One is a second grader in Manhattan. Over the protests of his American mother, immigration officials have been trying to deport him ever since he returned from a brief visit to his native Canada without the right visa. Another is an Irish professor of literature invited to teach at the University of Pennsylvania last month. He was handcuffed at the Philadelphia airport, strip-searched, jailed overnight and sent back to Europe to correct an omission in his travel papers.
Then there are the seven Tibetan monks who were visiting Omaha two weeks ago. After their church sponsor abruptly withdrew its support, their religious visas were revoked and a dozen immigration officers in riot gear showed up to arrest them.
–In case you missed it, the guest post from Iraq vet Tomas Young is well worth reading.
–A review of the new Neil Young concert movie by Jonathan Demme, here. This was filmed over two nights at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville last August. The concerts were closed to the public, but I had the great good fortune of attending both nights, thanks to my friend Louis Black (who is not the comedian), and the greater good fortune of meeting both Demme and Neil Young. Sitting in the third row, I felt like I was attending a private concert in Neil’s living room. Imagine the best concert you’ve ever been to, and imagine that it was immortalized on film. That’s how I feel about this one, and I haven’t even had a chance to see it yet.
From John Suggs, senior editor for the Creative Loafing alt-weeklies:
So, let’s look at the guy who started this whole cartoon escapade. He’s Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of the Danish newspaper. In all of the Lexis-Nexis database of stories from the American media on the Mohammed cartoons, there is absolutely no mention of the fact that Rose is a close confederate of arch-Islamophobe Daniel Pipes. Indeed, there is almost no context at all about Rose’s newspaper. Only a brief mention in the Washington Post gave a hint at a fact desperately needed to understand the situation. The Post described the affair as “a calculated insult … by a right-wing newspaper in a country where bigotry toward the minority Muslim population is a major, if frequently unacknowledged, problem.”
How bad is Pipes? He wants the utter military obliteration of the Palestinians; indeed, from the Muslim world, his racism is about as blatant as that of the Holocaust denying Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Pipes’ frequent outbursts of racism – designed to toss gasoline on the neo-cons’ lust for a wholesale conflict of cultures – earned him a Bush nomination to the U.S. Institute of Peace, a congressionally funded think tank. Rose came to America to commune with Pipes in 2004, and it was after that meeting the cartoon gambit materialized.
He’s got more and you really should, if you will forgive the expression, read the whole thing.
Perhaps you remember George Bush and Tony Blair used to get mad at Al Jazeera for broadcasting tapes of bin Laden, on the grounds the tapes might include secret messages for his minions.
In light of that, here’s an interesting slice of 1953 history from Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. The “Roosevelt” it refers to is Kermit Roosevelt (grandson of Teddy). He’d been sent to Iran by the CIA in order to organize the overthrow of the democratically-elected Mossadegh government:
Roosevelt told the Shah that he was in Iran on behalf of the American and British secret services, and that this would be confirmed by a code word the Shah would be able to hear on the BBC the next night. Churchill had arranged that the BBC would end its broadcast day by saying not “It is now midnight,” as usual, but “It is now exactly midnight.”
This makes me wonder two things:
1. When reporting on the Bush/Blair complaints, did the BBC mention this part of its own history—i.e., happily facilitating the overthrow of a government in a Muslim country?
2. Is the BBC still doing this kind of thing?
EXTRA CREDIT: In the run up to the invasion of Iraq, Andrew Sullivan liked to call the BBC the “Baghdad Broadcasting Company” because it was “actively cooperating with Saddam.”
An old friend of mine, who spent some time in a mental hospital because of some drug issues as a teenager, said something a long time ago that’s reverberating in my head today: The thing about nuthouses is, if you’re not crazy when you go in, you are when you come out.
