(Display Name not set)May 2004 Archives

The Memorial Day weekend is upon us. It's time to take a break. We leave for ours with a couple of reminders.

One is entertaining: Jon Stewart's commencement address a couple of weeks ago at his alma mater, The College of William & Mary, where "roughly 13,000 people packed into William and Mary Hall" to hear him. His advice to newly minted graduates was, as he might say on "The Daily Show," not unenlightening. "Thank you Mr. President," he began, after receiving an honorary doctorate. "I had forgotten how crushingly dull these ceremonies are."

The other reminder is frightening: See fellow ArtsJournal blogger Kyle Gann's item from yesterday, "Have We Been Hoaxed?," about the Nick Berg decapitation video.

There IS something fishy going on, no question in my mind. But what? The main conspiracy theory going around is that the CIA (and other intelligence operatives?) made the video as disinformation propaganda either to blame terrorists for Nick Berg's death, which the CIA (and/or the U.S. military) was itself responsible for -- thus pulling off a horrific cover-up -- or to take attention away from the Abu Ghraib torture photos that were coming out at the time by showing that the enemy was committing even more unspeakable acts against an American.

I don't think "changing the subject" by itself would be a strong enough motive. But to the extent that changing the subject and covering up a crime are not mutually exclusive (indeed would reinforce each other), I wouldn't put it past the CIA and/or other intelligence operatives to activate such a diabolical scenario. (The CIA has come up with crazier, more nefarious schemes before.)

Like millions of others, I let myself in for the misfortune of downloading the video. It was so barbaric I failed to notice many of the discrepancies the conspiracy theorists, and some professional observers with real expertise, have been pointing out. Two, however, struck me at the time: 1) The beheading itself, so shameful to watch, looked somehow unreal (no rivers of blood, etc.). 2) The time sequence, as noted on the video recording, was discontinuous. Later, after reading various profiles of Nick Berg, I was also struck that the gaunt hostage with the Lincolnesque beard in the video looked not at all like the round-faced, beardless Nick Berg I saw in earlier photos of him.

But now that they've been pointed out to me, I don't put much credence in the conpiracy claims for these discrepancies: the terrorists looked too well-fed to be rough-and-ready terrorists on the run; their hands looked too lily white; one of them is wearing American running shoes (supposedly a no-no) and another is wearing a gold ring (devout Moslems wouldn't do that); you can't see the prosthetic leg which the chief terrorist, Musab Al-Zarqawi, reportedly wears; Zarqawi was reported dead in 2003; Berg's blood-curdling scream was "probably" a woman's voice dubbed onto the video's out-of-sync soundtrack; the entire soundtrack was dubbed (so what?); the orange prison outfit Nick Berg was wearing and the white plastic patio chair he was sitting in for part of the video match up with the outfit and chairs seen in the Abu Ghraib torture photos (this does give pause).

The notion being touted by some that Berg was actually dead before he was beheaded is not inconceivable. (Thus the lack of blood.) But that doesn't mean the CIA killed him and faked the video. The terrorists could have done that themselves. The notion that the hostage in the video was not Berg seems hard to believe. You would think his family or his friends would have noticed and said so. The notion that Berg might still be alive somewhere in captivity is also not credible. Trouble is, I don't know what to believe.

Postscript: How does this fit into the conspiracy theories? A Johnny-on-the-Spot associate of Michael Moore interviewed Nick Berg for "Fahrenheit 9/11," but the footage never made it into the film.

A lot of people are wagging their fingers at the mea culpa admitted yesterday by The New York Times. Frankly, some of the finger-waggers seem to be piling on, not that the errors don't deserve a more thorough airing.

But it seems, too, that the Times has trouble learning from its own mistakes. The errors keep piling up. Consider this morning's headline on the front page: "Kissinger Tapes Describe Crises, War and Stark Photos of Abuse." The photos referred to, as described in the story's second graf, are "the color photographs of the men, women and children killed in the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam."

Must the headline writer for this story and/or the Times's front page editor be reminded that victims of wanton mass murder are not victims of "abuse"? Will there be a correction or clarification tomorrow about the inaptness of that headline?

Before taking a few days off for the long Memorial Day weekend, we feel an obligation to address some unfinished business: a recent email exchange with blogger Steve Sailer involving the item "Scraping Bottom" (May 10), which followed up on an earlier item, "The Spectrum from Blue to Red" (May 5). If posting the exchange smacks of a little too much inside baseball, we apologize.

----- Original Message -----
From: SteveSlr@aol.com
To: jherman@artsjournal.com
Sent: Wednesday, May 19, 2004 8:01 PM
Subject: "Anti-Semitic slur"?

You posted:

SCRAPING BOTTOM

Thanks to anti-liberal columnist and blogger Steve Sailer for clarifying the chart that correlated state-by-state average IQs and income with the votes for Bush or Gore in the 2000 presidential election. When we posted the item "The Spectrum from Blue to Red," we wrote: "The chart that explains it all for you" (an homage to Christopher Durang's outrageous satire, "Sister Mary Explains It All For You," which drove conservatives nuts). We also wrote that the chart "could be a joke," but "if so, it's a good one. No worse, certainly, than the outcome" of the election.

The trouble with Sailer's clarification is that he gets to the bottom of things by scraping bottom with an anti-Semitic slur when he writes that "anyone familiar with the topic would quickly recognize the fallaciousness of the data. The 113 [IQ] figure for Connecticut is way too high. That's about what Connecticut would be if it was all-Jewish."

posted by janherman @ Monday, May 10, 2004 | Permanent link/

Dear Sir or Madam:

You accused me of making an anti-Semitic slur, which is a very serious accusation, by mentioning that the average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews in America is around 113.

Considering that you slurred Republicans by publishing fraudulent IQ data, I'd be fascinated to learn the logic by which you arrived at the conclusion that I slurred Jews by mentioning accurate data. I'm familiar with about ten different estimates of American Jewish IQs published in refereed scientific journals. They range from 107.5 to 118. The scientist who is currently working the most on this topic told me that 113 is the best estimate. All the real world correlates of IQ -- educational level, income, scientific and literary accomplishments, etc. -- are roughly in line with that figure.

You seem to be implying that Jews are less intelligent. Besides apologizing to me, you should apologize for making an anti-Semitic slur.

Steve Sailer

----- Original Message -----
From: jherman@artsjournal.com
To: SteveSlr@aol.com
Sent: Thursday, May 20, 2004 7:42 PM
Subject: Re: "Anti-Semitic slur"?

Dear Mr. Sailer --

You just don't get it. What was the point of singling out the Jews as a group? It doesn't matter what their collective IQ is, high or low. They as a group had nothing to do with the issue you're so riled up about. By singling them out in the way you did you're trying to paint them as some sort of "other," something separate and alien, which is at the root of anti-Semitism. There also seemed to me an implicit ridicule. Why didn't you name some other group? Why choose the Jews? Further, in harping on how I fell for a hoax, you conveniently ignored what I wrote in my original post of the chart: "This could be a joke. If so, it's a good one. No worse, certainly, than the outcome of the 2000 election."

Sincerely,
Jan Herman

Footnote: Sailer never mentioned "Ashkenazi" Jews in his original blog. Even if he had, singling them out among Jews in general because of some actual study, worthy or not (which also went unmentioned), would not have mitigated the offense.

Jack Shafer was correct yesterday when he reported in Slate that The New York Times was preparing an "Editors' Note" reassessing "its pre-Iraq War coverage, particularly its coverage of weapons of mass destruction." Finding < EM>the note online took a bit of searching on the Times Web site. But it appears in plain view on the bottom of page 10 in the print edition:

We have examined the failings of American and allied intelligence, especially on the issue of Iraq's weapons and possible Iraqi connections to international terrorists. We have studied the allegations of official gullibility and hype. It is past time we turned the same light on ourselves.

The note cites five examples of "problematic articles" by date -- two in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, on Oct. 26, 2001 (about an alleged meeting in Prague between an Iraqi agent and Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the 9/11 terrorists, which was discounted a year later) and on Nov. 8, 2001 (about an alleged Iraqi terrorist training camp that has never been verified).

Though the note doesn't say so, those articles gave momentum to the conflation of "the war on terror" with Saddam Hussein, which the Bush gang exploited to the max to justify its invasion of Iraq. To this day, according  to various polls, much of the American public still believes the idea that Iraq was guilty of involvement with the 9/11 attacks.

Incorrect reports in the Times also gave misinformation about the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which should have been checked more carefully and challenged by editors before being published, the note says. Much of that misinformation was supplied by self-promoting Iraqi defectors lobbying for "regime change," especially Ahmad Chalabi, whose motives should have opened their allegations to doubt. That misinformation was "often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq," the note adds.

That sublime irony deepens rather than mitigates the errors, as does the fact that subsequent reports acknowledging or clarifying some of the misinformed coverage were played much less conspicuously than the original misinformation.

Shafer has been on the case for a long time, especially going after Judith Miller's misleading reports about weapons of mass destruction. She was not mentioned by name in the editors' note, however, nor were any other reporters or editors. The note says more reporting will be done that is "aimed at setting the record straight." It also offers readers a chance to delve more deeply into its erroneous coverage by going to the Times Web site here.

Of the 15 or so misleading reports that are listed online about alleged terrorist training camps and hidden weapons facilities, a quest for A-Bomb components and the controversy surrounding it, and the search for weapons of mass destruction, nine were written or co-written by Miller. Thus the headline on Shafer's piece: "Judy's Turn to Cry."

More headlines from the torture front: "General Is Said To Have Urged Use of Dogs" and "Abuse of Captives More Widespread, Says Army Survey." It wouldn't surprise us, given those headlines, that the administration arranged to take our minds off them with today's alert: "U.S. Warns of Al Qaeda Threat During Summer," but there's "Nothing Specific."

We're glad somebody noticed:

A senior diplomat from a country on the Security Council complained recently that the United States needed to provide consistent signals about Iraqi sovereignty. As an example, he said [Colin] Powell's recent statement that the United States would pull its forces out if asked after June 30 was at odds with Mr. Bush's statement that the United States would persevere and not allow itself to be driven from Iraq. "It's a complete contradiction," the diplomat said.

We're also glad somebody noticed Mr. Nice Guy's shortcomings as an author and as a columnist. Ever since reading his breakout book "Bobos in Paradise," which felt like a padded magazine article, we've had our doubts about him.

Back in October we put it gently when we said he was "still trying to find his rhythm" as a columnist. In November we described him as "increasingly irritating" but admitted he "got off a funny satire about Wal-Mart's lad-magazine ban." In December, when we were into purple prose alerts, we called him a "swiftly rising purplemeister" both for his writing style and his politics.

OK, you know we're talking about David Brooks, who claimed "Bush believes the U.S. has a unique role to play in [the] struggle to complete democracy's triumph over tyranny and so drain the swamp of terror." We hoped then that when the "triumph over tyranny" did "drain the swamp of terror," it would also do a clean-up job on the purplemeister's prose.

The last time we mentioned him, in February, we were struck by his assertion that the White House nitwit is inarticulate, "like most of us." We took that as an insult, believing as we do that in the inarticulate department the nitwit is peerless.

Remember what Kevin Phillips said about the Bush family? "Over four generations they have honed a pattern of loyalty to [America's] wealthiest 0.01 percent ... How you do that over four generations and not take that loyalty to the White House is not credible."

If anyone doubts his words, they should have a look at Paul Harris's investigation, reported the other day in The (London) Observer. Harris revealed that roughly $150 million -- or half of the $296 million raised in campaign contributions since 1998 by George W. -- "has come from just 630 people." And, he added:

Certainly the benefits of donating seem clear. A report by the group revealed that, out of 630 elite donors from 2000 and 2004, almost one quarter were given an appointment from the administration -- including 24 ambassadorships and two cabinet positions. In 2002 more than $3.5 billion of federal contracts were given to 101 companies that between them boasted 123 Pioneers and Rangers [contributors who gave, respectively, $100,000 and $200,000].

The contributors are part of an "extremely 'clubby' and close-knit" network representing elite wealth with "four main families ... at its centre": Seven members of the Bush clan itself, who have given at least $100,000 each; "Massachusetts millionaire" Richard Egan and two of his sons; and three members each of the Fox family, owners of the Harbour Group finance firm with major investments in China, and the Reynolds family of land developers.

But while the contributors represent elite wealth, the current occupant of the White House is not picky about ethical or moral pedigree. Harris reports that "146 of the donors have been involved in corporate scandals or helped to run companies that have."

