“Without a comprehensive, independent investigation into the United States’ torture and ill-treatment of detainees, the conditions remain for further abuses to occur, Amnesty International warned today as it released a 200-page report cataloguing the United States’ three-year descent into the use of torture. The report was released 6 months after CBS News first broadcast the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib. […] “‘Many questions remain unanswered, responsible individuals are beyond the scope of investigation, policies that facilitate torture remain in place, and prisoners continue to be held in secret detention,’ said Dr. William F. Schulz, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA. ‘The failure to substantially change policy and practice after the scandal of Abu Ghraib leaves the US government completely lacking in credibility when it asserts its opposition to torture.’ “In the report […] the organization documents the pattern of human rights violations that run from Afghanistan to Abu Ghraib via Guantç–£amo Bay and extend to ‘secret’ overseas detention facilities. It outlines how, despite the administration’s claims that the atrocities of September 11, 2001, ushered in a ‘new paradigm’ requiring ‘new thinking,’ the US has fallen into a historically familiar pattern of violating human rights in the name of national security.” (full text here; my emphasis) Update (11 Nov 04): One of the key architects of the systematic and widespread human rights violations is about to become US Attorney General.
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We got an answer for the question posed earlier: Yes, the public are idiots.
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This is big: The Economist - the magazine for people who believe you can eat money - endorses Kerry and calls Bush incompetent on its cover. This despite the fact that they support the Iraq invasion (citing the usual phony reasons).
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“The essential cruelty of Bush’s game is that he takes an astonishingly selfish and greedy collection of economic and political proposals then cloaks it with a phony moral authority, thus misleading many Americans who have a deep and genuine desire to do good in the world. And in the process he convinces them to lend unquestioning support for proposals that actually hurt their families and their communities. Bush has stolen the symbolism and body language of religion and used it to disguise the most radical effort in American history to take what rightfully belongs to the citizenry of America and give as much as possible to the already wealthy and privileged, who look at his agenda and say, as Dick Cheney said to Paul O’Neill, ‘this is our due.’” - Al Gore
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As if this wasn’t already obvious: “When the federal government issues a terrorist warning, presidential approval ratings jump, a Cornell University sociologist finds.” (story)
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“America is now offering lessons in what little wisdom it takes to govern the world. Confounded in Iraq, isolated from its traditional allies, shamed over Abu Ghraib, soaked in corporate corruption and the backwash of environmental harm, sustaining an uninherited budget deficit while preparing more tax rewards for the rich, as dismissive of the unhealthy as the foreign, as terrified of the unfolding truth as of mailed anthrax, it is a society made menacing by a notion of God’s great plan. America is tolerance-challenged, integrity-poor, frightened to death, and yet, beneath its patriotic hosannahs, a country in delirium before the recognition that it might have spent the last three years not only squandering the sympathy of the world but hot-housing hatreds more ferocious than those it had wished to banish for ever from the clear blue skies.” - Andrew O’Hagan in a pretty harsh piece about the Republican National Convention
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You know, I didn’t want to spend too much time thinking or writing about politics. But when I look at the US election, what I see is some sort of bizarro-world version of Mr Roger’s Land of Make Believe where the nice Mr Rogers is being replaced by the presumably likable Mr Bush (it still escapes me what’s likable about somebody that callous, vain, and manipulative), and where the nice neighbourhood where everybody is friends with all the other people - the land of make believe, which in practice doesn’t really exist - is being replaced by a world full of terror and violence where it’s best to stomp on all other people who then are immensely grateful for having been raped and pillaged. Looking at the polls, it seems that at least half the well TV-trained audience is buying this.
