December 21, 2016

“We were painting them a dire picture, and I couldn’t help but think they literally looked like they had no idea what was going on here. I remember their faces, it was like they had never fucking heard this stuff before.” For the “Bernie would’ve won” schadenfreudist, Sanders campaign staff say the Clinton campaign “fucking ignored” them and their advice to hit Midwestern swing states, where Clinton lost the presidency. / The Daily Beast

“Team Trump’s statement was utterly different. It described the victims as members not of a nation but of a religion.” For the time being, we have both a president and a president-elect. Their differing statements on the Ankara and Berlin attacks indicate the vastness between their worldviews. / The Atlantic

“He has just one year under his name. There’s no dash. There’s no hyphen. He lasted just a number of months, but he did the job. He did the absolute right thing. When asked to do something he felt was inconsistent with his oath as attorney general, he resigned.” From the incredible kicker of Wil Hylton’s 2010 profile of Eric Holder, in which the former attorney general considers the legacy of Elliott Richardson, the AG who defied Nixon by resigning. / GQ

“One Friday, at the beginning of the sermon, we saw a lot of soldiers surrounding the mosque. After the prayers, they started questioning the people. They were looking for Arabs. They asked me: ‘Saudi?’” Former Guantánamo detainee Mohammed el Gorani—who is Chadian, not Saudi—recounts how he was mistakenly picked up by American military personnel and eventually had the distinction of being the facility’s youngest prisoner. / London Review of Books

“I forgot everything in Guantánamo,” new Montevideo resident Jihad Ahmed Mustafa Dhiab told the Washington Post last year. / Washington Post

“Maybe it was a mistake to put together these task forces, to be so rational in the way we approached the topic.” The initial Guantánamo closure procedure initiated by Obama—careful study of the issue, accompanied by growing reticence to act due to the more crass political maneuver-ers in the White House, like Rahm Emanuel—doomed it at least as much as Congress. / The New Yorker

The abuse at Guantánamo extended far beyond the physical. A recent Times investigation into the mental health care that inmates received at the facility found that the integrity of health care professionals was tainted by a “willful blindness to the consequences” when they were forced to work alongside interrogators and kept in the dark regarding the true “special interrogation techniques” used on the men. / The New York Times

After failing to deliver on a campaign promise (never mind that day-one executive order) to close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, President Obama recently told Congress he intends to transfer some 18 of the 59 inmates left in the facility on his very last day. / The New York Times

Some background on a few of the new words added this December to the Oxford English Dictionary. / public.oed.com

Say what you like, but this guide to reducing anxiety while wrapping presents is seriously working for us this morning—and we’re not even wrapping presents. / WELL

In the order they appear, a list of quotes from Vanity Fair’s 2012 oral history of Guantánamo: / Vanity Fair

For me to be taken out of my cell for 15 minutes twice a week, I had to have two soldiers who would shackle me before I was taken out of the cell, and then before I’d walk out of the room, there has to be an infantry patrol with Humvees and fixed machine guns on top and then foot soldiers and then what they call the military working dogs—M.W.D.—and their handler. I needed to be put inside this cage to walk around for 15 minutes in flip-flops. It was amazing. I actually felt extremely dangerous. And it’s funny, because I’m only 5’3,” and all these soldiers are like twice the size of me, lengthwise. They’re doing this for little old me. I wonder what they’d be doing for serious criminals. —Moazzam Begg, a former detainee / Twitter

Guantánamo has changed. It is not that prison anymore. And when the administration—the Bush administration or the Obama administration—describe it as a very different facility, in significant respects they’re right. Some of the units are very bad, but some of the units are not. Some of the units are medium-security units. And while severe, they’re not terrible compared to prisons all over the country. Guantánamo’s moral bankruptcy now is not that it’s built around the creation of debilitating despair. Its moral bankruptcy now is that these guys are held without ever having been charged or tried or convicted of anything. —Joseph Margulies, the attorney for Yaser Esam Hamdi, who won a case against the Pentagon in the Supreme Court requiring the government to give Guantánamo detainees due process. / Wikipedia

“You never quite know what it is going to look like when you peek in there.” This profile of NHL team dentists is pretty gross. / The Globe and Mail

Purdue, facing increased regulations and public awareness of the dangers of its opioids, is planning to push its drugs to the rest of the world’s medical patients. / Los Angeles Times

There’s an alarming lack of data on Latinos—an ethnic, not racial group—in the criminal justice system, as a result of frequent misidentification by law enforcement and corrections officials. Which results in the artificial inflation of “white” prisoners and the masking of the white/black disparity in prisons. / apps.urban.org

“Besides a weak-tea cultural liberalism and support for skilled immigrants, Silicon Valley has rarely displayed any genuine progressive instincts, much less a cohesive political program.” No one should be surprised that Silicon Valley, borne of the military-industrial complex, is cozying up to Trump. / The Baffler

“This isn’t a data-sharing agreement—it is a secret government programme that turns the Department for Education into a border control force.” The United Kingdom’s education department is encouraging teachers to spy and report on children of illegal immigrants and to create a “hostile environment” for them in school. / The Guardian

Think it’s cold where you are? You don’t have to survive nine months alone in Siberia shooting a new survival reality show. Producers, who say the show is inspired by Lost, are advertising it as total anarchy. / siberiantimes.com

“Internal Uber employees helped ex-boyfriends stalk their ex-girlfriends and searched for the trip information of celebrities such as Beyoncé, the company’s former forensic investigator said.” Uber’s promises of data security are directly contradicted by stories of spying, like when employees accessed “God View.” / Reveal

After the election, downloads of encrypted messaging app Signal spiked in the United States, drawing the app misbegotten attention abroad: Egypt just blocked Signal. / Variety, engadget.com

This Christmas, watch out for the “cyber-ghost of Christmas future,” as concern mounts that the smart coffee machine under the tree might soon be infected with malware that’s undermining the nascent Internet of Things. / BBC

Oh, cheery: here’s James Clapper talking about how excited the NSA is to use the Internet of Things to separate the naughty from the nice. / engadget.com

One interesting recommendation popping up for making our web interactions more fair and secure: voluntary levels of permissions for data, as discussed by a computer scientist inculcating ethics into her industry and recommended as a key step to fixing the Internet by Vince Cerf. / quantamagazine.org, The Atlantic

Adventures in entrepreneurialism: The professional people walker of Los Angeles. / GearJunkie

FBI advice on how to survive the holidays / TMN