bookofdays

Next time you want to fry your brain, fly cross-country while reading the cheapest paperback in the airport, which happens to be about planes crashing into buildings, while watching a movie about a man held for a year at Kennedy Airport by Homeland Security..

cummings re shrub?

I'll be away for a few days -- family emergency in California. But here's a note for our so-called prez as he struggles to explain the results of his incompetence. (It's a metaphor, OK? Don't chase me down as threatening the president....)

Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus

he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

notes re the evolving gulag

I can't believe it: and I can. Nearly three years after the initial order declaring those captured in Afghanistan "enemy combatants," and thus not protected by the Geneva Conventions, the crack legal teams at the State and Justice Departments have written a similar manifesto re Iraqi prisoners, in part to justify what they'd already done, and mostly to justify the evolving gulag (All italics and bolds mine):

A government official said the opinion had been sought by the C.I.A. to establish the legality of its secret transfers of non-Iraqi prisoners, beginning in April 2003, for interrogation outside Iraq. The officials made clear that they were now describing the decision in order to publicly defend the legality of the C.I.A.'s newly disclosed actions.
The contents of the March 2004 draft memo were first reported on Sunday by The Washington Post, which said the C.I.A. had secretly transported as many as a dozen detainees out of Iraq for interrogation purposes in the past six months. On Monday, government officials said the March 2004 document had not been incorporated into the new legal opinion. They also said all of the prisoners the C.I.A. had transferred out of Iraq had been moved between April 2003 and March 2004, with none transferred in the past six months.
But the government officials said the new ruling could open the way for additional transfers on a broader scale, because the status of prisoners being held in Iraq is reviewed on a case-by-case basis. Under the administration opinion, the non-Iraqis who could be deemed exempt from Geneva Conventions would include suspected members of Al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations as well as other non-Iraqis believed to have traveled to the country after the invasion of March 2003 for the purpose of engaging in terrorism or joining in the insurgency.
The administration officials did not specify exactly how decisions about an individual's status under the Geneva Conventions would be made. But they said that the factors would include nationality, affiliation with terrorist organizations and activities inside Iraq, and that the decisions would be made by American government agencies who held the individuals in their custody.

_____________________

So they don't even consult lawyers for a figleaf until their actions are leaked, and then they either improvise plans to expand the practice or fold back the curtain long enough to enrage. And those "American government agencies" - do they include the CIA? Military intelligence? How long will be investigations be? Will they have any recourse? Does anyone besides those of us so obsessed really care?

Seymour Hersh doesn't think so. He sees Americans as at best indifferent, at worst applauding (viz. Abu Ghraib):

Abu Ghraib is a symptom, a terrible symptom of a system that went bad from the beginning. From the first days of the war, the attitude was 'We can do anything we want.' When John Walker Lindh – that young boy who was captured with al Qaeda, that lost kid from California – was first captured, the mistreatment was astonishing. He was stripped, thrown around. There was a bullet they didn't take out for days. The soldiers spit on him. There were people at the time who thought it was just madness what we were doing and that it would stop soon. But the American public liked it.
So in a funny way, we got what we wanted. We wanted payback, we wanted revenge. And we saw everybody in al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Muslim world as our enemy.

Hersh is unsentimental about the attitudes of the soldiers, while pointing to command directives (including the one being developed from the memo above, which we might call the "Son of Gonzales") as the reality check that can only be provided by a leader who understands his/her role:

Look, America is a very racist country and war brings out the worst in it. I have said – several times, publicly – that the one thing I've always liked about Bill Clinton is that he was the first American president since World War II to bomb white people.
There's a lot of racism. And when you fight a war, you dehumanize the other side – that's inevitable. And that's why you need leadership from the president. That's why you need clear guidelines to be established.

