FutureThink
America chooses to squander intelligence.
December 13
Two ‘signifying events’ collided today: a front-page New York Times article entitled “Changes Fading for Bill To Set Up a COVID Inquiry” and an appeal from The Intercept, “Tell the Justice Department to drop the prosecution of WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange now.” (1)
The well-sourced New York Times article repeated the claim of intelligence as a cure for suffering and ignorance, and also — more than a public attack on select individuals and institutions — an opportunity to understand and move forward as a community:
“The idea for a commission has been percolating for nearly two years, backed by members of Congress, advocacy groups representing the bereaved and the former executive director of the 9/11 Commission. Experts say that beyond charting a blueprint for confronting future pandemics, an independent panel — with the power to issue subpoenas and convene public hearings — would serve as a form of catharsis for the country and a way to comfort those who lost loved ones.
It might also answer a pressing question. Why does the United States have a higher death rate from Covid-19 than other wealthy nations?”
The Intercept appeal resounded with a similar “we’ve been here before” tone. Urging readers to rebuff the Biden Administration’s attempt to prosecute Julian Assange for espionage charges, the letter reads,
“Publishing is not a crime.
Twelve years after WikiLeaks exposed the dirty secrets of U.S. diplomacy in a massive publication of State Department cables, co-founder Julian Assange remains in a high-security British prison awaiting extradition to the United States. He faces espionage charges that could add up to 175 years in U.S. prison.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has the power to drop the case against Assange immediately. Instead, the Biden administration has continued the effort at prosecution begun under former President Donald Trump.
Assange’s indictment presents a critical threat to the First Amendment and to press freedom in the U.S. and abroad. It sets a precedent that could easily be used against any journalist publishing sensitive information — a major reason Obama’s Justice Department did not pursue the case.
The five major international media outlets that published cables from WikiLeaks are now calling for President Joe Biden’s Justice Department to end its prosecution of Assange immediately.”
And to ‘top it all off,’ I heard a friend ask me,
What happens to all the legislation ‘stuck in Senate Committees?’
I mulled over the absence of a New York Times editorial on the importance of intelligence as a public asset. (2)
I pondered to whom do I resend The Intercept appeal, with a note, “consider giving.” (3)
I witnessed that America is suffering an intelligence fraud in the making: the crime of burying lost opportunity.
A tragedy leaves scars and opportunities, a commitment to redeeming what is lost. What all three ‘events’ harbinger is a soulless, cruel aversion to intelligence.
In answer to my friend’s question, I considered making a tally of legislation that has been stalled in Congress and what it’s advocates must be living through:
Child Tax Credit
What’s left out of the Inflation Reduction Act
Pandemic Relief
Immigration Reform
Assistance for All Victims of Hurricane Whatever
I stopped after 5 items.
These bills are “stuck,” euphemistically speaking, in a pipeline often characterized as “bi-partisan,” a nod to compromised authenticity.
Many stalled bills have expiration dates, like supermarket dairy products.
Consider that this partial list of stalled legislation doesn’t begin to scrape at the surface of incomplete Commission efforts and findings, all recommending action, some more explicit than others:
9/11 Commission Report
Panama Papers
Supreme Court Reform Commission
Pandemic Response Accountability
I stopped after 4 items.
Consider that this partial list of unsealed and ignored Commission reports do not begin to estimate what’s to come:
January 6 House Select Committee Report
Drug Cost Relief
Extending funding for… ‘Whatever.’
I stopped after 3 items. I am getting tired.
Beyond losing trust in governance, the upshot of intelligence fraud is a cause for concern on several levels.
On one level, intelligence fraud squanders future deliberation and action (4). Coupled with a variety of public relations attempts at secrecy (what America can’t see won’t hurt her) and a general disdain for public interest, authoritarians manipulate the public knowledge.
