All Life Is Problem Solving

Marcy Wheeler who most frequently blogs at Firedog Lake as “emptywheel,” just filed a blog at Salon entitled: “The 13 people who made torture possible.”

I have two comments. First, please note Newt Gingrich, John Boehner, Rush Limbaugh, and any other distraction-motivated warriors vitally concerned about Nancy Pelosi’s alleged, but non-existent, insult of CIA personnel, that the Speaker is not on this list of potential war criminals. Tooo bad, soooo sad (for you that is).

And second, with real news analyses like Marcy’s appearing and feeding into public opinion and eventually into MSM outlets, I wonder just how long it will be before the Obama Administration concludes that it cannot avoid beginning an effort to enforce American laws prohibiting torture?

It’s interesting to look at torture as practiced by the Bush Administration from the perspective of Knowledge Management. In this case, from the perspective of the three-tier model. Let’s begin with the process of an interrogator trying to retrieve “knowledge” from another person. That’s a particular kind of knowledge integration called searching and retrieving (how unpleasantly antiseptic) in the Knowledge Life Cycle model (Level 2 of the three-tier model). Of course, it’s a very difficult retrieval process unless the person being interrogated is “cooperative.” So the problem is to secure that cooperation. One of the roles of Knowledge Management in this sort of context is to lay down the rules that will govern the search and retrieval process as implemented by an interrogator. The Bush Administration changed the rules governing permissible and even preferred strategy and tactics in certain interrogation situations. The resulting outcomes violated international law, treaties, and the US code. In addition, however, the more information we get about the results of using “enhanced interrogation techniques” on prisoners, the more it’s clear that these techniques were a failure, both from the point of view of eliciting significant information, and also from the point of view of doing it rapidly. Everything of importance supplied by Abu Zubaydah was given in standard interrogation sessions establishing relatively normal human relations with him. When waterboarding was used, even 83 times, only hostility and misleading information resulted. Waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times also produced only misleading information as far as we know up to this point. Torturing of other informants, after they had supplied useful information, has produced similar low quality results. In sum, torture took too long, and also failed to elicit high quality information. Government officials, contractors, and soldiers did things that were very wrong, broke the law by committing high crimes, and for those of you who are religious, sold their very souls for nothing. From the point of view of the Three-tier model: changing the rules was lousy Knowledge Management leading to very lousy knowledge processing (interpersonal searching and retrieving). It was another instance of terrible performance by the most incompetent American Administration in modern times. [Read more →]

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If you believe this Kit Bond bull puckey about the CIA never lying to Congress, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you!

But as everyone who is anyone except, of course, for the MSM and those unhappy that the Republican Party isn’t making things very interesting right now, thinks, the real issue, as put very well by Bruce Fein (quoted in Sam Stein’s piece in the Huffington Post), is not what Nancy Pelosi knew about torture and when she knew it, but is: [Read more →]

The Obama Administration evidently wants desperately to put the war crimes of the past behind America, and to address the economic, educational, environmental, energy, health care, and hopefully, equality issues that it views as the issues of our time. The trouble is that the people who really care about the Constitution won’t cooperate. There are two categories of such people. There are some like the Cheneys, Karl Rove, various Republican flacks, certain entertainers like Rush Limbaugh, and rising Republican stars like Sarah Palin (who doesn’t even know what it says), who view the Constitution and the laws as an inconvenience, as posing problems to solve in their continuing quest for power. They care about the Constitution as an obstacle to be overcome. There are others like Patrick Leahy, John Conyers, Russ Feingold, and yes, even Nancy Pelosi, who care about the Constitution and Laws because there is no America without them, and they know that the only way to protect them is to enforce the laws and to deter future attempts to make them dead letters, manipulable at the will of an overweaning executive. [Read more →]

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Dick Cheney keeps repeating his claims that “enhanced interrogation techniques” including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and others were effective in that they provided vital information, kept Americans safe, and saved many thousands of lives. He does this even while he continues to ignore the prior question of whether using EITs violates the Geneva Convention, and US law. Cheney also seems to think that he knows things about the use of these techniques that perhaps President Obama doesn’t. And the MSM and cable news networks seem to never tire of giving him a free platform to express his views, as though they are reasonable, credible and worthy of consideration, even if the MSM (except, perhaps, for Fox News, of course), doesn’t assert their truth.

