Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report – New York Times

December 24, 2005
Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report

By ERIC LICHTBLAU
and JAMES RISEN
WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 – The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

The government’s collection and analysis of phone and Internet traffic have raised questions among some law enforcement and judicial officials familiar with the program. One issue of concern to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has reviewed some separate warrant applications growing out of the N.S.A.’s surveillance program, is whether the court has legal authority over calls outside the United States that happen to pass through American-based telephonic “switches,” according to officials familiar with the matter.

“There was a lot of discussion about the switches” in conversations with the court, a Justice Department official said, referring to the gateways through which much of the communications traffic flows. “You’re talking about access to such a vast amount of communications, and the question was, How do you minimize something that’s on a switch that’s carrying such large volumes of traffic? The court was very, very concerned about that.”

Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.’s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda.

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.

The current and former government officials who discussed the program were granted anonymity because it remains classified.

Bush administration officials declined to comment on Friday on the technical aspects of the operation and the N.S.A.’s use of broad searches to look for clues on terrorists. Because the program is highly classified, many details of how the N.S.A. is conducting it remain unknown, and members of Congress who have pressed for a full Congressional inquiry say they are eager to learn more about the program’s operational details, as well as its legality.

Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program say the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.

This so-called “pattern analysis” on calls within the United States would, in many circumstances, require a court warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom.

The use of similar data-mining operations by the Bush administration in other contexts has raised strong objections, most notably in connection with the Total Information Awareness system, developed by the Pentagon for tracking terror suspects, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Capps program for screening airline passengers. Both programs were ultimately scrapped after public outcries over possible threats to privacy and civil liberties.

But the Bush administration regards the N.S.A.’s ability to trace and analyze large volumes of data as critical to its expanded mission to detect terrorist plots before they can be carried out, officials familiar with the program say. Administration officials maintain that the system set up by Congress in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does not give them the speed and flexibility to respond fully to terrorist threats at home.

A former technology manager at a major telecommunications company said that since the Sept. 11 attacks, the leading companies in the industry have been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the federal government to aid in tracking possible terrorists.

“All that data is mined with the cooperation of the government and shared with them, and since 9/11, there’s been much more active involvement in that area,” said the former manager, a telecommunications expert who did not want his name or that of his former company used because of concern about revealing trade secrets.

Such information often proves just as valuable to the government as eavesdropping on the calls themselves, the former manager said.

“If they get content, that’s useful to them too, but the real plum is going to be the transaction data and the traffic analysis,” he said. “Massive amounts of traffic analysis information – who is calling whom, who is in Osama Bin Laden’s circle of family and friends – is used to identify lines of communication that are then given closer scrutiny.”

Several officials said that after President Bush’s order authorizing the N.S.A. program, senior government officials arranged with officials of some of the nation’s largest telecommunications companies to gain access to switches that act as gateways at the borders between the United States’ communications networks and international networks. The identities of the corporations involved could not be determined.

The switches are some of the main arteries for moving voice and some Internet traffic into and out of the United States, and, with the globalization of the telecommunications industry in recent years, many international-to-international calls are also routed through such American switches.

One outside expert on communications privacy who previously worked at the N.S.A. said that to exploit its technological capabilities, the American government had in the last few years been quietly encouraging the telecommunications industry to increase the amount of international traffic that is routed through American-based switches.

The growth of that transit traffic had become a major issue for the intelligence community, officials say, because it had not been fully addressed by 1970’s-era laws and regulations governing the N.S.A. Now that foreign calls were being routed through switches on American soil, some judges and law enforcement officials regarded eavesdropping on those calls as a possible violation of those decades-old restrictions, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court-approved warrants for domestic surveillance.

Historically, the American intelligence community has had close relationships with many communications and computer firms and related technical industries. But the N.S.A.’s backdoor access to major telecommunications switches on American soil with the cooperation of major corporations represents a significant expansion of the agency’s operational capability, according to current and former government officials.

Phil Karn, a computer engineer and technology expert at a major West Coast telecommunications company, said access to such switches would be significant. “If the government is gaining access to the switches like this, what you’re really talking about is the capability of an enormous vacuum operation to sweep up data,” he said.

$88.00: A one year subscription to the Numero Group.

“Get all six 2006 records for one low price. Next year’s schedule is shaping up to be our deepest dig yet, with three Eccentric Soul releases, representing Miami, Detroit and Chicago, an incredible hippie-folk collection of Joni Mitchell’s unheralded competitors, a treasury of funky gospel, and a disco-rap bomb from Brooklyn that you might as well glue to your CD player. This offer is good only until January 31st 2006. You’ll regret passing it up in June.”

Police Infilitrate Protests, Videotapes Show – New York Times

December 22, 2005

By JIM DWYER

Undercover New York City police officers have conducted covert surveillance in the last 16 months of people protesting the Iraq war, bicycle riders taking part in mass rallies and even mourners at a street vigil for a cyclist killed in an accident, a series of videotapes show.

In glimpses and in glaring detail, the videotape images reveal the robust presence of disguised officers or others working with them at seven public gatherings since August 2004.

The officers hoist protest signs. They hold flowers with mourners. They ride in bicycle events. At the vigil for the cyclist, an officer in biking gear wore a button that said, “I am a shameless agitator.” She also carried a camera and videotaped the roughly 15 people present.

Beyond collecting information, some of the undercover officers or their associates are seen on the tape having influence on events. At a demonstration last year during the Republican National Convention, the sham arrest of a man secretly working with the police led to a bruising confrontation between officers in riot gear and bystanders.

Until Sept. 11, the secret monitoring of events where people expressed their opinions was among the most tightly limited of police powers.

