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Spies in the classroom


The terrorist attacks of 9/11 sent shivers of horror, disbelief, and indignation throughout America, and the American intelligence community was forced to face the tears and recrimination of the nation. Now America has the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program, a thee-year pilot program with a four million dollar budget that, by September of 2006, will send a maximum of 150 current or aspiring analysts — most are graduate students — to university programs, generally for two years, to resuscitate what critics have labeled America’s feeble and systemically crippled intelligence community. The question, then, is whether this program is a boon for the nation or a sinister and secret plan. The jury is still out.

The program is clearly designed to meet a near-desperate need of intelligence, as the terrorist attacks in 2001 demonstrated. In 2004 the CIA stated that it aims to increase the number of its analysts by 50 percent, and the organization has undergone numerous personnel reshuffles recently, in addition to the broader changes occurring in the American intelligence community-at-large.

While the program demonstrates an attempt to rectify recent intelligence failures with a larger pool of more focused analysts, there are concerns about the ethics of the program. Importantly, the students enrolled in the Pat Roberts program will be working behind desks and are not actual spies in the field; they seem, however, suspiciously close to spies in the classroom. The students are not obligated to disclose their intelligence affiliations to the academic community or to their professors, and some critics of the program have raised ethical concerns, especially regarding the students’ anthropological fieldwork and work in the social sciences, particularly given previous relationships between social scientists, the CIA, and totalitarian regimes. Associate Professor of Anthropology at St. Martin’s College David H. Price argues that the program may confuse and taint the ethical obligations of the academic with his or her allegiance to the intelligence community. Additionally, he argues that the unannounced presence of an intelligence community member will be tantamount to spying on professors.    

The success and efficacy of the program is still open to debate, and the its four million dollar budget is certainly small; this year’s budget for Title VI fellowships for area studies, which are funded by the federal government, channeled through participating universities, and which carry no government service obligations, is 28.2 million dollars. The issues the Pat Roberts program raises, however, are pertinent and valid; does this program threaten the intellectual and personal freedom of American professors, does it reintroduce an inappropriate dose of secret intimacy between academia and the intelligence community, and would making such a program more transparent compromise its very purpose?

—Mimi Hanaoka

  

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Blog

How language can sink a nation


George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, has figured out how “what was considered extreme just a decade ago [has become] national policy.” And he’s written about it in his book, Don’t Think of an Elephant!

Lakoff’s research in cognitive linguistics has shown how human goals, behavior, and actions are shaped by “frames,” which he defines as “mental structures that shape the way we see the world.” Consequently, “in politics, our frames shape our social policies and the institutions we form to carry out policies.” Lakoff explains,

“You can’t see or hear frames. They are part of what cognitive scientists call the ‘cognitive unconscious’ – structures in our brains that we cannot consciously access, but know by their consequences: the way we reason and what counts as common sense. We also know frame through language. When you hear a word, its frame (or collection of frames) is activated in your brain.”

Lakoff believes in the tie between language and politics: whoever controls language controls politics. He contends that the specific words people use to communicate, and the framing they use, are crucial to the future of the nation: the language used in American politics is a precision tool which shapes our political future.

The idea that language and politics shape each other is not new: George Orwell explored this theme in his novel, 1984, and in essays such as “Politics and the English Language,” as does William Safire in his weekly column, “On Language,” for The New York Times.

—Michaele Shapiro

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Photo Essays

Living Africa

Getting a firsthand look at child soldiers on a visit to Africa is harder than it sounds.


In August 2004, InTheFray published an interview with artist Josh Arseneau, along with some of his work. His artwork, inspired by news of the 2003 civil war in Liberia, portrayed the plight of child soldiers in West Africa and explored cultural connections to those children. Josh’s interest in the subject took him to the Gambia and Senegal last fall, where he gained  new perspectives to apply to his future body of work. Here Josh reflects on his trip and, through photographs from his travels, gives viewers an eye into his experience.

Click here to enter the visual essay.

One of the things I remember most clearly about Africa was drinking Sprite in the Banjul International Airport before leaving Gambia. It was my first cold drink in three weeks, and it was delicious.  

Occasionally I realize that an exact moment, even something as banal as drinking soda, represents what it means to be alive — not just alive, but possessing vitality. For some reason, I found more of these “near-life experiences” in Africa than halfway around the world, where I am now.

Cleaning rice in the afternoon sun was one of those experiences — an instance when I felt life buzzing around me like a super-charged aura or an energy field. While I picked out the small rocks and other inedibles that had gotten into the white rice, Mariama watched me intently.

She was the daughter of Nyimah, a friend of my guide and mentor, Haruna. I had met Haruna through an English website for the guesthouse he maintains. Born in northern Senegal, he was a member of the Fula tribe and spoke five languages, despite having never gone to school.