As I write this, Hersh is doubtless talking to some enterprising young reporter who wants his comment on the new official opinion -- I have a hard time calling it a "legal opinion," given that it's written to obliterate laws I hold dear. I wonder, if the election goes in a direction I pray for nightly, if a Kerry administration will be able to perform the kind of surgery needed to regenerate the still-evolvintg, now stricken, structuire of international human rights law.

not so accidental prophet

OK, even if you refuse to *listen* to a rap song for its anthemic qualities, this video should hook you. Its animation echoes so many of the images I've riffed on briefly here -- the darker moments of Full Metal Alchemist, or even Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers (not to mention his MAUS, now that I think of it). On its own terms it stuns.

As a political document it has enormous potential ( which is why an Internet campaign to swamp MTV's TRL is under way). But I'm more struck by it as political art, Picasso crossed with Goya.

And there's the connection with James Joyce I was looking for. (Explanation another day.though next I need to blog from the gulag.)

military injustice, NY Times style

Only about a third of Tim Golden's two part series on the Bush Administration's end-run around due process at Guantanamo
(part one and part two) was news to me. And most of it has been in the public record for many months; I kept wishing that sharp reporters like Tim Golden, who writes extremely well and pulls multiple strands together quite effectively, had been put on the beat long ago, instead of Pentagon reporters who nodded politely when told this was part of the always-capitalized War on Terror.

Golden limns effectively how the initial creation of Guantanamo, as well as the guidelines for the military tribunals,was constructed by political whack jobs with only the vaguest idea international law exists (including, of course, those who style Geneva Conventions "quaint").

________________________
Flanigan was at the center of the administration's legal counteroffensive. A personable, soft-spoken father of 14 children, his easy manner sometimes belied the force of his beliefs. He had arrived at the White House after distinguishing himself as an agile legal thinker and a Republican stalwart: During the Clinton scandals, he defended the independent counsel, Kenneth W. Starr, saying he had conducted his investigation "in a moderate and appropriate fashion." In 2000, he played an important role on the Bush campaign's legal team in the Florida recount....

Many of the Pentagon's experts on military justice, uniformed lawyers who had spent their careers working on such issues, were mostly kept in the dark. "I can't tell you how compartmented things were," said retired Rear Adm. Donald J. Guter, who was then the Navy's senior military lawyer, or judge advocate general. "This was a closed administration." A group of experienced Army lawyers had been meeting with Mr. Haynes repeatedly on the process, but began to suspect that what they said did not resonate outside the Pentagon, several of them said.

---------------

So just as they staffed Iraq's Green Zone with 20something applicants to the Heritage Foundation and allow only yes-men into the White House inner circles, the administration gave the job of drafting new legal strategies to political buddies and what they called "forward-thinking' lawyers less than enamored of legal approaches to war crimes.

Part two describes how legal pressure from Europe, Congress, and a core of relentless military defense counsel (on my roster of heroes, of course) has helped put some reins, if not brakes, on the Pentagon's capacity to detain and deport with no oversight. What he leaves out of all this is, of course, huge: the charges of torture at Guantanamo, the gag order on civilian defense counsel at Gitmo; the current use of "extraordinary rendition" and overseas interrogation centers; and the way these successive practices make the U.S. far more vulnerable to prosecution by the International Criminal Court than when the court was first convened. (The Rome Statute, the legal basis of the ICC, specifically exempts from prosecution citizens of nations whose laws abide by international standards of due process and human rights, and who prosecute offenders appropriately.)

Maybe there are even more to come: we can hope so. We can also hope Keller keeps him on the case as these matters proceed. And please don't say "military law" in your headlinewhen you mean "the international laws of war:" I can't be the only person who wondered if the Uniform Code of Military Justice had been rewritten in one night.

ok, here are the words

though I still think you should listen: it really is an anthem. The lines that keep repeating in my head: "The stars and stripes, they've been swiped, washed out and wiped/And replaced with his own face."

Meantime, Juan Cole also has received some interesting mail on the subject.

Mosh

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America
And to the Republic for which it stands
One nation under God
Indivisible...
It feels so good to be back..