Provided with images from the tape, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, did not dispute that they showed officers at work but said that disguised officers had always attended such gatherings – not to investigate political activities but to keep order and protect free speech. Activists, however, say that police officers masquerading as protesters and bicycle riders distort their messages and provoke trouble.

The pictures of the undercover officers were culled from an unofficial archive of civilian and police videotapes by Eileen Clancy, a forensic video analyst who is critical of the tactics. She gave the tapes to The New York Times. Based on what the individuals said, the equipment they carried and their almost immediate release after they had been arrested amid protesters or bicycle riders, The Times concluded that at least 10 officers were incognito at the events.

After the 2001 terrorist attacks, officials at all levels of government considered major changes in various police powers. President Bush acknowledged last Saturday that he has secretly permitted the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without a warrant on international telephone calls and e-mail messages in terror investigations.

In New York, the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg persuaded a federal judge in 2003 to enlarge the Police Department’s authority to conduct investigations of political, social and religious groups. “We live in a more dangerous, constantly changing world,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said.

Before then, very few political organizations or activities were secretly investigated by the Police Department, the result of a 1971 class-action lawsuit that charged the city with abuses in surveillance during the 1960’s. Now the standard for opening inquiries into political activity has been relaxed, full authority to begin surveillance has been restored to the police and federal courts no longer require a special panel to oversee the tactics.

Mr. Browne, the police spokesman, said the department did not increase its surveillance of political groups when the restrictions were eased. The powers obtained after Sept. 11 have been used exclusively “to investigate and thwart terrorists,” Mr. Browne said. He would not answer specific questions about the disguised officers or describe any limits the department placed on surveillance at public events.

Jethro M. Eisenstein, one of the lawyers who brought the lawsuit 34 years ago, said: “This is a level-headed Police Department, led by a level-headed police commissioner. What in the world are they doing?”

For nearly four decades, civil liberty advocates and police officials have fought over the kinds of procedures needed to avoid excessive intrusion on people expressing their views, to provide accountability in secret police operations and to assure public safety for a city that has been the leading American target of terrorists.

To date, officials say no one has complained of personal damage from the information collected over recent months, but participants in the protests, rallies and other gatherings say the police have been a disruptive presence.

Ryan Kuonen, 32, who took part in a “ride of silence” in memory of a dead cyclist, said that two undercover officers – one with a camera – subverted the event. “They were just in your face,” she said. “It made what was a really solemn event into something that seemed wrong. It made you feel like you were a criminal. It was grotesque.”

Ms. Clancy, a founder of I-Witness Video, a project that collected hundreds of videotapes during the Republican National Convention that were used in the successful defense of people arrested that week, has assembled videotape of other public events made by legal observers, activists, bystanders and police officers.

She presented examples in October at a conference of defense lawyers. “What has to go on is an informed discussion of policing tactics at public demonstrations, and these images offer a window into the issues and allow the public to make up their own mind,” Ms. Clancy said. “How is it possible for police to be accountable when they infiltrate events and dress in the garb of protesters?”

The videotapes that most clearly disclosed the presence of the disguised officers began in August 2004. What happened before that is unclear.

Among the events that have drawn surveillance is a monthly bicycle ride called Critical Mass. The Critical Mass rides, which have no acknowledged leadership, take place in many cities around the world on the last Friday of the month, with bicycle riders rolling through the streets to promote bicycle transportation. Relations between the riders and the police soured last year after thousands of cyclists flooded the streets on the Friday before the Republican National Convention. Officials say the rides cause havoc because the participants refuse to obtain a permit. The riders say they can use public streets without permission from the government.

In a tape made at the April 29 Critical Mass ride, a man in a football jersey is seen riding along West 19th Street with a group of bicycle riders to a police blockade at 10th Avenue. As the police begin to handcuff the bicyclists, the man in the jersey drops to one knee. He tells a uniformed officer, “I’m on the job.” The officer in uniform calls to a colleague, “Louie – he’s under.” A second officer arrives and leads the man in the jersey – hands clasped behind his back – one block away, where the man gets back on his bicycle and rides off.

That videotape was made by a police officer and was recently turned over by prosecutors to Gideon Oliver, a lawyer representing bicycle riders arrested that night.

Another arrest that appeared to be a sham changed the dynamics of a demonstration. On Aug. 30, 2004, during the Republican National Convention, a man with vivid blond hair was filmed as he stood on 23rd Street, holding a sign at a march of homeless and poor people. A police lieutenant suddenly moved to arrest him. Onlookers protested, shouting, “Let him go.” In response, police officers in helmets and with batons pushed against the crowd, and at least two other people were arrested.

The videotape shows the blond-haired man speaking calmly with the lieutenant. When the lieutenant unzipped the man’s backpack, a two-way radio could be seen. Then the man was briskly escorted away, unlike others who were put on the ground, plastic restraints around their wrists. And while the blond-haired man kept his hands clasped behind his back, the tape shows that he was not handcuffed or restrained.

The same man was videotaped a day earlier, observing the actress Rosario Dawson as she and others were arrested on 35th Street and Eighth Avenue as they filmed “This Revolution,” a movie that used actual street demonstrations as a backdrop. At one point, the blond-haired man seemed to try to rile bystanders.

After Ms. Dawson and another actress were placed into a police van, the blond-haired man can be seen peering in the window. According to Charles Maol, who was working on the film, the blond-haired man is the source of a voice that is heard calling: “Hey, that’s my brother in there. What do you got my brother in there for?”

After Mr. Browne was sent photographs of the people involved in the convention incidents and the bicycle arrests, he said, “I am not commenting on descriptions of purported or imagined officers.”

