Author: Helena

Those charming Chalabis (contd.)

Douglas McCollam has a pretty well-researched piece in the latest Columbia Journalism Review titled “How Chalabi played the press”. His focus is, not surprisingly, on the run-up to the war, and way that everyone’s (then-)favorite snake-oil salesman worked assiduously and successfully to plant in the western press the kinds of stories that would jerk western governments–but especially the US!–into launching the war that he sought against Saddam.
From a quick read of the piece–and from what one knew already–the way it seemed to work was this: Chala got gobs of money from various US government agencies to run something called the “Information Collection Program” (ICP).
Collection?? Well, that was the easy part… He would just groom a few alleged “defectors” from Iraq who would tell their tales to selected journalists. The part that Chala really focused on, however, was information dissemination. And in that department, he found many, many journalists whom he played like fine violins.
(So we taxpayers here in the US found ourselves paying money to someone who then used it to try to sell his lies to us.)
McCollam writes that he thinks the strong focus on Judy Miller in the whole journo community is not totally fair. He seems to give his own “Golden Gull” award to someone called David Rose. In a piece in the May 2002 issue of Vanity Affair, Rose recounted many stories from Mohammed Harith, a former Iraqi “Mukhabarat ” (intel) officer, who claimed to have personal knowledge of Saddam Hussein’s mobile biological weapons labs.
According to McCollam, in Rose’s article, Harith claimed that, in addition to those (now-discredited) “mobile labs”,

    Hussein was close to building a new long-range missile. He also told of a trip to Africa to buy radioactive materials for a dirty bomb from renegade Russians. He spoke of a chemical weapons factory in Samarra and a bioweapons lab in the suburbs of Baghdad. And so on. In the piece, Rose effusively praised the INC’s defector operation, going so far as to say it resembled ‘nothing so much as the Underground Railroad, the clandestine network which rescued slaves from the American South before the Civil War.’

Oh, gimme a break.
As McCollam notes,

Continue reading “Those charming Chalabis (contd.)”

US Army & Marines: mental health alert

Well, we knew it would happen, and it has. Now, a study supported by the Military Operational Medicine Research Program, U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command of Ft. Detrick, Md., has discovered that war is hazardous to the mental health of the soldiers who fight in it.
The study, titled “Combat Duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mental Health Problems, and Barriers to Care” was published in the New England Journal of Medicine this week. In addition to revealing some interesting facts about the breadth of the mental-health problems caused by the Iraq and Afghan wars to US service members, it also gives one little window into the shockingly high number of service members who feel responsible for the deaths of nonconbatants–see below.
The principal author of the study was Charles W. Hoge, MD. His five collaborators include a numch of clinical psychologiosts and one other MD. Promising anonymity to respondents, they gave a self-administered questionnaire to a large number of service-people before they were deployed, and then to others subsequent to deployments in either Afghanistan or Iraq. Their principal finding was that:

    The percentage of study subjects whose responses met the screening criteria for major depression, generalized anxiety, or PTSD was significantly higher after duty in Iraq (15.6 to 17.1 percent) than after duty in Afghanistan (11.2 percent) or before deployment to Iraq (9.3 percent); the largest difference was in the rate of PTSD.

That would be Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
So if you calculate that the increase in these conditions has been on the order of 6.3 to 7.8 percent among the soldiers (and Marines) who went to Iraq, and that probably 250,000 US service members have now served in Iraq–maybe a lot more?– you could calculate that somewhere between 15,750 and 19,500 Americans have been given serious mental disorders as a result of Bush’s quite optional decision to launch that war.
And we can all imagine what that means for those individuals, their families, and the communities they return to, I’m sure.

