In Memorium
In memorium,
down beneath the dust,
memories of battle,
bone fragments and rust.
We remember those who gave their lives,
whose flag draped coffins come home in silence;
whose service was more than honorable,
not because it's optional, but because we must;
Not to play a trumpet, not to win a vote,
not to bray triumphally,not to attack a stranger;
But because without them, our lives would be in danger.
Because without their courage, we'd be living in present chains.
We honor them in sunshine,
We honor them in rain.
We honor those who returned safely,
and those who still live in pain.
And most of all we honor those
who return in those flag draped coffins.
For those alive;
We should remember every limb and scar,
and be humble if all this was to our gain.
For how can one mans wealth and fortune
be built on anothers loss?
If the world is truly a better place,
then those who gave count it worth the cost.
For those no more;
We who stand on rusty, dusty, shoulders.
Should look up, look down, and all around,
and count ourselves lucky that we are here,
that this moment is ours,
For it will never be again;
But stands fixed in Living Memory;
Alongside future folks, who will stand on ours.
And we should honor these people,
and think of them every day,
as they return home in planes:
guarded from the press;
returned furtively to their families;
guarded from the acknowledgement and grief;
by the very men who sent them into harms way.
This memorial day, these men are very much on my mind.
And I pray, that their mission be a success,
and that they soon can come home.
Chris
Well it took guts to "do the right thing." And some Democratic Senators, and too few Republican Senators, did just that -- at the risk of retaliation by the forces behind the push to theocracy
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/international/asia/22abuse.html
-- the Family Research Council has vowed to punish those Republicans who embarrassed Senator Frist. The power of these people is demonstrated by the remarks of the President. You can hear him today, if you care to listen, talking about how research into embryonic stem cells is somehow evil because those cells are taken apart and reused instead of being destroyed or remaining on Ice. This minority of people drive the agenda because the rest of us aren't paying attention or don't care.
And of course the Republicans technically won this battle, in a way, because they succeeded in getting two nominees that many Democrats can't stand in for an "up or down vote." Oh yes, I'm still gloomy about the future of the Senate, there are systematic forces at work that can only be stopped by elections -- not by filibusters anyway. And I'm more gloomy about the future of our country. It's hard to find news unless I read those hated "liberal" (meaning truthful) Newspapers; the Post and the New York Times. One by one the rest of them have been cowed into submission. No news is good news -- unless the news is not being reported.
And I'm still really gloomy about the behavior of my beloved Country overseas. Newsweek was made to apologize for getting a story from an anonymous source who later could not verify his story-- as if the meat of the story were false. Yet the facts still stand that prisoner abuse was a fact of life, attempts were made to cover it up, and that people have died as a result of that abuse and not because Newsweek reported on one element of it. It wasn't Newsweek that set off riots -- it was people coming home from prison with lurid stories of being humiliated and mistreated not for their political beliefs but for their religious ones. The US can enjoin it's soldiers to respect the Koran all they want, but the damage is already done. It was done when Cheney asked the Justice department to rewrite the rules and allow "torture light" and the use of methods such as head-bagging, sleep deprivation, dogs, and mental abuse. It may have produced short term gain but it produced incalculable harm -- and as anyone involved in interrogation knows -- was highly unprofessional and mostly counterproductive in getting information. All it was good for was making some people very afraid -- and others very mad.
Today's New York Times covers abuse at Bagram Base. A place that ought to be a poster child for a can do military. A place where the President only recently was talking about what a success we are having in Afghanistan. Right now the Afghans are busy hating us and it is nothing but our own fault and the fault of a military whose brass refuses to take responsibility for their actions. How can we get anything done if no lessons are ever learned? With all the things our military can do to advance the cause of peace while defeating our enemies -- and we have to be famous for this. May God Forgive us. I know that the law of causality won't.
Two Afghan detainees died from their injuries in December 2002 after being shackled and beaten at the American military base in Bagram, Afghanistan.
By TIM GOLDEN
Published: May 22, 2005
Despite autopsy findings of homicide and statements by soldiers that two prisoners died after being struck by guards at an American military detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, Army investigators initially recommended closing the case without bringing any criminal charges, documents and interviews show.
Within days after the two deaths in December 2002, military coroners determined that both had been caused by "blunt force trauma" to the legs. Soon after, soldiers and others at Bagram told the investigators that military guards had repeatedly struck both men in the thighs while they were shackled and that one had also been mistreated by military interrogators.
Nonetheless, agents of the Army's Criminal Investigation Command reported to their superiors that they could not clearly determine who was responsible for the detainees' injuries, military officials said. Military lawyers at Bagram took the same position, according to confidential documents from the investigation obtained by The New York Times.
"I could never see any criminal intent on the part of the M.P.'s to cause the detainee to die," one of the lawyers, Maj. Jeff A. Bovarnick, later told investigators, referring to one of the deaths. "We believed the M.P.'s story, that this was the most combative detainee ever."
The investigators' move to close the case was among a series of apparent missteps in an Army inquiry that ultimately took almost two years to complete and has so far resulted in criminal charges against seven soldiers. Early on, the documents show, crucial witnesses were not interviewed, documents disappeared, and at least a few pieces of evidence were mishandled.
While senior military intelligence officers at Bagram quickly heard reports of abuse by several interrogators, documents show they also failed to file reports that are mandatory when any intelligence personnel are suspected of misconduct, including mistreatment of detainees. Those reports would have alerted military intelligence officials in the United States to a problem in the unit, military officials said.
