Innholdsfortegnelse for May 13, 2013 i The Nation

Whistleblowing While You Work
 Seattle
 Tim Shorrock’s article on the NSA Four, “Obama’s Crackdown on Whistleblowers” [April 15], points to the problem of hiring private contractors to do the NSA’s work. Shorrock also reveals the revolving door between NSA personnel and the private companies they later work for. Profits motivate these contractors and pose a huge conflict of interest, and taxpayers are picking up the tab. These corporations have no loyalty to the American people, and they do not have to answer to us. That they could manufacture a need for the surveillance of private citizens is of enormous concern.
 Shorrock reports that the whistleblowers have been harassed and blacklisted for speaking out. Average citizens are also under
surveillance and harassed by groups like
InfraGard and other for-profit agencies. (The military has…

The Boston Marathon bombing briefly united the nation in horror, grief and a commitment to persevere. That unity quickly disintegrated, however, as Republican senators called for treating the surviving suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a 19-year-old US citizen, as an “enemy combatant”—and for interrogating him at length while denying him access to an attorney. At Slate, conservative law professor Eric Posner proposed that Congress enact a new statute authorizing detention and interrogation without counsel for all “terrorism” suspects. Recognizing the suspect’s rights, the senators and the scholar claim, may deny us valuable intelligence. 
 These suggestions are flawed on multiple fronts. First, how can we declare someone an enemy combatant when there is no evidence that his acts were part of an armed attack by anyone other than himself and his brother?…

Anwar al-Awlaki’s youngest brother, Ammar, was nothing like him. While Anwar embraced a radical interpretation of Islam and preached jihad against the United States, Ammar was pursuing a career at an oil company in Yemen. Ammar was Canadian-educated and politically well connected. He dressed in blue jeans, wore hip Armani eyeglasses and sported a goatee. His hair was slicked back, and he had the latest iPhone. In February 2011, Ammar told me, he was in Vienna on a business trip. He had just returned to his hotel after sampling some of the local cuisine with an Austrian colleague when the phone in his room rang. “Hello, Ammar?” said a man with an American accent. “My wife knows your wife, and I have a gift for her.”
 Ammar went down to…

Nestled in a mass of concrete houses in a poor neighborhood in Amman, Jordan, is a bare two-room apartment, home to a 30-year-old Syrian named Maher, his 24-year-old wife Nour, their young son and daughter, and five members of his wife’s family. Only a few rays of sunlight filter into the apartment’s damp outer room, and all nine people sleep in the more habitable inner room on cushions given to them by their neighbors. Maher’s family has a small combination heater-stove courtesy of a charity organization, no refrigerator, and a four-foot-square bathroom with a squat toilet. The walls are peeling so badly that picking at the paint is a pastime for the children. 
 Maher, who asked that their real names not be used for the sake of family still…

The Book of My Lives By Aleksandar Hemon. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 214 pp. $25. When his short-story collection The Question of Bruno was published in 2001, the Sarajevo-born writer Aleksandar Hemon earned enthusiastic comparisons to Vladimir Nabokov, which had less to do with the particulars of Hemon’s fiction than with the fact that he began writing in English only after he arrived in the United States at the age of 27. What’s remarkable about Nabokov is his perfect icy fluency in a borrowed language. The joy of Hemon’s English, however, lies in the humor and vitality of its imprecision—its exuberant lack of fluency. His bizarre locutions and unusual sentences make The Question of Bruno a memorable collection of stories, but The Lazarus Project (2008)—his compact, hilarious, enraged novel about…

Ask yourself this: Do you know the name of any one of the people killed in the West Chemical and Fertilizer Company disaster? Do you know how many of them there were? Their ages, aspirations, what they looked like, whether they left behind children or what messages they last posted on Facebook? Do you know what the cause of the explosion was? Or if investigators are still searching for an explanation?
 You probably don’t know the answer to any of these questions, and I didn’t either until I started writing this. I didn’t know that officials have confirmed fourteen deaths, twelve of whom were first responders.
I didn’t know the name Jerry Chapman, 26, who volunteered with the Abbott Fire Company and who, according to his girlfriend Gina Rodriguez, was training…

Bozeman
 When a local newspaper here in Montana called for my views on a 19-year-old wrestler named Dzhokhar Tsarnaev with the confusing pedigree of being a Chechen from Dagestan who was reportedly born in Kyrgyzstan but mostly grew up in the United States, and what his motivations for the Boston Marathon terror attack may have been, I tried to use my background as the resident “Chechenologist” to help out. 
 Answering the second part of the
question—“Why?”—was easy: I did not know Tsarnaev’s motivations. But if he is guilty of the bombings—and I have little doubt at this point that he is—there must be a link to the deeply troubled history of Chechnya, and to the generations of anger, despair and trauma experienced by his people. 
 To start: Chechens are…

