Charles Bukowski once wrote “The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting.” Cynical, no? This came to mind when I watched Donald Rumsfeld on the air with Jon Stewart. They discussed why Americans trusted their elected officials in the decision to go to war with Iraq. More specifically, they debated how and why the US President decided the timing of when to go. I found it not only confirms what I wrote in 2007 about Curveball, but adds a whole new dimension to the debate. Here is my quote from Vagabond Scholar in 2007.

Psychologists have long known that typically, human beings tend to look for evidence to support their views, not for evidence to contradict them. This dynamic makes the thorough vetting of critical intelligence all the more crucial.

And here is what I wrote in 2006 about Risk Homeostasis:

The synopsis of Wilde’s theory is that if you perceive a change will make you safer, then you actually may be prone to take more risk, thus negating the actual risk reduction. However, if you want to be safer than you will make real tangible reductions in risk.

Today I can point you to Rumsfeld himself who talks about his October 15, 2002 “Parade of Horribles memo” (see part 2 below). He openly admits that while the President and his men were full of uncertainty in private, they felt Bush was required to put on the appearance of certainty for the public…so certainty was provided to the public for the purpose of appearing to have certainty. Rumsfeld says this is the need for a leader to show confidence. I agree with the last step in his argument, a leader should show confidence. However, I strongly disagree that a leader should show confidence only for the purpose of showing confidence. The missing link to private confidence seems to be lost on Rumsfeld.

In all fairness, Rumsfeld is stuck in a tough logical corner. If he argues there was confidence in private, then he makes the Administration look like fools for being wrong and believing bad intelligence information. The German intelligence experts and many in the CIA, for example, were not so easily fooled. That clearly would be a tougher position to defend. Thus, he takes the other argument. They had no confidence in private. Now he has the tough job of explaining why they were so confident in public. Saying it was a requirement of the role is weak. He needs a better explanation. A democratic leader should never trade in false confidence, which is basically where his story ends up. This leads Stewart to continually ask why the Administration worked so hard to get Americans to believe that Iraq was in possession of WMD.

Rumsfeld’s response to Stewart centers around the point that he and the Administration did not “rush” in their decision. That fits well with his argument about their private lack of confidence. Unfortunately, while he may say there was no rush, it just begs the question why they acted when they did. Who set the time line to decide, if not President Bush? A no-rush decision means to me they could have taken far more time evaluating the risks before advocating a decision to invade.

Updated to add: A new investigative story says a US Army General gave orders to troops to direct propaganda methods (designed to influence enemy combatants) against congressional delegations to get their support for the war…

The U.S. Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in “psychological operations” to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war, Rolling Stone has learned – and when an officer tried to stop the operation, he was railroaded by military investigators.

I guess the General thought he found an easy way to skip Congress right past the voting and into taking orders.

Reuters reveals an interesting African development related to protests in the Middle East and mobile communication:

Uganda has ordered phone companies to intercept text messages with words or phrases including “Egypt”, “bullet,” and “people power” ahead of Friday’s elections that some fear may turn violent.

“Messages containing such words, when encountered by the network or facility owner or operator, should be scrutinised and, if deemed to be controversial or advanced to incite the public, should be stopped or blocked,” he said.

[…]

The other English words or phrases on the list are: “Tunisia”, “Mubarak”, “dictator”, “teargas”, “army”, “police”, “gun”, “Ben Ali” and “UPDF”.

Bad idea. It will not work, not least of all because the black-list can be leaked; I see an impossible goal of staying abreast of slang and permutations already typical of SMS.

Who would type dictator when they can say tator, or tater, or tot? Who uses police when they can put cops, 5-0 or bobs? Wikipedia provides a list of euphemisms for police that covers every letter in the alphabet. I would use gas, or mace, or lach (short for lachrymatory), or pep(per), or RCA (riot control agent) instead of teargas.

I mean the obvious and historic defense is encoded language: the words gas and pepper have many meanings, and thus are hard to ban. This is a form of substitution. The key to decipher their correct (intended) meaning using message context or metadata. That easily defeats word-list censorship. How cool is that? Or should I say how radical? I’ve mentioned this before in terms of songs and poems like Kumbaya.

The NYT attempts to preserve or even restore meaning for the song often known only as Kumbaya

The lyrics told of people in despair and in trouble, calling on heaven for help, and beseeching God in the refrain, “Come by here.”

[…]

Far from compromise, “Come By Here” in its original hands appealed for divine intervention on behalf of the oppressed. The people who were “crying, my Lord” were blacks suffering under the Jim Crow regime of lynch mobs and sharecropping. While the song may have originated in the Georgia Sea Islands, by the late 1930s, folklorists had made recordings as far afield as Lubbock, Tex., and the Florida women’s penitentiary.

With the emergence of the civil rights movement in the 1950s, “Come By Here” went from being an implicit expression of black liberation theology to an explicit one. The Folkways album “Freedom Songs” contains an emblematic version — deep, rolling, implacable — sung by the congregation at Zion Methodist Church in Marion., Ala., soon after the Selma march in March 1965.

Like other songs I have mentioned before here, it was an encoded message among slaves to fight against injustice such as restrictions on speech.

To sing Kumbaya was to resist, perhaps even to signal to others an event that would need more resources — calling in backup. The peculiar characteristics of this song that originated in the American south are born out of resistance to authority; simple repetition with obfuscation helped ensure the availability, integrity and confidentiality of a message.

Also Folklife Center News, Volume 32, Nos 3-4, Summer/Fall 2010, in their exhaustive research of the song origins, explains how an alleged link is problematic and… Wikipedia tends to publish garbage.

The most common claim made today about the origins of “Kumbaya” is that it is from the Gullah-Geechee people of coastal Georgia and South Carolina. (The more outlandish versions of this theory, such as the one espoused on Wikipedia on April 2, 2010, claim that “Yah” is a remnant of Aramaic, and refers to God, despite the fact that “yah” means “here” in Gullah.) While a Gullah origin is certainly closer to the truth than either of the previous theories, AFC’s archival versions also call the Gullah claim into question.

The Folklife Center News provides instead a self-dealing alternative story:

…the evidence from the American Folklife Center Archive does not fully support any of the common claims about the origin of “Kumbaya.” Instead, it suggests that “Kumbaya” is an African American spiritual which originated somewhere in the American south, and then traveled all over the world…. Although it is truly a global folksong, its earliest versions are preserved in only one place: the AFC Archive.

Coastal Georgia and South Carolina is somewhere in the American south, no? Perhaps too specific. Either way, Kumbaya is a fight song.