Bourne and the Black Sites: Torture's Gone Pop

Just read the fascinating (and terrifying) article by Jane Mayer in this week's New Yorker on CIA "black sites;" secret facilities based abroad that house housed high-value terror suspects. There's too much going on in this article to comment on each intriguing point, however I will say that the timing of the piece nicely coincides with the recent release of the The Bourne Ultimatum. It's interesting how many parallels exist between the fictional activities of the CIA depicted in the film and the agency's actual activities as indicated in Mayer's article. One particular section in the piece really drives this home:

Lacking in-house specialists on interrogation, the agency hired a group of outside contractors, who implemented a regime of techniques that one well-informed former adviser to the American intelligence community described as “a ‘Clockwork Orange’ kind of approach.” The experts were retired military psychologists, and their backgrounds were in training Special Forces soldiers how to survive torture, should they ever be captured by enemy states.

Mayer describes the CIA's interrogation techniques as stemming from both the ominously named "Phoenix Program" (it's clear that Ludlum gets his creepy project names right) instituted by the military during the Vietnam War and from outside contractors. Most surprising perhaps is the implication that the CIA's expertise in "aggressive" interrogation lapsed after the Cold War. You would think these skills are not easily un-learned. Who knew.


The Bourne series focuses on a secret CIA program that trains assassins, primarily by brain-washing them through torture. Stuff of pure fantasy right? Apparently not. In Bourne psychopath psychologist Dr. Albert Hirsch (played well by the corpulent and wheezing Albert Finney) is an outside consultant hired by the CIA to train its own to be cold and calculating killers by, well, by torturing them. Mayer mentions in her article that many of the CIA's interrogators had been trained by psychologists who actually performed many of the torturous acts on the trainees. So if we're to take Mayer's article seriously, it seems as if this nasty torture business has been routinely practiced on both the high-value terror suspects and (obviously not to the same degree) the CIA operatives as well.

Art imitating life... great stuff. Normally the conspiracy theory-laden, "the government is out to get us," spy-thriller is scoffed at (see: Enemy of the State) and the actions depicted are seen as outside the realm of possibility. Not so with Bourne; the series, and Ultimatum in particular, has truly touched a nerve by making ridiculously illegal and frightening acts such as state-sanctioned torture seem eminently plausible. Fucking brilliant.

By the way, the media blitz surrounding Bourne is so extreme that there's a six-story billboard touting the movie on Matt Damon's apartment.

Iain Banks' "Matter" Cover Art Surfaces, Looks Pretty Bad Ass

This is the cover art for Iain M. Banks' new sci-fi title that's coming out in February. Check out a potential back cover blurb here.

This will be Banks' first Culture novel in 8 years and it has mouth-breathing sci-fi fans like yours truly salivating. If you have a few minutes, skim this short essay Banks wrote about the Culture. It's an excellent primer on the fascinating fictional setting he's devised and I imagine you might come away from it somewhat intrigued in concepts such as post-scarcity utopia and advanced genetic manipulation. Here's a passage discussing a particularly unique (and odd) aspect of life in the Culture that indicates what the society is all about:

To us, perhaps, the idea of being able to find out what sex is like for our complimentary gender, or being able to get drunk/stoned/tripped-out or whatever just by thinking about it (and of course the Culture's drug-glands produce no unpleasant side-effects or physiological addiction) may seem like mere wish-fulfilment. And indeed it is partly wish-fulfilment, but then the fulfilment of wishes is both one of civilisation's most powerful drives and arguably one of its highest functions; we wish to live longer, we wish to live more comfortably, we wish to live with less anxiety and more enjoyment, less ignorance and more knowledge than our ancestors did... but the abilities to change sex and to alter one's brain-chemistry - without resort to external technology or any form of payment - both have more serious functions within the Culture. A society in which it is so easy to change sex will rapidly find out if it is treating one gender better than the other; within the population, over time, there will gradually be greater and greater numbers of the sex it is more rewarding to be, and so pressure for change - within society rather than the individuals - will presumably therefore build up until some form of sexual equality and hence numerical parity is established. In a similar fashion, a society in which everybody is free to, and does, choose to spend the majority of their time zonked out of their brains will know that there is something significantly wrong with reality, and (one would hope) do what it can to make that reality more appealing and less - in the pejorative sense - mundane.

If that didn't get you revved up check out Banks' concept of politics in space!:

Essentially, the contention is that our currently dominant power systems cannot long survive in space; beyond a certain technological level a degree of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable.

