bookofdays

notes from their front line

I know I said I’d blog from California, but the trip proved unexpectedly tiring: physical challenges to  my vertigo presented by hills and wobbly public transit, the usual business-trip logistics, and intermittent Internet access in the various homestays. But most of all, my brain was full to bursting with stories -- from experts like Judy Ehrlich (link to TGW) and the directors of the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers’  Guild, but more important, from veterans of America’s three most recent wars.

I talked to Vietnam veterans like Paul Cox, who “turned off the war,” he says, when his unit slaughtered mamas and babies in their huts; Mike Wong, who left after advanced training rather than go to Vietnam;  and Steve Morse, a born Quaker who went back in after  his court martial for insubordination, and followed the invasion of Cambodia. I talked to Gulf War veteran Daniel Fahey, who went on to become a leading voice for those exposed to depleted uranium. I talked to Stephen Funk, the first public conscientious objector of the Iraq war, whose unusual and lefty background and sweet, fey presence make him an unusual military voice – but who still says “it’s easier to talk to people who’ve been through the training.”

And to two funding members of Iraq Veterans Against the War – one of whom’s still in the National Guard, and another who was a member of the First Marine Expeditionary Force – yes, that one.

r.i.p. - the first hero of my lai

“Didn't you take your life in your hands, Hugh, when you got out and told the American soldiers who had been killing that they'd better quit and let these people get out of the bunker,” Wallace asked Thompson, who wouldn’t answer.

“Yes sir, he did,” says Colburn. “And he didn’t even take a weapon with him. He had a side arm. He didn’t even have it drawn. He just placed himself … And I was thinking that, at that point, anything could have happened. And we watched Mr. Thompson go to the bunker and bring the people out.”

I learned at about 3 a.m. that Hugh Thompson had died: My first thought, after great sadness, was an additional sadness that I couldn't now speak to him, when giving him his honoured place in my history of dissenting soldiers.   I'll let Richard Goldstein's smart obit remind those who don't know or remember:

Hugh Thompson, an Army helicopter pilot who rescued Vietnamese civilians during the My Lai massacre, reported the killings to his superior officers in a rage over what he had seen, testified at the inquiries and received a commendation from the Army three decades later, died yesterday in Alexandria, La. He was 62.

satyagraha in NOLA

Mahatma Gandhi and MLK would both be proud of what they've done in the Ninth Ward. Not the government - the people standing in front of bulldozers.

When I 've taught introductory composition to community college students, I often insisted on either beginning or ending with an examination of Martin Luther King's "Three Ways of Meeting Oppression." It was in the text as an example of structured argument, one that examined both acquiescence and violence before asserting

The third way open to oppressed people in their quest for freedom is the way         of nonviolent resistance. Like the synthesis in Hegelian philosophy, the principle of nonviolent resistance seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites acquiescence and violence while avoiding the extremes and immoralities of both. The nonviolent resister agrees with the person who acquiesces  that one should not be physically aggressive toward his opponent; but he balances the equation by agreeing with the person of violence that evil must be resisted. He avoids the nonresistance of the former and the         violent resistance of the latter. With nonviolent resistance, no individual or group need submit to any wrong, nor need anyone resort to violence  in order to right a wrong.      

I was then often tasked with explaining what King (and I) meant by "nonviolent resistance." Did he mean boycotts? Walking around with a sign? I sometimes, even before they hit the news, cited "peace teams" like the Christian Peacemaker Teams, who place their physical bodies between armies and civilians; much of the coverage, since four CPT workerx were taken hostage, has the same kind of incomprehension as my students expressed about King. And talking about Gandhi and satyagraha, actual resistance in this country, about civil rights workers battered by police in Montgomery, just felt like a history lesson.

If I were teaching this spring, I'd start with that essay, and I would have  this example to point to: Ninth Ward residents putting their bodies between their homes and the bulldozers.

john mccain figleafs a national emergency

Those of you who faithfully read this blog only need to know this: the Graham Amendment, the one all set to undo Rasul and kiss habeas corpus goodbye, just got worse. Forget all the press about John McCain's heroic stand on torture (where were you when Gonzales was confirmed, sir?) - in the dead of night, that gnarly little amendment says, basically, that all such declarations are moot: evidence from torture can still be used as evidence in military tribunals. Contact your Senators now, especially if (as for New Yorkers) they're on one of the relevant committees: tell them to refuse, if necessary, to sign the conference committee report.

How do we know all this? Because they love it. Thanks as always, Hilzoy, for pointing out that

According to an amended draft of the measure being circulated Thursday among the sponsors, Graham has agreed to language that loosens the restrictions on terror evidence that’s obtained through “coercive” interrogations that may occur in other countries. Whereas Graham’s previous draft had forbidden the use of such evidence—in accordance with standard rules of military justice—the new draft says that it should be barred only “to the extent practicable.” The latest bill language also now says that the “probative value” of evidence should be considered—in other words, whether the information is persuasive.

on a magic carpet (bomb) ride

I know, it's been forever: I'm reporting simultaneously for two different pieces, one about domestic violence in New York's immigrant communities and one, called informally "The Things They Carry," about a prototypical new veteran I've been following around. And I write this about to head into a meeitng of the Veterans Advisory Board of the NY City Council.

