conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about United, States, Yale with the genre: Politics & Social Sciences, Politics & Government?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'The Age Of Terror'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first three paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Age Of Terror
  The first weeks of the crisis have seen a rash of reaction. First, in addition to the antiterrorism bill that rushed through Congress, the president created virtually overnight an Office of Homeland Security. It has been given sweeping but vague powers to coordinate domestic efforts against terrorism, and to "identify priorities and coordinate efforts for collection and analysis of information within the United States regarding... activities of terrorists or terrorist groups within the United States." Second, for the source of the CIA's woes and an implicit cause of the September 11 debacle, several members of Congress have pointed fingers at the Church Committee, the Senate Select Committee, chaired in the late 1970s by the late Senator Frank Church of Idaho, to study government operations with respect to intelligence activities. Third, at the urging of the White House, the television networks agreed not to air unedited videotapes of speeches by bin Laden for fear that they might contain coded messages to his cohorts, and several commentators and comedians have been temporarily banished from the airwaves for comments deemed to be politically incorrect and downright unpatriotic.
  Standing alone, none of these reactions seems earthshaking, but taken together, they paint a picture oddly oblivious to recent history. Although the Office of Homeland Security may fill an important bureaucratic gap, its creation also marks an important blurring of a more than fifty-year division of labor between federal domestic law enforcement agencies and international intelligence agencies. In the National Security Act of 1947, Congress expressly denied the CIA police, subpoena, law enforcement and internal security functions to ensure that it would act as a national security agency, not as a domestic law enforcement unit. Yet during the Vietnam War, the CIA blurred that line by conducting illegal secret domestic break-ins, mail intercepts, wiretaps, and domestic surveillance of antiwar activists and domestic protesters. Indeed, we sometimes forget that the infamous Watergate break-in was itself executed by the "plumbers," a White House unit funded with private campaign contributions, partially staffed by former CIA agents, supported by the CIA, and formed for the express purpose of "plugging leaks" by government officials suspected of having exposed the secret bombing of Cambodia. At this writing, how accountable the new OHS will be to Congress or the public remains unclear, given that it is headed by a presidential appointee with cabinet-level status who took office without ever being subjected to congressional confirmation.
  Similarly, those who blame the Church Committee for CIA failings forget how that and similar inquiries came about. Following President Nixon's resignation in 1974, President Ford declared that he would not tolerate illegal activities by the intelligence agencies, and formed the Rockefeller Commission to investigate intelligence abuse, followed by the creation of the Church and other committees to oversee government intelligence operations. In the late 1970s, those committees offered a comprehensive 263-page charter for reform of the intelligence community. But after extensive debate, legislative opponents trimmed that bill down into the two-page Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, which ended up making only a few modest revisions in the law.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Age Of Terror
  The first weeks of the crisis have seen a rash of reaction. First, in addition to the antiterrorism bill that rushed through Congress, the president created virtually overnight an Office of Homeland Security. It has been given sweeping but vague powers to coordinate domestic efforts against terrorism, and to "identify priorities and coordinate efforts for collection and analysis of information within the United States regarding... activities of terrorists or terrorist groups within the United States." Second, for the source of the CIA's woes and an implicit cause of the September 11 debacle, several members of Congress have pointed fingers at the Church Committee, the Senate Select Committee, chaired in the late 1970s by the late Senator Frank Church of Idaho, to study government operations with respect to intelligence activities. Third, at the urging of the White House, the television networks agreed not to air unedited videotapes of speeches by bin Laden for fear that they might contain coded messages to his cohorts, and several commentators and comedians have been temporarily banished from the airwaves for comments deemed to be politically incorrect and downright unpatriotic.
  Standing alone, none of these reactions seems earthshaking, but taken together, they paint a picture oddly oblivious to recent history. Although the Office of Homeland Security may fill an important bureaucratic gap, its creation also marks an important blurring of a more than fifty-year division of labor between federal domestic law enforcement agencies and international intelligence agencies. In the National Security Act of 1947, Congress expressly denied the CIA police, subpoena, law enforcement and internal security functions to ensure that it would act as a national security agency, not as a domestic law enforcement unit. Yet during the Vietnam War, the CIA blurred that line by conducting illegal secret domestic break-ins, mail intercepts, wiretaps, and domestic surveillance of antiwar activists and domestic protesters. Indeed, we sometimes forget that the infamous Watergate break-in was itself executed by the "plumbers," a White House unit funded with private campaign contributions, partially staffed by former CIA agents, supported by the CIA, and formed for the express purpose of "plugging leaks" by government officials suspected of having exposed the secret bombing of Cambodia. At this writing, how accountable the new OHS will be to Congress or the public remains unclear, given that it is headed by a presidential appointee with cabinet-level status who took office without ever being subjected to congressional confirmation.
