The US Govt, Practically Writing My Thrillers For Me...

Here's an article I wrote for Salon -- Holy Smokes, This Stuff is All Real? How I Get My Best Thriller Ideas From the Good ol’ US Government.

Whenever people ask where I get ideas for my thrillers, I say, “Direct from the US government.”

They laugh, but it’s true—in a time of indefinite imprisonment without charge, trial, or conviction (“detention”); torture (“enhanced interrogation”); extrajudicial assassinations (“targeted killing”); and, of course, the unprecedented bulk surveillance revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, third-party villains like SMERSH and SPECTRE and the rest can feel a bit beside the point. Indeed, when the NSA, in its own leaked slides, announces its determination to “Collect it All,” “Process it All,” “Exploit it All,” “Partner it All,” “Sniff it All” and, ultimately, “Know it All,” it’s safe to say we’re living in an age of “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Does that claim sound extreme? Have a look at this National Reconnaissance Office mission patch. What is this Octopus doing to the earth?

Read the rest here.

Because Nothing Says "Freedom of Expression" Like Dominance by the Big Five

Joe Konrath and I have some fun over at his blog with the notion that “Big Five” dominance is better for freedom of expression than any author being able to publish any book for any reader. My portion here; the whole thing over at Joe’s blog…

* * * * *

I just learned about an event put on by an organization called New America (formerly The New America Foundation): Amazon’s Book Monopoly: A Threat to Freedom of Expression? Ordinarily, propaganda is something that concerns me, but when it veers this far off into parody, I sometimes welcome it as a comic diversion.

Because, come on, putting your tendentious conclusion right there in the title and disguising it as a question, while an impressively textbook instance of question-begging, in this context is also pretty funny. Because, “Hey, we’ve already established that Amazon is a monopoly; we’re just here to determine how much of a threat the company poses to Freedom and All That Is Good. Is it an existential threat, like Roger Cohen said about ISIS? Or merely an extremely threatening threat?”

And who knows, maybe they’ll answer the question, “No,” right? Maybe the panelists will decide that Amazon’s “book monopoly” is actually a benefit to freedom of expression, as monopolies often are. It’s not as though they’ve structured things so that the question answers itself, and I don’t know why anyone would suspect this panel might be anything other than a diverse collection of open-minded people honestly engaging in free inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge wherever the facts may lead!

Thanks to the efforts of serious-sounding organizations like New America (and if that vague but happy-sounding name didn’t cause your bullshit detector to at least tingle, it should—see also Americans for Prosperity and the Center for American Progress), this “Amazon is a Monopoly” silliness is so persistent that Joe and I dealt with it in our inaugural post on zombie memes—“arguments that just won’t die no matter how many times they’re massacred by logic and evidence.” Half the purpose of the Zombie Meme series is to save Joe and me from having to repeat ourselves, so if you want to have a laugh about why, despite its persistence, “Amazon is a Monopoly” is so embarrassingly dumb and misguided, here’s your link.

But here’s the amazing part: “Amazon is a monopoly” is actually the clever half of the event’s title. The really funny part is what follows: that Amazon poses a threat to freedom of expression!

As I said in a previous Techdirt guest post called Authors Guilded, United, and Representing…Not:

Given that Amazon’s self-publishing platform enables all authors to publish whatever they like and leaves it to readers to decide what books they themselves find beneficial, while the New York Big Five (no concentrated market power in a group with a name like that!) has historically rejected probably 999 books for every one they deem worthy of reaching the public, a few questions present themselves. Such as:

•                Who has really been “manipulating and supervising the sale of books and therefore affecting the exchange of ideas in America,” and who has really “established effective control of a medium of communication”—an entity that screens out 99.9% of books, or one that has enabled the publication of any book?

•                Who has really been running an uncompetitive, controlled, supervised, distorted market for books—a company dedicated to lower prices, or a group calling itself the Big Five that has been found guilty of conspiracy and price fixing?

•                Who is really restoring freedom of choice, competition, vitality, diversity, and free expression in the American book market—an entity that consigns to oblivion 999 books out of a thousand, or one that enables the publication of all of them?

•                And who is really ensuring that the American people determine for themselves how to take advantage of the new technologies of the 21st Century—an entity responsible for zero innovation and dedicated to preserving the position of paper, or one that has popularized a new publishing and reading platform that for the first time offers readers an actual choice of formats?

