23.3.05
21.3.05
HoustonChronicle.com - Life support may be cut based on pay, prognosis:
"A similar case is still in the courts. Texas Children's Hospital wants to discontinue life support on 5-month-old Sun Hudson, who was diagnosed shortly after birth with a fatal form of dwarfism. His mother, Wanda Hudson, wants her son's care to continue at the hospital."
Unlike the Terri Scivaro case, many Texas families are losing family members against the wish of the patients' families. Keep your eyes on the ball.
"A similar case is still in the courts. Texas Children's Hospital wants to discontinue life support on 5-month-old Sun Hudson, who was diagnosed shortly after birth with a fatal form of dwarfism. His mother, Wanda Hudson, wants her son's care to continue at the hospital."
Unlike the Terri Scivaro case, many Texas families are losing family members against the wish of the patients' families. Keep your eyes on the ball.
From Digby:
By now most people who read liberal blogs are aware that George W. Bush signed a law in Texas that expressly gave hospitals the right to remove life support if the patient could not pay and there was no hope of revival, regardless of the patient's family's wishes. It is called the Texas Futile Care Law. Under this law, a baby was removed from life support against his mother's wishes in Texas just this week. A 68 year old man was given a temporary reprieve by the Texas courts just yesterday.
Those of us who read liberal blogs are also aware that Republicans have voted en masse to pull the plug (no pun intended) on medicaid funding that pays for the kind of care that someone like Terry Schiavo and many others who are not so severely brain damaged need all across this country.
Those of us who read liberal blogs also understand that that the tort reform that is being contemplated by the Republican congress would preclude malpractice claims like that which has paid for Terry Schiavo's care thus far.
Those of us who read liberal blogs are aware that the bankruptcy bill will make it even more difficult for families who suffer a catastrophic illness like Terry Schiavo's because they will not be able to declare chapter 7 bankruptcy and get a fresh start when the gargantuan medical bills become overwhelming.
And those of us who read liberal blogs also know that this grandstanding by the congress is a purely political move designed to appease the religious right and that the legal maneuverings being employed would be anathema to any true small government conservative.
Those who don't read liberal blogs, on the other hand, are seeing a spectacle on television in which the news anchors repeatedly say that the congress is "stepping in to save Terry Schiavo" mimicking the unctuous words of Tom Delay as they grovel and leer at the family and nod sympathetically at the sanctimonious phonies who are using this issue for their political gain.
By now most people who read liberal blogs are aware that George W. Bush signed a law in Texas that expressly gave hospitals the right to remove life support if the patient could not pay and there was no hope of revival, regardless of the patient's family's wishes. It is called the Texas Futile Care Law. Under this law, a baby was removed from life support against his mother's wishes in Texas just this week. A 68 year old man was given a temporary reprieve by the Texas courts just yesterday.
Those of us who read liberal blogs are also aware that Republicans have voted en masse to pull the plug (no pun intended) on medicaid funding that pays for the kind of care that someone like Terry Schiavo and many others who are not so severely brain damaged need all across this country.
Those of us who read liberal blogs also understand that that the tort reform that is being contemplated by the Republican congress would preclude malpractice claims like that which has paid for Terry Schiavo's care thus far.
Those of us who read liberal blogs are aware that the bankruptcy bill will make it even more difficult for families who suffer a catastrophic illness like Terry Schiavo's because they will not be able to declare chapter 7 bankruptcy and get a fresh start when the gargantuan medical bills become overwhelming.
And those of us who read liberal blogs also know that this grandstanding by the congress is a purely political move designed to appease the religious right and that the legal maneuverings being employed would be anathema to any true small government conservative.
Those who don't read liberal blogs, on the other hand, are seeing a spectacle on television in which the news anchors repeatedly say that the congress is "stepping in to save Terry Schiavo" mimicking the unctuous words of Tom Delay as they grovel and leer at the family and nod sympathetically at the sanctimonious phonies who are using this issue for their political gain.
14.3.05
Why do they hate freedom?:
"[Seymour Hersh] said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, 'You haven't begun to see evil...' then trailed off. He said, 'horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.'
He looked frightened."
"[Seymour Hersh] said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, 'You haven't begun to see evil...' then trailed off. He said, 'horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.'
He looked frightened."
Always read the fine print.:
"AOL ?> [has} the right to 'reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote' all content distributed across the chat network by users.
'You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the content or to be compensated for any such uses,' according to the AIM terms-of-service."
"AOL ?> [has} the right to 'reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote' all content distributed across the chat network by users.
'You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the content or to be compensated for any such uses,' according to the AIM terms-of-service."
