12.14.05

Essay: A Flashbulb Event

Posted in 9/11, History, Human Rights, Psychology, Terrorisim at 3:12 pm by Nick Soutter

A flashbulb memory is a memory so powerful that it is forever burned into your brain. Where were you when JFK was assassinated? When Pearl Harbor was attacked? On 9/11?

Flashbulb memories are caused by flashbulb events. These events commonly affect a society as a whole. There are many side effects of these events- they tend to bring families closer together, inspire people to follow their dreams, and to start families.

They also have a surprising and long term side effect… They shake people’s faith in their own ability to understand the world so deeply that people tend to actively seek authority figures in whom to place near absolute trust and confidence. Because these events affect large societies, they can cause hundreds of millions of people to abandon reason and critical thought for a sense of security. In psychology, it is a phenomenon unlike any other.

When JFK was assassinated, the public assumed that the Federal Government would do the investigating, that it could naturally do a better job than the police. They assumed that the government would naturally have our best interest in mind, and would never abuse the power placed in their hands in a time of emergency. It never crossed anybody’s mind that they might even have been involved in causing it.

The assassination of a president is not a federal crime. This is intentional, to prevent the possibility that the military, or any other branch of the federal government, would assassinate the president and then cover it up.

In times of crisis, people seek opportunities to abandon their judgment to a higher authority. The civilian doctors, who began the autopsy of JFK, did not question the military illegally taking the body and altering their notes. The Dallas police didn’t hesitate when the FBI took over most of the investigation. The media and police remained largely silent when the new president, Lyndon Johnson, had the bullet-riddled limousine completely rebuilt before any forensic analysis could be done on it.

Forty years later, evidence that the government was involved in JFK’s assassination is pretty conclusive. But most people prefer not to investigate or demand answers from the government. They argue that it was 40 years ago, and answers today would be irrelevant. The truth is it is far easier to leave it at “that was then, this is now” than it is to investigate the matter thoroughly, possibly finding both that the assassination wasn’t particularly difficult, and that it could easily be reproduced in modern times.

On September 11, 2001, America suffered another flashbulb event. Immediately after came the assumption that it was both necessary and wise to make drastic changes to our government, that it should be given broad new powers, and would never abuse the power placed in its hands in a time of emergency.

The first thing we lost was perspective.

We were not fighting a new enemy, and they were not suddenly all that powerful. Al-Qaeda has been at war with us for over 20 years. They’ve made dozens of attempts to bring down the World Trade Center. They planned Millennium attacks, to simultaneously blow up 12 passenger planes over the Atlantic, and probably hundreds more attacks the public doesn’t know about.

2001 was not a banner year for them. They didn’t recruit a new evil genius to lead them, they didn’t increase their dedication to our destruction, and they didn’t grow in numbers by any significant amount.

The only difference was that after 20 years, one of their plans finally, unequivocally, worked.

Well, give Ray Charles 200 darts and stick him in front of a dartboard, and even he will eventually hit the bull’s-eye. Doesn’t mean he can see.

They were willing to die to do us some damage. They were bound to succeed eventually. It was a question of time. And as spectacular as their success was, over 35,000 people die every year on our highways, 100,000 people from smoking. After 20 years of passionate hatred of our country, and a total commitment to destroying us, they have had only one major success, taking a total of 2,000 American lives. This suggests to me that they aren’t the threat we think they are.

Yes, there were failures on our end. Yes, the system could be improved. Improving inter-agency communication, reinforcing cockpit doors, and allowing for fuel dumps mid-air would all prevent the same thing from happening again. But an overhaul of a system which by all appearances has been working quite well seems to defy common sense, as did the assumption that we’d have to lose freedoms and weaken our moral positions to protect ourselves.

The Germans honestly believed that they were liberating Poland. Pinochet believed that the best way to protect his country was to silence dissidents who made his job harder, and to attack countries before they could attack him. Just as each murderer in jail believes himself innocent, that his crimes were justified and not as heinous as his cell mate’s, so do nations.

We should understand crime and punishment. Russia, the former record holder for the greatest percentage of its population in prison at 6%, has lost that title. With just over 7% of its population in prison, the US, the “Land of the Free” holds the world record for the percentage of its own people in jail (beating out China).

For the first time in history, we have changed from an enlightened policy of retaliation to the imperial policy of preemptive strikes against countries which might be a threat- acting in self defense by striking first.

We have used White Phosphorus, which we classified as a chemical weapon when used by other countries, in the war in Iraq (and, after using it, re-classified it as a conventional weapon).

We are rounding up suspects in Iraq1 and Afghanistan2(including known U.S. allies3) who are detained, sometimes for years, tortured4 and raped5, then released without charges. Human Rights Watch has called Abu Ghraib the “Tip of the Iceberg”6, and calls it a fair sampling of treatment which occurs, to this day, in 25 U.S. detention centers7 across Iraq. By the Army’s own accounting, a minimum of 28 to 31 detainees8 are suspected to have been murdered9 by U.S. officials while in custody (only one of them in Abu Ghraib). These murders are routinely listed as deaths by “natural causes”10. In some cases, prisoners who are released and speak out about what they experienced in U.S. custody have disappeared11.

The Red Cross estimates that 60-90% of the people currently detained by the U.S. are held by mistake.

According to our own military personnel, children as young as 10 are being captured, raped and tortured by the United States12. Labeled as “Internees”, they are held indefinitely, without notification of their families, and are denied access to the International Red Cross. It has become common practice for the U.S. Military to detain the families of suspects so that they may be used as leverage. In one case, the ACLU believes a tape exists of a 14-year-old boy being raped in front of his father to elicit a confession. Though ordered by a U.S. Court, the government refuses to turn over the tape on the grounds that to do so would humiliate the boy, and thus violate the Geneva Convention13.

The United States refuses to cooperate with UNICEF in regard to its child prisoners, and routinely denies medical access to prisoners from the International Red Cross. Amnesty International14 has called Guantanamo Bay “the gulag of our time”15.

It should be noted that Iraq does not present a security risk to the United States, nor was it involved in the 9/11 attacks. It should also be noted that the evidence that torture doesn’t work is overwhelming. People being tortured (both guilty and innocent) simply lie- make up stuff, to get the torture to stop.

Vice President Dick Cheney has said that, in the finest American tradition16, prisoners are being treated better than they would be by “virtually any other government on the face of the earth”17. He is also currently lobbying congress to legalize human rights abuses18 by the United States.

We have more classified documents, unreviewed by civilian authorities, than at any other time in history, including the Cold War and the McCarthy Era.

The Patriot Act appears to be being actively being used against U.S. citizens who are not thought to be, or even associated with, terrorists. Of the over 400 convictions brought about by the Patriot Act, only 39 of the people convicted were convicted of terrorism19, and of those the average sentence was 11 months. The Patriot Act requires judges to grant FBI warrants, with no oversight, if the FBI simply clams that it is part of a foreign intelligence investigation20. It also empowers the government to declare any US citizen a “Material Witness”, a status which allows indefinite detainment, and denies the detainee the right to counsel and a preliminary hearing21. It makes no requirement to notify friends, family, or any civilian organization of a person’s detainment.

In at least one case, a newspaper reporting these facts appears to have had it story misrepresented by, and the target of, the Department of Justice22.

We have gone from being a country so bored with our everyday lives that we impeached our own President for possibly lying under oath in a civil suit (a misdemeanor, by the way) based on the testimony of a single person…

… to a country that watches phenomenal amounts of evidence pile up that multiple members of this administration (including the President23) have lied before congress (a felony, by the way), deliberately violated the Geneva Convention and international law, endorsed and authorized war crimes24, and ruled over a period in which, for the first time in history, America has been denounced by every major human rights organization in the world 25.

All of this is printed every day in newspapers, and that I can tell, few people have noticed.

The difference between the two (investigating a president for possibly lying about sex, and forgiving a president who may be guilty of multiple felonies) is simple. It is a single flashbulb event.