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People always assume that something like this “The wishes of ordinary Europeans are very similar to those of ordinary Americans. Everybody wants to pay lower taxes and to be subject to fewer regulations. But European governments do not enact their citizens? will. There is less freedom in Europe than in the United States ? and ordinary Europeans are not happy about it!” could only be written by an American. Not so. There is no shortage of people like that in Europe as you can see in this exchange of letters. PS: I don’t have the time or energy to point out all the facts that are actually blatantly wrong in Petr Mach’s letter (like “European governments run the major national media.’ which for most countries I know of is simply wrong - btw, it’s very ironic there’s one country where it’s wrong and true: In Italy, the Prime Minister actually owns the largest TV station…). As you can see, European right-wing ideologues are more or less on the same level as their US counterparts.
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“There are different kinds of intelligence, and itÂ’s arrogant for a person with one kind of intelligence to question someone with another kind. He [George W Bush] certainly is a master at some things, and he has a following. He seeks strength in simplicity. But, in todayÂ’s world, thatÂ’s often a problem. I donÂ’t think that heÂ’s weak intellectually. I think that he is incurious. ItÂ’s astonishing to me that heÂ’d spend an hour with his incoming Secretary of the Treasury and not ask him a single question. But I think his weakness is a moral weakness. I think he is a bully, and, like all bullies, heÂ’s a coward when confronted with a force that heÂ’s fearful of. His reaction to the extravagant and unbelievably selfish wish list of the wealthy interest groups that put him in the White House is obsequious. The degree of obsequiousness that is involved in saying ‘yes, yes, yes, yes, yesÂ’ to whatever these people want, no matter the damage and harm done to the nation as a whole - that can come only from genuine moral cowardice. I donÂ’t see any other explanation for it, because itÂ’s not a question of principle. The only common denominator is each of the groups has a lot of money that theyÂ’re willing to put in service to his political fortunes and their ferocious and unyielding pursuit of public policies that benefit them at the expense of the nation.” - Al Gore, about George W Bush, in a very interesting article about his current life
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There is a Monty Python sketch where two ladies are talking with each other while watching TV. One of them says “People on television treat the general public like idiots.” Upon which the other one says “Well we are idiots.” The lady who thinks the public are idiots then goes to prove that at least she is an idiot and, needless to say, that’s when things get truly absurd. The US presidential election this year will be another test of whether the public are idiots.
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“The fact is that electoral democracy has become a process of cynical manipulation. It offers us a very reduced political space today. To believe that this space constitutes real choice would be naïve.” - Arundhati Roy discusses Public Power in the Age of Empire
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Regardless of how you look at this it’s quite depressing.
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“When he saw the horrific abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, Joe Darby knew he had to blow the whistle. But coming forward would change his life?as well as his family’s?forever, and for the worse. Because back in his own community and in the small towns of America, handing over those photos didn’t make Joe Darby a hero. It made him a traitor.” - story
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I don’t want to get too deep into the US presidential elections - for obvious reasons - but this discussion of some of the TV ads sponsored by Republicans is worth reading (also read story about the actual facts). I’ve heard people here refer to criticism like “The Conintern propaganda machine is running full tilt.” as “shrill”. Let me just add one thing: I grew up about one hundred miles from the border of a Communist regime - unlike all those anti-Communist crusaders here who, I bet, never actually met a real Communist - and I think the characterization of the Republican machinery as a “Conintern propaganda machine” is entirely justified. You know, I could even dig into German history a bit and come up with even less flattering descriptions for what can only be described as an utterly disgraceful and - in the end - undemocratic campaign: Nazi spinmeister Joseph Goebbels would have applauded the Republican smear campaign that’s spewing out hatred and lies across the US these days.
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I’m getting increasingly miffed by all those newspapers that require you to register before you can read something online. I simply do not want to give away my information just to read something. Which reminded me of the book Database Nation that I read quite a while back and that I can only recommend. PS: If you look at the Amazon page, you’ll have to excuse those “critics” who claim that technology doesn’t have anything to do with politics or that you can’t blame technology or whatever else it is they say. This whole Amazon review system is really just a joke. It might work for novels - even though there still is this kind of bias where reviews that diss a book get bad ratings - but for books like this one you can’t have a bunch of non-experts comment on the book as if they knew what they are talking about.
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“You just can’t trust a man who’s never been embarrassed by himself.” - Norman Mailer in a discussion with his son (Thanks, André!)
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Elizabeth Scanlon Thomas is an American who has lived in England for 15 years. Read her account of what it was like to come to the US for a funeral.
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Today’s winner of Conscientious’ Journalistic Race to the Bottom Prize is - surprise, surprise! - Britain’s BBC. Check it out: Rapist scoops 7m on Lotto Extra - that’s two completely pseudo-news item in one big story. A sex offender and a lottery winner, all in one. Well done, BBC!
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Robert H. Frank’s article How not to buy happiness (pdf version) is quite interesting. Just bear in mind that Mr. Frank is an American economist. (seen on eye-imagine.co.uk)
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In Esquire magazine, Ron Reagan lays out the case against George W. Bush in a very eloquent and elegant form.
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In a normal US presidential election somebody like John Kerry would be the conservative candidate who would probably win over a somewhat more progressive candidate, with the nuances being very subtle. But these aren’t normal times, and future generations will probably shake their heads when they look at this election. They will see that John Kerry is the somewhat more progressive candidate who is running against the equivalent of political Neanderthalism. John Kerry’s opponent is a candidate so far to the right that I can find no serious political equivalent in my fairly conservative home country Germany - unless I want to consider those right-wing fringe parties that sometimes pop up during elections but that usually are getting most of their attention from courts investigating whether they are endangering the constitution. I had people back in Germany ask me to explain to them the main power players in the Bush administration, and I had to tell them that I couldn’t. I never imagined I would someday bemoan a lack of political lunatics in contemporary Germany (just for the purpose of explaining something); and - unlike, say, many progressives - I am unwilling to go back about 70 years in German history, tempting as that may be (for some of the White House people I’ll gladly to make an exception). Anyway, given the choice and the nature of the electoral system in the US many self-proclaimed progressives have subscribed to the Anybody But Bush “philosophy”. If people like Noam Chomsky feel compelled to vote for somebody like John Kerry you know the pro-verbial piece of excrement is quite close to hitting that big fan. Today, I found an interesting article by Naomi Klein, which made it a little bit easier for me to understand what the Anybody But Bush people might be thinking. Excerpt: “The zealots in Bush’s White House are neither insane nor stupid nor particularly shady. Rather, they openly serve the interests of the corporations that put them in office with bloody-minded efficiency. Their boldness stems not from the fact that they are a new breed of zealot but that the old breed finds itself in a newly unconstrained political climate. We know this, yet there is something about George Bush’s combination of ignorance, piety and swagger that triggers a condition in progressives I’ve come to think of as Bush Blindness. […] This madness has to stop, and the fastest way of doing that is to elect John Kerry, not because he will be different but because in most key areas […] he will be just as bad. The main difference will be that as Kerry pursues these brutal policies, he will come off as intelligent, sane and blissfully dull. That’s why I’ve joined the Anybody But Bush camp: only with a bore such as Kerry at the helm will we finally be able to put an end to the presidential pathologising and focus on the issues again.”
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If you live in the US and you want to do yourself a favour order your personal copy of the documentary Outfoxed - Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism. It’ll leave you very angry but at least you can’t claim nobody told you. I watched it tonight and I think it’s absolutely brilliant.
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Geoffrey O’Brien has written what may be the ultimate Fahrenheit 9/11 review.
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This is what the “free speech zone” looks like at the Democratic convention in Boston. In case you don’t believe this - I agree it’s somewhat hard to believe - check out this photo album and this background article. What does this all tell us about the state of the democracy? PS: And this is what a popular Democratic weblog has to say about it. You know, the kind of weblog that slams Republicans for undermining the Constitution and that praises John Kerry as the guy who’ll save American democracy.
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If you look at the HTML title of this webpage - displayed as the name of the tab at the very top of this part of the screenshot - you’ll see that the person who built the page disagreed with the people who compile the news whether or not this is newsworthy. The programmer has a point here.
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“If George Washington could see the current state of his generation’s handiwork and assess the quality of our generation’s stewardship at the beginning of this twenty-first century, what do you suppose he would think about the proposition that our current president claims the unilateral right to arrest and imprison American citizens indefinitely without giving them the right to see a lawyer or inform their families of their whereabouts, and without the necessity of even charging them with any crime. […] “What would Thomas Jefferson think of the curious and discredited argument from our Justice Department that the president may authorize what plainly amounts to the torture of prisoners - and that any law or treaty, which attempts to constrain his treatment of prisoners in time of war is itself a violation of the constitution our founders put together. “What would Benjamin Franklin think of President Bush’s assertion that he has the inherent power - even without a declaration of war by the Congress - to launch an invasion of any nation on Earth, at any time he chooses, for any reason he wishes, even if that nation poses no imminent threat to the United States.” Speech by Al Gore, the best president this country never had (even though he won the election)
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“The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of elite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.” (story) The article end with a quote by Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch: “We’re giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld has lowered the bar.”
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I’m sorry if you came here to look for photography and now you find something else. Yes, the world is a bad place. Yes, we do need to find distractions to allow us to keep our sanity. But sometimes, things get so bad that we can’t allow ourselves to look the other way. This is a weblog about photography and these times are providing us with an example what power photography can have. We wouldn’t have known about what happened in that prison in Iraq if the people who tortured, humiliated, and, in some cases, killed their prisoners hadn’t taken photos of themselves and their actions. If we put all ideological altercation aside what makes this case so painful is the fact that we are not looking at thugs from some dictatorial regime who went berserk. We are looking at soldiers who went to Iraq for lots of reasons - one of which was to get rid of a regime that massively violated human rights and that let thousands of people perish under the most gruesome circumstances. Don’t misunderstand me, I did not and do not support the invasion of Iraq and I think that many, but not all, of the reasons given to support the war were phony and/or simply shameless lies. But I do believe that there are valid reasons; reasons that, for me, were not outweighed by the reasons against the invasion. And one of those reasons are the human rights violations under Saddam Hussein. And this is why seeing those images and learning about the horrendeous abuses in that prison (and elseplace) is so painful. “At least people there, especially in prisons, are better off”, I used to tell myself. No, they’re not! In fact, that kind of sexual humiliation is the absolute worst you can do to a Muslim. There’s no excuse for any of this. No excuse. I’ve heard about a “lack of training” and whatever else. What nonsense! Do you need extra training to know that you must not treat other people like animals? Does that require extra training? I don’t think it does. But what can we do? How can we deal with our anger and our frustration and whatever else we feel? Frankly, I don’t know. I think if you want to do at least something, consider giving money to Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. They can use it.
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“We’re not the good guys any more.”
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“We went to Iraq to stop things like this from happening, and indeed, here they are happening under our tutelageÂ… If we don’t tell this story, these kind of things will continue, and weÂ’ll end up getting paid back 100 or 1000 times over.” - ex-US Marine Lieutenant Colonel Bill Cowan Also see “Torture commonplace, say inmates’ families” Update (this is incredible): “As the US military continued to reel from photographs of troops abusing Iraqi prisoners, President Bush volunteered yesterday that Iraq is better off now that Saddam Hussein is gone and his ‘torture cells are closed,’ summoning an image that has haunted troops in recent days. ‘Because we acted, torture rooms are closed, rape rooms no longer exist,’ Bush said at a rally in Niles, Mich., just north of the Indiana border. The remarks have long been part of his stump speech, but were made just hours after he had discussed investigations into the alleged torture of Iraqis by US troops with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Later, at a stop in Kalamazoo, he again said that ‘the torture chambers in Iraq are closed.’” - story Note how they still call this “alleged torture”!
