Sunday, April 29, 2012
Hello, Martians. This Is America
LAST night the Martians touched down in the backyard. They were oval and bright pink, with two antlike antennae topped by eyes fringed with sea-anemone lashes. They said they’d come to study America.
“Why ask me?” I said. “America is farther south.”
“You are an observer,” they said. “Please tell us: Does America have a different ‘flavor’ from that of other countries? Is it the center of the cultural world? How does it look to outsiders?”
“America has always been different from Europe,” I said, “having begun as a utopian religious community. Some have seen it as a dream world where you can be what you choose, others as a mirage that lures, exploits and disappoints. Some see it as a land of spiritual potential, others as a place of crass and vulgar materialism. Some see it as a mecca for creative entrepreneurs, others as a corporate oligarchy where the big eat the small and inventions helpful to the world are stifled. Some see it as the home of freedom of expression, others as a land of timorous conformity and mob-opinion rule.”
“Thank you,” said the Martians, after looking up “thank you” on translate.google.com™. “How may we best discover the essence of America?”
“Through its literature, would be my choice,” I said, “but I’m biased.”
“O.K.,” said the Martians. “What should we read first? Can we have marshmallows?”
“Let’s start with two stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne,” I said. “ ‘The Maypole of Merry Mount,’ and ‘Young Goodman Brown.’ Here are your marshmallows.”
Their pink antennae waved excitedly. They stored away the marshmallows as rare American artifacts. Then they read the stories, very quickly, as Martians do. “What do these mean to contemporary America?” they asked.
“In ‘The Maypole of Merry Mount,’ ” I said, “some people having a fun party in the woods are disrupted by the Puritans, who consider them immoral. Both groups have come to America in search of ‘freedom.’ The Merry Mounters interpret ‘freedom’ as sexual and individual freedom, the Puritans as freedom to practice their own religion while outlawing the behavior of others. This fight is still going on in America: the same issues come up in every election. In my novel ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ ” I added modestly, “I’ve included them as ‘freedom to’ and ‘freedom from.’ ”
“We took that in high school,” said the Martians. “What about ‘Young Goodman Brown?’ ”
“So, in ‘Young Goodman Brown,’ ” I said, “this Puritan goes for a walk at night and discovers that all his neighbors and relations — including his young wife, Faith — are members of a satanic witchcraft group. He wakes up in the morning wondering if he’s had a bad dream. But ever afterward he distrusts the neighbors; and so do all Americans, because how do you know whether the neighbors are who they claim to be? Every once in a while America has a Salem-style witch hunt, during which hysteria takes over and people are tagged with the satanic label of the moment. Right now it’s mostly ‘terrorism,’ though in some quarters it’s ‘liberalism’ or even ‘evil-green-dragon environmentalism.’ ”
The Martians decided to eat one marshmallow each to see what it tasted like. Their mouths were underneath: they dealt with food by hopping onto it. “Can we have popcorn now? Orville Redenbacher’s?™ they said. “And a Coke?™”
“How do you know about those things?” I said.
“We watch American TV and Internet,” they said, “like everyone else in the universe. Though American cultural hegemony is slipping, we perceive: newly rich countries such as India and Brazil have developed their own mass media. Also, America’s promise of democracy and egalitarianism — the mainstay of its cultural capital, widely understood — is being squandered. America is viewed as riddled with internal contradictions, what with vote suppression, the economic inequality protested by Occupy Wall Street, the impact of the mortgage meltdown, and the public’s loss of confidence in political institutions. So, the popcorn? We can do the microwaving.” They took out their ray guns.
“After you’ve read the next book,” I said. “It’s Melville’s ‘Moby-Dick.’ ”
The Martians riffled through Moby-Dick at top speed. Then they consulted translate.google.com™ for an expression that would best convey their reaction. “Holy crap!” they said. “Does this mean what we think it means?” they said.
“What do you think it means?” I said. “I’ll do the popcorn myself: you might get the wavelength wrong.”
“ ‘Moby-Dick’ is about the oil industry,” they said. “And the Ship of American State. The owners of the Pequod are rapacious and stingy religious hypocrites. The ship’s business is to butcher whales and turn them into an industrial energy product. The mates are the middle management. The harpooners, who are from races colonized by America one way or another, are supplying the expert tech labor. Elijah the prophet — from the American artist caste — foretells the Pequod’s doom, which comes about because the chief executive, Ahab, is a megalomaniac who wants to annihilate nature.
“Nature is symbolized by a big white whale, which has interfered with Ahab’s personal freedom by biting off his leg and refusing to be slaughtered and boiled. The narrator, Ishmael, represents journalists; his job is to warn America that it’s controlled by psychotics who will destroy it, because they hate the natural world and don’t grasp the fact that without it they will die. That’s enough literature for now. Can we have popcorn?”
After inhaling the popcorn, they slurped up their Cokes™, then asked me to take an Instagram™ on their cellphones of them with the bottles.
“Now we are going to Las Vegas to do some gambling,” they said, “because it’s a very American thing. After that we will buzz the Grand Canyon, and then we’ll go to the Boot Hill Museum in Kansas and get pictures of ourselves dressed as Wild West cowboys and honky-tonk floozies.”
“I think you should be careful,” I said.
“Why?” the Martians asked.
“Forgive me for pointing this out, but you look a lot like diagrams of the human female uterus,” I said. “Complete with fallopian tubes and ovaries.”
A human being might be insulted to be told this, but it didn’t seem to bother the Martians. Having looked up “uterus” on translate.google.com™, they said, “Isn’t the uterus a good thing? The life force and so on?”
“In some parts of America,” I said, “the men are obsessed with uteri. They feel that having one is potentially demonic. It’s a hangover from ‘Young Goodman Brown.’ If they saw you hopping around — worse still, eating popcorn — they’d go completely berserk, and pronounce you pregnant, and put you in jail.”
“Maybe we will go to Radio City Music Hall instead,” the Martians said.
“Good choice,” I said. “You won’t stand out in New York, or not much. If anyone bothers you, accuse them of being specist. Throw in that you’re vegans.”
“O.K.,” they said. “When we get back to Mars, we will start an American book club. We wish to read David Foster Wallace, not to mention Edith Wharton and Raymond Carver and tons of others. It is the writers who convey the inner truth about a nation, despite themselves, yes? Will you join us on video?”
“A pleasure,” I said. “Any reader is a friend of mine.”
Unexceptionalism - A Primer
TO achieve unexceptionalism, the political ideal that would render the United States indistinguishable from the impoverished, traditionally undemocratic, brutal or catatonic countries of the world, do the following:
PHASE ONE
If you’re a justice of the Supreme Court, ignore the first sacrament of a democracy and suspend the counting of ballots in a presidential election. Appoint the candidate of your choice as president.
If you’re the newly anointed president, react to a terrorist attack by invading a nonterrorist country. Despite the loss or disablement of untold numbers of lives, manage your war so that its results will be indeterminate.
Using the state of war as justification, order secret surveillance of American citizens, data mine their phone calls and e-mail, make business, medical and public library records available to government agencies, perform illegal warrantless searches of homes and offices.
Take to torturing terrorism suspects, here or abroad, in violation of the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment. Unilaterally abrogate the Convention Against Torture as well as the Geneva Conventions regarding the treatment of prisoners of war. Commit to indeterminate detention without trial those you decide are enemies. For good measure, trust that legislative supporters will eventually apply this policy as well to American citizens.
Suspend progressive taxation so that the wealthiest pay less proportionately than the middle class. See to it that the wealth of the country accumulates to a small fraction of the population so that the gap between rich and poor widens exponentially.
By cutting taxes and raising wartime expenditures, deplete the national treasury so that Congress and state and municipal legislatures cut back on domestic services, ensuring that there will be less money for the education of the young, for government health programs, for the care of veterans, for the maintenance of roads and bridges, for free public libraries, and so forth.
Deregulate the banking industry so as to create a severe recession in which enormous numbers of people lose their homes and jobs.
Before you leave office add to the Supreme Court justices like the ones who awarded you the presidency.
PHASE TWO
If you’re one of the conservative majority of a refurbished Supreme Court, rule that corporations, no less than human beings, have the right under the First Amendment to express their political point of view. To come to this judgment, do not acknowledge that corporations lack the range of feelings or values that define what it is to be human. That humans can act against their own interest, whereas corporations cannot act otherwise than in their own interest. That the corporation’s only purpose is to produce wealth, regardless of social consequences.
This decision of the court will ensure tremendous infusions of corporate money into the political process and lead to the election in national and state legislatures of majorities of de facto corporate lobbyists.
PHASE THREE
Given corporate control of legislative bodies, enact laws to the benefit of corporate interests. For example, those laws sponsored by weapons manufacturers wherein people may carry concealed weapons and shoot and kill anyone by whom they feel threatened.
Give the running of state prisons over to private corporations whose profits increase with the increase in inmate populations. See to it that a majority of prisoners are African-American.
When possible, treat immigrants as criminals.
Deplete and underfinance a viable system of free public schools and give the education of children over to private for-profit corporations.
Make college education unaffordable.
Inject religious precepts into public policy so as to control women’s bodies.
Enact laws prohibiting collective bargaining. Portray trade unions as un-American.
Enact laws restricting the voting rights of possibly unruly constituencies.
Propagandize against scientific facts that would affect corporate profits. Portray global warming as a conspiracy of scientists.
Having subverted the Constitution and enervated the nation with these measures, portray the federal government as unwieldy, bumbling and shot through with elitist liberals. Create mental states of maladaptive populism among the citizenry to support this view.
PHASE FOUR
If you’re a justice of the Supreme Court, decide that the police of any and all cities and towns and villages have the absolute authority to strip-search any person whom they, for whatever reason, put under arrest.
With this ruling, the reduction of America to unexceptionalism is complete.
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Germany Looks to Southern Europe to Fill Jobs
SCHWÄBISCH HALL, Germany — While much of southern Europe is struggling with soaring unemployment rates, a robust Germany is desperate for educated workers, and it has begun to look south for the solution.
In the last 18 months, it has recruited thousands of the Continent’s best and brightest to this postcard-perfect town and many others like it, a migration of highly qualified young job-seekers that could set back Europe’s stragglers even more, while giving Germany a further leg up.
One of those helping forge the new era is Cristina Fernández-Aparicio Ruiz, 36, a newly arrived engineer from Spain, where unemployment just hit a depression-level 24.4 percent. She is working at an industrial company near here, trying to find a way to make a new elevator part mesh with older components.
Her German is spotty. But the company, Ziehl-Abegg, assigned her a mentor who made sure she had someone to sit with at lunch. And if she needed help finding a doctor or going to the supermarket, the company was ready to help with that, too.
“They are very nice here,” said Ms. Fernández-Aparicio, from Madrid. “And at the moment there are no jobs in Spain.”
The free movement of labor was one of the founding principles of the European Union, a central part of the effort to create a single, unified market. But in more prosperous times, few workers outside of Eastern Europe felt compelled to leave home.
That is changing under the pressures of the euro crisis and a harsh recession, and employers, governments and the migrants themselves are discovering that immigration, even when legal and nominally accepted, can raise tensions in ways that Europe’s founders may never have anticipated. Who wins and who loses — if anyone — is a matter of growing debate. But there is widespread agreement that Europe is rapidly entering a new era whose ramifications are only beginning to be understood.
For the most part, southern Europeans are relieved to find refuge in towns in this largely rural region in the state of Baden-Württemberg. But the strains of differing languages and cultures make many of the young migrants hang back when it comes to longer-term commitments like registering their cars here or signing up for two-year cellphone contracts.
The area is home to many of the small and medium-size family enterprises, known as the Mittelstand, that power Germany’s industrial export economy. But for many companies, finding qualified employees and keeping them is the challenge. There are 7,500 open jobs in Heilbronn-Franken, the region that is home to Schwäbisch Hall. These include everything from health care to hospitality, but the most dire need is for engineers.
When Hermann-Josef Pelgrim, the mayor here, invited several journalists from southern Europe to write about job opportunities in Schwäbisch (pronounced SHVAY-bish) Hall this year, the response to a glowing article by the Portuguese reporter was overwhelming. More than 15,000 unemployed Portuguese have since submitted their résumés. About 40 simply showed up.
In December, a planeload of 100 Spanish engineers flew to nearby Stuttgart for a weekend of job interviews. Within a month, about a third of them had been hired. And some German companies have been making connections over the Internet, simply plucking Spanish, Portuguese, Greek and Italian professionals from sites like LinkedIn.
Yet the migration — while urgently needed at the moment by both sides — has stirred fears that it may be conferring yet another advantage on Europe’s most powerful economy. German exporters have benefited from a euro dragged down in value by the struggling southern countries, and they are able to borrow money at rock-bottom rates as investors seek safe havens. Now, as the southern countries watch their young people move north, some are grumbling of a brain drain as well.
“This generation of young people who are leaving are our best qualified ever,” said César Castel, the director of operations for the Spanish branch of Adecco, a Swiss headhunting firm. “It is a huge loss of investment for Spain. On average it cost us 60,000 euros to train each engineer, and they are leaving.” That is about $80,000.
Mr. Castel says the crisis has flipped his business. He used to find employees for Spanish companies. Now he finds Spaniards for foreign companies, many of them German. Most jobs are in health services and engineering.