1.3.05
The Politicization of Social Security: More of the same: propaganda for the sheep. God Bless George Bush. Just think what a wanker he'd be if he didn't have Jesus in his heart.
25.2.05
"'We're not just looking for terrorists,' she said.": More erosion of the basic fundamental right to privacy under the guise of homeland security. Nothing new, but we should track the death of liberty atleast as thoroughly as we track the pope's.
22.2.05
21.2.05
Image133.jpg
Hunter S. Thompson: We are all wired into a survival trip now... 'No more of the speed that fueled the Sixties. . . a generation of permanent cripples who never understood the essential fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody. . . is tending the Light at the end of the tunnel.
Hunter S. Thompson has done himself in.:
Thompson: We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they're dazed and confused. The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic.' - Written in the year 2000
A few words from Scott Supak: While the fascist, psuedo-religious cults running this plutocracy will celebrate the deep funk that led to this man's demise, those of us who understood his twisted tunnel to the truth will never forget what he did for us...
Me again. I'm not sure what he "did" for me, but this world needs all the characters it can get, and I will miss him for that.
Thompson: We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they're dazed and confused. The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic.' - Written in the year 2000
A few words from Scott Supak: While the fascist, psuedo-religious cults running this plutocracy will celebrate the deep funk that led to this man's demise, those of us who understood his twisted tunnel to the truth will never forget what he did for us...
Me again. I'm not sure what he "did" for me, but this world needs all the characters it can get, and I will miss him for that.
13.2.05
From Pat Buchanan>No, al-Qaida was no more attacking our "freedom" when it drove those planes into the World Trade Center than were Iroquois, Sioux and Apache attacking our freedom when they massacred settlers on the frontier. Like Islamists, the Indians saw us as defiling their sacred soil, dispossessing them, imposing a hated hegemony. They cared not about our Constitution – they wanted us off their land.
If we were truly being attacked for our beliefs, and not our behavior, the war would have no end. Yet, all the other guerrilla and terror wars against Western powers there have ended. How?
When the British left Palestine, Irgun terror ended. When the French left Algeria, FLN terror ended. When Israel left Lebanon, Hezbollah terror largely ended. These countries chose to resolve their terror problem by giving up their occupations and letting go. Their perceived imperial presence had been the cause of the terror war, and when they departed and went home, the wars faded away.
If we were truly being attacked for our beliefs, and not our behavior, the war would have no end. Yet, all the other guerrilla and terror wars against Western powers there have ended. How?
When the British left Palestine, Irgun terror ended. When the French left Algeria, FLN terror ended. When Israel left Lebanon, Hezbollah terror largely ended. These countries chose to resolve their terror problem by giving up their occupations and letting go. Their perceived imperial presence had been the cause of the terror war, and when they departed and went home, the wars faded away.
I love these Germans and their festivals. We just celebrated Fasching last week. Basically, it has the same raison d'etre as Mardi Gras, but with a lot more substance. In my limited experience in the states it seems activities that involve heavy drinking, street dancing, and cross dressing typically exist for the entertainment of drunken frat boys tossing plastic beads and the bare boobied girls who gratefully recieve them. The good citizens stay at home and watch the spectacle from the comforts/confines of their lazy boy tv chair, nodding their head in silent wonder, thanking the good lord their generation never fell for the lure huffing.
Where as here in Germany the celebrations are attended by entire families, from grandpas with painted faces to babies in wicker strollers. No doubt, the alcohol and the frenzied air make for some hedonistic moments, but for the most part this is just good fun. dancing with strangers, arm and arm, grabbing wine from some girls hand and upending it without barly a "could I...?" Drinking beer by the half liter, out of a bottle no less. Imagine that, People drinking in the crowded streets and with glass bottles. No one threw them into the sea of people, no one brandished broken bottles. Just lovely stuff.
And it is a great excuse for an otherwise straight young man from Texas to wear fishnets, feathered boas, and eyemake-up.
Where as here in Germany the celebrations are attended by entire families, from grandpas with painted faces to babies in wicker strollers. No doubt, the alcohol and the frenzied air make for some hedonistic moments, but for the most part this is just good fun. dancing with strangers, arm and arm, grabbing wine from some girls hand and upending it without barly a "could I...?" Drinking beer by the half liter, out of a bottle no less. Imagine that, People drinking in the crowded streets and with glass bottles. No one threw them into the sea of people, no one brandished broken bottles. Just lovely stuff.
And it is a great excuse for an otherwise straight young man from Texas to wear fishnets, feathered boas, and eyemake-up.
