bookofdays

all the president's secrets

I watched All the President's Men last night, for the first time in 20 years. What struck me was not just the less-obeisant Washington press, or a still-cute Dustin Hoffman: it was how relatively innocent the Nixon's administration's abuses seemed. to me -- even its abuse of counter-intelligence, when compared to how deeply these guys are working to embed such practices into the "normal" range of executive power.  And while Marvin Kalb's Financial Times piece What Watergate Can Teach the White House (via Talk Left) points to the danger of perjury charges in the WHIG scanda, he doesn't acknowledge that to these guys, when the law goes against them it's time to change the law.

Even "cover-up" has to go by a new name. In a New York courtroom, a judge is finally hearing Maher Arar's suit against the INS and Justice Department . The judge is  scratching his head at  the government's invocation of the "state secrets" privilege, rarely used before this administration's Etch-a-Sketch approach to the Constitution.

In addition to claiming that valuable state secrets would have to  be spilled in discovery -- precluding any discussion of whether Maher Arar should have been abducted and shipped to Syria, where he was tortured -- this privilege has been invoked in a range of cases.. Inter-Press Service reports: Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, told IPS, "Once rarely invoked, the state secrets privilege is now increasingly used by the government as a 'get out of jail free' card to block unwanted litigation."

Including employment discrimination:

Jeffrey Sterling, an operations officer with the CIA in its Near East and South Asia Division from 1993-2001, claimed he was told he was "too big and black" to receive certain CIA assignments, and that CIA management placed expectations on him "far above those required of non-African-American Operations Officers." He also contended he was retaliated against for using the CIA's internal equal employment opportunity process.

However, the court noted, "There is no way for Sterling to prove employment discrimination without exposing at least some classified details of the covert employment that gives context to his claim."

The IPS story (no link yet, sorry) also notes the use of this strategy in the cases of Sibel Edmonds and Wen Ho Lee.

journalists for universal peace

Well, that was embarrassing.  I don't know how that germ of a post ended up getting published, instead of saved in draft form (my default), but I apologize to anyone who came across it, or saw it when they were checking to see if I'd written anything at all of import.

Those who've already wandered over to my other shop know some of what I've been up to: some of it seem w to fall, fairly directly, into our bailiwick here. Including the cross-post below, from my impression of Prof. Andie Tucher's 2-hour version of her patented intro to the history of American journalism. I'd heard a mini-version at the school's open house in April, where I first heard the anecdote about Joseph Pulitzer's 10-year fight to get Columbia to accept his $2 million, because journalism was so "disreputable." (I loved that story so much I thought of naming this blog "diseputable joe,"; I'd riffed further on the story here, connecting it to Deep Throat.)

The first "news paper," in 1539, reported The Battle of Flanders Field -- and so much else of the history of  the profession has been catalyzed by what happens in war.

Tucher showed us an eighteenth-century American "news sheet" -- a single page looking a little like a cross between the Pennysaver and the Wall Street Journal: four columns across of delicate squares, alternately giving polite advertisements (personals, patent medicines, horses) and  news -- of government actions,  financial markets and military campaigns that might disrupt trade. In other words, as she said "news for elites."  These sheets were also political party organs: one for Democrats and the other for Whigs, with no pretense at objectivity - or even at trying to include a range of voices or ideas.

From that point on, Tucher gave some glimpses of he evolution (?) from those staid documents to the cacophonies of today, focusing in part on how the voice and role of the reporter keeps shifting. And as with so much else, it's been war that catalyzed and/or exemplified these shifts.

Starting with the "penny papers," like the New York Sun, newspapers claiming to appeal to "the common man," reporters wrote not to advance a specific party line but to interest readers -- and the Civil War was the first BIG THING in which all were interested. And a new invention, the telegraph, meant that for the first time correspondents could show up at the battlefield and file their stories back in New York, badgering generals and exposing scandals.

They wrote like other nineteenth-century writers, with their whole hearts and purple prose.  Tucher read to us this famous, quite first-person, quite purple battlefield report from the infant New York Times:

Who can write the history of a battle whose eyes  are immovably fastened upon a central figure of transcendingly  absorbing interest -- the dead body of an oldest born, crushed   by a shell in a position where a battery should never have  been sent, in a building where surgeons dared not to stay….  My pen is heavy.  Oh, you dead, who at Gettysburgh have baptized with your blood the second birth of freedom in America,  how you are to be envied!

--Sam Wilkeson, filing from Gettysburg,   July 4, 1863 

 

"A reporter looking down at his dead son. Where would that  be in today's Times?" Tucher asked. "The op-ed section, right."  The path to the kind of neutral prose preferred by today's "serious" papers a long way off.

moonbats v. starship troopers

Cindy Sheehan's vigil in Crawford, Texas,is finally beginning to gather steam  -- enough, as Salon's Tim Grieve reports with amazement, for the cable nets to portray her as a "stalker."

Sheehan's journey, her demand to speak to Bush about the death of her son in Iraq, inevitably echoes Lila Lipscomb's  desolate face at the White House in Fahrenheit 9/11, as well as Sue Niederer's arrest on "defiant trespass" after making a similar demand of Laura Bush last year. Watch carefully as the group supporting Sheehsn in Iraq grows: will the response echo  Kent  State,  in this 1960s acid-flashback of a war? (The post title reflects a  song from the Australian band The Herd: see why, and listen,  in the jump.)

I hope Sheehan asks him about the new effort to minimize the official number of troops coming home with PTSD,  as the sheer financial strain of all these broken bodies and minds begins to hit. I hope she  challenges any Bush promises about troops coming home soon, and will ask about  the upcoming increase in troop levels (for the next set of Iraqi elections). The number of "ifs" attached to any actual withdrawal sounds like someone trying to come up with excuses not to get married.

I wonder if Aidan Delgado is going to Crawford too.

Delgado's home in Florida now,  after touring the country sharing his slides and experiences from Iraq  (including Abu Ghraib). (You can see the slide show here; my revious posts on Aidan: here and here.) And the Sarasota paper offers a profile that paints him as just another college student, albeit one who enlisted in the military at a poetic moment:

fear up

Some of the worse that happened that you don't know about, ok. Videos, there are women there. Some of you may have read they were passing letters, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib which is 30 miles from Baghdad [...]

The women were passing messages saying "Please come and kill me, because of what's happened". Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror it's going to come out.

It's impossible to say to yourself how do we get there? who are we? Who are these people that sent us there?

I'm two weeks past the day I first excerpted this ,from a 2004 speech by Seymour Hersh: two weeks since the guys in power   ignored  the deadline for turning over those images.

What have I  been up to since? Closing out the summer term, on two campuses -- I couldn't have asked for a better group of students, or departments more supportive -- and beginning to prepare for the next step, including starting the previously promised/threatened second blog, Crayons to Chaos. From now on, I'll be posting to both of these  -- though this, below, is likely my last to be quite this huge and discursive. 

Meanwhile, the noise on our favorite subjects has been kind of deafening.

Today alone we have the news that Guantanamo is being downsized, with hundreds of traumatized detainees being shipped home (rendered? it's actually unclear), in what Jeanne points out is a tacit admission that most of them were not the "worst of the worst" as claimed.  And we have the President, from his estate behind the Tumbleweed Curtain, trying to hold on tight to his favorite phrase: " the Global War on Terror. "

Speaking to the august  (??)  American Legislative Exchange Council in Grapevine, Texas,   he stomped on a few graves in order to emphasize it:

"We're at war with an enemy that attacked us on September the 11th, 2001," Mr. Bush said in his address here, to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group of state legislators. "We're at war against an enemy that, since that day, has continued to kill."

Mr. Bush made a nod to the criticism that "war on terror" was a misleading phrase in the sense that the enemy is not terrorism, but those who used it to achieve their goals. In doing so, he used the word "war," as he did at least 13 other times in his 47-minute speech, most of which was about domestic policy.

Why did he feel the need to do this now?

Because everyone else, from Cheney to  Rumsfeld to various secretaries and under-secretaries, have tried to ditch it. They'd instead fit a longer, klugey-er phrase into their mouths:  “a global struggle against violent extremism.”  Numerous commentators more exalted than I, from George Packer in the New Yorker to Juan Cole to Sidney Blumenthal, have already deconstructed this to great effect, as has Jon Stewart .  Bush, of course, hated it -- perhaps sensing what Packer says so succinctly:

The Administration is admitting that its strategy since September 11th has failed, without really admitting it. The single-minded emphasis on hunting down terrorists has failed (“Hearts and minds are more important than capturing and killing people,” Gregson said). The use of military force as the country’s primary and, at times, only response has failed, and has stretched the Army and the Marines to the breaking point. Unilateralism has failed. “It’s not a military project alone, and the United States cannot do it by itself alone,” Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy and a leading advocate of going it alone with military force, said on his way out the Pentagon door and into private life (good luck, fellas!).

Bush hates hard truths, even when spoken by his own flunkies.

So even when Shrub's resident hawks try to introduce a little reality-based language into their thinking zbout foreign policy, they bow to the master of the big political frame, nonevermind what it does to their efforts to appear sane to the rest of the world. (Fat chance, with Bolton at the U.N., I hear some of you whispering.) No doubt some of this confusion is due to the message-master Rove being a bit preoccupied: the cacophony is a little overwhelming.

But I'm here to say Shrub can have his simplicity. All he needs to do, all they need to do, is -to  just change one consonant. They wouldn't even have to stop minting all the convenient GWOT medals they give folks who serve in both Iraq and Afghanistan, two for the price of one.

Of course, it'd require a little honesty, too.

whose culture of violence?

Apologies for the silence here; in my scattered efforts to finish up one semester and get ready for something completely different, I've now had two complex posts wiped out before I had a chance to save them. within the past 4 days. For now, I will punt to Elendil, whose page should be a stop on your blogroll already and who has much to say about what's already become a succesful part of the new government in Iraq:

Most of the updates have been added to the month of July, as the new Iraqi government shows itself capable of building upon the foundation laid by the US, in the areas of arbitrary detention and torture.

• 22 May 2005: Ali is captured by the Wolf Brigade during Operation Lightning and tortured by application of electricity to his genitals
• 03 July 2005: A story in The Observer builds upon a HRW report from 6 months ago alleging that the new Iraqi govt, particularly the Ministry of Interior's 'Wolf Brigade', is using tortures such as knee-capping detainees with electric drills
• 04 July 2005: A spokesperson for the Iraqi government admits that Ministry of Interior police commandos have tortured Iraqis, but denies that this is government policy, and blames it on an Iraqi "culture of violence"
• 24 July 2005: Sunni official claims he was fired because he spoke against the new Iraqi government, and their role in arbitrary arrest and torture of Sunnis
• 30 July 2005: A Sunni protest against torture is buried in a Reuters report, which was about a suicide bombing.

I'll build on this later tonight, leaving you with this thought: Maybe GWOT isn't such a bad acronym after all.

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.

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.