Orca report

It was a nice bit of guesswork that led me to schedule our annual camping trip to San Juan Park on the west side of San Juan Island this last week. Every day had nearly perfect weather -- sunny but not too hot. The wind kicked up enough to keep us from kayaking too much (we used the windy afternoons to visit other places on the island), but we still were on the water a lot.

Oh, and we saw a lot of whales.

One of them was this fellow you see atop the post, a big male who came swooping along the shore at Lime Kiln Lighthouse at the lead of a pod of about 10 killer whales on the afternoon of July 28. We had been observing whales from the campground both the previous day and earlier that morning, a number of them in what appeared to be orca sleeping behavior: a large group of about five to nine orcas aligned in a row, one in a lead position and the others coasting along in a tight arc right behind him. They would surface about every hundred yards or so, exhale a row of plumes into the air, like the fountains in a Vegas plaza, whose mist would linger even in the sun's heat, then dive again. We saw about three other whales (one of them a large male) cruising along in their vicinity, seemingly acting as watchmen should anything go amiss.

We decided to visit the lighthouse, about a mile south of our camp, where the kids could hike the trails and see some sights. They did. A large superpod of about 25 orcas came passing through, directly in front of the crowd that had gathered along the shore. The first group of about 15 orcas performed some half-breaches and tail lobs (or so I am told), but appeared to be intent mostly on moving south. As it happened, I was charged with taking a 4-year-old to the potty when most of this group came through, and I missed them.

But as we watched this last group fade into the horizon, a second group of about 10 came zooming alongside the bank at the lighthouse. This spot is deservedly famed for orca-watching, because beneath the surface, the rocks drop off in a sheer cliff face into the water, so the whales will come right up next to it, trapping the abundant fish and snatching them up. In other cases, like this, they'll just use it to ride the back eddies in the stiff currents that roil these waters.

Among this group was a calf and a female companion, probably its mother (though "aunties" often play the role of guardians). We first saw them shortly after the big male came by. The calf was playing around. but was kept moving steadily by it mother:



Another whale -- either another female or a juvenile male -- seemed to be playing a role in keeping the calf moving forward:



The current was working in their direction, but the wind was against them, which created some wave action that they seemed to enjoy crashing through, especially a couple of other females/young males we saw:





I had a chance to see this group (at least, I think it was them; my identification skills are pretty nonexistent) much closer the next evening, the 29th. We had seen them earlier in the day off our camp site, in transit mode far out in Haro Strait and followed by the usual phalanx of whale-watching boats. That evening, they came back our way, headed north, and they came in close to shore to play a little just as the sun was setting.

I had just headed out in my solo kayak to get some photos -- a plan that did not work, due mostly to the low light and the situation -- toward a kelp bed about 250 yards offshore from the campground when I stopped short. The whales, I realized, were, actually coming in on my side of the kelp bed, as well as through it. Indeed, the same mother and calf, it appeared, were playing in the fronds.

One thing I've learned about orcas is that, despite the cute and cuddly image they may enjoy -- thanks to a gazillion Shamu stuffed dolls -- orcas in the wild are wild animals. It's true that there has never been a recorded attack by an orca in the wild on a human (a fact that, I think, speaks volumes about our relationship to them, considering the potential) -- but there have been some recorded instances of retaliation for harassment.

A lot of kayakers think that the absence of an engine on their boat means they can't possibly harass the whales. And it's true that, while I've witnessed hundreds of close encounters between kayakers and orcas, I've never seen even a smidgen of actual contact. A lot of this, of course, has to do with the amazing gracefulness of these huge animals; and some probably has to do with their well-noted sensitivity to contact with their skin. Still, I did witness on one occasion last summer a large bull make an aggressive, perhaps playful, rush at a group of kayakers, and I've read accounts of numerous real threats from bulls (who seem to play a protective role, which is only natural, considering the real awe they inspire).

But kayaks can harass by their silence. If you paddle directly into an orca's path and expect him or her to avoid you by virtue of their grace, you're more likely to unpleasantly surprise the whale and force it to dive unexpectedly or interrupt its breathing pattern. Certainly you're increasing the stress on the animal and, if it's hunting, you're probably disrupting its ability to feed. Most of all, you're really counting on its good will to keep from knocking you into the water and chewing you to little pieces. Or worse.

Interestingly, one of the behaviors that researchers and watchers have seen in the resident orcas this summer involves an unusual bit of killer-whale brutality: they seem to be killing a few Dall's porpoises. Now, understand: transient orcas -- the whales who traverse the Pacific Coast from Baja to Alaska, including the Puget Sound -- regularly eat Dall's porpoises, who are the fastest marine mammal in these waters (reaching speeds above 30 knots with relative ease); they mostly eat seals and sea lions, but will chase down and eat porpoises too.

But the transients and the residents of these waters seem to have little or nothing in common; their languages and calls are entirely different, as well as their diets -- the residents are strictly fish eaters. Indeed, Dall's have been seen cavorting in the presence of resident whales, seemingly undisturbed by them.

This summer, though, there have been at least three confirmed instances in which resident orcas were seen "capturing" a young Dall's porpoise, "playing" with it at length -- in on instance clearly penning it in and pushing it, in another tossing it into the air, and finally in another case of chasing,they submerged with it for an extended period, only to emerge a little while later on the surface with the porpoise's body, which they pushed around on the surface for awhile. Researchers recovered the porpoise's body and found it had been drowned.

Doug M summed it up on the Orca Network's listserv:

... [Killer whales are big predators and deserve respect. Often we've encountered people who look at the resident population as the the kindly vegetarian intellectual version of killer whales. From many of these same people we have heard the desire to call them "orcas" instead of killer whales. It is noteworthy to mention that the root of orca is roughly translated to mean "demon from hell" (think of the "Orcs" from Lord of the Rings). While many people emphasize the fact there has not been a recorded human kill from a killer whale in the wild, it should not take away from the fact that they are large, efficient predators. I don't mean this to instill fear in anyone, just a healthy dose of respect. Something to consider before chasing after the whales in a kayak or small dinghy.

Those thoughts clearly never crossed the minds of some of the other kayakers out on the water in the strait that evening. One fellow drove his kayak directly into the path of the orcas as they headed toward the kelp bed, then hooted loudly as several of them sprayed him with their plumes (which is indeed a great but putrid experience; whale breath reeks of rotting fish). Other kayakers he was attached with kept seeking out new whales as they came by and paddling toward their path in hopes of being similarly sprayed, and a few of them were. Some got warning tail lobs too.

I didn't manage to get any good shots off that evening, because my camera was still in its dry bag, tucked under my spray skirt when I first suddenly encountered the whales near the kelp bed; and the light had grown too dim in short order to photograph any of the others farther out. I could have gotten a great shot, I suppose, by diving into them, but some things are more important than a good shot. And besides, I saw them quite close up, which was what mattered more.

---

The next day, the whales returned at about 3 in the afternoon, and one of the other fathers in our group, Adam Peck, headed out with me in our two-man kayak. I rode in front in hopes of getting off some good shots. The whales were spread out, it seemed, across the entire nine-mile swath of Haro Strait, but they all were consistently headed south.

We caught up with a group of them about a mile offshore and got a good look at a big male about 50 yards in front of us, and about four more smaller whales followed in short order, but I didn't manage to capture any decent images of any of them; I was discovering that, on a long flat surface like these waters, my autofocus was having diffculty settling on a setting before snapping the shutter, since a flick of the wrist on a bobbing kayak could shift the range from fifty yards to five miles. By the time I realized I needed to turn it off, the whales were gone.

It was such a pleasant day, Adam and I decided to head south in their general direction and go take a look at the lime kiln and lighthouse in the distance. We paddled for another 45 minutes or so that way, and then realized that the pod had turned around and was headed back northward. We decided to follow along from a distance, sticking close to shore, since the current favored us there, and we wouldn't be harassing the whales.

As luck would have it, though, a mother and calf chose to go very close to the rocky shore too. In fact, when we spotted them, they were on the inside of our path, and as we caught up to them, we decided to stop before coming perpendicular to them, so as not to "trap" them. The mother appeared to be teaching the calf how to catch fish, and she was using the sheer cliff of the rocky shore as a training ground, trapping the fish next to the rock wall while the little one grabbed away. They shortly headed back toward the larger group, the calf spyhopping and frolicking in a kelp bed along the way.

We continued to follow for awhile, but as we approached the campground, we hugged the shoreline and rode the current and wind back into camp. We'd been on the water two and a half hours and were a little worn out; it looked as if the whales were heading out for good northward anyway, and there was no point chasing them.

Well, whales are nothing if not unpredictable. They also have a gift for confounding their pursuers. Sure enough, no sooner had we landed and walked up the bank than it became clear that the entire group that had spread across the strait throughout the day had coalesced in an area about a mile offshore from the park -- just far enough to make their figures too small even with my telephoto lens. This was about 30 whales, as near as I could tell, and they proceeded to put on the most spectacular display of breaching I've ever watched.

The show lasted for about 15 minutes, and featured at least 30 breaches, by my count. In one instance, two whales breached simultaneously next to each other, one peeling off left and another to the right. At times, it resembled a large ballet, with massive leaps and splashes almost synchronized to the whales' own mysterious music.