Think about it. This “New America” organization has put together a panel dedicated to persuading you that there was more freedom of expression when an incestuous group of five Manhattan-based corporations held the power to disappear 999 books out every thousand written, and indeed performed that disappearance as the group’s core function (they call this “curation”). And that, now that Amazon’s KDP platform has enabled all authors to publish virtually anything they want, freedom of expression is being threatened.

 For an organization calling itself “New America,” these jokers sure seem wedded to the old version.

In fairness to New America, I should note that their worldview is hardly unprecedented. The notion that the traditional way of doing things is ipso facto the best way of doing things was lampooned by Voltaire over 150 years ago through his character Dr. Pangloss, who was convinced (before experience in the world introduced doubts) that “All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” And Pangloss was himself based on the religious philosophy known as theodicy—a word coined over 300 years ago to describe a kind of faith that’s doubtless as old as the human race (and a word I admit I like because it sounds a bit like “idiocy”).

In fact, it was as recent as, say, the 1950s that a group of tweed-jacketed, straight white male college professors were genuinely convinced that the collection of books they deemed the most intrinsically worthy—all, coincidentally, written by other straight white males—represented the maximally possible amount of valuable expression, information, and ideas. They even called their collection the “canon,” which I admit did tend to make their subjective choices sound important and even divinely ordained. As people came to question the absence of women and minority writers from this collection selected exclusively by straight white males, I imagine the straight white males genuinely believed that broadening the “canon” to include women and minorities was a threat to freedom of expression and all that. This is just the way a lot of people are wired, especially when status and privilege are part of the mix.

And really, you do have to take a moment to applaud the mental gymnastics required of otherwise presumably intelligent people to say shit like “more authors writing more books reaching more readers is threatening freedom of expression, the flow of information, and the marketplace of ideas.” It’s War is Peace/Ignorance is Strength/Freedom is Slavery level doublethink. On the one hand, it’s sad, but on the other hand, in all the universe could there be a race as capable as humans of clinging so resolutely to faith in the face of so many contrary facts? Seen in this light, there’s something tragically beautiful about it.

And while I admit that New America’s “day is night, black is white” bizarro worldview isn’t easy to parody, I can’t resist trying. So…

Coming up next from New America: The Internet’s Dictatorial Grip: Impeding Access to Information? And The Tyranny of the Cell Phone: Shutting Down Communication? And Our Addiction to Paved Roads: A Threat to Freedom of Movement?

One more thing about this event that’s unintentionally hilarious, and then I need to get back to something worthwhile (AKA, the new manuscript). Take a look at the guest list. If you hired a team of NASA scientists to design the most rabidly, incestuously anti-Amazon panel possible, this is pretty much the group the team would propose. Though I doubt even the scientists (assuming they had a little dignity) would have gone to far as to bring in Douglas Preston and his literary agent, Eric Simonoff. I mean, this is getting pretty close to just adding clones of existing panelists and eliminating the last fluttering fig leaf of diversity.

They also have the dean of the Amazon Derangement crowd, Scott Turow. And Franklin Foer, who in fairness should be disqualified from even being on this panel because of his claim—in his much-derided “Let us kneel down before Amazon” screed—that “That term [monopoly] doesn’t get tossed around much these days, but it should”!

By the way, I wouldn’t be surprised if Foer makes the same cringe-worthy claim again, on this very “Amazon is a Monopoly” panel. The anti-Amazon crowd has never been particularly educable.

Also present will be Mark Coker, the head of Smashwords, an Amazon competitor. And author Susan Cheever, a member of Authors United, an organization that represents pretty much the platonic ideal of Amazon Derangement Syndrome. A couple of anti-trust lawyers to provide a veneer of legal gravitas (and to troll for clients, no doubt). And a second-year law student named Lina Khan who has argued that Amazon “should alarm us.”

And that’s it. That’s as diverse and wide-ranging as the lineup gets. The full gamut of viewpoints, from A…all the way to B.

Although really, even that feels a little generous.

Oh, by the way, Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google, another Amazon competitor, is the chairman of New America’s board of directors, too. No conflict of interest there. Nothing to disclose to anyone who might think this is some sort of disinterested, scholarly event.

