bookofdays

the legacy of samson

The news this morning of the bombing at Sharm-el-Shaikh  was bracing, if unsurprising in some ways. Still, that resort did feel a refuge during my too-brief time in that part of the world ( I'll post photos if I can later). Fot good solid analysis and a roundup of the commentary, the best come as usual from Billmon.

And today, Monday, Dan of the Christian Science Monitor writes of a "jihadi subculture":

The culture of Islamist suicide bombers is becoming more commonplace, as is the defining of civilians as "enemies."

Even in the wave of Islamist terror attacks that destabilized Egypt for much of the 1990s, suicide bombers weren't used. Now the country has seen two major attacks of this kind in eight months, with the latest death toll now at least 88.

What concerns counterterrorism experts is that tactics that once prompted fierce ideological debates within radical circles -- suicide and attacks on civilians are both classically defined in Islam as sins -- are now more likely to be embraced by young men. A decade or two ago, Muslim males might have been willing to take up a rifle and risk death fighting against the Soviets in the mountains of Afghanistan, but many would have balked at making the ultimate sacrifice or at blowing up civilians in a Moscow train station.

Still, I think it's still not useless to post this excerpt of  my crazy novel. If you ever needed to convince someone that that Islam has been hijacked as firmly as Christianity by its fundamentalists, this might give you a little ammunition.

I still never conceived that a project I've been nurturing for so long would be so fscking timely.

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"While we are bidden to place all our faith and trust in God, the rabbis nevertheless deduce from the language of the Torah itself that we should be active in improving and preserving the health of the body . . .Just as we are prohibited from taking the life of another, we are also prohibited by the Torah from taking our own life, which is God-given, and anyone who commits suicide is deemed a murderer and is not to be buried in a Jewish cemetery."
— Rabbi Eliahu Shalom Ezran,  spiritual leader of Magain David Sephardim Congregation, San Francisco

About suicide, the Holy Qur’an states clearly: ‘Do not kill yourselves, for surely Allah is Compassionate to you’ (Qur’an, 4:29), ‘Do not cast yourselves into destruction by your own hands’ (Qur’an, 2:195) and ‘No soul can die except by God’s permission’ (Qur’an 3:185). An Islamic objection to any form of suicide (rational or irrational) is that the motive which prompts individuals to take their own life is contrary to the divine prerogative over human life….  In theological and philosophical reasoning, suicide has been considered for centuries an unethical act. What is clear is that suicide has remained a religious taboo in the monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

-- G. Hussein Rassool, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil

Jerusalem, of course, one of the few places frequently associated with suicide in the minds of even non-suicides: some will likely think first of headlines about the ill-named “suicide bombers.”
Like the FBI agents who zeroed in on a pair of Muslim teenage girls in New York City and deported them -- in part, for mentioning suicide in an Islamic chat room on the Internet. (They should have hired me as a consultant. Show me, I might have told them, a sixteen-year-old girl who’s not intrigued by suicide and I’ll give you five bucks.)

But I digress: neither of those girls was from anywhere near Jerusalem.

Jerusalem, the tourist brochures assure us, is sacred to three great religions. More  like three branches of a family, drunken cousins in a multi-tiered bloodthirsty dynamic that’s rather Shakespearean, for the number of bodies left on the floor.  Adherents of all three faiths have crossed swords both literally and figuratively for so many generations, some sculpting in white stone the tragedy of Temple Mount, that one can only find ironic that Judaism and Islam share with Christianity (see the Jesus option, above) similar canons 'gainst self-slaughter. They also share the same mirror-image flirtation with martyrdom – and  a not-quite-death-defying obsession with Jerusalem.

The two were paired, Jerusalem and suicide, almost from the beginning, especially in early Jewish writing – the Old Testament, the early Talmud, and those sexy and violent books excluded from the canon as apocrypha – especially the 5 books of Maccabees, some of which I’ll save for the next  guidebook (Special Edition: Masada.)

