"We will hold you where no one can hear your screams"

Great lines of the day -- a Buzzflash article 'Torturous Silence on Torture' contains this quotation from Bishop Peter Storey, Central Methodist Mission, Johannesburg, South Africa, June 1981:

There is a price to be paid for the right to be called a civilized nation. That price can be paid in only one currency -- the currency of human rights . . . The rule of law says that cruel and inhuman punishment is beneath the dignity of a civilized state. But to prisoners we say, 'We will hold you where no one can hear your screams.' When I used the word 'barbarism,' this is what I meant. The entire policy stands condemned by the methods used to pursue it. We send a message to the jailers, interrogators, and those who make such practices possible and permissible: 'Power is a fleeting thing. One day your souls will be required of you.'

Bumping into the furniture

Cary Tennis' Since You Asked column in Salon is actually OK this week -- not particularly profound, but maybe helpful. The question is about how to deal with the anger felt toward Bush and the Republicans. Cary's answer is to read philosophy and to protest. Sounds OK to me.
The column is titled I'm filled with rage:

Dear Cary,
I have an emotional problem. I walk around with a rage inside me that I don't know how to address. I fantasize about things that, were I to describe them to you, I would be visited by black-suited men at my apartment one night and, if not taken away, at least placed on a list I'd rather not be on.
I don't know what to do with my rage. I can't hold it inside me like this, but every time it seems to dissipate, and I've forgotten, as I have the luxury of doing, what a sorry, sad, unjust and, yes, despicable state of affairs we've galloped merrily into, something dramatically and heart-wrenchingly demands that my rage be acknowledged. And frankly -- it's necessary to be reminded of these things.
My problem is this, I just never felt interested in or comfortable with political action. I can't stand the excruciatingly slow pace of it. I can't stand the one-step-forward, two-steps-back inevitability of it. I can't stand that progress is measured in generations and not years, in shades of brown and not in lives enriched.
I'd rather sing a song than write a letter. I'd rather nuzzle a belly than immunize a child. I'd rather build a tree house than a shelter. But I have to do something with this rage. I can't walk around wanting to inflict pain and suffering on the people in charge, who seem to have neither brains between their ears nor eyes in their heads nor hearts in their chests.
I don't like being angry. It's a pathetic cliché, but I'm a lover, not fighter. Especially when the fight is as heartbreaking and insurmountable as this. Where can I put this energy that is poisoning me?
Lover, Not a Fighter
Dear Lover Not Fighter,
You seem to be describing an overwhelming state of emotion that is linked to politics but not directly tied to one particular act -- as though world events had accumulated like snow on the roof and then crashed through, covering you to the chin. Your natural reaction is to struggle mightily against being engulfed. It's hard to find a target, though. You are immersed.
That makes it difficult, at first, to know what to say to you -- aside from "Grab the rope! Grab the rope!"
But I think I know what you are going through. There comes a time when we are so overwhelmed by events that we lose faith in orderly, sequential action toward moderate goals. Our situation seems so desperate that we need to do something right now or we will suffocate. Signing up to man a phone bank just doesn't cut it.
You are not alone. Your letter reminds me, actually, of the situation prior to last year's election when readers began saying they felt out of control and anxious; they were thinking of leaving the country. They were feeling apocalyptic. It was unthinkable that George Bush would be elected again. And yet it happened. We staggered out into the night.
I found myself trying to understand how human beings get themselves into these insane situations of mass hysteria, fascism, Nazism and so forth. One of the questions I had was why we in America seemed to be so deeply freaked out, torn, betrayed, as though having internalized some ideal notion of our country, as though it were a father or mother -- while those in other, older civilizations would shrug it off, or hunker down, or do something pragmatic like emigrate. And I came across the writing of Jacqueline Rose, who talked about how citizens of a democracy are uniquely vulnerable to feelings of unbearable inner contradiction when their countries act in unconscionable ways.
Anyway, during my investigations into the symptoms of our national disease, I myself fell ill; I had some kind of attack; I collapsed and was taken to the hospital, where they found nothing wrong.
It turned out that to get well I would have to stop taking everything so seriously.
So actually, believe it or not, to counter the effects of today's political climate, I have begun (again) reading Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." His is a mind so energetic, so engaged and so amusing in its speculations, so wide in its knowledge, that it acts as a tonic for one's befuddlement and outrage. Also, for the same reason, Terry Eagleton has been helpful. "The Illusions of Postmodernism" can also been taken like a vitamin to correct our deficiencies and relieve some of our symptoms.
Not that I understand what these brilliant men are saying, mind you. It's more like reading Sartre in junior high: You sense some marvelous energy and intelligence at work, eager to tutor you into being if you can only walk alongside and listen.
And it is helpful for outside voices to diagnose us as well, for we cannot always recognize our own symptoms. Jonathan Raban in the recent New York Review of Books:

