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they weren't allowed to tell anybody about the lawsuit .. Washington Post 29 Apr 2004 .. charmingly Orwellian .. gag order

washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51423-2004Apr28.html

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Holy folding shirts Batman!

 

The war I may have been wrong about the motives behind our war on Iraq. When it was suggested that the war in Iraq was a stepping stone to spreading freedom to the world through extreme methodology, I knee-jerked that the energy industry's greed and Bush family vendetta were guiding the war. Now, after watching Frontline's The Jesus Factor and having listened to evangelicals talk for the last 40 years or so, I believe President Bush's evangelical beliefs are being used by the greedy, vengeful right to sway what was quoted as 40% of Americans and 70% of voters who are deeply religious, into thinking that the Armageddon war is upon us, thus we need God's chosen president. The terrorists, who have a whack ideological bent as well, are none the less, religiously motivated to believe that our society is evil, just as we believe that fundamentalist Islam is. We attacked a place where major factions of the Moslem world have been held together by totalitarian force. Even without our intervention, Iraq was a cultural powder-keg. Through seemingly accidental actions (like insufficient troops, or armaments to really control Iraq) we have fomented that ill-ease. Warlords are gathering power as the (now neutered) UN plans to start running the show with their own puppet government this summer. Meanwhile, the mastermind of the attack on New York and Washington moves freely (he's not scheduled to be aprehended until October), calling for uprisings in Europe. And terrorist cells planning future attacks are still planning while our own (softened in order to support the war in Iraq) security forces still look for the last attack. We are even having a mock trial about it - I wonder how the part where Dick Cheney drank a glass of water went yesterday? Hey John "hidden-referrer" Ashcroft! (I know you read this blog) - the next attack won't be like the last one!

---

January 20^th, the earliest date a new President could be seated, is a long way off. And as you may recall, John Kerry is not my favorite Democrat. And Ralph Nader is not as dumb as he looks - he knew damn well that his candidacy would give us a Bush presidency. It's a classic case of the lesser of two evils, and Sen. Kerry is surely that. The lesser one, so from now on (until he is elected) I'll support John Kerry for President. But just until then, cause right after, the impeachment will start. So John, watch who's sucking your dick.

---

Incidentally, Paul Wolfowitz, undersecretary for death, said that that 'about 500' United States service men and women have died in the war. He left out over 200, I wonder why? Maybe he has different priorities than to support our troops.

 

I caught a bit of the BBC World Service on National Corporate Radio this morning, and was struck by the Beeb's heavy-duty coverage of the war crimes committed at the once-again-infamous Abu Ghraib prison. They interviewed the CBS correspondent in Baghad, a former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, and a British academic expert on war crimes, and described, in great detail, the specific acts captured in the photos. The Beeb news reader also cited a wave of revulsion sweeping across what we might jokingly refer to as the civilized world.

Even Tony Blair is appalled, apparently.

This made me curious to see how my local paper was handling the story. So I retrieved the paper from the yard, sat down on my front steps and looked at page one. There was nothing. Page two and three? Nothing. The "world in brief" column? Nothing. Finally, back on page A-16 or whatever, I found a short piece (without any of the photographs, naturally) that focused on the reactions of the families of the accused torturers.

And that was it. So when I got to the office, I did a quick Google search, and found that, by and large, the U.S. media was either ignoring the story, or, like the Inquirer, was playing up complaints that the moral midgets shown grinning and posing with their victims in the photos were somehow being unfairly scapegoated by the military -- like a gang of latter day Lt. Calleys. The international press, meanwhile, appeared to be in full-bore media frenzy mode.

The Guardian noticed the same dichotomy:

It was no surprise that newspapers around the world made huge, horrified play of the events at the Abu Ghraib prison. It was more of a surprise, however, that a search of the US press revealed not one word about the tortured prisoners. Not a leader column, not a news report, not even a TV review.

Now that's a bit of an exaggeration -- but only a bit. Up until this afternoon, the US media clearly was reluctant to give the story much more than pro forma treatment, and completely unwilling to pursue any of the nasty questions it raises about the U.S. government's far flung archipelago of anti-terrorist gulags. Parts of the international media, meanwhile, already appears to have concluded that there are no significant differences between the U.S. military and Saddam's Mukhabarat.

