Another Runaway General: Army Deploys Psy-Ops on U.S. Senators

From Rolling Stone:

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.

The orders came from the command of Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, a three-star general in charge of training Afghan troops – the linchpin of U.S. strategy in the war. Over a four-month period last year, a military cell devoted to what is known as "information operations" at Camp Eggers in Kabul was repeatedly pressured to target visiting senators and other VIPs who met with Caldwell. When the unit resisted the order, arguing that it violated U.S. laws prohibiting the use of propaganda against American citizens, it was subjected to a campaign of retaliation.
"My job in psy-ops is to play with people’s heads, to get the enemy to behave the way we want them to behave," says Lt. Colonel Michael Holmes, the leader of the IO unit, who received an official reprimand after bucking orders. "I’m prohibited from doing that to our own people. When you ask me to try to use these skills on senators and congressman, you’re crossing a line."

The list of targeted visitors was long, according to interviews with members of the IO team and internal documents obtained by Rolling Stone. Those singled out in the campaign included senators John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Jack Reed, Al Franken and Carl Levin; Rep. Steve Israel of the House Appropriations Committee; Adm. Mike Mullen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the Czech ambassador to Afghanistan; the German interior minister, and a host of influential think-tank analysts.
The incident offers an indication of just how desperate the U.S. command in Afghanistan is to spin American civilian leaders into supporting an increasingly unpopular war. According to the Defense Department’s own definition, psy-ops – the use of propaganda and psychological tactics to influence emotions and behaviors – are supposed to be used exclusively on "hostile foreign groups." Federal law forbids the military from practicing psy-ops on Americans, and each defense authorization bill comes with a "propaganda rider" that also prohibits such manipulation. "Everyone in the psy-ops, intel, and IO community knows you’re not supposed to target Americans," says a veteran member of another psy-ops team who has run operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. "It’s what you learn on day one."

When Holmes and his four-man team arrived in Afghanistan in November 2009, their mission was to assess the effects of U.S. propaganda on the Taliban and the local Afghan population. But the following month, Holmes began receiving orders from Caldwell’s staff to direct his expertise on a new target: visiting Americans. At first, the orders were administered verbally. According to Holmes, who attended at least a dozen meetings with Caldwell to discuss the operation, the general wanted the IO unit to do the kind of seemingly innocuous work usually delegated to the two dozen members of his public affairs staff: compiling detailed profiles of the VIPs, including their voting records, their likes and dislikes, and their "hot-button issues." In one email to Holmes, Caldwell’s staff also wanted to know how to shape the general’s presentations to the visiting dignitaries, and how best to "refine our messaging."
Congressional delegations – known in military jargon as CODELs – are no strangers to spin. U.S. lawmakers routinely take trips to the frontlines in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they receive carefully orchestrated briefings and visit local markets before posing for souvenir photos in helmets and flak jackets. Informally, the trips are a way for generals to lobby congressmen and provide first-hand updates on the war. But what Caldwell was looking for was more than the usual background briefings on senators. According to Holmes, the general wanted the IO team to provide a "deeper analysis of pressure points we could use to leverage the delegation for more funds." The general’s chief of staff also asked Holmes how Caldwell could secretly manipulate the U.S. lawmakers without their knowledge. "How do we get these guys to give us more people?" he demanded. "What do I have to plant inside their heads?"

Read the entire story here.

Autistic Fixation Shapes Photographer's Unique Images

From The Thinking Person's Guide to Autism:

The photographs of an emerging French photographer depict her fascination with reflections, a feature of her autism.

The photographer, who uses the online name "Luna" to protect her privacy, has been quietly posting her haunting, evocative images in the Flickr photo sharing website for the last two years. With oddly vibrant colors, they show entrancing and disorienting scenes of overlapping images which trap one's eye in layers of meaning.

Like most people with autism, Luna has several fixations -- topics which intensely fascinate her and dominate her thoughts. For Luna, these include cats, reflections, and vegan cooking. All three show up in her photographs, but her most moving images involve the reflections she finds everywhere. She explains that, for her,

"When I'm shooting, I often see the reflection before the thing which made the reflection. The object is not as important as the reflections. What I can see in a puddle is so moving for my soul, I'm melting with happiness!"

 Many of her images seem like photo-montages created by combining several other photographs using photo-editing software, but they are not. All of Luna's photographs are actual scenes she has found.

Luna began creating her intriguing, jewel-like images about two years ago with encouragement from an online French autism support group she joined in 2007. In 2009, the group hosted a small gallery showing of Luna's photographs in the city of Brest. She had a second show last year, as part of France's National Autism Awareness Week, and there will be a third show in April, 2011. The group has also self-published a book of Luna's work -- which sold out within two days. A second printing is underway.

 Professional photographer Courtney Bent is astonished by the power of Luna's photos. Bent is nationally known for her work putting cameras in the hands of people with significant physical and cognitive disabilities, helping them share their unique visions of the world. Bent's documentary about this work, "Shooting Beauty", has won numerous awards and she has been featured on NBC News and NPR, and in the Boston Herald. She also teaches photography at the college level and does commercial photography. As one might expect, people often approach Bent and ask her to look at a new "amazing" photograph by someone with a disability. Frequently, the work is only mildly interesting. But Luna's work was different: "I wasn't expecting it to make me go "WOW!" It's rare when I see something that is (this) unique and different."