The Divine Miss S -- a friend's not altogether admiring nom de plume for Susan Sontag -- told us: "It is probable that the 'torture' word will continue to be banned" by the W. gang. Tim Rutten, the Los Angeles Times media columnist, writing a week before her piece appeared in The New York Times Magazine on Sunday, told us:

The mainstream media's insistence on primly referring to what occurred in what was once Saddam Hussein's most infamous prison as "abuse" is part and parcel of their deep avoidance of this story's implications. Abuse is what happens when you fail to feed your parakeet or speak intemperately to a sensitive child. When you starve or drown or beat or sexually humiliate another human being, it is called torture. It's what occurred in Hitler's concentration camps, Stalin's Gulag, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Pinochet's Chile, Hussein's Iraq and -- now -- in the secret prison system the United States has constructed in defiance of its international obligations and our own laws and traditions.

That about covers that subject. But writers keep nibbling at the why's and wherefore's. Today Eliot A. Cohen does it in The Washington Post with a piece about "Our Soldiers and Us." He tells us:

If a society has no norm of chief executives accepting responsibility for their corporations' moral and financial failures, do not expect generals to line up to say: "It happened on my watch, and I therefore offer the secretary of defense my resignation." In some measure, societies get the militaries they deserve.

To which we say: "Yes sir!"

To the presidential speech last night at the U.S. War College, all we can say is: "Huh?" William Saletin refers to it as The Little Fucker's "Magical History Tour," an airbrushed version of reality: "Is Bush embarrassed that a year of occupation has failed to substantiate his claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to global terrorism? No. He hasn't even noticed."

Now hear this: The entire "state of Vermont -- and its charm -- is threatened by a corporate behemoth, a nonprofit preservation group warned on Monday," The Associated Press reports. "The alleged culprit: Wal-Mart."

Because of plans for several new Wal-Mart Supercenters across the state, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has placed the entire state of Vermont on its 2004 list of the most endangered historic places in the United States.

There are 10 other sites on this year's list, including Nine Mile Canyon in Utah, but "Vermont is the only state ever to make the annual list in its entirety."

Meantime, Wal-Mart keeps making headlines, including a report in this morning's New York Times that "Wal-Mart Stores collected well over $1 billion in state and local government subsidies during its decades-long expansion from a regional discount chain to the world's largest retailer, according to a report scheduled to be released today by a group that monitors job-subsidy programs."

The company isn't being accused of "doing anything illegal or anything unusual in the corporate world." After all, taxpayer handouts to huge companies with equally huge governmental influence are just one of the many time-honored practices in the U.S. corporate welfare system.

What's your opinion about Rummy boy, aka Bush's lip? The other day the liberal columnist Nicholas Kristof surprised himself by "Sticking Up for Rumsfeld." He wrote that demands for Rummy boy's resignation struck him as "unfair and premature," even though he has "presided over the most foolish conflict since the War of Jenkins' Ear in the 18th century."

(Don't remember that war? It pitted England against Spain over territorial claims in the southern colonies and got its name from Robert Jenkins, the master of the British ship Rebecca, who claimed his ear had been cut off by Spanish guards. The carefully preserved ear was shown in the British Parliament and became a rallying point for anti-Spanish propagandists.)

At any rate, the online liberal advocacy group moveon.org not only wants Rummy boy fired. It has written a script for a TV ad promoting that point of view and is asking the public to help put the ad on the air. Here's the script:

[Video]

Why hasn't George Bush fired this man?

You remember moveon.org's Bush in 30 seconds political campaign ad contest, doncha? Remember the winner, "Child's Pay," which was meant to air during the Super Bowl but wasn't allowed to? And the runner-up, "What are we teaching our children?" And the funniest ad, "If Parents Acted Like Bush"? And the best animated ad, "What I Been Up To ..."? And the best youth ad, "Bring It On"?

If you don't, just click the links. We offer them as an antidote to tonight's free White House ad, excuse me, presidential speech.

We probably won't hear about this new tactic in tonight's presidential speech on strategy in Iraq. Rummy boy is working to eliminate those pesky gosh darn photos: "Mobil phones fitted with digital cameras have been banned in U.S. army installations in Iraq on orders from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld," The Business newspaper reports.

More on "torture," the word and the practice: "Don't torture English to soft-pedal abuse" by Geoffrey Nunberg, in Newsday, adapted from his piece on NPR's "Fresh Air." It quotes Secretary of State Colin Powell saying on Fox News, "Torture is torture is torture." Also "What's in a Word? Torture" by Adam Hochschild, in The New York Times. Among other things, it goes into forms of torture such as "tormentum insomniae" which was "widely used in the Middle Ages on suspected witches" and which is known to us as "sleep management," a 21st-century euphemism that sounds like corporate pillowtalk. 

More essential reading: Susan Sontag has Sunday's cover story of The New York Times Magazine. It's a thoughtful, elegant essay called "The Photographs Are Us."  Here's a reminder that at Straight Up, blogged on the fly (on the gadfly?) -- we sometimes log on while still rubbing sleep from our eyes -- our timing seems right even if it somehow keeps us from writing long, considered essays.

In "The Duck in the Room" (May 7), we wrote:

The T-word -- "torture" -- was studiously avoided by all in more than three hours of the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Treatment of Prisoners in Iraq. Except, that is, for Sen. Edward Kennedy, who forthrightly spoke of "torture and abuse." The closest Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld came to using the T-word was when he said compensation might be made to Iraqi prisoners who suffered "grievous and brutal abuse and cruelty." By any other name that's "torture." The old rule applies: If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, looks like a duck, etc.

We cited Rummy boy's circumlocutions for the T-word: the "terrible activities" for which, he said, "I feel terrible" as he offered his "deepest apology to Iraqis who were mistreated." And the way Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, barely skirted the word torture -- but skirt it he did -- by calling it "prisoner abuse" that was "appalling, unconscionable and unacceptable." And the way Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, deputy commander of the U.S. Central Command in Iraq, substituted the word "mistreatment." And Lee Brownlee, Acting Secretary of the Army, applying the term "detainee abuse" that was, alas, "tragic and disappointing." And Gen. Peter Schoomaker, Army Chief of Staff, offering the summary that it was, not systemic and certainly not torture, but rather the "inexcusable behavior of a few." [The italics are ours.]

We are glad to see Sontag's thoughtful, elegant essay as a follow-up, beginning with her second paragraph:

The Bush administration and its defenders have chiefly sought to limit a public-relations disaster -- the dissemination of the photographs [from Abu Ghraib] -- rather than deal with the complex crimes of leadership and policy revealed by the pictures. ... There was also the avoidance of the word "torture." The prisoners had possibly been the objects of "abuse," eventually of "humiliation" -- that was the most to be admitted.

She then goes on in the third paragraph of her thoughtful, elegant essay to our duck analogy, citing "the definitions of torture contained in a convention to which the United states is a signatory: "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession." [The italics are hers.]

And in her fourth graph, Sontag notes:

Whatever actions this administration undertakes to limit the damage of the widening revelations of the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere ... it is probable that the "torture" word will continue to be banned. To acknowledge that Americans torture their prisoners would contradict everything this administration has invited the public to believe about the virtue of American intentions and America's right, flowing from that virtue, to undertake unilateral action on the world stage.

When we take the pulse of reality -- that is, developments in the Land of Is, as we like to call it -- we get our ideas from the news. In "Chew on This" (May 11), we wrote that "unspoken racism" was to our mind "a factor in what happened at Abu Ghraib." (How could it not have been, given the war climate of demonization?) And we cited that morning's essay by Luc Sante on the op-ed page of The New York Times, in which he noted the similarity of the torture photos at Abu Ghraib to old lynching photos of African-Americans. Both kinds of photos were, in his words, "trophy shots." He wrote:

Like the lynching crowds, the Americans at Abu Ghraib felt free to parade their triumph and glee not because they were psychopaths but because the thought of censure probably never crossed their minds.

Sontag agrees with Luc Sante, though not by name, in her thoughtful, elegant essay. She writes:

[T]he horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken -- with the perpetrators posing, gloating,over their helpless captives. ... If there is something comparable to what these pictures show it would be some of the photographs of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880's and 1930's, which show Americans grinning beneath the nake mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree.

The lynching pictures were in the nature of photographs as trophies -- taken by a photographer in order to be collected, stored in albums, displayed. The pictures taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib, however, reflected a shift in the use made of pictures -- less objects to be saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated.

But read her essay. Sontag goes beyond that small modulation (photos to be circulated rather than merely saved), beyond adducing pornography, video games and, yes, racism, as component parts of the Abu Ghraib torture orgy. She goes finally to "the backlash" against showing more of the photographs, to the so-called "assault" on the American public by showing them, to the "legalistic turn" of declaring them "classified" information, to the claim of "outrage" that the photographs will "undermine American military might," which is no more than "the continuing effort to protect the administration and cover up our misrule in Iraq."

None of this is new. We've heard or read all this before. But, as we said, it's an essay by Susan Sontag, which makes it thoughtful and elegant. And though it's derivative, it's essential.

Today's torture headlines are self-explanatory. Anyone who cannot see the signs of systematic mismanagement in all that's being reported must be blind. Even if the nitwit in the White House and the top Pentagon brass from Rummy boy on down had no knowledge of what was going on -- which strains credulity -- such purported ignorance is in itself Exhibit A for their culpability as incompetents.

Some sentient Republicans finally understand this. Like the rest of us shamed by the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, they presumably see the crisis as a moral issue. But if they don't -- if they see it merely in practical terms as "a metaphor for the mismanagement of the war" (Tim Russert's description this morning) -- we won't argue with them as long as their practicality leads to ridding us of the unredeemable thugs now in charge.

Today's menu: "New Details of Prison Abuse Emerge." The Washington Post reports "Abu Ghraib Detainees' Statements Describe Sexual Humiliation And Savage Beatings." Scott Higham and Joe Stephens write: "Previously secret sworn statements by detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq describe in raw detail abuse that goes well beyond what has been made public, adding allegations of prisoners being ridden like animals, sexually fondled by female soldiers and forced to retrieve their food from toilets."

The Post, which obtained more graphic evidence of the torture, reports: "Videos Amplify Picture of Violence." A photo gallery accompanying the article shows a U.S. soldier threatening a prisoner with an attack dog, a naked prisoner covered in feces standing with his arms outstretched as though crucified, a hooded prisoner handcuffed to the bars of a railing who appears to have collapsed.

Josh White, Christian Davenport and Scott Higham write: "The new pictures and videos go beyond the photos previously released to the public in several ways, amplifying the overt violence against detainees and displaying a variety of abusive techniques previously unseen."

Now add to those articles, these in The New York Times this morning:

+ "Justice Memos Explained How to Skip Prisoner Rights." Neil A. Lewis reports: "A series of Justice Department memorandums written in late 2001 and the first few months of 2002 were crucial in building a legal framework for United States officials to avoid complying with international laws and treaties on handling prisoners, lawyers and former officials say."

+ "Afghan Policies on Questioning Prisoners Taken to Iraq." Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt report: "The interrogation center at Abu Ghraib prison was run by a military intelligence unit that had served in Afghanistan and that had taken to Iraq the aggressive rules and procedures it had developed for the Afghan conflict, according to documents and testimony."

Toss in this column by Bob Herbert: "'Gooks' to 'Hajis,'" about a soldier who's being court-martialed for refusing to return to Iraq, where he witnessed "the killing of children, the cruel deaths of American G.I.'s [targeted by bounty hunters] ... the ineptitude of inexperienced glory-hunting military officers who at times are needlessly putting U.S. troops in even greater danger, and the growing rage among coalition troops against all Iraqis (known derisively as 'hajis,' the way the Vietnamese were known as 'gooks').

Have a look at this article, "Pentagon Approved Intense Interrogation Techniques for Sept. 11 Suspect at Guantánamo," and this one, "Screening of Prison Officials Is Faulted by Lawmakers," in which Fox Butterfield and Eric Lichtblau report on the "checkered record" of the assistant director of operations of American prisons in Iraq, John J. Armstrong.

Armstrong's appointment was approved by the Justice Department, although he is a former state commissioner of corrections for Connecticut who resigned from that post after the state "settled lawsuits by the American Civil Liberties Union and the families of two Connecticut inmates who died last year after being sent by Mr. Armstrong to a supermaximum security prison in Virginia."

"One of the inmates, a diabetic, died of heart failure after going into diabetic shock and then being hit with an electric charge by guards wielding a stun gun and kept in restraints," Butterfield and Lichtblau write. The other, "who had been diagnosed with mental illness, jumped off his bunk with a makeshift rope around his neck in plain sight of a guard who did nothing to come to his aid," according to the senior staff counsel for the ACLU's National Prison Project.