Not too long ago, I posted a blog that posed three questions about torture. My third question bears repeating. [Read more →]

In my last two KM blogs, I’ve analyzed the relationships between KM and conflict, in the context of seeing problems, making knowledge, and integrating knowledge. This post will extend the analysis to the top-tier of the Three-tier model, Knowledge Management activity itself.

I distinguish three major top-tier categories of KM activities. These are activities: I) directed at enhancing knowledge processing related to business processes and outcomes; II) performing knowledge processing creating and integrating knowledge about how to enhance knowledge processing related to business processing; and III) managing non-knowledge processing top-tier related KM activities themselves. I’ve already discussed the relationship of KM and Conflict in I) above in the first and second blogs in this series. Also, the factors discussed in that analysis also apply to II) just above. So that leaves discussing the relationship of KM to conflict in the sphere of category III activities. These are: symbolic representation; building external relationships with others practicing KM; and leadership. [Read more →]

”By Definition, if it was authorized by the president it did not violate our obligations under the convention against torture.“ Condoleeza Rice, responding to a question about waterboarding, 04/27/09.

”Article I, Section. 1. All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.” [Read more →]

In my last KM blog, I analyzed the relationships between KM and conflict, in the context of seeing problems and making knowledge. This post will extend the analysis to integrating knowledge.

I classify knowledge integration activities into four categories: knowledge and information broadcasting (KIB), searching and retrieving (S and R), teaching, and sharing. All of these can occur using media or electronic tools, or through face-to-face interaction, and all of them always occur in some interaction or collective agent context. At the individual level the context may be other individuals or collectives in an organization. Collective agents providing a context for knowledge integration include teams, friendship groups, organizational sub-divisions, committees of “experts,” communities of practice or inquiry, and the organization itself. Since knowledge integration activities occur in contexts of social interaction, it’s clear that they can involve conflict, cooperation, or withdrawal from social interaction. Since both excessive conflict and the withdrawal from social interaction often resulting from it, are both barriers to knowledge integration, part of doing a good job at enhancing knowledge integration is to use measures that will moderate the natural conflict behavior arising in all human interactions, including collaborative ones. [Read more →]

One of the hardest things about decision making is distancing yourself enough from the alternative you prefer, to look at its possible side effects, or unintended consequences, and then compare it against other alternatives with both their intended and unintended consequences. The Obama Administration decided to subsidize the big banks, while also allowing them to continue the valuation of their toxic assets at well above their current market value. At the same time it also decided not to take the banks into receivership, break them up, get rid of their toxic assets and sell them off later to private capital, at a profit to the Treasury.

The consequences they expect from this decision are that the Banking System will survive intact, the toxic assets will rise in value to a level high enough to make the banks solvent, and the banks will lend at a level high enough to help end the recession and get people on Main Street, and around the world, back to work. On the negative side, they probably recognized that they’d have both progressive and budget-minded conservative opposition, and would have to defend themselves against the charges of unfairness, and yet another welfare program for the already wealthy, implemented at the expense of the increasingly poor. They probably also thought that their decision would defend the Administration against the charge of socialism and prevent that sort of narrative from gaining traction more broadly than just among the Rush Limbaugh/Michele Bachmann set. [Read more →]

It’s been nearly 43 years since a liberal Democrat named Arlen Specter chose to become a Republican after successfully running on the Republican ticket for Philadelphia District Attorney. It’s been a long road, as the Party that gave him a chance to build a substantial legacy in the Senate became increasingly the home of intolerant folks who had little in common with his own perspectives. To become Chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee he had to grovel to the right, and agree to vote to confirm the judicial abominations Alito and Roberts for the Supreme Court. He had to watch while the President who headed his party gutted the constitution, and did all he could to destroy the remaining historic balance between the executive and the legislature. Finally, he was vilified by the ideologues when he voted with the new President, but exacted a high price for his support on the stimulus bill, including much more of his party’s treasured tax cuts than should have been in a bill that sought the maximum stimulus for an economy dropping like a stone. Finally, he got out, and “growled” at those who were turning his Party into a wingnut’s fantasy.

And finally, I imagine, placing myself in his shoes, while experiencing a silent moment or two, I fancy he must say to himself with a big grin on his face:

“Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty . . . “