“The victim is drowning”

Go read this important posting at Small Wars Journal, by Malcolm Nance, a former Master Instructor and Chief of Training at the US Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) in San Diego. “I know the waterboard personally and intimately,” he writes. “SERE staff were required undergo the waterboard at its fullest. I was no [...]

The honeymoon is over

 
Apparently U.S. attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey is having trouble figuring out if water boarding is a form of torture. As he recently told the Senate Judiciary Committee:
I don’t think that I can responsibly talk about any technique here because — (pause) — of the very — I’m not going to discuss and I should not [...]

Tesseractia

On the never-aging topic of From Here to Eternity (see longer post below), a quick pointer to a superb essay on “the manliness of Montgomery Clift” by Self-Styled Siren, who writes:
It’s often observed that the post-war Method actors redefined masculinity. It is more precise to say that Montgomery Clift (who was not entirely a Method [...]

Revolutionaries of the international system

 
In a week when President Bush has taken to describing the stakes in his confrontation with Iran as “World War III”, and Vice President Cheney warning Iran of “serious consequences” (one of the key phrases in the march to war against Iraq) if it “stays on its present course”, it’s worth reading Fareed Zakaria’s latest Newsweek column:
The American [...]

Devil’s island

 
Go read Scott Horton on the role of Central Intelligence Agency black sites (particularly the one located on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean) and torture in the ongoing confrontation between CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden and CIA Inspector General John Helgerson. Read this October 11 New York Times article for some useful background, [...]

Be quiet, Prew

 
British actress Deborah Kerr, dead at 86 — a sad fact which gives me an excuse to write not about Kerr but about From Here to Eternity (yes, this is how writers think about the death of people they don’t know personally — as a wonderful opportunity to write more). Its 1953 release date marked [...]

Without warning

George Santayana wasn’t thinking of history but of the progress of human consciousness when he wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (From volume 1 of The Life of Reason, 1905) Nevertheless, his striking phrase was taken up by generations of enthusiasts as a justification for the study of history, [...]

Points on the tesseract

First, in rampant defiance of Dennis Perrin’s kind welcome to the blogosphere [why a sphere? why not a tesseract? - ed.], in which he identified me as a key source for “your high-end cultural needs” — and thus, by the way, putting me under instant and enormous pressure to actually become capable of serving needs of that [...]

And by “you” I mean “me”

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made some rather interesting comments in a press roundtable today after concluding meetings with Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov and Minister of Defense Anatoliy Serdyukov. Rice is in Moscow with Defense Secretary Robert Gates to discuss Iran, missile defense, and other matters. She also met with eight human rights activists at [...]

Reclamation

One of the things I like most about nature is its patient opportunism. Although the presence of human beings invariably pushes animals into the peripheral spaces of our own world — excepting, of course, the impossible-to-intimidate raccoons that have made the Greater Toronto Area their haute-garbage dining lounge, and who consider us no more than trash-bag-carrying [...]