Orbis Non Sufficit (The World is Not Enough)

In retrospect, I wish I hadn't used the title "Arm Yourself Because No One Else Here Will Save You" for an entry over the summer. That line is from the opening song to Casino Royale, referring to - you guessed it - the dangers in espionage. I used it as a metaphor for being knowledgable about lifestyle decisions and ethics.

So here's another James Bond title, and another question of ethics.

Tonight there was a lecture by a retired member of the CIA, Jim Olson. He's written a book called Fair Play on the ethics of espionage and the lengths the CIA will go to to provide for national security. He grew up in a small town in Iowa and had dreams of finishing law school, finding a nice Iowa girl, settling down, and having a family. But in his last year of law school, he was contacted and recruited by the CIA. He went through years of training - physical training, psychological tests, crash courses in language immersion, skill building. Everything we've ever dreamt or seen in the movies from jumping out of airplanes to using innocent looking gadgets as deadly weapons. Over the next 31 years, Jim would meet his wife Meredith, also a CIA officer, and have three children - all while on assignment overseas. They moved a lot, and took a different job every time they got a new assignment, and therefore a new cover. Jim noted how difficult life would have been if Meredith hadn't also been involved with the CIA and understood the sacrifices.

For the length of time that they served in the CIA, neither Jim nor Meredith told any of their friends or family members about their true work. Jim took various covers as everything from a banker to a fertilizer salesman - Meredith's father just thought he couldn't hold down a steady job. It wasn't until the Olsons were undercover in Vienna, Austria and had a terrorist issue a death threat against their family that Jim and Meredith were forced to tell their oldest son about the nature of their work, in hopes that he would help look out for his younger siblings. They finished their assignment in Vienna safely.

But it wasn't his exciting life, nor the extent of his clandestine career that Jim came to lecture about. He posed the question: how ethically correct are the decisions that the United States Government makes in terms of acquiring intelligence and protecting the country? He set up several real situations and had us vote "yay" or "nay" on whether or not the decision was morally correct. All of the situations presented really happened.

First: It is against CIA protocol to treat people inhumanely or to practice espionage within US borders. So, somewhere overseas, the CIA enlists the help of other foreign allies to kidnap the head of a dangerous terrorist group, place him in a windowless room of an abandoned building, and beat him until he reveals the identities of his group members. The CIA did not participate in harming the terrorist, but they organized and funded the kidnapping. Right or wrong?

Answer: We, as audience members voted by a show of hands. Roughly 80% of us voted no, this was not morally correct, while 20% voted yes. But what did the US think? Well, let's just say the terrorist revealed the other members who were subsequently arrested and executed. When Jim asked if anyone would like to comment on their decision, people expressed frustration. A man lamented that he felt uncomfortable voting without knowing exactly how dangerous and volatile these terrorists were. Another older man was enraged that the US would even have been involved in something as reprehensible as torture. This guy was pissed. But he couldn't deny the fact that the US, indeed, was involved.

Next: Another well known terrorist group leader is known to be in a certain place. It is not possible to kidnap him, or arrrest him. With the extent of his dangerous work in mind, is it okay to employ the use of explosives or other technology and assassinate him?
This is the one that kills me. I voted no, it's not okay to assassinate people. I was among the 25% of the auditorium that thought so.

Some situations dealt with faith, Notre Dame being what it is. Is it ethical to take a cover as a missionary, or a member of the clergy? You would still be spreading God's Word and doing good works - you just wouldn't really be a missionary. And you would be using the relationships that you form to gain information and access to terrorist religious sects. I was sitting next to a priest who lived on campus. He was very friendly, obviously glad to meet someone to talk to. He had spent time working overseas in Africa - as a legitimate clergy member. I watched him out of the corner of my eye as we voted - me for using religion as a cover, and him against. The rest of the auditorium was split 50/50.

There were also situations of a different sort: like, there's a female CIA officer. She's joined a local tennis club in hopes of recruiting future CIA members. However, a government official from another country frequents the club as well. They form a friendship, playing sets and having lunch. The female officer notices that he might want more than friendship - and is prepared to seduce him in order to recruit him to the US. Ethical?

Then, there was the case of a terrorist who was secretly feeding information to the CIA. He demands that the US provide him with a prostitute, or he'll stop helping. Jimmy Carter was president at the time. He said okay.
Another was about sex and blackmail: There's a member of an Iranian sect who came to the US and frequented homosexual bars and engaged in homosexual activity. The FBI picks up on this and alerts the CIA to his presence. The strict Muslim policy of the terrorist group would be enraged if they found out the man was homosexual - he would be fired, to say the least. Should the CIA contact the man and threaten to tell his superiors about his sexuality unless he provides them with information?

