Month: October 2010

Iraq War Logs

October 26, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

This weekend Wikileaks released the Iraq War Logs – 40,000 “Significant Incident Reports” from the period of 2004-2009 that together tell the most detailed story of the war in Iraq during that time.

As was the case with the Afghan War Logs, a number of news media outlets received advanced access to the documents and extensive competing coverage can be found in the The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Der Spiegel, and last and least, The New York Times, which decided to lead with a hit piece on the personality of the founder of Wikileaks, rather than on what the war logs themselves reveal.  CNN played the same game.  (Not suprising, of course, from an institutions that were essential to enabling the war itself.)

Like Afghan War wikileak, there is so much to read, so video summaries can be useful:  The Guardian has a short video on prevalence of “Frago 242″, which is a “fragmentary order” not to investigate torture, and some of the consequences thereof. Al Jazeera presents an hour long special here.  And here is good highlight reel from U.K. Channel 4′s current affairs program, “Dispatches“:

The U.N.’s chief torture investigator thinks there is torture to investigate, and reminds Obama of his legal obligation to do so.  Dig through the logs yourself here.

Image Censorship in Iraq

October 21, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Bag News has a nice piece  in which photojournalist Michael Kamber talks about his experiences with military censorship of images in Iraq:

By the way, the idea that photographers are blocked from taking pictures of detainees in order to protect the detainees rights is a nice example of how the U.S. cynically employs its most lofty ideals in support of  its dark imperial agenda.

CA Prop 23 (2010)

October 20, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Prop 23, initially and primarily funded by two Texas oil corporations (Valero and Tesoro), would suspend the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB32) until unemployment drops to 5.5% for four quarters.

If it passes, Prop 23 will require that the State of California abandon the implementation of comprehensive greenhouse-gas-reduction program, and drop the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

Proponents argue that the measure will help preserve jobs, and that preserving jobs should take precedence over addressing the climate crisis. Opponents say that overturning AB32 will result in more air pollution, undermine the burgeoning clean clean energy sector, and reduce incentives to find alternatives to oil.  Also, there is mistrust of the motives of the measure’s sponsors, who happen to be among California’s worst polluters.

Here is an argument against Prop 23 in action-movie format, written and directed by respected acquaintance M. Cooke:

Unaccountable Rice: More of Obama’s “Looking Forward” and Stewart’s Sycophancy

October 19, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

In 2003, acting as W. Bush’s “National Security Advisor”, Condoleeza Rice was one of the most vocal and mendacious fear mongers pushing for the “pre-emptive” invasion of Iraq:

We know that he has the infrastructure, nuclear scientists to make a nuclear weapon…. we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

Around the same time, Rice also chaired the White House meetings in which “combined interrogation techniques”, i.e. torture, were approved:

Then-National Security Advisor Rice, sources said, was decisive. Despite growing policy concerns — shared by Powell — that the program was harming the image of the United States abroad, sources say she did not back down, telling the CIA: “This is your baby. Go do it.”

Thus did Rice help to unleash a shameful decade of war and torture. At least  a hundred thousand people, perhaps as many as a million and a half, died as a result of the war that she enabled, not to mention the untold numbers of wounded and displaced; Torture is now as American as apple pie, to the enduring shame of us all.

But that doesn’t stop President “Look Forward, Not Backward” from inviting the war criminal to advise him.

And it doesn’t stop corporate shill and professional “moderate” sycophant John Stewart from playing patty-cake with her on the Daily Show, helping the should-be-disgraced Rice reinvent herself and promote her new autobiography.

See also here.

Totally Non-Nazi Penis Scraping

October 12, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

In the late 1940s, just as Nazi doctors who had experimented on human subjects were being condemned to death by U.S. military tribunals at Nuremberg, U.S. doctors were themselves experimenting on human subjects not only in Tuskegee, but also, we now find out, in Guatemala.

By now, every school child has heard (or should have heard) about the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment, in which the U.S. “Public Health Service” withheld penicillin from syphilitic African-American men for the sake of a scientific study, with deadly results, even decades after penicillin became the standard treatment.

Now it comes to light that some of the same doctors were actually actively infecting Guatemalans with the disease.

According to the Susan Reverby, the medical historian who broke the story, the doctors chose Guatemala for their dark enterprise because prostitution was legal there, so in order to spread the disease they could simply hire syphilitic prostitutes to sleep with unsuspecting men in insane asylums.  But since this didn’t spread the disease quickly enough, they decided to scrape the inmates’ penises to facilitate the spread of the disease.  Reverby explains:

Syphilis is not an easy—there’s a reason it’s a sexually transmitted disease. You can’t just draw blood from someone who has syphilis and give it to somebody else. You actually have to create an inoculum. The disease—the bacteria that causes the disease can die when it’s in the air, which is why it has to pass through liquids and body fluids, primarily. And that’s why it’s sexually transmitted. So they created an inoculum using the ground-up testes of rabbits that already had the disease, and then they abraded or scraped the arms of people in the prison and in an insane asylum and in an army barracks. They used their arms. They used their cheeks. They also looked for men, frankly—I mean, this is the really, to me, absolutely unbelievable part that makes it look like a B-movie—they found men who had long foreskins. They took their penises. They moved the foreskin back. They abraded the head of the penis. They made the inoculum and put it on a little cotton—what’s called a pledget, or piece of cotton gauze. They held the penis for an hour and a half or two hours and hoped that they could transfer the infection this way.

These two “doctors” both conducted syphilis experiments on human subjects, and are themselves the subjects of a PBS Nova documentary called “The Deadly Deception“.  Dr. John Heller, on the right, who headed the Tuskegee study at the US Public Health Service in the ’40s, promoted penicillin as a treatment for syphilis at the same time as he “continued the policy of denying treatment to the [black] men in Macon County” even in the face of “undisputed evidence that men were dying, no penicillin was offered.”

Dr. John Colter, on the right, was involved in both the Tuskegee and Guatemalan experiments.  Even decades after the experiments ended, he defended the decision not to withhold treatment from people suffering from the disease:

It was important that they were supposedly untreated, and it would be undesirable to go ahead and use large amounts of penicillin to treat the disease, because you’d interfere with the study.

The power of self-exceptionalism is such that these doctors not only failed to recognize the subjects of their experiments as fellow human beings — they were black and brown and poor, after all — but they couldn’t even perceive themselves in the mirror of the Nazi doctors condemned to death at Nuremberg.  Historian Jim Jones relates this story about Heller:

I asked him specifically about Nuremberg and whether that gave him any pause. And he said, “Absolutely not.” I asked him if—whether he ever drew any associations between what they were doing and what the Nazis had done, and he said, “Certainly not.” And then he looked at me with a kind of wounded innocence and said, “They were Nazis.”

Smelling the Trees

October 10, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

If Los Angeles has a future, it will include much more of this:

CicLAvia was the shit! Biking around the city without fearing for your life? No exhaust in your face and you can actually smell the trees!

I often imagine a car-free L.A., and this is the closest I’ve come to actually seeing it. It’s beautiful.

So great, that I am creating a new post category called “Solutions”.

“There are no Palestinians”

October 3, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

I have a family friend who recently returned from a trip to Israel.  Apparently, she was concerned about the critical stance I take towards that particular nation state and so forwarded me a piece written by Weekly Standard comedian Larry Miller  (but often mistakenly attributed to Fox news comedian Dennis Miller), in which the author claims that “there are no Palestinians“:

The Palestinians want their own country. There’s just one thing about that: There are no Palestinians. It’s a made up word. Israel was called Palestine for two thousand years. Like “Wiccan,” “Palestinian” sounds ancient but is really a modern invention. Before the Israelis won the land in war, Gaza was owned by Egypt, and there were no “Palestinians” then, and the West Bank was owned by Jordan, and there were no “Palestinians” then. As soon as the Jews took over and started growing oranges as big as basketballs, what do you know, say hello to the “Palestinians,” weeping for their deep bond with their lost “land” and “nation.” So for the sake of honesty, let’s not use the word “Palestinian” any more to describe these delightful folks, who dance for joy at our deaths until someone points out they’re being taped. Instead, let’s call them what they are: “Other Arabs From The Same General Area Who Are In Deep Denial About Never Being Able To Accomplish Anything In Life And Would Rather Wrap Themselves In The Seductive Melodrama Of Eternal Struggle And Death.” I know that’s a bit unwieldy to expect to see on CNN. How about this, then: “Adjacent Jew-Haters.”

I hadn’t read the piece before, but it has been passed along certain circles since it was first published in April 2002. Although it is an older piece, I think it encapsulates a very central world problem that I return to again and again on this blog: the toxic distinction between the good and honorable and worthy “US”, and the vile and immoral and worthless “THEM”.

Here is how I responded:

Well, I have never been to Israel and would be interested to hear about your experiences — but I feel I have to respond to the content of what you sent me.

In short, and to be frank, I find Miller’s rant ugly and racist in the extreme – and typical of the kind of binary us/them thinking that was boosted in the wake of 9-11, and which continues to infect our culture.

This binary thinking is a deeply rooted ideology of the state and of the media, generally speaking, and therefore of many – perhaps most – citizens.  According to this ideology human beings are evaluated according to whether they fit into category “us” or category “them”.

This distinction between “us” and “them” is expressed in many forms, of course — white/black, rich/poor, American/non-American, Jew/Arab, etc. — but regardless of the particular expression, the application of this distinction (by the state / media / citizenry) has real world consequences that can be measured in terms of human suffering: to avenge 3,000 or so U.S. citizens, for example, it is justified to end the lives of hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million or more, Iraqi citizens. That neither Iraq nor its citizens had anything to do with the death of the 3,000 U.S. citizens is not perceived as relevant, since after all they fall into the broad category of “them”.

Miller’s rant goes beyond even this toxic distinction — not only are the people under Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank to be understood as “them”, but they are to be denied even the category of existence: “There are no Palestinians.”  The argument he presents – that “Palestinian” is a made up word – would, by parity of reasoning, also deny existence to Mexicans, for example, since “Mexican” is also a “modern invention”.  (It should be too obvious to point out that this argument can just as easily be applied the ontological status of “Israelis”.)

THEY, in Miller’s understanding, are “Adjacent Jew-Haters” who don’t want self determination but do want “a big pile of dead Jews”.  According to Miller’s worldview, there is no relevant distinction to be made between suicide bombers and schoolchildren, or even between the people under Israeli occupation and “all the other Jew-Haters” — namely the “five hundred million Arabs” who live on this planet.  Miller’s  broad category “they” is designed to render invisible stark distinctions to be found between “Arabs” in terms of nationality, culture, religion, ideology, gender, etc.

For Miller, as for other xenophobes, “they” are an essentially inferior kind of human being, and should be evaluated accordingly.

“Arabs” by definition are the kind of people who commit acts of terrorism an spread lies and dance for joy at the murder of innocents.  “Jews” are by definition the kind of people it is impossible to imagine doing these things – even in the face of clear evidence to the contrary.

Miller’s final word is to point out that if “America” was being attacked as frequently as Israel, that “we” would be clamoring for the extinction of “everything south of the Mediterranean and east of the Jordan.”  He points this out in order to excuse Israel’s belligerence, as if what “we” would clamor for in that situation would be just, and as if there are no legitimate grievances among the human beings populating Miller’s kill zone.

A Criticism of Sam Harris on the “Problem of Islam”

October 1, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

As the Park 51 controversy was being manufactured, prominent atheist Sam Harris wrote an article for the Washington Post arguing against the construction of an Islamic community center on the site.

Mr. Harris’ position in a nutshell is that although there are (and should be) no legal grounds to oppose the building of a mosque in lower Manhattan, it would nevertheless be in poor taste because Muslims believe in a particularly offensive book of myths and that the mosque would “be viewed by many millions of Muslims as a victory — and as a sign that the liberal values of the West are synonymous with decadence and cowardice.”

First, I’m not too convinced that the “problem of Islam” is categorically different from the problem of Judaism or Christianity. Harris thinks that there are “obvious historical reasons why [the Old Testament] inspires far less Jewish and Christian violence today.” He doesn’t give any specific examples, however, and in any case I don’t agree that Islam inspires more violence than Judaism or Christianity. The invasion of Iraq, for example, was originally framed in terms of a Crusade — no doubt an important justification in the hearts of many a Christian soldier. And I honestly don’t expect al-Qaeda ever to achieve anything close to the death toll resulting from that particular world historical crime. And Harris merely waves his hands over ongoing Zionist crimes in Palestine.

Secondly, regarding the argument that building a mosque would be taken as a symbol of victory among “Muslims”, and that they would thereby think that liberal values of religious tolerance are decadent and cowardly — I don’t understand this at all. I mean, who the fuck cares how it might be evaluated by this or that group? Either it is just to protect religious freedoms or it isn’t. If some group interprets a commitment to religious tolerance as a sign of weakness, are we supposed to reflexively agree with them? I mean, Harris doesn’t want to agree with jihadis about anything else — why this?

Moreover, I’m also not convinced that the construction of the mosque will be such a boon to jihadis. I rather expect that strengthening traditions of religious tolerance and pluralism will undermine extreme opposition to the “West” because it undermines the impression that such Enlightenment ideals are only employed cynically and hypocritically.

Thirdly, even though he is careful to say that there should be no legal obstacle in the way of building a Mosque in lower Manhattan, this categorically unique “problem of Islam” talk can just as easily be applied to other ideological positions — something about which the Atheist Harris should be wary. For example, I have heard similar arguments leveled against the particular “problem of Atheism” — that it is impossible to be moral as an atheist, that the greatest mass murderers in history were atheists, etc.

Someone defending Harris’ thesis might counter that the supposedly unique “problem of Islam” arises out of the particulars of the Qu’ran and Islamic traditions.  And of course it is true that there are certain features of the tradition that present particular problems, such as a stringent doctrinal opposition to any “separation of church and state”.

But while it is true that the letter of Islamic law, so to speak, endorse dark enterprises – killing infidels, etc. – so too do the books of Moses encourage the indiscriminate slaughter of non-Jews in the pursuit of establishing a religious kingdom.

But just as Jews aren’t some monolithic entity that all interpret and respond to their tradition in the same way, so too with Muslims. Communities of “Muslims” respond to and interpret their tradition in wildly different ways over time and space – just as do Jews and Christians.

To take it from a different angle: Let’s grant that it is true that there is no separation of Church and State according to the Qu’ran and to Islamic tradition generally. But what is the relevance of this fact? Is it meant to suggest that every person who calls themselves a “Muslim” today wants to take over the civil institutions and establish Shari’a law? It is a caricature, I submit. Just as it would be a caricature to suggest that every (male) Jew today believes that it is his duty to impregnate his daughters if that is the only practical way to acquire an heir.

The Qu’ran, read literally as the word of God whispered into a particular man’s ear by the Angel Gabriel, is essentially problematic. This post is not meant to defend Islam on its own terms – I just doubt Harris’ claim that Islam is essentially different from the other Abrahamic religions in terms of the problems arising from the doctrinal / exegetical particularities of each.

It is important to be on guard against such arguments.  It is too easy to think of “them” as categorically different then “us”, and such thinking is requisite to justify the incoherent U.S.-led global war on terror, which for a decade has rained death and misery upon untold numbers of Muslims in at least 5 countries, and has undermined the civil liberties of Muslims here in the U.S.