Evidence management to avoid challenge and change

Abuse of Faith in Governance: Mystery of the Unasked Question (Part #5)

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A curious situation has emerged in which it has become increasingly evident the degree to which those in authority seek to manage evidence -- whilst claiming to act with the highest integrity which it is insulting to question. Examples from the above include:

• Marketing: It is understandable that evidence questioning claims made about a product should be minimized or shown (authoritatively) to be invalid. This approach is associated with the same mindset that solicits positive endorsements (for a fee), whether from celebrities or from academic authorities. It is difficult to challenge any such claims. Ben Goldacre offers examples:
  • Newly released information regarding deliberate infection with sexual diseases by the US of asylum inmates in the 1940s -- raising questions about participation in medical trials today (The unacceptable face of medical research, The Guardian, 23 October 2010)
  • Pharmaceutical company settlement of claims for compensation for misleading the public (Drug firms hiding negative research are unfit to experiment on people, The Guardian, 14 August 2010)
  • Even those carrying out formal academic research are guilty of twisting scientific facts to suit their purposes (Don't like your findings? Spin them away, The Guardian, 24 July 2010)
    
    
• Government policy: Policies are readily formulated with the full weight of authorities, suitably selected for their willingness to offer weighty arguments in support of such initiatives. Unfortunately this follows the same pattern as with respect to the endorsement by authorities of products for sale, with little capacity to question the integirty of those doing so. More extraordinary, however, is the contrast between the "evidence" sought and offered in the marketing case compared to that sought and offered in formulating government policy. An excellent example is provided by claims by the pharmacuetical industry and government health authorities that there is "no evidence" in support of the health claims for many forms of complementary medicine. However, when it comes to evaluating proposed remedial government policy in many areas of collective welfare, the quality of "evidence" advanced can only be said to be as "inadequate" as in the case of complementary medicine -- by the standards of proof that government considers appropriate with respect to individual health.
  
  
• Religion: The practice of organized religions to "manage" evidence calling into question any aspects of their activity is well-recognized. This has now been extensively documented in relation to the policies of the Roman Catholic Church in responding to "evidence" regarding sexual abuse by clergy over decades (Geoffrey Robertson, The Case of the Pope: Vatican accountability for human rights abuse, 2010).
  
  
• Science: As a consequence of the Climategate controversy, attention has again been focused on questionable practices within the scientific community and complicity in protecting those involved over decades. This is extensively documented in relation to scientific fraud and misconduct. It is evident in the practice of funding scientific institutions to prove a political point, rather than requiring objective clarification of the validity of that point in relation to some alternative. Evidence is selectively collected and processed to that end, as notably documented by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway (Merchants of Doubt: how a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming, 2010). The wider community, even when aware of the practice, is effectively complicit in it. A striking example is of course "scientific whaling" and the various procedures comparable to it.
  
  With respect to the climate change issue, the matter has been given sharp focus by the resignation of Harold Lewis from the American Physical Society ("A Physicist's Climate Complaints", interview by Andrew Revkin, New York Times, 15 October 2010; Climate change 'fraud' letter: a Martin Luther moment in science history, an editorial by Anthony Watts, Christian Science Monitor, 19 October 2010). The resemblances to the behaviour of organized religion are all the more striking in that, when fraud is finally demonstrated unequivocably after a period of denial, arguments are then advanced that the system as a whole is self-correcting (Michael Shermer, When Scientists Sin: fraud, deception and lies in research reveal how science is (mostly) self-correcting, Scientific American, 23 June 2010).

• Military/Security: The exaggeration of supportive "evidence" for security threats was well-recognized during the Cold War. This has been widely documented in the case of the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (Jamie Doward, Iraq war inquiry: former UN expert accuses Whitehall of cover-up, The Observer, 25 July 2010). It is now a characteristic of evaluation of threat levels associated with terrorism. It has now been recognized in efforts to escalate inappropriately fears of terrorism, reported as "nonsensical" by European intelligence services -- with non-specific US warnings, which despite their vagueness led Britain, France and other countries to raise their overseas terror alert levels (Simon Tisdall and Richard Norton-Taylor, Barack Obama accused of exaggerating terror threat for political gain, The Guardian, 7 October 2010; British intelligence denies US terror warnings sparked by new info, The Guardian, 3 October 2010). This was understood to be a politically motivated attempt to justify a recent escalation in US drone and helicopter attacks.
  