To survive in space, ships/habitats must be self-sufficient, or very nearly so; the hold of the state (or the corporation) over them therefore becomes tenuous if the desires of the inhabitants conflict significantly with the requirements of the controlling body. On a planet, enclaves can be surrounded, besieged, attacked; the superior forces of a state or corporation - hereafter referred to as hegemonies - will tend to prevail. In space, a break-away movement will be far more difficult to control, especially if significant parts of it are based on ships or mobile habitats. The hostile nature of the vacuum and the technological complexity of life support mechanisms will make such systems vulnerable to outright attack, but that, of course, would risk the total destruction of the ship/habitat, so denying its future economic contribution to whatever entity was attempting to control it.

So hopefully these two passages show that, at the very least, Banks has a vivid imagination. I'm not sure they do the best job selling his brilliance, but I hope I've piqued your interest. If you're looking for a good place to start, check out his first Culture novel Consider Phlebas or my personal favorite Use of Weapons.

Rumors of Fake Steve Jobs' Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

A fairly momentous event occurred today in the world of online media when the identity of the mastermind behind the fantastic blog Fake Steve Jobs was revealed. In case you haven't been following the genius that is Fake Steve Jobs here's a quick description: an anonymous writer pretends to be the famously egoistic Apple CEO Steve Jobs by adeptly satirizing Jobs and many other Silicon Valley luminaries. The author, now revealed to be Forbes senior editor Dan Lyons, riled up the technology journalism set for the last year or so with his incisive and amusing commentary on the tech industry and a wide range of other topics including Lindsay Lohan, child labor, and the technology journalism set itself. Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media, perfectly encapsulated their collective frustration at being incapable of discovering Fake Steve's identity with his public failure of a witch hunt. To get a sense of why people cared so much about the identity of some random asshole pretending to be Steve Jobs, I'd recommend reading this gem, published on iPhone D-Day, or this vicious skewering of Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer.

The debate amongst the digerati is now centered on whether Fake Steve will continue to be entertaining post-reveal. The random jackasses clogging up the comments section of the NY Times article outing Lyons are mostly dubious about the prospects of FSJ. I'm not so sure. While the anonymity of Fake Steve certainly added to the blog's appeal, Lyons is clearly a gifted writer. Maintaining the interest of his recently acquired audience will be a true test of skill, but it seems patently unfair to Lyons to attribute a majority of the success of Fake Steve Jobs to the vicariousness engendered by anonymity. Sure, it was amusing to guess at who the author was and obviously the whole mystery aspect, which undoubtedly added a lot, is irrevocably gone. Those two attributes alone didn't make the blog successful however. Lyons' acerbic jabs at pretty much everyone made the blog a joy to read, and I expect him to continue to be successful as long as he doesn't start to pull any punches. Lyons, still in the voice of Fake Steve naturally, seems as if he's relishing the challenge. I for one will be interested to see whether he can keep it up.

Fear-Induced Inertia Loses Out to Irrepressible Boredom

I think I have what can only be described as a strangely self-deprecating yet simultaneously arrogant view of my abilities. See, I've wanted to do this whole casual writing thing for quite some time now, but I've been consistently thwarted by my own peculiar insecurities. Why write when someone has assuredly already written about whatever it is that I feel I need to write about (and probably done it far more adequately than I ever could)?

I imagine that many a burgeoning writer* have had this sudden, terrible, epiphany where they come to the realization that they will never add anything of intrinsic value to the literary tradition. That their brilliant ideas, their fabulous tales, or their meticulous research have already been conceived of, committed to beautiful prose and disseminated. Why publish at all if you're certain your work will be necessarily derivative? This stupid sensibility has meant that I'm petrified to write anything at all, because I fear that I will have somehow been negligent in my efforts and I'll soon realize that the piece I've slaved over for hours will turn out to be totally unoriginal and pedestrian.

I've come to understand that this is actually a ridiculously arrogant frame of mind. I'm too afraid to write because I'm paralyzed by the thought that I might not be considered in the same class as masters of the written word? I give up before I begin due, not to the lack of interest or even perceived ability necessarily, but rather to the fear that I won't be supremely talented?

That's rich.

So I woke up this morning convinced that I needed to stop being such an enormous bastard; that I needed to suck it up and just get started. That inspiration turned into this meandering explanation. Bottom line is, although it might turn out that I don't have anything worthwhile to contribute, there's no way to know without actually doing it. So with that dubious mandate, I'm off and running. Let's see how it goes, I hope I don't end up spectacularly wiping out...



*for the record I'm not a burgeoning writer, that would imply that I actually write. I do not, well at least up to this point I haven't seriously dedicated myself to the task.