Aux Etats-Unis, les "miracles" des armes de science-fiction

Par Pierre Vandeginste (Journaliste scientifique) Rue89

Déjà, cet été, DefenseTech nous racontait un drôle de truc, à propos d’un certain Active Denial System. Une sorte de "rayon de la mort", mais qui ne tue pas.

L’engin vous envoie une bonne petite claque de micro-ondes, comme celles du four éponyme qui vous réchauffent un surgelé en moins de deux. Et la brûlure sur la peau est si violente que n’importe qui décampe. Formidable pour disperser une manif. Les vidéos valent le détour, comme celle-ci. Là, c’est un journaliste qui fait le cobaye.

Que nous apprenait donc DefenseTech, ce jour-là? Non, pas de problème, ce merveilleux matériel marche au poil, mais figurez vous que le Pentagone venait de décider que, non, vraiment, il n’allait pas envoyer cette petite merveille en Irak, où on est pourtant bien convaincu qu’elle ferait des miracles. Pourquoi? Un problème de "com", semble-t-il. On a dû estimer que ce joujou ferait des ravages au 20 heures.

Aujourd’hui, l’excellente TechnologyReview nous parle d’un rayon magique qui arrête les voitures. Oui, comme dans les films de SciFi. Le HPEMS (High-Power ElectroMagnetic System) de Eureka Aerospace balance lui aussi son petit paquet d’ondes millimétriques. Bref, mais géant : deux gigawatts, pendant 50 nanosecondes. Aucun microprocesseur ne résiste à ce traitement. Comme les bagnoles actuelles en sont truffées, pour gérer l’injection, l’allumage et bien d’autres choses, elles baissent les bras.

La baseline de Eureka Aerospace, sise à Pasadena (Californie), est: "Imagination is as important as knowledge" (soit: "L’imagination est aussi importante que la connaissance"). Signé: Albert Einstein. Cela ne s’invente pas. Cette entreprise imaginative demande dix-huit mois pour proposer sa camelote à toutes les polices et armées du monde. Elle est pas belle, la vie?

En partenariat avec:

La rabia se va con arte

Fernando Botero afirmó que realizó las 79 obras sobre la tortura en Abu Ghraib para "sacarse la rabia"

ADNCultura

WASHINGTON (EFE).- El gigante de las artes plásticas colombiano, Fernando Botero, afirmó hoy en Washington que realizó las 79 obras sobre la tortura a prisioneros en Abu Ghraib para "sacarse la rabia" ante una conducta "inaceptable" del Gobierno de Estados Unidos.

Botero, de 78 años, se encuentra en Washington para la apertura en el Museo de Arte de American University mañana de su exposición sobre las atrocidades cometidas en la cárcel iraquí de Abu Ghraib que, aseguró, le causaron mucha "rabia".

Durante una rueda de prensa, Botero explicó que realizó esas obras en 2005 "para que el público las mire" -en especial el público con conciencia política-, pero enfatizó que prefiere no meterse en temas políticos porque, a su juicio, el artista "debe mantenerse fiel a las ideas de estética".

"Tienes que ser fiel a la pintura antes que a cualquier otra cosa", aseguró Botero.

El artista colombiano insistió en reiteradas ocasiones en que su muestra es apolítica y que sólo buscaba "sacarse la rabia" tras leer sobre las torturas cometidas en Abu Ghraib a manos de soldados estadounidenses.

"Sólo fui un artista tratando de plasmar mis sentimientos en un canvas... no fui un profeta sino un artista que buscaba liberar esa rabia", continuó.

Una vez completada la obra, "la rabia como que desapareció porque ya había dicho lo que tenía que decir", aseguró.

En su conjunto, las obras muestran la perspectiva de las víctimas, muchas de ellas desnudas, maniatadas, encapuchadas, apiladas en una pirámide humana, colgadas de un pie, o aterradas ante la presencia de un perro colmilludo y rabioso.

