Графити от улиците на Белград

1. Колумбе, да ти еба любопитството!
2. Смъртта е единственото, което ни е гарантирано, ако междувременно не се случи нещо.
3. Нашият въздух има едно предимство - виждаме какво дишаме!
4. Само дванадесет милиона души имат щастието да живеят в Югославия. Останалите нямат това щастие, но имат всичко останало.
5. Някой друг трябва да плати сметката, ние не сме си поръчвали такъв живот.
6. Умните мъже никога не се женят два пъти за една и съща жена!
7. Ако не можете да живеете един без друг, оженете се - и ще можете.
8. Всичко хубаво в тебе е дело на моите очи!
9. Бракът е дълго привикване към самотата.
10. Мъжете са като тоалетни - или са посрани, или са заети.
11. Бях скептичен към християнството, докато не видях, че съм Бог.
12. Какво е цивилизацията? Пътят на човека от пещерата до атомното скривалище.
13. Яжте говна - не е възможно милионите мухи да се заблуждават.
14. Някои оставят нещо след себе си само когато клекнат.
15. Stranger in the night. AIDS in the morning.
16. Вампир? Това е мъртвец, запазил присъствие на духа.
17. Големите победи никога не са извоювани в първата битка.
18. Лесно е да бъдеш почтен, когато нямаш друг избор.
19. По-добре тения, отколкото пълна липса на вътрешен живот.
20. Не се опитвай да набиеш каквото и да е в женска глава, след като малко по-долу има по-подходящо място за това.
21. Достатъчно те носих в сърцето си. Повърви малко!
22. Ако стоиш достатъчно дълго на едно място, зад теб се образува опашка.
23. Хирурзите носят гумени ръкавици, за да не оставят отпечатъци.
24. Тъкмо разбереш, че щастието е в тебе - и абортираш.
25. Не ми харесват платната на Рубенс. След пране се свиват.
26. Купих си нощно шкафче, но не зная къде да го държа през деня.
27. Колкото по-нависоко сме полетели, толкова по-малки изглеждаме на онези, които не са способни да летят.
28. Всяко семейство трябва да има по три деца. Ако се случи едното да е гений, другите две трябва да го издържат.
29. Тази година няма Великден - намериха тялото.
30. Истинският мъж нокога не се обръща подир жена, той е винаги зад нея.
31. Не обичам бързата храна, трудно се хваща.
32. Цял живот нямаше късмет, но докато му копаеха гроба, откриха нефт.
33. Отначало към момичетата се обръщаме с агънце, пиленце... По-късно животните порастват.
34. Децата са наследствени. Ако родителите ти не са имали деца, няма да ги имаш и ти.
35. Всяко защо има своето ебал ли съм го.

CIA interrogation techniques—a history.

The Birth of Soft Torture

By Rebecca Lemov
Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2005, at 5:07 PM ET

In 1949, Cardinal Joszef Mindszenty appeared before the world's cameras to mumble his confession to treasonous crimes against the Hungarian church and state. For resisting communism, the World War II hero had been subjected for 39 days to sleep deprivation and humiliation, alternating with long hours of interrogation, by Russian-trained Hungarian police. His staged confession riveted the Central Intelligence Agency, which theorized in a security memorandum that Soviet-trained experts were controlling Mindszenty by "some unknown force." If the Communists had interrogation weapons that were evidently more subtle and effective than brute physical torture, the CIA decided, then it needed such weapons, too.

Months later, the agency began a program to explore "avenues to the control of human behavior." During the next decade and a half, CIA experts honed the use of "chemical and biological materials capable of producing human behavioral and physiological changes" according to a retrospective CIA catalog written in 1963. And thus soft torture in the United States was born.

In short order, CIA experts attempted to induce Mindszenty-like effects. An interrogation team consisting of a psychiatrist, a lie-detector expert, and a hypnotist went to work using combinations of the depressant Sodium Amytal and certain stimulants. Tests on four suspected double agents in Tokyo in July 1950 and on 25 North Korean prisoners of war three months later yielded more noteworthy results. (Relevant CIA documents do not specify exactly what, but reports later claimed that the special interrogation teams could hold a subject in a "controlled state" for a long period.) Meanwhile, the CIA opened the door to pre-emptive psychosurgery: In a doctor's office in Washington, D.C., one unfortunate man, his name deleted from documents, was lobotomized against his will during an interrogation. By the mid-to-late 1950s, experiments using "black techniques," as the agency called them, moved to prisons, hospitals, and other field-testing sites with funding and encouragement from the CIA's Science and Technology Directorate*.

One of the most extreme 1950s experiments that the CIA sponsored was conducted at a McGill University hospital, where the world-renowned psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron had been pioneering a technique he called "psychic driving." Dr. Cameron was widely considered the most able psychiatrist in Canada—his honors included the presidency of the World Psychiatric Association—and his patients were referred to him from all over. A disaffected housewife, a rebellious youth, a struggling starlet, and the wife of a Canadian member of Parliament were a few of the more than 100 patients who became uninformed, nonconsenting experimental subjects. Many were diagnosed as schizophrenic (a diagnosis since contested in many of the cases).

Cameron's goal was to wipe out the stable "self," eliminating deep-seated psychological problems in order to rebuild it. He grandiosely hoped to transform human existence by opening a new gateway to the understanding of consciousness. The CIA wanted to know what his experiments suggested about interrogating people with the help of sensory deprivation, environmental manipulation, and psychic disorientation.

Cameron's technique was to expose a patient to tape-recorded messages or sounds that were played back or repeated for long periods. The goal was a condition Cameron dubbed "penetration": The patient experienced an escalating state of distress that often caused him or her to reveal long-buried past experiences or disturbing events. At that point, the doctor would offer "healing" suggestions. Frequently, his patients didn't want to listen and would attack their analyst or try to leave the room. In the 1956 American Journal of Psychiatry, Cameron explained that he broke down their resistance by continually repeating his message using "pillow and ceiling microphones" and different voices; by imposing periods of prolonged sleep; and by giving patients drugs like Sodium Amytal, Desoxyn, and LSD-25, which "disorganized" thought patterns.

To further disorganize his patients, Cameron isolated them in a sensory deprivation chamber. In a dark room, a patient would sit in silence with his eyes covered with goggles, prevented "from touching his body—thus interfering with his self image." Finally "attempts were made to cut down on his expressive output"—he was restrained or bandaged so he could not scream. Cameron combined these tactics with extended periods of forced listening to taped messages for up to 20 hours per day, for 10 or 15 days at a stretch.

In 1958 and 1959, Cameron went further. With new CIA money behind him, he tried to completely "depattern" 53 patients by combining psychic driving with electroshock therapy and a long-term, drug-induced coma. At the most intensive stage of the treatment, many subjects were no longer able to perform even basic functions. They needed training to eat, use the toilet, or speak. Once the doctor allowed the drugs to wear off and ceased shock treatments, patients slowly relearned how to take care of themselves—and their pretreatment symptoms were said to have disappeared.

So had much of their personalities. Patients emerged from Cameron's ward walking differently, talking differently, acting differently. Wives were more docile, daughters less inclined to histrionics, sons better-behaved. Most had no memory of their treatment or of their previous lives. Sometimes, they forgot they had children. At first, they were grateful to their doctor for his help. Several Cameron patients, however, later said they had severe recurrences of their pretreatment problems and traumatic memories of the treatment itself and together sued the doctor as well as the U.S. and Canadian governments. Their case was quietly settled out of court.