If you've never seen a whale breach in the flesh, it's hard to describe the effect on your psyche, but two words spring to mind: joy and awe. There is a something profoundly exuberant about these bursts into our world, but the whales -- who are always checking us humans out -- also can't seem to help knowing that the displays strike us dumb with wonder. And you know what? I suspect they like that, too.

In any event, it was a woundrous show. My wife is one of those people who always seems to be looking the other direction when whales breach in our vicinity. That day, she saw more breaches than in her entire 15-year career of whale watching. She just sat on the grass and soaked it in through her binoculars.

Adam and I sat on the bank with our little ones -- my daughter and his son, in fact, are best pals -- and watched the show. And the truth was, while we wanted to be out there (and I was chagrined that I had guessed wrong once again), we didn't really mind a bit that we weren't. I didn't have any photos, but I had the memories, memories that included watching the whales with my little girl. Some things, after all, are more important than a great shot.

[Note: last year's orca report is here.]

Gone whaling

I'm off to the San Juan Islands for a six-day outing with a passel of small children. Pray for me.

Nah, don't.

The other kind of terror

Christopher Dickey has a terrific piece up on Newsweek's online content this week:

The sentencing of Eric Rudolph, who bombed abortion clinics, a gay bar and the Atlanta Olympics, ought to be a milestone in the Global War on Terror. In Birmingham, Ala., on Monday he got life without parole. Next month he’ll stack up a couple more life terms in Georgia, which is the least he deserves. (He escaped the death penalty only because he made a deal to help law-enforcement agents find the explosives he had hidden while on the run in North Carolina.) Rudolph killed two people, but not for want of trying to kill many more. In his 1997 attack on an Atlanta abortion clinic, he set off a second bomb meant to take out bystanders and rescue workers. Unrepentant, of course, Rudolph defended his actions as a moral imperative: "Abortion is murder, and because it is murder I believe deadly force is needed to stop it." The Birmingham prosecutor declared that Rudolph had "appointed himself judge, jury and executioner."

Indeed. That's what all terrorists have in common: the four lunatics in London earlier this month; the 19 men who attacked America on September 11, 2001; Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City, and many others. They were all convinced they had noble motives for wreaking their violence. Terrorists are very righteous folks. Which is why the real global war we’re fighting, let's be absolutely clear, should be one of our shared humanity against the madness of people like these; the rule of man-made laws on the books against the divine law they imagine for themselves. It's the cause of reason against unreason, of self-criticism against the firm convictions of fanaticism.

He goes on to explore something we've discussed often here: the hard reality that terrorism does not always come from abroad, from brown-skinned foreigners, but often from our own midst as well; and that at the root of all of them lies a broad disaffection with modernity; and that truly winning the fight against terrorism requires us to confront and defuse that disaffection.

He also explores how this reality stands in stark contrast to the "war on terror" our current leaders have given us:

But if the war of ideas that British Prime Minister Tony Blair talks about is going to be won -- and he's right in saying that's the core battle -- then the difference between rationalism and obscurantism should be underlined at every opportunity. And that's not what's happening. Instead, since the detour into Iraq it seems the intellectual compass of those who led us there has gotten lost in a fog of moral pieties, and sweet reason has surrendered to missionary zeal. To be a true believer in the Global War on Terror you are supposed to believe that we are fighting terrorists in Iraq, but that they would never think of fighting back outside of Iraq. Any effort to understand the enemy or his motivations is treated as an apology for what he does. At times we seem to be infected by the very pathology we are fighting against.

In case there's any doubt that domestic terrorism remains a potent force, you can turn to the recent U.S. News and World Report piece outlining just how extensive their activities have in fact been even since Oklahoma City:

In the 10 years since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing killed 168 people, roughly 60 right-wing terrorist plots have been uncovered in the United States, according to an upcoming report by the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project. The plots, all foiled by law enforcement, reportedly included violent plans by antigovernment militia groups, racist skinhead organizations, and Ku Klux Klan members to use various types of chemical bombs and other weapons.

It's important to understand that this terrorism was defeated precisely because we undertook a law-enforcement approach to defeat it. Much of the success was predicated on solid intelligence-gathering and threat assessment, as well as appropriate timing for law-enforcement action. In other cases -- especially those since 9/11 -- we simply got lucky.

Some instances from the SPLC report:

-- May 20, 2005: Two New Jersey men, Craig Orler and Gabriel Garafa, who allegedly belong to neo-Nazi and skinhead groups, were charged with illegally selling to police informants guns and 60 pounds of urea to use in a bomb.

-- Oct. 25, 2004: FBI agents in Tennessee arrested Demetrius "Van" Crocker after he allegedly tried to purchase ingredients for deadly sarin nerve gas and C-4 plastic explosives from an undercover agent. Crocker, who was involved with white supremacist groups, was charged with trying to get explosives to destroy a building and faces more than 20 years in prison.

-- April 10, 2003: The FBI raided the home of William Krar, of Noonday, Texas, and discovered an arsenal of more than 500,000 rounds of ammunition, 65 pipe bombs and remote control briefcase bombs, and almost 2 pounds of sodium cyanide, enough to make a bomb that could kill everyone in a large building. Krar, reportedly associated with white supremacist groups, was sentenced to 11 years in prison for possession of a chemical weapon.

In many of these cases, the potential for mass casualties -- probably not as great as 9/11, but equal to or greater than the London or Madrid bombings -- was very high.

Of course, I've also written previously that Oklahoma City was the first major strike against us in the fight against terrorism -- we just didn't recognize it at the time. Maybe, slowly, we'll get there.

The Zigzag March of the Minutemen

One of the most disturbing trends we've observed this year has been the growing mainstream acceptance of the Minutemen, who represent a real incursion of right-wing extremism into the broader body politic. As we've noted, this includes endorsements of their activities both by public officials and the media.

The most recent advancement of this trend came from a top Border Patrol official (the same, it should be noted, who endorsed the Minutemen previously) saying his agency was considering giving official sanction to the Minutemen or similar groups:

The top U.S. border enforcement official said Wednesday that his agency is exploring ways to involve citizen volunteers in creating "something akin to a Border Patrol auxiliary" -- a significant shift after a high-profile civilian campaign this spring along the Arizona-Mexico border.

Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Robert C. Bonner told The Associated Press that his agency began looking into citizen involvement after noting how eager volunteers were to stop illegal immigration.

"We value having eyes and ears of citizens, and I think that would be one of the things we are looking at is how you better organize, let's say, a citizen effort," Bonner said.

He said that could involve training of volunteers organized "in a way that would be something akin to a Border Patrol auxiliary."

Bonner characterized the idea of an auxiliary as "an area we're looking at," and a spokeswoman said it hadn't been discussed yet with top Homeland Security officials.

A day later, his superiors at the Department of Homeland Security backed away from any such proposals [via Talk Left]:

"There are currently no plans by the Department of Homeland Security to use civilian volunteers to patrol the border," spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said in a statement. "That job should continue to be done by the highly trained, professional law enforcement officials of the Border Patrol and its partner agencies."

This mainstream support, uncertain as it may be, has helped the movement continue to spread, even to places with no discernible international borders, like Tennessee:

MORRISTOWN, Tenn. -- A volunteer movement that vows to guard America from a wave of illegal immigration has spread from the dusty U.S.-Mexican border to the verdant hollows of Appalachia.

At least 40 anti-immigration groups have popped up nationally, inspired by the Minuteman Project that rallied hundreds this year to patrol the Mexican border in Arizona.

"It's like O'Leary's cow has kicked over the lantern. The fire has just started now," said Carl "Two Feathers" Whitaker, referring to the fabled start of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Whitaker, an American Indian activist and perennial gubernatorial candidate, runs the Tennessee Volunteer Minutemen, aimed at exposing those who employ illegals.

Critics call the movement vigilantism, and some hear in the words of the Minutemen a vitriol similar to what hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan used against Southern blacks in the 1960s.

The Minuteman Project has generated chapters in 18 states -- from California to states far from Mexico, like Utah, Minnesota and Maine. The Tennessee group and others like it have no direct affiliation, but share a common goal.

"I struck the mother lode of patriotism or nationalism or whatever you want to call it," said Jim Gilchrist, a Vietnam veteran and retired CPA who co-founded the Minuteman Project 10 months ago. "That common nerve that was bothering a lot of people, but due to politically correct paralysis ... everyone was afraid to bring up -- the lack of law enforcement."

At the Department of Homeland Security, whose authority includes patrolling borders and enforcing immigration laws, response to Minuteman-type activism is guarded.

"Homeland security is a shared responsibility, and the department believes the American public plays a critical role in helping to defend the homeland," agency spokesman Jarrod Agen said from Washington. "But as far doing an investigation or anything beyond giving us a heads-up, that should be handled by trained law enforcement."

As the story notes, the uglier side of the Minutemen's base of support already has begun manifesting itself:

A group leading patrols of the California border raised concerns from the U.S. Border Patrol last week when they urged volunteers to bring baseball bats, mace, pepper spray and machetes to patrol the border. They backed off the recommendation, but insisted on another weapon when they started patrols Saturday: guns.

"The guns are for one reason -- to keep my people alive," said Jim Chase, a former Arizona Minuteman volunteer who is leading the effort.

It's worth keeping in mind, too, that these kinds of right-wing organizations are prone to implosion and real instability, as they typically involve a lot of high-maintenance egos and paranoid sensibilities. We saw this recently in the internal squabbling that erupted between various factions of the Minutemen:

Three months after hundreds of people descended on southern Arizona to stage civilian border patrols as part of the Minuteman Project, the anti-illegal-immigration movement has snowballed, with offshoot groups forming along the southern border and in other states.