What impresses Bent most is Luna's use of colors.

"She really is a master over her color technique," says Bent, "There is a feeling in her images that there's always a storm brewing. But she manages to find the quiet moment within the storm."

Bent says Luna achieves this calm-before-the-storm effect by stripping out the color in places at the edges of her images while enhancing the interior colors. Her color choices intrigue Bent: "Luna manages to create a warm, neon tone in her images, which seems to be a contradiction of colors. She is able to weave warm tones of yellow and brown with vibrant neon greens and blues to create an inviting, unique color palette."

"She has this amazing ability to create this quiet moment in chaos. It is almost like the chaos is peaceful to her. I'd be curious to find out how she literally views world. It's possible that the outside world appears to be really, really chaotic, and the snap of her camera allows her to create one still moment within the chaos, where the world…. stops… and is finally not moving anymore."
Bent is also impressed that Luna's reflection images have multiple layers or planes of images. "Each little portion is an image within itself. So you are allowed to settle peacefully on each little section, and each little section seems to have its own little story."

After Jeopardy! - The next job for computer Watson

From The Boston Globe:

IN A man-vs.-machine match up, does the computer always play the villain? IBM’s branding experts grappled with the issue a couple of years ago when they were deciding what sort of face and voice they should provide for the computer, Watson, which is competing this week on “Jeopardy!’’ The objective was to kindle warm feelings for the bionic quiz-show player — and even entice the public to root for it. They agreed they should distance Watson from the murderous computer, HAL, on “2001: A Space Odyssey.’’ That could be a PR disaster. And it shouldn’t resemble a person. Viewers might find that creepy — a reminder that Watson-like contraptions could be angling for their jobs. No, IBM’s computer would speak with a friendly, upbeat voice, flavored with a hint of the bionic, and its face would remain an abstract globe — with no eyes, nose, or mouth.
And yet Watson still stirs fears and resentment. As the computer headed into its “Jeopardy!’’ showdown last night against human champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, blogs and Twitter brimmed with fears about this next step in artificial intelligence. “I put the date at Monday, February 14, 2011. When Watson (SkyNet) goes live and crushes human intelligence on Jeopardy!’’ wrote one Twitter user. Meanwhile, a number of scientists in artificial intelligence, including several at MIT, the cradle of AI, view Watson as a cleverly-programmed dummy masquerading as a genius. Even as it masters a game of words and knowledge, they argue, it doesn’t “know’’ what it’s talking about.

Watson would not likely be the target of such criticism if it weren’t built for TV stardom. The game positions it in the role of a human. As such, it poses a threat for some, an insult for others. But the entire TV match is a contrivance, one designed to shine a global spotlight on IBM’s technology and burnish its brand. To create the drama and spectacle, IBM’s machine has to take on humans and imitate our brain functions. This positions it as an enemy and a pretender.

But the true implications of Watson’s technology will come after it retires from the stage and pursues a workaday career in offices and labs. That’s when Watson will shed its avatar and revert to its true nature, that of a powerful machine working for us, not against us. Watson will be a tool.

You might see Watson making laughable mistakes on its national turn, and wonder what value such a tool would have. In practice games, for example, it answered that a butterfly’s diet was “kosher,’’ and in one 19th-century literature clue it mistook Dickens’ Oliver Twist for the ’90s techno band, the Pet Shop Boys.

Yet there’s plenty of opportunity in the workplace for a fallible machine that (usually) makes sense of complex human language. The networked world is flowing with what computer scientists call “unstructured data,’’ much of it in words. It’s far too much for humans to read. Last year, for example, some 50,000 academic studies were published on neuroscience. Unlike a search engine, which ferrets out words and phrases from such studies, a language-savvy machine like Watson can dig through mountains of documents and come up with lists of possible answers. This service could prove valuable in call centers, police work, pharmaceutical labs, and even hospitals.

The key to understanding Watson’s value is to regard its answers as suggestions, or hypotheses. Consider Watson as a research assistant on a medical diagnostic team. A patient comes in with a puzzling set of symptoms. Watson launches a search through hundreds of thousands of journal articles and case studies. It returns with six possible diagnoses and its level of confidence in each one — along with links to the evidence it studied. Let’s say two of those six are far-fetched, the medical equivalent of its kosher butterflies. Doctors know enough to rule out a few others. Still, if even one of those six possibilities leads the team toward plausible answers they hadn’t considered, the machine will have done its job.

There’s no guarantee that Watson’s technology will provide the question-answering technology for all the industries IBM has targeted. Maybe competing companies or IBM itself will come up with cheaper, smarter, or more flexible systems. But a new generation of language-savvy machinery will soon be hunting down answers for us. Some will be wrong, some stupid. We human beings, exercising our still-unparalleled brainpower, will be the judges of that. Once you regard this technology as a powerful supplement to human cognition — and not a replacement — Watson suddenly starts to look much friendlier.