Of the five suicides in the Old Testament, the first to take place in Jerusalem is also among the most spectacular: Samson, who pulls down the walls of the First Temple, to die together with the same Philistines whose victory had led to the suicide of Saul. Judges 18:30 sings: the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life. Get that? He died so that the Philistines would die too, even if his temple would be destroyed with him, centuries before Islam was born --  millennia before its good name would be smeared with an epidemic of suicide-homicides.

the cup of despair goes on the shelf

What  is Needed After Food

And so beautiful it cracks the bones, especially Jerusalem
With the lustre of her stones, the hurt in her eyes
And our dreams for her children:  a triangle

Beauty, despair, hope...the whole mispocah
Pulling three ways at the same time
Like the people in so many families,

Fighting but joined at the hip, or call it a sandwich,
Despair the filling embraced by the bread of beauty and hope,
Like manna we at every day, sent from above,

While on earth in Jerusalem my friend's husband and son
Relax  from a sabbath meal, like well-fed beasts,
Happily slumped watching the aftermath

Of a game where the Nazareth team has just won
And vaulted from the bottom of their  league
To the top, the players have stripped off their shirts,

Hugging and dancing, circle dancing, belly dancing,
Waving at crowds in the stands to  make them cheer louder,
The coach strips his shirt from his hairy barrel chest,

Climbs a wire fence, wobbles and waves his hips.
When someone asks how he feels about his team
(A mix of Jews, Moslems, and one Nigerian,

He himself is Druze), he punches  the air
And roars, I beat them all! I beat Arafat! And Sharon!
I show them we love each other! We watch a while,

The celebration is still going on when we quit
To go back to the kitchen, where loaves of beauty and hope
Stand on the counter and the cup of despair goes on the shelf,

My friend and I, we don't ask for much, we read Amichai,
We're not messianic, we don't expect utopia, which is anyway
Another name for a smiling prison,

But love is a good idea, why on earth not,
Simple women that we are, simple mothers cleaning up
The kitchen to make one meal ready for the next.

                    -- Alicia Suskin Ostriker

When I started this blog, I said I'd post a poem on any day I couldn't write. I'd fallen away from it, which I now think is an error.   Alicia Suskin Ostriker's name may be familiar to you for her activism on peace and justice issues, but I've admired and taught her poetry for years now, and  was delighted to be able to review her new book for Pleiades. I'll post my thoughts, as I draft the review, in a bit - but for now, let this one be my offering to the morning, amid all our strife and horror.

 

i think that DoD's got a sick sense of humour

Our old friends at the Army Times report that given the stretched and bruised troop strengths we discussed yesterday,  the Pentagon has proposed that  the maximum age for new enlistments be raised to  forty-two.

Either someone's been reading Douglas Adams or listening to too much Depeche Mode-- or both.

SCOTUS seat: the godfather rewards

Speaking of  cut-rate Cosa Nostra operations (see end of previous post), the new SCOTUS nom fits breathtakingly into the pattern. Digby (as usual) is on the trail:

In case anyone is wondering if Roberts really is a partisan hack or not, Jeffrey Toobin's book "Too Close To Call" sheds some light on that subject:

The president's first two nominations to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia curcuit --- generally regarded as the stepping-stone to the Supreme Court --- went to Miguel Estrada and John G Roberts Jr., who had played important behind-the scenes roles in the Florida litigation.

"Some day, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me. But, until that day, accept this justice..."

And just when I thought I could get away with a completely civilian post, I learn this: Roberts was one of the D.C. Circuit judges denying any rights on the part of Guantanamo detainees -- even when they're citizens.  The implications may dwarf even Roe in urgency.

I'm otherwise a grading machine today, so I can't spend much time expressing my exasperation at usually-reasonable folk like Jeralyn at TalkLeft  that he seems "confirmable" and that they plan to "wait and see." Let alone the chorus of the so-called liberal media useful links from  Brian at  SCOTUSblog and here from  Jessica at Feministing). Lindsay has a much better directive for Dems and advocates alike.

Or, to import another succinct and important declaration:

                I call bullshit

...On the argument that John Roberts isn’t anti-choice cause he was “just a being a lawyer” when he said Roe should be overturned.

How about the fact that his wife is the former Executive Vice President of Feminists for Life?

