#mark danner

[irwonder]

Drones appear seductively low-cost and low-risk: no pilots are shot down and captured, relatively few civilians are killed, the American public cares little and thus the political cost seems negligable. And yet they are a stopgap measure, at best disrupting attacks at the cost of nourishing and expanding the movement itself. Relying on them implies an inherent movement toward expansion: applied narrowly at first to address specific threats, they grow addictive, becoming the go-to short-term method for dealing with groups that pose much more diffuse political problems to policymakers. The more drones are used, the more they are needed. Killing enemies and creating more, killing and creating more, they are deadly perpetual motion machines, prime symbolic instruments of permanent war.

Mark Danner, Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War

[irwonder]

Guantánamo, insists the president [Barack Obama], is not who we are. Yet Americans go on imprisoning without trial nearly a hundred detainees there. Torture, says the president, is not who we are. And yet he punishes not one for having tortured, contenting himself with the thought that 'hopefully, we don't do it again in the future.' Indefinite detention, torture, targeted assasination: all of these are not who we are. And yet they are what we do.

Mark Danner, Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War

[redshift-13]

One of the most interesting articles I read in 2023 was Mark Danner's "The Grievance Artist" in the Nov. 2 New York Review of Books, a review of several books by Trump insiders.

nybooks.com/articles/2023/11/02/the-grievance-artist-trump-mark-danner/

The following quote is from former senior official in the Department of Homeland Security Miles Taylor, from his book Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump:

word came down from the White House…to stop providing the president with lengthy documents. If there was a staple in it, the briefing paper was probably too long and needed to be cut. Fifteen-page updates on complex issues were chopped down to one. Bold fonts. Simple words. BIG pictures. Know your audience, they say, and the “audience of one” (as we called the president) had the temperament of a child, albeit a child with a finger lingering over the nuclear button.

Contrast that with reports of Obama and Clinton, both apparently vigorous and omnivorous readers.

It's no surprise then that a mind like Trump's, averse to reading and reflection, would wind up so often helplessly flailing when his impulsive fantasies met roadblocks. Here's a more extensive quote from the article:

"How to explain that the border and its influx of undocumented immigrants is a bitingly complex problem, springing from global economic realities and the impositions of American and international law and the bitter bottlenecks of domestic politics, to someone who simply is unable to absorb it? Who seems able to listen only to himself? Taylor describes these encounters vividly:

The president went back to his greatest hits—“a big, big border wall!” “cut off the cash!” “screw the Mexicans!”—and we sat there listening to the diatribe that had begun to sound like a Broadway sing-a-long from hell. We left without any clear direction…. Two days later, on March 19, he did the song and dance for us again. The Oval Office meeting was supposed to be about combating opioid addiction…[but] Trump steered the briefing to his favorite subject. He ran through his list of cruelly imaginative immigration policies once more.

Between meetings, Taylor and administration colleagues compare notes about the “pretty crazy shit” Trump had just spouted, speculating darkly on the president’s mental health. But he always manages to top the last performance, as in this phone call Taylor sat in on with Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen:

“Kiiiirstjen,” he said in his distinctive New York accent. “I can’t believe what I am seeing at the border.” The president…wanted to talk about creative options…. He had an idea: “a big, deep moat.” She muted the line. “Did he just say what I think he said?” “I want you to figure out how deep you can dig it, okay Kirstjen?” Trump proposed filling the moat with “snakes and alligators” to eat people alive if they fell into it. “How much would this cost, honey?” She unmuted. “We’ll look into it, Mr. President.” He kept pressing the point until she assured him again we’d get back to the White House. He wasn’t joking, and we weren’t laughing anymore. The call derailed the morning as DHS cobbled together a back-of-the-envelope estimate for digging a border-long ditch and filling it with snakes and alligators.

A moat with snakes and alligators along a nearly 2,000 mile long border. It sounds like the addled machinations of a tyrannical fairy tale King in the throes of madness.

