Circling the Roundabout

Wikipedia defines a roundabout as a "circular junction." Consider this one focusing on politics, international affairs, the national security state, journalism, technology & science, environment, economics and other amazing ephemera from around the internet. Come for the cerebral. Stay for the cat pictures.

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The tumblin’ life is over for me...

After some mental back n’ forth over whether or not to return to these here tumblin’ hills to post stories and whatnot, I have decided to cease all further activity on this blog. The archive will still exist, but for all intents and purposes this one needs to be done. It was a great five (or so) years, and I really enjoy the time spent here and the people I got to connect with in that time. That all being said, a life lived detached from what’s going on in the world is not for me. I am going to try and slowly pick up the article posting on Twitter. This is extremely ironic as I started this tumblr because I felt Twitter was too limited a space for posting excerpts of stories and my thoughts on them. How things change. Anyway, if you’d like to follow me over there my Twitter handle is @John_A_W Some other ways to check out my work: my Facebook Author page and my website.

And thanks to everyone who followed my stuff over the years. Tumblr still rocks as a platform, and I hope it continues to blossom as an amazing platform for news, art, writing, and everything else under the sun. Farewell.

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Where the heck have I been?

To those few hundred people who might have gotten used to seeing my article posts (and occasional essays and/or rants), you may be wondering why I seem to have dropped off the face of tumblr these past months. This is my attempt to sum up the latter half of a crazy year.

For one thing, I got laid off this summer. That meant I no longer had a cushy office job where I sat in front of a computer all day and could take a gander through all the wonderful tumbl-y things to be found on this here social media site. This led to a month of unemployment and general soul-searching on my behalf, looking into new types of work and also affirming my status as a full-time writer. I started writing about what I was going through on my website (which you can find here) and also began a series of posts for others out there who want to give this writing thing a shot.

I ended up finding work at a used bookstore run by a company whose values I actually believe in for the most part, and after the initial two-month training period I can do most anything around the place. This also helped force some more clarity into my life about just what kind of writer I want to be and where I might find my niche.

What else happened? My wife and I moved into a much better (and older) apartment. I launched my second novel, a supernatural thriller entitled Last Man on Campus. I did a series of book signings and readings that are going to finally wrap up next week. If you’d like to check out some more information about the novel (or my first one, Our Senior Year) click here to visit my “Books” page - you can also find links to purchase if you’re so inclined.

On the journalism front, I published my first long-form investigation on mental health for the local news website MinnyApple; check out part 1 here and part 2 here if you have interest, and feel free to share it far and wide, especially to those people you may know who struggle with such issues as bi-polar disorder.

To sum up: life intervened, and I suddenly found myself with very little time for the arguments of the interwebs, as fun and short-lived as they may be. I still enjoy reading long-form articles and am wrapping up a stunning book on the “War on Terror” by Jeremy Scahill entitled Dirty Wars, but for the most part I just don’t have time to post articles as I did. So to those who liked my posts and re-blogged them: thank you. I’m not completely done with politics as we obviously are entering a huge election year, but probably won’t be posting much on that stuff here. I’m planning on taking a big step back from journalism and world affairs in 2016 to focus on my fiction writing, with the hopes of finishing my third novel and publishing a few short stories in some literary journals.

What does this all mean? I’m not completely giving up on tumblr, as I feel it’s a great resource and social media spot, and an excellent place to find things to read and think about. Circling the Roundabout will still exist, and you can always check out my archive going back to 2011. You just won’t see many new posts over the next year.

A place you can find my current stuff, however, will be my website: johnabrahamwatne.com. Here you can find my blog, which is my new “official” place to write online, and links to my books and journalism. Feel free to peruse that once in a while to stay updated on my world, if’n you care.