Footnotes:
  1. Tanner, A. (2005, January 12). Iraqi Victim Says U.S. Torture Worse Than Saddam. Reuters [↩]
  2. Sheed, J. (2005, March 21). Guantanamo Abuse ‘Videotaped’. The Australian [↩]
  3. Bahrain royal family member tortured at Guantanamo prison camp. (2005, August 10). Associated Press [↩]
  4. White, J. (2005, August 3). Documents Tell of Brutal Improvisation by GIs. Washington Post, p.A01. [↩]
  5. Buncombe, A. & Morris, N. (2004, August 4). Shocking prisoner abuses are revealed. The Independent [↩]
  6. Simpson, I. (2005, April 17). Rights Group: Abu Ghraib Abuses ‘Tip of Iceberg’. Reuters [↩]
  7. Croke, L. A (2004, September 24). Torture and Rape Rampant in Iraq Prisons. The New Standard [↩]
  8. Jehi, D. (2005, March 26). Pentagon Will Not Try 17 GI’s Implicated in Prisoners’ Deaths. The New York Times [↩]
  9. Jehi, D. & Schmitt, E. (2005, March 16). U.S. Military Says 26 Inmate Deaths May Be Homicide. The New York Times [↩]
  10. U.S. Operatives Killed Detainees During Interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq. (2005, October 24). ACLU [↩]
  11. Harding, L. (2004, May 12). Focus shifts to jail abuse of women. The Guardian [↩]
  12. http://www.sundayherald.com/43796 [↩]
  13. ACLU Blames Gov’t for Abu Ghraib Delay. (2005, July 22). Associated Press [↩]
  14. Rights group leader says U.S. has secret jails. (2005, June 6). CNN [↩]
  15. Cohn, M. (2005, June 16). Bush Plays Politics with Guantánamo “Gulag”. Truthout [↩]
  16. Patterns of Abuse. (2005, May 23). The New York Times Editorial [↩]
  17. Lewis, A. (2005, June 21). Guantánamo’s Long Shadow. The New York Times [↩]
  18. Vice President for Torture. (2005, October 26). The Washington Post [↩]
  19. Myths and Realities About the Patriot Act. ACLU, [↩]
  20. See Above [↩]
  21. See Above [↩]
  22. The Editor, (2005, December 5). Washington Post’s Response to DOJ Patriot Act Letter. The Washington Post [↩]
  23. FBI E-Mail Refers to Presidential Order Authorizing Inhumane Interrogation Techniques. ACLU [↩]
  24. The Pinochet Principle: Bush Defends Torture in the Name of National Security. (2004, June 9). Democracy Now [↩]
  25. Lobe, J. (2005, May 26). Give Rumsfeld the Pinochet Treatment, Says US Amnesty Chief. International Press Service [↩]

10.03.05

Essay: Dia de la Resistencia Indigena

Posted in Christopher Columbus, History at 1:37 pm by Nick Soutter

Exactly one week from today is Columbus Day.

For many Native Americans, the name Columbus is synonymous with Adolph Hitler. For many Italian-Americans, the name is synonymous with Neil Armstrong. The remaining 95% of Americans are vastly unaware of the bitter feud between them, and simply think of him as the man who discovered America. None of these is particularly accurate.

Many Italian Americans take great offense at charges of genocide and rape levied against Columbus. They consider him a symbol of their national pride and heritage. All of that would make sense, if Columbus had in fact been Italian. Nobody is quite sure where he was from, but Italy is about the least likely. The strongest evidence suggests that his real name was Salvador Fernandez Zarco, that he was born in Portugal in a town after which he would eventually name one of the islands he discovered… Cuba.

Whoever he was, there were no significant records of him before the 1470’s. Columbus took great pains to hide his true identity, and whatever his name was, he may have found the “New World,” but he did not discover America.

The first people to discover the Americas were of course, the Native Americans. Their decedents likely walked here from eastern Siberia, some 14,000 years ago on the land bridge of Beringia. As the Ice Age ended, the ocean level rose, giving us the world as we know it today. Beringia was submerged, the British Isles trimmed from the European mainland, and Borneo, Sumatra, and Java were cut off from the Asian mainland.

Inaccessible to Europe and Asia except by boat, America was “lost” until re-discovered Leifur Eiriksson, a Viking explorer (and the first European to find the continent). The Vikings settled a colony in Nova Scotia, L’Anse aux Medows, roughly 500 years before Columbus was even born. The settlement didn’t survive very long, and the Vikings then apparently “misplaced” North America, and promptly forgot about it.

Columbus was next, and he never discovered the mainland. In an attempt to sail around the globe to Asia, he traversed the vast ocean and completely missed the continents of North and South America, landing on the only land between America and Spain… the Bahamas. The odds of that are astonishing. Missing the continents themselves for a few tiny islands was like looking for a haystack and coming up with a needle instead.

He named the islands the “Indies”, and made a total of four trips there. In his life, he never saw North America, and went to South America only on his third trip in 1498, by which time North and South America had already been discovered and explored by another man… Amerigo Vespucci. Vespucci found the mainland on April 10, 1497, more than a year before Columbus did. Having correctly calculated the circumference of the earth, Vespucci also recognized the land for what it was, a new continent, and named it “America.”

Contrary to popular belief, it was well understood at the time that the world was round. The only question was, how big was it? The land route to Asia was dangerous, and controlled by the Turks. A sea route would be safer and faster, if Asia were close enough. But boats could only go about 40-45 days without re-supplying, so they couldn’t explore further than about 20 days out (needing half their supplies to get back).

