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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 exception. I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people.” Nance demolishes the media myth that water boarding is merely “simulated drowning”:
Waterboarding is not a simulation. Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word.
Waterboarding is a controlled drowning that, in the American model, occurs under the watch of a doctor, a psychologist, an interrogator and a trained strap-in/strap-out team. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning. How much the victim is to drown depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim’s face) and the obstinacy of the subject. A team doctor watches the quantity of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs which show when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience, to horrific suffocating punishment to the final death spiral.
Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of black out and expiration - usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death. Its lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threaten with its use again and again.
Nance is outraged at America’s loss of honour in condoning the use of such torture, and warns that President Bush’s policies have validated and legitimized this torture technique for foreign governments and terrorist groups:
There may never again be a chance that Americans will benefit from the shield of outrage and public opinion when our future enemy uses torture. Brutal interrogation, flash murder and extreme humiliation of American citizens, agents and members of the armed forces may now be guaranteed because we have mindlessly, but happily, broken the seal on the Pandora’s box of indignity, cruelty and hatred in the name of protecting America. To defeat Bin Laden many in this administration have openly embraced the methods of Hitler, Pinochet, Pol Pot, Galtieri and Saddam Hussein.
His is a powerful and disturbing article.
Another voice. In an article based in part on Nance’s posting, The Independent quotes journalist Henri Alleg, who was subjected to water boarding by French forces in Algeria in 1957:
Soldiers strapped him over a plank, wrapped his head in cloth and positioned it beneath a running tap. He recalled: “The rag was soaked rapidly. Water flowed everywhere: in my mouth, in my nose, all over my face. But for a while I could still breathe in some small gulps of air. I tried, by contracting my throat, to take in as little water as possible and to resist suffocation by keeping air in my lungs for as long as I could. But I couldn’t hold on for more than a few moments. I had the impression of drowning, and a terrible agony, that of death itself, took possession of me. In spite of myself, all the muscles of my body struggled uselessly to save me from suffocation. In spite of myself, the fingers of both my hands shook uncontrollably. ‘That’s it! He’s going to talk,’ said a voice.
The water stopped running and they took away the rag. I was able to breathe. In the gloom, I saw the lieutenants and the captain, who, with a cigarette between his lips, was hitting my stomach with his fist to make me throw out the water I had swallowed.”
CIA director Michael Hayden has claimed that interrogation methods inducing the fear of imminent death have been used on only 30 suspects held by the United States. If that is true, then there are, at minimum, 30 war crimes charges waiting to be lodged against the director of the CIA and other high officials of the United States government, including the president himself. America should brook no delay; she has her honour to save.
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 — I’m sorry I can’t discuss, and I think it would be irresponsible of me to discuss particular techniques with which I am not familiar when there are people who are using coercive techniques and who are being authorized to use coercive techniques. And for me to say something that is going to put their careers or freedom at risk simply because I want to be congenial, I don’t think it would be responsible of me to do that.
Like the nominee, are you “not familiar with” water boarding as a coercive technique? It’s the sixth of a set of “enhanced interrogation techniques” instituted by the CIA in early 2002. As described to ABC News in 2005 by current and former intelligence officers, these are:
1. The Attention Grab: The interrogator forcefully grabs the shirt front of the prisoner and shakes him.
2. Attention Slap: An open-handed slap aimed at causing pain and triggering fear.
3. The Belly Slap: A hard open-handed slap to the stomach. The aim is to cause pain, but not internal injury. Doctors consulted advised against using a punch, which could cause lasting internal damage.
4. Long Time Standing: This technique is described as among the most effective. Prisoners are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are effective in yielding confessions.
5. The Cold Cell: The prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees. Throughout the time in the cell the prisoner is doused with cold water.
6. Water Boarding: The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner’s face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.
To clarify his thinking, Mukasey should read Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman at Balkinization, who writes:
Waterboarding is a paradigmatic example of torture. It is inconceivable that anyone involved in drafting, negotiating, signing, ratifying or enacting the Torture Act or Common Article 3 would have thought otherwise. Naturally, then, the U.S. itself has long considered waterboarding to be torture and a war crime — there was no dispute about this from at least 1901 until 2002 — and if our enemies used such a technique on U.S. military personnel, no one would, in public debate, deny that such a technique is a form of unlawful torture.
As the U.S. administration and its cabinet nominees retreat into the most hair-splitting forms of legalism and moral relativism in order to preserve the use of these techniques, and thus too the country’s growing international profile as a torture state, both the American news media and consumer television are starting to acknowledge that there is a serious issue to be dealt with here. To focus on TV, the most recent episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, “Harm“, grapples with the issue of U.S. military torture in Iraq, including the long-term psychological and physiological damage caused by ”enhanced interrogation” techniques like hooding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and hypothermia. A remarkably timely bonus is that the plot also revolves around an ethically-challenged private military company (that’s “mercenary outfit” to you).
For its part, ER last season (in “The Honeymoon is Over“) introduced a patient who suffers badly from post-traumatic stress disorder and is addicted to codeine. It emerges that he was a translator for Army intelligence in Iraq, and that he has witnessed countless acts of torture; he is now haunted by the detainees’ cries of innocence which he was required to translate.
Kyle: “‘Please don’t hurt me. I’ve done nothing wrong. God have mercy.’ I must have translated that a million times in Iraq, man. It didn’t matter. They didn’t listen to me any more than they listened to prisoners.”
There’s something good, something hopeful, in this as yet small trend — an expression of the civilized part of the American soul, perhaps, stirring itself after a long and fevered sleep. I desperately hope it continues to grow, because the more the American public is confronted with the reality of government-administered torture, the less it will be able to avoid choosing sides in the debate.
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 actor anyway) expanded the definition. Forever afterward, a man on screen would seem half-formed if the actor could not suggest some sort of inner life, no matter how much derring-do was shown. And exposing that inner life takes nerve, nerve that Clift had in abundance.