"I have been visiting the US for more than thirty years and have lived here for the last fifteen: during the last four of those years, America, in its public and official face, has become more foreign to me by the day -- which wouldn't be worth reporting, except that the sentiment is largely shared by so many Americans ... Under Bush's self-styled 'wartime presidency,' the composition of the American landscape is steadily altering. What was once in the foreground is moving into the background, and vice versa. Our world is being continuously rearranged around us in deceptively small increments. Though we like to pretend that the emerging new order is 'normal,' that daily life proceeds much as it always did, with a few small novel inconveniences, we keep on bumping uncomfortably into the furniture."

The sense of disorientation that he describes strikes me as central to what many of us are feeling: It is not so much that we disagree with specific policies as that, as he puts it, someone keeps rearranging the furniture. It would be tempting, if also paranoid, to consider us as the victims of a kind of shock-and-awe campaign, orchestrated not with bombs but with media and a planned concatenation of events, a bombardment from all sides on all our privileges and freedoms, beliefs and assumptions, wholly ideological in its content but military in its precision and its strategic concentration of force. The purpose of such an assault would be not just to win a series of individual battles but to systematically demoralize and disorient the left so that it becomes ineffective for a generation or two to come. After all, a confused and enraged enemy without a plan is a weak enemy indeed. The fact that we increasingly wander alone in the night, dumbly wanting only to club somebody with a stick, is evidence that, intentional or not, such a strategy seems to be working.
It is good to feel crazy about politics. It is a good signal. It means we must act. But act how? If you are feeling crazy and nearly violent with anger, protesting is good for you -- and good for the country! We saw this during the period of the Vietnam War: It was possible for a time to believe in the necessity of the war. One by one, though, people began to crack. One by one they sought a cure. It could only be found in action. People of all stripes took to the streets. Once that began to happen, the old regime was finished.
Lastly, a warning: Your symptoms may not be exclusively political; there is the possibility that you may require medical intervention. I am not particularly frightened for you, for I am well acquainted with the extremes to which one can go before one really needs to be checked in somewhere. Still, if the voices begin telling you to do things, harmful things, seek psychiatric help.

Signs of the times

From Voices from the Frontlines of Protest, Washington D.C., a sampling of the protest signs in the Washington march this weekend:

Yeeha is not a foreign policy
Making a killing
Ex-Republican. Ask me why
Blind Faith in Bad Leadership is not Patriotism
Bush is a disaster!' (with the President's face in the eye of a hurricane)
He's a sick nut my Grandma says (with a photo of an old woman in blue with halo-like rays emanating from her)
Osama bin Forgotten
Cindy speaks for me
Make levees not war
W's the Devil, One Degree of Separation
Dick Cheney Eats Kittens (with a photo of five kittens)
Bush busy creating business for morticians worldwide
Liar, born liar, born-again liar
Dude -- There's a War Criminal in My White House!!!
Motivated moderates against Bush
Bored with Empire
Pro Whose Life?
War is Terrorism with a Bigger Budget.

And here is what some of the people said about the signs they carried and why they marched. I wasn't surprised at the references to Cindy Sheehan, but I was surprised at how many people made the Hurricane Katrina connection:
What if they gave a war and nobody came? [And on the back it says] What if they gave a hurricane and nobody came because they were all at war? "I was absolutely infuriated after the hurricane. All our resources were at war. There was nothing to help our people here."


Not with my sons "Like Cindy Sheehan said, we have to get back to our humanity, and so we mothers have to begin to be teachers. We've lost our way."


