Archives for May 2004

Mark Danner speaks for us in “Torture and Truth,” his ruminations in the current issue of The New York Review of Books on the “Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade” by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba and the “Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on the Treatment by the […]

From Straight Up’s poet laureate, we received this message: “Ever consider running something critical of our president?” And so, per Leon (“Our Calvin Trillin”) Freilich: George W. Bush sometimes suggests that he abandoned reading newspapers when he moved into the Oval Office … [but he] is known for devouring the sports section. — USA Today […]

What did Kevin Phillips say at the “What We Stand For” conference that made him yesterday’s coming attraction for today’s report from the Land of Is? Pretty much nothing he hasn’t written in AmericanDynasty, his devastating examination of the Bush family dynasty going back four generations. But there’s nothing like hearing the message from the […]

This morning’s 9/11 Commission hearing about New York City’s questionable “emergency response” to the al Qaeda attack that killed 2,749 people and destroyed the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 is being televised from the New School in Manhattan and may be viewed in a Webcast by C-Span. (I’m having trouble with the link. Maybe […]

All eyes are on “The Gray Zone,” Seymour Hersh’s story, posted Saturday by The New Yorker, charging that “the roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal” can be traced to Rummy boy’s decision to apply “a highly secret operation” that dealt with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan “to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq.” The Afghanistan […]

Like Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road, we’re off to see the wizards of “What We Stand For,” a two-day conference featuring Paul Krugman, Gary Hart, Jim Fallows, Sandy Berger, Eliot Spitzer, Barbara Ehrenreich, Kevin Phillips, Robert Reich, Joe Trippi and many more from the Land of Is. In our absence, here are some excerpts […]

Will the family coat of arms being prepared for Colin Powell reflect his role as a federal arts patron? Not according to a report that the family crest he’s requested from the Lord Lyon, “which bestows coats of arms in Scotland,” will have a banner saying “Devoted to Public Service” instead of “Devoted to Public […]

CNN reports: The Malaysian company hosting “the al-Qaeda-linked Web site that first posted the video of Nicholas Berg’s beheading shut down the site today “because it was drawing too much traffic.” By now, of course, the decapitatiion nightmare can be seen elsewhere on the Internet. In the meantime, the Defense Department is still deciding whether to let the general public […]

You can’t say the press didn’t warn us. A year before the invasion of Iraq, The Wall Street Journal sent an enterprising reporter to the U.S. Army’s interrogation school in Fort Huachuca, Arizona. His report, published on April 26, 2002, describes an instructor telling his class of freshmen, many under the age of 20, that the […]

The right-wing blog A Dog’s Life, which describes itself as a “Pedigreed Member of the Ankle-Biting Riffraff,” refers this morning to “one Jan Herman, a microcephalic version of Frank Rich but with worse hydrophobia,” and puts yours truly in the company of Matthew Yglesias, former editor in chief of The Harvard Independent. How sweet. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

This morning’s lead editorial in The New York Times, “The Abu Ghraib Spin,” begins: The administration and its Republican allies appear to have settled on a way to deflect attention from the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib: accuse Democrats and the news media of overreacting, then pile all of the remaining responsibility onto officers […]

Most news of the torture scandal in Iraq has involved male prisoners. Luke Harding, a Guardian reporter in Baghdad, puts the focus today on the torture and rape of Iraqi women prisoners. Iraqi women needn’t have been incarcerated to come in for abuse, either. American soldiers on the street apparently feel they have a license to […]

Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who wrote the Army report on torture of Iraqi prisoners, is an American hyphenate. He is NOT white. He is a Filipino-American, born in Manila, who moved to Hawaii at age 11 and grew up there in a largely mixed-race society. I’d bet this made him sensitive to issues of racism […]

Ralph Nader live on C-Span on the Web: He’s answering viewers’ questions right now about various subjects, including the presidential campaign. Beginning at 9:30 a.m., Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who wrote the internal Army report on torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners, is to testify in a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. See […]

“My name is Nick Berg, my father’s name is Michael … I have a brother and sister, David and Sarah.” “My name is Daniel Pearl. I am an American Jew from California. I come from a Zionist family. My father is a Jew. My mother is a Jew. I am a Jew.” Postcript: Berg was […]

Did reality TV finally come to Iraq? Do you think the rise of popular American shows like NBC’s “Fear Factor” and CBS’s “Survivor” have anything to do with the torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere? Those top-rated “entertainments” have prized physical degradation, along with psychological humiliation and plain old human […]