Once you’ve read that and have developed an enlarged understanding of what real acting’s all about, here’s a posting of mine on Stephen Fry’s recent contribution to the world of blogging. The post is over on sans everything, a blog that’s been on the roll here for weeks now, but which I’ve never formally introduced to readers. Well, I’m introducing it now: sans everything covers subjects ranging from politics to philosophy to comics to animal rights to the media, and it’s written, more importantly, by three superb Canadian journalist/authors: John Haffner, Jeet Heer, and A. M. Lamey – oh, and me. Do drop by, and leave behind lots of incisive comments.
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 discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is “like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism.” For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.
Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland’s and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?
All true, and well said. But something in the construction of Zakaria’s sentences intrigues me. In the second paragraph he sets up a powerful argument based on a structure of parallelism: sentences 2 and 3 tell us about the size of Iran’s economy and its defense budget, and about that country’s propensity to invade others. Likewise, sentence 4 tells us about the size of the U.S. economy and its defense budget, while sentence 5… Oh wait. Sentence 5 talks about alliances against Iran. Zakaria has failed to complete the parallel construction with an observation of the United States’ propensity to invade others. Now, I won’t speculate as to why this might be — I frankly can’t imagine why the readers of Newsweek would find such an observation off-putting — but as a good Samaritan I can at least attempt to complete it for him.
Maybe “attempt” is too humble a word, for it’s really quite easy: “The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. It has not invaded a country since 2003.” Hmmm. It’s structurally perfect, but somehow it fails to help the reader properly compare the records of both the United States and Iran — after all, if in its entire history the United States invaded only Iraq, its score for the time period defined as late-18th-century-to-early 21st-century would be 1, which of course is only 1 worse than Iran’s score of zero. Knowing America’s true score is important, so let’s compare.
Iranian offensive actions against other countries since late 1700s (according to Zakaria):
- None
American offensive actions against other countries since late 1700s (selected examples only, based on data posted by the U.S. Naval Historical Center and Reed & Wright’s U.S. Military Chronology):
- 1806: Invasion of Mexico
- 1810: Invasion of West Florida (Spanish territory)
- 1812: Invasion of East Florida (Spanish territory)
- 1812: Invasion of Canada (British territory)
- 1813: Invasion of West Florida (Spanish territory)
- 1816: Invasion of remainder of the Floridas
- 1818: Seizure of the Oregon territory
- 1854: Bombardment of Nicaragua
- 1857: Seizure of Utah territory
- 1866: Raid into Mexico
- 1866: Punitive attack on China
- 1867: Partial occupation of Nicaragua
- 1867: Punitive attack on Formosa
- 1871: Punitive attack on Korea
- 1893: Invasion of Hawaii
- 1898: War against Spain
- 1899: Invasion of the Philippine Islands
- 1906: Invasion of Cuba
- 1918: Invasion of Russia
- 1926: Invasion of Nicaragua
- 1961: Invasion of Cuba (by proxy)
- 1965: Invasion of Dominican Republic
- 1970: Invasion of Cambodia
- 1983: Invasion of Grenada
- 1986: Bombardment of Libya
- 1989: Invasion of Panama
- 1998: Bombardment of Afghanistan and Sudan
- 1999: Bombardment of Yugoslavia
- 1993-2001: Bombardment of Iraq (various occasions)
- 2001: Invasion of Afghanistan
- 2003: Invasion of Iraq
As of this year, the score stands at United States: 31, Iran: zip. Given this record, the only thing Cheney should be able to accuse the Iranians of is geopolitical lethargy.
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, and as further reading, Scott’s post links to a Guardian article on an investigation into Diego Garcia now being initiated by an all-party foreign affairs committee of British MPs. A couple of paragraphs not quoted in Scott’s post give the grim flavour:
One [additional] possibility which the foreign affairs committee may explore is that suspects have been held on a prison ship off the coast of Diego Garcia. The UN special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, has said that he has heard from reliable sources that the US has held prisoners on ships in the Indian Ocean. There have also been second-hand accounts from detainees at Guantánamo of prisoners being held on US naval vessels.
One detainee told a researcher from Reprieve: “One of my fellow prisoners in Guantánamo was at sea on an American ship with about 50 others before coming to Guantánamo. He told me that there were about 50 other people on the ship; they were all closed off in the bottom. The people detained on the ship were beaten even more severely than in Guantánamo.”
Reprieve (mentioned above) is a British charity that ”provides frontline investigation and legal representation to prisoners denied justice by powerful governments across the world”. Its submission to the foreign affairs committee on the question of human rights abuses in British overseas territories can be found here.
Also quoted in the Guardian article is “Andrew Tyrie, Tory MP for Chichester and a campaigner against the CIA’s use of detention without trial”. Tyrie established in 2005 the All Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition; the group’s own submission to the committee can be found on its website.
And if you simply can’t face such depressing reading on a Friday night, by all means schedule it for Saturday evening instead, and in the meantime read Jeet Heer’s analysis of what “meritocracy” means to the Podhoretz household.
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 the end of the Korean War and the first year of the Eisenhower era, a time that American culture now mythologizes as a kind of uncorrupted and naive utopia of family values and patriotism, the Greatest Generation having settled down to raise their children (who would soon ungratefully grow up into the flower children of the late 1960s) and enjoy prosperous middle-management careers at large manufacturing concerns, thin-tied and grey-suited to a man.
Dealing with themes of adultery, brutality, drunkenness, prostitution, and murder, all of them set in and around a Hawaiian military base in 1941, From Here to Eternity reminds us that the past is just as complex — and just as real– a country as the present. This was no avant garde production intended to dissent from mainstream American life. Winning eight Academy Awards, the most for any film since Gone With the Wind, this was mainstream American life. In its sense of disillusion and of the difficulties faced by ordinary soldiers, it stands alongside films like The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), which focused on the psychological and familial troubles of veterans returning from the war.
A few scenes in particular come to mind. When Private Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) struggles to explain to a warm-hearted prostitute (Donna Reed) why he plans to stay in the Army for life, despite the mental and physical battering he is receiving from his barracks for refusing to box for the regimental team, he sounds like someone trapped in a violent marriage. His eyes are open, he knows his devotion is a one-way street, but he cannot conceive of an alternative.
Alma: Gee, you must hate the Army.
Prewitt: No, I don’t hate the Army.
Alma: Yeah, but look what it’s doing to you.
Prewitt: I love the Army.
Alma: But it sure doesn’t love you.
Prewitt: A man loves a thing. That don’t mean it’s gotta love him back.
Private Angelo Maggio (a young and scrawny Frank Sinatra), by contrast, is a scrapper — but all the same he is doomed. Picked on and abused by the thuggish stockade sergeant “Fatso” Judson (Ernest Borgnine), Maggio faces him down in a bar fight. Humiliated, Fatso warns him: “Tough monkey. Guys like you end up in the stockade sooner or later. Someday you’ll walk in. I’ll be waitin’. I’ll show you a couple of things.”
An undisciplined soldier, Maggio is eventually sentenced to six months in the stockade for being AWOL on guard duty. As Maggio enters the sergeant’s office, Fatso sees him and is flushed with a gloating victory. ”Hello, tough monkey,” he says. As the scene ends, Fatso picks up his billy club.
After a month of beatings, Maggio escapes the stockade and finds Prewitt, only to die in his arms. As he fades, he gasps out:
Fatso done it, Prew. He likes to whack me in the gut. He asked me if it hurts and I spit at him like always. Only yesterday it was bad. He hit me. He hit me. He hit me. Then I-I had to get out, Prew. I had to get out…They’re gonna send me to the stockade, Prew? Watch out for Fatso. Watch out for Fatso. He’ll try to crack ya. And if they put ya in a hole, don’t yell. Don’t make a sound. You’ll still be yellin’ when they come to take ya out. Just lay there. Just lay there. And be quiet, Prew.
As the film ends, what many Americans now call “The Good War” is reaching Pearl Harbor in the form of Japanese planes, itself spawning another myth about good and evil which would rapidly sand down all the hard edges of the time as it really was, leaving it, like the Eisenhower era, a shiny caricature of itself.
A final note. The movie’s title comes from a book by James Jones, which in turn got its title from a poem by Rudyard Kipling, “Gentlemen-Rankers”; the poem, appropriately, depicts the dissolute and jaded military life of another era.
Gentlemen-Rankers
TO the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned,
To my brethren in their sorrow overseas,
Sings a gentleman of England cleanly bred, machinely crammed,
And a trooper of the Empress, if you please.
Yes, a trooper of the forces who has run his own six horses,
And faith he went the pace and went it blind,
And the world was more than kin while he held the ready tin,
But to-day the Sergeant’s something less than kind.
We’re poor little lambs who’ve lost our way,
Baa! Baa! Baa!
We’re little black sheep who’ve gone astray,
Baa–aa–aa!
Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree,
Damned from here to Eternity,
God ha’ mercy on such as we,
Baa! Yah! Bah!Oh, it’s sweet to sweat through stables, sweet to empty kitchen slops,
And it’s sweet to hear the tales the troopers tell,
To dance with blowzy housemaids at the regimental hops
And thrash the cad who says you waltz too well.
Yes, it makes you cock-a-hoop to be “Rider” to your troop,
And branded with a blasted worsted spur,
When you envy, O how keenly, one poor Tommy living cleanly
Who blacks your boots and sometimes calls you “Sir”.If the home we never write to, and the oaths we never keep,
And all we know most distant and most dear,
Across the snoring barrack-room return to break our sleep,
Can you blame us if we soak ourselves in beer?
When the drunken comrade mutters and the great guard-lantern gutters
And the horror of our fall is written plain,
Every secret, self-revealing on the aching white-washed ceiling,
Do you wonder that we drug ourselves from pain?We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth,
We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung,
And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth.
God help us, for we knew the worst too young!
Our shame is clean repentance for the crime that brought the sentence,
Our pride it is to know no spur of pride,
And the Curse of Reuben holds us till an alien turf enfolds us
And we die, and none can tell Them where we died.
We’re poor little lambs who’ve lost our way,
Baa! Baa! Baa!
We’re little black sheep who’ve gone astray,
Baa–aa–aa!
Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree,
Damned from here to Eternity,
God ha’ mercy on such as we,
Baa! Yah! Bah!- Rudyard Kipling, Barrack Room Ballads (1895)
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, its implicit promise (under this new interpretation) being that historical awareness would help modern societies avoid making the “mistakes” committed by earlier societies. And in our own times, when a world war between the major powers might easily kill one or two hundred million people, such a promise has been especially appealing.
Yet wars have continued to start and sputter out following their own merry agendas, and it seems that no amount of liberal arts graduates has been able to protect us from our own worst foreign policy instincts. Worse, it turns out that historical memory has not enlightened but rather befuddled us. Every foreign policy challenge is now presented to us by savvy governments and narrative-addicted media as one in which the approved policy is fully justified by a powerful historical analogy. Negotiating with Iran is like appeasing Hitler at Munich. Fighting Sunni insurgents is like fighting the Viet Cong (if you’re opposed to the war), or like fighting Malayan guerrillas (if you support the war). September 11, 2001 is like December 7, 1941. Conservative historian Victor Davis Hanson is a master of this technique: in his recent and deceptively-titled book A War Like No Other, he manages to compare the Peloponnesian War to no less than four modern conflicts (see my review here).
In this context, a recent article by political scientist Dominic Tierney is worth reading. Published in this past summer’s edition of the Journal of Cold War Studies, Tierney’s piece examines the role that moral analogies (as opposed to merely strategic analogies) played in President Kennedy’s decision-making during the Cuban missile crisis, particularly the Pearl Harbor analogy. When the crisis began, the president’s military advisors pushed hard for a surprise air attack on the missile installations, with Robert Kennedy advocating an invasion to take care of the Cuban problem once and for all: “just get into it, and get it over with.” After the second meeting, Deputy CIA Director General Marshall Carter raised Pearl Harbor for the first time, not as a moral argument but as a warning against the logic of escalation. “this comin’ in there on Pearl Harbor [with a surprise attack] just frightens the hell out of me as to what goes beyond… You go in there with a surprise attack; you put out all the missiles. This isn’t the end; this is the beginning, I think.”
By the next day, however, Pearl Harbor had turned into a moral analogy. CIA Director John McCone opposed a surprise air strike by arguing that “the United States should not act without warning and thus be forced to live with a ‘Pearl Harbor indictment’ for the indefinite future.” This use of the analogy recurred again and again during the next few days of discussion, not in any sophisticated or analytical way, writes Tierney, but as a moral reference point of deceit and evil - it was, after all, the date that would live in infamy. Under Secretary of State George Ball finally defined the problem as one of national identity: “I think that a course of action where we strike without warning is like Pearl Harbor. . . . It’s . . . it’s the kind of conduct that’s such that one might expect of the Soviet Union. It is not conduct that one expects of the United States.”
Like other Americans of their generation, both John and Robert Kennedy had been profoundly affected by Pearl Harbor, and the analogy, Tierney argues, not only influenced the president’s ultimate decision to rule out a surprise attack, but even caused Robert Kennedy to change “from being a hawk to a dove”. Having forsworn the element of surprise, the committee soon realized that a naval blockade was the only realistic remaining option. (Fiercely opposing this idea, Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay unsuccessfully lobbed an analogy of his own - Munich - into the debate.)
As we know, the blockade policy led to a happy ending. But Tierney points out that there was only a weak logical relationship between the nature of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the proposed surprise attack on Cuba, and the analogy that linked the two. Dean Acheson, who criticized the analogy at the time, summarized his own arguments in 1969:
[A]t Pearl Harbor the Japanese without provocation or warning attacked our fleet thousands of miles from their shores. In the present situation, the Soviet Union had installed ninety miles from our coast - while denying they were doing so - offensive weapons that were capable of lethal injury to the United States. This they were doing a hundred and forty years after the warning given in [the Monroe Doctrine]. . . . How much warning was necessary to avoid the stigma of “Pearl Harbor in reverse”?
Analogies are tremendously powerful tools. Used carefully, they can aid in comprehension, stimulate fruitful comparative analysis, and generate innovative ideas. But they are seldom used carefully - almost never, by politicians - and so cry out for a particularly high degree of skepticism from listeners. If we can’t get out of the habit of taking analogies at face value, those who can remember the past and wilfully misapply it to the present shall inherit the earth. What’s left of it, anyway.
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 kind (Ah well. Better go find my copy of Brewer’s, I guess) – I offer you a glimpse of something which is clearly not high culture at all. But on the other hand, it’s clearly not low; it’s, well, it’s a cartoon. But a damn good one — that is, if you think that the style and mindspace of Jules Feiffer mixed with a computer science convention sounds like fun. ‘Nuff said: via Blue Girl in a Red State, it’s xkcd (”a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”).
Second, for those not yet exposed to his blog, Bob Harris’s site is well worth visiting regularly. Go there for his funny and highly intelligent commentary, but stay for his pudus (you’ll find out). He wins extra points because of his unconcealed soft spot for Canada — “a country where wars aren’t rushed into, health care and education are truly considered public issues of real import, and the environment is more than just a place to get and put junk”.
Bless his American soul, he has seen the light.
Lastly, in this happy season of Nobel Prizes, I want to link to a beautiful poem written by the winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature (awarded “for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality”), Wislawa Szymborska. Jon Schwarz drew his readers’ (and my) attention to it today as his favorite poem (excellent taste, that man), and the poem itself, “Reality Demands”, can be seen on Mike Gerber’s site here. And to encourage you to go read that poem, here’s another by Szymborska, on an all too timely (and all too timeless) subject:
Tortures
Nothing has changed.
The body is susceptible to pain,
it must eat and breathe air and sleep,
it has thin skin and blood right underneath,
an adequate stock of teeth and nails,
its bones are breakable, its joints are stretchable.
In tortures all this is taken into account.Nothing has changed.
The body shudders as it shuddered
before the founding of Rome and after,
in the twentieth century before and after Christ.
Tortures are as they were, it’s just the earth that’s grown smaller,
and whatever happens seems right on the other side of the wall.Nothing has changed. It’s just that there are more people,
besides the old offenses new ones have appeared,
real, imaginary, temporary, and none,
but the howl with which the body responds to them,
was, is and ever will be a howl of innocence
according to the time-honored scale and tonality.Nothing has changed. Maybe just the manners, ceremonies, dances.
Yet the movement of the hands in protecting the head is the same.
The body writhes, jerks and tries to pull away,
its legs give out, it falls, the knees fly up,
it turns blue, swells, salivates and bleeds.Nothing has changed. Except for the course of boundaries,
the line of forests, coasts, deserts and glaciers.
Amid these landscapes traipses the soul,
disappears, comes back, draws nearer, moves away,
alien to itself, elusive, at times certain, at others uncertain of its own existence,
while the body is and is and is
and has no place of its own.
- Wislawa Szymborska
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 the U.S. ambassador’s residence this morning, prompting the following exchanges with the press [emphasis added]:
QUESTION: [...] Do you — can you give us any sense of how they respond [to U.S. concerns about human rights] and whether over time you think that they have gotten any more sympathetic to your concerns or whether over time they perhaps, you know, have gotten less sympathetic and have had less of an ear for what they might regard as American interference?
SECRETARY RICE: You know, it never takes that tone or character. I think we’re beyond the time when we’re told to mind our own business. I, frankly, haven’t encountered that tone in any of these conversations. They do talk about their own history. They talk about their own evolution. They talk about the fact that this is 15 years in the making, that it’s not a very old system, trying to find its way toward democracy.
But I’ve continued to make what I think are the essential points. There are issues of human rights and we’ve been concerned and I’ve talked a good deal about the problems of individuals, journalists and others, who have had difficulty. But there are also institutional issues, issues about the — in a presidential system not having strong institutions, countervailing institutions, to the presidency. And I’ve been very open about the concerns that that raises in any country, not just in Russia but in any country. If you don’t have countervailing institutions, then the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development.
[...]
QUESTION: Can you talk about your meeting with the Prime Minister, the new Prime Minister, I mean your impression of him? He was a fairly unknown entity in the agency.
SECRETARY RICE: [...] I found him competent, on top of his brief this morning. We went through a number of issues. He was very focused on prime ministerial kinds of issues. We talked a good deal about the WTO, about economic relations. I raised, and as I said talked at some length, about issues of institutional development in Russia, democratic institutional development in Russia. But you know, I found him –
QUESTION: What was his response to that?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, he — you know, he talked about the fact that this is a young — I mean, it’s not that long since the revolution and — or since — yeah, since the revolution of 1991, and so forth. But again, I talked — I tend with the Russians to talk a lot about what I see as institutional deficiencies because that’s really the issue here is: Is this country going to have countervailing institution to the presidency?
QUESTION: You mean the parliament, the courts?
SECRETARY RICE: Mm-hmm. Parliament, the court, independent media, civil society. I think it’s extremely important, as all of us have done throughout secretaries of state coming here and even presidents, to raise individual cases of people who have been mistreated or cases of unresolved disappearances or murders or whatever. Those are very important to raise.
Ultimately, democratic guarantees come from institutional development. Democratic governance comes from a president who can never be too strong because there will always be a congress or a parliament to check him or her, because there will be an independent media to shed light on what is going on. Now, we did have in one case a kind of interesting discussion of how the Internet will be a source from which people will get their information globally, not — and so one wonders to the degree that you even control the media how well you’ll be able to control information in the long run. [...]
QUESTION: Is the Russian presidency too strong, in your view, as currently constituted?
SECRETARY RICE: I’ve said that I think there’s too much concentration of power in the Kremlin. And I’ve told the Russians that. I’ve said it publicly before. Because it’s just the absence of — I think everybody has doubts about the independence, full independence, of the judiciary, although at certain levels — I think — I can’t remember the numbers now, but Russian citizens almost always win against the government when they go to the judiciary, so it’s not — it’s not widespread, but on a lot of very high-profile cases I think there are questions about the independence of the judiciary. There are clearly questions about the independence of the electronic media and there are I think questions about the strength of the Duma.
After reading this, I immediately felt a smart-ass comment coalescing in my brain (this is quite normal for me, by the way, so don’t worry), something about a pot and a kettle, I think. But then I thought a bit more about the words she used: “I’ve been very open about the concerns that that raises in any country, not just in Russia but in any country. If you don’t have countervailing institutions, then the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development.”
In any country? Dare I speculate, hers included? Could it be (to speculate further) that for this career Sovietologist, Putin’s Kremlin acts as a kind of psychological stand-in for the White House, allowing her to criticize the “unitary executive” theory that drives and legitimizes the Bush administration’s deliberate and aggressive concentration of power, without being forced to confront the fact that she works for the administration and is thus effectively a supporter of this very theory? If so, what demons of cognitive dissonance must she wrestle to the ground every morning before being ready to come to work?
MACBETH
Cure her of that.
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?DOCTOR
Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.- William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Act V, Scene III
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 busboys – the departure of humans, conversely, leads almost immediately to a squatters’ takeover. Coral conquers our scuttled battleships; rats and bats occupy our abandoned houses; grass grows in the engine nooks of our broken down cars.
So it’s nice to read that the Siegfried Line, the 18,000-bunker network Hitler built to defend Germany’s western border, has now become home to a wide range of wildlife, including foxes, badgers, European wildcats (pictured above) and ten species of bat. Regional authorities have been keen to tear down the ruined bunkers to make way for farmland and development, but wildlife group BUND has been campaigning for an extension to a 2004 federal moratorium on dismantling the bunkers. The politics have been tricky, as BUND wildlife expert Sebastian Schöne told Spiegel Online:
“It’s been hard for us to deal with this issue because in Germany you’re immediately labeled as some kind of neo-Nazi if you say anything positive about the bunkers. We’re accused of trivializing history by calling it ‘Green Wall in the West’. But we’re not saying the Westwall is great. We’re just being pragmatic.”
The thought of industrial-scale Nazi fortifications covered in moss and turned into homes for small mammals brings to mind Briton Riviere’s Persepolis (1878, engraving (below) by Frederick Stacpoole), which shows the ruined and deserted capital of the Achaemenid Empire now visited only by two curious and wary lions. The picture is on display at the British Museum as part of a very interesting exhibition on the ancient Persian empire. At its original Royal Academy showing in 1878, the catalogue included two lines from the following portion of Omar Khayyam’s The Rubaiyat (1120, trans. Edward Fitzgerald from the Farsi, 1859):
The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon
Turns Ashes — or it prospers; and anon,
Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face,
Lighting a little hour or two — is gone.Think, in this batter’d Caravanserai
Whose Portals are alternate Night and Day,
How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp
Abode his destined Hour, and went his way.They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep:
And Bahram, that great Hunter — the Wild Ass
Stamps o’er his Head, but cannot break his sleep.
Former British prime minister and now Middle East peace envoy Tony Blair, hard at work learning well-known things for the first time:
“Blair was really astonished and angry,” says the UN official who gave him a presentation on the devastating effects of Israel’s “security barrier”, settlements, checkpoints, and closures on the lives of Palestinians in the occupied territories. “He asked very smart questions, though I did think that someone who was prime minister for so long should already have known these facts.”
Sir John Everett Millais’ Mercy: St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572, depicting an anti-Protestant zealot momentarily restrained by a nun’s supplication. Roughly seventy thousand Huguenots were killed in a wave of massacres that lasted from August to October 1572; Jean-Antoine de Baïf, although the most educated of the group of seven French poets known as La Pléiade and a co-founder of the Académie de Poésie et de Musique, penned a sonnet in celebration of the event. Other literary responses were more sophisticated (and less bloodthirsty). Several years after the killings Huguenot poet Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas wrote La Sepmaine, an immensely popular epic about the world’s creation by God. In his conclusion to the seventh day — during which “Th’ Eternall doth his glorious works survay” – Du Bartas reflects on the importance of civic unity and order, comparing a nation to a human body whose parts exist in harmony:
You Princes, Pastors, and ye Chiefs of War,
Do not your Laws, Sermons, and Orders mar;
Lest your examples banefull leprosies
Infect your Subjects, Flocks, and Companies;
Beware your evill make not others like;
For, no Part’s sound if once the Head be sick.[...]
Nor can I see, where underneath the sky
A man may finde a juster Policy,
Or truer Image of a calme Estate
Exempt from Faction, Discord, and Debate,
Then in th’ harmonious Order that maintains
Our Bodie’s life, through Members’ mutuall pains:
Where, one no sooner feels the least offence,
But all the rest have of the same a sense.- Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, La Sepmaine (1578), trans. Joshua Sylvester as The Divine Weeks and Works (1605)
In Myanmar (that’s Burma, you pinko!), William Kristol discovers another evil country to wage war against:
Couldn’t we use other military and intelligence capabilities to put more stress on the regime? As Sen. Joseph Lieberman has suggested, “The junta has tried to cut off the ability of peaceful demonstrators to communicate to the outside world through the Internet and cellphone networks; we should be examining how the junta’s ability to command and control its forces throughout the country might itself be disrupted.” What about limited military actions, overt or covert, against the regime’s infrastructure — its military headquarters, its intelligence apparatus, its rulers’ lavish palaces? Couldn’t such actions have a deterrent effect, or might not they help open up fissures in the regime? Have we really done all we can to avert the disaster that is unfolding?
Well, I suppose it would give U.S. Special Forces something to practice on as they while away the time waiting to attack Iran. Hate to see those guys underemployed.
“Pardon me,” a newcomer asked Rubin, “what is your name?”“Lev Grigorich”
“Are you an engineer too?”
“No, I’m not an engineer, I’m a philologist.”
“Philologist? They even keep philologists here?”
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle
Ah, when an average day’s roundup of intelligentsia would almost always yield a philologist or two amongst the catch! Not so today. Philologists are as rare as hen’s teeth; if one does turn up in the system, the government’s policy is one of immediate release. It’s a question of maintaining the breeding population, you see.
But seriously, where have all the philologists gone? I ask not because I grew up in a world filled with philologists, and now notice their absence. I’ve never met a philologist, not once in my life; I haven’t spotted one across a campus; haven’t heard one on the radio nor seen one on TV. From the day I was born, I’ve lived in an effectively philologist-free environment.
Over the years, however, I’ve stumbled across evidence that such people did exist, and that, in fact, their numbers were not insignificant when compared to other academic professions. For one thing, they frequently turned up as characters in literary novels usually written by (or about) continental Europeans. For another, famous people who one had been brought up to think of as philosophers turned out on later inspection to be philologists. Nietzsche a philosopher? Wrong.
In fact, as I recently discovered from a review in the Times Literary Supplement (of Joep Leerssen’s National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History), philologists were once considered rather hip:
In 1848, the year of revolutions, a “National Assembly” was convened at Frankfurt, to discuss unification of the German lands, civil rights and a constitution for a future Reich. The strangest thing about the assembly was its seating plan. Delegates were placed in a semi-circle facing the Speaker, but there was one seat in the centre of the semi-circle, directly opposite the Speaker, set apart from all the others. It was reserved for Jacob Grimm. Can one imagine a British durbar to decide the future of the Empire, deliberately and symbolically centred on a professor of linguistics, also known as a collector of fairy tales? But Grimm was not a mere linguist, he was a Philolog, and by 1848, as Joep Leerssen points out in his exceptionally wide-ranging study, philology was a combination of linguistics, literary history and cultural anthropology with the prestige of a hard science and the popular appeal of The Lord of the Rings. Grimm was there to speak, not for the nation, for there was no German nation, but for an imaginary Deutschland which he had very largely created in an unmatched though repeatedly imitated feat of “cultural consciousness-raising”.
More prosaically — when they were not creating nations out of thin air — what philologists generally did was to study historical texts, and by painstaking linguistic and contextual analysis, to discover the authoritative original text (or Ur-text), now cleaned of centuries of copyist errors, translator distortions, and the fabrications of forgers. This, of course, was a tremendously useful service for historians, who now no longer had to decide to accept or reject as a whole the documentary evidence they required to write history. In The Historian’s Craft, medieval historian Marc Bloch described the importance of the change:
True progress began on the day when, as Volney put it, doubt became an “examiner”; or in other words, when there had gradually been worked out objective rules which permitted the separation of truth from falsehood. The Jesuit Papebroeck, in whom the reading of The Lives of the Saints had instilled a profound mistrust of the entire heritage of the early Middle Ages, considered all Merovingian charters which had been preserved in the monasteries to be forgeries. No, replied Mabillon. There are unquestionably some charters which have been retouched, some which have been interpolated, and some which have been forged in their entirety. There are also some which are authentic, and this is how it is possible to distinguish the bad from the good. That year, 1681, the year of the publication of the De Re Diplomatica, was truly a great one in the history of the human mind, for the criticism of the documents of archives was definitely established.
Given how important this function is to the writing of accurate history, one should not be surprised to know that the profession has not, in fact, vanished. But — and this quite apart from philologists’ newfound and almost Hobbit-like ability to vanish into the background — it has begun to change. Rather than searching for an individual and authoritative Ur-text, some philologists have recently argued for an acceptance of the essential mobility of certain texts (particularly medieval ones), insofar as such texts have been continually and intentionally re-written, their meanings linked not to any original intent but more to the moment of their performance. This approach is sometimes referred to as the New Philology, and the key book here is Bernard Cerquiglini’s Éloge de la variante: Histoire critique de la philologie (1989) (published in 1999 by Johns Hopkins as In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology).
There’s no cause for worry, then. Philologists do still exist, and the species seems to be evolving at a healthy pace. But good luck catching one.
Arrested by Pakistani police in 2002 and then imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for over four years, 26-year-old Mohamed Lemine Ould Sidi has been released without charge and returned to his home country of Mauritania. He told AFP that he and other prisoners were forced to watch U.S. guards urinating on the Koran – ”After that we decided to no longer take it to our cells and only recited from memory” — and that he was subject to force feeding after a hunger strike. “Other prisoners, simple innocent Muslims were also tortured, humiliated in their beliefs and their human dignity,” he said. The AP reports that two other Mauritanian men, Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Ahmed Ould Abdelaziz, remain in Guantanamo Bay.
The Pentagon released at about the same time eight other captives: six Afghans, a Libyan, and a Yemeni. But the U.S. government refuses to concede error in having arrested and imprisoned any of these men. Quite the reverse: Pentagon spokesman Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon told AP last week that ”All detainees at Guantánamo are considered a threat to the United States — to include those transferred yesterday.”
One can’t help but wonder whether, given the ethics-free space in which the U.S. government now conducts itself, this declaration is meant not only as a defense mechanism, but also as a way of signalling that these men remain fair game in future operations. Does being freed from Guantanamo saddle you forever with the status of being one of the “usual suspects”?
Via Laura Rozen, an important NYT article on a 2005 secret opinion issued by Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department which authorized continued use of torture by the CIA. A short sample:
When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.
But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.
Read Marty Lederman at Balkinization on this topic:
Between this and Jane Mayer’s explosive article in August about the CIA black sites, I am increasingly confident that when the history of the Bush Administration is written, this systematic violation of statutory and treaty-based law concerning fundamental war crimes and other horrific offenses will be seen as the blackest mark in our nation’s recent history — not only because of what was done, but because the programs were routinely sanctioned, on an ongoing basis, by numerous esteemed professionals — lawyers, doctors, psychologists and government officers — without whose approval such a systematized torture regime could not be sustained.
Africa can celebrate: the United States now considers it important enough to assign an entire military command to it. With the operationalization of AFRICOM this month, the continent and its national governments will be able to bask in the sustained attention of senior American generals, and, more importantly, will be able to dip their hands in the loot bag of weapons and money that normally comes along with such attention.
The new command covers territory formerly split up between European Command (EUCOM), Central Command (CENTCOM), and Pacific Command (PACOM); AFRICOM will cover the entire continent except the state of Egypt, which will remain under CENTCOM’s purview. For its first year, the command will operate under EUCOM as responsibilities are transitioned to it, and will reach fully independent status by October 2008. Army Gen. William E. “Kip” Ward, the former deputy commander of EUCOM, has been confirmed by the Senate as AFRICOM’s first commander.
Gen. Ward declared in his confirmation testimony that “I see the establishment of AFRICOM as a wonderful opportunity to efficiently and effectively apply the elements of U.S. national power in ways that help the Africans develop and implement their solutions to African concerns,” which has a nice altruistic ring to it. But what the United States is really concerned with is, first, the “ungoverned spaces” into which some security experts fear terrorists may find refuge; second, the rather large amounts of oil found on the continent, particularly in and around the Gulf of Guinea (said a senior Department of Defense official in 2003, “a key mission for U.S. forces (in Africa) would be to ensure that Nigeria’s oil fields… are secure.”); and third, the growing influence there of potential “peer competitors”, namely China. For more background, here’s a 2004 article I wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle on increased U.S. security interest in the continent.
So while some African countries have been keen to accept American involvement, including Ethiopia (now considered America’s strongest African ally in the War on Terror) and Liberia (which has publicly offered to host the future AFRICOM headquarters), others have been more wary. “No foreign troops are welcomed on African soil,” Nigeria’s minister of foreign affairs bluntly stated on Monday, while the South African Development Community (SADC) has emerged as another opponent — in July the US ambassador to South Africa complained publicly of the unwillingness of the South African defense minister to even meet with General Ward. As a recent Congressional Research Service report observed:
There is considerable apprehension over U.S. motivations for creating AFRICOM, and some Africans worry that the move represents a neo-colonial effort to dominate the region militarily. U.S. military efforts on the continent have been seen as episodic, leading some to question a more sustained focus from DOD now. Reports of U.S. air strikes in Somalia in early 2007 and U.S. support for Ethiopia’s military intervention there have added to those concerns.
The case of Somalia in particular shows where U.S. priorities lie. After Islamist forces in 2006 overthrew the clan-based warlords who had dominated the country for years, achieving a tenuous stability where none had been before, the U.S. backed a massive intervention by Ethiopia, shattering the peace and leading to the flight of at least 400,000 people from the now violence-wracked capital. Having effectively refreshed the country’s “failed state” status, the American military has since then felt free to launch air strikes and gunboat attacks whenever terrorist-linked targets have appeared in the country.
General Ward’s objective to “help the Africans develop and implement their solutions to African concerns” looks a little less altruistic in this light, doesn’t it?
We moderns have a habit of assuming that major historical transitions are often painless and always unidirectional, with the forces of “progress” clearly identified and arrayed against the forces of “reaction”. The printing press, for example, is universally acknowledged to be a Good Thing in history, while its failed opponents are dismissed as a dour set of anti-intellectual clerics in the Catholic Church. Yet as Jacob Burckhardt pointed out in his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, the reaction against the printing press also sprang from some of the most literate and urbane people in Europe, including the bibliophile and pro-Humanist Pope Nicholas V. In founding the Vatican Library, Nicholas sent agents to scour the monasteries and palaces of Europe for classical and religious manuscripts, collecting 1,500 volumes in total. Where originals could not be obtained, cardinals and princes commissioned copyists — the Florentine librarian Vespasiano da Bisticci assembled a team of twenty-five to copy two hundred books for Cosimo de’ Medici’s Laurentian Library. And the books thus produced, writes Burckhardt, were works of art:
The handwriting was that beautiful modern Italian which was already in use in the preceding century, and which makes the sight of one of the books of that time a pleasure. Pope Nicholas V, Poggio, Gianozzo Manetti, Niccolo Niccoli, and other distinguished scholars, themselves wrote a beautiful hand, and desired and tolerated none other. The decorative adjuncts, even when miniatures formed no part of them, were full of taste, as may be seen especially in the Laurentian manuscripts, with the light and graceful scrolls which begin and end the lines. The material used to write on, when the work was ordered by great or wealthy people, was always parchment; the binding, both in the Vatican and at Urbino, was a uniform crimson velvet with silver clasps. Where there was so much care to show honour to the contents of a book by the beauty of its outward form, it is intelligible that the sudden appearance of printed books was greeted at first with anything but favour. Federigo of Urbino ‘would have been ashamed to own a printed book.’
Nicholas V’s relationship with books was both personal and aesthetic. According to 19th-century German historian George Voigt, “It was his greatest joy to walk about his library arranging the books and glancing through their pages, admiring the handsome bindings, and taking pleasure in contemplating his own arms stamped on those that had been dedicated to him, and dwelling in thought on the gratitude that future generations of scholars would entertain towards their benefactor. Thus he is to be seen depicted in one of the halls of the Vatican library, employed in settling his books.”
In the most obvious sense, what this depicts is the attitude of an elite who were able to afford the commissioning of such beautiful volumes, while the masses wallowed in illiteracy. But in another sense, which should not be forgotten, it depicts a love of learning and a reverence toward books – a reverence encompassing both their literary and their physical natures. So while we have gained immeasurably and indisputably from the diffusion of literature enabled by the printing press, we have also altered our relationship to books. Perhaps that too has been generally for the better, but surely not completely so. In their easy availability and their cheapness, how precious do our books seem now?
An illustration for Beatus of Valcavado, In Apocalipsin, showing four beasts of the Apocalypse as envisioned in Daniel 7: a winged lion, a winged leopard, a beast with ten horns, and a bear. Painted in Spain, ca. 940-945, by a scribe and illuminator named Maius.
1 In the first year of Belshaz’zar king of Babylon, Daniel had a dream and visions of his head upon his bed: then he wrote the dream, and told the sum of the matters.
2 Daniel spake and said, I saw in my vision by night, and, behold, the four winds of the heaven strove upon the great sea.
3 And four great beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from another.
4 The first was like a lion, and had eagle’s wings: I beheld till the wings thereof were plucked, and it was lifted up from the earth, and made stand upon the feet as a man, and a man’s heart was given to it.
5 And behold another beast, a second, like to a bear, and it raised up itself on one side, and it had three ribs in the mouth of it between the teeth of it: and they said thus unto it, Arise, devour much flesh.
6 After this I beheld, and lo another, like a leopard, which had upon the back of it four wings of a fowl; the beast had also four heads; and dominion was given to it.
7 After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it; and it had ten horns.
8 I considered the horns, and, behold, there came up among them another little horn, before whom there were three of the first horns plucked up by the roots: and, behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of man, and a mouth speaking great things.- The Book of Daniel 7, King James Bible
There’s a great essay by Daniel Soar in a recent London Review of Books about the NSA’s domestic Internet surveillance program and the complicity of major American telecommunications companies in the same. The highlight for me is Soar’s description of a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals hearing on a class action lawsuit brought against AT&T for warrantless surveillance, which contains a sentence of unsurpassed beauty (in bold):
‘Was a warrant obtained in this case?’ Judge Pregerson asked. ‘That gets into matters that are protected by state secrets,’ the deputy solicitor general replied. The court wanted access to a secret paper one of the lawyers had accidentally been allowed to see. The government refused point blank. ‘Every ampersand, every comma is top secret?’ Judge Hawkins inquired. ‘This document is totally non-redactable and non-segregable and cannot even be meaningfully described,’ said the assistant attorney general, demonstrating a more impressive grasp of obfuscatory rhetoric than his colleague. Towards the end of the afternoon, a tired Judge McKeown said: ‘I feel like I’m in Alice in Wonderland.’ She was right to: the government’s case rests, essentially, on claiming that whether or not there was a secret is itself a secret, presumably in the hope that the prosecuting lawyers might vanish in a puff of logic. A date for the court to submit its findings has yet to be set.
Who would have expected that the War on Terror would become its own religio-logical art form? Did the Inquisition achieve as much?
Jon Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution makes some interesting observations on the under-exploited ability of blogs to provide long range historical context for current events: “extending the memory of political discussions”, as he nicely puts it. I’m not sure if this is a capability unique to blogs — after all, a newspaper or a magazine is perfectly capable of providing the same sort of deep context — but it may be effectively unique, in the sense that bloggers don’t work for professional editors who say things like, “Love the historical analysis you’ve provided, Ian, but I’m not sure our readers will really need this level of detail. We’ve made one or two changes here; tell me what you think…”
Of course, when I was an editor, I never said things like that. Then again, our magazine made no money. Poverty is freedom.
