Thursday, April 12, 2007

some very fine art

hosted my frighteningly talented wife's art opening last night at Cafe Eclectic in Montclair -- one of my favorite places in the world, owned by the generous self-described boy scout Julio. They opened 10 years ago, the same year we moved out to Montclair. And I gave them their router for the free wi-fi (when Julio was thinking of going with one of those paysites).



pix are up all month. go see 'em. or go to her flickr site. and buy one now, before they go out of your price range -- most are 3 figure $....

Friday, March 30, 2007

Muslim and Christian Co-Existence

The WPUNJ Philosophy Club and the Muslim Student Association

~PRESENT~

Muslim and Christian

Co-Existence


Tuesday, April 3, 2007

7-10 PM

Library Auditorium

Moderator and Organizer: Adam Cannon (WPUNJ student)

Participants:

Joe Devore (historian) Former WPUNJ student

Muhammad el-Filali (historian) Islamic Center of Passiac County

David Greco (theologian) Christian speaker

Tamara Issak (practitioner), WPUNJ Student and MSA leader

Husnain Rajabali (theologian) teacher at the Imam Ali Center

Danny Papa (practitioner) WPUNJ student

This event is made possible by funding from the WPUNJ Alumni Association

Questions? Barbara Andrew – Department of Philosophy

Atrium 275 andrewb@wpunj.edu 973 720 3723

Friday, March 02, 2007

I am not sure about this metaphor

but might be worth discussing:
“History is like herpes”, a professor once told me. “It just keeps coming back, reminding us of the initial contact and infuriating us every time it does. But son-of-a-bitch, it’s real. And if you don’t take care of it, and deal with it…well, you know the rest.”
from lowermanhattanite guestposting at the News Blog.

Sunday, February 25, 2007

Freeway Blogger

Things are heating up...

U.S. developing contingency plan to bomb Iran: report

Sun Feb 25, 2007 9:42AM EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Despite the Bush administration's insistence it has no plans to go to war with Iran, a Pentagon panel has been created to plan a bombing attack that could be implemented within 24 hours of getting the go-ahead from President George W. Bush, The New Yorker magazine reported in its latest issue.

The special planning group was established within the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in recent months, according to an unidentified former U.S. intelligence official cited in the article by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in the March 4 issue.

Hersh on CNN here.

And:

From
February 25, 2007

US generals ‘will quit’ if Bush orders Iran attack

SOME of America’s most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defence and intelligence sources.

Tension in the Gulf region has raised fears that an attack on Iran is becoming increasingly likely before President George Bush leaves office. The Sunday Times has learnt that up to five generals and admirals are willing to resign rather than approve what they consider would be a reckless attack.


“There are four or five generals and admirals we know of who would resign if Bush ordered an attack on Iran,” a source with close ties to British intelligence said. “There is simply no stomach for it in the Pentagon, and a lot of people question whether such an attack would be effective or even possible.”


Oh, and this:

US funds terror groups to sow chaos in Iran


By William Lowther in Washington DC and Colin Freeman, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:30am GMT 25/02/2007

America is secretly funding militant ethnic separatist groups in Iran in an attempt to pile pressure on the Islamic regime to give up its nuclear programme.


President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime is accused of repressing minority rights and culture

In a move that reflects Washington's growing concern with the failure of diplomatic initiatives, CIA officials are understood to be helping opposition militias among the numerous ethnic minority groups clustered in Iran's border regions.



This I like

Virginia Apologizes for Role in Slavery

By LARRY O'DELL, Associated Press Writer
3:38 AM PST, February 25, 2007

RICHMOND, Va. -- Meeting on the grounds of the former Confederate Capitol, the Virginia General Assembly voted unanimously Saturday to express "profound regret" for the state's role in slavery.

Sponsors of the resolution say they know of no other state that has apologized for slavery, although Missouri lawmakers are considering such a measure. The resolution does not carry the weight of law but sends an important symbolic message, supporters said.

"This session will be remembered for a lot of things, but 20 years hence I suspect one of those things will be the fact that we came together and passed this resolution," said Delegate A. Donald McEachin, a Democrat who sponsored it in the House of Delegates.

The resolution passed the House 96-0 and cleared the 40-member Senate on a unanimous voice vote. It does not require Gov. Timothy M. Kaine's approval.

The measure also expressed regret for "the exploitation of Native Americans."

The resolution was introduced as Virginia begins its celebration of the 400th anniversary of Jamestown, where the first Africans arrived in 1619. Richmond, home to a popular boulevard lined with statues of Confederate heroes, later became another point of arrival for Africans and a slave-trade hub.

The resolution says government-sanctioned slavery "ranks as the most horrendous of all depredations of human rights and violations of our founding ideals in our nation's history, and the abolition of slavery was followed by systematic discrimination, enforced segregation, and other insidious institutions and practices toward Americans of African descent that were rooted in racism, racial bias, and racial misunderstanding."

In Virginia, black voter turnout was suppressed with a poll tax and literacy tests before those practices were struck down by federal courts, and state leaders responded to federally ordered school desegregation with a "Massive Resistance" movement in the 1950s and early '60s. Some communities created exclusive whites-only schools.

The apology is the latest in a series of strides Virginia has made in overcoming its segregationist past. Virginia was the first state to elect a black governor -- L. Douglas Wilder in 1989 -- and the Legislature took a step toward atoning for Massive Resistance in 2004 by creating a scholarship fund for blacks whose schools were shut down between 1954 and 1964.