If Spain’s economy turns around in two years, Mr. Castel said, he expects 90 percent of the Spanish professionals to return home. If the recession holds on longer, the figures could drop precipitously as the workers marry and have children abroad. He fears a situation where the northern economies retain industry and the southern ones are left with agriculture and tourism.
Germany’s experience with integrating foreign workers, particularly the country’s large Turkish minority, has proved difficult. Today, many government officials and business leaders are examining Germany’s culture, eager to do what it takes to be hospitable and acknowledging that they have not always been so.
“We need to become a welcoming culture,” said Guido Rebstock, head of the jobs agency in Schwäbisch Hall, repeating a phrase that has become part of the vocabulary here. “The firms have to help the workers with more than their jobs.”
Mr. Rebstock said the issue was driven home recently as the town contemplated its first-grade enrollment. In the last 13 years, the entering classes have shrunk by about 30 percent. “The demographic theme has definitely arrived here,” he said.
Last year, though, even while deaths once again exceeded births, the German population grew for the first time since 2002, thanks to a net immigration of 240,000 people, nearly double the 128,000 net gain in 2010. Countries like Poland and Romania sent the most, but German government statistics showed thousands more coming from the crisis-stricken southern nations.
To the unemployed masses in the south, Germany’s needs are a relief. In Baden-Württemberg, the unemployment rate is just 4 percent. The country seems like “El Dorado,” the legendary lost city of gold, said one Spanish engineer still searching for a job in Schwäbisch Hall. For the most part, engineers are being offered twice the salaries they could make in Spain, he said, though taxes are higher in Germany.
They generally find Germany more attractive than alternatives like South America and Australia because it is so close to home. Some say they expect to make lives here, but many say they are still hoping to return home soon.
Many of the Spaniards say the work environment in Germany takes getting used to, with Germans far more direct than Spanish people and much quieter. No one makes personal calls during business hours, for instance. But the work day is much shorter.
They were surprised that they were expected to greet co-workers each morning with formal handshakes and to call colleagues “Herr” and “Frau” (Mr. and Ms.). Impromptu hallway conversations over work issues were cut off by Germans suggesting it would be more appropriate to schedule a formal meeting.
The German fondness for order, often joked about, has proved true, said Carlos Baixeras, 30, an engineer who started working near Frankfurt 18 months ago. “There are rules for everything,” he said. “There’s a trash police.”
David Jiménez, 23, who just started working in Pforzheim, near Stuttgart, said his first few weeks were a nightmare. He could not even explain to the barber how he wanted his hair cut. Finally, he fell back on Europe’s common language: soccer. He pointed at his head and said, “Cristiano Ronaldo,” the name of the famous Portuguese striker. He still does not know what the different products are when he goes shopping.
“I can’t get a cold,” he said. “If I get a cold I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Right now, the migration benefits both countries. For Spain it relieves pressure on the overstretched welfare state and gives job opportunities to what has quickly become known as the lost generation. The conflict will begin when Spain eventually recovers and wants its engineers back.
“If they leave in a year or two, that is not good,” said Peter Fenkl, the president of the executive board of Ziehl-Abegg, Ms. Fernández-Aparicio’s employer. He estimated that it costs as much as $50,000 more to train and integrate a foreign worker than it does a German. But the company has little choice — having enough highly trained workers to fill orders is a necessity.
NYTObama Targets Romney at White House Correspondents’ Dinner - NYTimes.com
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Austerity Is No Quick Answer for Europe - Economic View
EUROPEAN policy makers just don’t get it. To hear them talk, you’d think that Europe was on the right path. Troubled countries just need more of the same, they say — more fiscal austerity, more labor market flexibility, more price stability — and the European crisis will be licked.
Have they looked at their own numbers? It has been two years since moves to austerity started, but the crisis is still with us. Growth in European gross domestic product was negative in the last quarter of 2011. Unemployment in the entire euro zone in February was 10.8 percent; in Spain it was an astounding 23.6 percent. And judging from the renewed turbulence in bond markets, investors don’t believe that prosperity is just around the corner.
Fiscal austerity is normally a sensible response to a loss in confidence in a country’s solvency, as has occurred in parts of Europe. But the current situation is exceptional. Short-term interest rates are very low, so large rate reductions to offset the negative impact of budget cutting are impossible.
In addition, the troubled countries of Europe are part of a common currency area. This means that the other obvious tool for stimulating growth during a time of fiscal austerity — depreciating the currency relative to that of their main trading partners — is not available, either.
The result is that austerity is uniquely destructive right now. Indeed, because of the harsh effect of budget cutting on growth, debt-to-G.D.P. ratios in Europe have continued to rise.
If stringent belt-tightening isn’t the answer, what is? It’s not to just ignore the deficit. Many European countries have long-run fiscal situations that are unsustainable and must be dealt with.
The core of a more sensible approach is to pass the needed budget measures now, but to phase in the actual tax increases and spending cuts only gradually — as economies recover. To use economists’ terminology, the measures should be backloaded.
They should also be specific — no more deficit targets without specifying how they’ll be achieved. Instead, lay out right now whose taxes will be raised and what spending will be cut. And specify when the measures will take effect — either along a set schedule, or tied explicitly to indicators of economic recovery.
BUT can such plans actually work? What’s to stop policy makers from promising the moon and not delivering?
History shows that countries have done such gradual consolidations before. In 1983, for example, the United States passed a Social Security reform plan that was backloaded in the extreme: it specified tough changes, including higher taxes and increases in the retirement age, to be phased in over almost three decades. They’ve all occurred on schedule and without debate. Likewise, in 1995, Sweden laid out a plan to cut its deficit by a whopping 8 percent of G.D.P. over the next three years. It worked as intended. Australia did the same thing on a somewhat smaller scale starting a year later.
Once legislation is on the books, politicians, even from opposing parties, have little incentive to change it. Why mess with a consolidation that’s already last year’s — or sometimes the last decade’s — news?
But what about bond markets? Don’t fiscal consolidation plans need to put the pain up front to persuade investors that they’re serious? After all, a number of European countries desperately need their borrowing rates to fall.
Investors, however, are very aware that low growth and high unemployment devastate a country’s fiscal outlook. I did the simple exercise of looking at news reports after the biggest increases in Spanish government bond interest rates over the last year. The most common cause was concern about whether European leaders would take needed measures to help troubled countries. But in about a third of the cases, bad news about Spanish growth was viewed as the culprit.
Markets don’t want counterproductive measures. For credibility, what matters is the nature and the composition of the tax and spending measures, and the clarity of the phase-in schedule.
Other steps could help bring markets along and allow distressed countries to follow a more gradual approach. In a very positive move, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund have greatly increased their rescue funds over the past month. Thus, if the authorities put their seal of approval on more gradual fiscal consolidation plans and stand ready to support troubled countries if needed, market interest rates on the countries’ debts will most likely come down.
If that doesn’t work, the European Central Bank could effectively cap the cost of borrowing for countries like Italy or Spain by buying large amounts of their bonds. If this were done after the countries had enacted specific, backloaded consolidation plans, the risk to the central bank would be manageable.
More generally, the European Central Bank could take further expansionary action. For example, it could reduce its benchmark interest rate, which is not yet at zero, and pursue quantitative easing by buying a range of assets. Any measure that would raise European growth even a little would make it easier for troubled countries to get their budget deficits under control.
Expansionary monetary policy could also help these countries to become more competitive. European policy makers talk about structural reforms — increasing labor market flexibility and reducing regulation — as the way to reduce wages and costs. But when overall inflation in Europe is very low, this strategy requires wages in troubled countries to fall, which rarely happens. If the European Central Bank aimed for slightly higher overall inflation — say, 3 percent — for a few years, these countries could become more competitive just by holding wage growth below that of their trading partners. That would help them to grow by increasing their exports.
FINALLY, countries that are not in distress, both inside and outside Europe, could help by stimulating their own economies. For example, Germany has a relatively modest long-run deficit and an enormous trade surplus. A tax cut for German consumers would raise domestic growth at a time when it’s anemic, and increase imports from its neighbors, helping them to grow as well.
What about the United States, which faces a terrible long-run budget problem, but no immediate threats from the bond market? The best policy here is to combine the backloaded consolidation I’m recommending for troubled countries with the short-run stimulus I’m advocating for countries like Germany. We could enact something like the Bowles-Simpson plan to reduce the deficit sharply over 10 years, and include in it more near-term investment in infrastructure, education and scientific research.
This would lower unemployment faster, and put us on a path to fiscal health. And, by strengthening our growth, it would help the world economy, too.
These policies are nuanced, so they are easily caricatured as doing something with one hand and undoing it with the other. Their key element is dynamics — using credible plans to lower borrowing costs and address long-run fiscal problems, while not taking immediate austerity measures that would raise unemployment when what countries need most is growth.
Current measures aren’t working. Sooner or later, politicians and citizens will demand a strategy that does.
Britain Riveted in Death of Spy, Gareth Williams
LONDON — Britain, home to the MI6 spy agency that inspired the James Bond stories and the billion-dollar film franchise, has been wrestling this week with one of the country’s strangest real-life spy mysteries in a generation, one that has become known popularly as the case of the spy in the bag.
An inquest held just across the Thames from MI6’s headquarters here has brought forth details of the bizarre and lonely death in August 2010 of Gareth Williams, a 31-year-old rising star in supersecret counterterrorism work. He was found in a fetal position, arms crossed on his chest, locked inside a duffel bag resting in an unfilled bathtub at the government flat assigned to him in the upscale Pimlico district of London.
His naked body had been in the bag for a week before it was discovered, so badly decomposed that the police and pathologists have been unable to determine whether he was murdered in what his family’s lawyer has suggested to the court was a plot by others skilled in the “dark arts” of spy work.
That theory has played prominently here, with Mr. Williams depicted alternately as a victim of Russian secret service hit men, extremists with Al Qaeda, or a multitude of other potential assassins working in the murky world of espionage who poisoned him with potassium cyanide or an overdose of a powerful sedative drug, GHB, a theory pathologists said could not be effectively tested because of the advanced decomposition.
While the police and MI6 officials have refused to rule out those theories, they suggested a more likely but mundane explanation: that although the day had long passed when the agency dictated agents’ lifestyles, he was leading a doubly secret life, as a licensed MI6 field agent and as a sexual fantasist.
According to this hypothesis, he simply died in a sex game that went wrong, probably involving someone who fled the scene. One of the sparse forensic discoveries at the scene involved traces of DNA that were found on the duffel bag’s zipper and the lock, not belonging to Mr. Williams or to anybody on the police or pathology teams, but too microscopic to offer a trail to anybody else.
The theory of sexual misadventure has been bolstered by evidence that Mr. Williams, a bachelor with no known romantic involvements, went to transvestite performances and visited sites on the Internet dedicated to bondage and “claustrophilia,” a condition that involves getting sexual thrills from being shut in enclosed spaces.
Investigators also discovered that he had more than $30,000 worth of women’s high-fashion clothing, including Christian Louboutin shoes and Christian Dior dresses, in carefully packed bags in his apartment. Much of the clothing was brand new, but some of the 26 pairs of shoes had been worn, and a bright orange woman’s wig was found over the back of a chair, along with a pair of newly pressed men’s underpants, in Mr. Williams’s otherwise sparsely decorated but conspicuously tidy bedroom.
At the inquest on Friday, a video was played showing two men hired by the police — one a yoga expert and the other a former military man trained in escape techniques, and both of roughly the same size and height as the muscular, athletic, 5-foot-7-inch Mr. Williams — trying to replicate what he would have had to do to get himself into the bag alone and lock it from inside. Using the same kind of red, extra-large North Face duffel bag, and the tub in the Pimlico flat, the two men were shown contorting themselves — more than 100 times in the case of one man, and 300 times in the case of the other — without managing the feat.
Investigators concluded that someone else had to have helped in closing the bag and locking it. The police have said further that they cannot rule out that Mr. Williams was dead before being placed in the bag, or that the bag with his body in it was lifted into the bathtub from somewhere else. There were no fingerprints or other traces that would have been expected if Mr. Williams had supported himself on the bathtub’s rim while lowering himself into the bag.
Concerns about national security have contributed to the 20-month delay in the inquest.
Mr. Williams, a Cambridge-educated mathematical genius from the mountains of North Wales, was working on what his superiors have described as the practical use of new technologies in the field of electronic surveillance. Police testimony has described him as a picture of tranquillity in death, lying faceup, looking “very calm,” with no injuries to his nails or fingers and no “signs of stress or fear” on his body or on the bag’s interior netting. But the men who tried to lock themselves in the bag, and pathologists, have said at the inquest that he would have suffocated within 30 minutes from a rapid 20-degree rise in heat and a buildup of carbon dioxide.
Family members, including Mr. Williams’s parents and a sister, appealed unsuccessfully to the coroner not to allow the video of the re-enactment to be shown to the court, but it was quickly posted on the Internet after the court session ended. Inquest sessions have been suspended when relatives have broken into sobbing and hyperventilating, on one occasion when a senior MI6 officer testified anonymously from behind a screen that their son’s MI6 supervisor had not been disciplined for failing to report him missing, even though the normally punctilious Mr. Williams had not been at work for more than a week.
MI6 and the other spy agencies in Britain, including Government Communications Headquarters, the powerful, partly American-financed electronic surveillance center, which had transferred Mr. Williams to MI6, are no strangers to scandals that have involved the sex lives of some of their greatest talents.