So yeah, it’s really that much of a hive-mind lineup. But that’s not even the best part. The best part is, this remarkably insular and incestuous exercise in groupthink has been assembled to speak out against a purported threat to…freedom of expression! The flow of information! And the marketplace of ideas!

None of this is an accident, by the way. It isn’t just stupidity and incompetence. There’s a reason organizations will try to take a narrow outlook and propagate it through multiple mouthpieces: doing so can create the impression that a rare and radical notion is in fact widely held—held even by ostensibly disparate groups—and therefore more trustworthy. Indeed, this form of propaganda is a favorite of some of the same reactionary groups New America is showcasing on its panel. As I said recently about the supposedly “unprecedented joint action” of some booksellers, authors, and agents complaining together about Amazon:

Which brings us to the second revealing aspect of this “propaganda masquerading as an interview” drill. You see, in the standard “blow-job masquerading as interview” gambit, it’s generally enough to hope the reader will just assume the interviewer and interviewee are working at arms-length. Making the point explicitly isn’t really the done thing. Here, however, perhaps not trusting readers to be sufficiently gulled, the ABA and AG are at pains to describe the “unprecedented joint action” of the AG, Authors United, the ABA, and the Association of Authors’ Representatives in going after Amazon for monopolizing the marketplace of ideas, devaluing books, and generally crushing dissent, democracy, and all that is good. The impression they’re trying to create is, “Wow, if so many separate organizations hate Amazon, Amazon must be doing something bad.”

But what’s critical to understand is that the most fundamental purpose of the Authors Guild, Authors United, the American Booksellers Association, and the Association of Authors is to preserve the publishing industry in its current incarnation. Whatever marginal differences they might have (I’ve never actually seen any, but am happy to acknowledge the theoretical possibility) are eclipsed by this commonality of purpose. Under the circumstances, the fact that these four legacy publisher lobbyists agree on something is entirely unremarkable (indeed, what would be remarkable would be some evidence of division). But if people recognize the exercise as a version of “No really, I read it somewhere…okay, I wrote it down first,” the propaganda fizzles. And that’s why these propagandists have to nudge readers with the bullshit about the “unprecedented joint action.” Otherwise, when Authors Guild Executive Director Mary Rasenberger cites Authors United pitchman Doug Preston as though Preston were a separate, credible source, people might roll their eyes instead of nodding at the seriousness of it all. They might even giggle at the realization that all those “When did Amazon stop beating its wife?” questions were functionally being put by Rasenberger to herself.

So no, this wasn’t remotely a cross-examination, or even a cross pollination (indeed, publisher lobbyists are expert at fleeing anything that offers even the slightest whiff of actual debate—which does make their alleged devotion to the Free Flow of Ideas and Information as the Engine of Democracy worthy of a smile, at least, if nothing else). It was just a stump speech lovingly hosted by someone else’s blog. The sole reason for the exercise was to create the misleading appearance of multiple, arms-length actors when functionally there is only one.

In fairness to the aforementioned Unprecedentedly Joint Actors, there is a rich heritage behind this form of propaganda. For example, in the run-up to America’s second Iraq war, Dick Cheney would have someone from his office phone up a couple of pet New York Times reporters, who would then dutifully report that anonymous administration officials believed Saddam Hussein had acquired aluminum tubes as part of his nuclear weapons efforts…and then Cheney would go on all the Sunday morning talk shows and get to say, “Don’t take my word for the aluminum tube stuff—even the New York Times is reporting it!”

So leave aside the fact that the “joint action” in question is anything but unprecedented—that it is in fact publishing establishment SOP. Anyone familiar with the record of these organizations will instantly realize that the “unprecedented joint action” in question is a lot like the “joint action” of all four fingers—plus the thumb!—of someone throwing back a shot of tequila. Like that of a little boy pleasuring himself—with both hands!—and trying to convince anyone who will listen that the Unprecedented Left and Right Action is proof that “Everybody loves me!”

Okay, I apologize for the multiple excerpts from previous posts. But what are you going to do? These bloviators keep vomiting up the same tired bullshit, no matter how many times it’s debunked. It just saves time to refer to the previous debunkings rather than typing it all out again.

My advice to New America? If you’re more than just a propaganda operation—if you really do care about freedom of expression, and the flow of information, and the marketplace of ideas—you might want to add at least a token panelist with a viewpoint that differs even just a tiny bit from that of the nine Borg you’ve assembled to intone that Amazon Is Evil and Will Destroy All That Is Good. Otherwise, your event is going to feel more like a circle jerk and less like sex. And, doubtless, with similarly productive results.