Except for the heavily armed guard at the entrance, there is little to suggest that the sprawling Navy airbase outside Lemoore—a town of 25,000 in central California—is anything but an oddly placed subdivision. Driving through its streets, we pass manicured lawns, several playgrounds, even a McDonald’s. It is not until we come to an intersection that the first hint of our location appears. Daddy, your princess has missed you! reads a handmade sign, swaying gently in the wind.
 “You see those all the time,” says Jack Boogaard, the longtime assistant superintendent of business for the Central Union School District, which operates two schools on the base. The stress caused when parents are deployed, along with the constant shifts in student population as families cycle in and out, poses a unique…

In early 2012, the National Library of Israel announced a competition for a new building in Jerusalem. The site was one of special prominence—near the Knesset, the Supreme Court and the Israel Museum—and the project enjoyed enormous national prestige. The competition was sponsored by two entities: the Israel National Library Construction Company and Yad Hanadiv, a foundation funded and controlled by the Rothschild family and the principal funder of the library project.
 The track record of the Rothschilds in sponsoring Israeli architectural competitions is somewhat checkered, which isn’t surprising for a rich and powerful organization participating in processes where the outcome is, theoretically, beyond its control. In the case of the Knesset competition (also financed in large measure by Rothschild money), the controversy surrounded the undistinguished composition of the jury…

Mira Nair comes up with only one moment of cinema in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and spends the rest of the 128 minutes refusing to think about it. Not that she’s obvious in her avoidance. Far from neglecting the rogue gesture, she surrounds it with expository monologues, polemical dialogues, diagrammatic incidents and a decade’s worth of editorial comment about the United States in relation to the Muslim world. Some of this scaffolding she borrows from the source novel by Mohsin Hamid, who contributed to the screen story; some she assembles with the help of other screenwriters. All of it is meant to explain the two seconds of truth that escape when Changez (Riz Ahmed), a young Pakistani expatriate with a fast-track Wall Street career, watches the television news on September 11,…

AUSTERITY’S GRIP: When blue-chip economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published a 2010 paper making the case for austerity, the report was seized upon by conservative economists, politicians like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, and deficit hawks Alan Simpson, Erskine Bowles and Pete Peterson. The authors argued that when the ratio of public debt to GDP exceeds 90 per-
cent, economic growth falls dramatically. With the United States and European nations nearing or exceeding that number, government efforts to stimulate the economy through traditional deficit-financed jobs programs would thus lead to slower growth, higher unemployment and worse debt.
 But austerity’s theoretical underpinnings have been exposed as flimflam, constructed out of egregious spreadsheet error and goofy logic. Thomas Herndon, a graduate student in economics at the University of Massachusetts, recently discovered that…

Moviegoers have any number of reasons to appreciate the achievements of the Indian-born filmmaker Mira Nair. The director of twenty-
two titles (according to IMDb), she has created a body of work that not only elevates our cinema but elucidates our world, even as it simultaneously entertains and educates its audience. Her newest film, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, is in many respects her most ambitious. Based on the 2007 novel by Mohsin Hamid, it tracks the progress of a son of the Pakistani elite who, after receiving a scholarship to Princeton, finds success at a McKinsey-like global consulting firm, where he enthusiastically embraces the pitiless diktats of global capitalism and reaps its seductive rewards.
 The year is 2001 and, of course, a crisis is coming. Watching the towers come down, the young…

Sequestration can seem a little vague, abstract, difficult to wrap your head around. But here’s what it means when it comes to housing: up to 140,000 fewer low-income families receiving housing vouchers, more children exposed to lead paint, higher rent for people who can’t afford it and a rise in homelessness.
 These are among the human costs of sequestration noted in a new paper by Doug Rice, senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).
 “These kinds of cuts are really unprecedented,” says Rice, noting that the total number of available vouchers has been cut only twice before in the thirty-nine-year history of the Section 8 program. “But here we are, in 2013, looking at severe cuts even at a time when the number of families…

Freaks of Fortune The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America. By Jonathan Levy. Harvard. 414 pp. $35. In 2010, Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein was summoned to testify before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which was charged with investigating the role of derivatives and other arcane investments in the 2008 economic meltdown. Still smarting from the flogging he was given by the press the previous year for boasting that the financial sector was doing “God’s work,” Blankfein adopted a more pragmatic approach in heading off calls for increased regulation and oversight. “Taking risk completely out of the system,” he warned, “will be at the cost of economic growth. We know from economic history that innovation—and the new industries and new jobs that result from it—require risk taking.”
…