You may recall that Butterfield earlier this month revealed that Attorney General John Ashcroft sent another prison official with a checkered history to Iraq to re-open Iraq's prisons. That official was Lane McCotter, the former director of the Utah Department of Corrections, who resigned that post under pressure in 1997 following the death of a mentally ill prisoner who'd been shackled naked to a restraining chair for 16 hours.

In "A Call to Conscience," Roger Morris, "the diplomat who quit over Nixon's invasion of Cambodia, asks Americans on the front lines of foreign service to resign from the 'worst regime by far in the history of the republic.'" This is powerful stuff. Reasoned. Urgent. Necessary.

Whenever he opens his mouth, the world-renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs speaks truth to power. Or so it seems to me, having heard him twice in the past few days.

The first time was over the weekend at the "What We Stand For" conference, where he brought more than 800 liberal Democrats to their feet with an extemporaneous speech that did not rely on rhetorical fireworks but rather on a simple statement of facts and an unadorned declaration of outrage.

He looked at his watch and noted that the day had just ended in sub-Saharan Africa. "Fifteen thousand people have just died," he said, from AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases. Another 15,000 would die the next day, and the next, and the next, every day for the rest of the year.

"We are the generation that could end extreme poverty on this planet," Sach went on after a moment of stunned silence. "If we were serious about our security, there is so much we could do. And we're doing everything wrong. I don't think there's any excuse or ever was any excuse for supporting this [Bush] gang."

He pointed out the fact that the Pentagon's $450 billion budget "is half the world's military expenditures" and compares with just $13 billion in U.S. foreign aid.

Sachs, 50, does not cut a physically impressive figure. On the contrary, he is short, slight, wears wire-rimmed glasses, and looks somewhat rumpled in his suit and tie. He speaks in a flat Midwestern accent. The only physical hint of the ferocious zest underlying his academic demeanour is a mop of black hair, which gives this Harvard-trained scholar the oddly boyish aura of a grown-up Denace the Menace. (The New York Times Magazine once cited him as "probably the most important economist in the world.")

The second time I heard him speak was yesterday to a gathering of environmentalists at the German Mission to the U.N. He pointed out that the world's downward spiral has forced the U.N. to delay its Millennium Development Goals by a decade and a half. The new target year for cutting extreme poverty in half, halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, among many others millenium goals, is 2015.

"With all of our successes, we have massive waves of degradation," said Sachs, who is Special Advisor to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. The last four years, "have been wasted" largely by violence, he said, pointing to the war in Iraq and armed conflicts all over the globe.

"I feel it particularly hard to be optimistic today," he added, "when U.S. helicopter gunships have killed 40 people in a wedding party [in Iraq] and an Israeli gunship has killed 10 people [in Gaza]. I'm pretty depressed."

Sachs was referring to a U.S. military attack along the Syrian border, which the Pentagon denies struck a wedding party. The Israeli attack in Gaza, which has been condemned by the U.N. Security Council (with the U.S. abstaining) and for which the Israeli Army has expressed "deep sorrow over the loss of civilian lives," is under investigation by Israeli authorities.

At the environmental conference, where winners of the U.N.'s Equator Prize for 2004 and others spoke about biodiversity, Sachs explained that among the various Millenium Development Goals one of the most significant is to obtain contributions from each donor nation amounting to 0.7 percent of its Gross National Product.

"How many times has President Bush said how important it is to meet the Millenium Goals?" Sachs asked. "President Bush -- I'm still waiting." The U.S. donation amounts to 0.13 percent of GNP, "the lowest level" of all the donor countries. Three billion people across the world -- half of the global population -- live on less than $2 a day, and a significant portion of them live on less than $1 a day. "I plead with the leaders," Sachs said. "Don't tell me about 'donor fatigue' when we have just gotten started."

Can you stand this much silliness? It came in an email message. We've been holding back on it, but somehow that seems wrong. So here's the "first final" list of events for the Republican National Convention in New York City:

August 30

6 p.m.: OPENING PRAYER read by Mel Gibson, while being flogged with a spiked leather strap wielded by Ann Coulter, who will enjoy it a little too much.

* TOM RIDGE raises National Alert Level to RED.

* LEST WE FORGET -- HONORARY ROLL CALL of All Members of (and Friends of) Bush Administration Who Might Very Well Have Been Killed In Vietnam If It Hadn't Been For Nasty Trick Knees, Anal Cysts, Recurrent  Headaches, and Highly-Placed, Overly-Protective Parents. (Sponsored by Tyson Chicken)

* ANTONIN SCALIA speaks -- "SLAVERY - THE ORIGINAL INTENT OF OUR FOREFATHERS, AND GREAT FOR BUSINESS! (Sponsored by Wal-Mart)

* DICK CHENEY hosts AMBASSADORSHIP RAFFLE -- Opening Bid 1,000,000 (cash, non-sequential bills 20's or less).

* CLIMAX OF THE EVENING -- FILM - "BRING IT ON!" Stirring fictionalized re-creation of Mr. Bush's actual dental appointment in Alabama in 1972, where he showed the incredible courage to allow "deep cleaning" of gums without anesthetic. (Sponsored by Sinclair Broadcasting)

* SUGGESTED AFTER-EVENT -- "GET BAKED WITH RUSH "Crankster" LIMBAUGH! (Location TBD) (Sponsored by Pfizer)

August 31

6 p.m.: OPENING PRAYER read by Our Lord (The Passion Of) Jesus H. Christ, as channeled by Lt. General William G. "Jerry" Boykin, the man who first revealed that Mr. Bush was chosen by God to lead this country into war against the heathens. Mr. Boykin will then give a short, upbeat presentation on Islam called, "My God can Beat Up Your God."

* TOM RIDGE raises National Alert Level to FLASHING RED.

* WAYNE LAPIERRE will pry Davy Crockett's Kentucky Long Rifle out of Charlton Heston's cold dead fingers (subject to Heston's death). (Sponsored by Smith & Wesson)

* DESIGNATED BROWN PERSON (Hispanic or Muslim, or possibly an Hispanic Muslim, if we can find one) will speak on how being a brown person doesn't automatically disqualify you from being a Republican (subject to finding a brown person capable of being bribed to do this -- may need professional actor, possibly brought in from Third World country)

* CLIMAX OF THE EVENING -- PAUL WOLFOWITZ announces American plans to invade Iran, strip them of nuclear weapons, and turn over entire country to Bechtel to be run as a subsidiary. (Wolfowitz will tell anxious voters that the operation will involve 200 out-sourced "consultants", will take one week and will be entirely funded by pocket change found in a White House couch.) (Sponsored by Halliburton)

* SUGGESTED AFTER-EVENT -- "RIDE THE WAVE WITH RUSH "Big Oxy" LIMBAUGH!" Do  a couple of 'ringers' with Big Pharma. (Sponsored by ROBITUSSIN)

September 1

6 p.m.: OPENING PRAYER by the REVEREND JERRY FALWELL who will demonstrate the spirit of Compassionate Conservatism(tm) and the eternal mercy of God by wishing a horrible fiery death and an eternity in the pit of hell for all non-white, non-male, non-Christian non-heterosexual non-Republicans.

* TOM RIDGE raises National Alert Level to PULSATING RED.

* THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF INSANELY RICH PERSONS (AAIRP) will present LAURA BUSH with A PLATINUM CHAINSAW in thanks for the Bush Administration tax cuts. (Sponsored by Gulfstream)

* ANN COULTER, BILL O'REILLY and SEAN HANNITY will lead a special TWO-MINUTE HATE aimed at photo of John Kerry.

* CLIMAX OF THE EVENING -- DIEBOLD CORPORATION WILL ANNOUNCE ELECTION RETURNS -- BUSH WINS RE-ELECTION WITH 51% OF VOTE (YET TO BE CAST). (JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA will certify vote results) Diebold Board member Wilbur H. Grafton will deny fraud, announce his retirement, and be named the new Ambassador to Jamaica. (Sponsored by Diebold)

* SUGGESTED AFTER-EVENT -- GET WRECKED WITH RUSH "Kicker" LIMBAUGH. (Sponsored by Eli Lilly)

September 2 (nomination night)

6 p.m.: OPENING PRAYER by ATTORNEY GENERAL JOHN ASHCROFT, who will then sing "Let the Eagle Soar" and light the ceremonial "TORCH OF FREEDOM(tm) with the (actual) Bill of Rights.

* TOM RIDGE raises National Alert Level to Fire Engine Red, and ANNOUNCES CAPTURE OF OSAMA BIN LADEN.

* CONVENTION SHIFTS TO "GROUND ZERO" -- DICK CHENEY will introduce and personally re-nominate PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH, who WILL IMPALE OSAMA BIN LADEN WITH DAVY CROCKETT'S KENTUCKY LONG RIFLE donated by Wayne LaPierre. (Sponsored by NRA)

* PRESIDENT BUSH WILL GIVE ACCEPTANCE SPEECH, standing on Osama's dead body.

FIRST PEEK -- Here is the proposed text for President Bush's speech:

"Hey, Freedom-Lovers! 9-11 Democracy Freedom Stay The Course Evil-doers trust my gut 9-11 Freedom Evil-doers Stay The Course Democracy 9-11 Evil-doers trust my gut 9-11 Democracy Freedom Stay the course Trust my gut Tax cuts Who cares what you think Evil-doers Things are great Jesus speaks to me 9-11 Democracy Freedom Stay The Course Evil-doers 9-11 Freedom Evil-doers Stay The Course Democracy 9-11 Evil-doers trust my gut 9-11 Democracy Freedom Stay the course Trust my gut Tax cuts Who cares what you think Evil-doers Things are great Jesus speaks to me. G'night everybody!"

POST CEREMONY CLOSING NIGHT PARTY OPPORTUNITIES:

* "GET MAXED with RUSH "ROCKET CAP" LIMBAUGH!" (Sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline)

* RICK SANTORUM 'DOG ON DOG' PETTING ZOO (adults only, please).

* BILL O'REILLY SHOWS OFF PULITZER PRIZE, ACADEMY AWARD, AND NOBEL PEACE PRIZE.

* SPECIAL BUFFET -- JOHN ASHCROFT will PERSONALLY EXORCISE A KINDLE OF CALICO  KITTENS, BARBECUE THEM, AND SERVE THEM ON CANAPES. (Sponsored by KRAFT "Thick  N' Spicy" BBQ Sauce)

The 9/11 Commission continues its hearings this morning (beginning at 8:30) on New York City's response to terrorism and may be watched on C-SPAN-3 on the Web.

Former NYC Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is testifying right now. The current mayor, Michael Bloomberg, will also testify, as will Tom Ridge, who heads the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

This morning, too, the Senate Armed Services Committee is taking testimony from Gen. Abizaid & Lt. Gen. Sanchez, the top U.S. commanders in Iraq, about Iraqi prisoner treatment. The hearing, which has already begun, may be watched on C-SPAN on the Web.

Postscript: C-SPAN keeps switching Webcasts. So if you click one or the other of the above links and get a different hearing than indicated, just go to C-SPAN's home page and follow the links there.

Mark Danner speaks for us in "Torture and Truth," his ruminations in the current issue of The New York Review of Books on the "Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade" by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba and the "Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on the Treatment by the Coalition Forces of Prisoners of War and Other Protected Persons by the Geneva Conventions in Iraq During Arrest, Internment and Interrogation by Delegates of the International Committee of the Red Cross":

Many of the young Americans smiling back at us in the [Abu Ghraib] photographs will soon be on trial. It is unlikely that those who ran "the process" and issued the orders will face the same tribunals. Iraqis will be well aware of this, even if Americans are not. The question is whether Americans have traveled far enough from the events of September 11 to go beyond the photographs, which show nothing more than the amateur stooges of "the process," and look squarely at the process itself, the process that goes on daily at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram, and other secret prisons in Iraq and around the world.

Ahmed Rashid also speaks for us in "The Rise of bin Laden," his review of "Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001," in the previous issue of NYRB:

What successive U.S. administrations could have done to prevent September 11 will always be debatable; perhaps the failure of intelligence to anticipate it is ultimately understandable, in view of the ponderous workings of bureaucracies. What is unforgivable is the failure of the current U.S. administration to maintain the resources and manpower needed to rebuild Afghanistan and to arrest bin Laden after September 11, and its decision to go to war in Iraq instead.