Consider the interest of making money from a soon-to-be-published book framed the intent of former President Trump to illegally seize classified documents and squirrel them away to Mar-A-Lago. His former National Security Chief, John Bolton, sought executive privilege in order to elude answering a Congressional call for documents — again in the interests of publishing his memoir of his tenure at the White House.
On another level, the crime of burying lost opportunity fuels “alternative reasoning,” exposing your audience’s inability to reason based on what’s visible, exposed, leaked:
“There has always been what the late historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style” in U.S. politics: witch hunts, Illuminati, Red Scares. William Jennings Bryan promoted conspiracy theories. Richard Nixon believed in them. Americans, by nature, are more distrustful of authority, and what those in authority say, than citizens of other advanced democracies.
But the Amercian electorate, at the dawn of the Trump age, was no more paranoid or predisposed to conspiracy thinking than it was in the past. Conservatives weren’t inherently more conspiracy minded than liberals. What changed is that, for the first time in U.S. history, a president and a major political party weaponized paranoia. Trump was the first president to promote conspiracy thinking from the bully pulpit, and the first to buld a system in which elites — Republican Party leaders — validated paranoia. For the first time, America had “a president who has built a coalition reaching out to conspiracy minded people,” Joseph Uscinsky, a University of Miami political scientist who studies conspiracy theories, told me.”
(Dana Milbank, The Destructionists, the Twenty-five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party)
On another level, intelligence fraud removes accountability — so much so that currently the DOJ in pursuing evidence of January 6 criminal activity is attempting to link “reaching out,” a euphemism for coercion, with willful intent: inciting ‘chaos’ by ‘reaching out’ to conspiracy thinking.
Where there is temporary closure to lost opportunity, consider our selective attention. Like devoted tabloid readers, we see only where and what bleeds and we eschew the ‘big issues’ like the growth of militarism, global exploitation, climate change, inequality — social and economic:
“The most profitable way for any public figure to build an audience is to tell people what they want to hear — which is usually that everything wrong with America is the fault of an opposing political faction or party.
Trust me, I get the temptation. I could spend all my time decrying the Trumpist far right — but pontificating about the obvious is a missed opportunity to shed light on the deeper and more enduring injustices at the heart of American empire.”
(Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of The Intercept; from a December 14 email)
DC is drowning in lost opportunity; so much so a hermetic pall descends on the Mall: a shadow industry, moving paper to storage facilities.
A smokeless inferno of dashed ‘what ifs.’
The little dirty secret behind early retirement from Congress and “return to the private sector.” The retreat from public service when the Rolodex of connections is deemed more valuable than the deals “left on the table,” the genuine public policies that won’t see the ‘light of day.’
Its dusk now and as I step off my soap box and retrieve my Barcalounger, I reflect, is this rant another journey into America’s unabashed ignorance and dependency on social media for what passes today as critical thinking?
Not exactly.
So, who’s to blame?
Speaking specifically, ‘who’ are the intellectual elites, of which I am a shameful member. At seventy-odd years on this planet, trust me: there are a lot of us. ‘We’ should know better because specifically ‘we’ refuse to accept that ‘we’ know less.
The first democratic institution to go is a free and uncensored press, the folks who gather intelligence and then publish it.
I didn’t say this…
I heard it somewhere.
December 13–17
Notes
1-Received by email, December 13. join.theintercept.com
2-Note the “news feature” which appeared December 12:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/us/politics/covid-commission-congress.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare Two Decades After 9/11 Inquiry
3-. If like me, you are alarmed at the level of dis/misinformation, support media investigators and public interest defenders like The Intercept, ProPublica, open-source intelligence gatherers such as Poynter.org and bellingcat.com. (Cf. How I Protect Myself from Misinformation by Grain of Truth)
4- Consider what is ‘beyond apprehension,’ more than a loss of critical thinking, a loss of critical curiosity,
Why does the United States have a higher death rate from Covid-19 than other wealthy nations?”
-”Changes Fading for Bill To Set Up a COVID Inquiry,” New York Times
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