Month: March 2007

Tony Blair rails against the shameless parading of the 15 captured Brits with his usual vigor, but what really takes the air out of his rhetoric is the alacrity with which the detainees have turned against their own government.

It’s been less than a full week since they were taken into custody, and already the woman, Faye Turney, has written three letters, two of them overtly critical of the British government and its foreign policy. Both Ms. Turney and Nathan Summers have gone on television, admitted to being in Iranian waters when apprehended, and apologized profusely to the Iranian people. They don’t appear to have been coerced, although, of course, their very presence in Iran is hardly voluntary: no doubt they’ll be judged victims of the “Stockholm syndrome” upon their return.

Blair avers that the Iranians “aren’t fooling anyone” with this exhibition of prisoners, and their clearly staged “confessions,” and yet one has to wonder why these frontline sailors turned so quickly. It’s embarrassing. No signs of torture, no glassy-eyed stare, no Morse code eyebrow movements signifying extreme distress, all perfectly calm and even natural:

“I ask the representatives of the House of Commons, after the government have promised that this type of incident would not happen again, why have they let this occur, and why has the government not been questioned over this? Isn’t it time for us to start withdrawing our forces from Iraq and let them determine their own future?”

That doesn’t sound at all like the stilted propaganda spiels coerced out of prisoners during, say, the Vietnam war. It sounds like an ordinary disgusted British citizen who blames her own government, rather than her captors, for her present predicament. “Why has the government not been questioned over this?” — indeed. In yet another letter recently released, Ms. Turney declared: “I’m writing to you as a British serviceperson who has been sent to Iraq, sacrificed due to the intervening policies of the Bush and Blair government.” The accusatory nationalist undertone, implying not too subtly that Blair is Bush’s poodle, is unmistakable and, under the circumstances, astonishing. Next we hear of Ms. Turney, she’ll be running for Parliament alongside George Galloway on the “Respect” ticket, and booked solid for a speaking tour of America.

I don’t mean to be disdainful of either of these two, whose predicament I can only imagine, but I think their behavior says something about the tenuous hold the official ideology has over our own centurions. One has to assume that the views of this bunch are, while expressed under duress, at least to some extent, a) sincere — how else to explain Ms. Turney’s eloquence? — and, b) fairly representative. If so, one has to wonder how long before their loyalty to the War Party is exhausted. The “coalition” hasn’t even attacked Iran yet, and already the troops are rebelling. Can we look forward to a full-scale mutiny if and when it comes to war?

Dr. Les Roberts from Columbia University discusses the famous Johns Hopkins/Lancet studies of “excess civilian deaths” in Iraq since 2003, the UK government scientists who told Tony Blair that Lancet had, if anything, underestimated the dead at 655,000 (more than the Rwandan genocide of 1994), the deliberate efforts of the U.S. government to suppress numbers of the dead.

MP3 here. (16:49)

Les Roberts, PhD, holds has a Masters degree in public health from Tulane University and a Ph.D. in environmental engineering from Johns Hopkins. He did a post-doctorate fellowship in epidemiology at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention where he worked for 4 years. In 1994, he worked as an epidemiologist for the World Health Organization in Rwanda during their civil war. He previously served as the Director of Health Policy at the International Rescue Committee. He is a lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering where he teaches each fall. He teaches a class entitled Water and Sanitation in Complex Emergencies and the 7-week quantitative component of the Program’s Investigative Methods in Complex Emergencies course.

Chris Hedges discusses the ignorance of John McCain, the media’s ignoring and whitewashing of the horrors of battle, the mythic narrative of war as honor and glory, the danger of war with Iran, and the rise of Pat Robertson style Christian Right nationalists.

MP3 here. (17: 10)

Chris Hedges, currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Hedges, who has reported from more than fifty countries, worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, where he spent fifteen years. He is the author of the bestselling War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, which draws on his experiences in various conflicts to describe the patterns and behavior of nations and individuals in wartime. The book, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, was described by Abraham Verghese, who reviewed the book for The New York Times, as “…a brilliant, thoughtful, timely and unsettling book whose greatest merit is that it will rattle jingoists, pacifists, moralists, nihilists, politicians and professional soldiers equally.”

Hedges was part of The New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. The Free Press published his most recent book, Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America in June 2005. The book was inspired by the Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski and his ten-part film series The Decalogue. Hedges writes about lives, including his own, which have been consumed by one of the violations or issues raised by a commandment. The Christian Century said of the book: “Far from the grandstanding around stone tablets in front of an Alabama courthouse comes Losing Moses on the Freeway, a refreshing reflection on the ten great Mosaic laws that is muted yet monumental in its own right.”

Hedges is also the author of What Every Person Should Know About War, a book he worked on with several combat veterans. Robert Pinsky, reviewing this book in The New York Times, called the book “…arresting, peculiar” and “significant.” “Neither jingoistic nor pacifist,” Pinsky wrote, “the book is about the moral authority of information, as it applies to the present and future nature of war.”

Hedges published American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America in January 2007 with The Free Press. The Christian right is a movement the former seminarian has criticized in articles such as his cover story in the May 2005 issue of Harpers’ magazine called “Soldiers of Christ.”

James Bovard discusses the U.S. attorney scandal, his hopes that more criminal activity will be revealed when Gonzales is forced out, Gonzales and Bush’s obstruction of the DoJ’s NSA wiretapping probe, Bush’s secret executive order “authorizing” torture, Rumsfeld’s “sovereign immunity,” the National Security Letter scandal, the government’s craven media sycophants, the hypocrisy of conservatives when it comes to their much-ballyhooed “rule of law” as it applies to Republicans in power, Scott’s short list of Bush administration lies, the phony 9/11 commission, the shameful failures of beltway “libertarians” in opposing war and torture, and the heroic Bob Barr.

MP3 here. (51: 26)

James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy (St. Martin’s/Palgrave, January 2006), and eight other books. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. His books have been translated into Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, and Korean.

The Wall Street Journal called Bovard “the roving inspector general of the modern state,” and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a “one-man truth squad.” His 1994 book Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty received the Free Press Association’s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism and Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner Award for the Best Book on Liberty in 2003. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought, and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association.

His writings have been been publicly denounced by the chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.

Because you need some of both to handle the present reality without losing your mind.

First, the funny, from Mike Gerber and Jonathan Schwarz.

Now, the serious, from Arthur Silber.

Former Army Sgt. Sam Provance, featured in the HBO documentary “Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,” talks about his experience [.pdf] as a computer expert at Abu Ghraib prison, the fake investigations into the tortures that took place there and the betrayal of Senator Lindsey Graham.

MP3 here. (34: 13)

Former Army Sgt. Sam Provance was one of the heroes of the Abu Ghraib scandal, the only uniformed military intelligence officer at the Iraqi prison to testify about the abuses during the internal Army investigation. When he recognized that the Pentagon was scapegoating low-level personnel, he also gave an interview to ABC News.

For refusing to play along with the cover-up, Provance was punished and pushed out of the U.S. military. The Pentagon went forward with its plan to pin the blame for the sadistic treatment of Iraqi detainees on a handful of poorly trained MPs, not on the higher-ups who brought the lessons of “alternative interrogation techniques” from the Guatanamo Bay prison to Abu Ghraib.

The Congress, which was then controlled by the Republicans, promised a fuller investigation. Provance submitted a sworn statement. But Congress never followed through, leaving Provance hanging out to dry.