From Straight Up's poet laureate, we received this message: "Ever consider running something critical of our president?" And so, per Leon ("Our Calvin Trillin") Freilich:

George W. Bush sometimes suggests that he abandoned reading newspapers when he moved into the Oval Office ... [but he] is known for devouring the sports section. -- USA Today 5/13/2004

PRINCE GEORGE OF D.C. SOLILOQUIZES

To read or not to read: that is the question.
Whether 'tis more compassionate to skip
The gloomy news from Iraq, with all attendant
Accounts of necessary prisoner
Encouragements to join the Coalition
Of the Concerned; or to leave to Rummy,
My heart-close aide and even other self,
The ticklish task of scissoring the clips
That 'scape from my subjects' baser element
And splash like thick, untreated sewer blood
The already-toxic major newspapers
Of the land. To read; to come across
Nay-sayers who never had to bloat a budget
To keep my mighty armies in the field
Warring 'gainst the Devil's own brigades,
Heathen bands of misbegotten brothers,
Craven looters sans the decency
To contribute to my noble party's coffers.
And who will side in the scurvy newspapers
With my fellow troops, my comrades in the trenches
And four-star hotels whose fate, long 'twixt with mine
Since my salad days as a battle-ready fighter
Pilot in the time of my father-King's excursion
Into the sandy landscape one bomby day
Of the still-perfidious Iraqians.
To read the newspapers? And risk the loss
Of action in their hemisemidemi
Pile of gross inaccuracies? Why, look you,
Souvenir pictures -- private, and personal property --
Printed for all the merry moochers to moon
Over and criticize as if my soldiers'
Own sweet memories of a glorious time
Belonged to anyone but them. Shame!
Shame on the peeping Toms of the daily press;
Excepting, methinks, those sporting gentlemen,
Wholly innocent of the Eastern beau monde's
Malevolent taint, who write about Barry Bonds.

What did Kevin Phillips say at the "What We Stand For" conference that made him yesterday' coming attraction for today's report from the Land of Is? Pretty much nothing he hasn't written in "American Dynasty," his devastating examination of the Bush family dynasty going back four generations.

But there's nothing like hearing the message from the horse's mouth. And Phillips's bracing voice dripped with irony and contempt as he delivered his verdict on the behavior of the Bush family. "Over four generations they have honed a pattern of loyalty to [America's] wealthiest 0.01 percent, the top 200,000 families," he said. "How you do that over four generations and not take that loyalty to the White House is not credible. The whole compassion business is clap-trap."

(In the words of one book critic, "It is hard to tell what offends Phillips the most: the Bushes' systematic deceit and secrecy, their shady business dealings, their cronyism, or their family philosophy that privileges the very wealthy and utterly dismisses all the rest.")

Phillips, a former Republican strategist who is now a registered independent, explained that "Republicans wanted a Main Street meritocracy. With the Bushes you get 'special strokes for special folks.'" We also got a nitwit in the White House who was not just "born with a silver foot in his mouth." He grew up to become a failure in the oil business, a major source of Bush family influence and wealth, who always managed to have his losses covered by others. "As the saying goes, 'every time he drilled a dry hole somebody came along and filled it up with money,'" Phillips said.

(According to bloomberg.com, the nitwit's assets are worth as much as $18.9 million: "Bush made his fortune with Major League Baseball's Texas Rangers, where he was managing director. His initial investment of $530,000 in 1989 soared to almost $15 million when he sold his share of the team to venture capitalist Tom Hicks in 1994. Bush was elected to his first term as [Texas] governor that fall.

"He got the money to buy into the Rangers partnership group by selling about 212,000 shares of Harken Energy Corp., an energy services company where Bush served on the board. Bush acquired the stock after Harken bought the energy exploration company he headed. The stock sale paid Bush $848,560.")

Perhaps worst of all, the Bush family has exploited public institutions and taxpayers's money to further its personal interests. The construction of the Rangers's stadium in Arlington, Texas, "shows how big they are on using government programs for high rollers in the private sector," Phillips said. He pointed out that Bush and his associates used the power of emiment domain, which is the right of government to seize private property for public use, to obtain the land for the stadium and a public bond issue to finance it.

"It amazes me," Phillips said, "that Democrats haven't distilled all of this into [a campaign] with a strong cutting edge."

This morning's 9/11 Commission hearing about New York City's questionable "emergency response" to the al Qaeda attack that killed 2,749 people and destroyed the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 is being televised from the New School in Manhattan and may be viewed in a Webcast by C-Span. (I'm having trouble with the link. Maybe you'll have better luck.)

The wizards from the Land of Is spelled out "What We Stand For" over the weekend in a stellar gathering at New York University's Skirball Center, convened by the New Democracy Project and The Nation. They didn't need to take their cues from Paul Krugman, the economist and liberal New York Times op-ed columnist, because they all came with plenty of their own ideas about "Taking Back America."

But you know what? The conference was one of those ya-hadda be-there things. I'd never heard Jeffrey Sachs before. Man! Powerful. Eliot Spitzer was a spritzer. Robert Reich is even shorter than I thought, and a much bigger presence, too. Leggy Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, looked way sexy enough in her miniskirt and spike heels to pass for a high-class hooker sorta. Mark Green was smarter than I expected, but he can sound like a Borscht Belt comic. The two of them, Green and vanden Heuval, organized the conference. They must have very fine Rolodexes.

Since it was Krugman who launched the conference with fightin' words about the current regime's deceit and incompetence, let's begin with him. If "regime change" comes in November, Krugman said, he hoped the next administration would "throw open the records" and not be "too magnanimous" to this one. "I believe the sunshine is going to be quite deadly," he said. It is precisely because the Bush regime has so much to hide, Krugman added, that the upcoming "election campaign is going to be so bitter."

Reminding an audience of more than 800 people in the sold-out hall that "we're dealing with Nixon but without the competence," Krugman went on to list seven progressive ideas needed to "change the mindset" of America. None of them were startling in themselves. But they were a collective touchstone for the rest of the conference, and he drove home each point as contrary to what the current regime believes: 1) intelligent economic policy works; 2) social insurance works; 3) health care works; 4) regulation works; 5) environmental protection works; 6) civil liberties work; and 7) democracy works.

Gary Hart, the former senator from Colorado who co-chaired the U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century, picked up on Krugman's theme of incompetence and deceit in a panel discussion on terrorism and war. Hart said he believes "there must be an old memo" in the files "explaining the strategy for going into Iraq." That memo "will be surfaced one day, although not by [Bob] Woodward."  

The invasion "was not for oil," he said, but "oil must have been part of it." It was to establish a military and, therefore, political presence in the Middle East "to condition the behavior of Iran, Syria, Lebanon" and other nations in the neighborhood, "and to protect our ally" Israel. While he disagreed with that as a policy, he said, one could make an argument for it. "What I object to," he emphasized, "is that this strategy was not layed out to the American people" before the invasion of Iraq.

Hart said that from the very beginning he believed "the president was doomed to fail in Iraq because he didn't have the support of the American people in the sense that he needed it." The current regime "never fully told the American people" what the cost of the war would be, not only in dollars or deaths but in the huge number of casualties. In addition to the more than 700 American soldiers who have died, there have been 8,500 to 10,000 combat and non-combat casualties. "This has been kept quiet," Hart added, on top of what he said were tens of thousands of Iraqi civilian casualties.

Asked how he assessed current developments in Iraq, he said he believed "the war reached a turning point 10 days ago" when the U.S. military "lost Falluja by turning authority over to a Baathist to extricate itself from an untenable situation."

This report will be continued tomorrow. Coming attraction: Kevin Phillips, author of "American Dynasty," subtitled: "Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush." Phillips, once the architect of the Republicans' "southern strategy" and now a former Republican, was blistering about the presumed Democratic presidential candidate. "If [John] Kerry wants to be stamped second-rate he can keep on being a stiff," Phillips said. "He'll join Dukakis and Gore. But if Kerry loses, historians will have to put him in a category not invented yet."

All eyes are on "The Gray Zone," Seymour Hersh's story, posted Saturday by The New Yorker, charging that "the roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal" can be traced to Rummy boy's decision to apply "a highly secret operation" that dealt with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan "to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq."

The Afghanistan connection to Abu Ghraib is supported in part by an earlier CNN report, posted Wednesday, that an Afghan police officer claimed he was "stripped naked, photographed, kicked and subjected to sexual taunting while being held by coalition forces in August." These are now familiar interrogation methods to anyone  who has seen the Abu Ghraib photos. The officer's allegation is currently being investigated by the U.S. military.

And today a report in The Washington Post by R. Jeffrey Smith, "Knowledge of Abusive Tactics May Go Higher," also supports Hersh's story -- which is being denied by the Pentagon -- that a few low-level Army reservists with "criminal inclinations" are being scapegoated to cover up for military leaders who knew what was happening.

Smith writes that the top U.S. commander in Iraq was alerted last November of a plan to use an interrogation method dubbed "fear up harsh" on a Syrian jihadist held at Abu Ghraib:

According to the plan, interrogators needed the assistance of military police supervising his detention at the prison, who ordinarily play no role in interrogations under Army regulations. First, the interrogators were to throw chairs and tables in the man's presence at the prison and "invade his personal space."

Then the police were to put a hood on his head and take him to an isolated cell through a gantlet of barking guard dogs; there, the police were to strip-search him and interrupt his sleep for three days with interrogations, barking and loud music, according to Army documents. The plan was sent to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.

(For further explanation of "techniques to make prisoners crack," see "The Wink-Wink Rules of Interrogation.")

How long will it take, if ever, for Rummy boy to accept the responsibility he has so loudly proclaimed for himself? We're waiting for him to fire those at the top who knew what was going on and then, because the nitwit in the White House won't do it, to fire himself.

Postscript: This evening Newsweek chimed in with a report that "Bush, along with Defense Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door" to torture and provided a rationale for the U.S. "to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions."

Like Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road, we're off to see the wizards of "What We Stand For," a two-day conference featuring Paul Krugman, Gary Hart, Jim Fallows, Sandy Berger, Eliot Spitzer, Barbara Ehrenreich, Kevin Phillips, Robert Reich, Joe Trippi and many more from the Land of Is.

In our absence, here are some excerpts from a memo by one of our fave columnists, Bruce Feirstein, channeling Karl Rove's updates of new "White House-approved media buzzwords":

+ Abu Grhaib prison. Henceforth, this will be known as the "Khalil Gibran/Dale Earnhardt Jr. vocational-training facility and recreational center." As John Kerry himself asked: "Who among us does not like NASCAR?"
+ "Liberators." This remains the preferred terminology to describe our presence in Iraq, as opposed to "bungling clueless superpower."
+ "American war criminals." Please substitute "Overzealous patriots."
+ "Independent contractors" remains our preferred appellation. "Mercenaries," "hired guns," "Halliburton employees" or "crazed good ol' boys operating outside any known moral or legal authority" are not acceptable synonyms.
+ "Prisoners of war." Better to say "Guests of interest."
+ "War Crimes," "Atrocities," "Human-rights violations," "Torture," "Softening up prisoners for interrogation." The preferred description is "intelligence-gathering activities." But if pressed, use "Having a frank and honest chat with our 'guests of interest.'"
+ "A world of hurt." Avoid. Please substitute "An unfortunate and unforseeable blip on the road to success."
+ "Chain of command." Obsolete.
+ "Swatting flies." Inoperative.
+ "Imminent threat." Banished.
+ "Boots on the ground." Expunged. (Alas, it seems that certain "independent contractors" mistook this to mean "boots on the prisoner's head.")
+ Presidential daily briefing. The P.D.B. will henceforth be known as "USA Today." If you get a chance, stop by to say hello to ace journalist Jack Kelley, who's been brought in to edit it.
+ "Unknown unknowns." Now that we know what said "unknown unknowns" are (i.e., white trash gone wild in Abu Ghraib prison), this phrase will be dropped from our lexicon.
+ "It's possible." As per use by Donald Rumsfeld: "Not a chance."

Future updates are pending, we hope. This morning even strait-laced William Powers offers a faux news summary, Rummy-style. And finally, for anyone who needs reminding: "The Wrong Direction" gets it right.

Will the family coat of arms being prepared for Colin Powell reflect his role as a federal arts patron? Not according to a report that the family crest he's requested from the Lord Lyon, "which bestows coats of arms in Scotland," will have a banner saying "Devoted to Public Service" instead of "Devoted to Public Service for the Arts."