7.2.05
American pathology
delusions
believing our own
self-righteous
bloody religious
nationalistic
propaganda
holy vomit
sacred shit
blind eyes to
our precious empire's
violence and greed
and the ignorance
and apathy
from which it springs
trampling Goodness
feeding the powerful
fucking the hungry
we dissent quietly
between grande caramel lattes
calm cool collected
numbified
good citizens.
how mushy
our American minds
so steeped in cynicsm
and twinkies
that horror and atrocity
are lost beneath
the gauze of doughnut glaze
t.v.'s too small
for proper outrage
flatline brainwave
never to rise
to rebuke
the evil
cast our name.
From Bob Herbert: "We know that people were kept in cells that in some cases were the equivalent of animal cages, and that some detainees, disoriented and despairing, have been shackled like slaves and left to soil themselves with their own urine and feces. Detainees are frequently kicked, punched, beaten and sexually humiliated. Extremely long periods of psychologically damaging isolation are routine.
This is all being done in the name of fighting terror. But the best evidence seems to show that many of the people rounded up and dumped without formal charges into Guant�namo had nothing to do with terror. They just happened to be unfortunate enough to get caught in one of Uncle Sam's depressingly indiscriminate sweeps. Which is what happened to Shafiq Rasul, who was released from Guant�namo about a year ago. His story is instructive, and has not been told widely enough."
delusions
believing our own
self-righteous
bloody religious
nationalistic
propaganda
holy vomit
sacred shit
blind eyes to
our precious empire's
violence and greed
and the ignorance
and apathy
from which it springs
trampling Goodness
feeding the powerful
fucking the hungry
we dissent quietly
between grande caramel lattes
calm cool collected
numbified
good citizens.
how mushy
our American minds
so steeped in cynicsm
and twinkies
that horror and atrocity
are lost beneath
the gauze of doughnut glaze
t.v.'s too small
for proper outrage
flatline brainwave
never to rise
to rebuke
the evil
cast our name.
From Bob Herbert: "We know that people were kept in cells that in some cases were the equivalent of animal cages, and that some detainees, disoriented and despairing, have been shackled like slaves and left to soil themselves with their own urine and feces. Detainees are frequently kicked, punched, beaten and sexually humiliated. Extremely long periods of psychologically damaging isolation are routine.
This is all being done in the name of fighting terror. But the best evidence seems to show that many of the people rounded up and dumped without formal charges into Guant�namo had nothing to do with terror. They just happened to be unfortunate enough to get caught in one of Uncle Sam's depressingly indiscriminate sweeps. Which is what happened to Shafiq Rasul, who was released from Guant�namo about a year ago. His story is instructive, and has not been told widely enough."
2.2.05
Google Image Result for http://www.victorynewsmagazine.com/images/TalibanTransit.jpg
On the day that the defense rested in the military trial of Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr. for the abuses at Abu Ghraib, American television news had a much better story to tell: "The Trouble With Harry," as Brian Williams called it on NBC. The British prince had attended a fancy dress costume party in Wiltshire (theme: "native and colonial") wearing a uniform from Rommel's Afrika Korps complete with swastika armband. Even by the standards of this particular royal family, here was idiocy above and beyond the call of duty.
For those of us across the pond, it was heartening to feel morally superior to a world-class twit. But if you stood back for just a second and thought about what was happening in that courtroom in Fort Hood, Tex. - a task that could be accomplished only by reading newspapers, which provided the detailed coverage network TV didn't even attempt - you had to wonder if we had any more moral sense than Britain's widely reviled "clown prince." The lad had apparently managed to reach the age of 20 in blissful ignorance about World War II. Yet here we were in America, in the midst of a war that is going on right now, choosing to look the other way rather than confront the evil committed in our name in a prison we "liberated" from Saddam Hussein in Iraq. What happened in the Fort Hood courtroom this month was surely worthy of as much attention as Harry's re-enactment of "Springtime for Hitler": it was the latest installment in our government's cover up of war crimes.
But a not-so-funny thing happened to the Graner case on its way to trial. Since the early bombshells from Abu Ghraib last year, the torture story has all but vanished from television, even as there have been continued revelations in the major newspapers and magazines like The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and Vanity Fair. If a story isn't on TV in America, it doesn't exist in our culture.