Read the rest over at Joe’s blog.

Chi-Raq

So I saw Chi-Raq yesterday. I went to bed still thinking about it, woke up still thinking about it, and though I need to keep cranking on the new novel, I can see I’m not going to get much done until I exorcise these Chi-Raq thoughts.

CHI-RAQ Trailer from 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks on Vimeo.

First, let’s just get out of the way that the movie is extraordinary. On a variety of levels, but maybe most of all in the range of its tone. It moves repeatedly and effortlessly from satire, camp, and fourth-wall-breaking sequences, including some almost hallucinatory dance numbers, to gut-wrenching, cinema-vérité style human drama. I’ve never seen a movie that had me alternately laughing so much at its antics with language and imagery, then crying so hard at its tragedies. I think part of the reason it affected me so much is that the satire was making me drop my guard. And every time I went for the over-the-top head fake, Spike Lee launched an incredibly real shot right up the middle that landed like a blow.

So yeah, Samuel L. Jackson is a scenery-chewing joy as a one-man Greek chorus, and the poetry of the dialogue is exuberant, and David Patrick Kelly’s out-of-the-blue nod to Dr. Strangelove is crazy and hilarious…and then you watch a lone Jennifer Hudson sobbing while she tries to scrub her recently murdered daughter’s blood from the pavement; or listen to John Cusack’s tremendous centerpiece as a Chicago pastor whose oratory channels tragedy into outraged determination; or see Angela Basset’s face dissolve in grief and fury at an insurance salesman’s attempt to capitalize on Chicago’s murder demographics; or realize from the look in his eyes that Nick Cannon’s conscience is belatedly asserting itself…and you just go to pieces.

Pray 4 My City (explicit version) - Nick Cannon from 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks on Vimeo.

Not that the movie’s aim and impact should be so terribly surprising: it clearly and powerfully signals where it’s going right from the opening credits, via a giant blinking all-caps red message on a black screen: THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. Yes, it is. And it’s mind-blowing that a society could treat tens of thousands of annual gun deaths as anything but.

Overall thoughts: the writing, especially the poetry, is incredibly inventive; the direction, from an initial tracking shot following an L train down to neighborhood street level and into a nightclub, is virtuoso; Teyonah Pariss’s performance is a jaw-dropping tour de force (and that smile...my God); the theme song, Pray 4 My City, is still in my head…but these already impressive pieces add up to something much larger than the sum of their parts. More than anything else, Chi-Raq is a political movie, a story about the human impact of gun violence, societal neglect, and fucked-up governmental priorities. Some people won’t approve of that. I wish there were more movies like it.

How Those Pakistanis Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Our Drones

A few days ago, I watched a video of a remarkable debate between Intercept journalist Glenn Greenwald and C. Christine Fair, Associate Professor of Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University, moderated by Al Jazeera’s Mehdi Hasan. I say “remarkable” because of the astonishing mental gymnastics Fair had to perform in support of her argument that Pakistanis welcome being droned by America. The debate was precipitated by a huge Intercept report, based on documents provided by a new, post-Snowden whistleblower, concluding that as many as nine out of ten people killed in our drone strikes weren’t the intended targets.

Well, mistakenly killing nine people for every one you kill on purpose might sound pretty bad, but Fair argued that actually it’s all pretty good because: (i) Pakistanis who say they don’t like their country being droned don’t count because they live in cities and are “cosmopolitan elites;” (ii) all polls and other studies suggesting Pakistanis don’t like being droned are unreliable because of various biases and methodological flaws; (iii) no one who believes that droning Pakistan is counterproductive knows the country sufficiently well to have a valid opinion; and (iv) we don’t know who’s been targeted and we don’t know who’s been killed, but we do know the program is working (this last one is especially puzzling, mostly in an internally contradictory kind of way).

Now, I admit I don’t know much about the region. I don’t speak any of the languages, and I’ve never traveled there. I haven’t read the Koran—not even a translation. So I’m clearly unburdened by the kind of erudition that seems to be the source of Fair’s confidence in her opinion that Pakistanis actually like it when America blows them up with sky robots.