But we happen to know (from a press release) that next week Secretary of State Powell and the U.S. State Department are to celebrate 40 years of the ART in Embassies Program, with help from the White House and Laura Bush. Fat cats -- sorry, art collectors -- have been invited to a panel discussion, "Art as Diplomacy: 21st Century Challenges," co-sponsored by the State Department and the independent Center for Arts and Culture based in Washington.

You probably didn't know the State Department creates art exhibitions worldwide and shows them in nearly 200 American embassies and diplomatic residences from Abidjan, the Ivory Coast (where a single silkscreen by Jacob Lawrence is currently on display), to Zagreb, Croatia (where the exhibition comprises 17 paintings, sculptures or photographs by seven artists). Well, now you know.

A sculpture exhibition, "Around the World in Forty Years," highlighting American artists who have loaned works to the ART in Embassies Program over the years, also will be on view at the State Department in Washington (through July 6). The biggest names in the art biz have had their works exhibited over the years, among them: Louise Bourgeois, Bruce Nauman, Isamu Noguchi, Claes Oldenburg, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith and Robert Wilson.

Oh by the way, the idea of wanting to have a family coat of arms seems a little creepy to us. It smacks of, well, royalist pretensions. But never mind. In this great democracy of ours, an immigrant nation of the tired, the poor, the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free," it's each to his or her own weirdness. (The Powell coat of arms will feature "a lion, an eagle, crossed swords and four stars symbolizing [his] status as a retired four-star general.")

CNN reports: The Malaysian company hosting "the al-Qaeda-linked Web site that first posted the video of Nicholas Berg's beheading shut down the site today "because it was drawing too much traffic." By now, of course, the decapitatiion nightmare can be seen elsewhere on the Internet.

In the meantime, the Defense Department is still deciding whether to let the general public see the Abu Ghraib photos that it screened privately for the Congress. The inclination to hold them back strikes Jimmy Breslin as worse than dumb.

In a column headlined "The ultimate reality show," he writes, "At that hour," when the prison photos were being screened in a secret room in Washington, "people everywhere in the country were looking at an American being beheaded, in live action. And on Internet or television screens or on trains and buses where people held cell phones with video screens.

"The prison pictures they [the politicians] watched in such secrecy belong to the public whose taxes pay for this war. These utter fools in suits and uniforms, some smooth-faced liar from the Pentagon, or a general who should be in a grand jury himself, try to control the free speech of the nation and commit a war crime. They also show complete ignorance of today's life."

Breslin wonders, too, how anybody can watch the TV reality shows, which are programmed "in prime time for the Low IQ brigades, when real reality is good action footage of our team torturing Iraqis and their team decapitating an American?" That irony also works in reverse.

You can't say the press didn't warn us. A year before the invasion of Iraq, The Wall Street Journal sent an enterprising reporter to the U.S. Army's interrogation school in Fort Huachuca, Arizona. His report, published on April 26, 2002, describes an instructor telling his class of freshmen, many under the age of 20, that the job of extracting information from captive foes "is just a hair's-breadth from being an illegal specialty under the Geneva Convention."

WSJ's Jess Bravin, now a senior special writer who covers legal affairs, wrote that "human intelligence collectors" -- the Pentagon name for interrogators -- "are authorized not just to lie, but to prey on a prisoner's ethnic stereotypes, sexual urges and religious prejudices, his fear for his family's safety, or his resentment of his fellows." Bravin's visit to the Army interrogation school was prompted by concerns over treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo who were designated as al Qaeda "enemy combatants." But his report sheds light on the roots of the current prisoner scandal in Iraq.

Soldiers at the interrogation school "study 30 techniques to make prisoners crack." Some involve incentives, like offering cigarettes. "If you've ever talked to a captured Arab who hasn't smoked for two hours, a pack of smokes can get you a long way," the instructor is quoted as saying. Other techniques intend to terrify prisoners. The "fear-up" technique consists of "heavy-handed, table-banging violence," according to an Army field manual, Bravin reports. "The interrogator behaves in a heavy, overpowering manner with a loud and threatening voice" and may "throw objects across the room to heighten the source's implanted feelings of fear."

The students receive "a day's training in the Geneva conventions of 1949," which govern what is allowed during interrogations of wartime prisoners. Because treatment is open to interpretation even according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, Bravin writes, interrogators are encouraged to exploit that possibility:

Thus, Sgt. Giersdorf tells students, "You can put a source in any position you want. You can chain his legs to the chair, you can handcuff his hands behind him," force him to stand at attention or have military police thrust him to the ground. "If [a prisoner] says it hurts, is it torture?"

"Yes," say several students.

"No, it's not," the sergeant corrects. America's allies, he says, go father, placing prisoners into what he calls "stress positions" until they talk. Those aren't taught here, he is quick to add, but "if you work with the Brits or the Dutch or the Germans, they can show you all about it." In an interview, he says, "I've known people in the U.S. Army who have used stress positions."

Bravin reports that "students are starting to get a feel for the job." And he ends the article with this chilling, wink-wink detail:

"While you're talking to a source, can you load a gun or sharpen a knife?" one soldier asks eagerly.

"Don't get caught doing it," Sgt. Giersdorf replies. "I mean," he corrects himself, "don't do it."

The right-wing blog A Dog's Life, which describes itself as a "Pedigreed Member of the Ankle-Biting Riffraff," refers this morning to "one Jan Herman, a microcephalic version of Frank Rich but with worse hydrophobia," and puts yours truly in the company of Matthew Yglesias, former editor in chief of The Harvard Independent. How sweet.

This morning's lead editorial in The New York Times, "The Abu Ghraib Spin," begins:

The administration and its Republican allies appear to have settled on a way to deflect attention from the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib: accuse Democrats and the news media of overreacting, then pile all of the remaining responsibility onto officers in the battlefield, far away from President Bush and his political team. That cynical approach was on display yesterday morning in the second Abu Ghraib hearing in the Senate, a body that finally seemed to be assuming its responsibility for overseeing the executive branch after a year of silently watching the bungled Iraq occupation.

This morning's lead editorial in The Washington Post, "Protecting the System," ends:

The sickening abuse of Iraqi prisoners will do incalculable damage to American foreign policy no matter how the administration responds. But if President Bush and his senior officials would acknowledge their complicity in playing fast and loose with international law and would pledge to change course, they might begin to find a way out of the mess. Instead, they hope to escape from this scandal without altering or even admitting the improper and illegal policies that lie at its core. It is a vain hope, and Congress should insist on a different response.

Both editorials tell the truth. But the Times editorial, which is stronger, tells more of the unvarnished truth not only because it is better written but because it uses, as the French say, le mot juste: "torture."

Postscript: From a faithful reader who has had justifiable doubts about the Times's coverage of the presidential campaign (he believes it skews against John Kerry) and, in my view, less justifiable doubts about its reporting on the Abu Ghraib scandal:

"The Times is still doing a good job on this abuse thing. I can't quite figure out what is going on. It doesn't fit, somehow. I think the catch is yet to come. Anyway, your comments on reality TV answered this, as quoted from the Times":

At an open meeting with Pentagon civilian and military personnel, Mr. Rumsfeld said Tuesday that abuse at Abu Ghraib was "a body blow" to America delivered by "a few who have betrayed our values." He said that acts of violent abuse and sexual humiliation captured in photos and video images at Abu Ghraib "ought not to be allowed to define us either in the eyes of the world or our own eyes, adding, "We know who we are."

"The lies will continue, though, and we will never know the truth," my friend continues, citing this:

A separate Army inquiry is under way into what role military intelligence officers played in the abuses. In afternoon testimony, senior Army intelligence officers told senators that none of their people were implicated despite conclusions to the contrary in General Taguba's report.

"Nothing will come of that inquiry," he adds. "The U.S. military has not really been under democratic control for at least half a century." He offers another citation referring to yesterday's Senate hearing on Abu Ghraib:

Mr. Cambone, [undersecretary of defense for intelligence], and other military officials said the interrogation techniques approved for use in Iraq were straight out of the Army manual and followed the Geneva Conventions. In that respect, he said, they differed from harsher techniques, like sleep deprivation and forcing prisoners to disrobe entirely for interrogations, that are authorized for use at the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

"And what does that bring to mind, making all those people stand there naked?" my friend asks, and answers: "Randomly shooting prisoners from guard towers was another Nazi technique that has been used in Iraq. ... It is all coming home. The U.S.A. will be like an Argentina. The reality has already been written and sung into existence. A house of cards will sooner or later always fall."

Most news of the torture scandal in Iraq has involved male prisoners. Luke Harding, a Guardian reporter in Baghdad, puts the focus today on the torture and rape of Iraqi women prisoners. Iraqi women needn't have been incarcerated to come in for abuse, either. American soldiers on the street apparently feel they have a license to treat them like trash.

Harding quotes Huda Shaker describing her humiliation at a checkpoint on the outskirts of the city, when one soldier pointed his gun at her and demanded to search her handbag. "He pointed the laser sight directly in the middle of my chest," she said. "Then he pointed to his penis. He told me, 'Come here, bitch, I'm going to fuck you.'" Professor Shaker, Harding informs us, is a political scientist at Baghdad University.

Astounding as that is, can we expect anything else when American leaders at the top of the chain of command, beginning with the nincompoop in the White House, pay nothing more than lip service to morality? Rummy boy says U.S. interrogation methods are just fine. So, golly gee, what's to worry?

Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who wrote the Army report on torture of Iraqi prisoners, is an American hyphenate. He is NOT white. He is a Filipino-American, born in Manila, who moved to Hawaii at age 11 and grew up there in a largely mixed-race society. I'd bet this made him sensitive to issues of racism that often sail right over the heads of many white Americans. Why is this relevant? Because unspoken racism seems to me to have been a factor in what happened at Abu Ghraib.

See Luc Sante's article this morning on the op-ed page of The New York Times. Sante, an authority on the history of photography, notes the similarity of the torture photos at Abu Ghraib to old lynching photos of African-Americans. He calls both kinds of photos "trophy shots." Sante writes: "Like the lynching crowds, the Americans at Abu Ghraib felt free to parade their triumph and glee not because they were psychopaths but because the thought of censure probably never crossed their minds."

I would venture that Taguba's experience as a Filipino-American immigrant with a special sensitivity to racism had as much to do with the depth of his report as his courage in bucking the system. No less important: Taguba's father, while serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, was captured by the Japanese in Bataan in the Philippines and was a prisoner of war until his escape during the infamous Bataan death march. You can be sure that his POW experience, too, focused his son's attention.

Postscript: The scathing editorial in the Army Times about "the now-infamous pictures and [Taguba's] even more damning report" gets things right: A failure of leadership at the highest levels. Apparently the enlisted soldiers involved in the scandal have come in for derision at the Pentagon as "the six morons who lost the war." But according to the Army Times "the folks in the Pentagon are talking about the wrong morons." We all know who the right morons are. "This was a failure that ran straight to the top."

Ralph Nader live on C-Span on the Web: He's answering viewers' questions right now about various subjects, including the presidential campaign. Beginning at 9:30 a.m., Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who wrote the internal Army report on torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners, is to testify in a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. See it here. You can read the report here. Taguba submitted that report on May 4. It is worth noting the boasts made one day earlier by our nitwit Maximum Leader.

"My name is Nick Berg, my father's name is Michael ... I have a brother and sister, David and Sarah."

"My name is Daniel Pearl. I am an American Jew from California. I come from a Zionist family. My father is a Jew. My mother is a Jew. I am a Jew."

Postcript: Berg was also an American Jew.

Did reality TV finally come to Iraq? Do you think the rise of popular American shows like NBC's "Fear Factor" and CBS's "Survivor" have anything to do with the torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere? Those top-rated "entertainments" have prized physical degradation, along with psychological humiliation and plain old human sleaze (NBC's "The Apprentice," anyone?).

Were prisoners ever asked to eat a piece of horse rectum, per "Fear Factor"? Were their relatives ever asked to eat tarantula spiders or juicy coconut palm worms, per "Survivor"? Did anybody torture prisoners, per Britain's "Drop the Celebrity," which kicks contestants off the show by dumping them from an airplane? (Hmmm, "Drop the Celebrity" may have taken its m.o. from Vietnam-era interrogations.)

Anyway, was there an influence? An infection? Did the U.S. military get any sense of permission, if not the actual "pranks," from our TV pop culture? Just asking.

Excellent reading on the Whitehouse dimwit: "As the president says, we misunderestimate him. He was not born stupid. He chose stupidity. Bush may look like a well-meaning dolt. On consideration, he's something far more dangerous: a dedicated fool."

Thanks to anti-liberal columnist and blogger Steve Sailer for clarifying the chart that correlated state-by-state average IQs and income with the votes for Bush or Gore in the 2000 presidential election.