Uno de los cuadros muestra a un hombre vendado y luciendo un sostén y calzón rojos, contra su voluntad. El torturador está ausente de la mayoría de las obras, salvo en cuadros como el tríptico "Abu Ghraib 43".

Presionado por los periodistas sobre el arte como instrumento político -dado que Botero ha dicho en el pasado que el arte puede ser un acto de denuncia-, el artista dijo que "todo esto se corregirá en 12, 14 meses".

Así, Botero hizo alusión a las elecciones presidenciales en Estados Unidos en noviembre de 2008, en las que el presidente republicano George W. Bush no podrá reelegirse.

No es la primera vez que el artista va más allá de "hacer arte lo mejor que uno puede".

Botero recordó que "no es la primera vez que me preocupa algo y lo debo expresar", pues ya hizo un centenar de obras denunciando los abusos de derechos humanos de la guerrilla colombiana, en el marco del conflicto armado más prolongado de América Latina.

Esas obras están albergadas en el Museo Nacional de Bogotá.

Preguntado sobre si Estados Unidos debe cerrar las cárceles clandestinas o el centro de detenciones en Guantánamo, Botero contestó: "no quiero meterme en cosas que no tengo ni la preparación ni la autoridad, porque no tengo el conocimiento de todos los hechos que hay atrás".

Para Botero, la función del artista es sólo "hacer arte" y hay una gran dife rencia entre "la política activa y real que es la que mueve las cosas (...) y la opinión política personal".

"Meterme a proponer soluciones o sugerir castigos no es mi oficio, es decir, ni me interesa ni tengo conocimiento de todos los datos que se necesitan para dar un juicio de las cosas (...) solo expreso mi rabia frente a algo que es evidente", puntualizó.

La polémica no ha estado ajena a su obra. Botero señaló que, aunque en EE.UU. hay libertad de expresión, la galería Marlboroneoyorquina donde se presentó su muestra "recibió muchas llamadas de repulsa, de odio".

Según observadores, esta muestra de Botero, en manos de un artista de menor nivel, habría suscitado acusaciones de traición por parte del Gobierno de Washington, en el marco de la lucha global contra el terrorismo tras los atentados de 2001.

La muestra de Botero es una de tres exposiciones que conforman el llamado "Arte de Confrontación", en el que el Museo de Arte de American University recoge obras de protesta social y política dentro y fuera de Estados Unidos.

La exposición, ya realizada en Nueva York y la Universidad de California en Berkeley, viene a Washington directamente de Milán, permanecerá en la capital de EE.UU. hasta el 31 de diciembre y continuará su gira en Monterrey, México.

Botero Sees the World's True Heavies at Abu Ghraib

In a series of paintings and drawings,
artist Fernando Botero reflects on the 2004
prisoner abuse scandal at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

By Erica Jong

Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, November 4, 2007

When we think about the Colombian artist Fernando Botero, most of us visualize his roly-poly people flaunting their fat, their fashionable headgear, their cigarettes and cigarette holders, their excess. I never thought of these as political images until I saw Botero's Abu Ghraib series in which hooded men dangle, upside down, and hideous dogs claw and growl at manacled prisoners arranged into pyramids and bleeding on each other.

Held by their hair, their hands, their manacles, the prisoners seldom come face-to-face with their torturers. They are beaten by hands outside the picture frame, urinated on by men whose faces rarely appear. A bound prisoner wears red panties and a bra -- obviously against his will. The torture is anonymous and masked. Even the prisoners are masked so the torturers cannot be identified. But Botero knows who they are. They are the same fat people whose antics he has previously appeared to delight in.

As a result of this astonishing series of drawings and paintings, we know he was not celebrating these people, only waiting for an opportunity to show their true nature. They are cannibals who feed off their brothers. They deal in the anguish of human flesh.

Fernando Botero, whose Abu Ghraib pictures will be on view at American University starting this week, read about the torturers of Abu Ghraib in the New Yorker, and made his own record of the horrors. He did not invent anything that was not described, but because he is an artist, we feel the terror of the tortured rather than the gloating of the torturers -- so present in the photographs they took of themselves at play in the blood of others.