What I do bring to the discussion, maybe, is some minimal insight into human nature of the sort we novelists like to flatter ourselves into believing is an important part of our work. And so, with no more than those embarrassingly scant credentials as my basis and with an even more minimal claim to some rudimentary common sense, I have to ask what’s probably a terribly un-nuanced and unsophisticated question. Which is:

How likely is it that any group of humans anywhere would appreciate a foreign power taking control of their skies and for years blowing up at will people the foreign power adjudged undesirable?

For example, you might believe street crime is out of control in America, or that a parasitical one percent is sucking the country dry, or that neo-hippy or minority protesters have it all wrong and are ruining everything, or that the Democrats are to blame for all the country’s ills, or that the problem is in fact the Republicans. But no matter what you believe, you probably don’t wish Russia or China or Iran or France or whoever would start patrolling the skies over your neighborhood and blowing up whatever Americans are vexing you. And you’d probably get a touch irate if one of those foreign countries went ahead and started up a drone program in America anyway. You’d probably resent such a foreign program under any circumstances, but if the program were blowing up nine people accidently for every one it killed on purpose, including at weddings and funerals, you might get so resentful you’d find yourself invested in getting some payback.

This is one of those things about human nature that’s super-obvious unless you deploy a lot of special learning to obscure it. As a species, we seem to have a deep-seated need to repay violence—especially violence by an out-group on our in-group—with violence of our own. See, for example, America’s ongoing response to 9/11.

So, being a somewhat simple man, I tend to figure that if I would hate something (invasion, occupation, robot airplane assassination campaign, that kind of thing) and react a certain way to it (by fighting back, for example), probably other people would react the same way were the shoe on the other foot. Even if they’re from faraway, exotically different countries—even countries impossible to understand except by data-driven PhD-credentialed area experts who have transcended the sorts of biases blinkering the benighted—I figure that our common human nature will provide a decent roadmap to understanding their behavior.

It occurs to me there’s even a name for this concept: I think I’ve heard it referred to as the Golden Rule. Or the Hillel the Elder version: “What is hateful to you, don’t do to others.”

But maybe what those rules really mean is, “Unless they’re Pakistani, because they’re different”? It could be that. I admit I’m one of those people who doesn’t know Pakistan well enough to say for sure. Plus I’m biased and don’t have good data.

And, in fairness to Fair and her learned, data-driven theories that Pakistanis welcome being droned—that the experience even reminds them of an uplifting story from the Koran!—it turns out there’s a long list of other peoples who, as it happens, were untroubled by foreign-inflicted violence and killing. So I am forced to acknowledge that Fair’s approach to justifying western violence does have a long and colorful history.

But wait, there’s still more…

Yesterday, Fair followed up her debate points with a post in the blog Lawfare. The additional points she made there are in their own way as interesting as the ones she made in the debate itself, while also perhaps shedding some light on how she’s able to maintain convictions about Pakistan that seem at odds with basic tenets of human nature. And so, a few thoughts in response…

Glenn Greenwald has tirelessly flogged the use of armed drones with Crusader-like conviction.

This one I just thought was funny. Someone who’s against bombing, invading, and occupying Muslim countries strikes Fair as some sort of Crusader? Holy backward historical references, Batman!

I was equally confused as to why the show was going to focus upon Pakistan, when the latest tranche of pilfered documents released by The Intercept promises to detail “the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia.”

We’ll come back to Fair’s notion of “pilfered documents.” Here, I’m more interested in the source of her confusion—apparently, the possibility that reactions in country X to a foreigner-run robot airplane assassination program might offer clues about reactions in country Y. Instead, Fair seems to cling to the notion that Pakistan is sui generis, somehow existing apart from aspects of human nature we can readily observe everywhere else.

The Intercept has set up a secure drop box to facilitate government employees’ illegally providing classified information to the organization.

Is it just me, or is anyone else getting the feeling that Professor Fair really doesn’t like leaks?

There’s a lot to be said about a mindset like this one. First, it’s authoritarian. Second, it’s weird, focusing as it does on the rare whistleblower rather than on rampant secrecy metastasis—akin to complaining about the brief drizzle we just had here in the Bay Area while ignoring the effects of a four-year drought. Third, it’s selective. Authoritarians like Fair never use words like “pilfer” or “illegal” to describe the kinds of leaks that are probably a thousand times more common than those of The Intercept’s new whistleblower: the ones offered up by insiders to pet reporters to make the government look good. We’ll come back to that last point in a second.