Sex is back in the White House. Bush is screwing us all! "I just think that the war in Iraq is a big mistake. Especially when I saw New Orleans and thought about the money for the levee system diverted to Iraq. That was upsetting. Even before that, though, I got the impression that the ones pushing the war were really planning for the best-case scenario, that they hadn't planned for anything but the best outcome. I think what they're doing is creating more terrorism."


Bring the soldiers home [part of a campaign to hand out toy soldiers] "The other night in New York at a Cindy Sheehan event, we were handing these out and I gave a packet to one of the mothers there. She recoiled. She said, ‘My son's in Iraq. I can't take those. I used to hide them from him.' But you know what she said then? She said, ‘Keep going. But keep going!' People get very excited about putting them in places and then other people find them. The other day we got an email from a cop who had found one in the Federal Courthouse in New York and he was so moved he wrote us."


New Orleans Evacuees for Peace "All of our National Guard troops were off in Iraq instead of rescuing people here. Instead of being here to help out, they were off making problems in the rest of the world."


No Iraqis left me on a roof to die "I've been thinking and thinking, trying to figure out how to make my people understand the direct correlation of this war and our well-being and I just thought this put it succinctly."

Here's the real "talk like a pirate" day

If you want to get a bit of an understanding about the meaning of the IAEA motion to report Iran to the Security Council, check out Jerome a Paris's Iran Nuclear Showdown article on Daily Kos.
Jerome also urges everyone to read Kos diarist Antifar's Smoke O'er The Water -- a brilliant piece of work:

So far, talk of stopping the war has cost most Americans little. Some discretionary income for yellow ribbons and now for gasoline, and some leisure time for perusing opinion columns for or against the war.
Blithely voting with our pocketbooks, we drive to protests and performances and marches and meetings all alone in a big V8 vehicle; we critique concepts like clashing civilizations over salads flown in from New Zealand and guacamole trucked up from Mexico. We blog over broadband about the better than six billion members of our species who live very close to the dirt, on less than a dollar a day, and always will. And we worry about our weight.
It's a bloody good life, compared to some others.
Which is to say, livin' large as we do is the opposite of stopping this war, or the coming wars over other resources we will also need to keep comin'. This war is for that salad, that SUV, and that guacamole, and for all the comfy, free and easy we still enjoy in America, currently courtesy of some grunts sweating out their second or third tours in Baghdad. Comfort isn't free or painless.
What will stop this pirate war, and future resource wars over water, food, lebensraum,and whatever else gets scarce -- is for Americans to look at this harsh thing we are doing to Iraq in order to keep our creature comforts, and turn away from it, even at the cost of some of those comforts. It certainly won't kill us. It certainly is killing them. The only way home from Baghdad is for enough Americans to decide that this nation will live on what we can make, not what we can take.
Bringing our troops home without making that decision will not solve the deeper problem, the root cause of these resource wars.
Aye. There's the rub. There's gold and grub enough for foreign wars. There's nary enough for us all to live like kings and queens, away out in the suburbs, driving to work and back, flying around the world when we feel the fancy, burning up twenty times the oil of the average citizen of Earth as if God said we were better than them.
That lifestyle was built on cheap oil, cheap food, cheap travel, and it's only going to be maintained in the future at the barrel of a gun, in the hands of your son. It's going to cost you that.
Is that comfortable? . . . Are we stuck on war without end, killing to keep it comin'? Is loot n' scoot really us? Are we the Vandals and Visigoths this time around? Are we the Huns who torture and rape and burn whole villages? Our troops have been doing things that we excoriated the Wehrmacht for doing when my Dad was a dogface back in `45. Inhuman things, unspeakable things, done in our names.
Is that acceptable? Is that us? Are we pirates?
Not facing this choice is choosing. Not choosing is choosing. Until we reduce our worldwide first-strike military machine to a national defense army we won't even have the means, motivation or mentality to stop stealing for a living. Our problem is oil, not terror. Our problem in Iraq is that we took our problem over there. We're fighting in someone else's house, over their possessions. We're a pirate nation while we do this, and the world at large will not put up with that for very long.
Will we choose to live more simply, here at home, or keep marching our men down to the sea with bloody theft in mind?
Well add it all up, me buckos. It will be one way or the other. Meanwhile, raise a black flag and sharpen your swords! Set every sail on a course for the Strait of Hormuz -- this time Bush is after the treasures of Tehran! Send him your sons and daughters; it's the yardarm for anyone who holds back now! The red white n' blue is the scourge of the sea, and there's no turnin' back for you or for me!
`Tis a pirate's life from here, `til we all meet Davy Jones or they hang us on high. It's glory and gold -- or smoke o'er the water an' a chilly grave.
There's the truth of it, and here's a guinea coin to the son of a whore who sings it out plain and simple:
America will not stop these wars.
America will be stopped.