The federal courts have long held that undercover officers can monitor political activities for a “legitimate law enforcement purpose.” While the police routinely conduct undercover operations in plainly criminal circumstances – the illegal sale of weapons, for example – surveillance at political events is laden with ambiguity. To retain cover in those settings, officers might take part in public dialogue, debate and demonstration, at the risk of influencing others to alter opinions or behavior.

The authority of the police to conduct surveillance of First Amendment activities has been shaped over the years not only by the law but also by the politics of the moment and the perception of public safety needs.

In the 1971 class-action lawsuit, the city acknowledged that the Police Department had used infiltrators, undercover agents and fake news reporters to spy on yippies, civil rights advocates, antiwar activists, labor organizers and black power groups.

A former police chief said the department’s intelligence files contained a million names of groups and individuals – more in just the New York files than were collected for the entire country in a now-discontinued program of domestic spying by the United States Army around the same time. In its legal filings, the city said any excesses were aberrational acts.

The case, known as Handschu for the lead plaintiff, was settled in 1985 when the city agreed to extraordinary new limits in the investigation of political organizations, among them the creation of an oversight panel that included a civilian appointed by the mayor. The police were required to have “specific information” that a crime was in the works before investigating such groups.

The Handschu settlement also limited the number of police officers who could take part in such investigations and restricted sharing information with other agencies.

Over the years, police officials made no secret of their belief that the city had surrendered too much power. Some community affairs officers were told they could not collect newspaper articles about political gatherings in their precincts, said John F. Timoney, a former first deputy commissioner who is now the chief of police in Miami.

The lawyers who brought the Handschu lawsuit say that such concerns were exaggerated to make limits on police behavior seem unreasonable. The city’s concessions in the Handschu settlement, while similar to those enacted during that era in other states and by the federal government, surpassed the ordinary limits on police actions.

“It was to remedy what was a very egregious violation of people’s First Amendment rights to free speech and assemble,” said Jeremy Travis, the deputy police commissioner for legal affairs from 1990 to 1994.

At both the local and federal level, many of these reforms effectively discouraged many worthy investigations, Chief Timoney said. “The police departments screw up and we go to extremes to fix it,” Chief Timoney said. “In going to extremes, we leave ourselves vulnerable.”

Mr. Travis, who was on the Handschu oversight panel, said that intelligence officers understood they could collect information, provided they had good reason.

“A number of courts decided there should be some mechanism set up to make sure the police didn’t overstep the boundary,” said Mr. Travis, who is now the president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “It was complicated finding that boundary.” The authority to determine the boundary would be handed back to the Police Department after the Sept. 11 attacks.

On Sept. 12, 2002, the deputy police commissioner for intelligence, David Cohen, wrote in an affidavit that the police should not be required to have a “specific indication” of a crime before investigating. “In the case of terrorism, to wait for an indication of crime before investigating is to wait far too long,” he wrote.

Mr. Cohen also took strong exception to limits on police surveillance of public events.

In granting the city’s request, Charles S. Haight, a federal judge in Manhattan, ruled that the dangers of terrorism were “perils sufficient to outweigh any First Amendment cost.”

New guidelines say undercover agents may be used to investigate “information indicating the possibility of unlawful activity”- but also say that commanders should consider whether the tactics are “warranted in light of the seriousness of the crime.”

Ms. Clancy said those guidelines offered no clear limits on intrusiveness at political or social events. Could police officers take part in pot-luck suppers of antiwar groups, buy drinks for activists? Could they offer political opinions for broadcast or publication while on duty but disguised as civilians?

Mr. Browne, the police spokesman, declined to answer those questions. Nor would he say how often – if ever – covert surveillance at public events has been approved by the deputy commissioner for intelligence, as the new guidelines require.

[From Jay Babcock: The book pictured above, published by the New York Public Library in 1998 in conjunction with an exhibition there, is the direct inspiration for the new line of Bastet “Mimeo” publications (see Arthur news for details). Here’s the NYUPL’s description of the “A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980” exhibition…]

From their apartments, garages, and basements, poets like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Spicer, Ted Berrigan, and Anne Waldman created their own publications as an alternative to the academic literary mainstream of the mid-twentieth century. More than 400 such publications are included in A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980, an exhibition on view from January 24 to July 25, 1998 in the Berg Exhibition Room of The New York Public Library’s Center for the Humanities at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.

These publications overflow with the enthusiastic experiments and explorations of such writers as Paul Auster, Clark Coolidge, LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka), Kenneth Koch, Eileen Myles, and Aram Saroyan. Also included are designs and original art by artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Joe Brainard, and Alex Katz, who created covers and illustrations for many of the publications. A compelling photograph that helps introduce the exhibition is by Allen Ginsberg, taken from his back window. At the bottom, in black ink, he inscribed “Out my kitchen window, Ed Sanders’ Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts was Emimeo’d in a secret location in the lower East Side’ circa 1964 . . . . ”

The writers who created their own publications required cheap, accessible means of duplicating them. In many cases they turned to the then prevalent mimeograph machine. “Mimeograph allowed for immediate publication and distribution and was a primary tool of communion among many poets and other writers of the ’60s and ’70s in what became known as the mimeograph revolution,” said Rodney Phillips, curator of the Library’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. Mr. Phillips and Steven Clay, Publisher of Granary Books, are the curators of the exhibition.

A Secret Location showcases several early items which were precursors to the wave of artist-created publications that started appearing in the 1960s. On view are two 1951 issues of Origin: A Quarterly for the Creative, a journal published by poet Cid Corman. Origin featured the work of many important poets, including early poems by Charles Olson, who (with Robert Creeley) a few years later created the seminal Black Mountain Review, published from Black Mountain College where he was Rector.