  Similarly, those who blame the Church Committee for CIA failings forget how that and similar inquiries came about. Following President Nixon's resignation in 1974, President Ford declared that he would not tolerate illegal activities by the intelligence agencies, and formed the Rockefeller Commission to investigate intelligence abuse, followed by the creation of the Church and other committees to oversee government intelligence operations. In the late 1970s, those committees offered a comprehensive 263-page charter for reform of the intelligence community.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: two more paragraphs. Start with the sentence 'Of all the permutations and combinations, the India- Pakistan matchup is the most worrisome, since those two countries have declared and demonstrated their nuclear capability and have already fought four wars, including a severe and prolonged skirmish in 1999'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Of all the permutations and combinations, the India- Pakistan matchup is the most worrisome, since those two countries have declared and demonstrated their nuclear capability and have already fought four wars, including a severe and prolonged skirmish in 1999. Mutual deterrence, escalation control, crisis management and other concepts developed between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the cold war simply aren't part of the vocabulary, mindset or behavior patterns in the Middle East and South Asia. It is all too easy to imagine a crisis that might begin with an incident of terrorism—say, another massacre in Kashmir of the kind that has been common in recent years, followed by an Indian retaliation of some kind—that spins out of control.
  Against that backdrop, India and Pakistan should have an incentive to get serious about regulating their arms race. The U.S. is uniquely positioned to help them do so.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last four paragraphs. End with the sentence ' Sound arguments can certainly be made that this is not really our responsibility, but it may be more constructive to recognize that finding ways to share our medical technology is an integral part of national defense in this new era.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: International terrorism and the need for smart, responsive strategies are likely to be with us for a long time. Our future security will require a constant supply of people trained in math, science, engineering, and serious computer science. Yet at present, diminishing numbers of young Americans enter these fields. Endless numbers of reports and a lot of money for K-12 education have tried and failed to address this situation. In recent years, of doctoral degrees awarded by U.S. institutions, about a third in science and half in engineering went to foreigners. Many of those students will remain in the U.S. and contribute to our needs. We welcome them, but also realize that the expertise of those from poor countries could, if they returned home, help ameliorate the conditions that support terrorism.
  Building the scientific research infrastructure in developing countries can lead directly to improved economies, health care, and general living conditions. The U.S. scientific community has important roles to play in this endeavor. One path is through its typical and extensive informal networks. Another is through formal mechanisms such as the international network of National Academies of Science initiated by the president of the U.S. Academy. A third, the establishment of world-class laboratories in developing countries, has been discouraging in the past because the laboratories are frequently unsustainable when the international sponsoring organization leaves. It is difficult to convince the host countries that investment in a scientific and engineering infrastructure, including trained scientists and engineers, should have priority because of its long-term effect on improving daily life. New approaches are needed.
  It will be especially challenging to enhance scientific interactions within Muslim countries, especially those in which government and religion are either unified or intertwined and whose hostility to the U.S. is, at least partly, the consequence of distrust of our technological advances. Professor Seyyid Hossein Nasr, a professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University, believes "that the cultural crisis created by the successful introduction of Western science and technology, successful enough to bring about rapid cultural patterns of change, is going to continue to pose major problems for the Islamic world." Perhaps experience with similar conflicts at home between scientists and people of fundamentalist faiths can help direct us toward constructive conversations with scientists in Islamic nations.
  Millions of people in poor nations watch their children die of diseases we have not seen in generations. They themselves are likely to suffer without hope of medical care from malaria, AIDS, tuberculosis, cholera, and other diseases. (Estimates of annual deaths from malaria worldwide were recently raised from 1 million to 2.7 million.) To such people, the introduction of dangerous biological and chemical agents into our relatively clean environments may not seem as horrible as it does to us. Also, the willingness of terrorists to die for a cause we find unfathomable may be influenced by the fact that life spans in their societies are in any case short. We need to see the world as our enemies do if we are to defend ourselves successfully. We have known for a long time of the tremendous disparity between the health of our populations and of those in developing countries. We have avoided doing much about this because our policies have been driven by free-market concepts and a miserly concept of our national wealth. Now we are forced to spend tens of billions of dollars of that wealth recuperating from and preparing for terrorist acts. Threatened people might now be less aggrieved if we had used those same tens of billions to share with them the things that give us such healthy lives, just as we shared with a devastated Europe at the end of World War II through the Marshall Plan. Sound arguments can certainly be made that this is not really our responsibility, but it may be more constructive to recognize that finding ways to share our medical technology is an integral part of national defense in this new era.