Weathering the Witch-Hunt

Letting an 82 year-old nun break in to your weapons-grade uranium storage facility is not without its consequences...

If there was an Academy Award for thoughtful, incisive writing on security leadership I'd nominate Nick Catrantzos for his two-part essay on the recent Oak Ridge Y-12 fiasco.

Now if you let three geriatric peaceniks roam around inside the wire at the national defense complex where the DoE keeps all the country's spare atomic bomb parts you should expect a drubbing.  You may expect your industry's regulator, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), to send you a tersely worded memo saying things like:

"...our preliminary fact-findings reveal that contributing and direct causes of the security event include an inappropriate Y-12 cultural mind set, as well as a lapse of discipline and performance..."

Ouch! 

At first the lesson seemed to be simple.   If any part of your security system is broken fix it, or ask that it be fixed - in writing - until it is fixed or until you are granted an exception - in writing - releasing you from pursuit of the deliverable for which the tool was provided.  In this case that lesson would be a little too simple.

In Part One of his pointed and pithy essay Catrantzos let's us in on a bit of a shocker.  The NNSA itself held the contract with G4S and was responsible for operational oversight until after the failure, which is when they transferred the contract to the engineering company operating the site - Babcock and Wilcox, and only then sent them the letter blaming them for the security breach.  With clients like these...

Part Two is even better.  If you have ever failed an audit, watched helplessly as a program slid inexorably out of control, or been woken up by news of some catastrophic screw up by a member of your team, you will recognize the wisdom of Catrantzos' advice. If none of these things have ever happened to you then you must read his essay so that you are ready for the day when they do.

Image credit: Adam Brimer http://m.knoxnews.com/photos/2012/aug/03/245458/

Conceiving God: The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion

Another excellent book by David Lewis-Williams...

Two of my favorite books in recent years were David Lewis-Williams' The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (2002), and Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and the Realm of the Gods (2005). The Mind in the Cave figured heavily in a paper I wrote for my Masters and I have looked forward to additional synthesis of his ideas.  Inside the Neolithic Mind is an important work about the significance of early religious structures, but I remain most interested in trying to understand what happened in the cave.  

To this list of my favorite books by Lewis-Williams I can now add Conceiving God: The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion (2010).  In it Lewis-Williams' returns to the cave and the neurology of the Homo Sapiens who left signs of their emerging religious sensibilities on its walls.  The core of his argument, literally and conceptually, are found in chapters five through nine, where he applies his deep knowledge of archeology and anthropology to questions surrounding the origin of the religion impulse and all its subsequent accretions. Lewis-Williams makes a compelling case that we modern humans are prone to religious experience - the numinous or the mystical - due to our neurology and biochemistry.  Once we had religious experiences our efforts to contextualize them resulted in religious belief - orthodoxy.  Religious belief among members of small social groups resulted in religious behavior - orthopraxy.  While Lewis-Williams accepts religious experience as all but inevitable, he is no fan of traditional religious organizations and their tendencies toward political intrigue, coercion, and violence.  

In some ways Conceiving God is his most personal book to date.  There is an edge to his early and closing chapters that theists (and some accommodationists) may find off-putting , but Lewis-Williams is not nearly so abrasive as some of the new atheists and he's a better writer.  On balance I found his work bracing and a welcome return to the cave where our humanity took form.

Some Days You Eat the Bear

Some days the bear eats you... 

It is with a heavy heart that I must announce that a rather shrill piece titled, "Security experts prepare steps to deal with 'active shooters'" was released by the very same paper - the Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal Sentinel - that published Meg Kissinger's balanced and thoughtful article, "Red Flags Missed In Mass Shootings"  Maybe their editor was going for that whole "fair and balanced" sort of approach?

My favorite quote in the whole frantic mess is:

"'Anybody who is operating these facilities, you do have your guard up a lot more than you did 20 years ago because we're seeing the frequency on a national and international basis,' Smith said." 

Seems Mr. Smith is unaware that violent deaths at work occur half as often as they did 20 years ago and that the frequency and severity of mass murder has not changed. With mass media writers like Joe Taschler feeding him Chicken Little prognostications who's to blame him?

Don't get me wrong. I'm pleased enough to have everyone's attention when it comes to creating sensible security policies and conducting shelter in place drills, but we might assure our employers and clients that the problem is not getting worse it's just getting more media coverage.

PS, the article does offer up a handy infographic as a side bar.  Ironically, it contradicts the tone of the piece.

Making Sense of Senselessness

Unlike many of their peers, two reporters make positive contributions to the public discourse...

Amid the din surrounding recent public mass murder events two journalists have taken the time to dig beneath the needlessly lurid and frequently simplistic surface details of recent public mass murders.

• 'Warning behaviors' sought to stop killings, by Bob Ortega of The Republic | azcentral.com
• Red flags missed in mass shootings, by Meg Kissinger of the Journal Sentinel 

They join a handful of well-written pieces I've seen in the past month that address this complex issue with balance, thoughtfulness, and depth.  They never once resort to hyperbole or fear mongering.  Both articles call us to think, rather than merely react.  We're fortunate to have minds like theirs on the crime beat.  We need more talented voices like theirs contributing to the public discourse on this topic.

Hands Off Domestic Right Wing Terror?

"We have met the enemy and he is us…"

It remains to be seen whether or not Wade Michael Page, perpetrator of last week’s mass murder at the Sikh Gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, was an active member of a white supremacist terror cell (doubt it), an ideologically motivated “Lone Wolf” (probably not), or a depressed sadsack who chose a public murder-suicide in alignment with his twisted world view.

On 10 August 2012 Homeland Security News Wire published an article, Domestic terrorism by members of extremist groups a serious threat: FBI, that is much better than their usual “Anything-GWOT-Is-Good” puff pieces.  It refers the reader to several interesting papers that have not received all the attention they might have in a less partisan atmosphere:

• Right Wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment
• White Supremacy: Contexts and Constraints for Suicide Terrorism

The most disturbing theme in the article was the reporting from Thomson Reuters, the Los Angeles Times, and Salon to the effect that conservative political backlash has hampered investigation of right wing domestic terror groups.  Homeland Security News Wire closes its report with this troubling paragraph:

In the wake of the controversy the study triggered, and charges of political motives, DHS disbanded the small team of analysts assigned to study “domestic non-Islamic extremism,” which had produced the report. The department now largely concentrates on threats from Islamic extremists, and analysts are monitor law enforcement and domestic intelligence issues are divided in their opinion as to how much resources and energy various government agencies now devote to monitoring non-Islamist terrorism threats.

Much as we would rather not think about it, domestic terrorism has been an element in American politics at least since the close of the America Civil War.  The enemy within has always looked much more like us than those from without.  We must not forget that now lest we turn our backs on a potentially dangerous truth.

Image credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_P._Murrah_Federal_Building