One of the most fascinating early items on view is Allen Ginsberg’s publication of his poem Siesta in Xbalba, which he created in 1956 aboard a ship in the Alaskan Sea. Ginsberg managed to find a mimeograph machine on board and published approximately thirty copies of the work.

It was Donald Allen’s watershed 1960 anthology The New American Poetry that stimulated the flood of poetry that led to the mimeo movement. Allen defined a “New York School” of poets, which included such writers as John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara. The work of these writers is included in many of the publications in A Secret Location, and their own elegant magazines are also on view. These include Art and Literature, edited from Paris by Ashbery, and Locus Solus, issues of which were edited by Ashbery, Koch, and James Schuyler.

In the early 1960s, a second generation of younger “New York School” writers emerged. Centered in New York City’s East Village, many were affiliated with The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, which even today is considered the premier venue for new and experimental poetry. The loose band of second-generation writers included Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Larry Fagin, Dick Gallup, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, and Lewis Warsh.

The exhibition features many of their publications, including copies of Berrigan’s “C”: A Journal of Poetry, Fagin’s Adventures in Poetry, and Angel Hair, edited by Waldman and Warsh. Also included is the first issue of the Poetry Project Newsletter, edited by Ron Padgett in 1972, and issues of The World, the Project’s journal. Both are still being published and are important beacons of contemporary poetry.

In addition to providing a cross-sectional look at the poetry and art of the 1960s, A Secret Location allows a glimpse at the vivid social life of the era through a series of photographs and artifacts from the personal collections of some of the second-generation “New York School” poets. A series of thirty or so small, color snapshots capture a charming exuberance which seems to have characterized the group. There also are photographs of a long-running poker game in which many of the writers played and of the session in which a score of poets posed nude for a painting by George Schneeman. The huge, unfinished artwork is on display and dominates the walls of the exhibition room.

Journals were often devoted to works in a particular style or form. For example, 0 to 9, edited by Bernadette Mayer and Vito Hannibal Acconci, focused on “concrete” poetry; Carol Berg?©’s Center published “performance” poetry; and Trobar, published in only five issues from 1960 to 1964, was dedicated to “deep image poetry.” A Secret Location also showcases publications reflecting a third generation “New York School” poetry as represented by the work of Eileen Myles, Gregory Masters, Michael Scholnick, Gary Lenhart, and others.

Although much of the material in A Secret Location was created in New York, the mimeo revolution thrived in many locations throughout the country, but especially in the San Francisco Bay area. Among the most important precursors to the genre was City Lights, which in the mid-1950s began publishing from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s bookstore in the city’s North Beach neighborhood. City Lights became known for publishing works of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and many other important poets of the Beat generation. Jack Spicer’s J, published in 1959 and 1960, also came out of the North Beach area. It featured intricate mimeographed covers with designs formed from thick patches of letters typed in repetition.

The materials in A Secret Location are drawn largely from the Library’s Berg Collection. Other materials have been loaned by poets and collectors. The exhibition will also form the basis for a book to be published by the Library and Granary Press.

Not in our name

The War Game had no budget, no hero and was banned by the BBC. Yet it remains a landmark anti-war film. Alex Cox traces the career of its fearless director

Alex Cox
Saturday July 9, 2005
The Observer

I saw Peter Watkins’ documentary film Culloden when it was first broadcast on December 15 1964. It was on the new, third channel, BBC2. I watched it with my parents; they didn’t let on to being impressed by it, but it disturbed me. After a diet of second world war newsreels recycled into documentaries, and old war features like Reach for the Sky (Douglas Bader loses both legs yet still pilots a Spitfire!), it was the first thing I’d ever seen on television that could be called anti-war. Thanks to the documentary style, the parallels between what the Americans were doing in Vietnam and what the English had done to the Scots were very clear. The Scotswoman telling the camera how the English troops had killed her child stuck in my head and haunted me. I resolved to be a pacifist. It was my 10th birthday.

Culloden was such a brilliant film, such a great and tragic work of art, that it should have got its 28-year-old director immediately fired from the BBC. Somehow, this did not occur. Maybe the BBC didn’t know what directors were – Watkins was credited only as writer and producer. More likely he was fortunate, and the head of documentaries, Huw Weldon, stuck up for him. We’re lucky Weldon did, because in the space of 18 months Watkins shot a pair of films that changed the nature of what a documentary could be, and that profoundly affected filmed drama. The other film was The War Game

What makes these two films particularly great is the director’s perfect use of minimal resources. Culloden and The War Game were only possible, are only conceivable, in black and white – where blood and earth and mud are all the same colour, and the viewer isn’t always sure what they’ve just seen. But Watkins’ inventive resourcefulness went way beyond film stock. These were the days before CGI and dinosaur-documentary budgets; there was no possibility of a wide shot or a panorama in either film. So Watkins did the reverse of what one expected: he concentrated on the faces of the people in his story – the clansman, the English soldier, the civil defence official, the relocatee.

Doing this, and filling in the background with a few more extras in costumes, got around the budget issue. But it also did something democratic, even revolutionary: it made the clansmen and the English prison conscripts protagonists. In a traditional war film, heroic individuals (William Holden, Alec Guinness, Peter O’Toole) received the lion’s share of close-ups; in Culloden, a landless man had as large a closeup as Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Watkins wanted to draw parallels between Culloden and Vietnam, of course, and to warn of the consequences of nuclear war. But, going far beyond that, he also wanted to oppose the western-heroic-drama structure, with its sole, strong protagonist, and its obvious moral line. In neither film did he try to score points against an obvious antagonist, or to rely on the tedious weight of a conventional villain. As the narrator points out in Culloden, there are thousands of Scottish soldiers in the English ranks, and Prince Charlie is an idiot. As order breaks down in The War Game, the police end up hoarding the last rations of food: how could they keep order, otherwise?

The nearest thing to a villain in either film is the actor playing an Anglican bishop in The War Game, who says (quoting the bishop’s words): “I still believe in the war of the just.” Watkins cuts straight from this close-up to blurred images of a vehicle, ablaze. “In this car, a family is burning alive,” the narrator says. The juxtaposition isn’t about nuclear war, any more. It could be a cut straight out of Culloden – or from an anti-war documentary about Iraq.

But there won’t be any bold anti-war documentary coming from the BBC; for the same reason, The War Game was banned, and remained unscreenable, for many years. In the past decade, a debate has arisen as to whether this great, passionate, genial film was banned as an act of self-censorship, or on direct orders from Whitehall. Patrick Murphy, Watkins’ biographer, writes that the BBC organised “secret screenings … for senior government representatives” in September 1965, prior to the official ban. He also reports that formerly classified documents relating to the genesis of the ban have been destroyed, so we may never know whether the BBC was leaned on, or whether they leaned on themselves. But these debates don’t really matter. The miracle was that Culloden, with its graphic anti-war message (“This is grapeshot. This is what it does”) had slipped through the net, and with it, Watkins’ original and radical style.

Inevitably, The War Game is technically more proficient and more interesting than Culloden. In less than a year, the young film-maker had got better at his craft, and wanted to try new things. In addition to the extraordinary editing, and the brilliantly choreographed action (both films’ action coordinator was Derek Ware), Watkins tried a new technique: the long, hand-held take, in which he followed a motorcycle dispatch rider from his pillion, into a building and up a flight of stairs; or a doctor, in his car, then out of it, without a cut. In a medium endangered by repetitive editing and storytelling, Watkins was pushing down barriers more effectively than any other film-maker.

But, if the jig with the BBC was up, where was he to go from there? Conventionally, a film-maker is supposed to make a work-for-hire feature at this point, then go off to Hollywood. This is more or less what Watkins did. But, equally predictably, it didn’t turn out as planned.

Privilege was a rock’n’roll messiah story, originally written by Johnny Speight, which Watkins adapted into his preferred quasi-documentary style. Punishment Park was a more personal project, which Watkins developed for himself and shot in the US in 1970. Like Culloden and The War Game it posited societal breakdown followed by reprisals and police actions, with the war-torn US in the grip of mass arrests and show trials. Again, Watkins filmed his stressed-out characters addressing the camera directly.

In this way, as in the hand-held style of his action sequences, the director Watkins most resembles is Stanley Kubrick, whose war-related films Fear and Desire and Full Metal Jacket also lack a single protagonist, and feature characters speaking directly to the camera. Kubrick and Watkins were alike in other ways, perhaps: both famously resisted the trappings of Hollywood and film festivals; both have a reputation for reclusivity and intelligence. But Kubrick’s intelligence led him to daily conversations with studio heads and to a 10-picture deal with Warner Bros. Watkins, more radical, more humanistic, far less politic, now lives in Lithuania, and publishes manifestos via the internet.

Watkins has made 14 films in all, ranging from a 17-minute amateur short to an anti-nuclear documentary, Resan (The Journey), which runs for 14 and a half hours. Of these, only two are “mainstream” features, in the sense of English-language dramas intended to be shown in the cinema; his recent work has been diverse in the extreme, and has received little distribution.

Right now, the British film industry is in a right mess. I’m sure Watkins has been having a great time, making films about Munch and Strindberg with enthusiastic amateurs, and tweaking his website. But, damn it, there’s a war on! We need Watkins here. The peace movement needs him, because it’s one of the largest national movements in the world, and one of the most ignored. And the nation needs him. Even reactionaries can agree with this, because Britain needs great, fearless film-makers who can see both sides of the question, no matter whom it incenses, and who can make radical, revolutionary films for little money. There are still great film technicians here, dying to work on great films – and I suspect that never since making The War Game has Watkins had the same combination of autonomy and economy that he achieved during that one momentous year.

Maybe the BBC in 1964 was a bureaucratic nightmare, but it also hired bright young men, set them up as full-time, salaried directors, and gave them some of the best technical staff in the world to work with: cameramen like Dick Bush and Peter Bartlett, editors like Michael Bradsell, stunt coordinators like Derek Ware. Their successors sit behind computers now, not just in Soho, but in Bradford, Liverpool, Nottingham, dutifully assembling promos and corporates and stupid reality TV. They hate the formulaic trash that they are paid to deliver. And they would love to work on films like the ones Watkins, Ware, Bradsell and company made. Peter, come home.

? Punishment Park was re-released yeserday.

COURTESY JOHN COULTHART!

SFWEEKLY, Jan 26, 2005

ARMAGEDDON IT

Oakland noise nuts Axolotl school us in aliens, hash, and the end of the world as we know it

By Justin F. Farrar

“Let me see if I understand this. According to the ancient calendar of the Mayans, some massive event, irrevocably altering humanity, is scheduled to occur on October 28, 2011.”

“Yes. That’s basically it.”

“Well, then, what the fuck do you think is really going to happen, Karl — global nuclear holocaust?”

“Possibly, but a hopeful thing that could happen is a total transformation in human consciousness. Then again, some say it will be permanent global blackout. There are actually infinite possibilities.”

So here I am grilling — quite relentlessly, mind you — this experimental musician-dude named Karl Bauer about what exactly is going to occur when this date, Oct. 28, 2011, hits us all, discussion of which is all Bauer’s fault. We are — I mean, I am — supposed to be conducting a professional journalistic interview, because Bauer, along with William Sabiston, is Axolotl (pronounced “ax-oh-lot-el”), Oakland-based creators of deeply meditative psych-noise. But we are both having a little trouble focusing on this because just minutes after Bauer entered my Ocean Beach digs for said interview two objects furtively appeared on the carpet that were not there before: a tiny but effective nugget of hash and a copy of the book The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness. I simply take all this in stride, because rapping with Bauer about such unabashedly New Age hippie-trippy subjects as violent cosmic realignment makes absolute sense considering how mind-fucking stoned and “out there” Bauer and Sabiston’s music feels.

Axolotl, you see, is one of literally hundreds, possibly thousands, of super-obscure bands and collectives from all over mother Gaia. These groups have sprung forth just within the past five years, and they’ve spurned traditional song structures in favor of a brand-new electronic-based brand of mind-expanding tones and sounds inspired by ’60s minimalism, feedback-packed experimental noise from early-’90s Japan, traditional Indian ragas, the faux world-music jams of the Sun City Girls, post-techno ambient electronics, fiery free jazz, field recordings of African and Asian tribal musicians, and ridiculously rare acid freakout psych-rock from the late ’60s and early ’70s that very few ears have ever heard save those belonging to fanatical record collectors.

“I feel like music has gotten real interesting since about 2001,” Bauer explains just after presenting evidence for the existence of world-dominating extraterrestrials called “Archons.” “Many bands these days, Axolotl included, seem to be inspired by world music — music that is, to a large degree, spiritual music, sometimes even ritual music. It seems as though the thought of the Eastern Hemisphere is now permeating the Western Hemisphere.” As you can plainly read, Bauer and I are now floating far, far above San Francisco, rapping about ultra-rare psych records, aliens, and Taoism. But for the uninitiated, here is a mental image explaining what Axolotl’s droning psychedelic noise sounds like, or, more importantly, does.

First off, please relocate to the quietest place that you know of. Now listen to the beat of your heart, to the soft, persistent ring in your ears, to the hushed hum of your nervous system, to the air drifting through your nostrils, to the garbled contractions in your abdomen, to the saliva collecting in the back of your throat, and even to the silence encompassing your body. If you meditate hard enough (but not too hard), the clatter of individual metabolic processes slowly morphs into a single, organically nurtured movement of sound. This is precisely what Axolotl (and the new psychedelia) strives to create using jury-rigged electronics and just about any other object capable of producing noise. It’s all about orchestrated sound flowing as a living, breathing organism.

“We want to feel the sound in our guts. We want to make huge gorgeous drones,” Bauer enthusiastically says. “We do not want to hurt people, but we do want them to feel this expanse of sound. I want to create an incredible physical experience. We really like the idea of the visceral fused to really blessed-out sounds. We really like the way frequencies affect hearing, depth perception, and sense of space. We love powerful tones. We just love that feeling.”

Of course, the evocation of all this patchouli-soaked yogi mysticism is not to imply that Bauer and Sabiston, while at home in their Oakland warehouse, wrap themselves up like a couple of Auntie Anne’s hot pretzels and record the sound of their stomach acids dissolving pork chops and apple sauce (although someone does need to request that as an encore at the next Axolotl gig). On the contrary, the duo actually started as live-action improvisational performers when Bauer, a classically trained violinist, and Sabiston, a drummer, came together in 2002 not long after Bauer relocated to the Bay Area from New York.

“I used to take mushrooms with some of my musician friends in New York,” Bauer recalls, “and we just wanted to have a bunch of shit in the room to find out what happened. We would just bang on lots of pots and pans with contact mikes. We just wanted to document weird human outbursts. That was a huge influence on all of us. Then I moved out here and I wanted to continue what I was doing back east.”

Before too long, Bauer augmented his violin with an assortment of toy instruments, trumpets, and human voices and started feeding them through a complex network of pedals, wires, and blinking lights, which transformed these formerly acoustic instruments into cyclical waves of feedback and thick, undulating sheets of static and distortion. Sabiston followed suit, ditching his drum kit and acquiring a small collection of hand-held percussion elements and this large black box outfitted with all types of esoteric knobs, buttons, and levers, which generates growling low-end frequencies and cascades of crackling static.

Axolotl’s preliminary results from this new fusion of the acoustic and the digital can be heard on the 2003 compilation Space Is No Place: NYC Noise From the Underground and the duo’s 2004 self-titled debut, both released on the New York-based imprint Psych-o-Path Records. As I mentioned earlier, Axolotl is indeed from Oakland, but its particular style of droning psychedelic noise definitely has much in common aesthetically and spiritually with New York’s current tribe of hippie-stinking noise-shamans such as Double Leopards, Black Dice, Mouthus, Animal Collective, Gang Gang Dance, Excepter, and the No Neck Blues Band. These acts convey a loose collective mind-set that Bauer feels quite intimate with.

Overall, Axolotl’s first full-length CD is a pretty expansive and far-out affair even though its palette of tones and frequencies is relatively narrow and the production quality just a little too uniformly digital. But the group is evolving at an accelerated clip. A mystical incandescence that Bauer and Sabiston’s debut only hints at can now be thoroughly and profoundly experienced on their brand-new CD-R, Archons?/Archons!, released on the Jyrk imprint, a small but industrious underground label operated by Oakland-based noise guerrillas D Yellow Swans.

“The song titles on the new CD-R [such as ‘Emme Ya,’ ‘Enuma Elish,’ and ‘Baal’] are influenced by a lot of cosmic thought and conspiracy stuff,” Bauer elaborates in a choked voice as if he’s preventing something from escaping his lungs.