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, CIA experts thought they understood the techniques necessary for "breaking" a person. Under a strict regime of behavioral conditioning, "the possibility of resistance over a very long period may be vanishingly small," several researchers concluded in an analysis used in the CIA's 1963 manual Counterintelligence Interrogation. At the agency, pressure increased to field-test coercive interrogation tools. The task, as CIA second-in-command Richard Helms urged, was to test the agency's techniques on "normal" people. At times, this imperative made the agency reckless. As part of the now notorious MK-ULTRA program—"one of the seamiest episodes in American intelligence," according to journalist Seymour Hersh—the CIA set up a safe house in San Francisco where its agents could observe the effects of various drug combinations on human behavior. They were in search of a "truth serum" and thought LSD might be it. Prostitutes were hired to bring unwitting johns back to the house, where the women slipped acid and other strong psychoactive substances into the men's drinks. From behind a one-way mirror, investigators watched, notebooks and martinis in hand. Sometimes the men took the drugs and managed to carry on. Sometimes they babbled or cried. An internal CIA review condemned these high jinks in 1963, but Congress didn't investigate them until 1977, after a post-Watergate crisis of confidence in the agency.

At least officially, the CIA ended its behavioral science program in the mid-1960s, before scientists and operatives achieved total control over a subject. "All experiments beyond a certain point always failed," an operative veteran of the program said, "because the subject jerked himself back for some reason or the subject got amnesiac or catatonic." In other words, you could create a vegetable or a zombie, but not a robot who would obey you against his will. Still, the CIA had gained reliable information about how to derange and disorient a person who was reluctant to cooperate. An enemy could quickly be made into a confused and desperate human being.

Since 9/11, as government documents and news reports have made clear, the CIA's experimental approach to coercive interrogation has been revived. Last week, as the Washington Post revealed the existence of secret CIA-run prisons—"black sites"—in Eastern Europe, Vice President Dick Cheney continued to campaign to ensure that the agency will not be prevented from using "cruel, inhumane, and degrading" methods to elicit intelligence from detainees. The operatives of the 1940s would approve.

Correction, Nov. 18, 2005: The article originally referred to the CIA's Technology and Science Directorate. The correct title is the Science and Technology Directorate. Return to the corrected sentence.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130301/

Economist addresses geopolitics

A Nobel Economist Analyzes the Strategies of the Deadly Serious Games Nations Play

Jon E. Hilsenrath. New York, N.Y.: Nov 7, 2005. pg. A.2

YEARS BEFORE he wrote the "Wealth of Nations," Adam Smith, the intellectual father of capitalism, wrote a lesser-known text called "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," which sought to explain why self- interested individuals might have feelings like pity or compassion for others.

Ever since, economists have been trying to predict and explain how individuals interact. To understand markets, they recognized, they needed to understand what lay hidden in the minds and motivations of people. Game theory, which became popular 200 years after Adam Smith, was an example. It sought to explain how individuals plot strategies against each other in simple games like chess and deadly games like the nuclear-arms race. As an indication of game theory's importance, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences last month awarded the Nobel Prize for economics to trailblazers in the field, Thomas Schelling and Robert Aumann.

Their work has been applied to everything from business strategy to bankruptcy. But it was in the geopolitical realm where the theorists made some of their biggest marks. Both came of age during the Cold War, when the arms race posed the most important strategic questions of the time. Geopolitics also is where their insights are especially valuable today, as political and business leaders try to understand how their decisions about terror, North Korea's nuclear ambitions and global warming could affect the economic landscape in decades to come.

In an interview, Prof. Schelling said terrorism isn't a big threat, but global warming might be. He also advocated U.S. participation in black markets for nuclear-fissile material. (Excerpts from an additional interview with Prof. Aumann are available at WSJ.com.)

Q: How have the rules of the game of nuclear deterrence changed now that the players are countries like Iran and North Korea, instead of the Soviet Union a generation ago?
Prof. Schelling: I think if Iran or North Korea gets nuclear weapons, they will think of them as deterrent weapons. They won't want to get into any kind of nuclear war. They won't want to use those weapons. They will want to use them to keep Russia or the U.S. from intervening militarily, and we will learn what it is like being deterred not by a highly qualified adversary, but by a couple of small inimical countries. We may have to get used to that.