But as the movement has grown, along with the media attention surrounding it, it has also splintered. Rival factions have emerged, squabbling over issues ranging from political correctness to use of the "Minuteman" name, and even over e-mail etiquette.

Some leaders of offshoot groups have launched verbal grenades at each other in the media and via news releases; others have traded insults online.

One group leader who feels particularly picked on says he has cut ties with Minuteman leadership and plans to operate solo.

And last month, Minuteman Project co-founder Jim Gilchrist dismissed two volunteers -- whom he characterized as "wackos" -- for sending querulous responses after he issued two e-mails to members of his group that threatened excommunication for those who didn't stop sniping at one another.

He signed one of his missives from "An American with better things to do than baby-sit quarrelsome adults."

"It's so counterproductive. It gets people distracted," said Gilchrist, a retired Orange County accountant who presides over Minuteman Project Inc., which he said is awaiting nonprofit status, and hopes to soon pursue employers who hire unauthorized workers.

"If I were to set up some rules of conduct, it would be to stop the argumentative attitude and be pleasant."

... [M]any agree the international media attention showered on the Minuteman Project, while it energized the anti-illegal-immigration movement, has also created a monster of sorts.

"When we left Arizona in April, too many people had seen the glamour," said Mike Gaddy, who is active in a Simcox-sanctioned Minuteman group in Farmington, N.M. " 'Gosh, I was on Sean Hannity. Gosh, I was interviewed by The Baltimore Sun. Gosh, I was interviewed on Spanish radio.' Egos are a terrible thing."

Like several others, Gaddy sees the elbowing as competitive. He says it bothers him that there are people in the movement who have political aspirations.

Gilchrist, for one, is contemplating a bid for Congress.

You have to read the whole thing to see how absurd the sniping gets. One of their opponents had the most accurate take:

Christian Ramirez of the American Friends Service Committee, a human rights group affiliated with the Quakers that has condemned the Minutemen and their successors, says he's not surprised.

"There has always been bickering among these types of organizations," Ramirez said. "There is always someone trying to become the leader of the anti-illegal-immigration movement, because it is such a fashionable thing. People are just fighting to see who is going to get more media attention."

One of the more interesting feuds has involved the Texas Minutmen, who announced their split from the national group:

The Minuteman Civil Defense Corp., the national organization led by co-founder Chris Simcox of Arizona, drew attention earlier this year with its patrols of the Arizona-Mexico border.

Last month, Simcox began to organize chapters around the U.S. and Canada. At least four sprouted in Texas, with plans to patrol the 1,200-mile border area as part of a national initiative called "Operation Secure Our Borders."

Some volunteers in Arizona were from Texas, and they returned to form Texas Minutemen LLC, based in Arlington. The group's co-founder, Shannon McGauley, said he agrees philosophically with Simcox but objects to the national structure.

McGauley's group also objects to paying the $50 fee per person that goes toward background checks and use of the national group's consultants, Web site and training.

"We wanted to keep it among Texans," he said. "And we don't charge anything."

Both groups have scouted land and have been gaining permission from landowners to set up lookout stations. Other groups have formed in New Mexico, California and Michigan -- among other border states -- with varying degrees of affiliation with Simcox's organization.

The Texas Minutemen said they will patrol the El Paso area, including Fabens and Fort Hancock. McGauley said his group has formed a loose network with similar organizations in New Mexico and California. He said another Texas group based in Houston is forming and expected to be part of the network.

Two Texas groups could cause problems, said Felix Almaraz, history professor specializing in Texas-Mexico border issues at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

"They're under different commands," he said. "They have a common objective of border security, but they're not coordinating together. It'll end up being selective surveillance."

Because the groups under close watch, any mishap could cause major damage to them, said Jerry Thompson, history professor at Texas A&M International University in Laredo.

"I think we need to be careful," he said. "This Texas individualism can get out of hand. What we need is more Border Patrol agents on the border. We don't need more Minutemen."

Meanwhile, of course, Simcox's national organization keeps bubbling along, despite all the zigzags. According to a news release on its Web site, its plans to organize patrols in four states -- California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas -- for the entire month of October:

Join fellow Patriot-Minutemen in October for a four state month-long Border Patrol to observe, report and protect the US from illegal immigration in all southern border states

MinutemanHQ.com is the new National Organization for the original Minuteman border project. It is the only group authorized by Chris Simcox and Jim Gilchrist who organized the first border watch.

Contact us immediately to learn about upcoming missions. We are expanding to California, Texas and New Mexico on the southern border. Requests from activated volunteers on the northern border with Canada - Maine, Vermont, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Idaho and Washington State are creating new operations, this is truly an exciting time for Patriots!

"Congress and the U.S. Senate continue to drag their feet on securing our borders with U.S. military and National Guard troops. Meanwhile, thousands of illegal immigrants cross our southern border every week.

Note, if you will, that this release specifically identifies the Minutemen as part of the Patriot movement -- that is, the movement that brought us militias in the 1990s. Indeed, the Minutemen are a direct offspring of an earlier "border militia" movement that was organized by Patriots.

However, you would be hard-pressed to find a mention of these extremist origins -- as well as the pervasive influence of extremists within its leadership and its membership -- in the recent love letter to the Minutemen that appeared in the right-wing Washington Times. The report offers fulsome details on the upcoming fall campaigns, as well as the Minutemen's supposed accomplishments to date:

More than 15,000 volunteers will man observation posts and conduct foot and horseback patrols this fall along the Mexican border from Texas to California and in seven states along the Canadian border in a new Minuteman vigil to protest what organizers call the government's lax immigration enforcement policies.

Chris Simcox, who heads the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, said volunteers from throughout the country who are "concerned that the U.S. government must be made to act and take control of our borders" are signing up in record numbers for the new monthlong patrols set to begin Oct. 1.

"We want a secure U.S. border and an end to the blatant disregard of the rule of law regarding illegal immigration," Mr. Simcox said. "Nearly four years after the September 11 attacks on America, we should be doing a better job of securing our borders.

"Our government is more concerned with securing the borders of foreign lands than securing the borders of the United States," he said.

Now, you'll want to take the numbers they predict on the border with a large mine of salt. They predicted 10,000 for the Arizona watch and came up with something far short of that (some media observers counted only around 2,500, at best, though of course the Minutemen's "official" numbers are around 8,000).

Simcox's insistence that the Minutemen's mission is focused on securing borders for the "war on terror" doesn't hold a lot of water, either. Most of the Minutemen, when interviewed, tend to talk about how their hometowns and neighborhoods are being overrun with criminal Latinos. It's about Latino-bashing, and the "war on terror" talk is just a fig leaf.

Indeed, Simcox himself will start talking this way if you let him go long enough, as one reporter did:

"It's a public safety issue because 30 percent of crimes are committed by aliens," said Simcox, who cites no source for the statistic. "There's an explosion of vicious gangs with no respect for human life that target us because of soft laws."

Perhaps in keeping with how things have actually gone so far for the Minutemen, their most recent patrol in California -- organized by Jim Chase, one of the splinter-group leaders -- once again featured more media folk and protesters than actual Minutemen.

Another report of the same event included some worthwhile observations from the people who came there to protest -- and an interesting response from the Minutemen:

Meanwhile, down a dirt road at the hilly, rugged border fence, protesters barbecued food, chanted and prayed, and stayed out of the sun. When they spotted border watchers, the protesters massed around them, telling them to go home.

"There's no place for you in California," said Bruce Cooley, of Los Angeles. "You are contributing to the deaths of people who are trying to cross to feed their families" back home.

One border watcher, who refused to give his name as he climbed into his Jeep, outfitted with a dirt bike, said he would be back. "It's intimidating to have all those people yell at you," the San Diego resident said. "But we'll come back tonight and just sneak up on them."

Yeah, that open daylight can be an annoying thing.

Reviews from here and there

My new book, Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community, just got its highest-profile review in a paper I've harshly criticized on many occasions in the past: the (ulp!) Washington Times.

Nonetheless, Tom Carter's piece is not just a strong review, but a good read in its own right. Carter, you see, grew up in Bellevue:

Growing up in the 1950s in a suburb of Atlanta "coloreds only" and "whites only" signs on water fountains and public toilets were fairly common. It never occurred to me that white people might have similar feelings toward "Orientals" until we moved to Bellevue, Wash., a suburb of Seattle in 1962. I remember my parents bewilderment at the openly hostile neighborhood reaction when a Japanese family tried to buy a house in our Mockingbird Hill development.

Riding our bicycles on Bellevue streets, walking to school, swimming in nearby Lake Sammamish, Bellevue was a white and middle-class. We knew nothing of the history, that Bellevue was a small farming suburb hewn from the wilderness, stumps removed, fields made workable and then planted by Japanese immigrants in the early 1900s. And after Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, it was one of many West Coast cities depopulated of Japanese by government order, a forced evacuation that sent hundreds of Bellevue Japanese to internment camps -- ultimately clearing the way for white suburbia.

Be sure to read it all.

And, while I'm at it, it's worth noting that the reviews for the book at the Amazon link were invaded earlier this week by the execrable "Bob," a onetime regular commenter here who not only liked to argue (a la Michelle Malkin) that the internment of Japanese Americans was justifiable but necessary, but eventually, he developed a habit of posting personal smears about local Nikkei, which earned him a deletion and a ban. Then he went away.