The latest chapter unfolding in Texas during that pre-inaugural week in January was broadcast on the evening news almost exclusively in brief, mechanical summary, when it was broadcast at all. But it's not as if it lacked drama; it was "Judgment at Nuremberg" turned upside down. Specialist Graner's defense lawyer, Guy Womack, explained it this way in his closing courtroom statement: "In Nuremberg, it was the generals being prosecuted. We were going after the order-givers. Here the government is going after the order-takers." As T. R. Reid reported in The Washington Post, the trial's judge, Col. James L. Pohl of the Army, "refused to allow witnesses to discuss which officers were aware of events in cellblock One-Alpha, or what orders they had given." While Mr. Womack's client, the ringleader of the abuses seen in the Abu Ghraib photographs, deserved everything that was coming to him and then some, there have yet to be any criminal charges leveled against any of the prison's officers, let alone anyone higher up in the chain of command.
Nor are there likely to be any, given how little information about this story makes it to the truly mass commercial media and therefore to a public that, according to polls, disapproves of the prison abuses by a majority that hovers around 80 percent. What information does surface is usually so incomplete or perfunctorily presented that it leaves unchallenged the administration's line that, in President Bush's words, the story involves just "a few American troops" on the night shift.
The minimizing - and in some cases outright elimination - of Abu Ghraib and its aftermath from network news coverage is in part (but only in part) political. Fox News, needless to say, has trivialized the story from the get-go, as hallmarked by Bill O'Reilly's proud refusal to run the photos of Graner & Company after they first surfaced at CBS. (This is in keeping with the agenda of the entire Murdoch empire, whose flagship American paper, The New York Post, twice ran Prince Harry's Nazi costume as a Page 1 banner while relegating Specialist Graner's conviction a day later to the bottom of Page 9.) During the presidential campaign, John Kerry barely mentioned Abu Ghraib, giving TV another reason to let snarling dogs lie. Senator John Warner's initially vigilant Congressional hearings - which threatened to elevate the craggy Virginia Republican to a TV stardom akin to Sam Ervin's during Watergate - mysteriously petered out.
Since the election, some news operations, most conspicuously NBC, have seemed eager to rally around the winner and avoid discouraging words of any kind. A database search of network transcripts finds that NBC's various news operations, in conscious or unconscious emulation of Fox, dug deeper into the Prince Harry scandal than Specialist Graner's trial. "NBC Nightly News" was frequently turned over to a journalism-free "Road to the Inauguration" tour that allowed the new anchor to pose in a series of jus'-folks settings.
But not all explanations for the torture story's downsizing have to do with ideological positioning and craven branding at the networks. The role of pictures in TV news remains paramount, and there has been no fresh visual meat from the scene of the crime (or the others like it) in eight months. The advances in the story since then, many of which involve revelations of indisputably genuine Washington memos, are not telegenic. Meanwhile, the recycling of the original Abu Ghraib snapshots, complemented by the perp walks at Fort Hood, only hammers in the erroneous notion that the story ended there, with the uncovering of a few bad apples at the bottom of the Army's barrel.
There were no cameras at Specialist Graner's trial itself. What happened in the courtroom would thus have to be explained with words - possibly more than a few sentences of words - and that doesn't cut it on commercial television. It takes a televised judicial circus in the grand O. J. Simpson tradition or a huge crew of supporting players eager (or available) for their 15 minutes of TV fame to create a mediathon. When future historians try to figure out why a punk like Scott Peterson became the monster that gobbled up a mother lode of television time in a wartime election year, their roads of inquiry will all lead to Amber Frey.
A more sub rosa deterrent to TV coverage of torture is the chilling effect of this administration's campaign against "indecency" through its proxy, Michael Powell, at the Federal Communications Commission. If stations are fearful of airing "Saving Private Ryan" on Veterans Day, they are unlikely to go into much depth about war stories involving forced group masturbation, electric shock, rape committed with a phosphorescent stick, the burning of cigarettes in prisoners' ears, involuntary enemas and beatings that end in death. (At least 30 prisoner deaths have been under criminal investigation.) When one detainee witness at the Graner trial testified in a taped deposition that he had been forced to eat out of a toilet, that abuse was routinely cited in newspaper accounts but left unreported on network TV newscasts. It might, after all, upset viewers nearly as much as Bono's expletive at the 2003 Golden Globes.
Even so, and despite the dereliction of network news and the subterfuge of the Bush administration, the information is all there in black and white, if not in video or color, for those who want to read it, whether in the daily press or in books like Seymour Hersh's "Chain of Command" and Mark Danner's "Torture and Truth." The operative word, however, may be "want."
Maybe we don't want to know that the abuses were widespread and systematic, stretching from Afghanistan to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to unknown locales where "ghost detainees" are held. Or that they started a year before the incidents at Abu Ghraib. Or that they have been carried out by many branches of the war effort, not just Army grunts. Or that lawyers working for Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales gave these acts a legal rationale that is far more menacing to encounter in cold type than the photo of Prince Harry's costume-shop armband.