When we posted the item "The Spectrum from Blue to Red," we wrote: "The chart that explains it all for you" (an homage to Christopher Durang's outrageous satire, "Sister Mary Explains It All For You," which drove conservatives nuts). We also wrote that the chart "could be a joke," but "if so, it's a good one. No worse, certainly, than the outcome" of the election.

The trouble with Sailor's clarification is that he gets to the bottom of things by scraping bottom with an anti-Semitic slur when he writes that "anyone familiar with the topic would quickly recognize the fallaciousness of the data. The 113 [IQ] figure for Connecticut is way too high. That's about what Connecticut would be if it was all-Jewish."

Thanks to a good friend who keeps us up to date on useful information, here's how our nitwit Maximum Leader (aka "the little fucker") blows his horn (and our mind). This is from a stump speech he gave just the other day -- May 3, to be exact -- in Sterling Heights, Mich.:

We confronted the dangers of state-sponsored terror and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. So we ended two of the most --[applause] -- we ended two of the most violent and dangerous regimes on Earth. We liberated over 50 million people. Once again, America is proud to stand against tyranny and to set nations free. [Applause.]

When Dick Cheney and I came to office, we found a military that was underfunded and underappreciated. So we gave our military the resources and the respect they deserve. And today, no one can question the skill, and the strength, and the spirit of the United States military. [Applause.]

The audience then chanted: "USA! USA! USA! USA!" The nitwit also said:

We showed the dictator and a watching world that America means what it says. [Applause.] Because -- because we acted, Saddam's torture chambers are closed. Because we acted, Iraq's weapons programs are ended forever. [Applause.]

How about "Military Personnel: Don't Read This!" As reported in Time:

It's not exactly every day that the Pentagon warns military personnel to stay away from Fox News. But that's exactly what some hopeful soul at the Department of Defense instructed, in a memo intended to forbid Pentagon staff reading a copy of the Taguba report detailing abuse of detainees at prisons in Iraq that had been posted at the Fox News web site.

There's a copy of the Pentagon Email Warning on the Time Web site. This is how it goes:

FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

AUDIENCE
All ISD Customers

SUMMARY
Fox News and other media outlets are distributing the Tugabe report (spelling is approximate for reasons which will become obvious momentarily). Someone has given the news media classified information and they are distributing it. THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS REPORT IS CLASSIFIED. ALL ISD CUSTOMERS SHOULD:

1) NOT GO TO FOX NEWS TO READ OR OBTAIN A COPY
2) NOT comment on this to anyone, friends, family etc.
3) NOT delete the file if you receive it via e-mail, but
4) CALL THE ISD HELPDESK AT 602-2627 IMMEDIATELY

This leakage will be investigated for criminal prosecution. If you don't have the document and have never had legitimate access, please do not complicate the investigative processes by seeking information. Again, THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS REPORT IS CLASSIFIED; DO NOT GO TO FOX NEWS TO READ OR OBTAIN A COPY.

Does the Pentagon look more and more like a dog chasing its own tail, or am I dreaming?

It is gratifying to see that the foreign editor of The New York Times, whose international reporting we long admired, agrees with us.

May 3: "The mission [in Iraq] is not only not accomplished. It has, with the latest revelations turned into a moral defeat so shattering that the political and military nightmare (still brewing, with worse to come) may one day seem to have been pre-ordained." -- "Bad to Worse," Straight Up

May 6: "This is not My Lai. This is not the war in Vietnam. This is different. But the lessons are the same. Will they ever be learned?" -- "Donkey Tale," Straight Up

May 9: "A military defeat is a damaging thing, and Iraq remains a tense battleground. But a moral one may be more devastating and more enduring for a power like the United States that has long held that its actions are driven, at least in part, by the desire to be a force for good with a liberating mission for all humanity. ...

"Abu Ghraib is not My Lai. Nothing like the infamous massacre of Vietnamese civilians took place in the Iraqi prison. But it is assuming something of the mantle of that tragedy -- a vivid stain on America's conscience. How the United States can recover the moral authority with which much of the world still yearns to vest it will depend on its choices over the next few weeks. The battle for Iraq now begins again, for the third time, and on tougher terms than ever." -- Roger Cohen, "They've Apologized. Now What?" Week in Review

More essential reading: This week's latest from Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, "Chain of Command," and last week's latest from Cynthia Ozick in The New York Observer, "The Modern 'Hep! Hep! Hep!'"

Here's a very helpful TIMELINE, courtesy of the liberal advocacy group moveon.org and John Kerry's campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, tracing events of the Iraqi prisoner scandal:

Fall 2003 Bremer repeatedly raises issue of prison conditions with Rumsfeld and the President's inner circle according to LA Times: "Bremer repeatedly raised the issue of prison conditions as early as last fall -- both in one-on-one meetings with Rumsfeld and other administration leaders, and in group meetings with the president's inner circle on national security. Officials described Bremer as 'kicking and screaming' about the need to release thousands of uncharged prisoners and improve conditions for those who remained." (Washington Post, Graham, 5/7/04)

November 5, 2003 Maj. Gen. Donald J. Ryder files report concluding that there were potential human rights, training, and manpower issues -- system wide -- that needed immediate attention. Discussed serious concerns about tension between missions of the military police assigned to guard prisoners and intelligence teams who interrogate them. (New Yorker Magazine, Hersh, 5/5/04

January 2004 Rumsfeld learns of photographs showing prisoner abuse according to the Washington Post: "...Rumsfeld has known of the photographs since January, when they came to the attention of U.S. commanders in Iraq, he had not seen them, and he was not aware that CBS was about to air them until just hours before they were broadcast last week." (Washington Post, Graham, 5/7/04)

Mid-January, 2004 Bush told about the photo of abuse according to the Washington Post: "Marine Gen. Peter Pace...said Wednesday on CBS's "Early Show" that beginning in mid-January, everyone "up the chain of command . . . was kept apprised orally of the ongoing investigation." Asked if Bush "was well aware of the situation," Pace replied: "Yes."" (Washington Post, Allen, 5/7/04)

Late February 2004 Major General Antonio M. Taguba issues 53-page report concluding that between October and December 2003 there were numerous instances of "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" at Abu Ghraib. Report was not meant for public release. (New York, Hersh, 5/5/04 and LA Times, McDonnell, 5/3/04)

March 2004 Six enlisted personnel charged with prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. One is court marshaled. (AP, Burns, 5/3/04)

Mid-April, 2004 Military learns CBS has pictures of prisoner abuse in Iraq. General Abizaid and General Myers ask CBS to post-pone broadcast of the photos. (NY Times, Schmitt, 5/4/04)

April 28, 2004

+ Graphic photos of abuse of Iraqi prisoners are shown on CBS 60 Minutes 2. (AP, Crary, 4/28/04)
+ Rumsfeld provides classified briefing to Congressional leaders on situation in Iraq, fails to mention that photos of Iraqi abuse victims will be aired that evening on television. (Senate Armed Services Committee Testimony, Levin, 5/7/04)
+ May 3, 2004 Spokesman McClellan says that Bush still hasn't seen or been briefed on the Taguba report. (WH Briefing, McClellan, 5/3/04).

May 4, 2004

+ Rumsfeld says he disagrees with critics who have said the Pentagon moved too slowly. Defense Department officials have moved correctly and efficiently, he said. "The system works," he said. "The system works." Admitted he had not read the whole Taguba report or seen the photos. (DoD Briefing, Rumsfeld, 5/4/04)
+ Military discloses Army has conducted 30 criminal investigations into misconduct by American captors in Iraq and Afghanistan, including 10 cases of suspicious death, 10 cases of abuse, and two deaths of Iraqis already determined to have been criminal homicides. (NY Times, Neilan, 5/5/04)
+ General George Casey, Army's Vice-Chief of Staff, refers to a "complete breakdown in discipline." (NY Times, Reuters wire, 5/5/04)

The International Committee of the Red Cross warned many high officials in the U.S. government last January and earlier that it had observed widespread abuse of Iraqi prisoners "tantamount to torture." The ICRC characterized this treatment not as the aberrant behavior of a few but "a pattern and a system," which, like the Army's own report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, gives the lie to Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker and his boss, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Meyers.

Schoomaker claimed as recently as yesterday in his Senate testimony that what happened at Abu Ghraib prison was the "inexcusable behavior of a few."  He was hewing to the line set by Meyers, who, you may recall, spent last weekend on the morning talk shows blaming a mere "handful" of low-ranking soldiers and complaining about inaccurate reporting by the press.

On the same day of their testimony in Congress, the ICRC director of operations, Pierre Kraehenbuehl, said the abuse represented more than isolated acts, and the problems were not limited to the Abu Ghraib prison. "We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a pattern and a system," he told a news conference in Geneva.

The ICRC's 24-page report, leaked Friday in The Wall Street Journal, "described prisoners kept naked in total darkness in empty cells at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison and male prisoners forced to parade around in women's underwear. Coalition forces also fired on unarmed prisoners from watchtowers, killing some of them."

Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, and U.S. military commanders were given this report, which summarizes previous ICRC investigations, in February. (The ICRC, based in Switzerland, is a neutral organization. Under the Geneva Conventions it visits prisoners of war and others detained by an occupying power, to see that countries fulfill their obligations under the 1949 accords.)

Equally astonishing are this morning's revelations in The New York Times that the official "who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time."

The official, Lane McCotter, 63, "later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs." And who picked McCotter and the others? That exemplary enforcer and protector of the law, none other than Attorney General John Ashcroft.

As Fox Butterfield reports: "When Mr. Ashcroft announced the appointment of the team to restore Iraq's criminal justice system last year, including Mr. McCotter," here's what Ashcroft said: "Now all Iraqis can taste liberty in their native land, and we will help make that freedom permanent by assisting them to establish an equitable criminal justice system based on the rule of law and standards of basic human rights."

You might conclude from this that our Maximum Leader's apology to the world for America's moral hypocrisy is less than sincere. You might even conclude from this that "torture and abuse" (to use Sen. Edward Kennedy's forthright phrase in yesterday's Senate hearing) is as American as apple pie. To read Butterfield's report, you wouldn't be wrong.

"Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern," he writes. Merely have a look at the photo of the naked Araqi prisoner bound to a bed in Abu Ghraib with women's panties covering his face (fourth image in the Washington Post slideshow) and compare it to Butterfield's description that prison inmates in Pennsylvania and other states "are routinely stripped in front of other inmates," and in an Arizona jail male inmates "are made to wear women's pink underwear as a form of humiliation."

The ugly icing on this rotten cake? Experts told Butterfield, "the worst abuses have occurred in Texas," where the prison system had to be put "under a consent decree during much of the time President Bush was governor because of violence by guards against inmates. ..."

So when our Maximum Leader, his Rummy boy and the Pentagon generals defend American honor with, respectively, expressions of regret, a deep apology, and hangdog looks on their faces, it should surprise no one that people will doubt their sincerity.

We get e-mails. Here is one:

Dear Jan: I've felt like more than a fan with you and your writings in the past. And I have been critical and judgmental of the tone and absolute leftness of your views. Now, in the past week, you've resorted to profanity and vilifying our President.

Someone sent me a memo stating that it would be unthinkable for the press to have subjected President Roosevelt to the abject criticism of Pearl Harbor. The career bureaucrats, I believe, make it impossible for any administration to make real progress to adequately service the citizens of our country, but the sitting president, according to today's press, must take the hit. I'm sorry. Truisms are lame excuses at best.

During WWI, you would have been prosecuted for your vilification of Mr. Bush. Probably imprisoned. I think that's where you and all the others belong. You have demonstrated that free speech has no limits, but you have committed TREASON in helping this country's enemies. A public apology for your actions would be your next step, sir.

-- Dr. Richard P. McGuir

Dear Dr. McGuir: Treason? You've got to be kidding.

Here is another e-mail:

Jan: I've been reading your blogs all week and I hope you keep going with them. People need to take a hard look at what's happening here and I applaud your efforts to keep us informed.

A disturbing thought occurs to me and that is that much of the world, including many in the Arab world, thinks that Americans are basically decent people -- it's just our government that's horrible.

What is the world going to think if the majority of all of these basically decent American people rally behind this Administration and re-elect George W. Bush in November? What's our excuse then?

The President talks about the recent scandal regarding the torture of prisoners as "a stain on our country's honor." When is someone going to stand up and say that our honor was permanently stained the day we invaded Iraq? It was stained forever the moment the first bomb fell.