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This in-depth article is by far the best article I’ve read so far about what went wrong and what could be done about it.
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Contrast this statement: “The fundamental issue between us and the terror network we fight is that we value every life.” (made by Bush advisor Karen Hughes who was trying to smear “pro choice” demonstrators) with this description of what happened during the (ongoing) siege of Fallujah.
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Those who have followed what is usually referred to as “the news” have become used to the fact that if you want real, actual information or explanations you have to look elsewhere. Calling the insurgants “enemies of freedom” doesn’t explain anything. It assumes we haven’t evolved from those kindergarten days when we believed in the tooth fairy and in the stork as the source of babies. Here is an article that explains the background of those two large religious groups in Iraq that you might have heard about.
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“An emotional former President George H.W. Bush on Tuesday defended his son’s Iraq war and lashed out at White House critics. It is ‘deeply offensive and contemptible’ to hear ‘elites and intellectuals on the campaign trail’ dismiss progress in Iraq since last year’s overthrow of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, the elder Bush said in a speech to the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association annual convention.” (my emphasis; no, this is not from The Onion, this is on Yahoo News)
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We’ve entered the era of Soap Opera News. Soap Opera News reports “progress” on some news item on an hourly (“breaking news”-style) basis and in most cases, it turns out it was all much ado about nothing. News as cheap entertainment, as a cheap thrill for the masses, where it doesn’t matter any longer that reality is usually infinitely more complicated. News that can be very conveniently manipulated simply by the way it’s being presented. News stations can always deny they manipulate the news because the “facts” never are. In fact, there hardly ever are any facts. See, for example, the hunt for that “top Al Qaeda leader” in Pakistan who, as it probably has just turned out, isn’t there. Clearly, Soap Opera-style news, exciting for the likes of CNN, Fox “News”, and all the other usual suspects - including an administration whose only hope for “re”-election is to maintain permanent fear of terrorism in the electorate. Update (22 March): “[Carl] Bernstein, the former Washington Post journalist who with reporter Bob Woodward unearthed the Watergate scandal, told a crowd of about 200 in a speech Thursday that much of today’s news has deteriorated into gossip, sensationalism and manufactured controversy.” story
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“The ‘al-Qaida victory’ argument is quick, easy, and profoundly wrong – for four reasons. The first and most obvious is the nature of the decisive switch that occurred in millions of Spanish minds between Thursday 11 March and Sunday 14 March. During this period, grief at Thursday’s horror was compounded by anger at their government’s manipulation of information over the next two days – an approach premised on blaming the Basque militant group ETA until polling day and reaping the rewards afterwards. […]
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“The lesson of the Dean implosion is not that internet-based campaigns are inherently weak, but that the combined force of traditional media outlets and the Washington political establishment working in concert are still strong enough to contain the new form of political organising.” story “Dean’s big mistake was in not recognizing, up front, that the media are very much part of the existing order and were bound to be hostile to his provocative kind of politics. […] For the record, reporters and editors deny that this occurred. Privately, they chortle over their accomplishment. At the Washington airport I ran into a bunch of them, including some old friends from long-ago campaigns, on their way to the next contest after Iowa. So, I remarked, you guys saved the Republic from the doctor. Yes, they assented with giggly pleasure, Dean was finished—though one newsmagazine correspondent confided the coverage would become more balanced once they went after Senator Kerry.” story
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There’s a fairly remarkable interview with Christopher Browning in The Atlantic Online, with a very interesting final paragraph: “The various perpetrators who became involved in the Final Solution and their decision-making processes were not unique. In fact, I would argue that many of the elements in this were a coming together of quite common factors and ordinary people. That, I think, is very important to recognize if we don’t want to place the Holocaust apart as some kind of suprahistorical, mystical event that we cannot fathom and shouldn’t even try to understand.”
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“Noting the image of Barbie dolls is ‘ripe for social comment,’ a three- judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected toymaker Mattel Inc.’s appeal of a lower court ruling in favor of satirizing the popular doll. […] The artist had argued that the photo series, which also included a photo of Barbie dolls wrapped in tortillas and covered in salsa in a casserole dish in a lit oven, was meant to critique the ‘objectification of women’ and ‘beauty myth’ associated with the popular doll.” (full story)
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iTunes Music Store - Facelift for a corrupt industry explains what’s wrong with Apple’s much hailed iTunes.
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“If the 21st century wishes to free itself from the cycle of violence, acts of terror and war, and avoid repetition of the experience of the 20th century - that most disaster-ridden century of humankind, there is no other way except by understanding and putting into practice every human right for all mankind, irrespective of race, gender, faith, nationality or social status.” - Shirin Ebadi
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“WE HAVE LOST CONFIDENCE in what we are seeing, hearing and reading: too much infotainment and not enough news; too many outlets telling the same stories; too much commercialism and too much hype. Every day, this commercial information system distorts our view of the world. […] “WE IMAGINE A DIFFERENT SYSTEM – a media democracy. We see great promise in the open communications of the internet and want that openness expanded into every form of media. We envision a global system of communications that has as its foundation the direct, democratic participation of citizens. To this end, we demand the timely transfer of key media sources back to the people.” Media Carta
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George Packer’s What Washington doesn’t see in Iraq, that recently appeared in New Yorker magazine, is a long read but it’s worth it.
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In The Guardian, George Monbiot write an excellent article about what he calls “The Moral Myth” - those familiar with world history will realize immediately that he is right. His explanation is consistent with what we’ve seen in history and it’s consistent with what we see now - regardless of what the spinmeisters want us to believe. “I do believe that there was a moral case for deposing Saddam […] by violent means. I also believe that there was a moral case for not doing so, and that this case was the stronger. That Saddam is no longer president of Iraq is, without question, a good thing. But against this we must weigh the killing or mutilation of thousands of people; the possibility of civil war in Iraq; the anger and resentment the invasion has generated throughout the Muslim world and the creation, as a result, of a more hospitable environment in which terrorists can operate; the reassertion of imperial power; and the vitiation of international law. It seems to me that these costs outweigh the undoubted benefit. “But the key point, overlooked by all those who have made the moral case for war, is this: that a moral case is not the same as a moral reason. Whatever the argument for toppling Saddam on humanitarian grounds may have been, this is not why Bush and Blair went to war. “A superpower does not have moral imperatives. It has strategic imperatives. Its purpose is not to sustain the lives of other people, but to sustain itself. Concern for the rights and feelings of others is an impediment to the pursuit of its objectives. It can make the moral case, but that doesn’t mean that it is motivated by the moral case. […] “the White House is not a branch of Amnesty International. When it suits its purposes to append a moral justification to its actions, it will do so. When it is better served by supporting dictatorships like Uzbekistan’s, expansionist governments like Ariel Sharon’s and organisations which torture and mutilate and murder, like the Colombian army and (through it) the paramilitary AUC, it will do so. “It armed and funded Saddam when it needed to; it knocked him down when it needed to. In neither case did it act because it cared about the people of his country. It acted because it cared about its own interests. The US, like all superpowers, does have a consistent approach to international affairs. But it is not morally consistent; it is strategically consistent.” full text
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Read what seems to be the conclusion of a somewhat bizarre struggle about a 65-year old article about Adolf Hitler’s home. Note how all the usual suspects get involved.
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“Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.” - Susan Sontag, concluding her acceptance speech for the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels award. [“Two weeks ago during the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Association of German Publishers and Booksellers awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade) to Susan Sontag. She was cited for standing up for ‘the dignity of free thinking’ and for her role as an ‘intellectual ambassador’ between the United States and Europe.”]
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