Last month, the military was telling us that the hunger strike at Guantánamo was diminishing, that it had peaked on September 11 last hear, when 131 prisoners were refusing food, and was now down to only 22 prisoners. They didn’t know why most prisoners had stopped refusing to eat. According to today’s New York Times, the number of hunger strikers is now down to only four. But there’s a good reason for that. Eating is not exactly voluntary. Guards have begun strapping detainees into "restraint chairs" like the one pictured to the left, using riot-control soldiers to keep them still (no details on that), and forcing long plastic tubes down their nasal passages and into their stomachs. The tubes are inserted and removed so violently that prisoners bleed and pass out. Too much food is put in the tubes, which causes prisoners to defecate on themselves.
If you’re strapped into a "padded cell on wheels," while a tube is forced down your nose, that means you’re no longer refusing meals.
A spokesman for the prison said that the force-feeding was carried out "in a humane and compassionate manner." I think that might just trump Duncan Hunter’s Guantánamo menu recital for the most absurd thing ever said about the treatment of prisoners. Yes, we abuse people, but we do it nicely.
After you read the NYT article, to put it in context, go read the series on Guantánamo in the current National Journal. It’s been obvious for a long time that many of the people caught up in the American gulag, or farmed out to its subsidiaries, were not monsters determined to kill Americans, but ordinary people — victims of mistaken identity or vendettas, people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, prisoners who were simply sold for substantial amounts of money, or even people whose names were coughed up by others under torture. What wasn’t clear is how common these gross errors were.
Corine Hegland’s articles make the matter somewhat clearer. Analyzing 132 government files on prisoners who have filed habaes corpus petitions, and heavily redacted transcripts of 314 tribunals for Guantánamo prisoners, she found that fewer than half were even accused of fighting against the United States or its allies, and that fewer than 20 percent have ever been al-Qaeda members. Only 8 men were tied to plans for terrorist attacks outside of Afghanistan. Eight. And two of those eight were released, and face no charges at home.
Any error that costs someone his freedom is unacceptable, but this isn’t a matter of a few rare errors. It looks like the innocent, lacking guile and connections, are more likely to be imprisoned than the guilty.
This is insane: A 17-year-old Yemeni teacher, Farouq Ali Ahmed, working in Afghanistan, is warned to get out of the country quickly, because it is no longer a safe place for Arabs. He escapes to Pakistan, without stopping in Kabul to pick up his passport. In Pakistan, he’s handed over to American forces. Being a foreigner without a passport is all the reason needed to send him to Guantánamo. Once he’s there, another prisoner swears he saw him at Osama bin Laden’s private airport, toting an AK-47. That other prisoner seems to make a habit of lying about Yemeni prisoners. He’s claimed to have seen many of them in places they could not possibly have been. But his word — and the fact that, under torture, Mohamed al-Kahtani pointed to Farouq’s picture — is enough to keep the now 22-year-old prisoner at Guantánamo.
The "evidence" against other prisoners is equally ludicrous. A sarcastic "OK, I saw bin Laden five times" at the end of a long interrogation turns up as an admission of guilt. Wearing a model of watch that has a circuit board that has been used for bombs serves as evidence against nine prisoners. Never mind that the watch is sold all over the world. Wear a Casio? Welcome to the gulag.
Suicide looks like a rational response to this nightmare.
In addition to the information about the prisoners, the article told me something intriguing about the lawyers who represent them. It’s not surprising: Initially, they assumed their prospective clients were guilty. They took cases because they believed in due process. Even monsters are entitled to their day in court. What they have learned about those prisoners gave them a deeper understanding of the importance of their work. If monsters aren’t entitled to all the benefits of the law, it becomes very, very easy to deny those benefits to the innocent as well. And unless the law is allowed to work its magic, there’s no way to know the difference. It’s not theory any more.
If we’ve learned anything over the past five years, it ought to be that the importance of due process isn’t just a nice thought for good times. The fact that in its absence the innocent will suffer is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt by what has happened at Guantánamo and other military detention sites. And now it should be obvious to anyone paying attention that the lack of due process has nothing to do with the nature of the detainees, but the nature of the people who are holding them. Detainees’ lawyers are convinced that the abuse of the hunger strikers is a direct result of the Graham amendment, which cuts prisoners off from access to the courts.