As Mr. Danner shows in his book, all this and more can be discerned from a close reading of the government's dense investigative reports and the documents that have been reluctantly released (or leaked). Read the record, and the Fort Hood charade is unmasked for what it was: the latest attempt to strictly quarantine the criminality to a few Abu Ghraib guards and, as Mr. Danner writes, to keep their actions "carefully insulated from any charge that they represent, or derived from, U.S. policy - a policy that permits torture."
The abuses may well be going on still. Even as the Graner trial unfolded, The New York Times reported that a secret August 2002 Justice Department memo authorized the use of some 20 specific interrogation practices, including "waterboarding," a form of simulated drowning that was a torture of choice for military regimes in Argentina and Uruguay in the 1970's. This revelation did not make it to network news.
"Nobody seems to be listening," Mr. Danner said last week, as he prepared to return to Iraq to continue reporting on the war for The New York Review. That so few want to listen may in part be a reflection of the country's growing disenchantment with the war as a whole. (In an inauguration-eve Washington Post-ABC News poll, only 44 percent said the war was worth fighting.) The practice of torture by Americans is not only ugly in itself. It conjures up the specter of defeat. We can't "win" the war in Iraq if we lose the battle for public opinion in the Middle East. At the gut level, Americans know that the revelations of Abu Ghraib coincided with - and very likely spurred - the ruthlessness of an insurgency that has since taken the lives of many brave United States troops who would never commit the lawless acts of a Charles Graner or seek some ruling out of Washington that might countenance them.
History tells us that in these cases a reckoning always arrives, and Mr. Danner imagines that "in five years, or maybe sooner, there will be a TV news special called 'Torture: How Did It Happen?' " Even though much of the script can be written now, we will all be sure to express great shock.
On the day that the defense rested in the military trial of Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr. for the abuses at Abu Ghraib, American television news had a much better story to tell: "The Trouble With Harry," as Brian Williams called it on NBC. The British prince had attended a fancy dress costume party in Wiltshire (theme: "native and colonial") wearing a uniform from Rommel's Afrika Korps complete with swastika armband. Even by the standards of this particular royal family, here was idiocy above and beyond the call of duty.
For those of us across the pond, it was heartening to feel morally superior to a world-class twit. But if you stood back for just a second and thought about what was happening in that courtroom in Fort Hood, Tex. - a task that could be accomplished only by reading newspapers, which provided the detailed coverage network TV didn't even attempt - you had to wonder if we had any more moral sense than Britain's widely reviled "clown prince." The lad had apparently managed to reach the age of 20 in blissful ignorance about World War II. Yet here we were in America, in the midst of a war that is going on right now, choosing to look the other way rather than confront the evil committed in our name in a prison we "liberated" from Saddam Hussein in Iraq. What happened in the Fort Hood courtroom this month was surely worthy of as much attention as Harry's re-enactment of "Springtime for Hitler": it was the latest installment in our government's cover up of war crimes.
But a not-so-funny thing happened to the Graner case on its way to trial. Since the early bombshells from Abu Ghraib last year, the torture story has all but vanished from television, even as there have been continued revelations in the major newspapers and magazines like The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and Vanity Fair. If a story isn't on TV in America, it doesn't exist in our culture.
The latest chapter unfolding in Texas during that pre-inaugural week in January was broadcast on the evening news almost exclusively in brief, mechanical summary, when it was broadcast at all. But it's not as if it lacked drama; it was "Judgment at Nuremberg" turned upside down. Specialist Graner's defense lawyer, Guy Womack, explained it this way in his closing courtroom statement: "In Nuremberg, it was the generals being prosecuted. We were going after the order-givers. Here the government is going after the order-takers." As T. R. Reid reported in The Washington Post, the trial's judge, Col. James L. Pohl of the Army, "refused to allow witnesses to discuss which officers were aware of events in cellblock One-Alpha, or what orders they had given." While Mr. Womack's client, the ringleader of the abuses seen in the Abu Ghraib photographs, deserved everything that was coming to him and then some, there have yet to be any criminal charges leveled against any of the prison's officers, let alone anyone higher up in the chain of command.
Nor are there likely to be any, given how little information about this story makes it to the truly mass commercial media and therefore to a public that, according to polls, disapproves of the prison abuses by a majority that hovers around 80 percent. What information does surface is usually so incomplete or perfunctorily presented that it leaves unchallenged the administration's line that, in President Bush's words, the story involves just "a few American troops" on the night shift.
