As noted above, I’ve got a few more eBay auctions up, including original art from an old TMW strip. I don’t put many of these up for bid, so for those of you who’ve written asking about this sort of thing, now’s your chance.

…Detroit area readers, please read the update linked above.

Over at the National Review, the guy from Weekend At Bernie’s thinks we’re being too harsh on Bill Bennett :

It was in this context that Bennett remarked: “I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose — you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” Was he suggesting such a thing? Was he saying that such a thing should even be considered in the real world? Of course not. His whole point was that such considerations are patently absurd, and thus he was quick to add: “That would be an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do.”

Bennett’s position, clearly and irrefutably, is that you cannot have tunnel vision, especially on something as emotionally charged as abortion, in addressing multifaceted problems. It is almost always the case that problems, even serious ones, could be minimized or eliminated if you were willing to entertain severe solutions. Such solutions, though, are morally and ethically unacceptable, whatever the validity of their logic. The lesson to be drawn is not that we can hypothetically conceive of the severe solutions but that we resolutely reject them because of our moral core.

Exactly! Bill Bennett wasn’t saying that we should abort all black babies. Only a monster would even suggest such a thing. He was simply pointing out that black people are inherently criminal. He’s not some sort of racist that approves of abortions, he’s a racist who hates abortion. Big difference.

In defending Bennett, the guy from Pretty in Pink was forced to point out an uncomfortable fact about America that most conservatives have spent the last few decades trying to sweep under the rug :

Statistics have long been kept on crime, breaking it down in various ways, including by race and ethnicity. Some identifiable groups, considered as a group, commit crime at a rate that is higher than the national rate.

Blacks are such a group. That is simply a fact. Indeed, our public discourse on it, even among prominent African Americans, has not been to dispute the numbers but to argue over the causes of the high rate: Is it poverty? Breakdown of the family? Undue police attention? Other factors — or some combination of all the factors? We argue about all these things, but the argument always proceeds from the incontestable fact that the rate is high.

Are African-Americans more likely to commit crimes^[1]? Possibly so, but notice the string of questions that follow this assertion, as if to imply that “this stuff is so complicated, nobody really knows the causes”. This is complete bulls***. African-Americans are also more likely to be living below the poverty level, get shitty educations, have inadequate access to healthcare, etc. All of which are actual factors^[2] in determining whether or not someone is going to be a criminal. The lack of insight of a**holes like Bill Bennett and the guy from St. Elmo’s Fire is so great, they can’t see the statistics that have “long been kept on crime” and come to any conclusion deeper than “black people commit crimes”. In other words, they’re too f***ing stupid to understand the statistics that they use to defend themselves.

But pointing this out inequalities doesn’t make someone a racist. No, Bill Bennett and the guy from Mannequin are racist because they’re pea-brained s***heads who refuse to look at the racial inequality in this country and search for answers beneath the surface. Why are African-Americans less likely to have healthcare than whites? Why do predominantly black schools get less money and have larger class sizes? Why do back people die sooner, make less, and are more likely to spend time in prison than their white counterparts? People like Bennett like to point out that the “black” part of town is usually the “bad” part of town, but it’s never really bothered them enough to ask “Why?”.

The reason for this cultural myopia is that the “If I can’t see it, it doesn’t exist” brand of conservatism has long held that racism is a thing of the past. To them, Martin Luther King Jr. cured racism with his “I Have A Dream” speech, and any remnants of inequality is due to some unexplained “cultural difference”^[3]. If you point out the obvious fact that the scars of slavery are still healing, they’re quick to respond “I’ve never owned any slaves”. Well, duh! The question isn’t whether slavery is over, but whether African-Americans are fully integrated into American society. The very fact that there are serious differences makes the answer a resounding “no”.

To cut this rant off while it’s still semi-coherent, lemme go back to the remark that started all this. In response to a question about whether the increase in abortions reduced the crime rate, Bennett said “you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down”. Even if that comment was defensible on its merits, one has to wonder why the first example that popped into Bennett’s head was the nexus between race and crime. The fact that there are still people like Bill Bennett who think there’s a causal relationship between skin color and crime tells you all you need to know about where we stand in terms of race relations in this country.