They do this, and God only knows what else, because they know they can.
During my little experiment with comments last week, I noticed this post in a thread about the Toles cartoon:
SP4 Tomas V. Young (Ret) Says:
As a veteran of the war in Iraq who knows a thing or two about “traumatic and life-altering injuries” although not to the point of the soldier depicted in the cartoon (I was lucky enough to only be paralyzed from the chest down.) I can safely say that the cartoon was far less offensive than the unfortunate accidents I have when the external catheter I wear for when the bladder I can no longer control decides to “function” or the hours of frustration I get when I try to make love to my wife and none of the options presented to us have worked. And it certainly is not as offensive as hearing the pro war/anti-cartoon crowd say that I shouldn’t “whine” about my situation because I volunteered and that sounds to me like they are saying that I got what I deserved. So take what they say with a very large grain of salt, they have no idea about how veterans with traumatic injuries feel, because if they did they would do best to use this cartoon in their new laugh therapy program.
In an email, reprinted here with permission, the author elaborates:
I want to start off by saying that I am not whining. I am merely talking about all the things I deal with everyday. I know that I volunteered and I have to live with that. But I want you to know that I volunteered to go to where the all evidence told me to go which was pretty much every other middle eastern country that wasn’t Iraq (that’s the conservative disclaimer.) And I still support armed action against those countries, although not as much now as it’s safe to say our armed action has been spread wafer thin (that one’s for the liberals.) But this business with the cartoon needed the opinion of a so-called “traumatically life-altering” injuries, although thankfully not as seriously as the strip portrayed.
Being a paralyzed veteran of a war that our own president has admitted was started on false terms I have alot to be upset about. Not only do I have to deal with the injury itself and the physical limitations that come with it but I get a cool sidekick called PTSD that leaves me jumpy, unreasonably angry at times, and equally unreasonably depressed and on top of that I get to have great memories of what it was like to walk but the equally great memories of the friends I had that did not make it back from the land of sand (I know it may be hard to read in print but those are sarcastically “great” memories.) I go through things that constantly make me feel shitty and I look for every little bit of humor I can squeeze out of a life that now offers little. Saying this I laughed my ass off at the caroon an in fact it is the background for my desktop. I am more offended at the fact that I received these injuries in a unarmored open air truck and although I can’t speak for anyone else I’d be willing to bet I’m not the only “traumatically life altered” veteran who thinks so.
Tomas specifically asked me to include his email address, which is Tomasyoung8@aol.com, and to mention that he’ll be on 60 Minutes this coming Sunday. There’s a long interview with him here.
Tristero at Hullaballo articulates something I’ve been grappling with pretty much my entire career:
The objects of satire are often - always? - respected authority figures or ideas within the culture of the satirist. WITHIN the culture, not OUTSIDE the culture. Even in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, the object of satire is not really the third world country to which Bill Boot has been booted by an editor who confused two Boots. It’s the British press’s hopeless, corrupt reporting from such countries. The satire was directed directly at institutions that were part and parcel of Waugh’s upper class British Twitworld.
In contrast, as I see it, Islam is not part of mainstream Danish culture. Mohammed has no genuine cultural authority the way, say, the royal family might. To call the cartoons satire, therefore, seems to me inaccurate. It’s simply ridicule, and ridicule of a figure from a culture that, from within Denmark - the satirizing culture - is Other. Danes are heaping scorn and humiliation on someone’s religion, someone who is not Us. Someone who doesn’t look like us, doesn’t act like us, doesn’t think like us, isn’t as rich as us. And just can’t be us.
And this is why so many right wingers have suddenly become free speech absolutists on the issue of the Danish cartoons. Right wingers hate satire, but they love ridicule.
A right wing white guy draws a black guy telling us what black people should think. August finds this problematic. Key graf:
Since the trademark of the Right seems to be ending posts with faux-sincere “advice” for the opposite side, by all means allow me to return the favor and offer some helpful advice to right-wingers chortling at “their” cartoonist: if you’re at the point when the most prominent black person you can put on your side of an issue is a fictional character in a white man’s shitty webcomic, your authority on cultural unity escaped this planet’s gravity quite some time ago.
Just a quick addendum to Greg’s post below: left wingers who “prefer osama to bush” are about as likely to exist as those little grey aliens whose primary purpose in life is to abduct humans in order to perform strange invasive surgical procedures. I am astonished that someone who professes to believe in the existence of either is taken seriously enough to be paid by Time magazine to blog, let alone given status as a featured columnist.
Also: it’s amusing to see Crazy Andy posing as a free speech absolutist, given the countless times he’s called for the censure of various opinions he finds momentarily disagreeable. But here’s the question: is Time magazine going to run those Danish cartoons? And if not, isn’t it a little weird for the Official Blogger of Time Magazine to be chastising the New York Times, and the “MSM” in general, for not running them either? Last time I looked, Time Magazine still had a relatively healthy circulation …
Y’know that post I did yesterday that included Andrew Sullivan’s infamous “fifth column” quote? Well, reader James forwarded the link to Andy, who had this to say :
u deny that there are some on the far left who would prefer osama to bush?
i’ve seen a couple of articles lately confessing exactly that.
andrew
Sullivan’s ridiculous strawman and lack of capitalization would be funny if he weren’t actually serious. Who are these traitors on the “far left”? Are they a well-organized group actively working to undermine the U.S. government or are they a couple of obscure, pissed-off bloggers who are venting a little steam? I’ve seen some pretty despicable things written by angry liberals and conservatives, but there’s a big difference between ranting against your government and collaborating with the enemy. Let’s go back to Sullivan’s original quote :
“The middle part of the country - the great red zone that voted for Bush - is clearly ready for war. The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead - and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column.”
The irresponsible thing about his statement isn’t that he’s warning about fifth column movements, but that he’s implying that pretty much everyone who disagrees with the President is a traitor. You’re painting with pretty broad brush-strokes there, Andy. By citing “the great red zone that voted for Bush” in your first sentence, you’re essentially setting up a false dichotomy that implicates everyone else in this undefined “decadent Left”. If you weren’t trying to draw a parallel, then the quote you’re defending is poorly written and should be explained beyond hiding behind your intentionally vague wording.
But if you really do think the majority of us blue-state, coastal lefties “may” constitute a “fifth column”, then would it be equally valid to make a statement like this?
“In the densely-populated urban areas which are likely targets for future attacks - and heavily favored Democrats in the last election - are serious about capturing Osama Bin Laden. The religious extremists in the south and Midwest have other plans - for they might be more interested in firebombing abortion clinics.”
Would it be okay to contrast John Kerry voters and white supremacists? Or divide the country into secular humanists and hate-filled bastards like Rev. Fred Phelps? Singling out extremists to score points against your political opposition isn’t just unfair, it’s lazy reporting.
Besides that, the whole point of my post wasn’t to bash Andy for a stupid-ass comment he made four and a half years ago, but to spur a discussion (in a roundabout way) about what constitutes a “fifth column” movement, who gets to make those decisions, and what actions should be taken against them. Andy’s gone on record as saying that the “far left” (a relative term if ever these was one) should be under suspicion, Sen. Graham believes it’s acceptable to spy on those of us suspected of being in the “fifth column” without a warrant, and the President rode to victory by repeatedly suggesting that John Kerry and his allies “embolden our enemies” , so where do you draw the line between legitimate dissent and “fifth column” activity?
A sharp-eyed reader caught this article via the Yahoo homepage, though it apparently vanished from same pretty quickly:
Although the strife over the Muhammad cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten already feels like it’s been going on for a small eternity, new angles continue to pop up each day. The latest comes from the Danish daily Politiken, conservative Jyllands-Posten’s more left-leaning competitor.
