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February 27, 2006

THE VIET-'RAQ CONNECTION

Not too long ago the idea of comparing the American misadventure in Iraq with the Vietnam War was strictly limited to anti-war activists. To mention Iraq and Vietnam in the same breath made neocons roll their eyes, and even pro-war establishment liberals wouldn't hear of it. How things have changed.

"Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon" is the title of an essay by Stephen Biddle in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, which will be out on newsstands today. "Contentious as the current debate over Iraq is," he writes, "all sides seem to make the crucial assumption that to succeed there the United States must fight the Vietnam War again -- but this time the right way. The Bush administration is relying on an updated playbook from the Nixon administration."

Biddle notes that "U.S. strategy in Iraq today is remarkably similar" to the plan for withdrawing from Vietnam that Nixon outlined in 1969. "Even the rhetoric surrounding the two plans is strikingly similar," he reminds us. "Bush's claim that 'as the Iraqi security forces stand up, coalition forces can stand down' parallels Nixon's hope that 'as South Vietnamese forces become stronger, the rate of American withdrawal can become greater.' "

The trouble is there's a difference between "a people's war" (Vietnam) and "a communal one" (Iraq), Biddle contends, and "Iraqization" -- which is "the main component of the current U.S. military strategy" -- will have the opposite of the intended effect:

In a people's war, handing the fighting off to local forces makes sense because it undermines the nationalist component of insurgent resistance, improves the quality of local intelligence, and boosts troop strength. But in a communal civil war, it throws gasoline on the fire.

Let's ignore the fact that Vietnamization did NOT make sense in Vietnam, either (when you look at that outcome), which Biddle somehow fails to address in his essay. Presumably, someone will bring that up on Wednesday at the Council on Foreign Relations, where Biddle (a senior fellow in defense policy) will participate in a roundtable to discuss the situation in Iraq three years after the invasion.

More important is whether the roundtable will address what independent historian and national security policy analyst Gareth Porter explains in his recently published revisionist history of the Vietnam War, "Perils of Dominance." To put it country simple, a superpower facing weak opponents can be too strong for its own good. Porter argues with persuasive lucidity that America's "decisive military dominance" over the Soviet Union and China -- "not Cold War ideology or exaggerated notions of the threat from communism in Southeast Asia," the commonly accepted reasons -- led the United States down the blinkered path to a debacle.

I see a hand going up in the back row. The Soviet Union doesn't exist today, and communism has been routed. So what's the relevance now? Let's see. You remember all those assurances by the White House, and the Defense Department, and the CIA? The invasion would be a cakewalk? The occupation would be flowers of gratitude? The weapons of mass destruction would be a slam dunk? Of course you do. Well, here's Porter on Vietnam:

The extremely high level of confidence on the part of national security officials that the United States could assert its power in Vietnam without the risk of either a major war or a military confrontation with another major power conditioned the series of decisions that finally led to war. To put it another way, the imbalance of power so constrained the policies of Moscow and Beijing toward Vietnam (and toward the peripheral countries more generally) that it created incentives for ambitious U.S. objectives in that country.

Porter offers chapter and verse, laying out his argument with unassailable facts as "evidence for the critical influence of unequal power relations" on crucial Vietnam policy decisions. He examines the implications of his revisionist history "for understanding the nature of national security policy making in a state with dominant power in the international system." His account, he argues, "definitively contradicts the comforting view that 'the system worked' in making policy on Vietnam."

Further, he discusses "the emergence of a 'dysfunctional' process of national security policy making accompanied by unprecedented political tensions and a pattern of dishonesty and deception within the executive branch in the struggle over Vietnam policy." And finally, he provides "the lessons to be gleaned, in the present 'unipolar moment' in global politics and U.S. foreign policy," from U.S. involvement in Vietnam "in a Cold War era that was" -- contrary to the conventional wisdom -- "also effectively unipolar."

Current events in Iraq have been moving so fast that even day-old commentaries can seem outdated. But Porter, whose analysis is not limited to historical retrospectives or to books with long lead times, cuts to the heart of new developments in commentaries for the global, multilingual Inter Press Service that have lasting value. See, for instance, "US Realignment With Sunnis Is Far Advanced," which dissects the apparent willingness of the U.S. regime "to make some kind of deal with all the major insurgent groups" in Iraq, a signal "that the United States is no longer wedded to the option of supporting Shiite military and police." Although already a month old, Porter's analysis seems as fresh as if it were written yesterday in both its diagnosis and prognosis.

Still earlier, his piece "How to End the Occupation of Iraq: Outmaneuver the War Proponents," for Foreign Policy in Focus ("a think tank without walls") in April, 2005, offered antiwar activists advice on strategy and tactics about developing a proposal for the negotiated withdrawal of U.S. troops and, at the same time, anticipated the commentaries of other, better-known pundits -- Fareed Zakaria, for example.

Here's what Zakaria wrote in his column in Newsweek on Aug. 8, 2005, "Talking With the Enemy":

America's goal must be to split the insurgency, which can be done only by co-opting some important elements of the Baathist movement. A senior non-U.S. diplomat, who has spoken to all the key figures in Iraq over the past two years, tells me that for months leaders of the insurgency have been putting out feelers that they would like to talk with the United States about a settlement. ... Salih al-Mutlaq, whose National Dialogue Council has links to the insurgents, argues that negotiating with them would cripple the jihadists. "If the Americans reach an agreement with the local [Baathist] resistance, there won't be any room for foreign fighters," he says.

And here's what Porter wrote five months earlier:

A negotiated settlement need not have the participation of every nationalist group to serve the interests of peace. The foreign terrorists in Iraq aligned with al-Qaida are certainly not going to be part of any peace settlement, but relations between the nationalist resistance leaders and their followers, on one hand, and the foreign terrorists who bomb Shiite mosques and behead foreigners, on the other, quickly became very tense last year. It seems likely that most of those in the resistance would be unwilling to tolerate the presence of foreign jihadists in the country once the American troops have departed. Turning those nationalist against their erstwhile foreign allies through a peace settlement, therefore, is the surest way to end the recruitment and training program of the terrorists in Iraq.

Both columns continue to make sense.

No armchair analyst, Porter travels widely in third-world countries and writes for other outlets such as tompaine.org and mediachannel.org. On Friday he arrived in Manila just as Philippine President Gloria Arroyo announced a State of Emergency. His comment? "A kind of Martial Law Lite declaration," he said in an e-mail.

With his permission and the publisher's, here's a special offering:

LESSONS OF VIETNAM FOR THE UNIPOLAR ERA
excerpted from "Perils of Dominance" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005)
© 2005 by The Regents of the University of California

By Gareth Porter

Since the end of the Cold War, it has been universally agreed that the international system is "unipolar," meaning that no other state or possible combination of states can counterbalance the power of the United States. Beginning in the 1990s and continuing into the new century, students of international relations and international security have carried on a heated debate over whether the new situation of clear-cut U.S. dominance is likely to endure and whether it is desirable in terms of international peace and stability. Defenders of policies aimed at exploiting the "unipolar moment" have argued that the present structure is likely to be enduring, and that it is more likely than a balance of power to preserve peace, because it minimizes uncertainty. They assert that U.S. dominance ensures that weaker states will not be tempted to challenge even an expansive definition of U.S. security interests around the globe.

Opponents of policies based on unipolarity, on the other hand, argue that a policy aimed at preserving and exploiting U.S. dominance is both futile, because of the fundamental tendency of states to balance against a dominant power, and dangerous, because the exploitation of dominance is likely to be seen as provocative by other states. Paralleling these academic arguments over the unipolar system, of course, are sharp differences of view over the practice of unilateralism in the use of military power by the United States against a weaker "rogue" state in the absence of a consensus of the international community. The Bush administration justified the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq as minimizing the likelihood of serious threats to U.S. and international security. Opponents saw the unilateral use of force in Iraq as more likely to increase regional instability and the dangers to U.S. and global security.