---

1 : And by “crimes”, I mean the scary kind that they talk about on the news like robbery and assault, not the “everyone does it” variety that’s so popular in Washington these days like insider trading, money laundering, and obstruction of justice.

2 : As opposed to skin color.

3 : A slimy way to leading people to that other conservative maxim, that all poor people are lazy.

UPDATE : Yes, I know the Andrew McCarthy who wrote the NRO article isn’t the same one who acted in all those movies in the 80’s. It was supposed to be a joke, so you can stop emailing me about it. Sorry for any confusion. I hope nobody got the impression that the actor from those John Huges movies was a racist or that the writer for the National Review was talented enough to star alongside Molly Ringwald or Rob Lowe.

A follow up on a story I posted a few days ago:

The US army has dropped an inquiry into whether soldiers posted photographs of dead Iraqis on a website in exchange for access to pornography.
A preliminary investigation had failed to determine if US soldiers had posted the gruesome pictures and whether these showed actual war dead, officials said.

Colonel Joseph Curtin said the investigation could be reopened if new evidence was presented.

A US Muslim civil rights group condemned the inquiry as insufficient.

Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic relations said the brief investigation “could only serve to further damage America’s image and interests throughout the Islamic world”.

But Col Curtin said the military was not sweeping the issue under the carpet.

“If the army thinks it’s in its interest to investigate something, we will.”

More.

…and on a tangential note: Judge Orders Release of Abu Ghraib Photos.

As the flood waters rose, hundreds of prisoners in New Orleans were simply abandoned:

According to inmates interviewed by Human Rights Watch, they had no
food or water from the inmates’ last meal over the weekend of August
27-28 until they were evacuated on Thursday, September 1. By Monday,
August 29, the generators had died, leaving them without lights and
sealed in without air circulation. The toilets backed up, creating an
unbearable stench. 

“They left us to die there,” Dan Bright, an Orleans Parish
Prison inmate told Human Rights Watch at Rapides Parish Prison, where
he was sent after the evacuation.

 
As the water began rising on the first floor, prisoners
became anxious and then desperate. Some of the inmates were able to
force open their cell doors, helped by inmates held in the common area.
All of them, however, remained trapped in the locked facility.

“The water started rising, it was getting to here,” said
Earrand Kelly, an inmate from Templeman III, as he pointed at his neck. “We was calling down to the guys in the cells under us, talking to them
every couple of minutes. They were crying, they were scared. The one
that I was cool with, he was saying ‘I’m scared. I feel like I’m about
to drown.’ He was crying.”

Some inmates from Templeman III have said they saw bodies floating in the floodwaters as they were evacuated from the prison.

Human Rights Watch and the ACLU are asking for an accounting of more than five hundred people who were in the prison before the flood, but are not on the list of those evacuated.

Who were these prisoners?

Democracy Now! has some information:

Orleans
Parish Prison, for your listeners, is really not a prison. It’s a jail.
It’s a temporary detention facility. Other parts of the country you
refer to county jails. We call them parish prisons in Louisiana.
Orleans Parish Prison is, in fact, one of the country’s largest jails,
although New Orleans was far from one of the country’s largest cities
before the storm. At any given time, there would be 7,500 to 8,000
prisoners being held at Orleans Parish Prison.

Now, some of these prisoners were in fact serving misdemeanor
sentences, and others were picked up for parole violations, but the
vast, vast majority of the prisoners being held at Orleans Parish
Prison were pretrial detainees. They had only been charged. They had
not been tried and convicted.

As far as I can tell, the only mainstream news source that has picked up this story is the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which focuses more on the “struggle…to keep destructive and desperate inmates at bay” than on the humanitarian issues:

Deputies said they repeatedly calmed inmates by telling them that food, water and rescue were on the way, but the message began wearing thin. In the Community Correctional Center, two commanders and a deputy said, inmates breached several layers of security, smashing visitor center security windows and breaking through stairwell doors.

The worst damage was done by inmates who broke off metal shower rods and dayroom benches, then used them as battering rams, they said.

“They knocked out some cinder blocks and breached some visitation booths,” the deputy said. “It was like the movie ‘Attica.’ “

The deputies said that until the cavalry showed up on Day Three in the form of SWAT teams from the state Department of Corrections, they were forced to scare inmates back into cells by brandishing their pistols and occasionally firing off beanbags.