And how comfortable are you with a nominee who has the support of Operation Rescue?

what WHIG hath wrought...

So why does all this Rove talk  matter so much? A few reasons why:

• A  man decides to turn himself in after 8 years AWOL from the Army, determined to get a new start and take punishment if that's warranted. Instead, he's put immediately into a unit headed for Iraq.
• A stockbroker and National Guardsman who served after  9/11. sleeping two weeksin tents downtown,  is called up for Iraq despite his documented"Ground Zero cough" and PTSD.
• A couple wonders if they should divorce so that the wife, a GI who has served in Iraq AND Afghanistan, can file a "family care plan" and be allowed to remain in the States with her children - otherwise, she fears, she's going back a third time.

These are altered composites, with some very real details, of some of the stories told around the table at the meeting I was at last night.  No links: they're not yet news stories and hopefully won't be -- if some honorable commanders, psychiatrists, chaplains and review boards do the right thing.

But the cases are living examples of the "stress on the force" described in this Chicago Tribune piece, and the flip side of the cheery happy recruiting news that's been reported this week.  The Army, at least, is "back on track" with a jump in recruits from the Midwest, thanks largely to the efforts of the enthusiastic Indiana Recruiting Battalion,  as described in today's Christian Science Monitor. And re-enlistments are up, thanks to bonus packages that sound pretty sweet when you've been eating MREs.( That report also datelined Indianapolis. CR, I'm praying you will comment here about Indiana so I don't have to.) (Update: Our old friends at the Army Times report that the maximum age for joining up may soon be forty-two. Either someone's been reading Douglas Adams or listening to too much Depeche Mode -- or both.

These cases, these canaries in the coal mine of this war, are also additional evidence of the crime represented by the destruction of our veterans hospital system , even before these  "contingency operations" (my snarky comment on the latter here) begin the real flood of veterans home. Home to their families, most of whom live in the red states that believed George Bush when he told them it was important. The Monitor piece lays it out clear: 40 percent of all new recruits since October  are from the South, and the Plains states make up most of the rest. (And recruiters who threaten to send wavering recruits to jail get promoted.)

We can only hope that when these families get hold of the White House Iraq Group, they march on the WH like the kids in the "Mosh" video.

As the scandal Shakespeare's Sister has so cannily named WHIG-Gate unrolls before our eyes, the more important big picture is getting the ink it deserves as well. I was as  delighted as I was saddened to see it in the Times -- not in some long, investigative piece connecting the dots (how so, when the newspaper itself is implicated) but on the editorial page, where Frank Rich cut to the core:

This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.

So put aside Mr. Wilson's February 2002 trip to Africa. The plot that matters starts a month later, in March, and its omniscient author is Dick Cheney. It was Mr. Cheney (on CNN) who planted the idea that Saddam was "actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time." The vice president went on to repeat this charge in May on "Meet the Press," in three speeches in August and on "Meet the Press" yet again in September. Along the way the frightening word "uranium" was thrown into the mix.

By September the president was bandying about the u-word too at the United Nations and elsewhere, speaking of how Saddam needed only a softball-size helping of uranium to wreak Armageddon on America. But hardly had Mr. Bush done so than, offstage, out of view of us civilian spectators, the whole premise of this propaganda campaign was being challenged by forces with more official weight than Joseph Wilson. In October, the National Intelligence Estimate, distributed to Congress as it deliberated authorizing war, included the State Department's caveat that "claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa," made public in a British dossier, were "highly dubious." A C.I.A. assessment, sent to the White House that month, determined that "the evidence is weak" and "the Africa story is overblown."

(Read the rest: it's worth it.) Rich doesn't speak explicitly of the White House Iraq Group, explicitly named in Fitzgerald's subpoena of White House papers. TalkLeft, Digby, and Pacific Views have all drawn attention to work ot Lt. Colonel Gardiner , about the group that dreamed the sales job Rich describes above--  in a campaign-war-room atmosphere where no slur was too low if it got the job done,  no lie too outrageous if it could be sold.

crip journo manifesto 2: toxic baby blood

I was going to do  a sort of cheerful quickie action alert: then something crossed my transom that turned it into a big warning. I can't do a better lead than Maggie Fox of Reuters:

WASHINGTON — Unborn U.S. babies are soaking in a stew of chemicals, including mercury, gasoline byproducts and pesticides, according to a report to be released Thursday.