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Meanwhile, in The Hague…

Meanwhile, in the ICTY branch of the venture of international “justice”, the Serbs’ wily and venal former President, Slobodan Milosevic, has been declared physically not “fit” to stand trial. (He has heart problems.)
This concept of the necessity that a defendant be “fit to stand trial” is an intriguing but little-noted aspect of western criminal procedure. It is not just a byway of medico-legal arcana, but is central to the whole theory of the criminal trial and punishment within the western legal system. (Actually, I’m not sure how it works within a civil-law system, and would love to be elucidated. I’m more familiar with the philosophical underpinnings of common-law systems.)
My favorite punishment guru, the Scottish philosopher R.A. (Tony) Duff, has a whole chapter in his 1986 book Trials and Punishments that explores the theories of fitness to stand trial, fitness to be sentenced, and–this is a particuarly interesting one–“fitness to be executed”. I don’t, however, have that book to hand. All I have is his 2001 book, Punishment, Communication, and Community.
Here, on p.80, he writes:

    The criminal law of a liberal polity, and the criminal process of trial and conviction to which offenders are subjected, are communicative enterprises that address the citizens, as rational moral agents, in the normative language of the community’s values… It seeks not just (as might a soveriegn) their obedience to its demands, but their understanding and acceptance of what is required of them as citizens… ”

All fine and interesting stuff. And it just underlines even further the degree to which the creation of ICTY (and ICTR) were acts of amazing boldness, in that they asserted, merely by Security Council fiat, that the whole world does indeed constitute a single such normative community, within which Judge Patrick Robinson and the two other red-robed judges in the courtroom could address Milosevic or anyone else they cared to address as fellow-citizens, bound by the same normative code.
Ah would that this were so. But assertion of such a fact does, I think, require a degree of consent from those who are–presto! just like that! by fiat of the Security Council!–to be included within the bounds of such a community.
Slobo has notably never given his consent…

Continue reading “Meanwhile, in The Hague…”

After atrocities: to seek remembrance or forgetting?

A notable piece by freelancer Vivenne Walt led the WaPo‘s “Outlook section yesterday. In it, Walt made the interesting observation that–despite what many news accounts in the West would have us believe–Iraqis were not all glued to their television sets, eagerly following Saddam’s court hearing on Thursday.
Walt gives us many examples of this–I’ll come back to some of these, later. But her own opinion, expressed fairly well in the piece, is that the seeming reluctance of Iraqis to examine all the details of the atrocities of their recent past is a bad thing. Hence the title of her piece: “Not better forgotten”.
She asks,

    What, after all, would German teenagers know these days about the Holocaust, if the gas ovens were not preserved and museums not built?”

I can understand her point. But from all the work that I’ve been doing on how societies can develop effective policies that enable them to escape from iterations of past atrocious violence, I would characterize her view of what “needs” to be done in the immediate aftermath of atrocities as a very “western” point of view.
And even in Germany, remember, it was not in the immediate post-Hitler years that Holocaust “remembrance” movement started, along with the whole series of explorations that Germans undertook regarding their own community and family members’ roles during the Hitler years. All that came much, much later than 1945. At the time, in 1945-46, in the immediate aftermath of the overthrow of Hitlerism, most of the German people were really not at all in the right “place” to start aggressively exploring their own society’s role in supporting the Nazis.
The Allied occupation forces in Germany did what they could, in their various ways, to “educate” or perhaps “re-educate” the Germans about the ghastliness of the Nazis’ deeds. Civilian work crews from various towns were forcibly taken out to nearby concentration/extermination camps to help in the cleanup, so that they could see firsthand what had been happening there. The Allies tried to disseminate the “latest news” of what was happening at the Nuremberg trials throughout Germany, in German, as speedily and effectively as possible. But by and large, most Germans–with some notable exceptions like Karl Jaspers (see this post from yesterday) really did not want to hear about it.
They had other concerns…

Continue reading “After atrocities: to seek remembrance or forgetting?”

Darfur crisis links

Today, I wrote a column for the CSM about the Darfur crisis. It’ll run on Thursday. I did a bunch of research on-line for it, and a little bit off-line. So that you out there in JWN readers’-ville can share some of the resources I found–and so that I can find them again when I need to–I thought I’d put some of the links to good stuff that I found into a post here.
Here for starters is a really shocking graphic from the USAID website that shows the “Projected Mortality rates in Darfur, Sudan, 2004-2005.”
I honestly don’t know what they base their projections on there, but I assume and hope it’s some fairly solid data and analysis. One shocking conclusion they present is that “Cumulative death rate would be approx. 30% of vulnerable group over 9 month period.” They project that the “Crude Mortality Rate” (CMR) might peak at the end of this December at a rate of 20 deaths per 10,000 heads of population per day.
20 a day is 600 a month which, if sustained, would mount to 6,000 deaths over 10 months. But after December, they say, the “CMR will decrease as people die or migrate out.”
One big issue in delivering aid and keeping people healthy and alive in Darfur is the annual rains. These are just mounting now: July, August, and September are peak rainfall months. Reliefweb has a good portal to a bunch of good maps about the Darfur crisis. In this one, you can see how the “front-line” of the rains is moving slowly northward through the region as I write this. In this one, you can see which parts of Western Darfur are completely inaccessible during the rains, which are accessible, and which–the vast majority, are only “partly accessible”.
This map shows the locations of “IDP concentrations and refugee locations” as of June.
Lots more maps and charts there!
Still on maps, Human Rights Watch has a good, clear one showing the region’s towns, and the main tribal groupings here. That’s part of their broader online resource center on the crisis.
Yeah, I admit I’m a maps-and-charts junkie. But I also like other kinds of resources…

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Saddam: the ‘banality of evil’ revisited

The NYT‘s John F. Burns is a seasoned, very experienced foreign correspondent. I was just amazed, though, that in the piece he had in today’s “Week in review” section, in which he reflected on what he had witnessed directly during Saddam’s short judicial appearance Thursday, he never made a single explicit reference to the idea of the “banality of evil”.
It was the philosopher Karl Jaspers who first made the observation–this was at the time of the Nuremberg Trials–that a court procedure should indeed seek to banalize evil. In October 1946, he wrote in a letter to his former student Hannah Arendt:

    It seems to me that we have to see these things in their total banality, in their prosaic triviality, because that’s what really characterizes them… I regard any hint of myth and legend with horror, and everything unspecific is just such a hint.

(Arendt later picked up on that observation and used “the banality of evil” as the subtitle to her 1963 classic, “Eichmann in Jerusalem”.)
Here was John Burns, in the lead to today’s piece:

    It was only in the courtroom, at the American military base, that their physical insignificance, their sheer unremitting ordinariness, became so plain.
    On television last Thursday, the images of the 12 former Iraqi leaders conveyed an altogether bigger impression, perhaps because the lens tightened until their faces filled the screen. But to a reporter sitting 25 feet away, for the five hours it took to complete preliminary hearings against Saddam Hussein and 11 others who terrorized Iraq, they seemed to have shrunk, pressing home the question: How could these utterly unremarkable men, forgettable in any other context, have so tyrannized their 25 million countrymen that they remained unchallenged for 35 years?

Interesting question…

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Karpinski joining our Hall of Fame?

Back in February, I wrote (here and here) about what seemed to me to be the disproportionate involvement of women in heroic whistleblowing acts from inside big, powerful organizations.
Now, I’m getting close to thinking that Brig.-General Janis Karpinski should join the JWN Women Whistleblowers Hall of Fame. She has made two important new revelations, yesterday and today, about important aspects of what was going on in Abu Ghraib prison when she was (nominally if not actually) in charge of everything that went on there.
In this story, from the AP via Napa News, she was quoted as saying that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized the use of coercive interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq.
“I did not see it personally (at the time), but since all of this has come out, I have not only seen, but I’ve been asked about some of those documents, that he signed and agreed to,” Karpinski was reported as having told another California newspaper, the Santa Clarita Signal.
(Thanks to Yankeedoodle for the heads-up on that.)
And then today, from AP and also on the BBC website, we have this testimony from JK:
She told the BBC Radio-4’s “Today” program that she met an Israeli working as an interrogator inside the prison:

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Gaza: Israel’s security ‘concept’

On June 30, AP had a story quoting unnamed Israeli security officials saying that, “Israel plans to establish a three-mile-deep ‘security zone’ in the northern Gaza Strip, with hundreds of troops patrolling the area in coming months to prevent Palestinian rocket fire on Israeli border towns.”
Oh boy, how tragic–for the Palestinians and for the Israelis.
You think the Israeli “security officials” have learned nothing from their country’s history over the past 20 years?
1985 was the year that, with their economy and society hit hard by the huge costs of maintaining an already 3-year-old occupation of one-third of Lebanon, the Israelis decided to withdraw the IDF from much–but notably not all of the land they occupied there. The portion they stayed in, they called the “security zone”.
Well, they could call it what they liked. For the poor bloody Lebanese who lived inside it–who included many relatives of my ex-husband–and for even more hundreds of thousands of Lebanese citizens and Palestinian refugees who lived in the area to the north of the “SZ”, its presence brought anything but security.
I don’t have to hand the figures for the literally thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian people who lost their lives because of continued fighting across the SZ’s northern front-line over the 15 years that followed that decision. Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Lebanese fixed-capital goods were destroyed in that fighting, too.
(Reparations from Israel, anyone?)
But we could just recall a few “high points” in the conflagrations that flared over that front-line: 1993, 1996, etc.
Oh, and along the way, the Israelis and their proxy forces in the SZ ran one of the Middle East’s worst torture centers there, in the prison in Khiam. And they kidnaped random Lebanese clerics and held them for more than a dozen years as hostages. Etc., etc.
Yes, some scores of Israelis died in those events, too. Overwhelmingly, though, they were soldiers: members of an armed force maintaining a military occupation over a portion of someone else’s country…

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Da movie: F-9/11

Okay, a few quick thoughts about ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ before I do my next post.
I guess the first thing to say is that it has always been evident to me that, if film were newsprint, this movie would belong on the Op-ed page of the newspaper, not the news pages. And that’s just fine. Of course movies can be–are!–part of the broader public discourse… But people who have been criticizing Michael Moore for “not showing both sides of the story”, etc etc, have really been missing the point.
Lighten up, guys. It’s opinion. Get used to it.
What’s more, unlike much so-called ‘opinion’ from the rightist side of the aisle, this movie is based on (one reading of) some very solid facts. I don’t think anyone has raised any credible criticisms of the facts MM presented in the movie.
Interpretations, though–well, that’s another matter.
June 30, Bob Dreyfuss of TomPaine.com ran a strongly worded criticism of the the movie. In it, he asks:

    am I the only one to notice that in one critically important way, it entirely misses the boat and gets nearly everything wrong? Maybe this has been said before? I’ve hardly read all of the criticism of Moore–but if so, I haven’t seen it. Moore totally avoids the question of Israel.

That’s a good point– though perhaps a little overstated. I don’t think MM got “everything” wrong. But yes, I did notice that after elaborately laying out all the plentiful information about the Bush family’s strong ties to the Saudi princes and the Bin Laden family, MM (1) notably did not say anything about the very close links between the Prez and the Likud (and their supporters), and (2) did not to my satisfaction explain –though this was certainly implied–how the Prez’s relationship with the Saudis helped propel him into launching a war against Iraq…

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Movie night

Tonight, no blogging because it was Bill ‘n Helena’s night out at the Michael Moore movie. (Also, three other friends.)
We have a great little independent (art-ish) movie theater in town, the Vinegar Hill Theater. It’s had F-9/11 since opening night last Friday. We tried to get tickets then. Hah! Silly us.
So we found out their ticket-sales policy: only selling tickets for the same day; sales booth for all three nightly showings opens at 3:30 p.m. I figured if I got there at 4:30 I could get 5 tickets for the 7 p.m. showing, then go to our weekly peace demonstration. It worked!
But the ticket agent also said that if we wanted to sit together we should join the line no later than 6:30. So I did that–leaving Bill and our friends finishing their dinner in a nearby eatery. I stood in line in torrential rain for 25 minutes till they let us in. What a great feeling of community on the line…
Oh, and then there was the movie. I’ll write more about that, later.