Archons?/Archons! consists of fragments of eight separate drones recorded over the past year that Axolotl has sequenced and edited into one 48-minute master-drone. This is the group’s most successfully psychedelic and trance-inducing release to date. (Time to pass that hash pipe again, Bauer.) It’s meticulously constructed and spontaneously performed. It’s dense but not muddy. It’s propulsive but not explicitly beat-driven. And sinking deeper into its expanse of textures and patterns, we discover faint digital tones that drunkenly chirp like naughty sparrows sipping cough syrup. Clusters of effervescent static tumble from the speaker cones like steel teeth patiently chewing on a mouthful of thin copper wire. Electronic babble nervously converses with hand rattles and bells. Deep, ghostly voices moan from within the ruined temples of Atlantis only to gradually melt and re-form into the well-measured whir of Bauer’s echo-stained violin. And vaporous feedback trails every sound.

At times these incredibly varied sonic textures feel like microscopic particles wandering the inner corridors of the mind heretofore locked shut, and other times they swell to monolithic proportions, dwarfing the listener and shaking the walls and furniture as if the N Judah were scuttling past your crib. But, regardless of volume and dissonance, what remains of ultimate importance is how deeply and succinctly Axolotl’s collective sound lives, breathes, talks, walks, cries, crawls, flexes, sighs, and coughs.

It’s that very last quality that seems particularly appropriate, because by this point our interview has devolved into violent fits of coughing and gasping amidst a thick, stagnant fog of hash exhaust, but, I must admit, the mind does feel slightly more expanded than ever before.

The BBC, Nov 28, 2005: Romantic love ‘lasts just a year’

Some couples may disagree, but romantic love lasts little more than a year, Italian scientists believe.

The University of Pavia found a brain chemical was likely to be responsible for the first flush of love.

Researchers said raised levels of a protein was linked to feelings of euphoria and dependence experienced at the start of a relationship.But after studying people in long and short relationships and single people, they found the levels receded in time.

The team analysed alterations in proteins known as neurotrophins in the bloodstreams of men and women aged 18 to 31, the Psychoneuroendocrinology journal reported.

They looked at 58 people who had recently started a relationship and compared the protein levels in the same number of people in long-term relationships and single people.

In those who had just started a relationship, levels of a protein called nerve growth factors, which causes tell-tale signs such as sweaty palms and the butterflies, were significantly higher.

Of the 39 people who were still in the same new relationship after a year, the levels of NGF had been reduced to normal levels.

Report co-author Piergluigi Politi said the findings did not mean people were no longer in love, just that it was not such an “acute love”.

“The love became more stable. Romantic love seemed to have ended.”

And he added the report suggested the change in love was down to NGF. “Our current knowledge of the neurobiology of romantic love remains scanty. But it seems from this study biochemical mechanisms could be involved in the mood changes that occur from the early stage of love to when the relationship becomes more established.”

However, he said further research was needed.

Dr Lance Workman, head of psychology at Bath Spa University, said: “Research has suggested that romantic love fades after a few years and becomes companionate love and it seems certain biological factors play a role.

“But while we are a pair-bonding species, there is some doubt over whether this is within monogamous relationships or not.

“Different societies have different practices and trends.”

Into harm’s way

By ‘rendering’ suspects to torturers America sinks to the moral level of Saddam

Henry Porter
Sunday December 11, 2005
The Observer

The word rendition was an odd one in the context. It seemed to imply long-standing procedures, an obscure diplomatic formality perhaps. It was some weeks later that I began to puzzle at the word used by my American contact over lunch in London and which, come to think of it, was accompanied by a series of nods and glances. I understood what it was to render something – although not perhaps someone – and I knew what a rendition was in the context of musical and dramatic performance, but what did it mean in the new war against terror? And what was ‘extraordinary rendition’?

This was in the dying weeks of 2001. Sometime early the following year I saw him again; this time he was on his way back from Afghanistan where he had been contracted to the US military in a quasi intelligence role. He was in exultant, kick-arse form. The war against the Taliban had been won; al-Qaeda was in flight and its members were being hunted down across the globe.

I asked him again about renditions. He revolved his eyes and looked away as though to say I was being dim, which maybe I was. But the problem with rendition, I explained, was that it was such an ambiguous term. A rendition can mean nothing more than a delivery, an exchange, or a return by agreement. Or it can refer to the process of extracting fat from meat by applying heat. Which did he mean? He shook his head. Rendition was delivery and it had nothing to do with fat and meat, and anyway he wanted to talk about something else. And extraordinary rendition? Well, buddy, use your imagination.

Sometime later I learned that rendition referred to the outsourcing of the interrogation of untried terrorist suspects, and that ‘extraordinary renditions’ could either refer to the capture and transport of suspects in the utmost secrecy, or to the performance of the suspect under extreme conditions – that is to say the information produced by torture. It wasn’t clear which, but I suspected it covered both.

As far as I was aware the phrase had not appeared in the media. But there was nothing hard for me to go on. I had no dates, places or names of individuals, and it seemed unlikely that I would get enough to write a piece of journalism. So I started drafting a novel called Empire State and that made things a lot easier because once you go from factual reporting to fiction people tend to talk more.

It was then that I heard a story about five Egyptian al-Qaeda suspects being arrested in Albania and flown to Egypt. The important part was that this had happened before 11 September 2001 – during the Clinton administration – proof that rendition was an established CIA practice.