That afternoon, he sat to my left and smoked a rolled cigarette while rocking Nyimah’s son, Pamusa, to the sound of the hard rice being sifted in its metal bowl. The sun was just starting to set over the ocean, and goose bumps prickled up through the sweat all over my body. It was a feeling that screamed, “This is what it means to be alive! This is what matters to the rest of your life — this is experience you will never again attain.”  

Why rice-cleaning resounded in me so strongly remains a mystery. Perhaps it was that it differed from all of  my previous knowledge of Africa. For 18 months prior, I had been researching, from a distance, child soldiers in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Uganda. All of my information had been gathered secondhand; I never talked to a child soldier, never saw one in person, and never talked to anyone whose life had been adversely affected by one.

What I did experience was haunting articles, essays, and interviews, and some of the most chilling photographs I had ever seen. Most of the material had come from online news sources and periodicals. Many of the images were appropriated from The New York Times and Getty Images. I had planned to translate all of this secondhand information into a large body of visual art that I would create — paintings, prints, and drawings — all based on, and in response to, the photos I collected from the various online sources.

When I went to the Gambia, I was on vacation, but I was still interested in following up on my research. The southern region of Senegal that borders the Gambia is Casamance — an area filled with militia fighting against the Senegalese government. One day, Haruna and I visited Alfonse, an art teacher at a French school and a farmer from Casamance. As we drank coffee and ate peanut butter on bread, I asked Alfonse about his experiences with the rebels in his home village. He became agitated while describing how young boys and men who could not afford school often turned to the rebels. They found the wealth they had always wanted at the end of their AK-47s.

Alfonse said it wasn’t uncommon to see them robbing people at checkpoints, taking everything but the victims’ clothes, and then driving off in the stolen car. He said the rebels had forgotten what they fought for; some of the younger ones never even knew. What they knew was the power of a gun waved in someone’s face.  

Alfonse’s stories of his hometown struck me, but registered as secondhand — I was still only experiencing the child soldiers from a distance. When I returned home, I flipped through the hundreds of photos I had taken. Compared to my research, the photos, at first, seemed horribly mediocre. They were images of daily life in the village of Katchikally, where I lived with Haruna — views of Tuman Street, the pier where the fishing boats docked, and children in the neighborhood. They represented the banality of daily life, and, I came to believe upon reflection, the most alive kind of experience.  

I realized then that the appeal of cleaning rice was its quiet completeness as a process of living. In John Dewey’s book, Art as Experience, he writes that experience may be of “tremendous import … or it may have been something that, in comparison, was slight, and which, perhaps because of its very slightness, illustrates all the better what it is to be an experience.”  

Dewey also writes, “Nothing takes root in the mind when there is no balance between doing and receiving.” I thought about how the final act of consuming the rice qualified cleaning it as an actual experience. And I wondered whether translating my research on the child soldiers into art qualifies it as an experience as meaningful and important as simply helping to get dinner ready.

It was clear to me then that my new body of work would try to combine these disparate experiences on the canvas — the experiences I lived, and those I translated in the safety of my studio. The new work would be done from photographs — my own and the hundreds I discovered during my research. As I turned all these photos into drawings, paintings, and prints, would my lived experience show as more authentic than my secondhand experience? And what would the experience of the viewer be, who sees these lived and secondhand images on the same picture plane?

STORY INDEX

RESOURCES >

Josh Arseneau’s homepage
URL: http://www.josharseneau.com

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Commentary

Media indecency

Dear Michael, before you step down, why not consider an amendment to the FCC’s definition of profane …


Although Video News Releases, or VNR’s, seem to have been around at least since the early 90s, their use seems to have increased in the last five years. Sure, President Clinton, a savvy marketer, used them. But we shouldn’t underestimate President Bush’s skills in this area, nor should we suppose that the blurred line between objectivity and advocacy — as evidenced by Karen Ryan, Alberto Garcia, Mike McManus, Maggie Gallagher, Armstrong Williams, and Jeff Gannon — was somehow unintentional.

While I’ve watched with bemusement, awe, and just a bit of outrage over the years as print advertisers have perfected the art of mimicking news, a syrupy sweet “article” extolling a new diet has nothing on a seemingly live news broadcast extolling everything from government policies to Chevrolet trucks. I balk at being expected to discern advertising from reporting when the former is being read by T.V. reporter Tish Clark Dunning as part of her regular broadcast.

The long festering problem was exposed to the world at large in last week’s New York Times article. Both corporations and the government have cottoned on to creating advertising clips that fit seamlessly into regular news reports. Distribute one of these clips via Reuters without it being labeled too clearly, and voilá, free advertising in the guise of news. Sometimes reporters even help by reading the script themselves.

If you like drug war conspiracy theories, the trouble could be said to have its beginnings back in 2000, when The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) filed suit with the Federal Communications Commission, complaining that the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) was smuggling anti-marijuana messages into news broadcasts. At this point, it appears that video news releases were still just a twinkle in the ONDCP’s eye. Having been authorized by Congress to buy discount advertising time from the networks, ONDCP came up with a brilliant idea. They offered stations the advertising time back if they would insert their own anti-drug messages (approved by the government, of course) into regular broadcasts.

In its slap on the wrist ruling, the FCC referred back to the Radio Act of 1927, which required sponsors to be identified, and admitted that “the basic purpose of such requirements has not changed since that time: ‘listeners [and viewers] are entitled to know by whom they are being persuaded’” (insertion in original text). However, rather than focusing on the “the news networks are liars” issue, they focused on Section 317 of the Communications Act of 1934, which says, “All matter broadcast by any radio station for which service, money, or any other valuable consideration is directly or indirectly paid … shall … be announced as paid for, or furnished … by such person.”

In the ONDCP case, the FCC limply declared that “sponsorship identification is required and we caution the Networks to do so in the future.” However, they apparently were not too worked up over the issue since they imposed no sanctions. Their reasoning relied heavily on determining what networks had received in return for allowing the government to rewrite their scripts, a rather complicated tradeoff, the “complexity” of which seems to have befuddled the regulatory agency.

“What then,” one might ask, “would be wrong with just perpetrating a simple old fraud on the public if no ‘service, money, or any other valuable consideration’ is paid for it?” Thus, in my retelling, was born the ONDCP’s next brilliant idea, the Video News Release, otherwise known as the “prepackaged news story” or “covert propaganda.” These labels were given by the unpopular-with-the-administration Government Accounting Office. The GAO, earlier this year, gave the thumbs down to the ONDCP on its VNR’s produced and distributed since 2002. Oops.

However, President Bush doesn’t quite agree, and got the Justice Department to overrule that other department. (It should be said that the current Comptroller General, David M. Walker, was appointed in 1998 for a 15-year term, and hence probably is not as concerned as Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez about what Bush wants.) Anyway, the Justice Department issued its own guidelines that, according to Bush, say VNR’s are fine,“so long as they’re based upon facts, not advocacy.” As contributor Andrew Blackwell details this month, reporters hired by the government don’t necessarily doctor the news. They do go out looking for a certain type of news — that which is supportive of the American position — while avoiding other types, a process combining fact and advocacy. A process which would be seen as biased in a journalism ethics class, but which the Justice Department seems to suggest is not only not illegal, but does not, in fact, exist. In the Justice Department’s book, fact and advocacy are apparently diametrically opposed.

So, according to the Justice Department ruling, as long as a government agency “provide[s] accurate (even if not comprehensive) information,” even if it smuggles that information into a news broadcast that does not identify the government as the author of the “news,” everyone is good to go. Our tax dollars at work.

Since nothing is going to happen to government agencies or the companies like Medialink Worldwide who create VNR’s, the focus has to be on the news agencies who never learnt about plagiarism in school. Shouldn’t they be embarrassed to be the government’s shill without getting anything in return?

Perhaps there is still time before the Senate votes on The Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2005 (The Janet Jackson-inspired bill that ups the fines paid by stations broadcasting material deemed “obscene, indecent, and profane,” yet to be agreed upon by both houses, continues to float around D.C.) to elaborate a bit on the bill’s definition of decency.

So humor me, Michael Powell, before you step down as head of the FCC. Assume fact, truth, and authorship to be considered sacred ideas, and profanity “marked by contempt or irreverence for what is sacred.” Would it be too far a stretch to find that, whether or not a station receives moola or moola-substitute, it is wrong and indecent to broadcast fake news?

If the FCC doesn’t act, we can rely on news directors’ discernment in these matters. In The New York Times’ March 13 exposé, David M. Winstrom, the director of Fox News Edge, is quoted as saying “If I got one [a VNR] that said tobacco cures cancer or something like that, I would kill it.”

If not reassured, I recommend investing. Medialink Worldwide’s stock price has risen 20 percent since December.

STORY INDEX

TOPICS> FAKE NEWS

Sign a petition against fake news
URL: http://www.freepress.net/action/petition.php?n=fakenews

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Quote of note


“My children don’t see role models in their lives: mayors, factory managers, postal workers, business owners. So we’re setting up a place to show our unique culture, our unique society.”

— Marvin T. Miller, who is deaf, speaking through an interpreter about the town for the deaf he intends to build on a sparsely populated stretch of land in South Dakota (Salem, the neighboring town, has 1,300 residents).  The proposed town, Laurent — named in honor of Laurent Clerc, a 19th-century teacher of the deaf — has already attracted 92 families who intend to move to the village, where all services, including stores, the fire station, restaurants, and businesses would be deaf-friendly. American Sign Language would be the dominant language in the village.

