Tag Archives: real life

Amanda Knox: The Final Chapter

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Italy, street

Perugia street scene (photo: Giovanni Dall’Orto, creative commons license)

Working on a crime thriller set in Rome, I’ve had to try to come to grips with the eccentricities of the Italian judicial system. As a result, I’ve maintained a strong interest in the long saga of Amanda Knox and her Italian former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. The pair was convicted, acquitted, convicted again, and now acquitted again for the final time in the 2007 murder of Knox’s British flatmate, Meredith Kercher, in Perugia, Italy.

U.S. journalist Nina Burleigh went to Italy for the first trial, lived in Perugia in the lead-up to it, and intended to write a book about a young American abroad who went off the rails and became involved in a horrific crime. Instead, as she recounts in her excellent book,The Fatal Gift of Beauty, she was soon convinced by both the lack of evidence and the treatment of the accused that Knox and Sollecito are indeed innocent. Her book also explores some of the reasons behind the Italian media and public’s apparent eagerness that “Foxy Knoxy” be found guilty.

To this day, opinion about the case is strongly divided. Most prominently, Kercher’s family remains convinced of Knox’s guilt. Former FBI Agent Steve Moore provides a useful understanding of why people, especially families, tend to maintain their belief that an accused is guilty, regardless of subsequent evidence and courtroom decisions. (A heartbreaking documentary film about this phenomenon is West of Memphis, covering the case of convicted teens dubbed the “West Memphis Three.”)

The pubblico ministero (Mignini) plays a pivotal role in an Italian courtroom, somewhat like a prosecutor in a U.S. court, but with greater powers. For much of the period of legal wrangling in the Knox/Sollecito case, the prosecution was handled by a poster-man for Italian jurisprudence gone amok, Giuliano Mignini, whose erratic logic was amply documented in Douglas Preston’s true-crime book,The Monster of Florence, about a serial killer who prowled “lovers’ lanes,” primarily in the 1970s and early 1980s. Preston has called the case against Knox one “based on lies, superstition, and crazy conspiracy theories.”

It certainly is a tale with many confusing elements—Amanda’s changing story, which was one of the chief marks against her, the investigators’ mistakes in securing evidence from the crime scene, the conflicting interpretations of the DNA evidence, and especially the clash of cultures when privileged foreign students indulge their freedoms far from home, oblivious to their conservative environment, an issue Moore discusses in this thoughtful blog post.

The story has fascinating characters, irredeemable tragedy at many levels, and the ability to evoke partisanship for or against out of proportion to the definite facts of the case. One can only hope that either when the court reveals its reasoning in finally acquitting Knox and Sollecito, which is to occur with 90 days of the reversal, or at some subsequent but not too distant time, the Kercher family can be persuaded that in the loss of their beloved daughter and sister, justice was achieved.

Good-bye to Snow!

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Possible snow showers tonight! Here’s a reprise of a post from last winter, my attempt to put the spirit of Old Man Winter to rest. “This is snow, OK? You satisfied? Now get outta here and tell Spring to come on in!”

08 Dec - 09 April 011

“Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely white-ivied the walls and settled . . .” – Dylan Thomas

The Central and Northeast U.S. isn’t the only country hit by snowstorm after snowstorm. Take a look at how Tokyo residents responded after a 10-inch blizzard—its biggest blizzard in decades. Snow sculptures from the land of “Hello Kitty.”

Photo gallery from the 2015 International Snow Sculpture Championships – Breckenridge, Colorado. Tokyo amateurs, be in awe!

Have a cup of hot chocolate and let Frank sing to you. Let it Snow!

Hot chocolate not warming enough? Here’s a hot toddy recipe that calls for brandy, whiskey, or rum (whatever you have, basically) and tea. The recipe says you can skip the tea. Just so it’s hot!

Your Cryosphere Glossary from the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Perfect for teachers, dads, and moms whose kids ask those tricky snow questions! Find out where it’s snowing right now with the NSIDC “near-real-time” data map.

Simon Beck’s Snow Art—made by stomping around in the snow, very precisely. Not just your everyday snow angel.

A collection of Snow Poems. I like this one by Frederick Seidel. Good to remember when you’re stuck in the snow:

Snow is what it does.

It falls and it stays and it goes.