Eric Muller recently posted some information about "Bob", who is evidently closely associated with a Bainbridge Island figure named James Olsen (if he isn't in fact Olsen himself). Olsen and his wife, Mary Dombrowski, have been badgering the Bainbridge school district about its history curriculum regarding the internment, a campaign that has, unsurprisingly, earned Malkin's endorsement.

Unfortunately, Amazon deleted Bob's review of my book. I say "unfortunately" not because I endorse Bob's views, of course, but because I do believe in the free exchange of ideas. It's useful to have Bob's explanation of why the internment was justifiable out there in black and white so that anyone can see exactly how thin and, ultimately, groundless -- not to mention profoundly amoral -- their argument really is.

As it happened, I preserved a copy of his review, and so I'll reproduce it here:

Absolute Garbage! Neiwert's a race-baiting flake!, July 14, 2005

Reviewer: Bob - See all my reviews

It is well-documented that the evacuation was motivated, not by racism, but by information obtained by the U.S. from pre-war decoded Japanese diplomatic messages "MAGIC" and other intelligence revealed the existence of espionage and the potential for sabotage involving then-unidentified resident Japanese aliens and Japanese-Americans living within the West Coast Japanese community.

You can read about MAGIC and it's subseqently being ignored by the reparations commission here.

[...]

The actual declassified MAGIC intercepts are here.

http://www.athenapressinc.com/smithsonian/Appendix3.html

The U.S. Congress immediately passed legislation providing enforcement provisions for FDR's Executive Order, unanimously in both the House and Senate, provided under Article 1, Section 9 of the United States Constitution.

Only persons of Japanese ancestry (alien and citizen) residing in the West Coast military zones were affected by the evacuation order. Those living elsewhere were not affected at all.

It is not true that Japanese-Americans were "interned. Only Japanese nationals (enemy aliens) arrested and given individual hearings were interned. Such persons were held for deportation in Department of Justice camps. Those evacuated were not interned. They were first given an opportunity to voluntarily move to areas outside the military zones. Those unable or unwilling to do so were sent to Relocation Centers operated by the War Relocation Authority.

At the time, the JACL (Japanese American Citizens League) officially supported the government's evacuation order and urged all enemy alien Japanese and Japanese Americans to cooperate and assist the government in their own self interest.

It is misleading and in error to state that those affected by the evacuation orders were all "Japanese-Americans."

Approximately two-thirds of the ADULTS among those evacuated were Japanese nationals--enemy aliens. The vast majority of evacuated Japanese-Americans (U.S. citizens) were children at the time. Their average age was only 15 years. In addition, over 90% of Japanese-Americans over age 17 were also citizens of Japan (dual citizens)under Japanese law. Thousands had been educated in Japan. Some having returned to the U.S. holding reserve rank in the Japanese armed forces.

During the war, more than 33,000 evacuees voluntarily left the relocation centers to accept outside employment. An additional 4,300 left to attend colleges.

In a questionaire, over 26% of Japanese-Americans of military age at the time said they would refuse to swear an unqualified oath of allegiance to the United States.

According to War Relocation Authority records, 13,000 applications renouncing their U.S. citizenship and requesting expatriation to Japan were filed by or on behalf of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Over 5,000 had been processed by the end of the war.

After loyalty screening, eighteen thousand Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans were segregated at a special center for disloyals at Tule Lake California where regular military "Banzai" drills in support of Emperor Hirohito were held.

The Supreme Court of the United States upheld the Consitutionality of the evacuation/relocation in Korematsu v. U.S., 1944 term. In summing up for the 6-3 majority, Justice Black wrote:

"There was evidence of disloyalty on the part of some, the military authorities considered that the need for action was great, and time was short. We cannot -- by availing ourselves of the calm perspective of hindsight -- now say that at the time these actions were unjustified."

That decision has never been reversed and stands to this day.

It should be noted that the relocation centers had many amenities. Accredited schools, their own newspapers, stores, churches, hospitals, all sorts of sports and recreational facilities. They also had the highest percapita wartime birth rates for any U.S.community.

More history for you to consider regarding the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians:

Consider that of the nine commission members, six were biased in favor of reparations. Ishmail Gromoff and William Marutani, relocatees themselves, sat in judgment of their own cases. Arthur Goldberg and Joan Bernstein made sympathetic, pro-reparation statements publicly before hearings even began. Arthur Fleming had worked closely with the JACL (he was a keynote speaker at its Portland convention in the '70s). Robert Drinan was a co-sponsor of the bill establishing the commission.

Consider that notices of when and where hearings were to be held were not made known to the general, non-Japanese public.

Consider that witnesses who gave testimony were not sworn to tell the truth.

Consider that witnesses who were pro-reparation were carefully coached in their testimony in "mock hearings" beforehand.

Consider that witnesses against reparation were harassed and drowned out by foot-stomping Japanese claques, that the commission members themselves ridiculed and badgered these same witnesses.

Consider that not one historian was asked to testify before the commission, that intelligence reports and position papers contrary to reparations were deliberately ignored.

Consider that as a result of the above, the United States Department of Justice objected strongly to the findings of the commission.

Lastly while we've all been educated on the doctrines associated with the rise of Nazism, I would be curious to know if courses are provided teaching the history of the doctrines of Japanese militarism, a belief system similar and equally as insidious as Nazism?

Any clasess on the kokutai? Hakko Ichiu? Any reading of Kokutai no Hongi? Shimin to Michi? The role of Nichiren Buddhism and Japanese "Language Schools" in teaching these doctines of Japanese racial superiorty to ethnic Japanese colonies throughout the word prior to Pearl Harbor?

Those of you learning this history at your public schools and universities should understand you are being taught an extemely biased and partial version of what really happened and why. I would urge you to go beyond the politically correct version of this history as propagated by the Japanese-American reparations movement.

I understand that publishing Bob's remarks helps him circulate those views. But I also believe that seeing them in print helps people understand how these folks think -- and a careful examination reveals their utter bankruptcy.

Ironically, nearly every one of the points Bob raises is in fact addressed and specifically refuted in the text of Strawberry Days, including the very real role of racism in the drama; the actual significance of the MAGIC encrypts; the demographic makeup of the internees; the military signup debate; what was really taught in those Japanese schools; and the significance of the Supreme Court rulings and the fact that Korematsu has never been overturned. (I don't discuss the behavior of some audience members at the Wartime Relocation Commission hearings, but then, it doesn't strike me as particularly significant. Strange, though, how "Bob" isn't equally outraged by the treatment that was afforded anyone who dared speak out against the evacuation at the Tolan Committee hearings in the spring of 1942.) Oh, and incidentally: I have no connection to any "Japanese American reparations movement."

So, how odd is it to post a review of a book whose text specifically refutes everything in your review?

Well, that doesn't matter to people like "Bob" and James Olsen and Michelle Malkin. They are True Believers, and no evidence -- not even a mountain of it -- will move them to admit that they are wrong. (Not that "Bob" will have bothered to actually read the book.) Nor, it seems, do they possess enough self-awareness to recognize just how morally repugnant the upshot of their argument (to wit: those Japanese really were untrustworthy and deserved to be locked up en masse) really is.

The rest of us can judge for ourselves.

The elimination game

Probably the most striking scene in Patrice O'Neill's excellent P.O.V. documentary currently airing on PBS, "The Fire Next Time," involves my friend Brenda Kitterman teaching her two teenage daughters how to use a handgun.

The girls were more or less forced to learn because Elizabeth, the elder of the two, began speaking out against right-wing hate groups at her Kalispell, Montana, school in emulation of her mom, and was subsequently threatened and had her tires slashed. Their family was subjected to a barrage of threatening phone calls and late-night visitations from strange men in their yard, one of them shouting at the mother to come out. The elder daughter was being followed home from her job every night.

It was part of a campaign of right-wing intimidation of conservationists and "liberals" in Montana's Flathead Valley, a phenomenon I've described in some detail previously. The Kittermans were hardly alone in facing this kind of harassment, but they experienced an especially intense version of it.

So we see Brenda, who is an ex-cop and more than familiar with firearms, teaching her daughters how to hold the gun, aim properly, and squeeze off a shot at a silhouette target. Trisha, the younger of the two, is uncertain whether she can actually pull the trigger on another person, so they sit down to talk about it, and Brenda advises her not to carry a gun until she's sure she can use it. Trisha nods, and agrees, then tucks her face into her arms and silently begins to cry.

This was one of the more vivid sequences in the film's depiction of the dynamic that hits any community when hateful eliminationist rhetoric takes root. Just as striking for me, in a low-key way, was how it demonstrated the chilling and intimidating effect that such thuggishness can have on ordinary people. As the film's advance text explains:

Nothing was more telling -- and is more disquieting in "The Fire Next Time" -- than the community's reaction to discovery of Project 7, its cache of guns and its hit list. The targets, after all, were not distant officials or outsider bureaucrats. They were everyone's longtime neighbors, including popular Police Chief Frank Garner and Sheriff Jim Dupont. And while many citizens, like Brenda Kitterman and newly elected Mayor Pam Kennedy, felt immediately moved to rally in protest, there was a degree of denial about the potential danger. Those accused of being terrorists were also neighbors, who had carved out a place for their views in public meetings and on the radio. For elected officials like Pam Kennedy and Gary Hall, the daily blast of on-air attacks turns public life into a risky proposition, given the real threat from Project 7. The result was also a spreading fear as people began to weigh the costs of speaking out.

I thought this was particularly embodied in an interview with the family of Mike Raiman, a Flathead Valley conservationist who took a leading role in standing up to the hateful talk that emanated from the likes of local right-wing radio talk-show host John Stokes.

Raiman is a grandfather, and both of his sons are in their early 30s with families of their own, though they work with him and have supported him throughout his ordeal -- in some cases, coming in for abuse themselves. But the elder of the two sons, you can tell, is weary of it all and wary too: he has a family to think about, and their safety is paramount to him. He doesn't know how much longer he can keep it up. You can't really blame him.

That's how eliminationist hate works, regardless of its target: Its aim is to threaten and intimidate not merely the immediate target, but anyone who might think of speaking out on their behalf. This cuts the target off from the community support it might normally enjoy and leaves them feeling even more isolated.

What, really, is eliminationism?

It's a fairly self-explanatory term: it describes a kind of politics and culture that shuns dialogue and the democratic exchange of ideas for the pursuit of outright elimination of the opposing side, either through complete suppression, exile and ejection, or extermination.

I first encountered it in Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, which is in many regards a problematic text, especially insofar as it describes prewar German society as almost uniquely predisposed to antisemitism. But Goldhagen's text correctly identifies and describes the essence of the Nazi campaign against the Jews as eliminationist in nature, something that was made undeniably manifest in the Holocaust.

But while eliminationism's most startling historical example was provided by the Nazis, it also has a long and appalling history in the annals of American democracy. It was manifest in the genocidal wars against Native Americans, when "the only good Indian was a dead Indian": in the many anti-immigrant campaigns waged by Nativists of many different stripes; in night-riding Ku Klux Klansmen, Jim Crow segregation, and the lynch mobs who murdered thousands of innocent blacks during the heyday of white supremacism; in the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War II; in the continuing march of hate crimes that target various kinds of "undesirable" members of society for terrorization and exclusion; and in the lingering far-right "militias" and related hate groups who scapegoat minorities and immigrants, gays and lesbians, government officials, and liberals generally, making them the targets of both hateful rhetoric and actual violence.

Eliminationism in truth forms the really hateful, violent core of fascism, the facet that distinguishes the real item from its pseudo manifestations (though of course not all eliminationism is necessarily fascist). It glories in violence, in action over intellect, and always insists, of course, that it represents the true national identity.

Rhetorically, it takes on some distinctive shapes. It always depicts its opposition as simply beyond the pale, and in the end the embodiment of evil itself -- unfit for participation in their vision of society, and thus in need of elimination. It often depicts its designated "enemy" as vermin (especially rats and cockroaches) or diseases, and loves to incessantly suggest that its targets are themselves disease carriers. A close corollary -- but not as nakedly eliminationist -- are claims that the opponents are traitors or criminals, or gross liabilities for our national security, and thus inherently fit for elimination.

And yes, it's often voiced as crude "jokes", the humor of which, when analyzed, is inevitably predicated on a venomous hatred.

But what we also know about this rhetoric is that, as surely as night follows day, this kind of talk eventually begets action, with inevitably tragic results.

While in recent years much of this activity tends to be relegated to fringe behavior, it's disturbing to observe this trend treading out of the fringes and increasingly back into the mainstream, as it did in the Flathead Valley -- and moreover, as it is doing on a national mainstream level. It's worth remembering, of course, that there have been many instances when eliminationism was very much part of mainstream American culture, and there's no reason to believe it couldn't happen again.

I was reminded of this the other night when I was talking to the very nice-sized audience that turned out for my reading from Strawberry Days at Ravenna Third Place Books in Seattle. In the front row was an elderly Nisei woman I didn't know, but later found out was Mary Matsuda Gruenewald, who had authored her own book on the internment, Looking Like the Enemy (and an excellent book it is).

I had earlier in the evening discussed how difficult it was for white people in the spring of 1942 to stand up and publicly defend their Japanese neighbors, pointing out that the few who did were subjected to "Jap lover" epithets, sneering attacks on their motives, and in some cases threats.

Ms. Gruenewald asked an interesting question: What, she wondered, would I recommend for people today, in the current environment, should they be faced with a similar choice?

I found myself giving her an answer similar to one I've actually given many times, including during a community gathering in Kalispell the summer after the events of "The Fire Next Time" (the crew was there and filming the event, but the gathering mostly wound up on the editing floor), as well as at community discussions on hate crimes. I can't recall the exact words, but it went something like this:

I think it's important for people to understand the value of standing up and making their voices heard, regardless of the threats that may come their way. Failing to do so will make our communities less safe, places we don't want to bring our children up in anyway. And when people find the courage to stand up and be counted, they'll quickly realize that they are not alone, that others will be there to stand beside them. We're the true silent majority, and tragedies like the internment only happen because too many of us lack the courage to make our voices heard. If the internment offers us any real lessons for today, it's that we cannot repeat the same mistake.

Now, I have to admit to being amused by Rev. Mykeru's recent takedown of a right-wing intimidation artist who calls himself "Lord Spatula," who has a habit of spewing all kinds of vile eliminationist rhetoric in the direction of a number of liberals who post on the Internet, including various threats of physical harm. Mykeru called him on his bluff, arranged a halfway meeting place, and told Lord Spatula to show up for an ass-kicking. Spatula, of course, backed down.

I can't say I endorse Mykeru's tactics, as satisfying as they might be, since they come down to promising actual violence, and being prepared to carry it out. But it's well worth remembering what his little exercise clearly revealed: Bigmouthed bullies are all, at their core, pathetic cowards. When they are confronted, they run away. They may lob a few shots in retreat, but they always run away. Unless, of course, we cede the field to them.

And eliminationism, in all its myriad forms, is in the end nothing but pure bullying. The sooner we begin confronting it, the more certain we are to halt its spread.

Eliminationism from the top

The Plame affair, it seems, really has Republicans snarling, their usual response when backed into a corner.

You can tell that because now the eliminationist talk is coming from the Bush White House's own mouthpiece -- namely, Rep. Peter King, who's been selected as the House point man for defending Karl Rove.

King was on MSNBC's Joe Scarborough show the other night and, according to the MSNBC transcript, had this to say:

And Joe Wilson has no right to complain. And I think people like Tim Russert and the others, who gave this guy such a free ride and all the media, they're the ones to be shot, not Karl Rove.

I haven't seen the tape of the show, but the quote is enjoying an odd half-life on the radio, thanks to Rush Limbaugh, who alters it slightly to "ought to be shot", and then chimes in inimitably: "That's Peter King, who's right on the money."

Lovely.

Just wondering: Have any Democrats in Congress -- or Joe Wilson, for that matter -- suggested that Karl Rove be shot?

Ah, I didn't think so.

Talking 'bout internment

You know, in rereading Michelle Malkin's In Defense of Internment, I'm so relieved to reread the passage in which she adamantly insists she isn't advocating that we begin rounding up and incarcerating Muslim Americans (at least not yet). Because it certainly is odd how others on the right -- both abroad and at home -- are advocating something along those lines these days.

First, LaShawn Barber offered the following helpful discussion:

As you reply, it may be helpful to consider one or more of the following:

- Terrorist cells in America: The necessity of racial/religious profiling of Arabs/Muslims

- Muslim internment vs. rounding up suspicious Muslims only vs. status quo of doing nothing

As John Cole adroitly notes, this is just the kind of helpful and serious discussion we need right now, along with those liberal hunting licenses.

And I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the bulk of the pro-internment discussion that followed seemed strangely cribbed from Ms. Malkin's work.

Then there was this Slate report from the London press [hat tip to Paul Donnelly]:

Rupert Murdoch's Sun made the most open threat to civil liberties, making a call that will surely concern Asian communities: "Britain is crawling with suspected terrorists and those who give them succour. The Government must act without delay, round up this enemy in our midst and lock them in internment camps. Our safety must not play second fiddle to their supposed 'rights.' "

That's reminiscent of conservative Henry McLemore's Jan. 30, 1942, nationally syndicated newspaper column:

I know this is the melting pot of the world and all men are created equal and there must be no such thing as race or creed hatred, but do these things go when a country is fighting got its life? Not in my book. No country ever won a war because of courtesy and I trust and pray we won't be the first because of the lovely gracious spirit ...

I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. I don't mean a nice part of the interior, either. Herd 'em up, pack 'em off and give 'em the inside room of the badlands. Let 'em be pinched, hurt, hungry and dead up against it. ... Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them.

Or there was Mississippi Congressman John Rankin, on the floor of the House, on Dec. 15, 1941:

"This is a race war! The white man's civilization has come into conflict with Japanese barbarism. ... Once a Jap always a Jap. You cannot change him. You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. ... I say it is of vital importance that we get rid of every Japanese, whether in Hawaii or on the mainland. ... I'm for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska, and Hawaii now and putting them in concentration camps... Damn them! Let's get rid of them now!"

Maybe this is all fresh for me right now because I just got back from my Strawberry Days signing at the Panama Cafe in Seattle's International District. We had a large crowd, many of them elderly Nisei, including several of the folks who participated in the book as interviewees (notably Tosh Ito, Sumi and Ed Suguro, Mitsuko Hashiguchi, Kim Muromoto, and Ty Matsuoka).

There was also an elderly white gentleman who did not give me his name, but was the first to ask a question and immediately launched into questions he thought would disprove my thesis. Eventually he attacked my use of the term "concentration camps" to describe the form of incarceration used on the Japanese Americans; I explained patiently that this was precisely the correct term to describe them, since such camps existed well before World War II (they probably originated in the Boer War), and the so-called "relocation centers" actually fit the description of them to a T (not to mention that leading officials at the time, including FDR, called them "concentration camps"); what the Nazis operated, I stressed, were not merely concentration camps, but death camps, and therein lies the real difference.

He then launched into a tirade claiming life was too cushy in the American camps to call them that, which was you can imagine provoked a strong response from a number of my elderly audience members who had rather vivid memories of the barbed wire and armed guards, as well as the rows of tarpaper shacks, the general degradation and discomfort, and the acute humiliation of having been stripped of all their rights as citizens. He began arguing loudly with them, until I stopped the discussion and explained that I wasn't going to let him disrupt this gathering, the purpose of which was to discuss the book -- and I moved on to the next question.

The man picked up his papers and left, offering a nonsequitur about patriotism and the quality of my research on the way out. No one had asked him to leave -- but no one was sorry he left, either. The rest of the evening was really quite pleasant.

But the whole affair reminded me that cheap rationalizations (like those that constituted the elderly man's claims, or those that pretend that this kind of historical revisionism doesn't fuel the advancement of a more radical agenda) die hard. Don't they, Michelle?

More on 'Strawberry Days'

We had a nice turnout for the Strawberry Days signing at the University Book Store last night, including a surprise visit from one of my interviewees, Kiyo Yabuki.

Kiyo was a veteran of the 442nd who was wounded near Bruyeres during the famed "Lost Battalion" rescue. He grew up in Bellevue, and settled just outside of town eventually, making a living as a postman. He told us last night that one of his customers on his old route in Bellevue was Miller Freeman. For those who've read the book, you'll understand the significance.

Or, you can just read Chris Winters' nice feature on the book for the King County Journal, which is the descendant of the old Journal American, where I wrote the first iterations of this story. (I was the JA's news editor from 1991 to 1994.) Winters provides a worthwhile summary of much of the material in the book, including some regarding Freeman.

At any rate, I was honored and tickled to see Kiyo. He has a lively personality, a gleam in his eye, and a quick smile. His Purple Heart was well earned; Kiyo was hit in the back of the legs by tree shrapnel and had his ligaments severed, and spent many months recovering. One of the more notable anecdotes from the book involves him:

He was hospitalized at a military installation in Vancouver, Washington, for most of the year he spent in rehabilitation.

"One time, when I was in the hospital in Vancouver, there was a couple from Portland that used to come visit the patients at the hospital," he recalled. "I guess I made a remark about the rain coming from Portland, and it really ticked this lady off. I was just joking. Knowing that I was of Japanese ancestry, she made a remark about Japs, that, 'You're just fortunate that you're alive. A lot of our boys were killed.' I couldn't argue with her on that one. I was just too slow with any kind of comeback. Maybe it was a good thing I didn't.

"Then again, being sensitive to discrimination, it really made me kind of shrink back. Even with the uniform on, you had the feeling you were in the wrong."

Bedridden for much of his time in Vancouver, Kiyo was glad to return home when he finally was released. His older brother, Alan, was trying energetically to resurrect their home and greenhouse at Hunts Point, since both had been ruined during their stay away.

Kiyo decided one day that his Army uniform needed dry-cleaning, so he took it down to a Bellevue cleaning service to get it done.

They refused to serve him -- because he was Japanese.

Kiyo recovered well enough to become a mail carrier, which was his job until he retired in 1989. Kiyo was as spry as any 80-plus-year-old I knew until recently, when he suffered severe injuries in a fall at his home, and now lives in a care facility. But his mind, it was obvious, is as lively as ever, just like the gleam in his eye.

'The Fire Next Time'

Hope you all have a chance to check out this week's airing of the P.O.V. documentary, "The Fire Next Time," which examines a small Montana community torn apart by the hatred spewed by right-wing extremists who decided to target liberals and environmentalists.

I was involved in one of the events at which these concerns came to a head -- in fact, I was one of the keynote speakers -- and may be in the film (I haven't seen it yet). Regular readers of Orcinus will recall that I wrote at length about the matter in this piece.

I'll discuss the film more after I've seen it. The link to the P.O.V. site above will take you to a locator that will tell you when it's showing in your area. (In Seattle, it's showing Thursday at 10 p.m. on KCTS.)

I think they liked it

Well, reviews don't come much more glowing than David Takami's piece on Strawberry Days for the Seattle Times, calling it "superb":

Neiwert details the start of the war and its devastating aftermath for the Nikkei community, culminating in their forced removal and incarceration. The author pulls no punches: "It destroyed the livelihoods and careers of thousands of citizens, based on an unconstitutional mass presumption of guilt. It humiliated a whole population of largely loyal and patriotic citizens by identifying them with the national enemy. ... It uprooted families, destroyed their close-knit structures, and laid waste to whole communities like the one in Bellevue."

Mixing in personal stories, he includes long sections on the decisions of military and government leaders that led to the incarceration and provides numerous examples of politicians and media spouting racist hate talk.

President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, and three months later officials posted "evacuation" orders in Nikkei neighborhoods. Because they could take only what they could carry, families had to make hasty arrangements to store or get rid of a lifetime's accumulation of property, farm equipment and personal belongings. On May 20, 1942, Bellevue's 60 Nikkei families, 300 individuals, got on a train in Kirkland, ending up in a "relocation center" in Tule Lake in northern California, the largest of 10 inland concentration camps.

The government allowed Nikkei to leave the camps and return to the West Coast in 1945. Some chose to move east; those who returned often found their homes vandalized and belongings stolen. They faced a vocal and virulent reception from the usual anti-Japanese crowd, although the support of other neighbors and the undeniable bravery and sacrifice of the all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team turned the tide of public opinion. Most Nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans) went to college and left farming for other professions.

Bellevue as they knew it was forever changed. Ninety percent of Bellevue's farmers were gone after the war, Neiwert reports, and the strawberry festival, canceled after 1941, finally resumed in 1987 but with scant acknowledgement of Japanese-American contributions.

Neiwert frets, in an afterword, about his being an outsider without the cultural sensitivity to properly approach his interview subjects. He needn't have worried. His portrayals are rich and insightful, and the quotations have the authentic ring of oral history. Although Bellevue has no significant memorial to the pioneering and (literally) groundbreaking achievements of Japanese Americans, "Strawberry Days" serves as a fitting paean to their efforts and as important historical testimony.

Takami's book on the Seattle Nikkei, Divided Destiny, was an important originating source for me (early on, I used it as something of a research guidebook). So I consider this high praise indeed.

Incidentally, we had a nice crowd of about 30 people out at Village Books last Friday in Bellingham. They asked good questions, too.

This is the busy week. Tonight is the University Bookstore appearance, and on Thursday we have the Panama Cafe event, followed by Friday's Ravenna Third Place Books show. I'll report back on anything significant.

... And for those of you wondering ... yes, I did manage to finish STP in one day Saturday. Took me till 10, but it was a good day.

Strawberry Days: First reviews

The pieces on my new book, Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community, are starting to roll in, and so far they've been very positive.

The highest profile so far is from the piece by Diane de la Paz in the P-I, which is actually more in the way of a profile and interview:

Do we need yet another book about the Japanese internment during World War II?

Yes, since it's "Strawberry Days" (Palgrave, 280 pages, $29.95). In this stranger-than-fiction chronicle, veteran Seattle journalist David Neiwert boils the evacuation of 117,000 down to Bellevue, and shows how neighborhood and government forces converged to empty that town of Japanese-American farmers.

In the Seattle Weekly, the estimable J. Kingston Pierce opines:

With its journalistic perspective, Strawberry Days lacks the emotional vigor of, say, Mary Matsuda Gruenewald's new internment-camp memoir, Looking Like the Enemy. Yet David A. Neiwert, once a reporter for the Bellevue Journal-American, uses extensive interviews with ex-internees and the prior printed statements of xenophobes to re-create a wartime climate of distrust, suspicion, and fear that pushed Eastside history to one of its early turning points.

... Most of the information in Strawberry Days has been presented elsewhere. But Neiwert's research into [Miller] Freeman's role in the Japanese expulsion expands our knowledge of this Eastside "founding father." That plus an epilogue in which the author eviscerates modern revisionists who would defend the internment and dispute racism as one of its causes are, by themselves, worth the price of this book.

In the meantime, Scooter at Nod to Nothing posted a warm review too. He notes something I was a little concerned about -- the essentially added-on nature of the Epilogue -- but, like Mr. Pierce, nonetheless deems it a worthy postscript:

The last chapter, "The Internment", is an attempt to contrast the internment of the Japanese in World War II with current apologists and their calls for the legality of similar actions versus other minorities, like post-9/11 American Muslims. As such, the chapter feels slightly "tacked on", but the inclusion is a valid one (and Neiwert is foremost a journalist), particularly because it resonates with Japanese Americans. There is a wonderful anecdote about a JACL employee being contacted numerous times after 9/11 by Japanese Americans having bad dreams about internment. When you read in a previous chapter that there were "claims that the Japanese internees were being fed better in the camps than were American G.I.'s" (p. 205) you get the willies and immediately begin thinking about Guantanamo and lemon chicken (excuse me for not linking to either Malkin's pages about internment or Coulter's diatribe about chicken, I find them both offensive). That's simply not a lot of forward motion since the Dies Committee (yes, it did evolve from criticizing minorities and Nazis into the persecution of communists and the New Left).

What's nice about all these responses is that they indicate the book is fairly effective in communicating the things I was trying to say.

I'm off tonight to the wilds of Bellingham for the 7 p.m. signing at Village Books.

And I'll be out much of the weekend after that. I'm riding in the Seattle to Portland bike ride, hopefully the one-day version. If anyone else is out there, my number is 210, and I'll be aboard a blue Lemond Croix de Fer with an orca on it. I've got a red and black Native "Seawolf" design jersey. Say hello if you see me.

Far left, meet far right

One of the peculiarities of the way extremism works is that you'll often find bizarre confluences of the far right and far left, as in the cases of David Icke, Lorena Fulani and Lyndon Larouche.

A lot of people attribute this, mistakenly I think, to a kind of simplistic model in which the political spectrum becomes circular, and the far left come close to resembling the far right. That ignores an important reality: that the interests and motivations of left and right are definably distinct, even at the extremes. A better model might be a globe, in which the polar extremes do indeed resemble each other -- but nonetheless they remain a world apart. So in reality, these confluences are noteworthy just because they defy that underlying dynamic.

One of these cropped up recently in atheist circles, when the Atheist Law Center, based in Montgomery, Alabama, announced last week that it was hosting a Wednesday appearance there by the noted Holocaust denier, David Irving:

British historian David Irving, an expert on World War Two, the NAZI era and erosion of rights of a Free Press and Free Speech will speak at the Prattville Holiday Inn, Exit 179 off Interstate-65 on Wed., July 6 at 6:30 PM. Those persons wishing to attend are expected to purchase a meal from the restaurant. Call Larry Darby before 2:00 PM on Wednesday so that we may reserve a seat for you.

Irving's topic will be, "The Lipstadt Trial Five Years On: Its Methods and Achievements." This is the breathtaking inside story of Irving's British High Court action against an Atlanta professor, Deborah Lipstadt for libel in England, and how she fought back with money poured in by the usual enemies of Free Speech. Lipstadt spent 13 million dollars, paying allegedly neutral witnesses up to half a million dollars each.

Irving, who exposed the fake "Hitler Diaries" in 1983, will also speak on "The Faking of Adolf Hitler for History," a look at the numerous documents that have been faked to help provide history's present view of him.

Darby, president of the Center, urges citizens concerned about the steady erosion of liberties in the U.S. to come hear of Irving’s experiences in challenging popular history of the NAZI era and the Western world’s taboos regarding what has grown into the holocaust industry.

Media for the masses in the U.S. are self-censoring, by and large unwilling to report criticism of Judaism (the root of all theism), organized Jewry, Israel or U.S. foreign policy regarding the Jewish state. A result of this censorship of genuine issues has been the establishment in the U.S. of a void of knowledge concerning just how powerful Jewish interests, such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, are in this country.

When individuals do find the courage to challenge politically correct notions involving Judaism, they are often met with knee-jerk responses of name-calling, such as "anti-Jew" or "anti-Semitic" or, in the case of Irving, "holocaust denier." Such vicious personal attacks have an effect of quashing free expression of opinion and free inquiry into a religion or faith-based practices, even when such practices have a bearing on U.S. national security.

Yes, it really is a problem that it's become difficult to raise issues regarding the activities and roles of Israel and AIPAC in American foreign policy. Especially when the people raising those issues seem immediately to resort to crude anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial to defend their positions. Because, as I've discussed at length here previously, Irving is not only a classic Holocaust denier, he's also a fairly naked anti-Semite as well.

Well, perhaps it's not surprising to see this combined with an attack on hate-crime laws:

Possibly the greatest challenge to Free Speech in the U.S. is the spread of "hate crime" legislation, where you can be punished for your thoughts or opinions, not just your bad acts.

In the United States, at least, this is simply false. Hate-crimes laws only affect acts that are already crimes.

Well, it's important to keep the activities of the Atheist Law Center in perspective, at least. The organization appears to be pretty much a one-man operation by Larry Darby. And, judging by some of the discussion generated among other atheists by Darby's announcement, nearly everyone who has read the release has immediately begun disassociating him/herself from the Center.

As well they should. People like David Irving are about the triumph of lies and superstition, both racial and religious. If atheists are the rationalists I've traditionally encountered, they'll want nothing to do with anyone who condones him.

Friday cat blogging

This is my cat, KT, shortly after we got her in November 1988. KT stood for "Kitty Trouble" -- she had a mischievous spirit, which included hiding in boxes and riding on my shoulders.

That mellowed in a few short years, of course. Other than her fondness for sharpening her claws on the plastic sheaths of my album collection, she really wasn't much trouble at all. She became a mellow, pleasant cat who was a terrific mouser and simultaneously a saint around small children, who loved to maul her. This was an important trait when we brought our own little cat mauler into the home in 2001, just when KT was getting old and little crotchety; though a little leery at first, she soon adopted my daughter as a friend and took to taking naps with her.

She also was my constant companion when I was writing. She had a knack for jumping into my lap at about the moment I needed a break and insisting on a head rub or back scratch, and otherwise lounging in the box with a blanket it in I placed atop my desk for her.

Cats can live to ripe old ages, and KT lived till she was 17. We almost lost her a year and a half ago when her kidneys started failing and she developed an internal infection, but we managed to pull her back. A couple of weeks ago, a similar infection hit again, and this time we weren't so fortunate; she gradually went into an irreversible decline and became just a little shadow of her former self. This last Monday, I took her in and held her and stroked her and talked to her while they administered the fatal shot.

I'm not sure how long I'll miss her, but I think it will be a long time. We're not getting another (my wife has become allergic to cats), and I'm not eager to do so anyway. She was my friend, and they don't replace easily. She had a sweet, gentle, and affectionate soul. And I think what tears me up the most is that I don't think I was ever adequately able to thank her for sharing it with us.

I haven't ever Friday cat blogged before (I always thought she would be annoyed by the intrusion on her privacy), and I won't again. But I hope she won't mind this little tribute, and this little way of saying: Thanks, KT.

The spectrum of hate

It's appearing likely that recent shooting death in Seattle -- a popular tennis coach gunned down by a West Seattle roadside -- was, judging by the Seattle Times report, in fact a black-on-white hate crime:

Two days before Newport High School tennis coach Mike Robb was shot to death while driving in West Seattle, the 18-year-old suspected of killing him was walking around a nearby neighborhood with a shotgun and said that he "wanted to kill a white man," an acquaintance said yesterday.

The acquaintance, Greg Triggs, also 18, said he took a box of shotgun shells from the suspect, Samson Berhe, who was with a friend who also was armed with a shotgun. Triggs said he briefly kept one of the shotguns.

Triggs said Berhe "was always talking crazy like that." He said he didn't take the threats seriously or call police.

A similar report was made last night by KIRO-7 television. It seems the teen wasn't the only one reporting that the suspect had made these threats:

Neighbors told KIRO 7 Eyewitness News the teen said he had a grudge against white people.

"He always say that he (was) gonna kill all the white people in the world," said Anna Bell Perkins. "Samson had, like, some sort of complex against Caucasian people. And he said he wanted to kill them all and told me I could watch," said another neighbor.

The P-I report has further details:

Samson Berhe twisted up his face, drooled and spoke in different voices to the two detectives questioning him about the shooting of a popular tennis coach, at one point flexing his muscles and challenging them to a fight.

In court documents filed yesterday, police say the teen called the detectives "all you haters," and, when asked to explain what he meant, punctuated his reply with an expletive: "all you ... white people!"

Berhe is now charged with first-degree murder in the death of Mike Robb, a popular Newport High School tennis coach who was shot Sunday in his car in West Seattle. Berhe was taken from King County's youth center to the adult jail yesterday, his 18th birthday.

Seattle police -- who'd dealt with the teen five times in the week before the shooting -- say he'd told neighbors he wanted to kill a white person or a police officer. One neighbor said Berhe, who is black, claimed at least a dozen times that he was "going to kill all the white people."

One of his friends -- a man whom police encountered with Berhe just hours before the shooting -- recalled Berhe stating it as an apparent mission:

"I got to shoot a cop or shoot a white person, you know, before I leave this world."

It's worth noting, of course, that none of these reports discuss this as a hate crime. That's fairly typical of the real lack of understanding among most working journalists of the nature of hate crimes.

Judging from the facts we know so far, this is an extremely disturbing case. The victim, a highly regarded Newport High tennis coach named Mike Robb, evidently pulled over on his way back from officiating an event on the other side of Puget Sound to assist the suspect, who it appears was faking automotive distress, and then hit him point blank in the head with a shotgun. It doesn't get much lower than that.

However, according to the Times report, there may have been a little more than just racial hatred at play:

Triggs' 46-year-old mother, Kelly, said Berhe was troubled. "He'd get all drugged up and say he was the Messiah," she said. "He'd say he wanted to see what it was like to kill someone."

Similarly, there's this in the P-I report:

Meanwhile, information from police and court papers show a teen with mental health problems. A week before the shooting, Berhe's mother told officers that the teen's doctor had taken him off his medication for mental illness, according to police.

These cases always become more complicated when there is a mental-illness issue involved, as there was in the Buford Furrow case. In one case in Montana, involving a mentally ill white man who walked up and gunned down a black man at rest stop in front of his family, no hate-crime charges were ever pursued; the man was simply institutionalized in the state mental hospital.

Regardless of the outcome in terms what kind of justice the perpetrator will face, this story drives home one of the real truths about hatred -- not just racial hatred, but all kinds of hatred of The Other: It is a festering toxin that infects all our lives and brings ruin to our homes.

It brings to mind another recent case involving a hate crime in an Illinois suburb:

Two men face hate crime charges in connection with the beating of two teenagers last week at the Illinois Beach State Park in suburban Zion.
Prosecutors say 29-year-old Patrick Langballe and 20-year-old Aaron Rush attacked two teenaged girls after the girls told the men they were lesbians. Officials say the men told the girls they were part of a neo-Nazi group.

Langballe is from north suburban Winnetka. He was convicted of vandalism charges after painting swastikas on a temple in Northfield back in 1997.

There's a similar report from a CBS affiliate:

Officials say one of the men made a sexual advance toward one of the girls when she told him she was a lesbian and in a relationship with the other girl.

The suspects allegedly told the girls they were Nazi skinheads and did not like homosexuals.

A fight broke out and left one girl with minor injuries.

This is, of course, only a relatively minor assault. But what's noteworthy about this is that neo-Nazis are typically understood to attack blacks and other ethnic minorities, especially Jews. That is, we tend to think of their hatred as primarily racial and ethnic hatred.

This is why, I think, so many evangelicals feel safe waging a holy war against homosexuals: that's a different kind of discrimination, they claim. It's based on moral beliefs, they argue -- as have, of course, centuries' worth of other haters, both racial and religious.

What all these stories sadly underscore is something we often forget: hate is no respecter of boundaries. It comes in all shapes and colors. Once the poison of xenophobic hatred contaminates the community well, it crosses those boundaries in ways that cannot be predicted, except for their inevitably awful outcomes.

It's always worth remembering that the chief practitioners of this kind of hatred for most of the history of this country have been white Christians. But the truth is that racial, ethnic, and religious hatred have been with us for most of the history of mankind. Hate begets hate begets hate. Who knows where it started?

All we do know is that, if we want it to stop, we need to break the cycle of hate. If we want it to end it, we have to end it now.

Some notes on Strawberry Days

Well, things are starting to bubble up for my new book, Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community, released earlier this month by Palgrave Macmillan.

I'm still waiting for the first newspaper reviews to begin appearing (the Seattle Times review is scheduled for July 10). In the meantime, both Sasha at Left in SF and Richard Estes at American Leftist -- who recently interviewed me on his KDVS-FM radio show -- have published nice reviews of the book on their respective blogs.

A couple of notes on these: Sasha mentions that she wishes the book had more about the actual camp experience. It's a reasonable point; I had a great deal more material I could have used on that account. But this aspect of the story is probably the one that has been written about most extensively, including such classics of the genre as Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's Farewell to Manzanar. For narrative purposes, I decided to provide primarily a broad overview of the camp experience, combined with a number of telling details from the experiences of my interviewees.

Richard mentions another aspect of the book:

Perhaps, Neiwert's most impressive achievement is an understated tone that allows the experiences of his Nisei interviewees to shine. In this instance, narrative style possesses an importance beyond the literary. Anyone with the most glancing familiarity with a Japanese American community is aware that a publicly low-key, modest demeanor (regardless of the actual truth in private) was considered de rigeur. Modernist and post-modernist methods of storytelling may be a creative way of producing a ground breaking biography of John Brown, sociological insight into the history of Los Angeles or a compelling oral history of the Spanish Civil War, but utilizing such techniques to describe the Japanese American community of Bellevue would have been a grave cultural error.

I wish I had in fact been this thoughtful in my approach, but the truth is that I kept the writing as spare and direct as I could for a couple of reasons: (1) I didn't want my writing to get in the way of the story that my interviewees had to tell, and I wanted it to reflect the tone of their own telling of the story; (2) that's how I strive to write generally. I'm something of a product of the Norman Maclean/Raymond Carver school of writing, and this book -- produced over many years as it was -- is probably the most polished piece I've published. No doubt my long exposure to the cultural inclinations of my subjects helped me along the way, though.

I should also mention another signing event, this one on Thursday, July 14, at the Panama Hotel Cafe in Seattle's International District, sponsored by Kinokuniya Books. I'm very excited about this one because of the historicity of the locale -- it's a very cool old building -- and the likelihood that a number of folks who were in the camps are likely to be in the audience. Many thanks to Takami Nieda at Kinokuniya for setting this one up.

Finally, I'm trying to cobble together a self-sponsored West Coast tour, and I'm proceeding with arrangements for signings in the Bay Area and San Diego. But I'd like to ask my readers for help in two other locales: Portland and Los Angeles.

The problem in Portland is that Powell's completely dominates the author-event scene there, and they've evidently decided I'm not important enough to host; when I inquired about a signing at one of their stores, they informed me they received too many requests and were declining. So, for my Portland readers who'd like to see me do a signing there, I have two requests:

-- Contact Powell's and urge them to reconsider. You can either call their main number (503-228-4651) or e-mail the person in charge of author events: michael@powells.com.

-- Failing that, I'd like some suggestions for another bookstore with enough size to host an author event. So far I haven't found one.

Finally, in Los Angeles, the number of bookstores is overwhelming. I'm wondering if any of my LA-area readers could suggest some stores to inquire with.

Thanks, and happy reading.

Who's weak on terror?

One of the cornerstones of the Republican attack on liberals as "weak on terrorism" -- voiced most notoriously by Karl Rove last week, but really a constant and building theme since 9/11 -- is the notion that the Bush administration has been aggressive and "resolute" in tackling this threat.

Like most Republican themes these days, it is unadulterated bullshit. It pretends that the arrogant imposition of a long-planned policy is the same as resolve, and that the careless use of military power is the same as aggressiveness. It also pretends that all of these, somehow, are an adequate substitute for real competence.

The reality is that the Bush administration has foregone a serious and effective campaign against terrorism by pursuing an unrelated military misadventure that will, in the long run, weaken our national defense -- especially against terrorist attacks.

I've made this point several times previously. The recent resurgence of the "liberals are weak on terror" theme -- inspired, no doubt, by the Bush administration's reported panic over its sinking poll numbers and the steady drumbeat of worsening news out of Iraq -- makes it even more pertinent.

Most people with real experience in combating terrorism are perfectly aware of this. They know that, before 9/11 Bush did not take terrorism seriously (and if there was any question of that, we need only reflect briefly on the remarkable record of inaction -- except, of course, for brush-clearing on the Bush ranch -- after the Aug. 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing). They also know that after 9/11, he hasn't approached it seriously either. Bush has chosen instead to use "terra" as a club for advancing his political agenda while continually undermining and ignoring the difficult and intricate work that fighting terrorism in a serious fashion requires.

One of these people is former FBI agent Mike German, who specialized in cracking domestic-terrorism plots. I've posted on German's work previously. He recently sat for an interview with Amy Goodman (which should be read in its entirety) in which he said this:

I don't think that, you know, you're ever going to stop terrorism. You know, and part of the problem is, we use one word to describe very many different things, you know, whether it's the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, or the D.C. snipers or, you know, organized white supremacist groups and organized foreign terrorist groups. We're certainly never going to stop terrorism altogether. You know, I think we just have to try to do the best we can to prevent as many acts as we can, and it requires really a lot of proactive work. And I think one of the big problems is after 9/11, there was generated this idea that criminal law enforcement is somehow ineffective in preventing terrorist attacks.

Well, my two cases prove that you could prevent terrorist attacks. I mean, in both of my cases, we actually used criminal law enforcement techniques to prevent acts of terrorism. And unfortunately, the way the intelligence reform has gone has moved from criminal law enforcement to this intelligence model. Well, you know, basically the problem in 9/11 was the American public had no idea how dysfunctional the F.B.I. counterterrorism program had become, but now we're under this intelligence model, we actually know even less about what the government is doing to protect us from terrorism. You know, there's less accountability in the F.B.I., and I certainly know that there are problems, and I reported those problems to Congress, but so far, Congress hasn't been able to even get to the bottom of what I reported to them over a year ago.

So, there's just no oversight, and those things are really the problems. And until we fix what is internally wrong in the F.B.I., I don't think it's going to change. I think that we're still at great risk. You know, the 9/11 Commission found that the big problems were the F.B.I. had a poor ability to analyze intelligence that was coming in from the street, that they didn't share information well, and they didn't have a computerized system to share information, even among agents. And just last week, the 9/11 Commission discourse project came out and told us that -- gave us their report card, and it was that the F.B.I. still doesn't have an analytic capability, it still isn't sharing information in the intelligence community, and it still doesn't have a computer system. That's four years after 9/11.

So when attack dogs like Rush Limbaugh and Rove accuse Democrats of being "soft on terrorism" and remark: "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," it is yet another mirror-image, Bizarro World reversal of reality.

The reality: When liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attack, they wanted to prepare an effective, nimble response combining military action with intelligence-gathering and law enforcement, as well as addressing the root causes of terrorism; conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and simply prepared to sell George W. Bush as a "war president."

Turns out they were pretty good at that. But fighting terror? These guys make Larry, Moe and Curly look like icons of competence.