But knowing Seymour Hersh's new piece was hitting today, I had to read it right away, and deliver some of the most disturbing bits to you. And of course, in the time I took to put this together, Jehanne was already giving a more plangent frame to it all.

Everyone who, unlike TV-resistant me,  watched Wolf Blitzer last night already knows Hersh's harshest: that when the inevitable troop withdrawals happen, they'll be replaced by an escalated air war, right on Vietnam-Not-So-Lite Schedule: The Return of Carpet Bombing.

In the battle for the city, more than seven hundred Americans were killed or wounded; U.S. officials did not release estimates of civilian dead, but press reports at the time told of women and children killed in the bombardments.

In recent months, the tempo of American bombing seems to have increased. Most of the targets appear to be in the hostile, predominantly Sunni provinces that surround Baghdad and along the Syrian border. As yet, neither Congress nor the public has engaged in a significant discussion or debate about the air war.

The insurgency operates mainly in crowded urban areas, and Air Force warplanes rely on sophisticated, laser-guided bombs to avoid civilian casualties. These bombs home in on targets that must be “painted,” or illuminated, by laser beams directed by ground units. “The pilot doesn’t identify the target as seen in the pre-brief”—the instructions provided before takeoff—a former high-level intelligence official told me. “The guy with the laser is the targeteer. Not the pilot. Often you get a ‘hot-read’ ”—from a military unit on the ground—“and you drop your bombs with no communication with the guys on the ground. You don’t want to break radio silence. The people on the ground are calling in targets that the pilots can’t verify.” He added, “And we’re going to turn this process over to the Iraqis?

avian flu thoughts from someone who should know

A guest post from Walter, who's a disaster recovery planner for a Fortune 500 company -- and a very dear friend. A good counter to tabloidism, and complement for the terrific work being done by folks like Melanie on this stuff.

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For those of us who are paid to worry, a flu pandemic has been near the top of the list for years. We ought to be pleased by the media attention it's suddenly getting. I am not.

 

Like earthquakes, pandemics come at long intervals, but are as certain as rain. Their impact, when they come, can be limited or devastating, and there's not much we can do to predict which the next one will be. Preparations have to be long term. We can stockpile supplies. Some materials can be used to limit the spread of disease, like surgical masks. Medicines can now help the immune system combat even new forms of viral disease. We can maintain vaccine manufacturing capacity. We can plan for how to function with a sharp! ly reduced workforce. We can plan for how to function under voluntary or mandatory quarantines. We can plan how to limit the vectors for spreading a disease. None of these can be effective when undertaken quickly; bold stands are of limited use against viral mutation.

 

The national media had been reporting the spread of avian flu in a consistent but low-key way. The tone recently and abruptly changed. George Bush was returning from a visit to Louisiana and Mississippi, where the Department of Homeland Security and local agencies had failed spectacularly to communicate with horrifying results. Liberal activists were happily allowing the radical right to take up the task of questioning the propriety of a Supreme Court nominee whose primary qualification seemed to be extreme personal loya! lty to the President. The Iraqi constitutional process was becoming increasingly farcical. And when George Bush got off the plane in Washington, he had been reading a book about pandemics.

 

Well, the good news is that we now know that he can read. His reaction (at his news conference on the 5^th) was typical: we can use the Army! But the most important effect was that the press began reporting on pandemics and avian flu in earnest.

 

It's a ready made story.  The risk is real. Our inability to protect ourselves reliably from the serious risk of death is real. The "not if but when" quotes are real, and well founded (though the Secretary of Health and Human Services sounds remarkably taken aback in his statements; he's running Mayor Nagin a close second for surprised panic in the face of the long known). However, none of this is new. It is news only because it previously has gone unreported. Mostly, it has become headline news at a very convenient moment for George Bush.

 

I still want to know why we're in Iraq, and when we'll leave. I want to know what can be done throughout the country to at least approximate the level of coordination between federal and local officials maintained in New York City. I want to know why we're still pursuing policies that increase our dependence on petroleum. I want to know who the heck Miers is, and whether there's any reason to think she would make a decent Supreme Court Justice. And if we're going to talk about avian flu, I want to know why B! ush's proposal for funding the Gulf (of Mexico, not Persia) states' recovery includes funding cuts to the Center for Disease Control.

fight till the hurt stops

Like James Wolcott, whose brilliant analysis of the savaging of Cindy Sheehan is a must-read,  I've had a death  in the "family" of my Manhattan building -- in my case, in the family of our super, Ramon.

Ramon has been ill with cancer, this year: we've watched him grow skinny and lose his hair from chemo, worrying that we would lose him. He's seemed better lately, and we were a lttle shocked and scared when we saw crowds gathering in front of his entrance on Monday night. This is Washington Heights; it looked like half the neighborhood was gathered on our block, crossing themselves in front  of  makeshift shrine.

But it was no death watch, as we realized  Tuesday. It was an actual death - of Ramon's son-in-law, Pfc. Jose Ruiz.

Perhaps you saw the full-face photo on Newsday's front page, and the headline:     HE ONLY SAW HIS BABY ONCE. His wife, at tonight's memorial service, was clear about her husband's decency in his service.

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.