And to everyone on tumblr who has enjoyed my work: thanks for reading and clicking. Here’s wishing everyone a great 2016.

jA_W

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Outside Psychologists Shielded U.S. Torture Program, Report Finds | The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency’s health professionals repeatedly criticized the agency’s post-Sept. 11 interrogation program, but their protests were rebuffed by prominent outside psychologists who lent credibility to the program, according to a new report.

The 542-page report, which examines the involvement of the nation’s psychologists and their largest professional organization, the American Psychological Association, with the harsh interrogation programs of the Bush era, raises repeated questions about the collaboration between psychologists and officials at both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon.

The report, completed this month, concludes that some of the association’s top officials, including its ethics director, sought to curry favor with Pentagon officials by seeking to keep the association’s ethics policies in line with the Defense Department’s interrogation policies, while several prominent outside psychologists took actions that aided the C.I.A.’s interrogation program and helped protect it from growing dissent inside the agency.

I have a lot of nonsense going on in my life right now so posting to the tumblr will be intermittent. But this piece, by James Risen in the NYT, is too horrific to ignore. It turns out a report has surfaced detailing the many ethical lapses and problems in the dubious relationship between the American Psychological Association and the Department of Defense and CIA. The entire story is worth digesting, if you can keep your stomach down, but I wanted to point out one brief passage that blew me away:

But ethical concerns persisted at the C.I.A. In March 2004, other agency insiders emailed the psychological association to say they were worried that psychologists were assisting with interrogations in ways that contradicted the association’s ethics code.

One of those who contacted the association was Charles Morgan, a C.I.A. contractor and psychiatrist who had studied military personnel who went through the SERE program’s simulated torture training, research that showed that the techniques used on them could not be used to collect accurate information.

Unbelievable. They had evidence that this stupid reverse-engineered torture plan would not work, but carried on regardless. If you needed any more evidence to prove that elite institutions at all levels of American society are profoundly broken, this would be it.

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About

(image via Wikimedia Commons) My name is John Abraham-Watne. I am an author/journalist located in Minneapolis MN. I live near Lake Calhoun with my wife Mary and our two cats, Marble and Scout. My...

I updated some stuff on my “About” page (mostly re-arranging, adding my book website and including some new cat picturz). Check it out!

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SAN FRANCISCO — An elite group of code makers and code breakers is taking American and British intelligence and law enforcement agencies to task in a new paper that evaluates government proposals to maintain special access to encrypted digital communications.

On Tuesday, the group — 13 of the world’s pre-eminent cryptographers, computer scientists and security specialists — will release the paper, which concludes there is no viable technical solution that would allow the American and British governments to gain “exceptional access” to encrypted communications without putting the world’s most confidential data and critical infrastructure, in danger.

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CIA photos of ‘black sites’ could complicate Guantanamo trials | Washington Post

Military prosecutors this year learned about a massive cache of CIA photographs of its former overseas “black sites” while reviewing material collected for the Senate investigation of the agency’s interrogation program, U.S. officials said.

The existence of the approximately 14,000 photographs will probably cause yet another delay in the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as attorneys for the defendants demand that all the images be turned over and the government wades through the material to decide what it thinks is relevant to the proceedings.

Unbelievable. If/when these pictures get leaked, it will provide yet further evidence that our federal government was implicit in a massive torture regime (for which no one was ever held accountable).

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François Hollande holds emergency meeting after WikiLeaks claims US spied on three French presidents | The Guardian

The French president, François Hollande, is holding an emergency meeting of his country’s defence council after claims that American agents spied on three successive French presidents between 2006 and 2012. According to WikiLeaks documents published late on Tuesday, even the French leaders’ mobile phone conversations were listened to and recorded.

The leaked US documents, marked “top secret”, were based on phone taps and filed in an NSA document labelled “Espionnage Elysée” (Elysée Spy), according to the newspaper Libération and investigative news website Mediapart. The US was listening to the conversations of centre-right president Jacques Chirac, his successor Nicolas Sarkozy, and the current French leader, Socialist François Hollande, elected in 2012.

The recorded conversations, which were handled by the summary services unit at the NSA, were said to reveal few state secrets but show clear evidence of the extent of American spying on countries considered allies. WikiLeaks documents suggest that other US spy targets included French cabinet ministers and the French ambassador to the United States

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Documents on 2012 Drone Strike Detail How Terrorists Are Targeted | The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Early in 2012, worried that suicide bombers might pass through airline security undetected, American counterterrorism officials ordered a drone strike in Yemen to kill a doctor they believed was working with Al Qaeda to surgically implant explosives in operatives, according to British intelligence documents.

The documents, previously undisclosed, include details about how terrorism suspects are targeted in drone strikes and how strikes can go wrong at times. The documents also show how closely the National Security Agency has worked in Pakistan and Yemen with its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, or G.C.H.Q.

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Al Qaida leader’s death renews debate: Do targeted killings make a difference? | McClatchy

WASHINGTON — The death in a U.S. drone attack of al Qaida’s Yemen-based second in command, coupled with the possible killing of a top extremist in Libya in a similar strike, has added fresh fuel to the debate among U.S. officials and terrorism experts about the impact of the targeted killings of extremist leaders.

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As Stress Drives Off Drone Operators, Air Force Must Cut Flights | The New York Times

“Having our folks make that mental shift every day, driving into the gate and thinking, ‘All right, I’ve got my war face on, and I’m going to the fight,’ and then driving out of the gate and stopping at Walmart to pick up a carton of milk or going to the soccer game on the way home — and the fact that you can’t talk about most of what you do at home — all those stressors together are what is putting pressure on the family, putting pressure on the airman,” Colonel Cluff said.

While most of the pilots and camera operators feel comfortable killing insurgents who are threatening American troops, interviews with about 100 pilots and sensor operators for an internal study that has not yet been released, he added, found that the fear of occasionally causing civilian casualties was another major cause of stress, even more than seeing the gory aftermath of the missile strikes in general.

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Obama lawyers asked secret court to ignore public court's decision on spying | The Guardian

The Obama administration has asked a secret surveillance court to ignore a federal court that found bulk surveillance illegal and to once again grant the National Security Agency the power to collect the phone records of millions of Americans for six months.

The legal request, filed nearly four hours after Barack Obama vowed to sign a new law banning precisely the bulk collection he asks the secret court to approve, also suggests that the administration may not necessarily comply with any potential court order demanding that the collection stop.

US officials confirmed last week that they would ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court – better known as the Fisa court, a panel that meets in secret as a step in the surveillance process and thus far has only ever had the government argue before it – to turn the domestic bulk collection spigot back on.

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Conor Friedersdorf: Congress Didn't Notice the FBI Creating a 'Small Air Force' for Surveillance | The Atlantic

What’s already clear, however, is the anti-democratic nature of keeping it hidden all these years. The U.S. is supposed to be governed by the people. Whether Americans want a federal law-enforcement agency using planes to conduct surveillance on vast swaths of the country is a question properly aired and debated.

It is for Americans to choose.

Instead, an executive branch that has grown alarmingly powerful since the September 11 terrorist attacks, or perhaps even before, imposed its preferred policy in secret. The vast majority of Americans were completely unaware of its choice.

This made voter accountability on the issue impossible.

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A U.S.-educated captive at Guantánamo who has pleaded guilty to being an al-Qaida money courier has told his attorneys he was twice waterboarded by CIA agents, something not previously disclosed, according to his lawyers in a release Tuesday of once-censored torture allegations.

The attorneys for Majid Khan, 35, a 1999 Maryland high school graduate who is awaiting sentencing next year at Guantánamo, that he spent much of his 2003-06 CIA captivity in solitary confinement. The first year was spent in “total darkness,” he said. through much of the first year, denied sunlight.