Among those voting for the measure was Delegate Frank D. Hargrove, an 80-year-old Republican who infuriated black leaders last month by saying "black citizens should get over" slavery.

After enduring a barrage of criticism, Hargrove successfully co-sponsored a resolution calling on Virginia to celebrate "Juneteenth," a holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

The Coming War with Iran

From the Project for Defense Alternatives, a great site with links to tons of articles on every aspect of the Iran situation: Confronting Iran: Critical perspectives on the current crisis, its origins, and implications

a commenter!

I am sort of ambivalent about this blog these days -- still not sure what to do with it -- so I am not really trying to get readers. But yesterday I had at least one, and this person left a comment! Since that is such a rare treat, I have decided to promote it to a post, with my reply to follow:
Anonymous said...

The wealthy or the monied class will always favor whoever has their best interests at heart. This can be said today, or 100 years ago or 100 years before that. The roaring 20's or the gay 90's weren't wonderful times for all, but mostly for the wealthiest 1% of the population, people like Rockefeller and Carnegie concerned with making money and their own level of comfort; they cared little for their employees.

The same could be true today, most employees do not have the same level of comfort they had even a few years ago. Recently the news, mentioned that life is wonderful if you are the wealthiest 1% of the population.

Certainly our politians today favor big business, workers rights have taken a few steps backwards. We need to think carefully about the coming elections and hope we can find another Adams or a Teddy Roosevelt, someone who isn't afraid to do the unpopular and take a stand against big business. As was true before the Revolution it is once again the "body of the people" who politicians should be listening to.


I take issue only with the word "always" in comment.

The remarkable thing about the revolution was that -- even if the wealthy were took longer than Samuel Adams to embrace the revolutionary cause -- many of the patriots were among the wealthiest of the colonists. There were few wealthier than Washington and Hancock but they both supported the revolution. Hard to believe, but in this instance they were truly motivated by ideals -- not the pursuit of wealth.

Now, maybe they were particularly exceptional individuals, these So-Called Founding Fathers (SCFF), but they also created and inhabited an environment where ideas and ideals mattered. I think that is what we need right now -- more than a TR or Samuel Adams to save us. We all -- "the body of the people" as the commenter says -- need to work on creating a political and cultural environment where serious discussion of issues is encouraged and demanded even.

With that in mind I link here to the latest from Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, a sharp-eyed and ruthless critic. He sometimes goes for the easy Menckenesque barb rather than deep analysis, but there are few sharper pens out there these days. A taste:
If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family -- the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune -- would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion. Or how about this: If the Estate Tax goes, the heirs to the Mars candy corporation -- some of the world's evilest scumbags, incidentally, routinely ripped by human rights organizations for trafficking in child labor to work cocoa farms in places like Cote D'Ivoire -- will receive about $11.7 billion in tax breaks. That's more than three times the amount Bush wants to cut from the VA budget ($3.4 billion) over the same time period.

This leads me to link to an old post of a brilliant speech by Al Gore on the state of our democracy and public discourse. It begins:
I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America's fabled "marketplace of ideas" now functions.
[...]

In fact there was a time when America's public discourse was consistently much more vivid, focused and clear. Our Founders, probably the most literate generation in all of history, used words with astonishing precision and believed in the Rule of Reason.

Their faith in the viability of Representative Democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry. But they placed particular emphasis on insuring that the public could be well-informed. And they took great care to protect the openness of the marketplace of ideas in order to ensure the free-flow of knowledge.

The values that Americans had brought from Europe to the New World had grown out of the sudden explosion of literacy and knowledge after Gutenberg's disruptive invention broke up the stagnant medieval information monopoly and triggered the Reformation, Humanism, and the Enlightenment and enshrined a new sovereign: the "Rule of Reason."

Indeed, the self-governing republic they had the audacity to establish was later named by the historian Henry Steele Commager as "the Empire of Reason."
Finally, there has been a debate about liberals should approach religion in the current political environment. As usual, Digby seems to present the clearest case:
I have no problem with politicians using religious rhetoric to inform voters of their own personal views, but when appeals to positive virtues become exclusively associated with religious values we end up aiding and abetting a whole host of conservative appeals to authority in the process. We must value reason itself, and employ it liberally and respectfully or we are going to find that the epistemic relativism that the right's been so successful with in recent years will have some very unpleasant consequences.

This nation is not going to be prosperous and successful in the future if we fail to properly emphasize the idea that reason is intrinsic to democracy. And we certainly are not going to be able to deal with the complicated challenges we face, like the rise of militant fundamentalism, nuclear proliferation or global warming unless we agree that people who do not subscribe to religion can be trustworthy and that science, analysis and knowledge form as much of a legitimate basis for human progress as religion. The right demagogues these things for the express purpose of advancing their authoritarian agenda and I don't think it's wise for Democrats to allow a new class of "religious strategists" to further empower them in some ill-conceived crusade to gain votes from the least likely people in the nation to vote for them.

If the Democratic party doesn't stand for freedom and equality and the basic rational premise of the constitution then nobody does. The Republicans sold that out when they made their bed with Jerry Falwell, even though they pretended for years that they were the keepers of the flame. I'd hate to see the Democrats capitulate to the same socially regressive forces and empower the opposition in the process.

The religious and secular left have the chance together to make both reasoned and moral arguments for social justice, civil liberties and civil rights based upon our shared liberal values. Our rational and idealistic worldviews are not in tension. There is no purpose to all this pandering to the right except perhap to give a few new strategists an opportunity create a divide where none exists so they might exploit their positions as professional mediators.

Beware the insider religio-political industrial complex. It dishonestly foments this fight with bogus statistics and bad advice. Democrats are making a big mistake if they listen to them. Their political ambition is tragically weakening the one thing that keeps the nation together and keeps the right from hurtling completely out of control --- the US Constitution and a respect for the clear-eyed reason that inspired it. Democracy is not faith based and religion isn't democratic. People need to be reminded of the difference not encouraged to see them as the same thing.

Troop morale

I have never understood how words spoken here in the USA could have an effect on "troop morale" in the greatest military in the history of the universe (just as I cannot understand how these same words can "embolden the enemy" as if the people attacking American forces in Iraq sit around worrying and feeling bad until someone in the US says something critical of Bush, at which point they jump up and plant an IED or shoot down a helicopter).

This comes from "a troop":
Pundits and politicians seem both greatly concerned and badly informed about troop morale. As a troop myself, I thought I'd start a dialogue of the 10 best and 10 worst things for my morale. I hope others will chime in with their nominations.

Ten worst:

1. Getting blown up
2. Buddies getting blown up
3. Re-securing a town we secured year before last
4. 'Taps'
5. The 'catch and release' detainee program
6. Colostomy bags
7. Civilian young men who won't look me in the eye when I'm in uniform
8. Any scene from any shopping mall anywhere in America
9. Editorials pointing out that casualties are 'light by historical standards'
10. Lies

Ten best:

1. Iraqis willing to fight for their country
2. Good sergeants
3. Clean, dry socks and t-shirts
4. Cigarettes and Chi without body armor
5. The USO at the DFW airport
6. Meeting an Iraqi leader from my last tour who's still alive
7. "Nothing significant to report"
8. Sleep & KBR macadamia nut cookies (tie)
9. Dead generals (this one is hypothetical, at least for the last six years, but Ridgeway said "it's good for the troops' morale to see a dead general every once in a while.")
10. Truth

Conspicuous by its absence is any speech by any politician, except those that fall in category 10. Hope this helps.

Monday, February 19, 2007

Focus the Nation -- on Global Warming -- Feb 26th

GLOBAL WARMING SOLUTIONS: NEW JERSEY FOCUS THE NATION SUMMIT- VIDEOCONFERENCE: DR. EBAN GOODSTEIN, Monday, February 26, 2007, 4:30-8:30 PM ET

NJHEPS, New Jersey Higher Education Partnership for Sustainability and FOCUS THE NATION have announced an interactive, videoconference on “GLOBAL WARMING SOLUTIONS FOR AMERICA: NEW JERSEY FOCUS THE NATION with Dr. Eban Goodstein” linking faculty, students and community people to nine N.J. host college campuses on Monday, 26 February 2007 from 4:30 to 8:30 PM ET.

WHO: You are invited to participate in NEW JERSEY FOCUS THE NATION SUMMIT, a live videoconference sponsored by NJHEPS - New Jersey Higher Education Partnership for Sustainability - and FOCUS THE NATION and produced by NJEDge, New Jersey Higher Education Network.

See Live video from campus and community interactive webcasting from Fairleigh Dickinson University, Kean University (coordinating site), NJIT, Princeton University, Ramapo College, Raritan Valley Community College, Rowan University, Rutgers-Busch Campus, Piscataway, Seton Hall University and William Paterson University.

WHAT: The New Jersey kickoff for FOCUS THE NATION is a national global warming educational, nonpartisan, action-oriented discussion on climate stabilization. Join with teams of faculty, students and community people at over a thousand colleges and universities and high schools in the United States. A catalyzing event designed to turn the national conversation about global warming from fatalism to constructive engagement with the challenge of our generation.

*SPEAKER: Dr. Eban Goodstein, is Professor of Economics at Lewis and Clark College and Director of FOCUS THE NATION

*WORLD CAFÉ Dynamic dialogue in the World Café to decide Action-Plans -- and food!

*STUDENT LEADERS FROM CLIMATE CHALLENGE representing the student clean energy movement

WHEN: MONDAY, 26 FEBRUARY 2007, 4:30-8:30 PM ET

WHY: The goal is to get climate solutions on the agenda of all the presidential candidates, legislators, mayors and political parties before the next election through citizen action.

HOW TO PARTICIPATE -- Two Choices:

OPTION 1) CREATE A LIVE - FOCUS THE NATION - EVENT ON YOUR CAMPUS OR COMMUNITY. Invite faculty, students and community people and stream the videoconference live into a meeting room via computer on a large screen and join the meeting via video. Do the World Café—we will supply instructions. Instant Message questions and comments to the videoconference and get live replies. Send us the results by email. Your group will not be “live” on the screen, but you will see everything and be able to respond. For information, call Dr. Donald Wheeler, Senior Advisor, NJHEPS, DrDWheeler@optonline.net

OPTION 2) INVITATION TO THE CAMPUS: You are invited to any one of the NINE CAMPUS VIDEOCONFERENCING SITES. Bring a group of colleagues, students and friends. TO REGISTER and for information, please email one of those listed below:

1. FAIRLEIGH DICKINSON UNIVERSITY Florham Park, Dr. Joel Harmon, Coordinator. To register, contact Christine Farias CFarais@fdu.edu Location: Dreyfus Auditorium. Parking behind Dreyfus or in Student/Visitor Parking Directions: Campus map:

2. KEAN UNIVERSITY, Dr. Donald Wheeler, drdwheeler@optonline.net (for registration) Kean Hall 127, Parking anywhere on campus between white lines, arrive on time or early to avoid rush for 5:00 classes. Directions: Campus Map

3. PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, Dr. Shana Weber To register contact Mary Banfield Banfield@princeton.edu Videoconference Location: Robertson Hall 016, Directions: Robertson Hall is part of the Woodrow Wilson School on the campus of Princeton University, Princeton , NJ. Driving directions: Parking: Visitors should part in Lot 21 (SE corner of campus) for this event and take the free campus shuttle ( BLUE ROUTE). Shuttles arrive every 10 minutes. The shuttle has a stop at the Woodrow Wilson School on the corner of Prospect and Washington Road. Make sure to check with the driver to let them know your destination. Campus map link: Campus shuttle link:

4. RAMAPO COLLEGE OF NEW JERSEY, Dr. Michael Edelstein, To register contact Donald Wheeler drdwheeler@optonline.net Location: Student Center, Room 137. Directions & campus map:

5. RARITAN VALLEY COMMUNITY COLLEGE, Dr. Daniel Aronson, DAronson@raritanval.edu Conference Center, ATTC 101. Directions & campus map

6. ROWAN UNIVERSITY, Mr. John Imperatore, Rowan Hall Auditorium. To Register: Imperatore@rowan.edu Directions & campus map

7. RUTGERS UNIVERSITY - Busch Campus, Piscataway, Priscilla Hayes, Esq., Hayes@aesop.rutgers.edu Location: Room 120 ABC, Busch Campus Center Directions & campus map:

8. SETON HALL UNIVERSITY, Dr. Marian Glenn, glennmar@shu.edu Location: Walsh Library Beck Rooms (ground floor directly in front of the entrance). Exit the Deck and cross the street. Walsh Library is to the right. Parking: Stop for a guest pass at the Security Booth, and park in the deck. Directions & campus map:

9. WILLIAM PATERSON UNIVERSITY, Dr. Richard Pardi, pardir@wpunj.edu Videoconference Location: Hobart Hall room 132A Directions: Click on University Map, see Entry 2 for visitor parking. Hobart Hall is building #3 over the foot bridge.

Friday, February 16, 2007

Samuel Adams and the radicalism of the American Revolution

I like it when historians make connections between the past and events of today -- creating a usable past. It is not easy business, but when it works the juxtapositions can illuminate both past and present. Poputonian does that today in discussing the class basis of the American Revolution -- e.g. Samuel Adams was far ahead of the John Hancock and the international merchant and monied class in calling for revolution:

We The People - Part Two

The Money Divide

by poputonian

Several posts ago someone pointed out that the corporate media fell on the other side of the money divide, and thus could not be relied on to advocate the People's cause. Samuel Adams, the man who almost single handedly triggered the American revolution with the Committees of Correspondence, faced a similar issue back in the early 1770s. John Galvin, in his superb book Three Men of Boston, detailed how Adams was losing his way with the monied interests, and thus shifted his focus away from Boston merchants, the most prominent being John Hancock, and toward the Boston mechanics and rural farmers.

When the Boston merchants hired Otis to represent them in 1761, they were aggressive in their desire to fight the imposition of new rules on trade. The decade that followed, however, brought many bitter lessons. Nonimportation, which at first seemed a good answer that would bring quick results, had stifled all trade. Many of the best businessmen were bankrupted by the stagnation of trade in 1765, caused by the tightening customs stranglehold on the port of Boston. The merchants showed their dissatisfaction in a steadfast avoidance of any further affiliation with the radicals of the town: no more nonimportation, they said, no more support for Boston violence, no more attacks in the provincial administration. Hancock, who had inherited the leadership of the Boston merchants, led the way. He broke off his close friendship with Samuel Adams and made his peace with Hutchinson.

As long as Otis had been the dominant figure in Boston opposition o contemporary Parliamentary policy, the merchants were willing to commit themselves to his leadership. He was a radical, yes, but a constructive politician, in background and in philosophy a fellow merchant who might edge near the brink of defiance but whose uppermost concern was the betterment of the empire and consequently Massachusetts. He was, for the merchants, a force for good -- meaning a mutually profitable relationship with the mother country under a very liberal trade policy with increasing power for American colonies without repudiation of the old institutions. Aberration in his thinking were forgiven him and charged to the pressures of the time. (Otis himself had recognized this toleration and used it to extricate himself when trapped by his own inconsistencies.)

Adams had no such inconsistencies, nor did he possess any constructive view of the British empire as the potential salvation of mankind. He did not seek stability above all -- in fact, he was willing to sacrifice a prosperous American trade, at least temporarily, in order to gain other ends. In the eyes of the merchants, Adams was much less predictable than Otis; they saw that the end at which he aimed was increasing independence -- and perhaps even total independence -- of Great Britain. What this would mean now one knew. Additionally, Adams' obstructionism in the House, forcing adherence to the refusal to do business until the governor move the General Court back to Boston, was beginning to cost too much. Without taxes and legislation, the province could not function, and without good government, commerce suffered. Continued exasperation of the Crown was certain to bring added punishment to Boston. Even more liberal businessmen began to hope fervently for a return of a healthy Otis to the scene.

Recognizing the reluctance of the merchants to cast their lot with him, Adams had already begun to transfer the basis of political power of the Boston radicals away from the merchants and toward the people. The merchants, he said, had been too long the "unconcerned spectators" on the political scene, who could be depended on only when their close interests were seen by them to be threatened. It was "the body of the people" who must decide the acceptance or rejection of Parliamentary decisions. He would base the fight on them..

Adams thus lost the support of the powerful and influential Merchant's Society, a fact discernible in his poor showings in the elections of 1772.
...
His refusal to compromise, however, did not cost him his influence over the Sons of Liberty. He had seen to it that the small group, the Loyal Nine of 1766, was expanded into the Sons of Liberty (with 355 members) by 1769. These were the mechanics and small tradesmen of Boston, who now began to dominate the town meeting while the merchants grew ever more fearful of them.

Samuel Adams would eventually flood the small rural Massachusetts towns with letters, successfully drawing them into the revolutionary movement. In a similar way, the impeachment movement today isn't coming from the business class, the major media, or from New York, Chicago, LA, or Dallas. It's coming from the states, and towns such as Brattleboro, VT, Boca Raton, FL, Portland, ME, Hanover, NH, Iowa City, IA, Minneapolis, MN, San Diego, CA, Parma, OH, Santa Fe, NM, Nashua, NH, St. Cloud, MN, Newark, NJ, Dunellen, NJ, Oakland, CA, Albany, OR, Lompoc, CA, Winchester, MA, Bowling Green, OH, and Galveston, TX. Perhaps this is a case of don't follow the money.

(Subscription link to The Remedy, an impeachment newsletter, is at the bottom of the afterdowningstreet link above.)


Interestingly, the very act of blogging is itself an updating of the Committees of Correspondence.

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Propaganda watch

Glenn Greenwald dissects today's NY Times stenography of the Bush administration on Iran.

Or maybe it is a tape recorder. Shorter Michael Gordon:
U.S. Says...United States intelligence asserts...reflects broad agreement among American intelligence agencies...civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies provided...military officials say...The officials said...The assessment was described in interviews over the past several weeks with American officials...Administration officials said...according to the intelligence...According to American intelligence...Some American intelligence experts believe...they assert...notes a still-classified American intelligence report...a senior administration official said...according to Western officials...Officials said...An American intelligence assessment described to The New York Times said...Other officials believe...American military officers say...American officials say...According to American intelligence agencies...Assessments by American intelligence agencies say...Marine officials say...American intelligence agencies are concerned...Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week.

This war will... vs. No it won't

Go read this one, then check out the date, then check out the source...

This war will... vs. No it won't

... Crying is optional...

Friday, February 09, 2007

"An Iraq Interrogator's Nightmare"

from today's WaPo:

An Iraq Interrogator's Nightmare

By Eric Fair
Friday, February 9, 2007; A19

Aman with no face stares at me from the corner of a room. He pleads for help, but I'm afraid to move. He begins to cry. It is a pitiful sound, and it sickens me. He screams, but as I awaken, I realize the screams are mine.

That dream, along with a host of other nightmares, has plagued me since my return from Iraq in the summer of 2004. Though the man in this particular nightmare has no face, I know who he is. I assisted in his interrogation at a detention facility in Fallujah. I was one of two civilian interrogators assigned to the division interrogation facility (DIF) of the 82nd Airborne Division. The man, whose name I've long since forgotten, was a suspected associate of Khamis Sirhan al-Muhammad, the Baath Party leader in Anbar province who had been captured two months earlier.

The lead interrogator at the DIF had given me specific instructions: I was to deprive the detainee of sleep during my 12-hour shift by opening his cell every hour, forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes. Three years later the tables have turned. It is rare that I sleep through the night without a visit from this man. His memory harasses me as I once harassed him.

Despite my best efforts, I cannot ignore the mistakes I made at the interrogation facility in Fallujah. I failed to disobey a meritless order, I failed to protect a prisoner in my custody, and I failed to uphold the standards of human decency. Instead, I intimidated, degraded and humiliated a man who could not defend himself. I compromised my values. I will never forgive myself.

American authorities continue to insist that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident in an otherwise well-run detention system. That insistence, however, stands in sharp contrast to my own experiences as an interrogator in Iraq. I watched as detainees were forced to stand naked all night, shivering in their cold cells and pleading with their captors for help. Others were subjected to long periods of isolation in pitch-black rooms. Food and sleep deprivation were common, along with a variety of physical abuse, including punching and kicking. Aggressive, and in many ways abusive, techniques were used daily in Iraq, all in the name of acquiring the intelligence necessary to bring an end to the insurgency. The violence raging there today is evidence that those tactics never worked. My memories are evidence that those tactics were terribly wrong.

While I was appalled by the conduct of my friends and colleagues, I lacked the courage to challenge the status quo. That was a failure of character and in many ways made me complicit in what went on. I'm ashamed of that failure, but as time passes, and as the memories of what I saw in Iraq continue to infect my every thought, I'm becoming more ashamed of my silence.

Some may suggest there is no reason to revive the story of abuse in Iraq. Rehashing such mistakes will only harm our country, they will say. But history suggests we should examine such missteps carefully. Oppressive prison environments have created some of the most determined opponents. The British learned that lesson from Napoleon, the French from Ho Chi Minh, Europe from Hitler. The world is learning that lesson again from Ayman al-Zawahiri. What will be the legacy of abusive prisons in Iraq?

We have failed to properly address the abuse of Iraqi detainees. Men like me have refused to tell our stories, and our leaders have refused to own up to the myriad mistakes that have been made. But if we fail to address this problem, there can be no hope of success in Iraq. Regardless of how many young Americans we send to war, or how many militia members we kill, or how many Iraqis we train, or how much money we spend on reconstruction, we will not escape the damage we have done to the people of Iraq in our prisons.

I am desperate to get on with my life and erase my memories of my experiences in Iraq. But those memories and experiences do not belong to me. They belong to history. If we're doomed to repeat the history we forget, what will be the consequences of the history we never knew? The citizens and the leadership of this country have an obligation to revisit what took place in the interrogation booths of Iraq, unpleasant as it may be. The story of Abu Ghraib isn't over. In many ways, we have yet to open the book.

The writer served in the Army from 1995 to 2000 as an Arabic linguist and worked in Iraq as a contract interrogator in early 2004. His e-mail address iserictfair@comcast.net.

Tom Tomorrow -- The Right Wing Noise Machine


Saturday, February 03, 2007

With Trembling Fingers

Periodically, I go back and read this article from early 2004.

American denazification

I have always found the Right's obsession with George Soros to be funny because I rarely ever hear about him. I know who he is and all that, but he is not someone who seems to cut a large public figure on the left.

But then I read these words: "America needs to follow the policies it has introduced in Germany," Soros said. "We have to go through a certain de-Nazification process."

Wow. You do not hear words like that often enough in public life today. Steve Clemons writes one of his best posts ever supporting Soros against the attacking pundits. I would add that I believe the American people as a whole -- not just the leadership class -- has to go through the process.

Friday, February 02, 2007

The Bill Buckner of political commentary

or is it Scott Norwood?

Greg Sargeant nails Tom Friedman.

Tom Friedman is among the most important interpreters of the Middle East for American audiences. They rely on him to explain and exercise sound judgment on a fraught and confusing part of the world whose affairs have more of an impact on us right now than any other region. That is a position of immense consequence. And the decision to back the invasion of Iraq was -- and will be -- the single most important decision of his career. He blew it, and right now he should feel like Bill Buckner felt after he let the ground ball dribble between his legs -- only infinitely worse, because by dint of his role as one of America's principle interpreters of the Middle East, he helped create a catastrophe that has destroyed thousands of families and will have untold consequences for many decades.

Yet has anyone seen a single sign anywhere that Friedman has ever suffered a moment's anguish or even self-doubt about this catastrophic failing? I haven't. If you've seen any, please send along. Look, there are no easy answers to the question of how -- or whether -- pundits like Friedman should be held accountable for getting it wrong, however disastrously. But how about a little self-imposed accountability? What about a hint of remorse? Friedman's email makes you wonder whether to him all this is anything more than a big fat joke. Who cares if I was wrong about the most important foreign policy decision this country's made in decades? Just get my assets right, please.

I agree that one of the worst things about all the violence unleashed on the world by the Bush Administration is the lack of any sense of remorse or even empathy on the part of the pro-war pundits like Friedman and Zakaria. They just blithely move on. I don't expect it from Bush or someone like David Brooks, but for some reason this lack of understanding of the reality of the impact of war on peoples lives is maybe more unseemly from those who now pretend to oppose Bush.

"What Digby Says"

a snippet:
I think they are foolishly counting on Bush not following through which is a shameful miscalculation if not political malpractice --- you simply have to assume after observing him all these years that he will. He and Cheney are desperately unpopular and they have come to believe that their legacy will be redeemed by history, so parochial concerns about popular support or public will in their own time are irrelevant. Indeed, I think they probably believe they have to do this in order that history will clearly see how they bucked the tide of popular opinion and expert advice to remake the middle east. It's all they have.

Democrats cannot abet this, not even rhetorically, to satisfy a powerful lobbying group that may be as mad as the neocons and the Bush administration. This time, they will not be let off the hook. Bush is out in two years and if any of them are on record talking trash about Iran at this delicate moment, they will be held accountable for what follows.

Scott Ritter says it here:
While President Bush, a Republican, remains Commander in Chief, a Democrat-controlled Congress shares responsibility on war and peace from this point on. The conflict in Iraq, although ongoing, is a product of the Republican-controlled past. The looming conflict with Iran, however, will be assessed as a product of a Democrat-controlled present and future. If Iraq destroyed the Republican Party, Iran will destroy the Democrats.
We'll be lucky if it only destroys the Democratic party. The stakes are actually much higher for all of us than that.

Read the rest here.

Propaganda, Fascism and the coming war with Iran

I claim no great prescience or brilliance. I was just paying attention, reading and searching for information, using a little historical knowledge and reasoning ability. Stephen Hadley continues to say that the term "civil war" does not apply; of course not: the word is clusterfuck -- unexpurgated. And those of us who were paying attention predicted this.

Now the long-planned hit on Iran is coming. Maybe I will be wrong. There is always a possibility of the Democrats or military leaders stopping the Bush administration. There is even the possibility that they have not been planning on attacking Iran next all along.

The coming months will also put a couple of terms to the test -- for me. I tend to try to avoid using the words propaganda and fascism because I think people have trouble taking them seriously. But the value of words is when they describe reality. So, leaving aside the question of whether it has already been proven that Fox News, for example, is a propaganda outfit and the Bush administration is moving toward (or has embraced) fascism -- using the rigorous definitions of the terms -- I would like to watch (at a distance) the performance of Fox News and the Bush Administration to see how they conform to predictions arising from the strict social scientific and political definitions of propaganda and fascism.

One of the things about history is that we historians don't deal with the future. Unlike true social scientists, our models cannot be tested for their predictive value -- except retroactively, which has its value but .... But we can use analytical terms that have arisen to describe social and historical reality and note tendencies, deriving "lessons learned." That it why I find it useful to compare the Iraq situation to past experiences. The trick is figuring out which stories give us lessons and why. You gotta be flexible, not doctrinaire.

I am not actually trying to do that here; I am not trying to ascertain, for example, whether we are "repeating" the experience of Germany in the 1930s. I am simply laying out my prediction that we will see a textbook propaganda campaign -- but not necessarily one that has made it into the textbooks; expect something different than the run-up to the Iraq War; there will be no presentation to the UN, no attempt to get them to sign on, no attempt really to persuade the American public; an event will transpire that will provide the pretext for action and the President will present it to us as a fait accompli. "We have always been at war with Iran." Of course, this has already begun, and it is not only Fox and their accomplices. As Bob Somerby, Media Matters, Greg Sargeant (google 'em; I'm too lazy to link) and others demonstrate daily, they have plenty of help from the rest of the press playing their roles perfectly.

Similarly, with "creeping fascism." I have a great deal of hope that the Democrats will fight the worst of it. But clearly the party has not caught up to the rest of the American people. I am kinda with Steve Gilliard, who predicts a sudden and early departure for both Bush and Cheney. I would not lay money on it, but I do think something will come out in the trials and investigations that will very quickly tip the scales; Cheney will go, replaced by (no prediction); Bush not long after when the next revelation reveals itself.

This makes the need for more war soon all the more urgent for Bush and Cheney.

Global Warming is a Hoax!

now where is my $10,000.

Interview with Tyler Drumheller

I can't say he tells us anything that hasn't been out there already, but the former CIA station chief in Europe confirms the Downing Street minutes, in strikingly similar language:
SPIEGEL: So the White House just ignored the fact that the whole story might have been untrue?

Drumheller: The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy. Right before the war, I said to a very senior CIA officer: "You guys must have something else," because you always think it's the CIA. "There is some secret thing I don`t know." He said: "No. But when we get to Baghdad, we are going to find warehouses full of stuff. Nobody is going to remember all of this."

Read the whole thing here.


Wednesday, January 31, 2007

"In the past, even presidents were not above the law."

the quaint, good ole days...

January 31, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor

Bush Is Not Above the Law

Washington

LAST August, a federal judge found that the president of the United States broke the law, committed a serious felony and violated the Constitution. Had the president been an ordinary citizen — someone charged with bank robbery or income tax evasion — the wheels of justice would have immediately begun to turn. The F.B.I. would have conducted an investigation, a United States attorney’s office would have impaneled a grand jury and charges would have been brought.

But under the Bush Justice Department, no F.B.I. agents were ever dispatched to padlock White House files or knock on doors and no federal prosecutors ever opened a case.

[...]

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

George Washington and the Middle East

from Glenn Greenwald:

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

George Washington and the Middle East

George Washington's 1796 Farewell Address is an amazingly prescient warning to the U.S. to avoid certain dangers with regard to foreign policy. As we become more and more entangled in the intricacies not only of regional politics in the Middle East, but also in the domestic political conflicts of virtually every significant Middle East country, it almost seems as though we have purposely set out to violate every principle of foreign affairs which Washington articulated:

[...]

The Moustache of Understanding strikes again

I find Tom Friedman to be among the most pernicious and odious of the basking sycophants in our nation's press corps. He has been wrong about everything (e.g. the world is not flat, no matter what the taxi drivers of Bangalore tell you) and has aided the Bush administration in perpetrating their crimes against humanity by layering a liberal gloss on the efforts to kill brown people. At least people like Bill Kristol admit they want to kill more brown people (well, not they, themselves, actually -- they want our hired guns to do so).

Friedman's latest effort is a call for a Muslim Martin Luther King, Jr.

Now, MLK. Jr. is one of those names we invoke when we want to feel good about ourselves. In death and mythology we all love MLK, Jr. I wish they would make a MLK, Jr. teddy bear that would intone his dulcet cadences soothingly as we drift off to sleep.

But if you have ever read him -- or even anything in depth about him -- you will know that he was a brave and fierce warrior for the cause of justice. He put himself on the line time after time, and ultimately gave his life for the cause. King pissed people off, and not just white supremacist extremists. Read his Letter from a Birmingham Jail for a taste of his uncompromising spirit.

Even better, read his speech from April 4, 1967 at the Riverside Church, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence where King finally, belatedly comes out against the Vietnam War.

I tried to read through for easily digestible excerpts to post here, but I really cannot do that in fairness to the speech or to the reader.

As I read my rage, my sadness, and my hopefulness rise and fall with the waves of his words. At the end I am left with one conclusion:

What this country needs right now is an American Martin Luther King, Jr.

Saturday, January 27, 2007

Not my Commander in Chief

Garry Wills addresses a pet-peeve of mine in today's NY Times:

January 27, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor

At Ease, Mr. President

Evanston, Ill.

WE hear constantly now about “our commander in chief.” The word has become a synonym for “president.” It is said that we “elect a commander in chief.” It is asked whether this or that candidate is “worthy to be our commander in chief.”

But the president is not our commander in chief. He certainly is not mine. I am not in the Army.

[...]

[...] The president is not the commander in chief of civilians. He is not even commander in chief of National Guard troops unless and until they are federalized. The Constitution is clear on this: “The president shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States.”

When Abraham Lincoln took actions based on military considerations, he gave himself the proper title, “commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” That title is rarely — more like never — heard today. It is just “commander in chief,” or even “commander in chief of the United States.” This reflects the increasing militarization of our politics. The citizenry at large is now thought of as under military discipline. In wartime, it is true, people submit to the national leadership more than in peacetime. The executive branch takes actions in secret, unaccountable to the electorate, to hide its moves from the enemy and protect national secrets. Constitutional shortcuts are taken “for the duration.” But those impositions are removed when normal life returns.

But we have not seen normal life in 66 years. The wartime discipline imposed in 1941 has never been lifted, and “the duration” has become the norm. World War II melded into the cold war, with greater secrecy than ever — more classified information, tougher security clearances. And now the cold war has modulated into the war on terrorism.

[...]

Friday, January 26, 2007

Columbus, American Identity, and Iraq

some thoughts I posted on my us history survey blackboard:

One way that I make a connection between Columbus and who we are today involves the ideological process at work that allowed the Europeans to feel superior and thus engage in brutal behavior.


I see a great deal of dehumanization of Iraqis in our public discourse. While some of it is straight out racism, there are other ways that we make the victims of our occupation less than human, or at least not worth our concern.


How can we justify invading a country that posed no threat to us, was successfully contained, a country whose skies were already patrolled by US planes over 2/3 of the land – in violation of the principles of international law? How can we justify the bombing from the air we continue to do into residential neighborhoods? The estimated 650,000 dead?


How can we justify firing missiles into Somalia to strike terrorists (and then hit the wrong people)? How can we justify or accept people being kidnapped, tortured and killed all over the world – paid for by our taxpayer dollars? How can we justify a concentration camp where people who are known to be innocent, and who have no legal recourse, have been held for five years? How can we justify kidnapping a Canadian citizen and sending him to Syria – a country supposedly so evil that we cannot even deign to negotiate with them – to be held in a boxlike cell and tortured? How can we justify holding a brown-skinned man with a Spanish sounding name in solitary confinement -- without any human contact – in a secret brig in South Carolina for two years – long enough to drive him out of his mind?


Well, I think the first way we justify and accept all this – to ourselves – is to ignore it all, at least in the details.


But an essential element in our rationalization is the thought or feeling that the people who are dying do not count for much. We may not see them as less-than-human, like Spanish explorers and priests often did, and this attitude may not be “racist,” but there is a similar psychological process going on within individuals and as a society.


We are able to accept the mythology of Columbus – or minimize the significance of his actions (“he was just a man of his time”) – and maybe that is okay. But when our national identity begins with him, that mythology provides the basis for action.


I guess the simple way to explain this is to say that it is no coincidence that thousands of people have to die while we spread freedom.


I am not even arguing the merits of the Bush policies – I am not getting into whether these things really need to be done in the name of “national security” -- I am simply saying that this dehumanization and violence have evolved in tandem with ideas of freedom and American mythologies.

girl in water

My wife is a writer who is currently finishing a book. So naturally she is doing a lot of something else. Since it is too cold for gardening, she is left with cleaning and, now, drawing -- which reminds me that Leonard Lopate had a segment about procrastination today which I hope to listen to some day.

Turns out she is extremely good at it. Or so I think.

You can see more here.

“Because I told them it had to."

From Think Progress:
“He’s tried this two times — it’s failed twice,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) says of President Bush’s escalation plan.

“I asked him at the White House, ‘Mr. President, why do you think this time it’s going to work?’

And he said, ‘Because I told them it had to.‘”

Pelosi reportedly then asked, “Why didn’t you tell them that the other two times?

Thursday, January 25, 2007

End of Vietnam War

I was talking today in class about the end of the Vietnam war, the lessons learned (or not), and the mythologies that permeate our popular memory of the war (e.g. we lost because of the media, the liberals, the congress, -- we didn't have the "stomach" to fight, as Cheney says now.

Digby, who I think is the smartest analyst of the impact of what we think of when we think of "the sixties," has a great post today commenting on two Rick Perlstein articles:

Can We Win this Time?

What TR said

Glenn Greenwald has a great discussion of the authoritarian Bush cultists and the Federalist Papers that deal with Congress and the military.

He also highlights this quote that Teddy Roosevelt wrote in an editorial for the "Kansas City Star" during World War I.

The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole.

Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile.

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.

"Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star", 149
May 7, 1918

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

maybe starting up again

am toying with starting this thing up again. playing with the design.

here is something worth looking at:

Israelis, America and Iran

It sounds like the stuff that conspiracy theories are made of. In a coastal resort near Tel Aviv, senior Israeli politicians and generals confer with top officials and politicians from Washington to discuss the threat of a nuclear Iran. In any good conspiracy theory, however, these talks would be going on in secret – preferably in an underground bunker. In fact the Herzliya conference on “Israel’s national security” is taking place perfectly openly in a smart hotel. And I am in the audience.

more here...