Although the effects on the babies are not clear, the survey prompted several members of Congress to press for legislation that would strengthen controls on chemicals in the environment.

The effects on the babies is not clear? A few paragraphs later,she outlines the mud thrown in our faces instead:

"Of the 287 chemicals we detected in umbilical cord blood, we know that 180 cause cancer in humans or animals, 217 are toxic to the brain and nervous system, and 208 cause birth defects or abnormal development in animal tests," the report said.

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Among the chemicals found in the cord blood were methylmercury, produced by coal-fired power plants and certain industrial processes. People can breathe it in or eat it in seafood and it causes brain and nerve damage.

Also found were polyaromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, which are produced by burning gasoline and garbage and which may cause cancer; flame-retardant chemicals called polybrominated dibenzodioxins and furans; and pesticides including DDT and chlordane.

The same group analyzed the breast milk of mothers across the United States in 2003 and found varying levels of chemicals, including flame retardants known as PBDEs. This latest analysis also found PBDEs in cord blood.

I remember seeing Fooling with Nature, Frontline's documentary about "endocrine disruption" that was screened at  an environmental justice conference in 1993, in San Jose. Long and somewhar difficult for non-scientists to follow, it described a widespread pattern of mutations across species and phyla, attributable to toxic chemicals.

rummy's boys

A quick one, while I finish a longer piece to post tonight:

Better (and certainly bigger) bloggers than I have already noted General Geoffrey Miller's truth-telling session before the Senate this week, which proved satisfactory in a perverse way to those of us who'd been agonized at his level of impunity -- even as he got off without a reprimand:

WASHINGTON - Interrogators subjected a suspected terrorist to abusive and degrading treatment, forcing him to wear a bra, dance with another man and behave like a dog, military investigators reported Wednesday, saying that justified their call for disciplinary action.

They said  they recommended that Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller be reprimanded for failing to oversee his interrogation of the 9-11 suspect at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But Gen. Bantz J. Craddock, commander of U.S. Southern Command, said he overruled their recommendation and will instead refer the matter to the Army's inspector general. Craddock concluded that Miller did not violate any U.S. laws or policies, according to officials familiar with the report.

The alert may remember this spanky-new commander at USSC: a  name like Craddock, a bit more distinctive than the generic Miller or even Sanchez, certainly rang my bell.

and continues.

OK, now it's official what we've all suspected for some time. It's Karl Rove who committed treason by acting like the campaign operative he is, smearing an opponent in that opponent's softest spot. In this case, the opponent was an expert on  national security issues - and the soft spot was the cover of a CIA agent.  And rumors from across the blogosphere blast that the dude is about to be indicted.

God knows I'm less surprised than awed by the beauty of it all. It may indeed be, as Lawrence O'Donnell has it, that Rove was just stupid -- not realizing that criminal laws prevented what to him was a far less devilish smear than "McCain has a black child" or "John Kerry is a coward." After all, this one was just the truth, and something he may have even learned from his equally clueless preznit. (Full disclosure: I just heard O'Donnell on the radio, and the latter inference is borrowed from him.)

All of that has the sleepy White House press corps finally in a minor snit: I've never heard them harass young Scottie as they did today, trying to get him to admit that he'd lied to them:

QUESTION: Do you stand by your statement from the fall of 2003, when you were asked specifically about Karl and Elliot Abrams and Scooter Libby, and you said, "I've gone to each of those gentlemen, and they have told me they are not involved in this"?

QUESTION: Do you stand by that statement?

MCCLELLAN: And if you will recall, I said that, as part of helping the investigators move forward on the investigation, we're not going to get into commenting on it. That was something I stated back near that time as well.

QUESTION: Scott, this is ridiculous. The notion that you're going to stand before us, after having commented with that level of detail, and tell people watching this that somehow you've decided not to talk.

You've got a public record out there. Do you stand by your remarks from that podium or not?

and so it begins.