The minimizing - and in some cases outright elimination - of Abu Ghraib and its aftermath from network news coverage is in part (but only in part) political. Fox News, needless to say, has trivialized the story from the get-go, as hallmarked by Bill O'Reilly's proud refusal to run the photos of Graner & Company after they first surfaced at CBS. (This is in keeping with the agenda of the entire Murdoch empire, whose flagship American paper, The New York Post, twice ran Prince Harry's Nazi costume as a Page 1 banner while relegating Specialist Graner's conviction a day later to the bottom of Page 9.) During the presidential campaign, John Kerry barely mentioned Abu Ghraib, giving TV another reason to let snarling dogs lie. Senator John Warner's initially vigilant Congressional hearings - which threatened to elevate the craggy Virginia Republican to a TV stardom akin to Sam Ervin's during Watergate - mysteriously petered out.
Since the election, some news operations, most conspicuously NBC, have seemed eager to rally around the winner and avoid discouraging words of any kind. A database search of network transcripts finds that NBC's various news operations, in conscious or unconscious emulation of Fox, dug deeper into the Prince Harry scandal than Specialist Graner's trial. "NBC Nightly News" was frequently turned over to a journalism-free "Road to the Inauguration" tour that allowed the new anchor to pose in a series of jus'-folks settings.
But not all explanations for the torture story's downsizing have to do with ideological positioning and craven branding at the networks. The role of pictures in TV news remains paramount, and there has been no fresh visual meat from the scene of the crime (or the others like it) in eight months. The advances in the story since then, many of which involve revelations of indisputably genuine Washington memos, are not telegenic. Meanwhile, the recycling of the original Abu Ghraib snapshots, complemented by the perp walks at Fort Hood, only hammers in the erroneous notion that the story ended there, with the uncovering of a few bad apples at the bottom of the Army's barrel.
There were no cameras at Specialist Graner's trial itself. What happened in the courtroom would thus have to be explained with words - possibly more than a few sentences of words - and that doesn't cut it on commercial television. It takes a televised judicial circus in the grand O. J. Simpson tradition or a huge crew of supporting players eager (or available) for their 15 minutes of TV fame to create a mediathon. When future historians try to figure out why a punk like Scott Peterson became the monster that gobbled up a mother lode of television time in a wartime election year, their roads of inquiry will all lead to Amber Frey.
A more sub rosa deterrent to TV coverage of torture is the chilling effect of this administration's campaign against "indecency" through its proxy, Michael Powell, at the Federal Communications Commission. If stations are fearful of airing "Saving Private Ryan" on Veterans Day, they are unlikely to go into much depth about war stories involving forced group masturbation, electric shock, rape committed with a phosphorescent stick, the burning of cigarettes in prisoners' ears, involuntary enemas and beatings that end in death. (At least 30 prisoner deaths have been under criminal investigation.) When one detainee witness at the Graner trial testified in a taped deposition that he had been forced to eat out of a toilet, that abuse was routinely cited in newspaper accounts but left unreported on network TV newscasts. It might, after all, upset viewers nearly as much as Bono's expletive at the 2003 Golden Globes.
Even so, and despite the dereliction of network news and the subterfuge of the Bush administration, the information is all there in black and white, if not in video or color, for those who want to read it, whether in the daily press or in books like Seymour Hersh's "Chain of Command" and Mark Danner's "Torture and Truth." The operative word, however, may be "want."
Maybe we don't want to know that the abuses were widespread and systematic, stretching from Afghanistan to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to unknown locales where "ghost detainees" are held. Or that they started a year before the incidents at Abu Ghraib. Or that they have been carried out by many branches of the war effort, not just Army grunts. Or that lawyers working for Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales gave these acts a legal rationale that is far more menacing to encounter in cold type than the photo of Prince Harry's costume-shop armband.
As Mr. Danner shows in his book, all this and more can be discerned from a close reading of the government's dense investigative reports and the documents that have been reluctantly released (or leaked). Read the record, and the Fort Hood charade is unmasked for what it was: the latest attempt to strictly quarantine the criminality to a few Abu Ghraib guards and, as Mr. Danner writes, to keep their actions "carefully insulated from any charge that they represent, or derived from, U.S. policy - a policy that permits torture."
The abuses may well be going on still. Even as the Graner trial unfolded, The New York Times reported that a secret August 2002 Justice Department memo authorized the use of some 20 specific interrogation practices, including "waterboarding," a form of simulated drowning that was a torture of choice for military regimes in Argentina and Uruguay in the 1970's. This revelation did not make it to network news.
