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First of all, the piece misleadingly states that journalists are manipulated by aid workers. Journalists come to get what the public is demanding, which is the traditional media fare of emergencies, tragic stories and the occasional triumph. It’s a regrettable situation, but one in which journalists have at least as much agency and responsibility as aid workers.

Secondly, Gourevitch airbrushes the donors out of this picture. Aid agencies certainly bear responsibility in going after badly-directed aid money, but we’re unlikely to get a good understanding of the situation without including in the discussion the people and institutions who put out the grants in the first place.

Gourevitch blames the NGOs for being self-policing. That’s like blaming unruly children for not having received enough discipline. Shouldn’t he also talk about the people who should be policing the aid industry, including the press and donors?

More generally, Gourevitch fills his article with unsubstantiated claims that he puts out as indisputable fact. His sweeping one-sentence dismissal of Peace Corps is a disservice to any attempt, on the part of the reader, to understand that complex institution. In his last anecdote, he suggests that a boy might not have his throat slit were it not for the presence of aid workers. That’s at best a speculative claim, well below the standard the New Yorker is known far. In any case, this line of thinking indicts the press at least as much as it indicts the aid workers. Sadly, there are plenty of examples of atrocities, in Congo and elsewhere, that happen without any aid presence.

There is plenty of legitimate grounds for criticism of NGOs and emergency work. But for that criticism to be insightful and lead to positive change, it needs to come with an understanding of the system as a whole, and curiosity about why the different actors act the way they do. Both are in short supply in this article. The irony is that Gourevitch’s article is much like humanitarianism at its worse: a smug, self-righteous, under-informed individual, blind to his own limitations, judges others from a position of moral superiority, and does more harm than good in the process.

This Ben Franklin quote is more relevant today than ever — especially as America braces itself for the onslaught of high resolution, full-body airport scanners resulting from the Christmas Day “underpants” bomber.

Never mind that it has been reported that the scanners would never have picked up the underwear explosives to begin with, and that routine security measures concerning this event were abjectly ignored; we will nevertheless be subject to humiliating, high-resolution images of our naked genitalia viewed by non-health care hourly wage earners in the name of “security.”

In the UK, these scanned images of children actually violate current child pornography laws. There is also evidence to suspect that all of the body images will be mined like fingerprints for national and global databases.

The body scanners, conveniently ordered for our airports by Homeland Security before the Christmas bomber event, are manufactured by Rapiscan, who coincidentally is represented by Michael Chertoff, former Homeland Security chief who stands to make millions (if not billions) off of this deal. A monumental conflict of interest, or just Chertoff’s dumb luck?

Enforcement of airport full-body scanning constitutes a direct assault against the integrity of the mind and body of the American citizen. As an intended or unintended consequence of Homeland Security, the loss of liberty, demoralization and control of the people should be recognized as the real culprit that should strike terror into the hearts of men. Once our freedoms are lost, they will more than likely not be returned.

In the words of Patrick Henry, “Fear is the passion of slaves.”

We cannot let fear cripple us into total submission.

This measure needs to be resisted.