It melts and it is here somewhere.

We all will get there.

And, Boston, we’re sorry!

Shedding Light

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night sky, light pollution

(composite satellite photo: woodleywonderworks, creative commons license)

On vacation in Bryce Canyon—one of the few truly dark places left in the United States—a visiting astronomer said that in 25 years, if trends in light pollution don’t abate, no child in the United States will be able to see the Milky Way. Living for forty years in the New York-D.C. corridor, I have seen it only once, in far rural Virginia. In too many places now, the Milky Way and all except the brightest stars are “vanishing in a yellow haze,” says the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA).

Light pollution may sound at first like a problem that isn’t much of a problem, but it has consequences, disrupting the natural patterns of animals (many of which are nocturnal), migrating birds, and humans’ sleep patterns. Not only are sleep disorders a problem for many people, some research suggests these disrupted circadian rhythms raise the risk for chronic diseases: obesity, diabetes, and cancer.

Some years ago, the city of Tucson tackled the problem, when its expansion and night-glare threatened the operation of the night-observation telescope array at the nearby Kitt Peak National Observatory. In Tucson, night lighting must be shielded so that the light is directed down, not allowed to spread in all directions. IDA’s conservation program is attempting to designate dark sites that can preserve the starry night skies for future generations. (Proper lighting also conserves resources, given that 22% of U.S. energy use is for lighting.)

Milky Way, night sky

The Milky Way (photo: Forest Wander, Creative Commons license)

Many businesses—car lots and gas stations are an example—are lit much too brightly at night, in the mistaken assumption that this makes them safer. We referred to the parking lot of a movie theater in Florida where we visited as the “brain surgery parking lot,” it was so brightly lit. Too much light creates glare that actually makes it harder to see. Having lights outfitted with correctly calibrated motion detectors indicate an intruder more easily than lights burning at full power all night. According to light pollution expert Paul Bogard, whose book is The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light, “the best lighting is uniform, low-level lighting.” In other words, light when and where it is needed, not attempts to recreate High Noon.

Related articles

***400 Things Cops Know

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police, neighborhood

(photo: en.wikipedia)

By Adam Plantinga – If you write (or read or watch) crime stories, you’ll be fascinated by the detailed insights from a veteran Milwaukee and San Francisco patrolman (now police sergeant). The Wall Street Journal called the book “the new Bible for crime writers.” And, if you  wonder about how crimes are managed in the community, you’ll definitely gain some insights.

Plantinga, who is a Phi Beta Kappa magna cum laude graduate of Marquette University, divided his 400 lessons into 19 chapters on “Things Cops Know About . . .” shots fired, juveniles, booze and drugs, domestic violence, and so on. Each chapter is not only a dive into specifics, but as important, together—with candor and humor—they provide an unfiltered view into the thought processes of the cops called out to deal with some of society’s worst and most intractable problems, deaths in circumstances that most of us never have to contemplate, much less confront, and the possibility of violence at every traffic stop. The endemic cynicism he reports arises from constant exposure to people behaving badly, as well as the internal machinations of many police departments.

In the chapter on shots fired, I was surprised to learn how hard it is to find bullets after they’re fired (unless they’re in somebody), in part because “most handguns have ranges exceeding a mile.” Of course, before a bullet can go that far, it generally hits a tree or a house or something. And most criminals aren’t very good shots, Plantinga says. But, as a responding officer, you can’t count on that.

I saw a movie about a hit-and-run accident over the weekend, and thanks to reading this book, I tried to telepathically help the on-screen investigator: “Look for prints on the rearview mirror!” Thanks, Sergeant Plantinga.

**** 1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina

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New Orleans, Katrina

The New Orleans “bathtub ring” (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

By Chris Rose – This collection of newspaper columns from the New Orleans Times-Picayune in the days and months following Hurricane Katrina is, as the cover says, “a roller-coaster ride of observation, commentary, emotion, tragedy, and even humor”—whose shaky pilings are sunk into the physical, economic, and emotional debris of a devastated city.

Rose reports unflinchingly about the horrors and about the small personal triumphs the city’s residents experienced as they tried, not always successfully, to scrabble back to some kind of normalcy. Collectively, his writings probably better than anything else I’ve read answer the question people asked at the time, “Is New Orleans worth it?” His love of the city—its music, food, culture, and traditions, but mostly its people—soaks every page like floodwater.