Columbus’ calculations put Asia about 24-28 days away, and he was literally willing to bet his life on it. He was given three ships and was charged with bringing back gold from Asia. In return he would get 10% of the profits, governorship over any new lands, and the title of Admiral.

30 days later, they had not found Asia, and the crew was understandably restless. Though there was a reward (10,000 maravedias a year for life) for the first person to spot land, they were also desperate for supplies. Three days later, a sailor spotted one of the Caribbean islands. This caused considerable jubilation, after which Columbus claimed that he had actually seen it the night before (though he failed to mention it), and took the reward.

Arriving in the Caribbean, Columbus named the land the “Indies”, and the natives he found “Indians”. “I showed them my sword,” he wrote in his journal, “they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance… With fifty men we could subjugate them all.”1

Many of the natives wore gold jewelry, suggesting to him that gold was plentiful. He enslaved what natives he could, and demanded they take him to the gold. He was led to Haiti and Cuba, but found little of interest. So he loaded his ships with native slaves and returned to Spain.

While the slaves had value, it was small compared to the gold that had been expected. He knew that he could not get a second trip without the promise of a considerable return on Spain’s investment. So he lied, claiming that most of the mountains and rivers he had seen contained vast quantities gold. He was given 17 ships for a second trip.

He was also given explicit instructions by the King and Queen of Spain to maintain friendly relations with the natives (in the hopes of later converting them to Christians). He was there for gold, spices, and silks, not for slaves.

His second trip to the Indies was as fruitless as the first. He ordered all natives over the age of 14 to collect a weekly quota of gold. Any person not meeting his quota would have his hands cut off. Knowing there wasn’t nearly enough gold to make the quotas, the Native Americans fled. Columbus had them hunted down and mutilated for their betrayal. So ferocious were the Spaniards that suicide by poison became preferable to many of the natives. 110,000 of them were slaughtered in just two years, wiping out the entire population on several islands.

Columbus then established a fort in Hispaniola and captured 1600 Arawk “Indians”. Most were kept there and used as slaves. Women and children were raped, and Columbus himself wrote in his journal of using slaves for sex and sword practice. He took 550 of the slaves back with him to Spain. Half of them died on the trip there. Spain, surprisingly, did not consider enslavement within the bounds of “friendly relations,” and freed the surviving slaves.

Even more surprisingly, he was given 6 ships for a third trip. The priest Bartolome de Las Casas was instructed to go with him and keep an eye on him. Bartolome would later publish “A short account of the destruction of the Indies” based on what he saw. He wrote that “from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines.”

When Columbus arrived for the third time, he found his fort in near rebellion. While he was away it had become clear to them that the gold Columbus had described to get his second trip did not exist. Faced with mutiny, he began hanging his own men. Finally, he was arrested, striped of his governorship, had his profit sharing deal with Spain revoked, and was sent home in shackles.

Columbus was insulted by suggestions he had found a “New World.” He died vehemently opposing the increasingly popular idea, believing instead that his calculations had been correct, that had found Asia, and that Amerigo Vespucci’s “America” was simply the Asian mainland.

As the governor of the Indies, he was responsible for what many historians consider to be genocide. Bartolome’s figures are likely highly inaccurate- 500,000 being a more realistic number. Does this put Columbus in the same league as Hitler? No. But we are talking the same ball game. One is forced to wonder how many Native Americans would have died had Columbus had Hitler’s technology, had Spain not arrested Columbus, or had there been more people to kill.

Many Native Americans find the name “Indian” offensive. It was the name Columbus gave them. Columbus Day became a national holiday in 1971, though in some South American countries it is called the “Day of Indigenous Resistance” and is a day of mourning.

Footnotes:
  1. Zinn, H. (1999). A Peoples History of the United States. New York: HarperCollins. [↩]

09.30.05

Essay: Three Months at N2

Posted in History, Japan's Nuclear Weapons Program, WWII, War at 8:09 am by Nick Soutter

Last month was the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, once again begging the question… Should we have dropped the bomb?

A rough timeline outlining the 1945 bombing is as follows:

July 16th: Trinity Test - first successful atomic bomb test.

August 6th: Hiroshima bombing. 100,000 people killed instantly.

August 9th: Nagasaki bombing. 80,000 people killed instantly.

August 9th: USSR declares war on Japan.

August 14th: Japan surrenders / fighting stops.

September 2nd: USA officially accepts the surrender of Japan.

It is often suggested, knowing that the USSR was going to enter the war, and that Japan could not possibly defeat both enemies, that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks were un-necessary. There are, however, some problems with that line of reasoning.