On Saturday, Politiken printed a series of caricatures of Jesus on its editorial page. Next to them, the paper reprinted an e-mail exchange from April 2003 in which a leading Jyllands-Posten editor rejected publication of satirical cartoons depicting Jesus Christ. His reasoning? “I don’t think the readers of Jyllands-Posten would be pleased with the drawings. I think they would cause an outrage. That’s why I won’t use them.”
That line of reasoning, of course, is raising eyebrows this week. Does the newspaper responsible for launching the battle over the Muhammad caricatures, which now presents itself as a champion of free speech, apply a different standard for its Christian readers? “It does look a little like hypocrisy,” said Politiken opinion page editor Jacob Fuglsand.
Reached by telephone, Jens Kaiser, the Jyllands-Posten editor responsible for the email said he now regrets the wording of the message. “I could not foresee that my kind refusal would be published three years later. My fault was that I didn’t tell him what I really meant. The cartoons were just bad.”
Ultimately, however, the Jesus cartoons were an unfortunate coincidence. The self-employed illustrator responsible for them, Christoffer Zieler, sent the unsolicited Jesus caricatures to the newspaper just before Easter 2003. “He suggested that we print them on Easter Sunday,” Kaiser recalled, but he rejected them, “like 95 percent of all submissions.” Kaiser also explained that he often tried to use more polite methods of brushing off illustrators than to simply tell them their work was lousy.
But in today’s loaded atmosphere, the e-mail is proving explosive. The decision showed a “double standard” a member of the Muslim interest group told Britain’s Guardian.
Politiken first learned of the drawings after the illustrator contacted the newspaper. “I found that it was a nice story that opens a new angle on the dilemmas an editor faces,” Fuglsand said. Of course, editors also love nothing better the opportunity to take a stab at the competition.
Conservatives are going batshit crazy because of this statement at the funeral for Coretta Scott King by Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery :
We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there. [Standing Ovation] But Coretta knew and we know that there are weapons of misdirection right down here. Millions without health insurance. Poverty abounds. For war billions more but no more for the poor.
Pity the poor conservatives who hate being reminded that they’ve been on the wrong side of every civil rights struggle in our nation’s history. And in case there’s any doubt about whether these sentiments were in line with the beliefs of Mrs. King, here’s part of an interview she gave shortly before the Iraq war began :
BLITZER: Mrs. King, thank you so much for joining us. Let’s talk a little bit about the legacy of your husband. How much has the racial situation in our country improved since his death, if you believe, indeed, it has?
KING: Yes, I think it certainly has improved tremendously, but we still have much more to be done. Martin defined the evils and the injustices in our society in three areas — poverty, racism and war. And he said that we cannot solve one problem without solving the other, working to solve the other one. And I think we have remnants of all of those. We’ve made some small progress in some areas more than others, but we still very much have poverty. We still very much have racism. And we still very much have a threat of war.
. . . BLITZER: You raised the issue earlier of war. Where do you think [your husband] would come down on the whole issue of possibly going to war with Iraq?
KING: You know, my husband always believed that there should be peaceful negotiations, and he believed in nonviolence. He was committed to it totally, and he believed that conflict should be handled through the United Nations, so strength in the United Nations, and let the United Nations take the leadership. And I believe that Martin would, if he were [alive] today — although I don’t normally speak for him, but I know what he was saying at the time of his death — is that war cannot serve any lasting good toward bringing about peace. If you use weapons of war to bring about peace, you’re going to have more war and destruction. You cannot have peaceful means — peaceful means will have to be used to bring about peaceful ends. If you use destructive means, you’re going to bring about destructive ends.
Face it conservatives, Coretta Scott King was a liberal. While civil rights heroes like the Kings were leading a non-violent struggle for equality, your political heroes were finding new ways to court southern racists away from the Democratic party. The Republican journey to victory was fueled by the votes of bigots, so it’s a little late in the game to start acting like you have the right to speak for the leaders of a movement you fought against.