"Nobody seems to be listening," Mr. Danner said last week, as he prepared to return to Iraq to continue reporting on the war for The New York Review. That so few want to listen may in part be a reflection of the country's growing disenchantment with the war as a whole. (In an inauguration-eve Washington Post-ABC News poll, only 44 percent said the war was worth fighting.) The practice of torture by Americans is not only ugly in itself. It conjures up the specter of defeat. We can't "win" the war in Iraq if we lose the battle for public opinion in the Middle East. At the gut level, Americans know that the revelations of Abu Ghraib coincided with - and very likely spurred - the ruthlessness of an insurgency that has since taken the lives of many brave United States troops who would never commit the lawless acts of a Charles Graner or seek some ruling out of Washington that might countenance them.
History tells us that in these cases a reckoning always arrives, and Mr. Danner imagines that "in five years, or maybe sooner, there will be a TV news special called 'Torture: How Did It Happen?' " Even though much of the script can be written now, we will all be sure to express great shock.
31.1.05
A beautiful woman has awoken and left for work. I am left with a cup of English tea, looking out across the snow-capped roofs of Schwabing, the blue oninion of St. Joseph's prodding the gray sky. Seven floors below, cyclists make there way carefully along the frozen terrain of Turkenstrasse. The plant, which recently has had a steady diet of weissbier, leans hopefully towards the open window. But there will be no rain today. The fresh air coming off the city is cold and dry. Somewhere a garbage truck grumbles in the streets below; it is Monday morning, but still sacred as any Sabbath.
I will catch a train in the next hour or so to the country. A friend which I have not yet seen this year awaits me. There in a garden that sits on a slow river, I will eat and drink and read and sleep and breathe mountain air.
What have I done? What I am doing? What are my dreams? Am traversing the distance that separates me from them? Is there even a distance; could this be my dream? What if I never move a stone from here to there, never punch a window through certain metaphysical walls, but am content with not having done so? Am I really free?
This tea is cold.
I will catch a train in the next hour or so to the country. A friend which I have not yet seen this year awaits me. There in a garden that sits on a slow river, I will eat and drink and read and sleep and breathe mountain air.
What have I done? What I am doing? What are my dreams? Am traversing the distance that separates me from them? Is there even a distance; could this be my dream? What if I never move a stone from here to there, never punch a window through certain metaphysical walls, but am content with not having done so? Am I really free?
This tea is cold.
7.1.05
5.1.05
An aside- my blog erased all the comments. If some one who loves me reads this could you please go through and leave some words so it doesn't look as though no one ever gave me a shout back. Cosmetics.
Speaking of products usually designed for womem, a girl gave me a pair of tights. I know I have seen well-packaged male dancers prancing about on stage with these things, but I can not help but feel I am delving into some deviant behavior here, that perhaps I am beginning the slow downward spiral into women's underwear.
However, they are warm beneath my pants in the dead of winter on my bike through the snow and so on.
Exasperrating the situation- I just received a copy of Robbie Williams greatest hits, and I like it. What is happening to me?
Speaking of products usually designed for womem, a girl gave me a pair of tights. I know I have seen well-packaged male dancers prancing about on stage with these things, but I can not help but feel I am delving into some deviant behavior here, that perhaps I am beginning the slow downward spiral into women's underwear.
However, they are warm beneath my pants in the dead of winter on my bike through the snow and so on.
Exasperrating the situation- I just received a copy of Robbie Williams greatest hits, and I like it. What is happening to me?
4.1.05
18.12.04
7.12.04
Last week, I came across a semi-circle of construction vehicles surrounding Odeonsplatz. In the center was a stage floating on a sea of orange.
I parked the bike and headed in for a closer look. Over the P.A. a man gave a speech in an Eastern European accent, pausing occassionally for an audience member with a crackling microphone to shout back from the midsts of the crowd. He was no heckler. It was choreographed, like the canned responses of a catholic mass.
Above the crowd in the shadows of buildiings older than my country, banners sprayed with Russian troops go home or Viktor Yushchenko is the heart of the Ukraine swayed in the wind. Orange was the colour du jour. Most people held orange balloons, or atleast an orange itself. A man who I think must be famous in some village stood and gave a rousing rendition of the Ukrainian national anthem.
Then young girls dispersed wax torches throughout the crowd, who now huddled around common flames as we patiently waited for our torches to catch fire. Then we headed down the street shouting Russia go home, before breaking into a slow, moving, almost mournful song. The sun moved behind th earth, only torches now, a sea of orange, our faces aglow, we the people marching the cobbled streets, a moment of history that was not really mine.
Over the protests of a protectective mother, I gave my torch to an empty-handed Ukrainian boy.
I parked the bike and headed in for a closer look. Over the P.A. a man gave a speech in an Eastern European accent, pausing occassionally for an audience member with a crackling microphone to shout back from the midsts of the crowd. He was no heckler. It was choreographed, like the canned responses of a catholic mass.