-- Joan Daniels

Dear Joan Daniels: Great point about why our Maximum Leader, aka "the little fucker," has to go.

The dummy in the White House told the world he feels really, really sorry about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. How sorry? So sorry that he vowed to keep his boy Rummy on the job. And we all know that Rummy, who runs the U.S. military, feels really, really sorry, too. That's what < FONT color=#003399>he's about to tell the Congress. Watch him squirm in two separate Capitol Hill hearings to be broadcast on C-Span on the Web, beginning at 11:30 a.m. ET and at 3 p.m. ET. (Let's see if he avoids the T-word the way the dummy does.)

A friend writes that comments by major media figures in 2001 "might help us understand why Americans ended up torturing and murdering prisoners." When you look at what leading figures in the media have said, the abuse at Abu Ghraib "does not appear to be just an anomaly committed by some girl from West Virginia. Note especially the comment encouraging torture by Jonathan Alter that was published in Newsweek."

Alter's comment was cited by the P.U.-litzer Prizes for 2001, an awards competition administered by syndicated columnist and author Norman Solomon with Jeff Cohen of the media watch group FAIR. Solomon created the P.U.-litzers Prizes more than a decade ago "to give recognition to the stinkiest media performances of the year."

Here are some of the most relevant awards given that year:

WILD ABOUT THAT MADMAN AWARD -- Thomas Friedman of The New York Times
"I was a critic of Rumsfeld before, but there's one thing ... that I do like about Rumsfeld," columnist Friedman declared on Oct. 13 during a CNBC appearance. "He's just a little bit crazy, OK? He's just a little bit crazy, and in this kind of war, they always count on being able to out-crazy us, and I'm glad we got some guy on our bench that our quarterback -- who's just a little bit crazy, not totally, but you never know what that guy's going to do, and I say that's my guy."

TORTUOUS PUNDITRY PRIZE -- Jonathan Alter of Newsweek
In the Nov. 5 edition, under the headline "Time to Think About Torture," Newsweek's Alter wrote: "In this autumn of anger, even a liberal can find his thoughts turning to ... torture. OK, not cattle prods or rubber hoses, at least not here in the United States, but something to jump-start the stalled investigation of the greatest crime in American history.... Some people still argue that we needn't rethink any of our old assumptions about law enforcement, but they're hopelessly 'Sept. 10' -- living in a country that no longer exists."

PROTECTING VIEWERS FROM THE NEWS PRIZE -- CNN Chair Walter Isaacson
"It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan," said Isaacson, in a memo ordering his staff to accompany any images of Afghan civilian suffering with rhetoric that U.S. bombing is retaliation for the Taliban harboring terrorists. As if the American public may be too feeble-minded to remember Sept. 11, the CNN chief explained: "You want to make sure that when they see civilian suffering there, it's in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States."

PROTECTING READERS FROM THE NEWS PRIZE -- Panama City News Herald
An October internal memo from the daily in Panama City, Florida, warned its editors: "DO NOT USE photos on Page 1A showing civilian casualties from the U.S. war on Afghanistan. Our sister paper ... has done so and received hundreds and hundreds of threatening e-mails... DO NOT USE wire stories which lead with civilian casualties from the U.S. war on Afghanistan. They should be mentioned further down in the story. If the story needs rewriting to play down the civilian casualties, DO IT."

BEST EMBRACE OF TERRORIST MINDSET AWARD -- columnist Ann Coulter
This category had many candidates -- pundits apparently trying to sound as fanatical as the terrorists they were denouncing -- but it was won by Coulter, who wrote in September: "We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."

Runner-up: Thomas Woodrow and The Washington Times, for a column headlined "Time to Use the Nuclear Option," which asserted: "At a bare minimum, tactical nuclear capabilities should be used against the bin Laden camps in the desert of Afghanistan. To do less would be rightly seen by the poisoned minds that orchestrated these attacks as cowardice."

HISTORY IS FOR WIMPS PRIZE -- Newsweek
When Newsweek published a Dec. 3 cover story on George W. and Laura Bush, it was a paean to "the First Team" more akin to worship than journalism. Along the way, the magazine explained that the president doesn't read many books: "He's busy making history, but doesn't look back at his own, or the world's.... Bush would rather look forward than backward. It's the way he's built, and the result is a president who operates without evident remorse or second-guessing."

Go to the site (click the link) for descriptions of the other 2001 P.U.-litzers:

+LOVE A MAN IN A UNIFORM AWARD -- Cokie Roberts of ABC News "This Week"
+ BLAME CERTAIN AMERICANS FIRST PRIZE -- televangelist/pundits Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson
+ AMERICA UNITED EXCEPT FOR THOSE DECADENT TRAITORS AWARD -- Andrew Sullivan of The New Republic and Sunday Times of London
+ SHEER O'REILLYNESS AWARD -- Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly and Catherine Seipp of MediaWeek
+ CHILD WARNOGRAPHY AWARD -- Bob Edwards, NPR News

Remember our May 3 item < FONT color=#003399>Bad to Worse, citing William Osborne's idea that the military is conducting a cultural war on its own people? Have a look at these two awards from the P.U.-litzer Prizes for 2003, which offer more proofs of that:

CLEAR IT WITH THE PENTAGON AWARD -- CNN
A month after the invasion of Iraq began, CNN executive Eason Jordan admitted on his network's "Reliable Sources" show (April 20) that CNN had allowed U.S. military officials to help screen its on-air analysts: "I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met with important people there and said, for instance -- 'At CNN, here are the generals we're thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war' -- and we got a big thumbs-up on all of them. That was important."

ANCHORS AWAY TO WAR PRIZE -- Fox News Channel and PBS "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" (Tie)
On March 24, about an hour before the first NATO missiles struck Yugoslavia, viewers heard a Fox News Channel anchor make an understandable slip: "Let's bring in our Pentagon spokesman -- excuse me, our Pentagon correspondent." A more scripted demonstration of journalistic independence came later in the war, when "NewsHour" anchor Margaret Warner introduced a panel: "We get four perspectives now on NATO's mission and options from four retired military leaders."

Jack Shafer's piece, "Honey, They Shrunk the Newspaper," is generally right about a lot of things wrong with the electronic editions (vs. the standard Web site versions) of The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times -- and what's right about them. (Here in miniature is what an electronic edition looks like.) He's exactly right when he says:

E-editions preserve the information-rich typography of print by displaying replicas of the newsprint page. An e-edition reader has a leg up on the reader of the HTML version of the paper because the original typefaces and placement retained in PDF give the e-edition reader clues about the intended rank and "play" of a news story (in the editors' opinion). Web sites suffer on this score because most stories are presented in long lists of plain text.

But the standard, broadband Web site versions we've become accustomed to also have their advantages. For instance, Rwanda: 10 years of pain, from Newsday, is a broadband Web report not to be missed. You can't find it in Newsday's print edition, and you wouldn't find it in an electronic edition (even if Newsday had one).

An easy prediction: The day can't be far off when Web-based designers will meld electronic editions and broadband Web site versions in user-friendly packages to give us the best  and worst of both worlds.

The T-word -- "torture" -- was studiously avoided by all in more than three hours of the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Treatment of Prisoners in Iraq. Except, that is, for Sen. Edward Kennedy, who forthrightly spoke of "torture and abuse."

The closest Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld came to using the T-word was when he said compensation might be made to Iraqi prisoners who suffered "grievous and brutal abuse and cruelty."

By any other name that's "torture." The old rule applies: If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, looks like a duck, etc.

We also heard Rummy say, "I take full responsibility" for the "terrible activities" that took place at Abu Ghraib. We heard him say, "I feel terrible about what happened to those Iraqi detainees." We heard him offer his "deepest apology to Iraqis who were mistreated."

Here's how the others being questioned in the hearing skirted the T-word:

+ Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called what happened "prisoner abuse," which was "appalling, unconscionable and unacceptable."
+ Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, deputy commander of the U.S. Central Command in Iraq, called it "mistreatment."
+ Lee Brownlee, Acting Secretary of the Army, called it "detainee abuse" that was "tragic and disappointing."
+ Gen. Peter Schoomaker, Army Chief of Staff, called it the "inexcusable behavior of a few."

To be fair, there was a questioner's reference to "atrocities" toward the end of the hearing. And the word "homicide" did come up in a factual description of the "abuses."

The tale read 'round the world: Woman harnessed like a donkey (London Evening Standard), Elderly Woman 'Ridden Like A Donkey' by US Troops (The Scotsman), Troops put harness on 70-year-old woman (The Australian).

As reported by the Associated Press in London, it begins: "U.S. soldiers who detained an elderly Iraqi woman last year placed a harness on her, made her crawl on all fours and rode her like a donkey, Prime Minister Tony Blair's personal human rights envoy to Iraq said Wednesday."

And there was the Maximum Leader preaching to the Arab world. (Click on the video: 'President Bush in damage control on Arabic TV.') The best commentary on that? Try this: "Mr. Bush sometimes sounded as if he was chiding angry Arabs for not appreciating the United States' good intentions."

< EM>Or this:

[The] belief, that the photographs are distortions, despite their authenticity, is indistinguishable from propaganda. Tyrants censor; democracies self-censor. Tyrants concoct propaganda in ministries of information; democracies produce it through habits of thought so ingrained that a basic lie of war -- only the good is our doing -- becomes self-propagating.

This is not My Lai. This is not the the war in Vietnam. This is different. But the lessons are the same. Will they ever be learned?

Postscript: Given the nature of human nature, the answer to that question is "probably not." Here's one reason: An experiment simulating prison in 1971 at Stanford University showed how fine the line is < FONT color=#003399>"Between 'Normal' and 'Monster.' 

Coincidentally, an old college friend who's now a psychiatrist on the clinical faculty of the Stanford medical school, had recalled the experiment for me yesterday. Seeing the 'Fine Line' report this morning, he added: "The most horrific fact, which I underestimated, was that 2/3 of the subjects pushed the button for electrical shock, following orders, all the way up to the lethal level."

Correction: In quoting my friend, I conflated Philip Zimbardo's prison experiment at Stanford with Stanley Milgram's "quite separate experiment at Yale," another friend, Robert Cohen, at the University of California, Irvine, messages me. In Milgram's experiment pretend "investigators" had volunteers believe they were giving electric shocks to other volunteers. "Both experiments were done around the same time," Cohen writes, "and both show how humans mindlessly do what they think is expected of them, but they were quite different in both methods and results."

Another postscript: A reader writes, "The woman who is shown in several of the torture photos is from my home state of West Virginia. What can I tell you except: 'I'm sooooo proudddddd.' (Irony intended.) The name of the soon-to-be court-martialed trailer park denizen turned military policewoman is Lynndie England. She is from someplace called Fort Ashby, West Virginia. After the recent unpleasantness, they took her photo down from the Wall of Honor at the nearby Wal-Mart. To the best of my knowledge it was NOT the pic of her smoking a cigarette and pointing at the private parts of one of the prisoners.

I presume you've seen this by now, but in case you haven't: "Disney may block anti-Bush film." The film at issue is Michael Moore's latest, "Fahrenheit 9/11," which is to have its premiere later this month at the Cannes International Film Festival.

The New York Times quotes Moore's agent as saying that Disney CEO Michael Eisner feared that distributing the documentary (produced by its Miramax Films division) would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where the Maximum Leader's brother, Jeb Bush, is governor. Disney executives denied that.

Moore told the Times: "At some point the question has to be asked, 'Should this be happening in a free and open society where the monied interests essentially call the shots regarding the  informatioin that the public is allowed to see?'"

The real reason for Eisner's concern is that Osama bin Laden's family and other powerful Saudi clans who've been linked to the Bush family own vast amounts of Disney stock. (Nah, just kidding.)

The chart that explains it all for you: A state by state tabulation of the average IQ, income and winning presidential candidate in the 2000 election, according to the Ravens Advanced Progressive Matrices. The matrices are a product of The Test Agency, a well-known British publisher and distributor of psychometric tests, testing software and management training.