These debates on the advantages and disadvantages of unipolarity and of policies that exploit it have assumed that there has never before been anything in the modern state system even remotely similar to the present global structure of power. This assumption reflects the conventional view that there was a rough bipolar balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War. The reinterpretation of the period between the Korean and Vietnam wars offered in this study suggests, however, that the dominance of U.S. power over that period was roughly equivalent to the unipolarity of the post-Cold War period. In the earlier period, U.S. power could not be balanced by that of the Soviet Union and China. By 1964, U.S. officials had begun to view the Soviet Union less as a Cold War rival for power than as a potentially useful adjunct to U.S. efforts to impose a settlement in Vietnam at some future date. Several major states today arguably occupy analogous political roles in relation to the issue of unilateral U.S. use of military force.

The insights that can be gleaned from reassessing the dynamics of the political system and of U.S. policy making toward Vietnam during that period are highly relevant, therefore, to the present "unipolar moment." In particular, the U.S. experience on the road to war in Vietnam offers useful lessons about the ways in which the United States is most likely to become involved in wars in a unipolar system. The question is whether wars are more likely to arise from states that seek to make a significant change in the international balance of power, or even to disturb a regional status quo, or from the tendency of the United States to extend its power and influence too far and to provoke greater resistance and hostility to U.S. power.

In retrospect, it is clear that the U.S. dominance during the interwar period of the Cold War reduced to virtually nil the possibility of wars involving the Soviet Union or China -- the only second- or even third-level states in the power hierarchy who at least in theory were hostile to U.S. power interests. Neither Communist great power was willing to taken even minimal risks of a military clash with the United States. The extreme imbalance of power ruled out even the encouragement by the USSR or the PRC of a direct challenge by local Communists to U.S. power interests. It is no accident that the Soviet Union and China, whose internal organization and ideology inclined them toward support for such challenges to the existing international order, both gave up their previous policy of backing revolutionary struggles just as the new power configuration emerged at the end of the Korean War. Those effects of the unipolarity of that interwar period can be counted as positive for preventing war.

The lesson of this study of the impact of unbalanced power on the Vietnam issue, however, is that the absence of challenge from second-rank or third-rank states in terms of power does not prevent the occurrence of war on the periphery. The initiative in challenging the U.S. power position in South Vietnam in 1959-60 did not come from either of the major Communist powers, after all, but from the Vietnamese Communists themselves. It was not the North Vietnamese regime, moreover, that initially pushed for an armed uprising aimed at upending the Saigon regime. The party leadership in Hanoi, under pressure from their Communist patrons and cautious in the face of the ever-present threat of U.S. military force, had been prepared to continue to support the Soviet-Chinese strategy of waging only political struggle in South Vietnam. The initiative came from the South Vietnamese victims of the Diemist repression, for many of whom the issue of armed struggle was literally one of life or death. Their motivation in taking up arms had nothing to do with Cold War politics between the two blocs. These southern communists and former Viet Minh forced the hand of the North Vietnamese regime by threatening Hanoi with a loss of control over its followers in the South.

In the earlier unipolar power era, then, it was those with the least power who were willing to take the initiative to challenge U.S. power, rather than those who were closest to the United States in power capabilities. Although seemingly paradoxical, this historical fact reflected an elementary reality: these local resistance forces had the least to lose and the most to gain from challenging the status quo established by U.S. power. Furthermore, they were the least knowledgeable about U.S. power capabilities. This fact suggests that the debate over the present unipolar power structure has been too narrow in its focus on whether other major powers or potential major powers are likely to challenge U.S. dominance. The previous experience with unipolarity indicates that the United States can probably intimidate second- and third-level states, because the risks of even slight over resistance to U.S. assertion of power beyond their borders are simply too great. One lesson of the path to war in Vietnam, however, is that war is much more likely to arise, not from a decision by those with the most to lose but from conflicts involving the vigorous assertion by the United States of its power interests abroad, even in the absence of an overt challenge by another state.

A second lesson from the path to war in Vietnam has to do with the roles of force and diplomacy in the ability of the dominant power to exert influence on potential foes. The dominance of the United States in the international politics of the interwar period was based primarily on its ability to manipulate the implicit or explicit threat to use U.S. air and naval power -- including the ultimate sanction of the use of nuclear weapons -- without having to actually use that power. We now know just how strongly the existence of strategic asymmetry impressed on the Soviet Union and China, as well as North Vietnam, the risks and costs of war with the United States. During the entire period between the Geneva Accords and the major U.S. combat intervention in Vietnam in 1965, the North Vietnamese leaders were ready to make far-reaching compromises on the length of time that an independent non-Communist regime could remain in the South, provided that it was buffered from U.S. political-military power. That position was a direct consequence of the ability of the United States to threaten wholesale destruction of North Vietnamese society. For the same reasons, the North Vietnamese also limited participation in the armed struggle to native southerners for the first four years of the war.

Despite genuine fear of U.S. attack, however, the DRV [Democratic Republic of Vietnam] became increasingly committed to the struggle in the South from 1961 on. Its gradual assumption of increasingly greater risk reflects two factors working in tandem. The first was the fact that the outcome of the struggle in the South bore on the primordial interest of the regime in national independence. The more direct reason for the escalation of North Vietnamese involvement, however, was that the United States completely shut the door on any compromise that could have allowed North Vietnam to end the war honorably.

By rejecting diplomatic negotiation, the United States threw away most of its actual ability to shape the political outcome in South Vietnam through a combination of threat, restraint, and knowing what concessions it could extract from Hanoi, short of giving up the ultimate possibility of reunification. Paradoxically, by attempting to press its advantage too far -- and especially by engaging in systematic bombing of North Vietnam while blocking the possibility of diplomatic overtures -- the United States sacrificed its considerable influence over Hanoi's choices.

I have argued above that the outcome of U.S. policy can be traced to the reading of power relationships by the national security bureaucracy. In opting to put in a large ground contingent and postponing any diplomatic probe of Hanoi in 1965, Johnson's national security advisers were basing their recommendations on the incentives that they presumed to be inherent in the overwhelming U.S. dominance in the power relationship with Hanoi. In doing so, they completely ignored the much more complex set of actual incentives facing Hanoi.

This episode illustrates the broader problem of the reliance by the national security bureaucracy on the absence of any external countervailing power in using force. It suggests that national security officials in the dominant state are incapable of going beyond crude signals of hierarchical power in thinking about going to war against a weaker state or sociopolitical movement in conflict with U.S. policy. The record of policy deliberations on Vietnam suggests that the advisers were simply unable to recognize that they were pressing their power advantage too far in South Vietnam in that crucial March-May 1965 period. The fateful decisions to deploy more troops and to forgo genuine negotiations were only possible because of the engrained habit of relying too heavily on the U.S. power advantage in Vietnam over a period of years. This is obviously not a tendency that is exclusive to the U.S. Vietnam policy in the first half of the 1960s, moreover. It is likely that it is endemic to policy making over a prolonged period of unbalanced power and conflicts with much weaker adversaries.

In documenting the effect of the imbalance of power on U.S. policy toward Vietnam, this study illustrates the most fundamental insight of realist international relations theory: that a rough balance of power is necessary to curb the tendency of the strongest state to exploit its power advantage to the maximum at the expense of weaker states. "Unbalanced power is a danger to weak states," Kenneth Waltz once observed, adding, "It may also be a danger to strong ones." Realist theory generally asserts that the tendency of the strongest state to extend its power and influence continues until it is checked by external forces or by sociopolitical forces at home that weaken its ability to do so.