I don't think that conclusion is justified -- although it's hard to say whether the exaggeration is wild or merely slight, given the Pentagon's Soviet-style approach to government secrecy. But the contrast in coverage made for an incredibly vivid demonstration of the yawning gap between how the rest of the world sees America and how America sees itself -- a perceptual disconnect that seems to be growing, not shrinking, even as the two parts are being ever more closely wired together. Globalization doesn't appear to have made much of a dent yet in the tendency of America (and Americans) to live in a separate reality, as isolated as possible from what the rest of the world sees, thinks and must endure.

In the days when Britannia ruled the waves, this same tendency was described as a "splendid isolation" -- one which allowed Queen Victoria's royal subjects to regard the rest of the world with a potent mixture of contempt, arrogance and (occasionally) pity for not having had the good fortune to be born an Englishman. It produced a sense of cultural exceptionalism so deeply ingrained it was taken for granted.

The American version can be just as chauvinistic -- if not downright xenophobic, as we saw following the death and mutilation of the four U.S. security guards in Fallujah. But Americans are newer to the imperial game, and in many ways less enthusiastic about it. It isn't so much that we feel superior to the rest of the world -- although many Americans do -- but that we know so little about it, and care even less.

Traditionally, we haven't wanted to know or needed to know -- not when the world was large and we had 3,000+ miles moats on either side of our slice of continent. In the melting pot ideology, Americans were supposed to forget where they came from, and had some pretty strong incentives to shed the immigrant identity as quickly as possible. Isolationism has deep, deep roots here, and the leap from frontier republic to global hegemon has been very, very quick, historically speaking. Sociologically, Americans are about as well prepared for the burdens of modern imperialism as they were for the cultural revolution of the 1960s. It's "future shock" all over again.

This basic cluelessness explains a great deal, I think. It allows Americans to continue drawing a sharp distinction between their traditional domestic institutions and norms (pluralistic, legalistic and at least nominally democratic) and their behavior abroad (brutal, authoritarian, and, at its worst moments, downright fascistic.) It's a kind of imperial adaptation of what historian Pierre van den Berghe labeled 'herrenvolk democracy' -- in which egalitarian norms within the privileged class or race are combined with paternal and/or repressive treatment of subject peoples.

The American political system has always had a strong herrenvolk tinge to it, and while the branches (such as segregation) have been largely lopped off at home, the cultural roots are alive and well in the populist conservative tradition -- and, by extension, in conservative-dominated institutions like the U.S. military.

More than most American institutions, the Army has managed to erase the old racial herrenvolk distinctions. But it hasn't, and probably can't, remove the underlying cultural roots -- which, for better or worse, are embedded in what we now loosely (and rather inaccurately) tend to think of as "red state" values. In a place like Iraq, in the middle of a dirty war, those roots are free to send up fresh xenophobic shoots. To the soldiers captured at play in those photographs, the Iraqis are obviously just untermenschen -- or, to use the American equivalent, niggers.

What gives this story its special Orwellian quality is the fact that herrenvolk democracy -- or, more accurately, herrenvolk imperialism -- isn't an officially sanctioned ideology any more, and thus can't be acknowledged by the official media. I think that's why the The corporate press's reticence has gone beyond its usual deference to bureaucratic officialdom or fear of being criticized for not "backing the troops." It's also doing its bit to preserve the fiction of splendid isolation -- the psychological barrier that keeps the "good" America of hot dogs, baseball and the Bill of Rights separated from the "bad" America of fortress embassies, arrogant proconsuls and war crimes. A form of homeland defense, in other words.

There have been some limited exceptions to this particular brand of imperial self-censorship. Both the Washington Post and the L.A. Times have at least touched on the dark questions -- like the identity and role of the private contractors who supervised the interrogations at Abu Ghraib (leave it to the Rumsfeld Pentagon to privatize torture!) and the mounting evidence that the conduct documented in the snapshots was essentially standard operating procedure, even if the photos themselves were not. The Houston Chronicle even had the temerity to run a Reuters story that mentioned, albeit only in passing, Amnesty International's official statement on the incident:

Amnesty International has received frequent reports of torture or other ill-treatment by Coalition Forces during the past year. Detainees have reported being routinely subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment during arrest and detention. Many have told Amnesty International that they were tortured and ill-treated by US and UK troops during interrogation. Methods often reported include prolonged sleep deprivation; beatings; prolonged restraint in painful positions, sometimes combined with exposure to loud music; prolonged hooding; and exposure to bright lights. Virtually none of the allegations of torture or ill-treatment has been adequately investigated by the authorities.

These exceptions to the rule, however, have been both rare and largely half-hearted -- buried at the bottom of long stories, in many cases tacked on to unrelated reports about the Marines bugging out of Fallujah or the latest machinations in the limited sovereignty puppet show. By and large, American journalists don't seem to understand what all the fuss is about, or why the rest of the world is so unwilling to accept the usual Pentagon lies. Given the kind of feedback CBS is getting from its viewers, it's an understandable blind spot.

The White House, on the other hand, at least appears to have a slight clue. With the Coalition of the Willing now down to the Coaliti, and still dropping letters, the administration has suddenly discovered the importance of a decent respect for the opinions of mankind -- as opposed to the popular prejudices of registered Mississippi Republicans. Bush's handlers even trotted him out this afternoon to say how "disgusted" he is by the whole affair. But note the almost lawyerly wording:

Yes, I shared a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated. Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people. That's not the way we do things in America. (emphasis added)

But of course, the Abu Ghraib prison isn't in America -- which is really the whole point.

Check out this Morning News interview with Ari Weinzweig, author of "Zingermans Guide to Good Eating" (a recent purchase of mine).

I really like this quote: (when asked what cliched phrase/description he would drop from the troves of food writing): "Just one. The emphasis on the word 'quality' when it's used without any definition. On its own the word has no real meaning. That's the one that's on my mind right now."

[The Amateur Gourmet]

NY Times: Court Hears Case on U.S. Detainees. The Bush administration yielded no ground before the Supreme Court on Wednesday in arguing that the open-ended military detention of United States citizens as enemy combatants, without criminal charges or access to lawyers, was justified both in law and as policy.

The administration's claim here -- that the president and his aides alone can decide to lock an American citizen away forever is a claim to their right, and that of future presidents', to be tyrants. It's incredible that this is even thinkable. But our collective fear from the Sept. 11 attacks, and Congress' absolute spinelessness in defending the Constitution it swore to uphold, has given Bush what he so plainly wants: the opportunity to be the president who asserts, and gets, absolute power. Absolute power is always abused. Always. This kind of absolute power -- making leaders the prosecutor, judge and jury -- is the lynchpin of tyranny. If the court upholds this abuse of liberty, it will be assisting in a crime: If this assault on the Constitution succeeds -- if the Constitution has truly become meaningless on something so fundamental -- then we will have destroyed America to save it. The stakes are that high. NOTE: Slate's coverage of the court arguments yesterday has a smart additional feature. There are inserts linking to the audio of specific exchanges.

(sciencedaily.com)

 

Next time you're on a phone call with a friend, or relative, or telemarketer, try augmenting the experience of communication with your online, Instant Audience. Highlight moments of shared significance with a chorus of "ooohs" or "wows," applause or laugh

 

 

E.J. Dionne: Stooping Low to Smear Kerry. "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" It was the classic question posed by Joseph Welch to Sen. Joseph McCarthy 50 years ago during the Red-hunter's hearings investigating the Army for alleged communist influence. With his query, Welch, the Army's special counsel, began the undoing of McCarthy. Unfortunately, the question needs to be asked again. It needs to be posed to shamelessly partisan Republicans who can't stand the fact that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are facing off against a Democrat who fought and was wounded in Vietnam. Cheney said in 1989 that he didn't go to Vietnam because "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service." While Kerry risked his life, Bush got himself into the National Guard.

Ian's Shoelace Site  [via thebooge.ca < Riley Dog]

 

It’s taken me a long time to recognize how bad my memory is. Part of the problem is that I forget how much I forget. There’s an obvious paradox in this. To know that your memory is bad means remembering, if nothing else, this fact. However it does not mean remembering, in the extreme case, any actual instances of forgetting. I know this because the extreme case applies to me: I have trouble remembering the specific times I’ve failed to remember. What I remember instead, as a kind of placeholder, is the fact of my forgetfulness.

(SciAm)

 

Heartbreaker
As an overview of everything that has gone wrong with the Bush administration's Iraq venture, Peter Galbraith's New York Review of Books piece -- "How to Get Out of Iraq" -- makes for a captivating read: dispassionate and clear, informed by personal experience but not visibly settling quarrels, it's a sobering and saddening account of all the lost opportunities and botched enterprises that are now coming home to roost for us in Iraq. All Americans, those who supported and those who opposed Bush's "war of choice," are now stuck with a losing hand. Throwing Bush out of office in November might help reboot some of the processes his administration has trashed, like our foundering international alliances; but it can't turn the clock back in Iraq, where, as Galbraith outlines, we have set the stage for a disastrous civil war.

Meanwhile, bizarrely and appallingly, the president keeps gleefully throwing away what few cards we have left. Arabs don't trust us? Hey, it's the perfect time to tell Israel that those West Bank settlements are okay, after all, never mind what our diplomatic position has been all these decades!

Atkinsians know that the devil has a name and that it is High Fructose Coorn Syrup, Elevator of Insulin and Most High Gycemic. It's validating, therefore, to see some sciency-type news about how bad corn syrup is for us, how it's creating a nation of diabetics, and how it accounts for 10 percent of the average American's daily calorie intake. Yow.

"This shows the increase in the past 20 years is almost exclusively carbohydrates and certainly corn syrup consumption has increased dramatically."

Gross said he was not "picking on the corn syrup industry," but added, "It is hard to ignore the fact that 20 percent of our carbohydrates are coming from corn syrup -- 10 percent of our total calories."

Link (via Electrolite)

 

April 26, 2004

Whoever has the misfortune to be elected to the White House in November is going to preside over four years of shocking turbulence in world affairs and will be largely helpless in the face of such events as the wobbling of world oil markets, the tanking of hallucinated finance, asymetrical jihadi terrorism, increasing climate abnormalities, and the circulation of desperate third world populations. Though I am a registered Democrat, I often think it would be better if George W. Bush continued in office, in part because I doubt that Mr. Kerry would be any more effective in the face of these disorders, but also because it would put an end to the dominant Republicanism of the past 20 years as neatly as the Civil War killed off the feckless Whigs.

The only hitch with this scenario is that both the Republicans and Democrats look like the Whigs of 1860. Both parties today are blind to the greatest problem facing American civilization: our over-investment in oil-and-gas-dependent technology, and the looming depletion of those primary resources. Neither party has the courage to tell the public the truth: that the suburban dream is coming to an end and that we have to change the way we live and work in this country fundamentally. Both parties promote the wishful myth that a high-tech miracle ("the hydrogen economy") is going to rescue America from the rigors and hardships of a post-cheap-oil world.

The Republicans may be marginally more reckless and dangerous since so many of them subscribe to an apocalyptic brand of Christianity that appears to welcome world cataclysm -- either that, or they are pretending to be pious. Both parties are hostage to predatory corporatism as embodied in Enron and WalMart. Bill Clinton didn't show any more enthusiasm for enforcing the anti-trust laws than Dubya Bush. While the Republicans may be crazy in matters of religion, the Democrats have long given up on the important social issues of wealth inequity for a craven preoccupation with race pandering under the banners of "diversity" and "multiculturalism." Neither party is interested in defending our immigration statutes. For all that, I regard the Democratic party as marginally more capable of re-adapting to the terrible realities of this new century. At least they are not waiting for "the rapture."

But they may have to feel four more years of pain -- along with the rest of the country -- to get where they need to go and find candidates who are capable of leading the public instead of just following in the their sleepwalking footsteps.

Yesterday the president's longtime handler and current campaign advisor Karen Hughes was on CNN attacking John Kerry's military service record and subsequent work as a Vietnam war protester. But before getting lost in the details of Hughes' attacks, let's draw...

 

Powerball is the poster child for the Multi-State Lottery Association (MUSL). It is currently played every Wednesday and Saturday in 30 states by millions of people who are dumb enough to think that they can actually win the jackpot. The truth of the matter is that somebody will win the jackpot... just not you. And it's not because the odds are against you. It's because you don't know how to successfully play the lottery. Inside, I'll go over winning techniques from "how to pick winning numbers" to "how many tickets to buy" and "which rituals have the best payoff". I also go over a sure-fire way to win the jackpot. Please gamble responsibly. If you decide to gamble irresponsibly, smoke while you do it so that you at least look cool.

 

ABC News is currently running a web headline which reads: "Medal Dispute, EXCLUSIVE: Did Kerry lie about Vietnam War medals?" Here's a question. Can someone tell me the last time ABC used the "L" word about President Bush? Or is...

 

[SFGate]

 

The one with my private meditation lesson.

 

They deserve a day of their own. . .

I know that you believe that you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant. Robert McCloskey, State Department spokesman (attributed)...

 

When I went to lunch with AJC food critic John Kessler the first time out, I took the opportunity to ask him a penetrating question. The question went like this: "So, Mr. Kessler, let's let the cat out of the bag: what's your secret junk food?"

"My secret junk food?"

"You know," I continued, "what do you eat that's not-so-gourmet? Like Twinkies? Or Hohos?"

"Oh I see," he responded thoughtfully. "That's easy. Supermarket sushi."

What's funny about that, I think, is that for many Americans supermarket sushi is the epitome of gourmet dining. In any case, it's rather fascinating to think about the cultural journey sushi took from Japan, to hole-in-the-wall sushi joints in America, and finally to our supermarkets. I took this photograph tonight at Whole Foods and I think it says a lot about how the American machine takes something genuine and exotic and spins it into the ordinary and mundane. Now supermarket sushi is--in the eyes of John Kessler, and many others--just your average American junk food.

The LA Times keeps looking into the endlessly unseemly behavior of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and today runs this remarkable account of how Scalia's "2002 ruling on redistricting cleared the way for hunting partner Rep. Charles W. 'Chip' Pickering to retain his seat in Congress."

In Bushworld, it's their reality. We just live and die in it.

 

The occupation never recovered from the early blunders the administration made in handling the situation in Iraq.

 

Long ago I asked why on earth no one seemed to care any more about the missing Bush Military records. Now comes CJR Campaign Desk: Spin Buster to ask that question again.

Campaign Desk has been curious for a while now about what happened to the story of President Bush’s Vietnam-era service in the Texas Air National Guard. After the White House’s February 13 Friday night data dump of all assembled records, there was little press follow-up. We never read anything that sorted through the details of the over 300 documents released to figure out what, exactly, happened back then; all we ever got was a few pieces noting that little of the information was new, and listing still-unanswered questions.

Why, exactly, did the media drop the matter?

Campaign Desk thinks it has part of the answer,

In part, no doubt, it’s because some of the details seem to come down to personal memories. But that doesn’t strike us as an excuse for throwing in the towel and failing to clarify a controversial story that the press had resuscitated itself (largely courtesy of Bush’s “Meet the Press” interview on February 8).

In other words, Campaign Desk is mystified.

I’m not mystified. Stupefied. Incredulous. But not mystified. See, there’s no Democrat banging the gong on this (and if there were s/he’d be attacked by the press for being shrill). And the press is just not up to doing the hard work itself. Haven’t been since they became ‘professionals’ instead of working stiffs.

Plus, who’s got the story for the agenda-setting New York Times? Why none other than Katherine Seeyle.

MapMachine.

 

Understanding polls. For those of us who slept through statistics.

 

This is the scariest thing this administration has done. Bush has said this conflict will go on for decades. If the Executive branch has carte blanche to imprison anyone, citizen or not, without any Constitutional safeguards as long as this conflict lasts, it could very well lead to the end of American freedom as we know it. The Executive branch gets to define how long the conflict is, who is involved, who gets imprisoned without benefit of a lawyer, due process or any basic human rights. People can just disappear. Is this the sort of power we want to invest in ANY human being? We know how great the temptations can be. We have seen it again and again throughout history. We fought the British because they had many of these same despotic laws. If the Supreme Court allows these principles to stand, one day the US will be the subject of a similar revolution, because we will have turned our backs on the very foundations that provide us with ANY moral peak to promulgate our views. Only shear force of arms would then allow us to continue to have any kind of say in the world politic. That is surely the path of decline and failure. In the long run, ideas are more important than weapons. Right does make might, in contrast to the path these principles will take us down. I hope it is not one this country will travel. Unfortunately, I am not optimistic. It takes courage to live in a free, democratic society. That is why so many of our Founding Fathers provided so many important words describing freedom, liberty and tyranny:

 

Red vs. Blue and Political Self-Segregation:

The Austin-American Statesman&rsquo;s Bill Bishop begins a series of articles on the increasing political segregation across the US; a variety of segregation that has surprisingly increased while others (for example, racial) have declined. Timothy Noah of Slate has some thoughts. For background, it's been discussed elsewhere that the traditional 2000 election red vs. blue state map is misleading and that a gradated county map might be more enlightening. Here's one. Here's an analysis with a different take on the data. And here are some other interesting cartograms of that election's results. [Alternative Links Inside]

 

There are many reasons I love the Internet, but the fact that weblogs like Louise Garston's exist would have to be one of them. "Nice cup of tea and a sit down" is the Internet hub for cake, tea, and biscuits. That's it. Period. Simple. It's totally sincere and sweet, and full of breaking news about which flavor of jam is most popular for discriminating toast aficionados, newly resurrected teas, and so on. Sometimes, Louise posts tea-and-biscuit related art, like a portrait of "Two little old space-alien ladies having a nice sit down." At present, Louise is pretty worked up about the fact that the "iconic" biscuit known as Tim Tams have recently become available to UK consumers, after a long and ardurous struggle. "Tescos sell them now," says Louise. "Hooray, you have to tell everyone, they're fantastic! Enjoy!"
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