Mr. Greenwald and his associates refer to these persons as “whistleblowers.”

Well, yes, but only in the dictionary sense.

(Also, a parenthetical plea: can we eliminate the word “persons” from the lexicon, except maybe when used ironically, and learn to love the standard plural “people,” instead? We could then move on to “monies,” at which point we’d be on a roll and people might start writing more the way they talk.)

Empirically, the documents that have been leaked are riven with selection bias; leakers, driven by whatever personal motives, often selectively leak specific documents.

You have to be suffering from some pretty nuclear-grade selection bias of your own to make this point about a whistleblower and not apply it to the thousands of government officials who leak secrets in a way that’s favorable to the government (no illegal pilfering there!) every. Single. Day.

In fairness, the most invisible biases, and therefore the most dangerous, are always the ones that affect ourselves. Which would explain how Fair is able to simultaneously criticize other people for their alleged biases while turning an apparent discussion of a Koran passage by host Mehdi Hasan—something about unbelievers being unintelligent cattle—into an approving “cite.” It sounded like bullshit even before I looked closer. It was. Watch the video yourself. At their impressive best, Hasan’s remarks are laudable—who would argue that anyone should cede the moral high ground? At their occasional worst, they come across as the Islamic equivalent of neo-Atheist self flattery, or American exceptionalism or other nationalism. If Fair’s aside wasn’t a deliberate smear, it could only have been the result of intellectually crippling bias—the kind she readily perceives in everyone who doesn’t agree with her.

Consumers of these documents have no idea of how representative this sample is of all information that exists about the drone program. There are most certainly classified reports that positively describe the program’s utilization in specific theatres, but these documents have not apparently been leaked.

True, if by “have not apparently been leaked” Fair means to exclude New York Times articles like this one:

Drone Strikes on Al Qaeda Are Said to Take Toll on Leadership in Pakistan

LONDON — Revelations of new high-level losses among Al Qaeda‘s top leadership in Pakistan‘s tribal belt have underscored how years of American drone strikes have diminished and dispersed the militant group’s upper ranks and forced them to cede prominence and influence to more aggressive offshoots in Yemen and Somalia.

While the C.I.A. drone strike that killed two Western hostages has led to intense criticism of the drone program and potentially to a reassessment of it, the American successes over the years in targeting and killing senior Qaeda operatives in their home base have left the militant group’s leadership facing difficult choices, counterterrorism officials and analysts say.

And hey, guess what those anonymous counterterrorism officials were doing? They were leaking—AKA pilfering and illegally providing classified information to the media.

But they sure weren’t whistleblowing. Maybe this is why Fair hasn’t noticed.

In fact, given Mr. Greenwald’s evangelical zeal against the various uses of drones, I doubt that if the organization received such reports, it would publish them.

Why would it bother? For the publication of self-interested, government-revering leaks, we already have the New York Times and many other access-journalism addicts consistently happy to violate their own rules on the use of anonymous sources to curry favor with the powerful. Fair acts as though the government doesn’t already leak like a ruptured colostomy bag when doing so serves its own interest. The government does so constantly and pervasively, and suggesting that an investigative outfit like The Intercept should provide the government yet more assistance in promoting self-interested leaks is at best bizarre.

And if it did publish such exculpatory documents, would The Intercept’s writers simply dismiss them as “rank propaganda”?

Only if they wanted to accurately characterize government leaks justifying government programs, I imagine.

Second, these leakers are always anonymous, for obvious reasons: they do not want to be prosecuted for breaking the law. However, anonymous sources cannot be vetted for the sagacity of their interpretation or for their motives…Obviously, someone who is breaking the law to provide these documents must be presumed to be completely honest and factually correct in his assessments. [I think that last part is sarcasm]

I don’t want to belabor this point, but…again, government-serving leaks are probably a thousand times more common than government-critical ones. Fair is applying her principle to the .1% of critical leakers while giving a pass to the 99.9% wink-and-nod variety. The selective concern would be strange under any circumstances. That she manages to do it while lecturing others on the dangers of bias is stunning.

In its most recent product, “The Drone Papers,” The Intercept tells readers that the leaker was moved by his moral outrage. But is it not possible that less noble motivations compelled the leaker to provide these particular documents? If the motive was espionage or work-place dissatisfaction, does that change our perception of the documents and the leaker’s explanation of them?