Q: There's also this concern that North Korea or Iran could become involved in illicit trade in nuclear weapons?
Prof. Schelling: I have a hunch that if there ever appeared to be a black market in fissile material or in actual bombs, that the U.S. would have the good sense and the cleverness and the ability to enter the black market and engage in what we used to call preclusive purchases. During World War II there were a lot of natural resources, mostly minerals, that the Germans badly needed, and the U.S. had a program of buying up those materials, not because we wanted them but because we wanted to keep them out of the hands of the Germans. I would think that we would be able to outbid anybody that wanted to buy a nuclear weapon. If North Korea thinks it can sell a nuclear weapon for $1 billion, we ought to be in there offering $5 billion so nobody could top that bid.

Q: That sounds like a slippery slope. How is the Bush administration doing managing the changing nuclear threat?
Prof. Schelling: It's perfectly clear that it's had no success in Iran, and it's had no success in North Korea. Whether that's because it's doing it badly or because it's an impossible task, I don't know. I tend to think that it is not being very pragmatic about North Korea. We really ought to give North Korea some kind of nonaggression assurance . . . We should volunteer it, on grounds that the primary motivation for North Korea to get a nuclear weapon is to make sure the U.S. can never attack. If they were to take seriously a nonaggression treaty, they might feel less need to have a nuclear weapon.

Q: Doesn't that just invite other players into the game?
Prof. Schelling: I don't think so. Who? Brazil? Argentina? Bangladesh? Who wants to get into the game? It is not a good game to get into.

Q: In the case of terrorism more broadly, we're dealing with an enemy that doesn't seem to be bound by the same sense of self- preservation that we're accustomed to from an enemy.
Prof. Schelling: It is important for us, the potential victims, to recognize that with the exception of the Twin Towers in New York, terrorism is an almost minuscule problem. [John] Mueller, at Ohio State University, estimates that the number of people who die from terrorist attacks is smaller than the number of people who die in their bathtubs. If you take the Trade Towers, we lost about 3,000 people. Three thousand people is about 3 1/2 weeks of automobile fatalities in the U.S. If you rank all of the causes of death in the U.S. or around the world, different kinds of accidents, drowning, falling down stairs, automobile accidents, struck by lightning, heart attacks, infections acquired during hospital surgery, terrorism is way down at the bottom.

Q: Then what are the biggest issues globally that need to be attacked?
Prof. Schelling: A big problem is going to be climate change. We're going to spend a long time trying to figure out what to do about it. I don't think we have any idea yet what to do about it. In the second half of the 20th century, arms control was the most demanding diplomatic issue there was. In the 21st century, greenhouse-gas emissions, global warming and climate change is going to be the biggest diplomatic issue there is.

Q: But you've also said that you don't expect global warming to severely impact the developed economies because agriculture is such a small portion of our output?
Prof. Schelling: It's a very severe threat to a lot of developing countries. For many of them, 30% of their gross product is agriculture or fisheries or forestry. In many countries half the people depend on agriculture for subsistence. In this country, so few people depend on agriculture for their living that the Census Bureau no longer counts farmers. So I think even if in this country global warming doubles the cost of growing food, that would reduce [gross domestic product] by between 1% and 2%, and that would happen over a period of years in which GDP would double. So instead of doubling by 2060, you would double by 2061 or 2062. You would never notice a difference.

Q: Why is it such a big threat then?
Prof. Schelling: In the U.S., if you don't worry about ecological damage, species extinction and things of that sort; if you don't worry about what happens in Bangladesh or Indonesia or Brazil; if you figure air conditioning will always take care of your weather problems; then I would say with one or two exceptions, you probably don't have to get too scared. One exception is there is a body of ice in Antarctica called the West Antarctic ice sheet. It is anchored by some islands, but warming the water surrounding it might cause it to slide into the ocean. The estimate is that that would raise sea level by as much as 20 feet. That means to go from the White House to the Capitol, you go by boat. It would be a huge calamity.

© 2005 Wall Street Journal

Jon E. Hilsenrath at jon.hilsenrath@wsj.com
URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113132305200889621.html