Above the crowd in the shadows of buildiings older than my country, banners sprayed with Russian troops go home or Viktor Yushchenko is the heart of the Ukraine swayed in the wind. Orange was the colour du jour. Most people held orange balloons, or atleast an orange itself. A man who I think must be famous in some village stood and gave a rousing rendition of the Ukrainian national anthem.
Then young girls dispersed wax torches throughout the crowd, who now huddled around common flames as we patiently waited for our torches to catch fire. Then we headed down the street shouting Russia go home, before breaking into a slow, moving, almost mournful song. The sun moved behind th earth, only torches now, a sea of orange, our faces aglow, we the people marching the cobbled streets, a moment of history that was not really mine.
Over the protests of a protectective mother, I gave my torch to an empty-handed Ukrainian boy.
24.11.04
This is for the public record:
I have in recent years exhausted much energy into the practice of misery and debauchery. I spent so much of myself wishing I lived not in a place called America, that to finally be free of its confines is simply bliss.
Everything is possible again. Work comes. New challenges come. New friends come. Fresh ideas come. Indeed, power itself comes. The creative forces swirl about. I do not know exactly why, but this is where the universe wants me, or this is where I want my universe to be- either way- i am happy. and that makes me happy. and so on.
I have in recent years exhausted much energy into the practice of misery and debauchery. I spent so much of myself wishing I lived not in a place called America, that to finally be free of its confines is simply bliss.
Everything is possible again. Work comes. New challenges come. New friends come. Fresh ideas come. Indeed, power itself comes. The creative forces swirl about. I do not know exactly why, but this is where the universe wants me, or this is where I want my universe to be- either way- i am happy. and that makes me happy. and so on.
23.11.04
Reagan sent me this link: http://www.metagifted.org/topics/metagifted/indigo/.
I have not gone through it yet, but it seems worth looking in to. If for no other reason than to have something interesting to discuss with Reagan if you are lucky enough to bump into her downtown sometime, you know what I'm saying.
I have not gone through it yet, but it seems worth looking in to. If for no other reason than to have something interesting to discuss with Reagan if you are lucky enough to bump into her downtown sometime, you know what I'm saying.
16.11.04
As I said a long time ago, I would not discuss politics on these pages. However, I must say one thing: I truly hope you religious, fundamentalits are correct in your estimations of hell, because if you are then I have no doubt you zealots will suffer there, along the other mass-murdering nutcases.
If you honestly think a man was born of a virgin and died on a cross so you could build a temple to use as a soapbox to peddle a conservative politcal agenda, you are a damned fool.
You fundamentalists pulled through once again. This time around the number one issue for voters was "moral values", and for those voters eighty-six percent voted Bush. I welcome a considerstion of moral values, but in these considerations could we please include the cost of war.
How many of you Bible-thumpers even know how many innocent civilians have died in Iraq alone.
15,000 dead Iraqii civilians killed in the first five months of O.I.L.
Of course, you people would be so kind as to remind me of the historical insignifigance of this number in the light of say, Veitnam's 58,000 dead soldiers. You've got to break a few eggs to make an omelette, right?
Then I would remind you that 15,000 dead is the blood of five 9-11's.
I used to blame government. I used to blame media. After this election cycle, I blame the people. Not all people, but I do not need to qualify. You know who you are.
You folks make me sick. I am so ashamed to share my flag with you. As long as it stays it your hands, it burns in my heart.
This bit of energy. This bit of energy. And this bit of energy is the last I waste on these matters.
If you honestly think a man was born of a virgin and died on a cross so you could build a temple to use as a soapbox to peddle a conservative politcal agenda, you are a damned fool.
You fundamentalists pulled through once again. This time around the number one issue for voters was "moral values", and for those voters eighty-six percent voted Bush. I welcome a considerstion of moral values, but in these considerations could we please include the cost of war.
How many of you Bible-thumpers even know how many innocent civilians have died in Iraq alone.
15,000 dead Iraqii civilians killed in the first five months of O.I.L.
Of course, you people would be so kind as to remind me of the historical insignifigance of this number in the light of say, Veitnam's 58,000 dead soldiers. You've got to break a few eggs to make an omelette, right?
Then I would remind you that 15,000 dead is the blood of five 9-11's.
I used to blame government. I used to blame media. After this election cycle, I blame the people. Not all people, but I do not need to qualify. You know who you are.
You folks make me sick. I am so ashamed to share my flag with you. As long as it stays it your hands, it burns in my heart.
This bit of energy. This bit of energy. And this bit of energy is the last I waste on these matters.
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