Wasn't going to post today, until the following headline blared at me. (If you're so inclined, read  the title of this post to  yourself using the voice-over from Ambassador Kosh from Babylon 5.)

Newspaper Withholding Two Articles After Jailing
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

The editor of The Cleveland Plain Dealer said last night that the newspaper, acting on the advice of its lawyers, was withholding publication of two major investigative articles because they were based on illegally leaked documents and could lead to penalties against the paper and the jailing of reporters.

The editor, Doug Clifton, said lawyers for The Plain Dealer had concluded that the newspaper, Ohio's largest daily, would probably be found culpable if the authorities were to investigate the leaks and that reporters might be forced to identify confidential sources to a grand jury or go to jail.

"Basically, we have come by material leaked to us that would be problematical for the person who leaked it," Mr. Clifton said in a telephone interview. "The material was under seal or something along those lines."

In an earlier interview with the trade journal Editor & Publisher, which published an article on its Web site late yesterday, Mr. Clifton said that lawyers for The Plain Dealer and its owner, Newhouse Newspapers, had strongly recommended against publication of the articles.

"They've said, This is a super, super high-risk endeavor and you would, you know, you'd lose," Mr. Clifton told Editor & Publisher. "The reporters say, 'Well, we're willing to go to jail,' and I'm willing to go to jail if it gets laid on me, but the newspaper isn't willing to go to jail."

This is what we've all feared, even those of us who (like me)  found ourselves deeply conflicted about  the spectacle of Judith Miller being turned into a First Amendment heroine -- Miller, who is so influential that her role in causing the Iraq war almost crossed over into culpability (on the level of the Rwandan radio station RTLM.:

Compared to other major papers, the Times placed more credence in defectors, expressed less confidence in inspectors, and paid less attention to dissenters.” complained {Columbia Journalism Review editor Michael] Massing.

When[Massing] personally asked Miller why she had not included more comments in her stories from experts who contested the assertions made by Iraqi defectors and the White House, she offered the following explanation:

“My job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal."

Back to J-school with you, girl.  (Update: as  a prime player in the 1986 Reagan-Administration infowar against Libya, Miller has been at this for 20 years at least.)And besides, as Ambassador Joseph Wilson and  others have noted and Mike Malloy on Air America yowled, "She's covering up a crime!"

This morning, David Ignatius at the Washington Post summarized the dilemma neatly:

werewolves and london

"Four Blasts in London, 50 dead." All of yesterday, aside from teaching, the only words that mattered. As if Thomas Pynchon had reached out from beyond his scrim and sent the screaming not from across the sky but underground in this oldest of all mass transit systems. His words, from Gravity's Rainbow, still feel a possible glimpse of the tunnel confusion:

Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it's night. He's afraid of the way the glass will fall--soon--it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light only great invisible crashing....Inside the carriage, which is built on several levels, he sits in velveteen darkness, with nothing to smoke, feeling metal nearer and farther rub and connect, steam escaping in puffs, a vibration in the carriage's frame, a poising, an uneasiness, all the others pressed in around, feeble ones, second sheep, all out of luck and time: drunks, old veterans still in shock from ordnance 20 years obsolete, hustlers in city clothes, derelicts, exhausted women with more children than it seems could belong to anyone, stacked about among the rest of the things to be carried out to salvation. Only the nearer faces are visible at all, and at that only as half-silvered images in a view finder, green-stained VIP faces remembered behind bulletproof windows speeding through the city. . . .

Vaulting from  a morning with Voltaire's commedia on state evil (see previous post) to an evening escorting my creative writing students over the Brooklyn Bridge  and the Staten Island Ferry,  I didn't see (though I read some of) the coverage and commentary. I've therefore spent far too much time trying  to make sense of it this morning from my web sources, and finding either solace, insight, or good snark that helps defend one from the sense that this incident is about to be used to play us, badly.

• Juan Cole's piece on Salon is a don't-miss. In addition to pointing out, as he does on his own site today, that what happened in London was what Iraqis go through every day, he actually analyzes the "al-Qaida" communique (from a group with no previous links to OBL or Zarqawi) and paints the bombs as direct blowback from the Iraq war: