After a brief interlude of carefully-composed panic, we got busy looking at Craig’s List, and discovered that, actually, there’s plenty of good stuff in our price range in the parts of Brooklyn we’d like to live in. Fast forward through an extensive and highly scientific search process (sextant, calipers, telescope, Geiger counter), and the upshot is, we’re leaving Park Slope and moving three stops south to Sunset Park, trading our dingy cramped apartment in a building held together with paint for a large, light-filled, and freshly renovated row house about ten doors down from the hills and weeping angels of Green-Wood Cemetery.
Of course, all of this has been a large and unplanned-for distraction, which means both of us are even more behind on returning phone calls and answering email than usual, to say nothing of updating weblogs. Can’t be helped. On the bright side, all that’s left now is the actual move. This has been Packing Week. This Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, if any of our New York-area friends and/or readers would like to help move the high-tech chromium-steel-and-glass headquarters of nielsenhayden.com, they should email us for details. Food and drink will be provided, along with the entertaining company of such literary reprobates as may also be along for the ride. Plus, toting boxes in and out of U-Haul trucks! Such a deal.
Before the war, for instance, there was a loud debate among intelligence analysts over the information provided to the Pentagon by Iraqi opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi and defectors linked to him. Yet little of this seeped into the press. Not until September 29, 2003, for instance, did the New York Times get around to informing readers about the controversy over Chalabi and the defectors associated with him. In a front-page article headlined “Agency Belittles Information Given by Iraqi Defectors,” Douglas Jehl reported that a study by the Defense Intelligence Agency had found that most of the information provided by defectors connected to Ahmed Chalabi “was of little or no value.” Several defectors introduced to US intelligence by the Iraqi National Congress, Jehl wrote, “invented or exaggerated their credentials as people with direct knowledge of the Iraqi government and its suspected unconventional weapons program.”“Not Fit to Print,” by James C. Moore, Salon, May 27, 2004:Why, I wondered, had it taken the Times so long to report this? Around the time that Jehl’s article appeared, I ran into a senior editor at the Times and asked him about it. Well, he said, some reporters at the paper had relied heavily on Chalabi as a source and so were not going to write too critically about him.
It turned out that the aluminum tubes were covered with an anodized coating, which would have been machined off to make them usable in a centrifuge. But that change in the thickness of the tube wall would have rendered the tubes useless for a centrifuge, according to a number of nuclear scientists who spoke publicly after [Judith] Miller’s story. Aluminum, which has not been used in uranium gas separators since the 1950s, has been replaced by steel. The tubes, in fact, were almost certainly intended for use as rocket bodies. Hussein’s multiple-launch rocket systems had rusted on their pads and he had ordered the tubes from Italy. “Medusa 81,” the Italian rocket model name, was stamped on the sides of the tubes, and in a factory north of Baghdad, American intelligence officers later discovered boxes of rocket fins and motors awaiting the arrival of the tubes of terror.“Media Mix,” by Peter Johnson, USA Today, May 26, 2004:The probable source for Miller’s story, in addition to U.S. intelligence operatives, was Adnan Ihsan Saeed, an Iraqi defector Miller was introduced to by Chalabi. Miller had quoted him in a December 2001 report when Saeed had told her he had worked on nuclear operations in Iraq and that there were at least 20 banned-weapons facilities undergoing repairs. Of course, no such facilities have been found—meaning Saeed was either lying or horribly uninformed. […]
The Times plays an unequaled role in the national discourse, and when it publishes a front-page piece about aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds, that story very quickly runs away from home to live on its own. The day after Miller’s tubes narrative showed up, Andrea Mitchell of NBC News went on national TV to proclaim, “They were the kind of tubes that could only be used in a centrifuge to make nuclear fuel.” Norah O’Donnell had already told the network’s viewers the day before of the “alarming disclosure,” and the New York Times wire service distributed Miller’s report to dozens of papers across the landscape. Invariably, they gave it prominence. Sadly, the sons and daughters of America were sent marching off to war wearing the boots of a well-told and widely disseminated lie.
Martin Kaplan, dean of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, says that “for people who are serious and thoughtful, the Times is a gatekeeper of quality in terms of what’s credible and believable. When it published those pieces, it sent signals which legitimized our going to war and calmed people’s fears that we were rushing. It turns out that the Times was hoodwinked just like the rest of the country.”Get Your War On:
Sean Baker was a member of the Kentucky National Guard from 1989 to 1997. During that time, he served in the Gulf War. In the late 90’s, he got out of the Guard, but re-enlisted after September 11th.Nothing wrong with our military culture, though! Just a few bad apples.In January 2003, Baker was a member of the 438th Military Police company in Operation Enduring Freedom at Guantanamo Bay, where he says he was “given a direct order by an officer in the U.S. Army” to play the role of a detainee for a training exercise.
“I was on duty as an MP in an internal camp where the detainees were housed,” said Baker.
Baker claims that he was ordered to put on one of the orange jumpsuits worn by the detainees. “At first I was reluctant, but he said ‘you’ll be fine…put this on.’ And I did,” said Baker.
Baker says what took place next happened at the hands of four U.S. soldiers—soldiers he believes didn’t know he was one of them—has changed his life forever.
“They grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and unfortunately one of the individuals got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me while I was face down,” said Baker. “Then he—the same individual—reached around and began to choke me and press my head down against the steel floor. After several seconds, 20 to 30 seconds, it seemed like an eternity because I couldn’t breath. When I couldn’t breath, I began to panic and I gave the code word I was supposed to give to stop the exercise, which was ‘red.’”
But, Baker says, the beating didn’t stop. “That individual slammed my head against the floor and continued to choke me,” he said. “Somehow I got enough air, I muttered out, ‘I’m a U.S. soldier, I’m a U.S. soldier.’”
Baker says it wasn’t until one of the soldiers noticed what Baker was wearing did the exercise stop. “He saw that I had BDUs and boots on.”
Nearly 15 months after that day, and countless medical treatments at Walter Reed Hospital, Baker is now medically retired from the military, but still suffers.
“I sustained an injury to my brain, a traumatic brain injury which has caused me to have a seizure disorder I deal with daily,” said Baker.
Baker’s traumatic brain injury is outlined in a military document in his possession, which says the injury “was due to soldier playing role as a detainee who was uncooperative.”
(Via Looka!, which is full of much more cheerful posts about food and drink, all reminders that even among monstrousness life is worth living.)
Unfortunately, they’re us:
Her plight began on Jan. 30 at 2:30 a.m., when two U.S. Humvees pulled up to the door of her family’s house as an Apache helicopter circled overhead. The soldiers asked for her father, Abdullah, 66, an American-educated geologist. Moayad insists that she does not know what U.S. forces wanted from her father, whom she described as a low-level Baath party official.When will the civilized world realize that there can be no compromise with those who practice terrorism?Moayad told the soldiers that her father had gone to neighboring Jordan to undergo surgery for prostate cancer and she showed them his medical records. They arrested the only other man in the house: Moayad’s husband. As her mother and children started to cry, Moayad said the troops told the family that they just wanted to ask Ibrahim some questions and they promised to bring him back the next day. […]
On Feb. 17, Moayad said, a group of soldiers knocked on her door and delivered a handwritten letter from Ibrahim. It said he was being transferred from a U.S. base in Baghdad to Abu Ghraib prison “until the arrival of my father-in-law.” […]
Moayad has made the 40-mile roundtrip journey from Baghdad to Abu Ghraib 18 times. On most visits, she stood outside the gates with other family members waiting in vain for information about their relatives. One soldier who felt sorry for her looked up Ibrahim’s name on the prison’s computer system and told her that he was marked as a detainee with “intel value.”
Moayad, whose patchwork English is the legacy of her Texas childhood, doesn’t know what “intelligence value” means and how it might affect her husband’s status. But the Red Cross report documented a pattern of abuses—including humiliation, hooding and threats of execution—against Iraqi prisoners deemed to have an intelligence value.
“The American soldiers kept on telling me, ‘Bring your father, and you will get your husband back,’” said Moayad, her soft voice trailing off. “How can they say that he’s not a hostage?”
On May 15, her 18th visit to Abu Ghraib, Moayad finally got to see her husband. Ibrahim told her he was being well treated, but he said that military officials had forced him to write the letter pleading for his father-in-law to surrender.
In a related development, it has been brought to our attention that the state of Texas should probably not actually be “sawed off the mainland and pushed out to sea.” Electrolite regrets the error.
Elsewhere, Electrolite is entertained to find itself included in a list of scholars who blog. Electrolite is now entertaining suggestions as to what we’re a “scholar” in. Along with fellow scholar Avedon Carol, we will be setting up shop as a full-fledged academic movement just as soon as this question has been fully answered to our satisfaction.
Brooks has faith—literally—in democracy: “if we muddle through in Iraq and some semidemocratic nation slowly emerges, it won’t be because of American skill. It will be because the democratic creed is so strong it can withstand the highest incompetence.” He believes in American democracy the way an evangelist believes in his religion—which is exactly how the American Founding Fathers didn’t believe in democracy. Brooks seems to be saying that if we can make democracy work, then it works because it didn’t need us to make it work. This, of course, doesn’t make any sense. Then again, it’s quite familiar. Imagine the professional athlete who trains his whole life and then wins the big game, only to turn around and say “I didn’t win this. God wanted me to win.” Um, no—you trained really hard. If you didn’t train really hard, you wouldn’t have won. God is rather irrelevant. Likewise, if democracy works in Iraq, it’s because everybody made it work.Work like you were living in the early days of a better nation.I don’t think any idea is so good that “it can withstand the highest incompetence.” Jesus didn’t tell his disciples to sit around and do nothing: he gave them specific instructions and he told them that His message would only take hold if they made it work. Mohammed was the same. Faith is not enough. It may be well and good if your idea has transcendent validity, but in the end it will only appear transcendently valid if some very competent people put it into practice with skill and precision.