Intelligence and War

Nobody would argue that 9/11 was anything short of, in manifold ways, one giant unmitigated breakdown. The 9/11 Commission is still, to the behest of the Bush administration, investigating possible CIA wiretapping, torture and secret prison coverups, each of which encompassing its own interesting, unique dimension relative to international law, which remains to be vital, inconsistencies critical, where force, as a generalized notion becomes extensible to political violence. In other words, inconsistencies in international law, which might even be conceived as ineffiencies of sorts, in the realm of information, encompass a unique capacity to translate into political violence as a function of the entropy generated in the wider sphere of human relations - alliances, in particular - as some by-product of those ineffiencies.

With Abu Ghraib I think there are two things that are really important. The story of how it became such a big story – it partly has to do with Seymour Hersh [the journalist who broke the story], it partly has to do with whoever leaked those pictures to the media, but it is also true that even when the pictures were first shown, it was not quite such a big story in the United States until President Bush was forced to comment on it. And the reason he was forced to comment on it is because the pictures were also circulating in the Arab world. There was a big reaction in Arab public opinion, and he felt it was necessary to comment on that. So that fact that there are these other flows of information besides the ones involving Western media — it is not purely national, it is a global flow of information. And Bush has to respond to that.

Charlie Wilson's War, Stalingrad, Metal Furtinha, World War Three - and yet when I watch the news I sometimes remain unable to distinguish between what I see on the History Channel and what's being reported in the media. In other words, why would I need to watch a movie about history when what's happening right before my very eyes is history itself - not in the sense of its relativity to a future or potential future, but to the past ? Hence, if psyche as structure exists in time, as space, analogically related, on some level to geopolitical space, then it must possess the elements of psyche in the form of id, ego and superego, the analog of which is the past, present and future.

--- national identity ecology

Heidegger may have been the most prominent recent philospher to have made the distinction that might be best generalized as a question of time and existence or, " Being and Time. " While in the study of acoustics it's called the " Time Reversal Phenomenon. " Do we, as a civilization, have the power to determine the future, determine our own destiny, by re-determining history in a current context ? Why is Chechnya not Afghanistan ? Why is Osama not Osama ? To what extent is collective human behavior guided by some prevailing symbolism ? Is it a Jungian question ? Do symbols - some prevailing symbolic architecture - dictate the zeitgeist ? Is there a symbolic architecture that might exist in time and space that communicates, perhaps in much the same way an acoustic signal does, with human cognition, both on an individual and collective scale ?

What strikes me is the notion that both history and the future can be determined by the present - in some current context - but not necessarily as Marx may have conjectured, because history repeats itself but rather because sociological systems are, to competing extents in time and geopolitical space, both conservative and progressive, yet not in equal measures.