Sorta puts the rest of the world on notice, doesn't it?

Now here are Christians I can respect

This news story Cdn activist preaches reconciliation for Iraq led me to this website: Christian Peacemaker Teams: committed to reducing violence by "Getting in the way" -- a unique organization of Mennonites, Brethern and Quakers who have been working in Iraq since the fall of 2002. It is dangerous work because they have been operating outside the Green Zone for all that time. They also insert themselves into other dangerous places in the world, with the idea of reducing conflict and violence -- they work in Arizona on immigration issues, in Palestine on Iraeli/Palestinian conflicts, even in Canada on conflicts between First Nations and the Canadian government. Its a remarkable group.

The Frog talks about the Lame Duck

In That Lame Duck Moment: September 15, 2001 Frog begins -- "Inevitably, predictably, George Bush took only four years to go from the highest approval ratings of any president in my lifetime to the lowest, and he did both while on vacation." -- and goes on from there in a terrific post about how Bush's Andrew Jackson Square appearance revealed the lame duck moment in Bush's presidency. "History will not be kind to the man who used his presidency for legacy-making in an attempt to best his father."

Great line of the day

"The central role of America-hating kooks in the anti-war movement is why Vietnam went on for so long- what patriot was going to side with people like that? The opponents of the current war seem to have fallen into the same trap."
This is the opinion of someone writing at the right-wing site The Corner which was posted at the Daou report.
I'll just pause for a bit while you wrap your head around the reasoning here . . . dum dee dum dee dum . . . finished?
Can you believe it?
What this guy thinks is that if only the anti-war people weren't so . . . well. . . ANTIWAR, why then the true patriots could join them and then, of course, the war would end lickety-split.
So actually the war is really the fault of the people protesting against it.
So there!
Pogo said it --

Door number one, or door number two?

William Pfaff from the International Herald Tribune writes a pretty clear summary of what is going on now in Iraq and the choices which remain to be made by the Bush administration.

There is inevitability to what is happening in Iraq that was visible from the start. The Vietnam war had been, so to speak, an honest war. The Iraq war is a dishonest war. The outcome will be identical.
President Lyndon Johnson, the Bundy brothers, Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk really did believe that the Chinese Communists ran the Vietnam war, and would exploit victory there to motivate Communist uprisings throughout Southeast Asia and beyond.
They didn't appreciate that the world isn't so simple. The Communists won and nothing happened.
The people who invaded Iraq didn't care whether the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction. They wanted to control Iraq for economic and strategic reasons (and possibly for personal ones, in the case of both the Bush family and Donald Rumsfeld, who had dealt with Saddam Hussein when the United States backed Iraq's war against Iran).
Like their Vietnam predecessors, they could not imagine that the United States wouldn't easily prevail. They learned that the Pentagon is incapable of successfully fighting a war that is not the high-technology war for which it stubbornly prepares, despite the absence of an enemy capable of fighting such a war.
The most deadly enemy weapon against American convoys in Iraq is the buried or camouflaged roadside bomb (or "IED," as the military bureaucracy prefers: "improvised explosive device" - the acronym making it sound like a high-technology innovation).
The Pentagon countermeasure, reportedly already being tested by the aerospace industry, is "a power source (which would project) a big spike of energy from a truck or aircraft-borne emitter, (to) fuse the circuitry of a blasting cap or pre-detonate it before the convoy gets there."
The lower-technology counter-countermeasure, of course, would be for the enemy to go back to mechanical detonators.
Iraq is identified as "a new kind of war." It actually is a peculiarly vicious and indiscriminate form of guerrilla war, used by the American colonies against British troops in the revolutionary war, by Philippine nationalists against American occupation (1899-1901), the SOE, OSS and European Resistance forces against the German army in World War II, and the Vietnamese against the United States three decades ago. In every case, national integrity versus foreign occupation was the issue.
The force of American public opinion now is turning against the Iraq war. The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll says 55 percent of the public disapproves of George W. Bush's leadership, and only 39 percent wants U.S. troop levels in Iraq maintained.
The discovery that the vast array of American military power simply isn't working in the real world had the Bush administration near panic even before Hurricane Katrina. It was understood for the first time that the United States risks defeat in Iraq. This is interpreted as bringing with it terrorist triumph throughout the "Greater" Middle East and catastrophic loss of American credibility, not to speak of defeat in "World War IV" (as the more alarmist neoconservatives call it).
The latter insist that the United States must press on or be revealed a "pitiful, helpless giant," as Richard Nixon said of defeat in Vietnam. However, the sky did not fall then, and the United States survived Vietnam - only to put itself in exactly the same situation 30 years later, attempting the same remedies.
"Iraqization" of the war is current U.S. policy, on the model of "Vietnamization," with similarly unpromising results. Some analysts want Iraq partitioned into three states. That would make a gift of Shiite Iraq to Iranian influence, could bring Turkish intervention to prevent an independent Kurdistan, and would continue to be resisted by the Sunni Arabs.
The best-publicized recent proposal has been that of Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr. in Foreign Affairs magazine, endorsed by David Brooks in the New York Times as "blindingly obvious." It is an "oil spot" strategy, which envisages extending a fully secured zone in Iraq from the present Green Zone in Baghdad (and similar places in other cities), neighborhood by neighborhood, and village by village, until all of Iraq is secure. (Does he know how large Iraq is?) This, Krepinevich says, "would require a protracted commitment of U.S. resources, a willingness to risk more casualties ... an enduring U.S. presence (of at least a decade) and hundreds of billions of dollars."
Indeed it would, and it was tried and failed in Vietnam (one version was the notorious Phoenix program), since there is no way to assure that the "secured" zones are not full of unsecured people. Not even Saddam Hussein's secret police could deliver zones purged of insurgents, their sympathizers, friends, families and fellow-tribesmen. Nor could the country function under such circumstances. Like Phoenix, it is another version of the "strategic hamlet" program applied successfully in the (then) British Federation of Malaya just after World War II when a part of the Chinese minority rebelled. The Chinese were forcibly moved into secure hamlets, isolating them from the population and their foreign supporters. Considered a China-sponsored Communist revolt at the time, no one seems to remember that it was also an old ethnic-based conflict between two readily identifiable peoples. If the insurgents in Iraq were Chinese, Krepinevich's plan might work.
Since they are not, and since the Iraq war is all about the American presence in Iraq, opposed by both Shiites and Sunni, the real choice is between negotiating a schedule to leave now - which might still be feasible - and staying on for "decades" and billions of dollars more, and leaving then, defeated, with the American electorate in revolt.

Pfaff doesn't get into what effect the war with Iran will have on this equation -- but in the end it won't be any more effective than was Nixon's decision to get Cambodia involved in the Vietnam War.

The reporters are not afraid anymore

The protests are now, finally, being described as "massive" -- they always were massive, but the media would never describe them that way. The reporters don't seem to be afraid to report -- they're describing the crowd sympathetically rather than focusing on freaks and conga lines and debates over numbers, and they're not trying to inflate a few dozen counter-protesters into a false equivalency.
Associated Press reports that 100,000 marched in Washington:

In the crowd: young activists, nuns whose anti-war activism dates to Vietnam, parents mourning their children in uniform lost in Iraq, and uncountable families motivated for the first time to protest. Connie McCroskey, 58, came from Des Moines, Iowa, with two of her daughters, both in their 20s, for the family's first demonstration. McCroskey, whose father fought in World War II, said she never would have dared protest during the Vietnam War. "Today, I had some courage," she said. While united against the war, political beliefs varied. Paul Rutherford, 60, of Vandalia, Mich., said he is a Republican who supported Bush in the last election and still does — except for the war. "President Bush needs to admit he made a mistake in the war and bring the troops home, and let's move on," Rutherford said. His wife, Judy, 58, called the removal of Saddam "a noble mission" but said U.S. troops should have left when claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction proved unfounded. "We found that there were none and yet we still stay there and innocent people are dying daily," she said. "Bush Lied, Thousands Died," said one sign. "End the Occupation," said another. More than 1,900 members of the U.S. armed forces have died since the beginning of the war in March 2003.

Here is Washington:


Seattle:


In Los Angeles, Ron Kovic ("Born on the Fourth of July") led the march:


London:




Baghdad

The tyranny of events

The apocalypse is tumbling toward us, and writers like Joe Conason are still writing about how the US could avoid "perceived defeat" in Iraq by getting the UN to help with a negotiated settlement "which could eventually persuade the Sunni nationalist rebels to lay down their weapons and enter the nascent political system". Joe, are you writing from some parallel universe where John Kerry won the election? Wishful thinking is not a policy.
Events keep marching forward. The events in Iraq and elsewhere are overtaking anyone's ability to negotiate anything with anybody.
The Saudis are running around with their hair on fire -- warning "everyone who will listen" that Iraq is "hurtling toward disintegration" and will take the region with it.
According to Moon Over Alabama, Seymour Hersch is saying that "the US administration promised to take care of Israel's assumed biggest strategic danger - Iranian nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, Pakistan is developing small nuclear weapons in the kiloton range, essentially at landmine size, transportable. Pakistan is protecting OBL. Pakistani hardcore leadership is afraid they will be next after Iran. And now AFT is reporting that the rationale for war with Iran is being advanced.

Great line of the day

From "Justin Case" commenting on Steve Clemont's post "Time to do some Outing in Vatican City" from The Washington Note: "Christianity has nothing to do with Christ and probably never has, unless Christ was a close-minded, misogynistic, war-loving, imperialistic, aggressive hater of anything he didn't understand or agree with. "

Jokes of the day

From the website Late Night Political Jokes:

In New York a man has set the Guinness World Record for being a couch potato. He spent 68 hours and 48 minutes straight watching TV. So nice to see FEMA director Mike Brown landing on his feet. --Jay Leno
Martha Stewart is with us tonight and she's going to show us how to dig a tunnel with a melon baller. --David Letterman

Thanks, Cindy

Well, its about time.
Here is this AP story - Antiwar protesters going on offense - actually talking about the big anti-war protests this weekend, in advance and without implying that anyone participating is a traitor.

Antiwar groups are using a $1 million ad campaign and a demonstration they say will attract 100,000 people to try to re-energize their movement and pressure the Bush administration to bring troops home from Iraq. Organizers of Saturday’s protest, which will take marchers past the White House, say it will be the largest since the war began more than two years ago. Cindy Sheehan, the woman who drew thousands of protesters to her 26-day vigil outside President Bush’s Texas ranch last month, is among those planning to participate.

Its about time the antiwar movement got some attention from the press.
They have this idea that there was no anti-war movement in the US, that the movement needed to be reenergized.
This is wrong, wrong, wrong. There have been people doing their own protests for years -- beginning, of course, with the millions of people around the world who protested Iraq before it even started, but continuing on to the people setting up crosses every weekend on beaches and to people picketing Walter Reed. Its been going on all over the United States and the world, but with the press determined to ignore it.
The media wants to pretend now that they weren't covering the anti-war movement because it didn't exist. Well, OK, if that's what you need to believe. At least you guys are covering it now. What Cindy Sheehan reenergized was the press and their willingness to provide coverage to the movement. Thanks, Cindy.

Over There

We have been watching FX network's Over There on History Television and we think this is one of the series which we will try to watch each week -- though, as I said tonight to my husband while we were watching Episode 3 tonight, its sort of like watching a show about the German side in Occupied France.

Great line of the day

"And who says the Pentagon doesn't believe in fairies?"
This is the question asked by John from AMERICAblog after reading the Pentagon's latest TinkerBell thesis: "Chief Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita urged people not to gauge the war based on the volume of rebel bombings. "That's not a good way to determine how good or bad things are going -- by (counting) how many things are exploding," Di Rita said."