For someone ordinarily so quick to dismiss everything that isn’t “data,” Fair’s pivot here to the mushy realms of the workings of the human heart is deft enough to make a novelist blush.

Sure, we should always factor in what we can know of a person’s motives (which often isn’t much). Which is why the government worked so hard (and ultimately unsuccessfully) to brand Snowden as a narcissist. What’s really odd, though, isn’t that people who hate whisteblowers always try to impugn their motives. It’s that such people never question the motives of the countless officials whose leaks amplify the government’s preferred narrative.

So if you leak to challenge power, there must be something nefarious going on. If you leak to burnish power, you’re just doing God’s work.

Nope, no bias there.

A third problem is the presumption that classification confers some standard of quality.

I see none of this in The Intercept’s reporting and can only surmise that Fair is either projecting or trying to set up a straw man. Pretty obviously, the point isn’t that secret documents are some kind of holy scripture, but rather that the documents in question are ones the government itself relies on, and as such are noteworthy regardless of their underlying “standard of quality.”

In my experience, classified products are rarely worth the effort to obtain and read.

Which might make one wonder why Fair is so upset about the pilfering and illegality and all that.

The Intercept claims that the documents it received “show that during a five-month stretch of the campaign [Operation Haymaker], nearly nine out of 10 people who died in airstrikes were not the Americans’ direct targets.” This is not the same as being “innocent.”

I find myself wondering a bit about someone whose attempt at exculpation is, “Hey, the person we accidentally blew up wasn’t ‘innocent!’” It seems maybe a bit like saying, “Hey, that guy we executed for a murder he didn’t commit? Well, turns out he might have had a couple outstanding parking tickets. Dude had it coming to him!”

Luckily, I secretly love when life imitates art, because this all reminded me of Agent Rogersz from Repo Man, responding to concerns about an innocent man being tortured by declaring, “No one is innocent!”

With respect to Pakistan, there is one study that actually comes to the exact opposite conclusion as the one put forward by Mr. Greenwald…Excluding one catastrophically disastrous strike which inflicted one of the worst civilian death tolls since the drone program started in Pakistan, nearly 90 percent of the people killed were militants.

Leave aside whether “We don’t accidentally kill as many people as you claim” can best be characterized as “the exact opposite conclusion.” Apparently the really catastrophically disastrous strikes don’t have catastrophically disastrous effects. In fact, catastrophically disastrous strikes shouldn’t be counted at all. And, once we’ve magically gerrymandered out those catastrophically disastrous strikes, we can explain away a dozen studies, polls, and informed commentary (and this one, too) and focus only on the one report we like, citing it for the counterintuitive proposition that Pakistanis welcome a drone assassination program that mistakenly kills only one innocent (whoops, I mean non-targeted) Pakistani out of ten and that the program is working as advertised.

Mr. Greenwald also cited the opinions of well-regarded generals such as General Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan [“The resentment created by US drones is much greater than the average American appreciates. They are hated on a visceral level”]. Mr. Hasan also cited the views of retired U.S. Lt. General Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency [“Even when it works, even when we take out a big name, it makes us all feel good for 24 hours. And you know what? It doesn’t matter. It just makes them a martyr, they get replaced, it just creates a new reason for all of them to fight us harder”]… it should be emphasized that the opinions offered by any generals, unless supported by data and rigorous analysis, are simply opinions.

Fair also claimed during the debate that “He [General Flynn] doesn’t have data. He has no data.”

I just want to say that I hope the guy who used to run the DIA had access to some data. You’d generally want heads of the DIA and other such massive intelligence bureaucracies to stumble across a little data from time to time as they’re formulating their opinions. Otherwise our tax dollars are being wasted even more than I suspected.

As for McChrystal, during the debate he had the honor (along with investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, author of the drones-and-related topics book Dirty Wars: The War is a Battlefield and subject of an accompanying Oscar-nominated film of the same name) of being one of the many people Fair claimed “actually doesn’t know Pakistan.” Someone better tell that to McChrystal, because he seems to have written a whole book on the topic, a topic he probably had a hard time avoiding during his time as the commander of US and NATO forces in neighboring Afghanistan.

