dependent on some sophisticated, tricky cyber thing to work.’ “(10)

Quite simply my argument is that terrorists know how to exploit the fundamental flaws in current systems which split system from user, part from whole. Neither will they have forgotten that it was an Islamic scholar al-Khowarizmi  around 825AD, who is thought to have first introduced, the concept of algebra the Islamic meaning of which is “the art of bringing together unknowns to match a known quantity”.

REFERENCES
(1) Stephen Guastello, ‘Managing Emergent Phenomena: Nonlinear dynamics in work organizations’, 2001.
(2) David Halberstam, ‘War In a Time of Peace’, 2001.
(3) Stephen Wolfram, ‘A New Kind of Science’, 2002.
(4) $1m figure quoted in ‘Bin Laden Along Afghan-Pakistan Border — Spy Chief’, 12 July 2002,  www.reuters.com.
(5) Ethan Nadelmann, Drug Policy Alliance, in an email to the author, 1999.
(6) “It is reasonable to expect that life, if it exists elsewhere, will still be characterized by extreme adaptability and invasiveness. In an unstable and unpredictable universe,” he concludes, “these qualities are needed if life is to survive, either on a planet or anywhere else.” Freeman Dyson, quoted in ‘Freeman Dyson Offers Up New Extraterrestrial Search Ideas’ by A.J.S. Rayl. See www.comdig.org/ComDig02/ComDig02-22/.
(7) ‘A Way of life for Agnostics,’ James Lovelock, Gaia Circular, Summer 1999.
(8) Stuart G. Hall, ‘Real Life Linux – Credit where credit’s due’, Linux User, October 2000.
(9) Murray Gell-man, ‘Let’s Call it Plectics’, Complexity Journal, Vol. 1/ No. 5 (1995/96).
(10) Assistant Secretary of Defense John Stenbit quoted in ‘Qaeda cyberterror called real peril’, by Barton Gellman, of the Washington Post, June 28 2002.