Botero calls art "a permanent accusation," but his Abu Ghraib series seems to me more than an accusation. Rather, it constitutes a complete revision of whatever we have previously thought of Botero's work. (He refuses to sell these works because he doesn't want to profit from the pain of others. He plans to donate them to museums.)

What is this need people have to abuse each other, then boast about it? What is this need to make others powerless before them, to see them bleed and scream and beg for mercy? Psychologists theorize that torturers are repeating their infantile impotence by inflicting it on others. That seems glib to me. Empathy is a rare human quality, but it is essential to our humanity.

But American torture is different from other tortures because of the high opinion we have of our country and ourselves. Torture is something others do. We are above that. We are reasonable people governed by a great Enlightenment document we call The Constitution. We help, not hurt people all over the world. It is the incongruity of our image of ourselves versus the reality of our behavior that stings most.

Botero's Abu Ghraib series has been shown before, but never in Washington. It is a moment: The people who got us into Abu Ghraib can contemplate what went on there.

I dare them to look at these images and be unmoved.

The series's entry into the visual world has not been easy. In the Bay Area, they were shown not in a museum, but in a library at the University of California at Berkeley. Still 15,000 people saw them.

Susan Sontag wrote that the Abu Ghraib photographs showed "the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality." Is this true?

I doubt it. I think that most of the people who see these Botero images will be as horrified as I am. Complicity in torture is invisible to most people. They do not know what they can do to prevent it -- hence their passivity.

Botero, inspired by Picasso's "Guernica," broke through his passivity by making these works. Many people have contrasted them with his supposedly "happy" fat people. I don't think Botero's fat people are happy at all. I think they are also political -- the haves fattening on the invisible have-nots.

"The whole world and myself were very shocked that the Americans were torturing prisoners in the same prison as the tyrant they came to remove," Botero said to the San Francisco Chronicle. "The United States presents itself as a defender of human rights and of course as an artist I was very shocked with this and angry. The more I read, the more I was motivated. . . . I think Seymour Hersh's article was the first one I read. I was on a plane and I took a pencil and paper and started drawing. Then I got to my studio and continued with oil paintings. I studied all the material I could. It didn't make sense to copy, I was just trying to visualize what was really happening there."

What will be our reaction to his visualization? Will we continue in passivity? Will we deny that such horrors still take place? Or will Botero's art have the power to change us?

We might also ask what power art can have in general. Did Goya stop cruelty in his time, or Picasso in his? No. But the role of the artist in raising our consciousness and bearing witness is essential. The artist makes us open our eyes to our own cruelty, our own passivity, our own indifference.

For that alone, his witnessing matters.

I am looking at another recent work by Botero in which a roly-poly woman is stuffing her face with an apple as if she were a Christmas pig. Before the Abu Ghraib series I would have shrugged off this image. Now I see all Botero's work as a record of the brutality of the haves against the have-nots. I would be surprised if the Abu Ghraib series of images did not completely change our view of Botero as an artist.

Novelist, poet and nonfiction writer Erica Jong wrote a catalogue essay for the Milan exhibition of Botero's Abu Ghraib pictures and has a Botero sculpture of Eve with a snake and an apple in her apartment in New York. Her most recent book is "Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life."

If you go: "Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib" opens Tuesday at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, at the intersection of Massachusetts and Nebraska avenues NW. Through Dec. 30. Open Tuesday-Sunday 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Free. 202-885-1300.

Foreign Policy, Privatized

By ALLISON STANGER and OMNIVORE

The New York Times

WHILE most Americans are aware of the controversy over the role of the private security company Blackwater in Iraq, probably few understand that armed contractors in Iraq are just the tip of an iceberg. Across the globe, in everything from diplomacy to development to intelligence, contractors are a major American presence, and only a small fraction of them carry weapons. American foreign policy, to a great extent, has been privatized.

Enlarge This Image

Omnivore

The charts below, based on figures from the Federal Procurement Data System, tell the story. In 2005, federally financed contractors were working in every United Nations-recognized country except Bhutan, Nauru and San Marino.