So I flew to Tirana, stayed in the Rogner Hotel and waited for various contacts I had been given to return my calls. If you hang about in the Rogner sooner or later you meet everyone you need and with a help of a fixer – one of the few Albanian males I met who was not suffering some mild psychotic disorder – I got to the bottom of the story of how five men were trapped by the electronic surveillance of the local intelligence service and were transported to Cairo by the CIA. They were all tortured and two were hanged.

Since it had all happened in 1998 people didn’t mind talking about it. Only when I asked about current operations against al-Qaeda in the Balkans did the shutters come down. I left Tirana for Cairo and after many false trails found the facilities where these things were likely to have happened. I also learned that American intelligence officers were part of the process. They did not simply leave the rendered suspects, but remained on hand to receive information produced by the interrogation. That America was collaborating with torturers was shocking, but it was seeing these facilities that brought home to me the terror and despair of the men who were wrung dry before being executed.

Rendition is profoundly wrong and it happens to be against American law. In 1998 the US Congress passed legislation that confirmed the policy of the United States ‘not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States’.

Outsourcing torture is also against International law, but still the secret flights continue across the world and through European airspace – 400 over the United Kingdom alone. Countless suspects have disappeared into various facilities never to be heard of again.

We get hot under the collar about the CIA’s ‘black sites’ in Europe but nothing is done. Last Thursday the Law Lords ruled that the secret tribunals hearing cases related to terrorism suspects could not consider evidence that wouldn’t be acceptable in a criminal trial – in other words that which is produced by torture. This is an important ruling for Liberty and the other human rights organisations that fought the case, but it will have no effect on renditions, for as I learned during my trips in 2002, they occur in an entirely different dimension to the criminal justice system of civilised countries. Renditions service the ‘intelligence community’, not the law courts. They are about gaining information, not proof.

Last week on a trip to Europe, the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, clarified her country’s policy by saying that America would meet its treaty obligations in respect of torture. Two points need to be remembered from her statement. The first is that it was flagged by her aides as an important shift in policy, from which we may therefore conclude that the CIA had been directly involved in the mistreatment of suspects. The second is that at no stage did Rice deny or condemn the practice of outsourcing torture to countries such as Egypt.

Read her assurances carefully and you realise that she did not address the main issue about rendition. As though to underline this, senior al-Qaeda suspects being questioned in Europe were transferred to North Africa prior to her landing in Europe last week.

Are we Europeans content as long as the torture is not going on in our backyard? It would seem so, but in Britain we should remember that during the war, when we faced a greater threat than the one posed by al-Qaeda, we did not resort to torture. The late Colonel T. A. Robertson, a friend of my family’s, was known as TAR in MI5, where for much of the Second World War he directed the B1(a) section responsible for tracking down Abwehr agents. He would no more have contemplated torture than amputating his own right hand. No doubt this charming man was as hard as nails but he was also civilised and, like the rest of his generation, fought for civilisation.

We affirm and protect civilisation by behaving within its constraints, not by shipping blindfolded men into dungeons where they are plugged into the electricity supply. If only the Prime Minister had thought for a few moments before rising in the House of Commons last week to support renditions, he might have recalled that on that very day the court listening to the trial of Saddam Hussein heard evidence from women who claimed to have been tortured by the dictator’s secret police.

What is the moral difference between Saddam’s behaviour and the American renditions? There is none. For the dirty secret about torture is that it is not simply to gain unreliable information but that it is a weapon of punishment and extreme terror, which is deployed in exactly the same way by America as it was by Saddam. Knowing that, imagine yourself a Muslim and then see what you think about extraordinary renditions.

New York Times Sunday Magazine

Conservative Blogs are More Effective
By MICHAEL CROWLEY

Published: December 11, 2005

When the liberal activist Matt Stoller was running a blog for the Democrat Jon Corzine’s 2005 campaign for governor, he saw the power of the conservative blogosphere firsthand. Shortly before the election, a conservative Web site claimed that politically damaging information about Corzine was about to surface in the media. It didn’t. But New Jersey talk-radio shock jocks quoted the online speculation, inflicting public-relations damage on Corzine anyway. To Stoller, it was proof of how conservatives have mastered the art of using blogs as a deadly campaign weapon.

That might sound counterintuitive. After all, the Howard Dean campaign showed the power of the liberal blogosphere. And the liberal-activist Web site DailyKos counts hundreds of thousands of visitors each day. But Democrats say there’s a key difference between liberals and conservatives online. Liberals use the Web to air ideas and vent grievances with one another, often ripping into Democratic leaders. (Hillary Clinton, for instance, is routinely vilified on liberal Web sites for supporting the Iraq war.) Conservatives, by contrast, skillfully use the Web to provide maximum benefit for their issues and candidates. They are generally less interested in examining every side of every issue and more focused on eliciting strong emotional responses from their supporters.

But what really makes conservatives effective is their pre-existing media infrastructure, composed of local and national talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, the Fox News Channel and sensationalist say-anything outlets like the Drudge Report – all of which are quick to pass on the latest tidbit from the blogosphere. “One blogger on the Republican side can have a real impact on a race because he can just plug right into the right-wing infrastructure that the Republicans have built,” Stoller says.

Earlier this year, John Thune, the newly elected South Dakota senator, briefed his Republican colleagues on the role of blogs in his victory over Tom Daschle, the former Democratic minority leader. The message seems to be catching on. In Arkansas, the campaign manager for the gubernatorial candidate Asa Hutchinson sent a mass e-mail message to supporters in May promoting the establishment of blogs “to comment on Arkansas politics as a counter to liberal media.” With the 2006 elections coming, Democrats have begun trying to use blogs more strategically. But given their head start, Stoller says, conservatives “will certainly have an upper hand.” Again.