Temas de relações internacionais, de política externa e de diplomacia brasileira, com ênfase em políticas econômicas, em viagens, livros e cultura em geral. Um quilombo de resistência intelectual em defesa da racionalidade, da inteligência e das liberdades democráticas.
O que é este blog?
Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida.
Há umas semanas rodou por aí, partilhada à exaustão, a tradução de um texto francês sobre o empobrecimento da língua. O texto é bonito, mas a argumentação está colada a cuspo.
O cronista, um professor de gestão francês chamado Christophe Clavé, pouca culpa terá. Afinal, a língua é um tema interessante e, quando há que escrever uma crónica e não nos aparece outro assunto, há sempre a possibilidade de bater na língua dos dias de hoje. É um truque velho de séculos. Uma crónica escreve-se depressa, nem sempre temos tempo para pensar no que dizemos. Acontece.
Já fico um pouco mais preocupado com todos os leitores cultíssimos, exigentíssimos e sempre com o pensamento crítico na boca que, perante uma prosa sobre a língua que não mostra conhecimento mínimo sobre o estudo dessa língua, a divulgam sem remorsos e sem pensamento crítico que se veja.
Vejamos então o que diz o tal texto partilhado. Uso a versão traduzida que vi partilhada. O texto original é um pouco diferente (para dizer a verdade, mais subtil), mas foi este o texto que tantos portugueses quiseram partilhar. Vamos a ele.
«O QI médio da população mundial, que sempre aumentou desde o pós-guerra até o final dos anos 90, diminuiu nos últimos vinte anos …É a inversão do efeito Flynn. Parece que o nível de inteligência medido pelos testes diminui nos países mais desenvolvidos. Pode haver muitas causas para esse fenómeno.»
Alto e pára o baile! Na verdade, houve ganhos tremendos — quase inacreditáveis — do QI nos últimos 100 anos, em todo o mundo. Este é o gráfico do aumento (não são valores absolutos, são valores relativos à base):
US President Donald Trump has unleashed another round of personnel changes in the intelligence community, replacing career national-security officials with unqualified toadies. With the White House's war on intelligence agencies taking its toll, those who remain are likely to be intimidated into submission.
Kent Harrington
Project Syndicate, Praga – 5.3.2020
Atlanta - After nearly four years of inveighing against the US intelligence officials and analysts who revealed Russia’s meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, Donald Trump is finally acting fully on his paranoia by carrying out a purge. The recent defenestration of top US national-security officials may come as a shock to Americans, but it is no surprise to the Russians. For months, the joke making the rounds in Moscow goes that if Trump would only fire his spy chiefs, he could get his intelligence directly from the source: Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Among those ousted by Trump in the past month were the acting director of national intelligence, Admiral Joseph Maguire, and his deputy. But the removal of senior officials isn’t the most important part of the story. What matters most is that Trump wants to send a message to the intelligence community’s rank and file, which has consistently given the lie to his groundless claims about issues ranging from the North Korean nuclear program to climate change. Trump wants to intimidate US intelligence professionals into submission, and he might just succeed.
There is no question that Trump’s latest round of firings qualify as a “purge.”His interim choice to replace Maguire, Richard Grenell, who had been the US ambassador to Germany, is a notorious Trump sycophant with no intelligence experience. Grenell will happily play to the Oval Office’s audience of one. He has already ordered his own minions to start investigating alleged conspiracies among the intelligence officials who uncovered Russia’s election interference, and to pore over personnel files in search of those who may not be sufficiently loyal to Trump.
With the 2020 presidential election approaching, it isn’t hard to see Trump’s motive. In December, intelligence officials avoided the public portion of their annual threat briefing to Congress, following hearings a year earlier in which they provoked Trump’s wrath by contradicting him on almost every major national-security issue. The message from that episode was clear: Trump wants an executive suite staffed by servile appointees who will muzzle the intelligence agencies throughout the 2020 presidential campaign season. If Grenell does his job and completes the purge, Trump’s new DNI nominee should be able to sail through the Senate confirmation process with an innocent smile.
That nominee will be Republican US Representative John Ratcliffe, another consummate Trump toady. Ratcliffe’s attacks on Special Counsel Robert Mueller during the congressional hearings into the Russia investigation led Trump to pick him for the DNI job last summer. But revelations that Ratcliffe had inflated his resumé to make up for his lack of intelligence experience torpedoed his nomination, with even Senate Republicans admitting that loyalty to Trump is not a sufficient qualification for the job. Now the Senate will be faced with choosing between Ratcliffe and Grenell.
Ratcliffe’s history of shameless pandering suggests that, like Grenell, he will politicize intelligence whenever Trump demands. The intelligence community’s job is to deliver facts and nonpartisan analysis to the president, top policymakers, and military commanders, regardless of their stated policy preferences. But Trump has made many efforts to suppress or discredit intelligence he doesn’t like, and he is now likely to do so with abandon.