I scrutinize every word, memorize every line
I spit it once, refuel and re-energize and rewind
I give sight to the blind, my insight through the mind
I exercise my right to express when I feel it's time
It's just all in your mind, what you interpret it as
I say to fight, you take it as I'mma whip someone's ass
If you don't understand, don't even bother to ask
A father who has grown up with a fatherless past
Who has blown up now to rap phenomenon that has
Or at least shows no difficulty multi-task
And in juggling both perhaps mastered his craft
Slash entrepreneur who has held onto few more rap acts
Who's had a few obstacles thrown his way through the last half
Of his career typical manure moving past that
Mr. kisses ass crack, he's a class act
Rubber band man, yea he just snaps back

[Chorus:]
Come along follow me as I lead through the darkness
As I provide just enough spark that we need to proceed
Carry on, give me hope, give me strength
Come with me and I won't steer you wrong
Put your faith and your trust as I guide us through the fog
To the light at the end of the tunnel
We gonna fight, we gonna charge, we gonna stomp, we gonna march
Through the swamp, we gonna mosh through the marsh
Take us right through the doors (c'mon)

All the people up top on the side and the middle
Come together lets all bomb and swamp just a little
Just let it gradually build from the front to the back
All you can see is a sea of people some white and some black
Don't matter what color, all that matters we gathered together
To celebrate for the same cause don't matter the weather
If it rains let it rain, yea the wetter the better
They ain't gonna stop us they can't, we stronger now more than ever
They tell us no we say yea, they tell us stop we say go
Rebel with a rebel yell, raise hell we gonna let em know
Stomp, push, shove, mush, Fuck Bush, until they bring our troops home (c'mon)

[Chorus]

Imagine it pouring, it's raining down on us
Mosh pits outside the oval office
Someone's tryina tell us something,
Maybe this is god just sayin' we're responsible
For this monster, this coward,
That we have empowered
This is Bin Laden, look at his head noddin'
How could we allow something like this without pumping our fists
Now this is our final hour
Let me be the voice in your strength and your choice
Let me simplify the rhyme just to amplify the noise
Try to amplify the times it, and multiply by six...
Teen million people, Are equal at this high pitch
Maybe we can reach alqaeda through my speech
Let the president answer a higher anarchy
Strap him with an Ak-47, let him go, fight his own war
Let him impress daddy that way
No more blood for oil, we got our own battles to fight on our own soil
No more psychological warfare, to trick us to thinking that we ain't loyal
If we don't serve our own country, we're patronizing a hero
Look in his eyes its all lies
The stars and stripes, they've been swiped, washed out and wiped
And replaced with his own face, Mosh now or die
If I get sniped tonight you know why,
Cause I told you to fight.

[Chorus]

And as we proceed,
To Mosh through this desert storm,
In these closing statements, if they should argue
Let us beg to differ
As we set aside our differences
And assemble our own army
To disarm this Weapon of Mass Destruction
That we call our President, for the present
And Mosh for the future of our next generation
To speak and be heard
Mr. President, Mr. Senator
Do you guy's hear us...hear us...[laughing] (Hailie)

I'd say this is the last you'll hear from me about Mathers, but I'd likely be lying.

an explanation and an anthem

First, the explanation:

When I first heard Eminem in 2000, I was completely taken in by his Slim Shady persona, though I wasnt yet attending to rap as poetry; I noticed that the beats and the rhymes were amazing, as I jogged to hip-hop radio. By the time he became a public controversy in 2001, bewailed by many people I usually trust, like Ellie Smeal of Feminist Majority, I was deep in my initial study of John Berryman's Dream Songs, an autobiographical cycle featuring two personas, the Berryman cipher Henry and a crafty doppelganger whose diction is part-borrowed from minstrel shows. ("There ought to be a law against Henry. /They is, Mr. Bones, they is.") I therefore suspected immediately that neither "Shady's" misogyny nor his homophobia should be taken at quite such an immediate face value, or as Mathers' core views. In my desultory way, exploring the Berryman connection, I've been more and more impressed with Mathers' craft -- and had begun to suspect that his politics may be worth attending to. (Or I wouldn't have put up the other blog.)