“There were some inmates who acted out, but I’d say 99 percent acted responsibly,” Short said.

Acting responsibly apparently means laying down and quietly dying, not trying to get the hell out of there, or help others survive.

The P-D also reports the official story: No inmates died. That may turn out to be true. I certainly hope so. But if 517 people are unaccounted for, as Human Rights Watches says, somebody needs to do some explaining.

In addition, way back on September 5, Newsday carried a human interest story on a corrections officer’s “harrowing escape” from the flood. The fate of the prisoners is not the main focus of the article, but it contains some interesting information nonetheless:

As Katrina raged Monday outside the prison on Perdido Street, water
began seeping into the building where Barnes worked. Toilets began to
back up. By Tuesday, the water inside was about 3 feet high and about
320 inmates had to be moved to the second floor, she said.

As water rose 5 feet high that evening, the situation became
desperate, she said. About 40 civilians, including family members of
prison workers, had also taken refuge at the jail. Word spread among
the inmates that the Ninth Ward neighborhood of New Orleans, where many
had family, was underwater. Unfed for days, the inmates began to riot
inside their cellblocks, Barnes said.

“We had no phone lines, no electricity,” she said. “There was raw
gas in the water … If it wasn’t for the deputies, a lot of people
would have died.”

She believes many drowned anyway, including inmates housed on the
first floor of the Templeman 3 building, where Barnes said that in the
chaos, some inmates may have remained locked inside.

“We evacuated everybody who was at the jail as far as we know once
we got there,” said Pam Laborde, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana
Department of Corrections, which helped evacuate the prison. Laborde
said she could not confirm what may have happened before rescuers from
her agency arrived.

Too many contradictory stories here.

It’s been a week since Human Rights Watch issued the results of its investigation, and if reporters had been talking to people in New Orleans long before that they would have heard rumors worth following up. It’s really outrageous that no major paper has investigated this story.

UPDATE: I see (via Ben Greenberg, who has much more information on the story) that in fact the New York Times had an editorial on the subject today. Calling for an investigation is good. Sending some talented reporters out to investigate would be better.

I finally found a spare hour this morning to sit down and read the Human Rights Watch report on abuse of prisoners by the 82nd Airborne Division at Camp Mercury, near Fallujah. Over the weekend both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times carried articles on Captain Ian Fishback, one of three members of the 82nd Airborne who reported the abuse to HRW, as well as to aides to John Warner and John McCain (and, according to the LAT, Carl Levin). Today’s Washington Post follows up by printing the letter Fishback wrote to McCain, and, in a related editorial, notes that the confusion about what soldiers considered permissible at Camp Mercury is directly attributable to this administration’s “evasive legalisms in response to simple questions about uncivilized conduct.”

Basically, this administration has said to American soldiers: We’re not going to tell you what the policy on treatment of prisoners is. You can guess. If you guess wrong…well…you lose.

If, on the other hand, you are significantly smarter and more honorable than Lynndie England…ha!…you still lose. (Damn! It’s good to be king!) Captain Fishback went to Iraq believing that the Geneva Conventions did not apply there, because that was the impression his training left him with. It was only when he heard Donald Rumsfeld testify at the Abu Ghraib hearings that the letter of the Geneva Conventions were supposed to apply in Iraq, that he realized something was wrong, and began to act, assuming there should be some relationship between stated policy and what was happening on the ground. That’s a reasonable and decent assumption. If anyone above Captain Fishbback’s pay grade had believed Rumsfeld was telling the truth about the Geneva Conventions applying in Iraq,  there would have been a whole lot of people realizing they were in trouble if they didn’t get things cleaned up fast. Didn’t happen. Captain Fishback wandered through a military maze for 17 months, trying to find someone to take his concerns seriously, before turning to senators and Human Rights Watch. And he wasn’t just ignored, he was threatened, and denied a pass to leave his base in order to speak to senators.

Seems no one was terribly concerned about someone from the Department of Defense showing up and screaming, “We told you the Geneva Conventions count here!”