Both Republicans and Democrats have already raised alarms about the White House’s meddling in critical intelligence activities. In January, Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, warned that the Trump administration was pressuring intelligence agencies to withhold information on Ukraine from congressional oversight. And in the Senate, an intelligence briefing to explain the imminent threat that supposedly justified the targeted killing of Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani in January was met with bipartisan criticism over what looked like White House misrepresentations.
To be sure, presidents have every right to give intelligence agencies new directives and to remove officials for failures or missteps. After the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, President John F. Kennedy installed an intelligence-community outsider, John McCone, at the helm of the CIA. And after the Iran-Contra scandal implicated CIA Director William J. Casey, President Ronald Reagan tapped William H. Webster, a former FBI director, to replace him. Nonetheless, until Trump, no president has so blatantly put his own political fortunes ahead of the country’s security by discrediting the very agencies charged with its defense.
Indeed, not even a president as ethically challenged as Richard Nixon has come close to Trump’s war on intelligence. Under pressure from the Watergate scandal, Nixon, in February 1973, appointed James R. Schlesinger to replace Richard Helms as CIA director, because the latter had refused to go along with the coverup. Upon arrival, Schlesinger downsized the agency, forcing out hundreds of experienced officers and unsettling the rank and file. But he never questioned the agency’s loyalty or discredited its work. Moreover, unlike Grenell and Ratcliffe, Schlesinger, who later served as secretary of defense, at least had national-security credentials.
Trump’s ceaseless attacks and installation of political apparatchiks at the top of the intelligence community has undoubtedly taken its toll on morale. US spies and intelligence analysts are trained to do their jobs with integrity and to take risks in the field. They are there to provide independent, nonpartisan information and analysis in the service of the country’s security. By ignoring their findings, denigrating their work, and hunting for signs of disloyalty, Trump’s actions have jeopardized that mission.
So far, the intelligence community’s leaders have said little about the damage that Trump has wrought. The most charitable explanation of their silence is that they are protecting the mission by keeping their heads down. That may be true. But at some point, silence becomes indistinguishable from complicity, particularly when those who are most responsible for the success of the mission are targeted by purges and bogus investigations. When those who should be receiving accolades are getting the boot, something has gone very wrong.
Kent Harrington, a former senior CIA analyst, served as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia, Chief of Station in Asia, and the CIA’s Director of Public Affairs.
Percorrendo o noticiário internacional nesta manhã, encontro esta "pérola" no site da Foreign Policy:
U.S. Intelligence No Closer to Pinning MH17 Downing on Russia by Shane Harris Foreign Policy, July 23, 2014 Five days after Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine, U.S. intelligence officials are still not certain who fired the missile that felled the doomed airliner, nor have they conclusively linked the attack to Russian military forces, according to senior intelligence officials.
Não sei se é auto-ironia, ou apenas excesso de zelo com os cuidados que se deve ter com o novo czar do Kremlin, mas algumas perguntas são de rigor:
Os "rebeldes" pró-russos do leste da Ucrânia dispunham de baterias anti-aéreas ou de mísseis sofisticados quando se "rebeleram"?
Eles compraram esses artefatos no mercado livre de armas?
Sua intenção é formar um novo estado independente, tipo Ucrânia oriental, ou Ucrânia russa?
Onde estão os radares que certamente seguiram a trajetória de todos os objetos voadores no fatídico dia do acidente?
Por que não começar respondendo essas questões?
A Inteligência americana sofreu um apagão?
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
PS.: Quase todos os países que contam na comunidade internacional soltaram notas e enviaram pêsames aos governos da Ucrâna, da Malásia, dos Países Baixos, pela tragédia. Ainda não vi nada no gênero vindo do Brasil. Estamos esperando o final das investigações para dar pêsames?
The revelation this week that former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden had already received help from the Russian government during his sojourn in Hong Kong in June—according to reports, he even stayed at the Russian consulate for two days before flying to Moscow—has put a new perspective on his relations with the Kremlin. Over the summer, there has been much debate about whether Snowden is a courageous whistleblower or a traitor. Even if he started out closer to the former, his protection by the Russians may increasingly make him appear a defector who fled one country in order to serve another.
Snowden is an unlikely spy. As some have argued, by exposing secret and possibly illegal government security programs to a global public, he was acting against uncontrolled state power everywhere—something that might be particularly threatening to the Kremlin. Russia has a far more pervasive security apparatus than the US does, and is known for dealing aggressively with anyone who tries to criticize it. There is no word in the Russian language that accurately describes “whistle-blowing.” If one of Russia’s citizens had done what Snowden did, he or she would already be serving a life sentence in a labor camp.
But Snowden’s revelations about extensive US government eavesdropping (including on American citizens and friendly Western governments) were also an unexpected propaganda boon for Moscow, though at the cost of increased tension in its relations with the White House. After being criticized by the Americans for years over its human rights violations, Russia was finally able to point the finger back at them for “persecuting” Snowden. (While Snowden was still in limbo in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport earlier this summer, Russian President Putin announced that his government would not grant Snowden asylum unless he agreed to stop revealing information that would “harm the interests of the US.” Clearly, that was just posturing, apparently in order to persuade President Obama to keep his commitment to meet with Putin in Moscow in September for bilateral talks, which Obama has since declined to do.)