The ongoing calamity didn’t stop when the wind and rain ceased, but went on and on in the form of poor government decision-making, ill-conceived emergency and reconstruction plans, rapacious utility companies and developers, loophole-seeking insurance schemes, lost possessions and people. To report on it, Rose got out and about, bicycling through the devastated areas, recording the citizenry’s stories. And some stories they were!

Rose’s close attention to these trials was not without its costs. A little more than two months after the disaster, he began one of his essays by quoting the people who said to him, “Everyone here is mentally ill now.” It took a while for him to recognize it—almost seven months—though his wife, his editor, his friends, and his readers tried to convince him much earlier, but he, too, was breaking under the strain. “I feel as if I have become the New Orleans poster boy for posttraumatic stress, chronicling my descent into madness for everyone to read,” he wrote in late March 2006. A few months later, he wrote about his yearlong battle with depression and what he was, finally, doing about it.

He’d been the city’s cheerleader, encouraging people to be strong and stand tall and celebrate what they still had, and his admission of needing serious help loosed a response from thousands. “It boggles the mind to think of how many among us are holding on by frayed threads, just barely, and trying to hide it as I was for so many months.” Even acknowledging that, he ended an essay about his depression with words of encouragement and purpose: “Find some way to shine a light. Together, maybe we’ll find our way out of this.”

New Orleans, Katrina

House destroyed, chandelier intact (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

This collection of essays is one of those compilations where the whole is so much more than the sum of the parts. Yes, there’s repetition among them; yes, his messages are often the same. But the reader cannot help but think that if only the people’s situation were improving faster, he wouldn’t have had to hammer his message home so hard and so often. I pictured him in many ways like the John Goodman character in the first season of Treme—outraged and caring and providing his testimony. The difference is that the real Chris Rose stuck it out.

NSA Chief Speaks in Princeton

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Mike Rogers, NSA, military

Adm. Mike Rogers (photo: wikipedia)

Admiral Mike Rogers—Director, National Security Agency, and Commander, U.S. Cyber Command (the military’s centralized operational command for cyberspace operations)—spoke at Princeton University yesterday, part of an ongoing effort to establish greater understanding of the NSA mission and encourage private sector partnerships .

He kept his own remarks short, describing the missions of the two agencies he heads, in order to maximize time for audience questions. A key challenge he noted is assuring that efforts to manage the nation’s cyber-threats and foreign intelligence-gathering are appropriately balanced against “the inherent right to privacy” of the American people. In the late 1960s and early 1970s (the Watergate era), revelations of government spying on U.S. citizens led to two new mechanisms for privacy protection: FISA courts (authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) and congressional oversight. Unfortunately, Rogers said, the public has lost confidence in both those approaches at a time when threats have rapidly escalated.

“Would we even be having this conversation if it weren’t for the whistleblowers?” an audience member asked.

Rogers responded, “I don’t know any whistleblowers. I only know of thieves who stole government information.” He went on to say that he wished he had that information back, because the loss of it has imperiled troops overseas and many other individuals and activities, as well as entailed considerable costs. He tells his staff that, if they see any information or process of gathering it that they consider illegal, immoral, or unethical, they should raise it within the chain of command, and it isn’t up to each individual person to pick and choose which laws to obey.

In deciding how to respond to a cyber-attack, his command uses the same principle of proportionality that the military does in general. The exact means of retaliation is a policy decision, not his alone. In North Korea’s hacking attack against Sony last November, for example, he urged the President to “think more broadly,” beyond just cyber-methods, and the U.S. government response to date includes economic sanctions against Pyongyang.

A questioner asked what happens when information amassed on foreigners includes information about Americans (“incidental” information). Rogers wouldn’t speak to whether the FBI or CIA access such information but said the NSA treats it differently, as to whether and how long it is kept, than it does information on foreigners.

Another controversy raised was the NSA’s practice of bulk data storage. Rogers said that at least some bulk data storage is necessary because the agency does not know now what may be useful down the road. There are limits on how long information is retained, but these are currently “more of an art than a science,” he said. A January report by an expert panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that, at present, there are no screening methods that are a viable alternative to bulk data collection, although privacy protections can be strengthened.