By the way, another data-challenged person ignorant of all things Pakistani who might have come up but didn’t was Admiral Dennis Blair, former Director of National Intelligence, who claims drone strikes are “the politically advantageous thing to do—low cost, no US casualties, gives the appearance of toughness. It plays well domestically, and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term.”

Mr. Greenwald and Mr. Hasan also asserted vigorously that drones make more terrorists than they kill. To support this claim, Mr. Greenwald cited the opinions of several well-known persons. First, he cited Malala Yousafzai, the teenage girl whom the Pakistani Taliban shot for her promotion of female education…Ms. Yousafzai is a courageous young woman. She is not, however, representative of Pakistani thought…She’s also no expert on the matter at hand, her good intentions notwithstanding. Leaving aside her personal tragedy and perseverance, Ms. Yousafzai lived in Malakand, not in the tribal areas where drones exclusively operate…

It’s a little surreal to listen to a white chick from Georgetown explain how an actual Pakistani’s views on drones don’t count because the Pakistani isn’t representative of Pakistani thought, isn’t an expert, and didn’t live in the right part of Pakistan. But it is consistent with Fair’s overall theme that everyone who disagrees with her—NGOs, army generals, ex-heads of intelligence agencies, the British government, Pew polling, various actual Pakistanis—knows Pakistan so little, is so deprived of meaningful data, or is so crippled by bias, that they can’t understand the unique Pakistani appreciation of being droned by a foreign power.

There was also some discussion during the debate about whether—law and morality aside—drone strikes are ever effective. I want to say just one thing about this. Which is:

Of course drones sometimes take out an intended target. But then, so do chemical weapons. So do nukes. So would a flamethrower, if you deployed one against a house fly. “Effective” in this context is as misleading as the question of whether “torture ever works.” Anything can “work,” anything can be declared effective, if you exclude every side effect and other cost from your calculations. But destabilizing a nuclear-armed country and turning material numbers of its population into militants in order to kill a few fungible individuals might on balance be considered an odd definition of “effective.” It might even be considered insane.

Beyond which, as Greenwald himself points out during the debate, we’ve been waging a global war against terrorism for over fourteen years now and there’s no sign anything is getting better—in fact, every western government says things are getting worse. All of which even without more should make claims of drone “effectiveness” somewhat suspect.

I knew it [the debate] had aired only when Mr. Greenwald’s legion of acolytes began trolling me on Twitter with the familiar litany of often-misogynist rants.

Strangely enough, I think the key to Fair’s inability to understand that people don’t like being bombed by foreigners is contained in that one short sentence.

First, though, I want to congratulate Greenwald on having acquired a legion of acolytes. As someone who can legitimately lay claim only to a small cadre of people I sometimes flatter myself to think of as “fans” and no acolytes at all that I know of, I am humbled—and a little envious. I’m disappointed, though, that Fair missed the alliterative possibilities in something like Legion of Lackies. Well, maybe she’ll write another Lawfare post.

Anyway, I didn’t see the tweets in question, but I spend a decent amount of time on Twitter and so have no trouble believing that various people addressed Fair in demeaning, belittling, insulting ways, some of them misogynist. No doubt, there’s a lot of ugliness on the Internet.

Yet in her own tweets, Fair has taken to calling Greenwald “GeeGee.” There are too many to link to; if you’re curious, just search for it on her Twitter page.

Calling someone named Glenn Greenwald something like GG on Twitter could be easily explained as a way of saving scarce characters. But “GeeGee”? Come on. Everyone knows that conferring a nickname on a stranger—especially any kind of diminutive—is inherently insulting, and there’s no question that in resorting to this embarrassingly childish behavior, Fair is trying to insult Greenwald.

What’s so revealing here is that Fair knows she herself doesn’t like being insulted (unless she’s that rare individual who welcomes litanies of misogynist rants). And yet she seems incapable of what should be only the smallest of imaginative leaps: if she doesn’t like being insulted, probably other people don’t like being insulted, either. If she doesn’t think people should do it to her, probably she shouldn’t do it to other people. That Golden Rule thing again.

And though it’s a trivial instance of the phenomenon, the broad dynamics are similar: this is the same person who must know she would hate it if a foreign power started droning her neighborhood—but who can’t imagine that other peoples might feel the same way she would.

Sad to see so much learning get in the way of something so obvious. Sadder still to know how many people have to suffer and die because of intellectual and imaginative occlusions like Fair’s.