Needless to say, the people who need to hear about these offstage Trumpian dramas the most never will, ensconced as so many of them are in cultish information bubbles. Worse, even if they did hear, it probably wouldn't matter.

Consider by contrast to Trump's ravings the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE). Here's from the fourth book of his Meditations, with this writing chosen almost at random:

X. These two rules, thou must have always in a readiness. First, do nothing at all, but what reason proceeding from that regal and supreme part, shall for the good and benefit of men, suggest unto thee. And secondly, if any man that is present shall be able to rectify thee or to turn thee from some erroneous persuasion, that thou be always ready to change thy mind, and this change to proceed, not from any respect of any pleasure or credit thereon depending, but always from some probable apparent ground of justice, or of some public good thereby to be furthered; or from some other such inducement.

Downward and upward the ages.

[gafyorordo881371-blog]

history of audiobooks : Spiral by Mark Danner | Politics

Listen to Spiral new releases history of audiobooks on your iPhone, iPad, or Android. Get any BOOKS AUDIO by Mark Danner Politics FREE during your Free Trial

Written By: Mark Danner Narrated By: Tom Zingarelli Publisher: Tantor Media Date: June 2016 Duration: 5 hours 38 minutes

[irwonder]

Meantime the permanent politics of fear makes the country uniquely vulnerable to the very terrorism it means to combat. A vast counterterror apparatus has arisen that serves to magnify the importance of each terrorist attempt, and politicians and the press do their part to multiply the fear. Only in the post–September 11 era would it have been conceivable for two young men using nothing more than two homemade pressure-cooker bombs to shut down the city of Boston or for an anonymous troublemaker with a "crudely written email threat" to close the entire Los Angeles school system. In our fear and anxiety we have become a highly tuned instrument, taut and tense, ever ready for terrorists to play upon. We have fallen into a self-defeating spiral of reaction and counterterror. Our policies, meant to extirpate our enemies, have strengthened and perpetuated them.

Mark Danner, Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War

[shortbookreviews]

The Massacre at El Mozote is a book about the confusing nature of terror, the complex means by which people invite other people to their doom, and the conflicting reactions of the doomed and damaged. I first read the original version of this book when it filled an entire issue of The New Yorker in 1993. In the waiting room of my therapist’s office, appropriately. This is not a book that requires my endorsement. It is a book that is already necessary. A book that will remain necessary, always.

[expletive-avoidance]

‘ “Stop the [expletive] praying,” he said loudly.’

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/books/review/guantanamo-diary-by-mohamedou-ould-slahi.html

[jameshupp]

The gloves came off: four simple words. And yet they express a complicated thought. For if the gloves must come off, that means that before the attacks the gloves were on. There is something implicitly exculpatory in the image, something that made it particularly appealing to officials of an administration that endured, on its watch, the most lethal terrorist attack in the country’s history. If the attack succeeded, it must have had to do not with the fact that intelligence was not passed on or that warnings were not heeded or that senior officials did not focus on terrorism as a leading threat. It must have been, at least in part, because the gloves were on—because the post-Watergate reforms of the 1970s, in which Congress sought to put limits on the CIA, on its freedom to mount covert actions with “deniability” and to conduct surveillance at home and abroad, had illegitimately circumscribed the President’s power and thereby put the country dangerously at risk. It is no accident that two of the administration’s most powerful officials, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, served as young men in very senior positions in the Nixon and Ford administrations. They had witnessed firsthand the gloves going on and, in the weeks after the September 11 attacks, they argued powerfully that it was those limitations—and, it was implied, not a failure to heed warnings—that had helped lead, however indirectly, to the country’s vulnerability to attack.

Mark Danner, "US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites"

Never underestimate how far people are willing to go to rationalize why horrible things that might be their fault could not possibly be their fault and, moreover, are clearly the fault of someone else whom they are predisposed to dislike.