Author: Milan

The CIA holding out on the FBI before 9/11

The [redacted by the CIA] picture [of Khallad, alias of Walid bin Attash] had been in the CIA’s possession when Steve Bongardt and the Cole team had been shown the [redacted] three pictures on June 11, 2011. If it has been shown to the Cole team, Steve and the other agents would have identified the man in the picture as Khallad. We knew exactly what Khallad looked like from the Cole investigation. And if we had learned that the CIA had had a picture of Khallad in June 2001, and had been monitoring him, we would have gone straight to headquarters saying that the CIA had lied about not knowing about Khallad, and we would have demanded that they hand over the information.

If that had happened, at a minimum, Khalid al-Mindhar would not have been allowed to just walk into the United States on July 4, 2001, and Nawaf al-Hazmi, [Mohammed] Atta’s deputy, would have been arrested. At a minimum.

Soufan, Ali H. The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda. 2011. p. 296

There will be good things ahead

Now that the darkest part of the year has passed, I’m hopeful we’ll see something like what my Uncle Robert described in an email to me last year:

It seems sometimes like things plod along, yielding neither joy nor sorrow; and then suddenly an unexpected series of events, meetings, or conversations; a surge of energy and clarity; or just a darn good night’s sleep, something shifts and the heart fills, the mind opens, and one gets the feeling of something like epiphany. I hope you are experiencing this as often as possible!

There’s much to fear and much that needs to be changed about the world, but the future will also hold wonderful surprises which we’re completely unable to foresee now. I’ve often thought about some of the saddest times in my life and the feelings I might have had then of simply not wanting to experience the future. With hindsight, I can see now that so many of the things which I would now regard as the most rewarding and significant of my life came after those darkest days, and they would have had their potential expunged in the hopelessness of those moments.

The future will bring joy and sorrow, and eventually death, and we should cultivate a feeling of gratitude for being able to experience any of it: each of our brains an impossibly complex and unlikely combination of atoms and higher-order structures — from monomers, precursors, and bare inorganic ions to proteins, DNA, cellular organelles, and organs — as with the sensory organs and neurons through which our experiences occur.

Gearing up for school to resume

I didn’t go anywhere over the break, aside from a one night Christmas bus trip to Hamilton, because I wanted to use the time to advance my dissertation project. Important progress has been made on that front, with my committee now in agreement about what the chapters should be, which questions each should seek to answer, what my hypotheses are, and what evidence supports them. I wish I had gotten more done in terms of booking more interviews and transcribing handwritten notes from the ones that already happened, but at least with only one TA position this term I will have more time to devote to those tasks.

I have a stack of exams to grade before the term begins, which will have to be a big focus during the next few days, as distasteful and tedious an activity as it always is.

I’m excited that I’ve been given permission to audit Professor Diana Fu’s “Contentious Politics and Social Movements” course. That’s the main scholarly literature I am drawing upon in my analysis of the campus fossil fuel divestment movement in Canada so it will be great to learn more about it from an expert, go through some important readings on the subject, and discuss it all with some fellow students.

Open thread: climate lawsuits

People are making use of nearly every possible mechanism to try to cajole, convince, pressure, or force governments into adopting plans that are ambitious enough to avoid dangerous climate change.

One possible avenue of remedy is lawsuits, like when the Urgenda Foundation convinced a Dutch court to require the government to tighten its 2020 emission reduction target.

In October, The Economist reported:

The state of New York filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil, claiming that it misled investors about the risk that regulations on climate change posed to its business. The suit alleges that the oil company “built a façade to deceive” how it measured the risk and frequently did not apply the “proxy cost” of carbon, which accounts for expected future events, to its decisions.

There are attractive and unattractive features to using the courts. On the plus side, they may be more open to evidence than politicians, who are generally loathe to do anything that might threaten jobs or economic growth in the near term. The biggest limitation is probably the courts aren’t policy-makers and defer to legislatures to actually design government policy. Also, because both the causes and the effects of climate change are spread across space and time it’s impossible to say that emissions from source X caused consequence Y. Also, since the people harmed are all around the world and largely in the future there is no court that can hear petitions from all of them.

That said, there is cause for hope that lawsuits will be part of an effective path forward and a means to hold governments to account when they want to claim to be climate champions while simultaneously favouring and protecting emitting industries.

Related:

Open thread: ballistic missile defence

An episode involving missile defence* from the West Wing holds up very well today. The craggy old American chief of staff is in favour, out of fear of what rogue regimes might do to America. The British ambassador is opposed because it’s impractical, violates international law, and risks worsening the global nuclear weapons situation.

I can see why people like the idea of being able to stop a few missiles launched by North Korea or Iran, or by a rogue commander somewhere. At the same time, I think the dangers of a nuclear arms race make the development and deployment of such a system unwise, even if the major technological hurdles could be overcome. It’s the classic security dilemma: you build something meant to make you safer, potential opponents interpret it as making them less safe (by reducing the credibility of their deterrent) so they build expensive countermeasures. In the end, everyone has wasted money on the race and everyone ends up less safe. It could also tempt decision-makers into recklessness, based on false confidence that the system will nullify any response to their aggression.

We should be working to de-alert and dismantle the nuclear arsenals of the authorized nuclear powers under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Against that backdrop, resisting proliferation to new nuclear states would be more plausible.

* I don’t mean defending things like aircraft carriers from ballistic missiles. I mean systems to protect domestically-located military facilities and population centres from ballistic missile attack, probably with nuclear weapons.