------------------AVG IQ---AVG Income-------'00
(1) Connecticut.........113.........$26,979..........Gore
(2) Massachusetts.....111.........$24,059..........Gore
(3) New Jersey..........111.........$26,457..........Gore
(4) New York.............109.........$23,534..........Gore
(5) Rhode Island.........107.........$20,299..........Gore
(6) Hawaii.................106.........$21,218..........Gore
(7) Maryland..............105.........$22,974..........Gore
(8) New Hampshire......105.........$22,934..........Bush
(9) Illinois..................104.........$21,608..........Gore
(10) Delaware.............103.........$21,451..........Gore
(11) Minnesota............102.........$20,049.........Gore
(12) Vermont..............102.........$18,834..........Gore
(13) Washington..........102.........$20,398..........Gore
(14) California.............101.........$21,278..........Gore
(15) Pennsylvania........101.........$20,253..........Gore
(16) Maine.................100.........$18,226..........Gore
(17) Virginia...............100.........$20,629..........Bush
(18) Wisconsin............100.........$18,727.........Gore
(19) Colorado...............99.........$20,124.........Bush
(20) Iowa....................99.........$18,287.........Gore
(21) Michigan...............99.........$19,508.........Gore
(22) Nevada.................99.........$20,266.........Bush
(23) Ohio.....................99.........$18,624.........Bush
(24) Oregon..................99.........$18,202.........Gore
(25) Alaska...................98.........$21,603.........Bush
(26) Florida...................98.........$19,397.........Bush
(27) Missouri.................98.........$18,835.........Bush
(28) Kansas..................96.........$19,376.........Bush
(29) Nebraska...............95.........$19,084.........Bush
(30) Arizona.................94.........$17,119.........Bush
(31) Indiana.................94.........$18,043.........Bush
(32) Tennessee............94.........$17,341..........Bush
(33) North Carolina........93.........$17,667.........Bush
(34) West Virginia.........93.........$15,065..........Bush
(35) Arkansas...............92.........$15,439.........Bush
(36) Georgia.................92.........$18,130.........Bush
(37) Kentucky...............92.........$16,534........Bush
(38) New Mexico............92.........$15,353.........Gore
(39) North Dakota..........92.........$16,854.........Bush
(40) Texas....................92.........$17,892.........Bush
(41) Alabama.................90.........$16,220.........Bush
(42) Louisiana................90.........$15,712.........Bush
(43) Montana.................90.........$16,062........Bush
(44) Oklahoma................90.........$16,198........Bush
(45) South Dakota...........90.........$16,558........Bush
(46) South Carolina..........89.........$15,989........Bush
(47) Wyoming.................89.........$17,423........Bush
(48) Idaho......................87.........$16,067........Bush
(49) Utah.......................87.........$15,325........Bush
(50) Mississippi................85.........$14,088........Bush

This could be a joke. If so, it's a good one. No worse, certainly, than the outcome of the 2000 election.

Postscript: And a joke it is.

It's embarrassing: The U.S. State Department plans to delay the release of a human rights report (which was due out today) because, as one official put it, the report describes actions taken by the U.S. government to encourage respect for human rights by other nations, and releasing it now (in light of the American abuse scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq) could "make us look hypocritical." No shit, Sherlock.

Since we were just speaking of freedom of expression, here (thanks to a link from Romenesko) is Ted Rall's cartoon about the late Pat Tillman, which was killed by MSNBC.com. The news site's editor in chief says he killed it because it's unfair and tasteless. The "It" list, which ranks "hottest" celebrities each week according to readers' picks, meets MSNBC.com's standards of fairness and good taste.

None of the accounts we've read of Fidel Castro's two-hour May Day speech in Havana's Revolution Square -- variously reported in The Kansas City Star, which had the most interesting account, the Financial Times, and Channel News Asia -- mentioned the Cuban president's personal remarks about the war in Iraq.

Courtesy of the public relations office at the Cuban Mission to the United Nations in New York, which transmitted the written text of the speech, here's what Castro had to say about that:

The Iraq war brings to many people memories of the Vietnam War. To me, it brings back memories of the Algerian war of liberation, when French military might shattered against the resistance of a people with a very different culture, language and religion, in a country which in places is just as desert-like as many regions of Iraq, a people that managed to defeat the French troops and all their technology, which was fairly advanced for its time. The French had previously sustained defeat in Dien Bien Phu, where Bush's predecessors were on the point of using nuclear weapons.

In this type of war the entire arsenal of a hegemonic superpower is superfluous. This superpower can conquer a country with its enormous power but it is impossible to administer and govern that country if its population battles resolutely against the occupiers.

Castro also underscored the violations of human rights by U.S. military authorities who are holding prisoners indefinitely at the Guantanamo naval base on the eastern tip of Cuba. Such violations are a matter of real concern for Americans and others. But Castro's sentiments are rather suspect coming from someone with his record on human rights.

The PEN American Center has called for the current occupant of the White House "to abandon Patriot Act politics" and lead "an open, bipartisan evaluation of individual provisions of the Act that are scheduled to end by 2005, including Section 215, which opens records of individual reading activities to government scrutiny."

Good luck.

Section 215, in case you don't remember, amended and greatly expanded the scope of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The FBI now has the right to examine "any tangible things" -- to quote the law -- including bookstore and library records, PEN said in a press release issued Monday.

Under Title II, Section 215, of the USA Patriot Act, investigators can seek records even of individuals not suspected of terrorism. It also has a gag provision that prevents institutions from disclosing that their records have been examined.

"Like many sectors of the literary community," PEN "fears that such sweeping authority threatens the privacy necessary for law-abiding citizens and residents to explore controversial information and ideas."

The PEN American Center is an association of more than is 2,600 writers and editors. It is the largest of nearly 130 PEN Centers worldwide that compose International PEN, which has promoted literature and protected freedom of expression for more than 80 years.

The sunset provisions of the Patriot Act, says Larry Siems, the director of PEN's Freedom to Write and International Programs, "were built in to ensure that Congress would look carefully both at how the elements of the law are working to thwart terrorism and whether particular provisions are compromising essential liberties."

PEN has sent a letter to the White House "endorsing strong, targeted measures to confront terrorism and prevent terrorist attacks," but also "pressing for refinements and improvements to the Patriot Act and other post-9/11 security measures to protect privacy, ensure public access to government information, and comply with international law and human rights covenants."

The letter, co-signed by PEN American Center President Salman Rushdie, asks the current occupant of the White House to "protect and promote a critical and open review of the sunset provisions, one that acknowledges the shared commitment of all participants to the security and safety of U.S. citizens, residents, and interests and that allows for changes born of wisdom and experience."

The Maximum Leader is doubtless all ears. Here is Attorney General Ashcroft's view of the USA Patriot Act. Read it at your own risk.

The author William S. Burroughs used to say that nothing happens in reality unless a writer writes it first. I take his meaning in a metaphorical sense, but he was speaking more or less literally. So was the poet Wallace Stevens in a signature poem, "The Idea of Order in Key West":

And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

The composer William Osborne believes in the literal meaning as well. "We write (or sing) our world into being," he says, noting that it is the theme of "Cybeline," his music theater collaboration with Abbie Conant, presented six weeks ago at the Walt Disney Hall music complex in Los Angeles.

Why bring this up now? Because the horrific news from Iraq about American and British soldiers torturing prisoners -- as reported Sunday by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker and by The Mirror in London -- was prefigured in the 1982 play "Catastrophe," which Samuel Beckett wrote in honor of Vaclav Havel about the interrogation of a dissident. There's a remarkable equivalence between the torture photos from Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad and scenes in the play. The equivalence (of abuse and humiliation) does not have pictorial exactness. But the meaning is scarcely different.

In one of the play's scenes "a theatre director and his assistant arrange a protagonist, who stands on a black block submitting to their direction. 'D', the director, wears a fur coat and matching toque (a kind of hat) and smokes a fat cigar." Think of the horseplay of the smiling U.S. soldiers as they posed their abused prisoners for photos. These two photos from a production of "Catastrophe" -- here and here -- are less graphic than the "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" revealed in Major General Antonio M. Taguba's Army report, which Hersh obtained, but the intended goal of abject human degradation is the same.

"Cybeline" took the issue a step further. Osborne's program notes explain that "under the social engineering of the military," exemplified "with special clarity" by the "history of 20th century Germany," a human being can become "a consciously programmed construct, or cyborg. As such, humans are not served by the media but are part of its apparatus, cyberbia." It reaches the point where "society itself becomes a programmable cyborg." He writes:

This is the fascistic reduction of human society, the mass programming of a culture, to simplistic ideals generally formulating social identity based on slogans and the unifying forces of hatred. Strength through joy, Blut und Boden, and Lebensraum were common slogans during the Third Reich, but ultimately, media sound bites such as Weapons of Mass Destruction, Liberation, Support Our Troops, and War On Terrorism could have a similarly reductive and imperialistic effect.

America's all-volunteer military had to embrace advertising since it needed to compete for human resources in a free market. It also has to manipulate the media to win propaganda wars. The military has thus entered the cultural wars of society. Since the military's resources are unparalleled, its ability to conduct a cultural war on its own people is without comparison. Be all that you can be. An Army of One. A few good men. Join the navy and see the world. Under the military-industrial complex's massive social engineering, war has become the unifying force of American society. (Italics added.)

This U.S. Army Web site gives a hint of what Osborne means. The section on "Jobs" is especially telling. For example, SPC Christopher Bashaw, describes his satisfaction with a Land Warrior Program he's in, which tests the Army's latest technology and "makes every soldier wearing it a part of a mobile computer network."

As U.S. Senator Robert Byrd said in "Mission Not Accomplished in Iraq," a speech he gave last week to mark the anniversary of the Maximum Leader's triumphal made-for-television landing aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln to declare the end of major combat operations:

Since that time, Iraq has become a veritable shooting gallery. This April has been the bloodiest month of the entire war. ... Young lives cut short in a pointless conflict and all the President can say is that it "has been a tough couple of weeks." A tough couple of weeks, indeed.

Plans have obviously gone tragically awry. But the President has, so far, only managed to mutter that we must "stay the course." But what course is there to keep when our ship of state is being tossed like a dinghy in a storm of Middle East politics? If the course is to end in the liberation of Iraq and bring a definitive end to the war against Saddam Hussein, one must conclude, mission not accomplished, Mr. President.

The mission, it has turned out, is not only not accomplished. It has, with the latest revelations, turned into a moral defeat so shattering that the political and military nightmare (still brewing, with worse to come) may one day seem to have been pre-ordained.

Correction: The photos in the London newspaper The Mirror referred to above as showing British troops torturing Iraqi prisoners have since been exposed as fakes.

Two very different kinds of reviews, and we love them both: Martin Bernheimer's quick dissection of "Die Walküre" at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and Clive James's probing analysis of "Cyrano de Bergerac" at the National's Olivier Theatre in London.

Bernheimer's lede:

The Ring fanatics are here and night after night they're filling the house. These aren't modern Wagnerites, it should be noted, who think the old mythological tales can benefit from psychological insight, social comment or political interpretation. These aren't adventurers who savour symbolism or find updating a potentially stimulating exercise. No, the Met, capacity 4,000, has turned itself into a mecca for conservatives who enjoy fairy-tale pretence, who want to see trees with leaves, sopranos with breastplates and villains with horned helmets. Forget Bayreuth.

James's lede:

His nose preceding him by a quarter of an hour, the hero of Cyrano de Bergerac is a reminder that there were once things plastic surgery couldn't do. Today it can turn Michael Jackson into his own sister. But the original Cyrano, furiously active as poet, swordsman and celestial fantasist in seventeenth-century France, was stuck with his deformity. ... Appearance was destiny. If a man's appearance ruled him out in the eyes of the woman he loved, there was nothing he could do about it. Except, perhaps, one thing. What if he could rule himself back in through her ears?

Read both reviews and savour them. We could all take a lesson.

By contrast, I read a hatchet job the other day on the Roundabout Theater's revival of the Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman musical, "Assassins," at Studio 54 in New York, and was flabbergasted. The headline could have been: "Kill All the Liberals." After a lede bashing New York City theater for its liberal culture and politics and the liberal circles Sondheim is said to travel in, the reviewer added insult to injury by beginning his second paragraph with one of those back-pedaling don't-get-me-wrong apologies: "I speak, mind you, as a passionate admirer of Mr. Sondheim ..."

The negative judgment of "Assassins" (basically, love the production / hate the show) may be correct for all I know, not yet having seen Sondheim's dirty deed. What astonished me about the piece was the unctuous tone and the impression it left of a Wall Street Journal reviewer carrying water for the Journal's liberal-bashing editorial page, which, in a peculiar arrangement, has authority over the paper's arts and culture section.

He writes of Sondheim: "You can all but hear the purr of self-satisfaction in his voice, the sound of a rich man snuggled in the well-upholstered lap of comfortable certitude. I wonder when he last questioned anything his fellow liberals thought about... well, anything." Rest assured, this is not a reviewer huddled under a bridge somewhere in the unupholstered lap of a cardboard box, but rather a well-fed aesthete dining out comfortably on the certitude of his opinions.