Until the end of the Cold War, realists generally did not apply this general principle to the United States, but in the present "unipolar moment," the issue of how to restrain excessive use of U.S. power is unavoidable. It has now become part of the debate over the advantages and disadvantages to the United States and to the world of U.S. dominance of the international system. Waltz, for one, has suggested that peace will require not only external constraints on U.S. power but internal restraints as well. Students of unipolar politics and foreign policy looking at the questions of domestic restraint on the deployment of U.S. power abroad would do well to take account of the political dynamics of policy making on the road to war in Vietnam.

A recurrent theme of this study has been that the impetus for the assertive use of U.S. military power in Vietnam came overwhelmingly from the national security bureaucracy itself, rather than from the presidency. The previous section discusses the ways in which the policy-making process on Vietnam because dysfunctional because of the refusal of national security advisers to accept a presidential policy that rejected the use of military force in defense of national security interests. That earlier unipolar experience suggests that the problem of inadequate domestic restrains may be exacerbated by the tendency of the national security bureaucracy to assert itself in policy making.

Alongside these parallels between the present unipolar moment and the one that existed for at least twelve years in the 1950s and 1960s, there are obvious differences as well. Perhaps the main one is a far greater pluralism of sociopolitical and intellectual views of national security in the current phase of unipolar power than existed in the earlier period. As long as the unipolar moment persists, however, the political power of the national security bureaucracy, both within the executive branch and in the larger society, will certainly remain a challenge to domestic efforts to restrain the use of military power by the United States.

Posted by jherman at 1:02 AM

February 23, 2006

OH YEAH

A friend writes, "Ya gotta love Lina":

The ones who don't enjoy themselves, even when they laugh. Oh yeah. The ones who worship the corporate image, not knowing that they work for someone else. Oh yeah. The ones who should have been shot in the cradle... Pow! Oh yeah. The ones who say "Follow me to success, but kill me if I fail... so to speak." Oh yeah. The ones who say we Italians are the greatest he-men on earth. Oh yeah. The ones who are noble Romans, the ones who say "That's for me," the ones who say "You know what I mean." Oh yeah. The ones who vote for the right because they're fed up with strikes. Oh yeah. The ones who vote white in order not to get dirty. The ones who never get involved with politics. Oh yeah. The ones who say "Be calm, calm." The ones who still support the king. The ones who say "Yes, sir." Oh yeah. The ones who make love standing in their boots, and imagine they're in a luxurious bed. The ones who believe Christ is Santa Claus as a young man. Oh yeah. The ones who say 'Oh, what the hell.' The ones who were there. The ones who believe in everything, even in God. The ones who listen to the national anthem. Oh yeah. The ones who love their country. The ones who keep going, just to see how it will end. Oh yeah. The ones who are in garbage up to here. Oh yeah. The ones who sleep soundly, even with cancer. Oh yeah. The ones who, even now, don't believe the world is round. Oh yeah, oh yeah. The ones who are afraid of flying. Oh yeah. The ones who have never had a fatal accident. Oh yeah. The ones who have had one. The ones who, at a certain point in their lives, create a secret weapon, Christ. Oh yeah. The ones who are always standing at the bar. The ones who are always in Switzerland. The ones who started early, haven't arrived, and don't know they're not going to. Oh yeah. The ones who lose wars by the skin of their teeth. Oh yeah. The ones who say "Everything is wrong here." The ones who say "Now let's all have a good laugh." Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Posted by jherman at 9:47 PM

February 21, 2006

BOLD, RED-FACED CONTRADICTIONS

Iraqi death squads doing America's dirty work? Why would you think that? The U.S. regime has distanced itself from the Sunni genocide, hasn't it? In public, of course. But yesterday's story in the Los Angeles Times, "Police Tied to Death Squads" shows, possibly without meaning to, how contradictory and difficult the distancing is:

A 1,500-member Iraqi police force [the highway patrol] with close ties to Shiite militia groups has emerged as a focus of investigations into suspected death squads working within the country's Interior Ministry. ...

"We don't train them, we don't give them equipment, we don't conduct site visits over there. They are just bad, criminal people," said a high-ranking U.S. military officer who advises the Interior Ministry. [But now hear this:] The officer was one of three who each spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they wanted to maintain relationships with Iraqi police officials and avoid retaliation by U.S. military superiors. ...

"Who knows who they all are? Nobody controls them but the minister," the officer said, referring to Interior Minister Bayan Jabr.

Jabr, a Shiite with close ties to the Badr Brigade, a paramilitary group, has been at the center of allegations of abuse at the hands of Iraqi security forces. The minister's notoriety rose last year as the bodies of hundreds of men -- mostly Sunni Arabs -- started appearing in sewage treatment plants, garbage dumps and desert ravines. ...

Leading Sunni figures have blamed the reprisals on Jabr. ...

In a recent interview, Army Maj. Gen. Joseph Peterson, who is leading the multibillion-dollar effort to train and equip Iraq's police forces, vigorously defended the minister and said he was heartened by Jabr's pledge to investigate the abuse fully.

"Death squads -- they're a real issue," said Peterson. "I can tell you, we caught our first death squad," he said, referring to the unit that was apprehended last month. "The minister of Interior is elated that we caught them," he added. ...

Army Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch [above], a U.S. military spokesman, said that the Interior Ministry was leading the investigation into the suspected death squad.

Ali Hussein Kamal, the Interior Ministry's intelligence chief, said, in an interview Sunday that investigators were also trying to determine whether the Iraqi general in charge of the highway patrol was linked to the squad.

"If we find that these allegations that he is involved are true, we will be taking very firm measures against him," Kamal said. "But generally speaking, high-ranking officers are usually ignorant of what their lower-ranking officers are doing."

By golly, you betcha. That's just what Rummy said about Abu Ghraib: The torturers were a bunch of low-ranking bad apples, thass all.

Posted by jherman at 8:24 PM

February 20, 2006

TORTURE: THE REAL McCOY

The subject of torture is back with a vengeance not only in the latest Abu Ghraib photos obtained by Salon, but in "The Memo," Jane Mayer's latest exposé, which pins the blame on a gang of war criminals running the U.S. government.

So before it disappears into the past, here's a must-see: Alfred McCoy speaking with Amy Goodman in a Democracy Now! interview that aired on Friday. He is the author of "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror," published last month by Metropolitan Books. McCoy, who is also a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, gives an absolutely riveting account of the history of torture techniques perfected by the CIA over the past 50 years.

Some of it may surprise you. For instance, McCoy says that all the CIA's research with electroshock, hallucinogens, and other drugs came to nothing as interrogation tools. LSD, mescaline, and sodium pentathol, the so-called truth serum, simply did not produce useful results.

Instead the agency discovered that the two principal tools that worked were simple, even boring techniques: 1) sensory deprivation, and 2) self-inflicted pain. With these two techniques alone CIA researchers were able to induce psychosis in research subjects, he says. Since then the CIA has added sensory overload (such as loud music) and two more techniques, perfected at Guantanamo and later brought to Abu Ghraib: 3) cultural sensitivity ("particularly Arab male sensitivity to issues of gender and sexual identity"), and 4) individual fears and phobia.

McCoy's presentation is far more striking and detailed than you get from my outline. He also traces the development of Army and CIA interrogation manuals, actual practices, and Congressional legislation regulating them. And much of what he says may be confirmed with ease, he adds, by typing KUBARK into the Google search engine. (Or just click the link.) This will get you to a list of relevant documents, including the formerly secret 1963 CIA counterintelligence interrogation manual. McCoy suggests reading the manual footnotes because that's where some of the most interesting information is. If you click on this, you can see the actual training manual documents, which illustrate the linkage at key points from 1963 to 1983 to 1992. And don't forget to have fun.

Now read this from Bob Herbert's column on Monday, "The Torturers Win." Herbert describes what he calls "the quintessential example" of extraordinary rendition -- the CIA's "reprehensible practice" of outsourcing torture, i.e., kidnapping suspected terrorists and secretly packing them off, drugged, hooded and shackled, to foreign countries for interrogation -- along with proof that the U.S. regime's war criminals have already subverted the American justice system.

Terrible things were done to Maher Arar, and his extreme suffering was set in motion by the United States government. With the awful facts of his case carefully documented, he tried to sue for damages. But last week a federal judge waved the facts aside and told Mr. Arar, in effect, to get lost.

What were those terrible things? Just this: Arar, right -- "a 35-year-old software engineer who lives in Ottawa, [Canada], with his wife and their two young children [and had] never been in any kind of trouble" -- was subjected to extraordinary rendition. In other words, he was "seized and shackled by U.S. authorities at Kennedy Airport in 2002, and then shipped off to Syria, his native country, where he was held in a dungeon for the better part of a year."

His guards beat him with electrical cable. Cats pissed on him. He himself had no place to piss or shit except in his unheated, rat-infested cell, which was the size of a grave and just as dark, Herbert writes. After 10 months, "when even Syria's torture professionals could elicit no evidence that he was in any way involved in terrorism," he was released and no charges were ever filed against him.

The Center for Constitutional Rights in New York filed a lawsuit on Mr. Arar's behalf, seeking damages from the U.S. government for his ordeal. The government said the case could not even be dealt with because the litigation would involve the revelation of state secrets. ...

... U.S. District Judge David Trager dismissed Mr. Arar's lawsuit last Thursday [and] wrote in his opinion that "Arar's claim that he faced a likelihood of torture in Syria is supported by U.S. State Department reports on Syria's human rights practices."

But in dismissing the suit, he said that the foreign policy and national security issues raised by the government were "compelling" and that such matters were the purview of the executive branch and Congress, not the courts.

He also said that "the need for secrecy can hardly be doubted." ... As an example of the kind of foreign policy problems that might arise if Mr. Arar were given his day in court, Judge Trager wrote:
"One need not have much imagination to contemplate the negative effect on our relations with Canada if discovery were to proceed in this case and were it to turn out that certain high Canadian officials had, despite public denials, acquiesced in Arar's removal to Syria."

Oh yes, by all means, we need the federal courts to fully protect the right of public officials to lie to their constituents.

Sidenote: A front-page article in today's New York Times says another case "has come to symbolize the C.I.A. practice known as extraordinary rendition" -- that of Khaled el-Masri, "a German citizen of Arab descent who was arrested Dec. 31, 2003, in Macedonia before being flown to [a] Kabul prison." Well, takes yer cherce: Arar or Masri. And doncha just love that description, "arrested" and "flown"? Soooooo travel agent.

Postscript: Speaking of terminology, a friend messages: "Contemporary, uh, 'book burning'?"

Posted by jherman at 9:45 AM

February 19, 2006

DEAD RECKONING

It was 59 years ago that Richard Nixon made his first speech before the House of Representatives:

I think that every Member of the House is in substantial agreement with the Attorney General in his recent statements on the necessity of rooting out Communist sympathizers from our American institutions.

"Meanwhile in Look magazine, Eleanor Roosevelt observed The Russians Are Tough," says David Ehrenstein, who will doubtless appreciate Nelson Algren's remarks, also from that golden age of snoops and dupes when the late, great novelist's life was turned inside out and upside down by the FBI and other Red hunters.

"Say I'm standing knee-deep, and sinking, in the muddy waters of the Little Calumet, " Algren wrote.

Some anxious-looking patriot paddles up, identifying himself as the Washington correspondent of The New Yorker bringing tidings of comfort and joy: namely, that if the Little Calumet were the Volga I'd be up to my ears. And paddles away as contentedly as if he'd really done something for me.

He hasn't done a thing, this roving mercenary with the shaky gerund. Not even when he warns me that I better stop saying Ouch when McCarthy gives the screw another turn -- lest the Kremlin overhear my yip and tape record it for rebroadcasting to Europe. Who's paying him for God's sake?

The insistence of these long-remaindered intellectuals on short leashes that, compared to the drive for conformity in the USSR, we don't have any notion as yet of what the real thing can be like, reveals loyalty to nobody save Henry Luce. Whose dangerous dictum it is that it is now America's part "to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit." ...

When we can make a half-hero out of a subaqueous growth like Whittaker Chambers, and a half-heroine out of a broomstick crackpot like Hester McCullough, and then place a government employee under charges because unidentified informants alleged that "his convictions on the question of civil rights extended slightly beyond that of the average individual," it is time to call a halt.

Prescient words from "Nonconformity," a booklength essay Algren wrote between 1950 and 1953. It was published for the first time in 1996 by Seven Stories Press, with an afterword by Daniel Simon, who rescued the mansucript from oblivion.

Some presidents don't deserve to be honored, not on President's Day or ever. Nixon is one. The Bullshitter-in-Chief is another.

Posted by jherman at 11:52 AM

February 18, 2006

WHAT HARRY DINT SAY

Cheney Boy's 78-year-old shooting victim, Harry Whittington, spoke out after being released from the hospital. As reported by the Associated Press, "His voice was a bit raspy, but strong, and he had what appeared to be a line of scarring on his upper right eyelid and scrapes on his neck." This is what he said: "I regret that I couldn’t have been here earlier so you could see what a lucky person I am." This is what he dint say:

Posted by jherman at 11:28 AM

February 17, 2006

DEEP FOCUS, ES CLARO?

Before the week is out I want to clarify an issue of burning interest to film hogs, critics, scholars and other lower forms of life. There seems to be a sudden interest in "deep focus" and its original Hollywood practitioners. It's a simple cinematic technique, and yet its history and meaning are somewhat misunderstood even by such cinephiles as The New Yorker's film critic, David Denby.

Writing in the current New Yorker about "how clear and sharply focussed the wide-screen image was" in Steven Soderbergh's new, low-budget picture "Bubble," Denby marvels that the "focus is not only sharp; it's sharp deep into the shot, at distances of thirty feet or more from the camera." And then he gets into a discussion of the French film theorist André Bazin, whose influential writings in the 1950s assigned "an almost moral importance" to "the commonplace photographic measure of depth of field." Denby points out:

In the Russian silent movies, and in the American cinema of the thirties, depth of field -- the amount of the frame that was in sharp focus -- was generally shallow, and filmmakers used lighting and editing to direct our attention to the most significant part of the action; the rest was blurry, mere background. As Bazin noted, however, such directors as Orson Welles, in "Citizen Kane," and William Wyler, in "The Little Foxes," both working with the cinematographer Gregg Toland, greatly expanded depth of field -- expanded it so much that the audience was suddenly free to direct its gaze to the foreground or the middle distance. It could follow an actor as he moved through the set or not. Deep focus, Bazin said, liberated the spectator from the coercion of montage.

All true, but -- and there are several "buts" -- Welles and Wyler used deep focus in opposite ways. Bazin stated this himself in a seminal essay in 1948. He recognized that Wyler exploited deep focus to achieve an "invisible" style that prized realism. By "invisible," as I wrote in my Wyler biography "A Talent for Trouble,"

Bazin meant his signature was honest, democratic and stripped down, in contrast to that of Orson Welles, which he regarded as mannered, even sadistic. Wyler's point, Bazin wrote, "is not to provoke the spectator, not to put him on the rack and torture him. All [he] wants is that the spectator can (1) see everything; and (2) choose as he pleases. It's an act of loyalty to the spectator, an attempt at dramatic honesty." Bazin compares the neutrality and transparency of Wyler's staging -- "un style sans style" -- with Andé Gide's literary technique, which maximized clarity, immediacy and directness. ... [L]onger, therefore less deceptive, shots ... allow the audience to choose what it sees. Unlike Welles's use of "deep focus" to create effects (such as foreshortening perspective or heightening suspense), Wyler makes functional use of the technique. ... [H]is first and only worry is to make the audience understand ..."

Welles wants to dazzle -- and he does, of course -- as often as not with exotic effects that give the viewer no choice but to submit to their impact. You can prefer Welles or Wyler, but you can't put them in the same bag just because they both worked with the same cinematographer whose technical and artistic skills helped them perfect the use of deep focus.

Bazin went to the trouble of counting the number of shots in Wyler's most famous deep-focus picture, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), to prove how streamlined his style was. (He noted that Best Years used roughly 190 shots per hour, compared with 300 to 400 for the average picture.) But for all Bazin's theorizing, which remains the essential analysis of Wyler's body of work, he was basically echoing and elaborating on Wyler's own intentions as expressed in an essay, "Magic Wand," which was published in 1947 in Screen Writer magazine. Referring to his collaboration with Toland, Wyler wrote:

We decided to try for as much simple realism as possible. We had a clear-cut understanding that we would avoid glamour close-ups and soft, diffused backgrounds. ... [And] since Gregg intended to carry his focus to the extreme background of each set, detail in set designing, construction and dressing became very important.

But more important, "carrying focus" in black-and-white cinematography provided crisp images with "good contrasts and texture ... establishing a mood of realism." Also -- and this was paramount -- it not only allowed Wyler greater freedom in staging his scenes but imposed a more rigorous, fluid and involving aesthetic.

I can have action and reaction in the same shot without having to cut back and forth from individual cuts of the characters. This makes for smooth continuity, an almost effortless flow of the scene, for much more interesting composition in each shot, and lets the spectator look from one to the other character at his own will, do his own cutting.

As useful as the technique was, however, Wyler's concern really lay elsewhere. "I have never been as interested in the externals of presenting a scene," he pointed out, "as I have been in the inner workings of the people the scene is about."

Something else I'd like to clarify. Whenever The Little Foxes (1941) is mentioned in the context of deep focus, per Denby, the scene usually cited as the perfect example of the technique is the so-called "staircase scene." In fact, that scene -- with Bette Davis as Regina, and Herbert Marshall as her ailing husband Horace -- was purposely NOT shot in deep focus most of the way through. As I noted (bear with me), here's why:

[The scene] begins with Regina telling Horace, who is sitting in his wheelchair, that she never loved him but married him only for material gain. What she cannot see, but we can, is the pained expression on Horace's face, as her remarks precipitate a heart attack. He tries to take his medication, but the bottle drops and breaks. ...

When he pleads for her help, she recognizes an opportunity and sits stock still not lifting a finger or blinking an eye. Horace staggers out of his wheelchair toward the staircase behind her. He struggles up toward the bedroom where he has more medication. But the camera doesn't follow him. It remains fixed on Regina's stony face, which is rigid with anticipation in the foreground. She listens keenly for his collapse in the background.

Instead of using deep focus in this scene, which could have kept both planes of action sharply etched, Wyler chose to blur the focus on Horace in the background, where the external drama is. The camera keeps Regina in sharp focus, where the internal drama is, both to draw attention to her cruelty and to underscore her steel will.

"What is interesting here is the wife," Wyler explained. "The scene is her face, what is going on inside her. You could have him out of the frame completely, just hear him stagger upstairs. ... Gregg said, 'I can have him sharp, or both of them sharp.' I said no, because I wanted audiences to feel they were seeing something they were not supposed to. Seeing the husband in the background made you squint, but what you were seeing was her face."

As long as I'm clarifying things, I might as well go all the way. Have a look at the Turner Classic Movie commentary⊗ for a recent presentation of Wyler's Dodsworth (1936):

Wyler, for his part, was a known perfectionist in his approach to filming. One cast member recalled "one entire afternoon spent shooting a scene of a crumpled letter being blown gently along the length of a terrace. He wanted it to go slowly for a way, then stop, and then flutter along a little further." (From A Talent For Trouble by Jan Herman). Luckily, he had Gregg Toland -- whom he considered a technical genius -- as his cinematographer and Dodsworth is full of stunning, deep focus compositions such as the scene where Sam and Edith accidentally meet in Naples at an American Express office.

The commentary gets it wrong when it cites Toland's contribution to the film, and wrongly reinforces the widespread notion that Wyler was dependent on Toland's eye for pictorial composition. Here's the relevant passage from the book:

The cinematographer for Dodsworth was Rudolph Maté not Gregg Toland, who was working for Howard Hawks on Come and Get It. ...[Maté] was a fine craftsman, in Wyler's opinion, but no Toland. Still, if proof were needed that Wyler did not depend on Toland's eye for mastery of the screen -- pictorially or dramatically -- Dodsworth provides it. Even more than These Three, it shows the spare elegance of his fluid style, balanced compositions and steady takes.

Wyler always credited Toland with being a technical genius. But his own concern with spatial arrangement of characters in a scene to tell a story or create an effect -- whether psychological or symbolic -- predated his work with Toland. In Dodsworth, moreover, there is plenty of evidence to indicate that Wyler conceived of 'deep focus' shots, even without the technological means to perfect them.

A case in point is his treatment of the accidental meeting of Sam and Edith in the American Express office in Naples. The two characters, each unaware of the other, shift back and forth between foreground and background. Wyler's pictorial division of the scene develops a sense of expectation in the viewer. Visually, if not dramatically, the configuration foreshadows the sort of pattern Wyler would use again, most notably in The Little Foxes and The Best Years of Our Lives, which were benchmarks of the Toland-perfected 'deep focus' technique.

Es claro? I hope so, 'cuz just typing all of this has tuckered me out.

⊗This item originally cited Rob Nixon as the author of TCM's "Dodsworth" commentary. Not so Nixon informs me. In an email sent today (Dec. 17, 2006), he says, "i do write for tcm's website and recently contributed an article about dodsworth for the essentials series, in which i was well aware that gregg toland was not the cinematographer. but this is not the article posted on line that you refer to (especially since your article is dated last february, months before i even wrote the new piece). i don't know who wrote the piece you refer to, but it wasn't me. i've sent a message to the person who edits and compiles the tcm website to have my name removed from it."

My apology to Nixon for repeating the error. TCM has swiftly updated the "Dodsworth" commentary I cited, eliminating both the Toland mistake and Nixon's name as author. Another thing ought to be said: the TCM site is really pretty great. It offers movie fans lots of terrific info.

Postscript: David Ehrenstein writes:

Excellent points.

Jean Renoir's use of depth of field in "Boudu Saved From Drowning" (1932) should also be cited in any discussion of this aspect of film style. And Renoir didn't have Gregg Toland or the sort of sharp-focussed cinematography that arrived in the '40s.

Alan Edelson writes:

This is an interesting topic. I too believed the story that the famous staircase scene in "The Little Foxes" involved deep focus, even though I have seen the film several times.

From what rudimentary optics I know, increasing the depth of focus of a lens depends on increasing the "f" stop (i.e., closing down the iris), which requires boosting the lighting of the scene to compensate for darkening the exposure. Wide-angle lenses inherently have an increased depth of focus, but may not be appropriate for many movie scenes.  Of course, the development of improved lens designs helped. These were greatly aided by the use of computers in lens design from the late '50s on, as well as by the use of compound lenses and glass of different optical qualities.

It must have required technical ingenuity of a high order for cinematographers to achieve increased depth of focus in the "old days." And artistic judgment by the director. I recall that a common alternative device when directing the viewer's attention from a close up actor to one in the background was to employ a cam that was timed to switch the focus of a camera lens from near to far, or vice versa, but I was always uncomfortably aware of this artificial gimmick. Anyway, I enjoyed reading your discussion. It reminded me of the range of skills required of a really great film director like William Wyler.

Yes, Toland was regarded at the time as something of a mechanical genius. He experimented with coated lenses, high-speed film stock, Waterhouse stops, and even got into sound-deadening with a camera "blimp." He was also very quick on the set. What took some cinematographers four hours to light took him 30 minutes, according to Wyler, who was driven to distraction by the slow ones.

Posted by jherman at 4:03 PM

February 16, 2006

CHENEY BOY'S NURSERY RHYME

From his interview with Brit Hume:

I'm the guy
who pulled the trigger
that fired the round that hit Harry.

From Mother Goose:

This is the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.

Postscript: And now for the topper: Mother Abu Ghraib.

Posted by jherman at 8:53 AM

February 15, 2006

DA CHENEY FUNNIES

The stuff coming out of the White House is too funny to stop. Coupla hunnerd proof at least. Can't help it. Here's more:

And don't forget, he loves the smell of gunpowder.

Posted by jherman at 12:50 PM

PREYTORIAN GUARD RIDES AGAIN

I dunno who Don Krupp is, but I say give him an op-ed column. His letter to the editor in this morning's New York Times works for me.

To the Editor:

Re "No End to Questions in Cheney Hunting Accident" (front page, Feb. 14):

The debacle of Vice President Dick Cheney's misfire while quail hunting in Texas is a sad caricature of what the whole Bush administration is about: make an error in judgment, try to keep a lid on it, and then blame everyone else when the story inevitably becomes public.

When confronted with questions, the Bush White House tried to blame Mr. Cheney's hapless hunting partner for getting in the way. These, of course, are the people leading this country. Remember, these are the same people who misled the country about mythical weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

If we can't trust Mr. Cheney and company with a simple shotgun, why should we trust them with this nation's Defense Department?

Don Krupp
Olympia, Wash., Feb. 14, 2006

I suppose Don Krupp would have to be vetted before being given a column. Unfortunately, he shares a name with Alfried Krupp, patriarch of the infamous German armaments family, a k a the Krupp conglomerate. But from the tone of his letter I doubt that he's related. Nicht wahr?

Postscript: This arrived last night, Feb. 20, validating my belief in DK and, not incidentally, the wonders of the Web:

Dear Jan,

I just stumbled across your blog and your kind remarks about my recent letter to the editor in The New York Times.

As for being "vetted before given a column," I can assure you that I have no family relation to the Krupps of Germany. I am Polish and my surname is a shortened derivation of a much longer, less pronounceable name than the one my father was christened with - Krupowicz.

Thanks for taking notice of my letter. I had fun writing it and was thoroughly surprised when The Times accepted it for publication.

Regards,

Don

Posted by jherman at 9:54 AM

February 14, 2006

TRICKLE, TRICKLE

Not to jump the gun, so to speak -- but if Cheney Boy's 78-year-old shooting victim were to die from the "minor heart attack" he suffered or from any other injuries he sustained as a result of being accidentally shot, can Cheney Boy be charged with negligent homicide?

If so, will he be?

And if that were possible, would it be too much to ask Cheney Boy's victim to give his life for the good of the Republic? The question is fraught with moral implications but worth asking, methinks.

Postscript: A reader writes: "How many more revelations will it take before people realize this is a crime family? A hunting accident (even if lethal) is nothing compared to the fraudulent push into war. Nothing."

Another writes: "I asked that same question myself. I would think that at the very least a grand jury should be called. Who ruled it accidental?"

Ah. Good point. And here's the funky answer: The local Texas sheriff, Ramon Salinas III of Kenedy County, said an investigation had concluded that the episode was "no more than an accident." As reported by The New York Times, Salinas said he sent his chief deputy, Gilbert Sanmiguel, to the Armstrong Ranch (where the shooting took place) on Saturday night. He said Sanmiguel interviewed Cheney Boy and reported that the shooting was an accident.

By Sunday, however, the sheriff's department had yet to speak to Cheney Boy's victim, Harry Whittington. "But you could say it's closed," Salinas said of the case. Then, on Monday, the sheriff's office issued a press release that said "Mr. Whittington's interview collaborated [sic] Vice President Cheney's statement" and that the department was "fully satisfied that this was no more than a hunting accident."

Yes, you read that right. The interview was a collaboration. Presumably, the sheriff's department meant a corroboration. You don't need to be Sigmund Freud to draw a suspicious collusion -- sorry -- conclusion.

Posted by jherman at 4:49 PM

DA BIG BLOW

Before the record blizzard of '06 disappears into the murk of history, I want to let everyone know that I'm alive and well. One friend out West, hearing about "da big blow," messaged me: "I hope you're comfortably dug in for the duration. Thass lotsa white stuff. Coraggio!"

Yes, it took lotsa coraggio to survive without a dent. But I was so dug in I hadda watch the Weather Channel to find out it was snowing. And then I saw this day-after photo of Times Square, left.

Well, I thought it was Times Square until another friend who lives in Brooklyn messaged that he'd taken it last night at 6:15 p.m. in Prospect Park, not far from his Park Slope apartment. When I asked him, "Where are the crowds?," he admitted he hadn't taken the picture himself, but had grabbed it from an online source.

"It's not actually Times Square," he said. "But it does show a park, out West somewhere. In this age of memoirs that's close enough, isn't it?" And anyway, he'd been over to Prospect Park to witness the scene. "It was quite manageable," he said. "I saw a few sledders and a handful of skiers."

In fact, there were more than a few cross-country skiers out on the street, like the one, below, on First Avenue in Manhattan's East Village. Yesterday I saw a skier myself. Not on the slopes. On the subway. Not on skis, but in full regalia carrying her skis. Apparently she was on her way to Central Park.

By the way, everybody noticed how manageable the blizzard of '06 has been. "Even as the snow fell, and fell and fell, late Saturday and throughout Sunday, it never felt like the end of the world," Andy Newman wrote in this morning's front-page story, "As Monsters Go, This Storm Had a Lighter Tread."

Unlike the blizzard of '47, which held the city's snowfall record of 26.4 inches until this weekend's blow topped out at 26.9 inches.

"In those days many one- and two-story houses were heated with fuel oil," another friend recalled, describing his childhood experience in '47. "They still are. In our case it was Paragon that supplied us. Well, it turned out the oil was low."

My grandfather usually took care of that sort of thing. But suddenly on this day there was no fuel, no oil, no heat. Somehow my grandparents took off for my aunt and uncle's apartment a few miles away; a place with HEAT in a large apartment complex. My Dad went to stay with his cousins so that he could get to work early in the morning. The rest of us -- mother, brother and little me, we intrepid few -- bundled up and went to sleep with the last dregs of some warmth still in the house.

Morning was cold, really cold, not merely "really" cold but so cold that getting out of bed was entirely out of the question -- till force overcame my resolve (or inertia, which may be the same thing). Ultimately, bundled and freezing, we set forth for the main street, Morris Avenue, and started looking for transportation, indeed, even a cab. (You needed to be dying before you took a cab!)

I was about to lie down and face the big sleep. But 5 or 6 blocks later, a miracle! A cab! It stopped and took us past Yankee Stadium, up the big hill to my Dad's cousins who had another miracle waiting for us. Three miracles, in fact: Shelter! Warmth! Food!

This friend of mine no longer lives in New York City. He has chosen to live where snow is not allowed and where miracles are a daily occurence. "As Scarlett once said," he says, "I'll never, never, freeze my butt off again!" He lives in Beverly Hills.

Posted by jherman at 9:54 AM

February 12, 2006

MASTER OF THE COSMODEMONIC

Somehow in all the reports I've seen about Western Union's last telegram (sent on Jan. 27) and the end of an era, there was the usual nostalgia for a bygone technology and the usual chronicle of Samuel Morse and the invention of the telegraph, and the usual summary of famous (even apocryphal) telegrams sent by William Randolph Hearst, JFK, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Cary Grant and so on. But there was no mention anywhere I looked of the man who wrote the greatest homage to Western Union ever penned: Henry Miller.

The reason, of course, is that Miller's homage is no homage at all. It is the bitter opposite. He does not wax nostalgic, sentimental, romantic, or patriotic. His memories of Western Union, where he worked for several years in the early to mid-1920s, were engraved forever in "The Tropic of Capricorn." Describing his experience as employment manager for New York's messenger department, he calls Western Union the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company (sometimes the Cosmococcic Telegraph Company) and offers an indelible, angry, funny, ranting satire of corporate bureaucracy that goes well beyond the usual.

One day by chance, Miller writes, "when I had been put on the carpet for some wanton piece of negligence, the vice-president let drop a phrase which stuck in my crop. He had said that he would like to see some one write a sort of Horatio Alger book about the messengers; he hinted that perhaps I might be the one to do such a job. I was furious to think what a ninny he was and delighted at the same time because secretly I was itching to get the thing off my chest. I thought to myself -- you poor old futzer, you, just wait until I get it off my chest ... I'll give you an Horatio Alger book ... just you wait!"

I saw the Horatio Alger hero, the dream of a sick American, mounting higher and—higher, first messenger, then operator, then manager, then chief, then superintendent, then vice-president, then president, then trust magnate, then beer baron, then Lord of all the Americas, the money god, the god of gods, the clay of clay, nullity on high, zero with ninety-seven thousand decimals fore and aft. You shits, I said to myself, I will give you the picture of twelve little men, zeros without decimals, ciphers, digits, the twelve uncrushable worms who are hollowing out the base of your rotten edifice. I will give you Horatio Alger as he looks the day after the Apocalypse, when all the stink has cleared away.

Read the whole passage. It includes a stunning indictment of a brutal system that was taken up again two decades later by Allen Ginsberg, in "Howl," which by the way bears a striking resemblance to it in literary style and passionate rhetoric.

Here's Miller in 1938:

I saw the army of men, women and children that had passed through my hands, saw them weeping, begging, beseeching, imploring, cursing, spitting, fuming, threatening. I saw the tracks they left on the highways, the freight trains lying on the floor, the parents in rags, the coal box empty, the sink running over, the walls sweating and between the cold beads of sweat the cockroaches running like mad; I saw them hobbling along like twisted gnomes or falling backwards in the epileptic frenzy, the mouth twitching, the saliva pouring from the lips, the limbs writhing; I saw the walls giving way and the pest pouring out like a winged fluid, and the men higher up with their ironclad logic, waiting for it to blow over, waiting for everything to be patched up, waiting, waiting contentedly, smugly, with big cigars in their mouths and their feet on the desk, saying things were temporarily out of order.

Here's Ginsberg in 1956:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked ...

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,

who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930's German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles ...

They both come out of Whitman, natch. Case closed.

Posted by jherman at 12:47 PM

February 10, 2006

FORWARD NAILS LAUDER

Ron Lauder is liable to be bent out of shape by a story in The Forward today. It nails the billionaire business mogul-cum-philanthropist's deceptive, contradictory, and hypocritical stance on the restitution of Nazi-looted art as 1) a prominent collector who may or may not own some of it, 2) a former treasurer of the World Jewish Congress, which advocates Holocaust-era art restitution, and 3) a former chairman of the Museum of Modern Art, which has been involved for years in a scandalous restitution case.

In a story headlined "Shoah Suit Puts Scrutiny On Lauder's Art Collection," reporter Nathianiel Popper writes:

When the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, a Viennese art collector who perished in the Dachau concentration camp, began trying to track down their ancestor's collection of Egon Schiele paintings, they hit what they thought was a stroke of luck: At least two of the pieces seemed to have ended up in collections associated with cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder ...

Given that Lauder [left] himself had argued vociferously for museums and private collectors to disclose the provenance, or ownership history, of any pieces thought to have been looted from Jewish homes during World War II, the family members assumed that they would easily get information about Lauder's collection.

They assumed wrong.

Despite his high-profile advocacy for openness -- including testimony before Congress in 1998 -- Lauder has never publicly listed the works in his own collection, many of which are by painters who were popular with Jewish collectors before the Holocaust. And a museum that he founded has failed to fulfill its pledge to post provenance information for its collection.

The last time a reporter bent Lauder out of shape on this subject, the reporter was dumped by his employer. I'm referring, of course, to David D'Arcy. As I've previously written, D'Arcy's contract with National Public Radio "was terminated after a piece he did on Holocaust art theft and the Museum of Modern Art sent MoMA board chairman Ron Lauder so far around the bend that museum officials accused D'Arcy of 'shabby reporting' and pressured NPR to repudiate it."

Will Popper get the same treatment? I don't think so for lots of reasons I've already explained many times, mainly having to do with NPR's management. Will Lauder need cosmetic surgery? Dunno. The Forward is not likely to offer it.

Posted by jherman at 10:29 AM

February 9, 2006

IT'S ALL IN THE LINKS

Here's what a friend calls some pretty scary shit, what I call James Risen's weird hems and haws, what Sam Harris calls the reality of Islam, what Doug Ireland calls threats to press freedom on both coasts, what David Ehrenstein calls fait divers à la Cronenberg, a history of violence, plus the continuation, what Filmstrip International calls American Civics Volume II (a video) and, finally, what Current TV calls The Battle for America (also a video).

Postscript: Uh, dint mean to forget popcult maven Ryan McGee's running nitpick on last night's 2006 Grammys (a marathon shitfest I had the wisdom to avoid).

PPS: Regarding the first link above ("some pretty scary shit"), a military and intelligence analyst I know with statistical expertise writes: "After reading the first few paragraphs of US plans massive data sweep -- 'Little-known data-collection system could troll news, blogs, even e-mails. Will it go too far?' -- I wondered whether it has occurred to any of the (rightly concerned or alarmed) observers that these systems may well be worthless for their advertised purpose?" He continues:

Numerous supporters [of data mining] babble such things as "we have to 'connect the dots.'" Data-mining systems do not connect the dots. They create more dots, probably 99.99% of which do not belong. The resources wasted trying to eliminate the bum "dots" is potentially enormous.

The intelligence failure that was memorialized with "a failure to connect the dots" was addressing the "dots" the FBI and CIA already had. More "dots" that in fact belonged might have helped but probably not. The failure -- and it was huge -- is analytical incompetence throughout top management at both agencies. Wholesale, automated data mining is more of the same. Both the country and the false positives are likely to pay a high price for the unabated analytical incompetence.

Posted by jherman at 9:23 AM

February 7, 2006

ONE MORE VENTRILOQUIST DUMMY

So Cheney Boy's ventriloquist dummy (the Bullshitter-in-Chief) has his own ventriloquist dummy (Alberto Gonzales). That's been clear from the time Gonzales was appointed attorney general. But it was never clearer, right down to the crooked grin, than it was in his testimony as a star witness for the regime's warrantless domestic spying program.

And as long as I'm posting today -- when the regime has just released a $2.77 trillion budget calling for "compassionate conservative" cuts in social programs like education and health care -- how about this little-publicized piece of news? The cost of the Iraq war could top $2 trillion.

That's the estimate of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, which is more than four times the expected cost of $500 billion (according to congressional budget data) through the end of 2006. It oughta give taxpayers something to think about.

Here's Stiglitz's original 36-page paper, co-written with Linda Bilmes, who teaches public finance at Harvard's Kennedy School. If you don't have time for that, here's an op-ed piece they wrote, "War's stunning price tag," which asks: "Why were the costs so vastly underestimated?"

Good question. But I wouldn't expect any of the regime's ventriloquist dummies to answer it. Would you?

Posted by jherman at 10:20 AM

February 6, 2006

PICTURE THIS

Muslim rioters offended by the 12 cartoons of Mohammed first published in Denmark -- rioters who went nuts because the content of the cartoons insulted their Prophet, but also because they believe it's blasphemous to picture him at all -- apparently don't know or care that Mohammed has been depicted in their own historical and religious Muslim texts.

I'm quoting that from a friend's e-mail message, though I don't know where the information originated. But I think it's reliable or I wouldn't be posting it. The message came with an attached image, left, which shows a miniature of Mohammed re-dedicating the Black Stone at the Kaaba. It's from Jami Al-Tawarikh ("The Universal History" written by Rashid Al-Din), a manuscript in the Library of the University of Edinburgh; illustrated in Tabriz, Persia, c. 1315.

The really weird information in the message may be less reliable, but I'm betting it's accurate. Here it is:

When a delegation of Danish imams went to the Middle East to discuss the issue of the cartoons with senior officials and prominent Islamic scholars, the imams openly distributed a booklet that showed not only the original 12 cartoons, but three fraudulent anti-Mohammed depictions that were much more offensive than the ones published in Denmark. It is now thought that these three bonus images are what ignited the outrage in the Muslim world.

The hotlinked references come from The Counterterrorism Blog, a bigfoot site founded and edited by a corporate-cum-government consultant who describes it as "the first multi-expert blog dedicated solely to counterterrorism issues." The mission statement says the site intends to serve as "a gateway to the community for policymakers and serious researchers" and is "designed to provide realtime information about terrorism cases and policy developments." Maybe it does.

Postscript: Holy shit! How about these depictions of Mohammed throughout history!

Posted by jherman at 11:27 AM

February 4, 2006

WHAT MAKES BIN LADEN TICK?

He hates the Jews. That's what makes him tick. Everything he does is motivated by one thing -- anti-Semitism.* Ditto for his inner circle. So said Peter Bergen, author of "The Osama Bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al-Qaeda's Leader," at an on-the-record meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York earlier this week. This may not be surprising to you, but Bergen's insistence on this point -- it was one of the key points of his talk -- struck me as astonishing because it sounded like too great a simplification. But there it was.

From everything Bergen knows, and he is no slouch in the Bin Laden department, having interviewed the man and written a previous book about him, "Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin Laden," the al-Qaeder leader is so obsessed by his hatred of Jews that it colors everything he says and does not just about Israel but about America and Europe and, frankly, any place on the planet that fails to match his obsession. And even then he may not be placated. Think Saudi Arabia.

(Given the recent cartoon backlash, will Muslim gunmen surround the furrin relations council's elegant Manhattan headquarters on the Upper East Side and demand an apology? Will ambassadors to the United States be recalled? And when it gets out that Bergen's presentation was part of his publisher's promotional campaign for "The Osama Bin Laden I Know," will that put The Free Press at risk? Don't forget, it also published "Holy War, Inc." And how about other American publishers, or booksellers that stock the titles?)

One of the most surprising things Bergen said -- surprising to me at least, though I'm sure not to the experts who have followed the story closely -- is that Bin Laden's innermost circle has debated the wisdom of the 9/11 attacks. Bergen, right, said that some of Bin Laden's closest associates believe 9/11 was a strategic mistake. The reason? While it was a tactical and propaganda victory, 9/11 resulted in al-Qaeda getting kicked out of Afghanistan. Everyone knows that, of course, and that the loss of its key base of operations has led to major disruptions in the network's ability to organize and execute its plans. But who knew debate was even allowed within Bin Laden's hearing?

Which brings up something else Bergen said. Contrary to the received wisdom huckstered by the U.S. regime to the American public, Bin Laden is not isolated from information in some dark cave, but rather well informed about world events (even watches "Larry King Live") and, far from being out of it (if he's in a cave, which Bergen doesn't believe), is certainly in charge of al-Qaeda (along with Ayman al-Zawahiri, who created the organization with him). And in case you were wondering, Bin Laden is not suffering from any life-threatening illnesses, Bergen said. He also noted that Bin Laden is very smart (despite his single-minded anti-Semitism), physically brave, and unlikely to be captured, preferring to die for his cause.

The best outcome and the least likely, Bergen said, would be for Bin Laden to fade into oblivion. More probable and also the worst outcome, he said, is that he would become a martyr, as he has claimed he would. ("I take him completely at face value," Bergen told Al Jazeera, also in an interview earlier this week, reiterating what he said at the furrin council. "He will martyr himself." Read that interview. It's fascinating and repeats much else Bergen said at the council, although he makes no mention of Bin Laden's motivating anti-Semitism. Was he not asked about it? Probably not. But then he wasn't asked about it at the council either. He just volunteered it right off the bat.)

Coupla other things Bergen said that took me by surprise:

• The Pakistani press is very courageous. It reports information about al-Qaeda that never gets out to the world press.

• The real recruits for al-Qaeda do not come from the madrassas (Islamic religious schools) in Pakistan and other Muslim nations considered spawning grounds for terrorists -- again contrary to the received wisdom -- but from universities and other institutions of higher learning in the West, mainly European. Bergen joked that the London School of Economics is far more dangerous than any madrassa.

(A bit of research shows that he has said this before, for example, in an op-ed piece called "The Madrassa Myth," published last June in The New York Times: "While madrassas may breed fundamentalists who have learned to recite the Koran in Arabic by rote, such schools do not teach the technical or linguistic skills necessary to be an effective terrorist. Indeed, there is little or no evidence that madrassas produce terrorists capable of attacking the West." And since we're at it, here's another piece worth reading, an interview with Bergen published in September 2004 by The Jamestown Foundation's Global Terrorism Analysis Web site).

• The battleground for al-Qaeda terrorists these days is Europe's vulnerable cities, where the war on terrorism is now focused, not in America. If there were some sort of radiological attack on a U.S. city, Bergen said, he had no doubt there would be huge casualties. But such an attack wouldn't be easy to execute, and huge casualties notwithstanding, it would not change America's way of life. No more, in any case, than the Aum Shinrikyo cult's 1995 sarin nerve gas attack in Tokyo changed Japan's way of life. Bergen did say, however, that the Aum attack was more of a model for an urban attack in the U.S. than the recent terrorist attacks in London and Madrid, for two examples, and he doesn't understand why more attention hasn't been paid by U.S. intelligence and security agencies to the Aum model.

• He also can't understand why U.S. intelligence agencies haven't been able to track down Bin Laden by tracing the route(s) taken by his and al-Zawahiri's video and cassette releases to Al Jazeera, especially since there have been about three dozen of them since 9/11. Not to put too fine a point on it, he finds it incomprehensible that basic surveillance wouldn't have gone a long way to tracing the routes back to their source.

• Finally, the notion that the U.S. and al-Qaeda are caught up in a "clash of civilizations" is bunk, Bergen said. Bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network, as awful as they are, do not present an existential threat to the West. No matter what the Bullshitter-in-Chief says about them, they can't hold a candle to the threat of the World War II Nazis.

All of this comes from an establishment journalist, remember, someone who does not necessarily take the establishment line but who also does not take seriously the Chomskyan view of U.S. policies, as he told me privately. So I'm not talking Robert Fisk here. (In fact, Bergen's opinion of Fisk is mixed: "Great reporter, terrific writer, brilliant and brave. A neo-Chomskyan. His reportage should be labeled commentary.") I'm talking Bergen, CNN terrorism analyst, adjunct professor at John Hopkins University, and one very smart fella with a crisp Oxford accent. That accent may strike you as tsk-tsk, but I was impressed.

Postscript: * Regarding the term "anti-Semitism," common usage means hatred of Jews. That is how I've used it. But the term is technically complicated, and in reference to Arabic anti-Semites replete with contradictions: See this.

Posted by jherman at 12:39 PM