How ISIS is Different

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desert, man in desert

(photo: Ilker Ender, creative commons license)

The issue of terrorism and the response of secular societies to it is the sharp edge of international relations and of much current interest. Recently, this website has included my summary of Graeme Wood’s article in The Atlantic, “What ISIS Really Wants,” as well as a review of the book The Terrorist’s Dilemma, by Princeton professor Jacob Shapiro about how covert organizations organize themselves.

Putting these two analysis side-by-side, ISIS appears to be both fundamentally and functionally different from the “traditional” terrorist organizations Shapiro describes in a number of key ways, including:

  • traditional terrorist organizations, including al-Qa’ida, have political aims (getting Westerners out of the Arabian peninsula, etc.), whereas ISIS’s aims are religious
  • because of their political goals, traditional terrorist organizations have at least some interest in controlling ultra-violence, as it decreases their political capital, whereas ISIS is focused on establishing absolute, undiluted Sharia and the accompanying violence is part of the package
  • traditional terrorist organizations want to protect their leaders, whereas ISIS appears to court confrontation, or at least is not dissuaded from pursuing its tactics by fear of Western reprisal and
  • traditional terrorist organizations must operate “underground” in their host countries, so their activities—including communication with their agents in the field—always carry a security risk, whereas ISIS is operating in the open in its captured territories, and indeed must hold those territories in order to maintain the caliphate it has declared.

With respect to how an organization can behave when it has territory (a safe haven), ISIS does follow the pattern of traditional terrorist organizations by exploiting that benefit. In addition, traditional terrorist organizations suffer when there is a complete security vacuum and see the need to establish social institutions; not surprisingly, then, ISIS’s plans include a kind of social agenda (albeit along lines endorsed by Mohammed), though whether the organization can pull it off is another question.

These differences call for different approaches, not approaching ISIS like a spinoff al-Qa’ida or the Provisional IRA. This is new.

****The Terrorist’s Dilemma

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laptops, soldiers

(photo: wikimedia)

By Jacob N. Shapiro – an academic’s look at the organizational constraints on traditional terrorist organizations—from those in pre-Revolution Russia to the Irish Republican Army to Al Qa’ida to Fatah and Hamas—and how groups manage these difficulties. Princeton professor Shapiro gave a fascinating talk about his research last December and resolved to read his book.

In part, his message is that terrorist organizations face many of the familiar challenges as do other organized human endeavors. They have resource management issues, they have personnel issues, they have issues related to achieving their goal. But operating as covert and violent organizations imposes a number of additional, unique security constraints.

A key factor is the extent to which “management”—the terrorist leaders at the top—and “line” personnel—the people carrying out day-to-day operations are in sync. Often, they are not. A terrorist organization’s leaders typically have a political agenda, which requires compromise, negotiation, a focus on long-term goals and, therefore—in an effort not to alienate national leaders or the populace of the host country—the need to keep a lid on violence, at least to some degree. This is because, as Shapiro says, “the groups that eventually win political power, or even major concessions, do so not on the strength of their violence, but on the back of large-scale political mobilization and participation in normal politics.”

By contrast, people drawn to the front lines of the same terrorist movement, to whom operational decisions may be delegated, are likely to be more extreme and to seek confrontation and heightened violence, “action in its own right,” Shapiro says. Disagreement in the ranks is common, as personal histories and captured documents amply demonstrate. Even Osama bin Laden counseled restraint among the rank-and-file.

However, controlling the troops requires a fair amount of communication, and every communication between underground organization leaders and the field entails a security risk. Thus, control is always imperfect. Similarly, it is the leaders of terrorist organizations who generally are the fundraisers and the people responsible for husbanding the organization’s resources. Closely managing who spends funds for what purposes again leads to security exposure. These two tradeoffs—operational security vs. tactical control and operational security vs. financial efficiency—play out in one underground terrorist organization after another, across time and geography.

Much has been learned about these organizations (via captured documents—and in one case reported here, which would be unbelievable if it were written into a political thriller, Wall Street Journal reporter Alan Cullison purchased a used laptop in Kabul as a quickie replacement and discovered his new machine had been that of Al Qa’ida #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri, turned in for resale without wiping the hard drive.)

Shapiro contends that understanding why terrorist organizations make the choices they do is an essential first step in designing counter-terror policies. For any number of reasons, ISIS may be different than these past organizations and not understanding those differences also will lead to tragedy.

It’s Tso Good

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Chinese food, General Tso's chicken

General Tso’s chicken (photo by Jason Lam, Creative Commons license)

The Search for General Tso (trailer) is an engaging chronicle of cultural assimilation told “with the verve of a good detective story” by writer-director Ian Cheney and producers Amanda Murray and Jennifer 8. Lee, based on a ubiquitous restaurant menu item adapted to Americans’ palate. (A recipe is included on the film website, above.)

Shown during the recent Sedona International Film Festival, at other film festivals around the country, and available for viewing through the link above, this popular, humor-laced documentary also traces the history of the real General Tso, a fearsome warrior from the late 19th Century.

The dish was inspired by President Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972 and was introduced at the venerable Shun Lee Palace, near Lincoln Center in New York City. But the dish’s history predates its American introduction. Its originator was a Hunan chef named Peng Chang-kuei, who fled Communist China and settled in Taipei, Taiwan. He created General Tso’s chicken in 1955 for Chiang Kai-shek.

Now 90 years old, Chef Peng frowns when shown a picture of the dish, noting he would never use scallions or decorate the plate with broccoli! To achieve a sweet-and-sour taste, the American version adds sugar—another touch unheard of in traditional Chinese cooking.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 94%.

By Tucson-based guest reviewer Jodi Goalstone, who writes the highly entertaining blog Going Yard, Offbeat Baseball Musings. It made me hungry just to post this!

What ISIS Really Wants

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world on fire

(photo: pixabay)

Graeme Wood’s penetrating article, “What ISIS Really Wants” in the March 2015 Atlantic tries to answer deceptively simple, yet strategically essential questions related to the intentions of ISIS’s self-declared caliphate and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Although the organization’s motives and aims apparently have eluded many Westerners, Wood says its propaganda machine, much of which operates online, makes those answers knowable.

According to Wood, analysis of these resources reveals that ISIS “rejects peace as a matter of principle,” hungers for genocide, is prevented by its religious views from adopting certain practices (even if they are key to its survival), and “considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.” Understanding ISIS’s beliefs about the path to the Day of Judgment—its “dystopian alternate reality”—can help the West predict its actions and develop more effective countermeasures, Wood says.

Osama bin Laden operated a geographically diffuse network of relatively autonomous cells that had political aims, such as getting Westerners out of the Saudi Arabian peninsula. These cells operated more-or-less independently, in countries and territory they didn’t control, and attempting to exercise central authority over these scattered cells would have created a high security risk for al-Qaeda leaders.

In total contrast, ISIS has been able to seize and hold territory, thanks to the vacuum of authority in Syria and Iraq, and can therefore effectively implement a top-down, highly controlled structure. In fact, ISIS must continue to hang onto this territory in order to maintain the caliphate. But the key distinction between ISIS and al-Qaeda is that ISIS’s aims are religious, not political, and underpin “the group’s commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse,” Wood says.

We have diluted the meaning of this word with the snowpocalypse, the zombie apocalypse, and so on, but to ISIS, what they foresee is the original meaning: that is, the complete and final destruction of the world. With total annihilation looming, why not court death? What difference does one life–or a dozen, or a hundred–make?

Westerners have a difficult time accepting a theological basis for the mass executions, beheadings, stonings, crucifixions, and immolations taking place in the Middle East. Yet, secular societies should not dismiss ISIS followers as merely a congregation of disaffected Muslims from around the world (and some few from the United States). It is a mistake, Wood believes, to see ISIS as anything other than a religious, end-of-days group, built on a coherent (if controversial) interpretation of Islam, whose members follow the exact letter of the law, as they understand it.

Meanwhile, the politically correct “Islam is a religion of peace” mantra does not fit the brutal laws of war as laid out in the Koran, and which were developed during a violent era. Wood quotes Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel as saying that Islamic fighters “are smack in the middle of the medieval tradition and are bringing it wholesale into the present day.”

Wood says that the rest of the world must recognize ISIS’s “intellectual genealogy” if it is to react in ways “that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal.”

This summary is based primarily on the introduction to this thought-provoking essay. Here is the link to the entirety.