Tags:
Journalism of Courage
THE DAWN
PAKISTANS SWEETHEART
COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
Why did the CIA start killing?
In 2004,the CIAs counterterrorism efforts moved from capturing suspected terrorists to killing them with armed drones. Mark Mazzettis report in The New York Times reveals that a May 2004 report by John Helgerson,the agencys inspector general,was responsible for the shift. Armed drones and targeted killings offered a new direction. Killing by remote control was the antithesis of the dirty,intimate work of interrogation, writes Micah Zenko. Before long,the CIA would go from being the jailer of Americas enemies to a military organisation that erased them. The CIA made this choice,not because they thought it was the best strategy,but reportedly because they could not trust themselves not to torture the detainees.
The New Yorker blog
The Three-Billion-Dollar Brain
Last week,writes Gary Marcus,the Human Connectome Project released a massive set of images of the brains of 68 adult volunteers. If I were in the Obama administration,Id be worried. The administration is about to submit a three-billion dollar request for something called Brain Activity Map. The Brain Activity Map is more like an effort to figure out the economy by examining individual consumers. Their contributions are different,if complementary. Still,although there is little risk of overlap between these two,the Obama Administration would do well to reflect on what Human Connectome has discovered so far: it is easier to collect massive amounts of data than to understand them, says Marcus.
