1 Boring Old Man

Revealed: US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war
^{Secret document details American plan to bug phones and emails of key Security Council members}
The Observer
by Martin Bright, Ed Vulliamy in New York, and Peter Beaumont
1 March 2003
Read the memo

Katharine Gun: Ten years on what happened to the woman who revealed dirty tricks on the UN Iraq war vote?
^{In the runup to the critical vote on war in Iraq, Katharine Gun exposed a US plot to spy on the UN. As a film of her story is planned, she tells of her anger and frustration – but not her regrets}
The Observer
by Martin Bright
2 March 2013

That came to light a lot faster than the back story of the Iraq War, since it was such a felt presence in all of our lives. But then [no rest for the weary], the chairman of the very Department of Psychiatry I had been affiliated with was investigated by the US Senate and removed from his position for unreported income and conflicts of interest – Dr. Charles Nemeroff. And I was off and running again as I learned about how much deceit and corruption was right under my nose in my own specialty of psychiatry.

I have no intention of going backwards and spending my time following the ins and outs of the recent whistle-blower’s [speaking of whistle blowers…] leaks or how it all plays out. I expect it will blanket our news all by itself. The NSA’s capacity to eavesdrop is well known to me from last time around. It should be no surprise to any of us in a post 911 world. The issue then, and now, isn’t that it can be done. It’s the oversight that matters. What was missing back in 2003 was oversight. What was missing in the financial collapse in 2008 was oversight. And what was missing in the pharmaceutical invasion of academic psychiatry and the psychiatric  literature that got so out of hand was oversight. This latter piece is much more suited to me than my former preoccupations, so no political regressions coming. If you care about the NSA and its goings on, follow emptywheel, and her fellow bloggers. They have a wellspring of moral outrage and a political agenda, but they’re also truly amazing investigative people who will unearth the back story in this recent revelation. Another resource is Glen Greenwald, the interviewer in the video in the last post, now with The Observer. He got going back in the days of the Plame Affair, a bit before I did on a blog Unclaimed Territory and never looked back to his career as a litigator.

I’ve wondered aloud and privately about why one of my retirement hobbies has been deceit, secrecy, and lack of oversight. I sort of know the answer. It’s what my job was for forty years – helping people see how having oversight of their own mental processes was worth it in the long run in the conduct of living. And it wouldn’t take a rocket scientists to figure out why that’s what I ended up doing for a career. The great discovery of my own life halfway back was realizing that I didn’t have enough oversight in my own mind, and doing what I could muster to make some progress in that area. I’d heard the saying, "We’re only as sick as our secrets" all my life, but I didn’t really even know what it meant until I saw it in the mirror. What I learned early was that any progress on that front was progress nonetheless, and I also never looked back.