  The secret Iraq war logs released by WikiLeaks reveal the extent of previously unlisted civilian deaths, and denial of violent abuses by the military and by security contractors:
  
  -- Simon Rogers, Wikileaks Iraq: data journalism maps every death, The Guardian, 23 October 2010;
  -- Nick Davies, Jonathan Steele and David Leigh, Iraq war logs: secret files show how US ignored torture, The Guardian, 22 October 2010
  -- Nick Davies, Iraq war logs: Secret order that let US ignore abuse, The Guardian, 22 October 2010
  -- James Meek, Iraq war logs: How friendly fire from US troops became routine, The Guardian, 22 October 2010
  -- Robert Fisk. Torture, killing, children shot - and how the US tried to keep it all quiet. The Independent, 24 October 2010
  
  Curiously, if not cynically, the claim is made that release of such information places the lives of coalition forces at risk (Amy Fallon, Iraq war logs: disclosure condemned by Hillary Clinton and Nato, The Guardian, 22 October 2010). There is no reference to the lives of civilians already terminated in secret in that arena by those forces. Presumably the price is acceptable as notoriously declared by Madeleine Albright's response, as US Secretary of State, to a query as to whether the death of 500,000 Iraqi children was justified in order to further US policy (60 Minutes, 12 May 1996). She indicated: "the price is worth it" -- an attitude that has been the subject of commentary in relation to the 9/11 attacks. For 9/11 conspiracy theories, that attitude would be consistent with the argument that the attacks were either intentionally allowed to happen or were a false flag operation orchestrated by an organization with elements inside the United States government.
  
  As noted by Simon Jenkins (A History of Folly -- from the Trojan horse to Afghanistan, The Guardian, 22 October 2010):
  

  By recording failure in meticulous detail, the logs mock the moral basis for so-called wars among the peoples. Like Vietnam's TV images, they leave the Iraq and Afghan conflicts as bloodthirsty killing fields, devoid of rational justification. The war logs are not so much sensational as relentless. Most of the material was known. It is the detail that bears devastating witness. Afghanistan 2001 now enters firmly into the pantheon of folly, from the wooden horse to Napoleon in Moscow to Vietnam. Indeed it bears the added crassness of coming two decades after the Russians committed the exact same folly in the same place.
  In 1971 the Pentagon papers revealed the deception of the Johnson and Nixon governments during the Vietnam war. The papers were credited with collapsing US morale as the war drew to a close. The Afghanistan logs convey a different message. They show George Bush, Tony Blair and their generals to be so dazzled by their massive military (and intellectual) firepower that they thought they were invincible against a tinpot Taliban.... Like puppets dancing to manufactured fears and dreams of glory, these leaders have lost their grip on Plato's "sacred golden cord of reason". Until that grip is restored, the folly revealed by the war logs will continue.

  It is unfortunate that policy in relation to security, notably the threat of terrorism, is now completely unable (or unwilling) to offer any credible proof of such threats -- by the conventional standards of proof demanded in other contexts (notably with respect to pharmaceutical remedies). The approach taken is either to claim the need for secrecy as a protection for national security and (secret) exchange agreements with other security forces or to claim that incidents are incontrovertible evidence of such threats. Whether those incidents have been fabricated for that purpose, as false flag operations, cannot be proven and is not raised as a credible question. A highly questionable recent sequence of events is offered by the coincidence of the following:

  3 October 2010:  US State Department issued an alert stating: "current information suggests that al-Qaida and affiliated organisations continue to plan terrorist attacks". It warned American citizens to take safety measures when travelling in Europe, particularly on public transport or at tourist sites.
  7 October 2010: A US terror alert issued this week about al-Qaida plots to attack targets in western Europe was politically motivated and not based on credible new information, according to senior Pakistani diplomats and European intelligence (Barack Obama accused of exaggerating terror threat for political gain, The Guardian, 7 October 2010).
  14 October 2010: Terror alert defended despite lack of evidence (US state department defends Europe-wide terror alert, The Guardian, 14 October 2010). The hardcopy version of the article was titled US knew of no specific plot to justify October terror warning -- only indicated in the body of the online version.
  27 October 2010: The UK's largest airport owner has backed calls for an overhaul of Britain's aviation security regime after the chairman of British Airways attacked "redundant" anti-terror measures (BAA backs call to end 'redundant' airport security checks, The Guardian, 27 October 2010).
  29 October 2010: Suspicious package detected on cargo plane from Yemen to the USA (Terror alert: how the hunt for the packages unfolded, The Guardian, 29 October 2010; Bomb plot highlights differences between US and UK cargo screening, The Guardian, 29 October 2010; Terror from the air - al-Qaida's previous plots to attack the west, The Guardian, 29 October 2010)
  30 October 2010: Credibility of threat confirmed (Barack Obama says explosive package terror threat is 'credible', The Guardian, 30 October 2010)
  1 November 2010: Package not detected as a result of screening but through a double agent (Cargo plane bomb plot: Saudi double agent 'gave crucial alert', The Guardian, 1 November 2010)
  2 November 2010: Threat reframed (Cargo plane bomb plotters used 'dry run', say US officials, The Guardian, 3 November 2010). the above sequence summarized by Wikipedia in entry on 2010 cargo plane bomb plot.

  Is there any indication that the question was asked as to whether this pattern of coincidence -- only too reminiscent of the Boy Who Cried Wolf -- was entirely self-serving on the part of security interests to justify the investment in measures which increase their own importance (Cui Bono: Groupthink vs Thinking the Unthinkable? 2005)? Possibly as a distraction from more problematic threats, it is also reminiscent of the manner in which little boys herding cattle make loud noises to right and left of a herd in order to drive the herd in the desired direction (Promoting a Singular Global Threat -- Terrorism: strategy of choice for world governance, 2002; Terror as Distractant from More Deadly Global Threats, 2009).
  
  Puzzling to some commentators is the fact that after a decade of ever increasing security procedures regarding passenger screening, background information and the like, it is only now that it is realized that there was a gigantic unexamined security loophole -- namely the cargo packages travelling under the passengers feet in the cargo holds of airplanes. The loophole was only discovered by a tip-off and subsequent security measures are reactions to the creativity of terrorists. This raises the question of what other loopholes are not being examined by security services and await more creativity by terrorists for them to be recognized. The question applies equally to other threats which depend on disasters for them to be recognized -- given the lack of foresight capacity of governance.
  
  Regrettably it has now become quite unnecessary for government to consider the actual sources of threat -- or to mention such possibilities to the public. The thinking process has been short-circuited -- all threats now derive directly (or indirectly), and unquestionably, from Al-Qaeda, an "organization" whose very "existence" has never been proven in terms of any conventional standards of proof. Furthermore, in an increasingly cynical world, an actual bomb disaster with loss of life is no longer "proof" that it was actually perpetrated by "Al-Qaeda", when it may be in the interest of other parties to do so -- irrespective of the cost. For example, as Yemen intensifies its military campaign against Al Qaeda's regional arm, it faces a serious obstacle: most Yemenis consider the group a myth or a ploy (Mona el-Naggar and Robert F Worth, Yemen's Drive on Al Qaeda Faces Internal Skepticism, International Herald Tribune, 4 November 2010).
  
  This is an approach which harks back to the period in which all blame was attached to witchcraft and works of the devil. No critical thinking was then required -- suspects were merely "put to the question" to confirm this, according to the procedures defined by the Malleus Maleficarum (1486). Its main purpose was to systematically refute arguments claiming that witchcraft does not exist, discredit those who expressed skepticism about its reality, to claim that witches were more often women than men, and to educate magistrates on the procedures that could find them out and convict them. The book became the handbook for secular courts throughout Renaissance Europe. As with the Boy Who Cried Wolf, the difficulty will come when there is a genuine threat -- not deriving from "Al-Qaeda" -- but all claims by government regarding that new threat are held by the public to lack credibility. That time is coming.
  
  
• Justice: The many documented miscarriages of justice are typically due to the (mis)treatment of evidence, as extensively documented by Gareth Peirce (Dispatches from the Dark Side: on torture and the death of justice, 2011)

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