Alan M. Turing, the mathematician whom many regard as the father of modern computer science, known for leading the team that cracked Nazi Germany’s military ciphers in World War II, committed suicide in 1954 by eating a cyanide-laced apple after being convicted of homosexuality, then a criminal offense. The so-called Cambridge spies of the 1950s, several of whom fled to the Soviet Union, had homosexual liaisons as young men.
But MI6 has used the mystery of Mr. Williams’s death to signal that efforts have been made to neutralize the potential for blackmail in the private lives of British agents. One of the two MI6 officials who have testified at the inquest said the agency knew of Mr. Williams’s sexual predilections, including his visits to bondage Web sites, his interest in transvestite performances and his collection of women’s clothing, and deemed that they posed no problem in his professional life, where he had performed “world-class work.” Other MI6 officials have said some of his work involved close contact with American spy agencies, and visits to the United States.
The MI6 official, identified in court as SIS F — for the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6’s formal name, and “female” — said agents’ sex lives were now their own private concern. “There is no set template for what their lifestyle should be,” she said. “Individuals have lifestyle and sexual choices and sexual preferences which are perfectly legitimate.” But she also said Mr. Williams had used his MI6 computer to make “a small number” of illicit searches on the MI6 database, which she did not detail, that could have made him vulnerable to blackmail by foreign agents. While the agency believed there was no connection between his spy work and his death, she said, that could not be ruled out.
Another clue to Mr. Williams’s mind-set at his death came from a clipping from the newspaper The Observer that was found in his flat. Dated on the day before his last Web search, the article focused on research into what people on their deathbeds most regretted. These included not having the “courage to live true to myself” and wishing they had “stayed in touch with friends” and had “let myself be happier.”
A version of this article appeared in print on April 28, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Death of Spy, Zipped Into Bag, Spawns Theories and Inquest.
NYTBritain Riveted in Death of Spy, Gareth Williams - NYTimes.com
'via Blog this' "Mr. Williams, a Cambridge-educated mathematical genius from the mountains of North Wales, was working on what his superiors have described as the practical use of new technologies in the field of electronic surveillance. Police testimony has described him as a picture of tranquillity in death, lying faceup, looking “very calm,” with no injuries to his nails or fingers and no “signs of stress or fear” on his body or on the bag’s interior netting. But the men who tried to lock themselves in the bag, and pathologists, have said at the inquest that he would have suffocated within 30 minutes from a rapid 20-degree rise in heat and a buildup of carbon dioxide."
"Alan M. Turing, the mathematician whom many regard as the father of modern computer science, known for leading the team that cracked Nazi Germany’s military ciphers in World War II, committed suicide in 1954 by eating a cyanide-laced apple after being convicted of homosexuality, then a criminal offense. The so-called Cambridge spies of the 1950s, several of whom fled to the Soviet Union, had homosexual liaisons as young men."
Flight of Chen Guangcheng, Chinese Rights Lawyer, Thrills Dissidents
By ANDREW JACOBS
BEIJING — For months, Chen Guangcheng, one of China’s best-known dissidents, played a cat-and-mouse game with the phalanx of guards encircling his home. He dug a tunnel to try to escape, a friend says, but was found out. And he sneaked out a video that alerted his supporters to the smothering confinement he said he and his wife endured at the hands of the men who kept them virtual prisoners in their rural farmhouse.
Then last Sunday night, in an improbable escape, Mr. Chen, who is blind and reportedly weak from months of mistreatment, scaled the wall that had been built around his house, slipped past his security detail and made a desperate sprint to apparent safety in Beijing. The daring rush for freedom could not have been possible without a small network of activists who risked detention to help him and who, supporters with knowledge of the escape said, used coded messages to communicate and elude a surveillance apparatus that is one of the world’s most pervasive.
By Saturday, three activists who had either helped him or had been advocates in the past had disappeared, including the woman who drove Mr. Chen more than 300 miles to Beijing and a man who admitted to meeting the dissident as he was shuttled between safe houses in the capital. The man’s wife said he was taken away by the police.
Friends of Mr. Chen, along with people in the Chinese government, say he is now inside the American Embassy in Beijing. If true, that creates diplomatic headaches for the United States just days before Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other American officials arrive for annual talks.
That the underground network of activists was able to help Mr. Chen evade his captors and move around the capital undetected for days has undoubtedly shaken Chinese leaders, who have become increasingly determined to suppress dissent through technology and brute force. Friends say his escape was so well executed that local officials did not realize until Thursday that he was gone.
“His escape is nothing less than a miracle,” said Zeng Jinyan, a human rights campaigner who also spent time with Mr. Chen last week.
Mr. Chen’s flight could not have come at a worse time for China’s leaders, who were already struggling to limit the fallout from the case of Bo Xilai, the center of a cascading scandal that cost him his seat in the Politburo and exposed internal divisions among top officials in the one-party state.
News of Mr. Chen’s improbable odyssey has electrified China’s rights activists, scores of whom had sought for months to draw attention to his plight and to challenge his extralegal detention by flocking to Dongshigu village in futile attempts to see him. The journeys, many of them publicized through social media, always ended the same way: The guards paid to keep Mr. Chen and his family incommunicado would use violence to drive visitors away.
Mr. Chen, 40, has long been a cause célèbre among human rights advocates both in China and abroad. A self-taught lawyer who was illiterate well into his 20s, Mr. Chen earned renown by defending disenfranchised peasants and the disabled. But he infuriated local officials in Shandong Province after filing a class-action lawsuit on behalf of women forced to undergo abortions and sterilizations under the country’s strict family-planning policy.
In 2006, he was convicted on charges that many legal experts say were trumped up. After serving his 51-month sentence, he was escorted back to Dongshigu, where local officials were determined to keep him silent. They turned his home into a makeshift prison, surrounding it with guards, surveillance cameras and a jamming device to ensure that he could not communicate with the outside world. His wife and young daughter were also confined to the house, although the daughter was later allowed to attend school accompanied by guards.
Many details of the escape remain murky, but supporters say Mr. Chen may have been aided by a sympathetic guard. They also say that the night before his escape, he was able to discuss his plans with supporters via cellphone — a remarkable detail given how hard the guards had worked to keep him isolated.
Friends said Mr. Chen’s subterfuge was months in the making. In recent weeks, they said, he stayed in bed continuously to convince his minders that he was too weak to walk, or to try to leave.
As part of the plan, his wife stayed behind to distract the guards stationed outside the front door.
After he scaled the wall outside his home, he hid somewhere before making his way to a predetermined pickup spot almost a day after leaving home. It was then that He Peirong, a rights activist from Nanjing, arrived in her car and drove Mr. Chen to Beijing, according to the account she posted on her microblog account.
“Now Chen Guangcheng is either in a safe place or in the hands of State Security in Beijing,” she wrote Friday morning, shortly before the authorities in Nanjing arrived at her home and took her away, according to a fellow activist who was on the phone with her at the time. Ms. He remained unreachable on Saturday, and her microblog account has been disabled.
According to Hu Jia, a well-known dissident and AIDS activist who met with him in Beijing last week, Mr. Chen, who had arrived in the capital on Monday, spent the subsequent three days protected by a loose network of supporters who made sure he slept in a different apartment each night.
Mr. Hu, who has been under constant surveillance, said the network consisted of five people. After several frantic days, he said, “It was decided that there was only one place in China that is absolutely safe, and that’s the U.S. Embassy.”
He said he was certain that Mr. Chen had made it to the embassy, because on Friday he received a predetermined coded message confirming that Mr. Chen had made it there.
China Aid, a Christian organization in Texas, also helped in the effort to bring Mr. Chen to safety. Although he would not provide much detail of that assistance, the president of China Aid, Bob Fu, said he was in frequent contact with Mr. Chen in Beijing.
Even as they celebrated Mr. Chen’s flight, activists worried about the backlash that appeared to be building. On Thursday night, Mr. Chen’s brother was taken away by the local authorities, his family said, and state news media reported that his son was also being sought. Human rights advocates say they fear that Mr. Chen’s wife and mother may also be in grave danger.
Several of those who assisted Mr. Chen or publicly advocated on his behalf apparently have also been detained. In addition to Ms. He, the activist who drove him to Beijing, Guo Yushan, a scholar in Beijing, has been missing since Friday, after telling friends he was being trailed by security agents. And shortly after talking to a reporter on Saturday, Mr. Hu, the AIDS activist, was taken away by the police, his wife said.
Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, said Mr. Chen’s escape highlighted the organizational prowess of Chinese rights activists in the face of increasingly sophisticated surveillance. But he acknowledged that the success came at a price.
“It’s hard to call this a victory if everyone involved in his escape ends up detained, arrested and imprisoned,” he said.
Salvador Jara Guerrero
La Jornada
My friend Salvador Jara Guerrero is the Rector of the Nicolaita University, UMSNH. He declared in today's press conference, that the people in the University Housing, are not representative of the University, the students are better than that.
I wouldn't want to be in his shoes.
Good luck Professor Jara!
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