It has become conventional wisdom to blame the Bush administration for the “hollowing out” of government, but this misses the mark. While contract spending has more than doubled since 2001, serious federal efforts to outsource began under President Bill Clinton.

Nor is contracting necessarily bad: United States money creates jobs for the local population, and humanitarian organizations like Save the Children, CARE and Catholic Relief Services have relied heavily on dollars from Washington. Outsourcing can play to America’s strengths, exploiting our capacity for innovation, flexibility and efficiency.

Yes, as we have seen in Iraq, hiring contractors can lead to severe problems with accountability and fraud. And while steps like making contractors liable for civil penalties may manage some symptoms, they will not cure the disease. We need to devise far better ways of overseeing contractors worldwide.

Some are tempted to turn back the clock and reassert traditional government authority, denouncing private-sector greed and the “coalition of the billing.” But that would be a terrible mistake, for outsourcing is in part a rational response to the new possibilities of the information age. The challenge will be to manage creative forms of collaboration between government and the private sector in ways that serve the public interest.

Allison Stanger, a professor of political science at Middlebury College, is writing a book on the privatization of American power. Omnivore is a graphic design firm in New York City.

Processos contra aéreas do 11 de setembro

Mais de um terço dos casos de processos abertos por parentes de vítimas dos atentados de 11 de setembro chegaram a termos de acordos com as companhias aéreas e as empresas seguradoras, a menos de uma semana do início das primeiras audiências finais sobre o caso. Quatorze dos 35 casos remanescentes, incluindo a ação aberta pela viúva de Patrick Driscoll, um dos passageiros do vôo United 93 - derrubado na Pensilvânia. O caso de Driscoll seria o primeiro a chegar a um tribunal, em uma audiência marcada para hoje. Donald Migliori, advogado da família e de outros impetrantes, afirmou que uma das exigências do acordo era a de justamente não revelar o valor do montante acertado como indenização.

O ponto essencial para o acordo sobre Driscoll foi a autorização do juiz que preside o caso para que fosse apresentada na corte a transcrição das gravações do Cockpit Voice Recorder dos momentos finais do United 93. Se o desespero dos passageiros tentando retomar o controle do jato, em poder do terrorista Ziad Jarrah, foi um décimo do que vi no filme de Paul Greengrass, são gravações horripilantes. O Boeing foi jogado verticalmente ao solo por Jarrah ao perceber que os passageiros iriam conseguir invadir a cabine.

De 21 casos remanescentes, três são relativos a passageiros do vôo American Airlines 11, e dois do United Airlines 175, que se chocaram contra as torres Norte e Sul do World Trade Center, respectivamente. Outros 15 casos são relativos a passageiros do American 77, que se chocou contra o Pentágono (algo que, pelas imagens que não canso de ver na internet, me parece inverossímil).

Inicialmente, 96 famílias processaram as companhias aéreas e as empresas de segurança a elas ligadas por terem permitido que os 19 terroristas comandados pelo saudita Mohammed Atta entrassem nos aviões com armas. Esse grupo optou por não fazer parte do fundo especial de compensação às vítimas criado pelo congresso americano. Ao todo, US$ 5,99 bilhões serão distribuídos entre 2.880 famílias de vítimas do atentado. Fonte Slot do JB

Obama le candidat des militaires

Comme tout le monde, les militaires ont le droit de donner de l’argent au candidat de leur choix.
D’après le Center for Responsive Politics, ils se mettent à donner aux démocrates.
Avant 2002, 20 % de leurs contributions allaient aux démocrates.
Cette année, c’est 40 %.
L’un de leurs favoris est Barack Obama (l’autre: le républicain anti-guerre du Texas, Ron Paul).

Lequel Obama est de plus en plus patriote.

On ne le voit plus qu’enfoui dans le rouge-blanc-bleu.

Six ans après le 11 septembre 2001, il faut encore se draper dans le drapeau pour tenir un discours anti-guerre…

do Blog Big Picture de Corine Lesnes