The Samurai code had had a strong cultural influence on the Japanese. They had often claimed that to them, dying was preferable to losing the war. What we had seen while taking Okinawa bore that out. The Japanese had begun loading Kamikaze (suicide) planes with explosives and ramming them into the US fleet, and the fighting on land had been the fiercest yet of the entire war.

The fact that the Japanese ultimately surrendered might seem to be proof that death was not in fact preferable. This is a common error in logic. The truth is that even at the moment of surrender, the Japanese likely still would rather have died than loose.

But dying to prevent losing the war was not an option they had. By August 10th it was likely quite clear that they were going to loose. The choice they had was to loose and live, or loose and die. The fact that they were prepared to die to avert loosing was no longer sufficient. Losing had become inevitable.

It appears likely that they would not have surrendered until victory was truly beyond all hope.

Based on the experience in Okinawa, and given the sacrifices the Japanese were willing to make, conservative estimates suggested that taking the Japanese mainland would cost the lives of 250,000 US troops, 3 Million Japanese troops, and 1 Million Japanese civilians (who had thrown themselves from cliffs rather than be captured).

Roughly 38 Million people had already lost their lives in World War II. The idea of decisively ending the war at a cost of 200,000 enemy lives probably seemed reasonable.

One must also remember that it was a war. Gambling 250,000 American lives on whether or not Japan would surrender when the USSR entered the war would not be particularly good war planning. Not finishing off an enemy because you assume that they will surrender isn’t so smart either. Such assumptions have lost many a country many a war. The Japanese were an industrious people, and assuming they were finished before it was true could have been a huge mistake.

In fact, there is considerable evidence that it would have been a mistake, that the Japanese did have hopes of beating the combined forces of the USA and USSR. Though it seems impossible, there was one way they thought they could…

With nuclear weapons…

A little known fact (even after being published by the AP and the Japan Times1) is that the Japanese had two active nuclear weapons programs in 1945, with the goal of developing a 20kT bomb nearly 40% larger than the Hiroshima device.

The first program was started by the army in the spring of 1941, and was based in the Rikin Laboratory in Tokyo. Though progress was steady (and possibly assisted in by a US spy from Los Alamos) they suffered continual supply problems. They had hoped to solve these problems with 560kg of uranium from Germany2, but the sub carrying the shipment was seized by the Americans before it could get to Japan. The program finally ended in failure when the Rikin lab was destroyed in the fire-bombing of Tokyo on April 14th, 1945.

However the second program, run by the Japanese Navy3, had considerably greater success. Anticipating the possibility of bombing in Tokyo, the project was halted for three months and moved to the N2 lab in Japanese occupied North Korea, where bombing was less likely, and labor and uranium were more plentiful.

On August 12, 1945, the Japanese detonated a nuclear blast off of the coast of Konan4, less than a month after the US Trinity test. Japan had become a nuclear power just two days before it surrendered.

On August 5th, the Japanese plan to win the war was not unreasonable5. It would take one to three months to make nuclear weapons which could be deployed in the field. They would hold off the invasion of the mainland while they made two bombs. They would then detonate one in the middle of the US Pacific fleet and one in San Francisco. To that end they had built a submarine, which could hold and launch aircraft, to carry a plane and the bomb to the United States. With the US Fleet gone, they would have enough time to make dozens of nuclear bombs.

However, after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it became clear to them that despite the successful nuclear test, by the time they built a deployable nuclear weapon, there would be no Japan left to defend. The US had won a nuclear race it didn’t even know it was in.

Had the moving of the N2 lab taken less than three months (or had the US not attacked Hiroshima and Nagasaki), it is quite possible that Japan would have successfully built and deployed two or more nuclear weapons against the United States. We would likely still have won the war (by all accounts we had more uranium and could build bombs faster than they could), but not without our own deployments. The result would be a nuclear war with a total of 5-8 deployments before the Japanese surrender.

Truman had no idea that the Japanese even had a nuclear weapons program. Fortunately, however, he didn’t take the risk.

Footnotes:
  1. Hall, K. (2003, March 7). Wartime Documents Set Record Straight. The Japan Times [↩]
  2. Benke, R. (1997, June 1). New Evidence Tracks Japan’s Efforts to Create Atomic Bomb. ASSOCIATED PRESS [↩]
  3. Physics Daily [↩]
  4. Snell, D. (1946, October 2). Japan Developed Atom Bomb; Russia Grabbed Scientists. The Atlanta Constitution [↩]
  5. Japan’s Atomic Bomb [↩]

« Previous entries