—Mimi Hanaoka

    

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Nobel laureate Ayatollah al-Sistani


“As we approach the season of the Nobel Peace Prize, I would like to nominate the spiritual leader of Iraq’s Shiites, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, for this year’s medal. I’m serious,” claims The New York Times’ columnist  Thomas L. Friedman, writing about the accomplishments of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most prominent Shiite cleric in Iraq.

Friedman cites three main reasons that al-Sistani has contributed to the democratization of Iraq and, more broadly, the Middle East: al-Sistani has advocated a political strategy and vision of Iraq that has centered on positively and proactively focusing on the lives of Iraqis without resorting to defaming other movements or individuals; he has encouraged Iraqi voters, and not elite or self-appointed clerics, to have the commanding voice in post-occupation in Iraq; most importantly, in Friedman’s view, al-Sistani supports an understanding of Islam that is amenable to democracy. As Friedman characterizes it, in al-Sistani’s view, politics may be infused with Islamic values, but clerics will not be the dominant political force.

Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s most recent and most visible political role in reforming Iraq from beneath the rubble was to encourage his Shia followers to vote in the January 30th elections, whereas some Sunni organizations demanded that potential voters boycott the elections. Voter turnout was a staggeringly low 2 percent in some predominantly Sunni areas, as voters boycotted the elections or were intimated away from the voting booths by rampant violence.

—Mimi Hanaoka

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Seeking an escape route


Mythical stories of young soldiers disappearing across the border into Canada, in search of freedom from conscription, are the relics of the Vietnam era — or are they?  As The New York Times reported yesterday, a small group of currently enlisted men and women are seeking conscientious objector status, or seeking refuge across the United States’ northern border.  The difference for this generation of soldiers, however, is one of choice; all currently enlisted United States military are volunteers.

The Peace Out website, created by a group of veterans who successfully obtained conscientious objector status, received more than 3,000 hits its first day. No doubt, these numbers are due in part to conflicted sentiment over current armed combat in Iraq, but rather than see them merely as a reflection of as this, the Times article prompts us to question the stark differences between our military’s recruiting campaign, and the realities of life under fire. Soldiers recruited in peacetime,
and lured with the promises of steady employment and college education, did not expect to find themselves in combat in a country nine time zones away.

“It wasn’t what I thought it would be,” Private Hughey said. He said he enlisted at 17 from his home in San Angelo, Texas, because a recruiter promised that the military would buy him the education his father could not afford. He said he had tried to push aside little doubts he had, even back in basic training, but realized as his unit prepared to leave Fort Hood, Texas, for Iraq last March that he could not go.”

Current gossip mongering about the possibility of reinstating the draft obscures the embarrassing need to question the armed forces’ demographics. For our generation of soldiers, volunteering has grown scarily similar to conscription.

—Laura Louison

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Rev-ed up


It seems to me that the Western world, particularly in regard to areas that have any sense of authority, are only open to degree-educated people. I have been pondering the Church in my role as a pastor and I have come to the conclusion that the Church, as a global entity, is set up to cater, mostly, for middle-class, university-educated, people who respond to a lecture format of information dissemination and who also engage with ideas and concepts.

A key part of my calling is pastoral care. I, particularly, have a concern for those people who find themselves on the edge of the church. I meet weekly with a man suffering from bipolar disorder. It is not glamorous, cutting-edge ministry that will get me a cover shot on Christianity Today, but I feel, nonetheless, that it is worthwhile. I also meet with a schizophrenic man, and my wife and I are assisting a single mother in need at this time.

I share these things not to boast but in order to raise some thoughts. Of course, I do much more than this in my ministry, but these tasks for me are equally, if not more, valuable than my teaching role.

As I pondered this I began to think about how accessible politics is for the lower-class, lower-income person or for the mentally ill or the socially disadvantaged. Even websites such as this attract upper middle-class, university-educated people. I am not wanting to trigger a Monty Python-esque battle for the worst upbringing, and I am not at all minimizing the value of websites such as this, but what I want to raise is whether we, as socially concerned, politically active, spiritually aware, intelligent people, are creating structures that encourage the participation of those who fall through the cracks of society.

My contribution to this, in practical terms, is a drop in the ocean, but I am learning that I can only do what I can do. What are you doing? What more can I do? The political system in the U.S.A. is heavily loaded towards a wealthy minority who can afford to get involved. I want to assert that there is a place for grass-roots movements. I know that they are around. I would like to encourage anyone who is involved in political, social or spiritual engagement with people on the fringes of society to respond to this post or to email me. I would like to build a profile of positive contributions to society both in the U.S. and elsewhere.

What I have done here is to throw out some thoughts. This is not a comprehensive answer by any means but it is a beginning of sorts.  Will you join me in the journey?

Regards,
Rev. Les

—Les Chatwin

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personal stories. global issues.