But I just listened to "Mosh" and you should too, even if you don't like rap. It's an anthem that builds and builds, and whose lyrics betray an enormous political sophistication as well as deep poetry.

Listen before the link goes away. Wait out the standard rapper-boast opening and listen to the youth of America march on the Oval Office, following a leader who channels MLK and JFK, careful to "simplify the rhyme just to amplify the noise" about "the weapon of mass destruction that is our President."

marshall's coming through

I've been mildly embarrassed, in some ways, as a 42-year-old feminist writer, to be as fascinated with Marshall Mathers (Eminem) as I am. Yes, I'm writing about him in a literary way, seeing a thread from James Joyce to John Berryman to Mathers; but I also jog with "8 Mile" in my player and have the lyrics to that song memorized, enjoying that small portion of scholarship as fun. And even as I posted about "Square Dance" last month, whose lyrics encapsulate the poverty draft, I wondered how seriously to take those politics - and thought I might have blown whatever vague credibility I have in the blogosphere.

Now, Juan Cole has noticed our less-accidental prophet -- just as Mathers is coming out from behind the smokescreen of the clowny entrance of his new album,releasing his first single targeting Bush. And Cole is absolutely right about the "rebel yell." Mathers specializes in inverting cultural expectations -- can he invert the rage that so often is diverted from its most appropriate targets?

assorted campaign blips

Digby, among others is speculating that the "October Surprise: (10 days left!) will be a Bush flightsuit arrival at Bagram Air Force Base, or the "newly democratic" opium republic of Afghanistan. But I'm busy mulling over the week-old reports in El Mundo that Osama Bin Laden is actually in China, where his family (according to some) has lived for many years and where he sops up some of the Muslim fundamentalist energy otherwise directed at Beijing. This may all be high-level conspiracy theory nonsense, but I'm not at all sure.

Meanwhile, I'm pissed at John Edwards for the first time for his Chris Reeve comments:

______
Edwards invoked the actor at a campaign event when he said, "If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve will get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."
___________________________
No researcher would make such a bald-faced claim. Did he mean 2010? I voted for Edwards in the primary and have in general seen the litigator in him as a *good* thing, but I wish Medium John (as Atrios calls him, would apologize.

putin, iran, and...mao?

It *is* rather breathtaking, how some of W's most frequent endorsers have been world leaders more frankly undemocratic than he: first, the autocrat busy re-"sovietizing" Russia yesterday, and today, spoke #2 of the "axis of evil." Both made me more set to make sure people saw Juan Cole's brilliant essay on one of the most frightening sections of the Susskind article. He compares this White House to China in 1958:

"Mao had introduced the Great Leap Forward with the phrase "it is possible to accomplish any task whatsoever. By the end of 1958, it seemed as if his claim was true . . . However, in 1959, things started to go wrong. Political decisions/beliefs took precedence over commonsense and communes faced the task of doing things which they were incapable of achieving. Party officials would order the impossible and commune leaders, who knew what their commune was capable of doing or not, could be charged with being a "bourgeois reactionary" if he complained. Such a charge would lead to prison.

Quickly produced farm machinery produced in factories fell to pieces when used. Many thousands of workers were injured after working long hours and falling asleep at their jobs. Steel produced by the backyard furnaces was frequently too weak to be of any use and could not be used in construction – it’s original purpose. Buildings constructed by this substandard steel did not last long."

Iraqis that were supposed to throw flowers instead formed an insurgency. Reservists are coming home legless to inferior healthcare. Children born into poverty stay there.A nation constructed by such substandard promises is in serious danger.

If only we now had a Honey, out of Doonesbury. who was Mao's translator at his most delusional and turned his worst commands harmless by ignoring or mistranslating them.