But offering asylum to Snowden may bring more tangible benefits to Russia as well. The Russian security services have no doubt demanded access to the laptops Snowden brought with him. And they will also insist on debriefings. As the Associated Press recently pointed out,
The disclosure of Snowden’s hacking prowess inside the NSA also could dramatically increase the perceived value of his knowledge to foreign governments, which would presumably be eager to learn any counter-detection techniques that could be exploited against U.S. government networks.
Snowden has already been accused by the US Justice Department of violating two clauses of the 1917 Espionage Act by engaging in “unauthorized communication of national defense information” and “the willful communication of classified intelligence information to an unauthorized person,” along with theft of government property. (Bradley Manning was found guilty of similar espionage charges this month.) If Snowden complies with Russian requests for information about the NSA—or for that matter, about the CIA, an earlier employer—then he leaves himself vulnerable to the further and much more serious charge, under the Espionage Act, of “aiding the enemy.”
Is Snowden’s flight to Russia turning him into precisely the traitor US authorities accuse him of being? Coincidentally, it was fifty years ago in June that the world learned the shocking news about another Westerner who fled to Russia, the former high-level British intelligence officer Kim Philby. It is probably unfair to draw comparisons between Snowden and Philby, whose betrayal of his country as a double agent did unprecedented damage and cost many lives. Snowden was not an agent of a foreign state, and was apparently motivated to divulge NSA secrets to journalists by his indignation at the discovery of the NSA’s pervasive and intrusive eavesdropping program. But the longer Snowden remains in Russia, at the mercy of his Russian hosts, the greater the chances of his ending up like Philby and living the life of a man without a country.
Philby, as is well known, began operating as an agent of the Soviets during his years at Cambridge in the 1930s. After he joined MI6 (British foreign intelligence) and rose to become the head of counterintelligence against the Soviets, Philby was privy to MI6’s most sensitive information, including the identities of the “moles” the British had recruited within the Soviet secret services and the contents of intelligence communications between Britain and its allies. He also worked, from 1949 to 1952, in Washington as the British liaison officer to the CIA and the FBI, which gave him additional access to top secret American intelligence, such as the Venona project, which involved decoding intercepts of secret Soviet communications worldwide. Philby was by far the most valuable agent that the Soviets ever recruited. Though there were suspicions about him for much of the 1950s, he managed to evade conclusive discovery of his perfidy by the British until January 1963, when he was forced to flee secretly—and with Soviet help—from Beirut to Moscow.
Philby’s treatment after his defection does not bode well for what Snowden might expect in Moscow. Philby was provided with ample material comforts but, according to Rufina Philby, the Russian woman he married in 1971, he “suffered greatly from having nothing to do and feeling unwanted.” Sometime in the 1960s, he even tried to take his own life—by slitting his wrists. Philby was very much at the mercy of his handlers, who kept him isolated from Soviet society, such as it was, and bugged his flat and telephone. He was not invited to KGB foreign intelligence headquarters, at Yasenevo, until 1977, a full fourteen years after his arrival in Moscow. At some point he began giving occasional lectures at a safe house in Moscow to young KGB trainees who were heading for diplomatic posts in the West. But much of his time was spent drinking at home. The ravages of alcohol addiction, from which he had suffered well before his defection, continued to plague him until he died in 1988.
Whatever Snowden’s intelligence value to the Russians, he will not necessarily be treated any better than Philby. He is twenty-one years younger than Philby was when he arrived in Moscow. He can probably, as Philby did not, master the Russian language if he puts his mind to it. And he reportedly has been offered a job by the Russian on-line social network VKontakte, as a specialist in protecting the security of its subscribers’ communications. (A great irony, given the well-documented efforts of the Russian security services to penetrate and control social networking sites.) Snowden presumably also has access to the world beyond Russia through the Internet, while Philby lived in Moscow under an assumed name, once a week picking up outdated British newspapers from a post-office box, and had only occasional visits from his children living in Britain.
But Snowden will nonetheless feel isolated and tightly controlled by Russian authorities. His lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, who Snowden selected from two names offered him to by the Russian border police at the airport, is known to have close ties with both the Kremlin and the Federal Security Service (FSB), which controls the border police.
Kucherena’s background, and the fact that he serves as chairman of a board for public oversight of the police and security services, including the FSB, suggest that he will do everything he can to orchestrate the Snowden case in accordance with the Kremlin’s interests. Kucherena has also said publicly that, while his client can live in a hotel or rent an apartment, “the personal safety issue is a very serious one for him.” So Snowden won’t be strolling around Red Square or going out to Moscow’s bars and restaurants for entertainment.
More to the point, he is bound to suffer disillusionment with his new hosts—perhaps like what happened to Philby, who arrived with far stronger ideological commitments. In an interview while he was still in Hong Kong in June, Snowden, referring to the interception of private communications by the NSA, said, “I do not want to live in a society that does this sort of thing.” He did not foresee that he would find himself now in a place where his every move and every contact would be monitored by a government that is far more controlling of its citizens than its American counterpart.