And the threats haven’t stopped. Today’s NYT reports that Fishback is being pressured to give up the names of the two sergeants who also spoke to Human Rights Watch, but who have decided (probably wisely, all things considered) to remain anonymous. Investigators, he says, have shown far more interest in the names of the whistleblowers than in those who allegedly beat and starved prisoners. In that context, Donald Rumsfeld’s comment on the case  — “To the extent somebody’s done something that they shouldn’t have done, they’ll be punished for it.” — sounds quite ominous.

They have created a world in which it is not safe to go along, but neither is it safe to report a crime. The only people who can survive such a system are those who are ruthless enough to commit crimes, and smart enough to cover them up. Bush and Company have created a military that can’t make room for decency.

The astonishing thing is that the good people still keep raising their voices, even if it costs them a career.

There’s a lot to the report. Much of the press’s emphasis fell on the elite reputation of the 82nd Airborne:

If substantiated, the allegations would represent one of the most
serious episodes in the mistreatment of detainees by American military
personnel since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. This is
the first time that soldiers in the regular Army have been implicated
in widespread abuse. Previous abuse cases have involved misconduct by
relatively untrained National Guard and Reserve troops.

The 82nd Airborne is one of the most storied units in the U.S.
military. The division has a record of distinguished service stretching
for nearly a century, and its members are considered highly trained
professionals. Formed during World War I, the division was reactivated
during World War II, when its handpicked paratroopers landed behind
German lines to prepare for the D-day invasion of Europe.

Based at Ft. Bragg, N.C., it is the largest paratroop force in the
world. Its members served in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and various
brigades have served several tours in Iraq.

In such a unit, evidence of a significant breakdown in discipline
would call into question the Army’s contention that previously
disclosed abuses did not reflect systemic problems. The misconduct
reported by Fishback and the two noncommissioned officers was said to
have begun in September 2003 and continued through the following April.
The abuses at Abu Ghraib occurred within that period, mainly the fall
of 2003, and were publicly revealed in April 2004.

A Capitol Hill aide familiar with the new allegations said they were considered “very credible.”

I don’t know about all that. Regular army military intelligence units were certainly “implicated” at Abu Ghraib. Taking the fall is another story. There have, in fact, been some pretty serious cases of abuse involving Special Forces soldiers and Navy Seals. The elite. This is not all about Lynndie England and a bunch of semi-educated animals, and that’s nothing new.

There are other things in the report I found more interesting than what the press focused on. A lot of it is depressingly familiar: Ghost prisoners. Medical personnel witholding treatment and falsifying records. But a couple of things, while not exactly new, give insight into how this abuse has evolved:

1. From the first revelations out of Abu Ghraib, distinctions have been drawn between over-zealous intelligence gathering and “animal house on the night shift” — as if abuse had to result from one or the other, and if it was clear that there was some of the latter, it ruled out the former. The military police at Abu Ghraib insisted that military intelligence people ordered them to soften up prisoners. The abuse itself was classic C.I.A stuff. But it was impossible to deny that the guards seemed, in photographs, to be having one hell of a good time. If they enjoyed it, how could it have anything to do with gathering intelligence?

That was always a ridiculous question, but the relationship between torturing for “truth” (or whatever poor imitation of it you can get from torture) and out-of-control soldiers is laid out fairly clearly in the three accounts published by HRW. Soldiers were ordered to mistreat prisoners:

Someone from [Military Intelligence] told us these guys  don’t get no sleep.  They were directed to get intel [intelligence] from them  so we had to set the conditions by banging on their cages, crashing them into  the cages, kicking them, kicking dirt, yelling.  All that shit.  We never  stripped them down because this is an all-guy base and that is fucked up shit.   We poured cold water on them all the time to where they were soaking wet and we  would cover them in dirt and sand.  We did the jugs of water where they held  them out to collapse all the time.

The account is a little mangled, of course. What was ordered is not entirely clear. MIs told them not to let the prisoners sleep, but were the methods of keeping them awake MI inspired? Maybe. Or maybe it was improvised. Or maybe they had other instructors:

In Afghanistan we were attached to Special Forces and saw OGA.   We never interacted with them but they would stress guys.  We learned how to do  it.  We saw it when we would guard an interrogation.

OGA — Other Government Agency — probably refers to the CIA. Captain Fishback makes exactly the same point — that soldiers witnessed and copied CIA techniques.

In essence, they were ordered to mess up the prisoners, and indirectly taught how to do it. But once authorized abuse begins, revenge and pure sadism kick in: The soldiers report that prisoners were abused on order, for amusement, and as revenge for friends who were killed. It’s difficult to tell where one motive leaves off and the other begins. Most likely, more than one motive was operating at any given time.

2. Confusion about the policy on how to treat prisoners seems to have been not just widespread but almost universal:

• When Captain Fishback saw the Abu Ghraib pictures, he wasn’t shocked by the abuse, but by the reaction. He’d seen similar abuse at Camp Mercury and up to that time had been under the impression that such actions were in accordance with U.S. policy.

• I’ve developed a deep respect for the JAG corp lately, but Captain Fishback has some counterpoint: A JAG lawyer, for example, told him that chaining a naked prisoner to the ground was within the Geneva Conventions.

Was Lynndie England supposed to have a better grasp of the law than JAG? If a West Point educated captain didn’t know what was permitted, how could anybody expect Lynndie England to know?

And even if you give everyone in this administration far more benefit of the doubt than they have earned, far more than I’m able to give them, isn’t it obvious that this level of dysfunction requires an investigation at the very least?

Of all days, why did President Bush choose today to pardon four drug dealers? Are they all well-connected Republican donors or is George just paying them back for letting him crash on the couch? (via Think Progress)

Not this again. Now that Tom DeLay has been sidelined and replaced with closeted homosexual Rep. David Dreier, the gleeful outing campaign has begun anew. As with the Gannon scandal, I’m of the opinion that using someone’s homosexualit y as a smear is a bit hypocritical when you’re trying to tarnish the reputations of bigots. Granted, it’s a much lesser hypocrisy than being a gay homophobe, but I’m still uncomfortable with liberals using homosexuality in a negative way to taunt conservatives. Nevertheless, in this instance, I agree with this L.A. Weekly story on Dreier’s outing from last year :

I have always taken the view that outing a gay person should be approached with caution, and that in doing so one should strictly adhere to the Barney Frank Rule. As articulated by the openly gay Massachusetts congressman during another anti-gay GOP witch-hunt over a decade ago, when Frank threatened to out a number of gay-baiting Republican fellow congressmen, the rule insists that outing is only acceptable when a person uses their power or notoriety to hurt gay people.

Dreier clearly meets that standard, for his voting record is strewn with anti-gay positions. To cite just a few: He opposed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would have banned discrimination against gay people in hiring; voted for the gay-bashing Defense of Marriage Act; voted for banning adoption by gay and lesbian couples in the District of Columbia (3,000 miles away from Dreier’s district); voted to allow federally funded charities to discriminate against gays in employment, even where local laws prohibit such bias; and voted against the Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

Asking Dreier to reconcile his anti-gay public record with his homosexuality is a legitimate avenue for criticism. Playing “gotcha!” just reinforces the notion that being gay is something to be ashamed of. So yeah, Dreier is a hypocrite whose private life is about to catch up to him. So be it. But can the liberal blogosphere try to point this out without being so childish about it?

I’ll close with something I said in the comments section at my site earlier this year :

What makes this situation so tragic is that the right’s homophobia forces some of their strongest supporters even deeper into the closet. Gay Republicans aren’t hiding from us, my conservative friends, they’re hiding from you.

A Travis County grand jury today indicted U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on one count of criminal conspiracy, jeopardizing the Sugar Land Republican’s leadership role as the second most powerful Texan in Washington, D.C.

The charge, a state jail felony punishable by up to two years incarceration, stems from his role with his political committee, Texans for a Republican Majority, a now-defunct organization that already had been indicted on charges of illegally using corporate money during the 2002 legislative elections.

More.

From Time magazine:

Every Neil Young album arrives with a question: which Neil this time? the folkie? The grunge progenitor? The acoustic country guy? Or the avant-gardist whose sonic violence can make instruments — and sometimes fans — cry out for mercy? For his 31st album, Prairie Wind, out Sept. 27, it’s yet another Neil Young: a mortal one. In March, Young was told he had a brain aneurysm, and Prairie Wind poured out of him in the week between diagnosis and his undergoing surgery. Naturally, there are songs about death and loneliness, but the album, one of the most melodic of his career, also deals with religion, family and the good times he remembers growing up on the Canadian steppes.

I haven’t had a chance to pick up the CD yet, but I did have the extraordinary privilege of being introduced to the songs for two nights running in Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium. The shows were filmed by Jonathan Demme for a film that should be out later in the year — in fact, that was the entire reason they were held, and as such, they weren’t open to the public. Fortunately for me, I have a friend with friends in high places, so I made it in — third row, center stage. That picture up above was pretty much the view from my seat. For a lifelong Neil Young fan, it was extraordinary. But I don’t really write about music, and rather than make a clumsy attempt to do so, I’m going to turn it over to my friend Louis:

I saw the show three times — one run-through and two performances. Given that I have the attention span of a gnat, I’m usually not given to attendance at multiple shows, even of favorite artists, but on Friday night at the end of the second performance I was ready to come back again the next night. The Ryman, former home of the Grand Ole Opry, is one of the great music halls in this country, especially, though not only, in regard to ambience, intimacy, and acoustics. Several times Young commented that he felt like he was inside a guitar.

The show unfolded over the course of the evening, Young accompanied by 30 or more musicians on stage at one time or another. They came on, they exited, they returned in a different configuration, switching instruments and positions. Watching Young during the run-through performance is extraordinary, his sense of music broken down to every instrument without losing sight of the sweep of the work. He sees the forest for the trees, noting the smallest detail without losing any sight of the grandest ambition.

This is not going to be Neil Young’s Stop Making Sense. Demme and Young were both working on a grander, less focused tableau where the excitement is visceral if not as immediate, the richer pleasures derived cerebrally from lyric, history, and juxtaposition. Still, it works so beautifully musically that it would hit the groove if there were nothing else to it.

But there is: watching Neil and Pegi Young smile at each other. This is a work about mortality and friendship, about romance and sadness, about everyday love and family, about history, the present and the future, the land and its people, Canada and the United States.

Emmylou Harris joined Young on a number of songs. Ben Keith played steel guitar throughout. Other players included guitarist Grant Boatright, drummer Chad Cromwell, keyboardist Spooner Oldham, bassist Rick Rosas, and fiddler Clinton Gregory. The Fisk University Jubilee Singers, the Nashville String Machine, and a horn trio led by Wayne Jackson of the Memphis Horns also joined the fun at different points. Usually they would join for whole songs, but the choir came out part way into a song to join in, and the string section made an appearance in the middle of a song to play on a section and then left.

The staging was ideal, only a few different backdrops, the lighting superb, and the clothing from Manuel’s — suits that are hip and retro. The performance looked like an early photo process color postcard, a 1940s traveling country & western show as well as an almost too trendy modern cocktail bar.

Prairie Winds is an exquisite journey; I can’t begin to talk about it as a concert. It was something so much bigger, finally reminding me of nothing so much as Brian Wilson’s Smile, the entire concert of a piece. Rather than resurrecting a lost, never-finished album, this was a whole new creation. And not just Prairie Wind; the older songs were equally important in shaping a cohesive whole. Young wrote these songs for the times in which they were composed and the albums on which they appeared. Still, it was like Smile in the way it combined the known and the new, memory and dreams. Songs and even just pieces of songs and/or music from Smile ended up on at least a half dozen other Beach Boy albums. Listening, you knew them as distinct songs. The revelation was in how they fit together. The same was true of Young’s performances, songs like “Old Man,” “Needle and the Damage Done,” and “Comes a Time” perfectly crafted for this mosaic, feeling born to their place rather than shoved in or just played randomly for an encore. The older songs finally seemed at home: All the music together formed a startlingly mature work that, while denying none of life’s tragedies, insisted that the direction is forward.

There’s much more, if you follow the link. And Scott Simon interviews Young here.

Okay, we already knew this part:

His killing was widely reported by the media, including conservative commentators such as Ann Coulter, who called him “an American original — virtuous, pure and masculine like only an American male can be.” His May 3, 2004, memorial in San Jose drew 3,500 people and was nationally televised.