Khan made the disclosures to his attorneys in private conversations, published accounts of which previously had been heavily redacted by the CIA. But the conversations were recently vetted anew under new rules for declassification in place after the release of portions of a Senate committee investigation into the CIA's secret overseas interrogation of suspected terrorists. Under the new rules, portions of Khan's statements were deemed acceptable for public release, and the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City released them Tuesday.

The center also called for the dismissal of CIA Director John Brennan. The CIA had no immediate comment.

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Edward Snowden: The World Says No to Surveillance | The New York Times

At the turning of the millennium, few imagined that citizens of developed democracies would soon be required to defend the concept of an open society against their own leaders.

Yet the balance of power is beginning to shift. We are witnessing the emergence of a post-terror generation, one that rejects a worldview defined by a singular tragedy. For the first time since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we see the outline of a politics that turns away from reaction and fear in favor of resilience and reason. With each court victory, with every change in the law, we demonstrate facts are more convincing than fear. As a society, we rediscover that the value of a right is not in what it hides, but in what it protects.

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Seumas Milne - Now the truth emerges: how the US fuelled the rise of Isis in Syria and Iraq | The Guardian

In reality, US and western policy in the conflagration that is now the Middle East is in the classic mould of imperial divide-and-rule. American forces bomb one set of rebels while backing another in Syria, and mount what are effectively joint military operations with Iran against Isis in Iraq while supporting Saudi Arabia’s military campaign against Iranian-backed Houthi forces in Yemen. However confused US policy may often be, a weak, partitioned Iraq and Syria fit such an approach perfectly.

What’s clear is that Isis and its monstrosities won’t be defeated by the same powers that brought it to Iraq and Syria in the first place, or whose open and covert war-making has fostered it in the years since. Endless western military interventions in the Middle East have brought only destruction and division. It’s the people of the region who can cure this disease – not those who incubated the virus.

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New Snowden Documents Reveal Secret Memos Expanding Spying | ProPublica

Without public notice or debate, the Obama administration has expanded the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international Internet traffic to search for evidence of malicious computer hacking, according to classified NSA documents.

In mid-2012, Justice Department lawyers wrote two secret memos permitting the spy agency to begin hunting on Internet cables, without a warrant and on American soil, for data linked to computer intrusions originating abroad — including traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware, the documents show.

The Justice Department allowed the agency to monitor only addresses and “cybersignatures” — patterns associated with computer intrusions — that it could tie to foreign governments. But the documents also note that the NSA sought to target hackers even when it could not establish any links to foreign powers.

The disclosures, based on documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former NSA contractor, and shared with the New York Times and ProPublica, come at a time of unprecedented cyberattacks on American financial institutions, businesses and government agencies, but also of greater scrutiny of secret legal justifications for broader government surveillance.

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John Cassidy: It’s Time to Let Edward Snowden Come Home | The New Yorker

To repeat, none of this would have happened without Snowden’s intervention. Doubtless, the intelligence agencies are pressing the White House to stick to its hard line about prosecuting him, on the grounds that dropping the charges, or making some sort of plea bargain, would encourage other leakers. But that is a self-serving argument, and it doesn’t stand up to inspection. In a free society, we want whistle-blowers who have persuasive evidence that great wrongs are being carried out to come forward and tell us about them. The President has argued in the past that Snowden could have taken his concerns to his seniors, and that he would have been protected by an executive order affording protections to whistle-blowers in the intelligence agencies. The notion is risible. As the Times editorial board pointed out last year, the executive order that Obama was referring to didn’t even apply to government contractors like Snowden.

Americans understand that they live in a world that contains people and organizations intent on doing harm to the United States, and they are willing to grant the federal government some intrusive powers in order to protect the country and its citizenry. But they also want reassurance that the authorities aren’t monitoring the every move and communication of ordinary people who have nothing to do with terrorism or any other form of wrongdoing. In the words of the high-level panel of experts appointed by Obama, “Free nations must protect themselves, and nations that protect themselves must remain free.”