You know, there was an article in TIME magazine last summer, back when my dad had that subscription. I remember topics of waterboarding. All kinds of ethical, controversial fun. Then there was one, which I have dug up for the sake of sharing the tenet of kindness. There was an Al-Qaeda operative that was captured and held in a Yemini prison for about a year. His name was Abu Jandal, and he was Osama bin Laden's chief bodyguard. The FBI came in to question him, unsuccessfully. He was uncooperative and difficult. And he didn't eat any of the cookies that were served at the meeting. One of the FBI officers learned that Jandal was diabetic, and couldn't eat sugar. So the next meeting, the officer brought him sugar-free cookies. The big bad bodyguard was touched. He softened. And started talking.

No form of physical or psychological torture was required.

Arm Yourself, Because No One Else Here Will Save You

One of my longest-running obsessions is lifestyle experiments - where you adopt a lifestyle completely different from your own in order to learn about how other people live. I think my interest started with Morgan Spurlock when he did Super Size Me and ate nothing but McDonald's for a month to see what would happen (answer: bad things). And then Spurlock launched the series 30 Days, where he did various things like give everything up and live on minimum wage, incarcerate himself in jail, or otherwise take another person and put them in a situation opposite to how they live their own lives (i.e., a pro-choice activist lives with a pro-life family; a homophobic lives in a gay community, etc.).

Anyway, 30 Days was cancelled about two years ago, and my interest gradually died down (I actually never noticed that it ran a third season before it was cancelled). But two weeks ago, I got my wisdom teeth out and - in a Lortab-induced sloth like state - exhausted the On Demand function on my cable box and watched everything that caught my eye, namely other lifestyle experiment shows. Mostly BBC, Planet Green, and Discovery Health, to name a few channels - I could go on for pages about the different shows, but I'll spare you that. Anyway, the BBC is rather innovative and audacious with their experiments - they'll go all out on ridiculous things, like doing various crash diets in hopes of achieving a size 0, or smoking lots of marijuana to see what it does to you (see Super High Me).

But there were also more realistic ones that were more inclined to seeking a moral from the experience. Blood, Sweat, and Takeaways (and Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts) took six people and made them work in sweatshops (slaughtering animals and producing textiles, respectively), also requiring that they live under the same conditions as the people who spend their lives there. They have to do dirty, back-breaking, degrading work for very little pay and still have to find a way to make enough to provide for their families. I've always heard the phrase "cheap labor", but I never really thought about how everything works - basically, fast food and chain-store clothes are sold so cheap because the distributors are saving a heck of a lot of money on labor. While I don't see how that's ethical in any way, I'm sure many people will tell me things like "life isn't fair", or "free market capitalism". To each their own opinion.

Speaking of ethics; here's a touchier subject that's been on my mind today: how much of your body is marketable? Legally, and ethically. For example, you can go to a blood center and donate blood plasma for about $35 or so twice a week, which is the least taboo of everything I've researched. And I've known that guys could go to a sperm bank and sometimes receive a monetary compensation for their donation - something significantly easier, doesn't even involve needles, and will get you about $200, maybe. Unfortunately, women don't have the luxury of that ease. But something that's recently become popular is women selling their eggs to infertile couples. This is substantially more difficult than either of the other procedures - interested parties must pass rigorous physical as well as psychological exams in order to be deemed fit. About 10% of women will pass on to the next step. If a woman is approved and chosen by an interested couple, she must then go on a hormone regime, which involves taking a daily hormone shot in the lower stomach to stimulate the ovaries (normally, one egg is released every month, but with hormones, you'll get maybe 10-25). Then, she'll go in for an outpatient procedure to have the eggs extracted by a needle and a suction tube. When she recovers, she'll be rewarded with anywhere from $3,000 to $15,000, depending on a variety of factors.

Sounds slightly terrifying, right? And it has all kinds of downsides, from minor inconveniences to health risks - some of which haven't even been fully investigated - and everything in between. But what reporters are postulating is that in the declining economy, people will do anything to get themselves out of debt. And that is why young, healthy female college students who are suffering from student loans and credit card debt are the prime target.

But where do you draw the line between taboo and just plain wrong? Generally, things like hair, plasma and sperm are socially acceptable to be traded for money, mostly because your body can make more. However, women only have as many eggs as they're born with, yet paid egg donation is completely legal. And while you're born with two kidneys, you really only need one - yet you can't be monetarily compensated for donating the other. And livers will grow back if you donate a part of it, but that's only accepted as a donation as well (disregarding that most donations are between family members who wouldn't dream of charging one another a penny).

I'm not even going to try to address black market organ rings, or anything like that, simply because it's late, and trying to figure that stuff out makes me sad.

A last few things:
1) I finished A Clockwork Orange. Notes to come.
2) I have a reading plan for all the time I have to wait on my dad at the University in between classes: Finished ACO, check. Now to finish The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which I abandoned two months ago for happier books. Then The Picture of Dorian Gray.