Not until five weeks later, as Tillman’s battalion was returning home, did officials inform the public and the Tillman family that he had been killed by his fellow soldiers.

But as it turns out, Tillman the man was far more interesting and complicated than the one dimensional object of Ann Coulter’s necrophiliac fantasies:

He started keeping a journal at 16 and continued the practice on the battlefield, writing in it regularly. (His journal was lost immediately after his death.) Mary Tillman said a friend of Pat’s even arranged a private meeting with Chomsky, the antiwar author, to take place after his return from Afghanistan — a meeting prevented by his death. She said that although he supported the Afghan war, believing it justified by the Sept. 11 attacks, “Pat was very critical of the whole Iraq war.”

Baer, who served with Tillman for more than a year in Iraq and Afghanistan, told one anecdote that took place during the March 2003 invasion as the Rangers moved up through southern Iraq.

“I can see it like a movie screen,” Baer said. “We were outside of (a city in southern Iraq) watching as bombs were dropping on the town. We were at an old air base, me, Kevin and Pat, we weren’t in the fight right then. We were talking. And Pat said, ‘You know, this war is so f — illegal.’ And we all said, ‘Yeah.’ That’s who he was. He totally was against Bush.”

Another soldier in the platoon, who asked not to be identified, said Pat urged him to vote for Bush’s Democratic opponent in the 2004 election, Sen. John Kerry.

Senior Chief Petty Officer Stephen White — a Navy SEAL who served with Pat and Kevin for four months in Iraq and was the only military member to speak at Tillman’s memorial — said Pat “wasn’t very fired up about being in Iraq” and instead wanted to go fight al Qaeda in Afghanistan. He said both Pat and Kevin (who has a degree in philosophy) “were amazingly well-read individuals … very firm in some of their beliefs, their political and religious or not so religious beliefs.”

Baer recalled that Tillman encouraged him in his ambitions as an amateur poet. “I would read him my poems, and we would talk about them,” Baer said. “He helped me grow as an individual.”

Tillman subscribed to the Economist magazine, and a fellow soldier said Tillman created a makeshift base library of classic novels so his platoon mates would have literature to read in their down time. He even brought gourmet coffee to brew for his platoon in the field in Afghanistan.

The story of the Atlanta woman who talked the escaped killer into turning himself in by talking about God and the Purpose-Driven Life inspired a lot of pious commentary at the time:

So, before the SWAT team surrounded the apartment complex with guns, Smith had defused the situation with love. In fact, when Nichols left her, untied, with ready access to guns, and when Smith followed Nichols in her own car while he ditched his stolen truck, Smith declined to take the opportunity to free herself. Instead she hoped to convince Nichols to turn himself in without hurting anyone else. “For a country used to getting things done with overwhelming force, it was a humbling lesson in Peacemaking 101,” writes the Monitor.

Well, as it turns out, the story’s a little more complicated:

Ashley Smith, the woman who says she persuaded suspected courthouse gunman Brian Nichols to release her by talking about her faith, discloses in a new book that she gave him methamphetamine during the hostage ordeal.

Smith did not share that detail with authorities at the time. But investigators said she came clean about the drugs when they interviewed her months later. They said they have no plans to charge her with drug possession.

In her book, “Unlikely Angel,” released Tuesday, Smith says Nichols had her bound on her bed with masking tape and an extension cord. She says he asked for marijuana, but she did not have any, and she dug into her illegal stash of crystal meth instead.

Smith, a 27-year-old widowed mother who gained widespread praise for her level-headedness, says the seven-hour hostage ordeal in March led to the realization that she was a drug addict, and she says she has not used drugs since the night before she was taken captive.

“If I did die, I wasn’t going to heaven and say, `Oh, excuse me, God. Let me wipe my nose, because I just did some drugs before I got here,’” Smith told the Augusta Chronicle.

* * *

She writes that she asked Nichols if he wanted to see the danger of drugs and lifted up her tank top several inches to reveal a five-inch scar down the center of her torso _ the aftermath of a car wreck caused by drug-induced psychosis. She says she let go of the steering wheel when she heard a voice saying, “Let go and let God.”