Those interrogators and others from Bagram were later sent to Iraq and were assigned to Abu Ghraib prison. A high-level military inquiry last year found that the captain who led interrogation operations at Bagram, Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, applied many of the same harsh methods in Iraq that she had overseen in Afghanistan.
Citing "investigative shortfalls," senior Army investigators took the Bagram inquiry away from agents in Afghanistan in August 2003, assigning it to a task force based at the agency's headquarters in Virginia. In October 2004, the task force found probable cause to charge 27 of the military police guards and military intelligence interrogators with crimes ranging from involuntary manslaughter to lying to investigators. Those 27 included the 7 who have actually been charged.
"I would acknowledge that a lot of these investigations appear to have taken excessively long," the Defense Department's chief spokesman, Larry Di Rita, said in an interview on Friday. "There's no other way to describe an investigation that takes two years. People are being held accountable, but it's taking too long."
Mr. Di Rita said the Pentagon was examining ways to speed up such investigations, "because justice delayed is justice denied."
A spokesman for the Criminal Investigation Command, Christopher Grey, would not discuss details of the case, but played down the significance of the agents' early proposal to close it. He said that the investigation had been guided by a desire for thoroughness rather than speed, and that it eventually included more than 250 interviews around the world.
"Case agents make recommendations all the time," Mr. Grey said. "But the review process looks at investigations constantly and points to other things that need to be completed or other investigative approaches."
While the proposal to close the case was ultimately rejected by senior officials, documents show that the inquiry was at a virtual standstill when an article in The New York Times on March 4, 2003, reported that at least one of the prisoner's deaths had been ruled a homicide, contradicting the military's earlier assertions that both had died of natural causes. Activity in the case quickly resumed.
The details of the investigation emerged from a file of almost 2,000 pages of confidential Army documents about the death on Dec. 10, 2002, of Dilawar, a 22-year-old taxi driver. The file was obtained from a person involved in the inquiry who was critical of the abuses at Bagram and the military's response to the deaths.
The file presents the fates of Mr. Dilawar and another detainee who died six days earlier, Mullah Habibullah, against a backdrop of frequent harsh treatment by guards and interrogators who were in many cases poorly trained, loosely supervised and only vaguely aware of or attentive to regulations limiting their use of force against prisoners they considered to be terrorists.
According to interviews with military intelligence officials who served at Bagram, only a small fraction of the detainees there were considered important or suspicious enough to be transferred to the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for further interrogation. Two intelligence officers estimated that about 85 percent of the prisoners were ultimately released.
Still, most new detainees at Bagram were hooded, shackled and isolated for at least 24 hours and sometimes as long as 72 hours, the commander of the military police guards at Bagram, Capt. Christopher M. Beiring, told investigators. Prisoners caught in infractions like talking to one another were handcuffed to cell doors or ceilings, often for half an hour or an hour, but sometimes for far longer. Interrogators trying to break the detainees' resistance sometimes ordered that they be forced to sweep the same floor space over and over or scrub it with a toothbrush.
The responsibility of senior officers at Bagram for carrying out such methods is not clear in the Army's criminal report.
In several instances, the documents show Captain Wood and her deputy, Staff Sgt. Steven W. Loring, sought clarification about what techniques they could use. "Numerous requests for strict guidance on P.U.C. treatment have been voiced to the Staff Judge Advocate," Sergeant Loring said, referring to the detainees by the initials for Persons Under Control, "but no training has been offered."
Major Bovarnick, the former legal adviser to the detention center, told investigators that the shackling of detainees with their arms overhead was standard operating procedure when he arrived at Bagram in mid-November 2002. On Nov. 26, after complaints from the International Committee of the Red Cross, he convened a group of military and C.I.A. officials at Bagram to discuss methods of interrogation and punishment, including shackling to fixed objects.
"My personal question then was, 'Is it inhumane to handcuff somebody to something?' " he said. Referring to his consultations with the two senior lawyers at Bagram, he added, "It was our opinion that it was not inhumane."
After the deaths, officers who served at Bagram said, there was a similar debate over whether criminal charges were warranted.
Military lawyers noted that the autopsies of the two dead detainees had found severe trauma to both prisoners' legs - injuries that a coroner later compared to the effect of being run over by a bus. They also acknowledged statements by more than half a dozen guards that they or others had struck the detainees. But the lawyers and other officers did not press for a fuller accounting, two officers said in interviews.
Instead, statements showed, they pointed to indications that both detainees had some existing medical problems when they arrived at Bagram, and emphasized that it would be difficult to determine the responsibility of individual guards for the injuries they sustained in custody.
"No one blow could be determined to have caused the death," the former senior staff lawyer at Bagram, Col. David L. Hayden, said he had been told by the Army's lead investigator. "It was reasonable to conclude at the time that repetitive administration of legitimate force resulted in all the injuries we saw." Both Major Bovarnick and Colonel Hayden declined requests for comment.
As late as Feb. 7 - nearly two months after the first autopsy reports had classified both deaths as homicides - the American commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, said in an interview that he had "no indication" that either man had been injured in custody.
General McNeill, who has since been promoted, declined repeated requests to clarify his remarks.
In retrospect, the investigators' initial interviews with guards, interrogators and interpreters at the detention center appear cursory and sometimes contradictory. As transcribed, many of the statements are little more than a page or two long.
Most of the guards who admitted punching the detainees or kneeing them in the thighs said they did so in order to subdue prisoners who were extraordinarily combative. But both detainees were shackled at the hands and feet throughout their time at Bagram. One of them, Mr. Dilawar, weighed only 122 pounds and was described by interpreters as neither violent nor aggressive. Both detainees also complained of being beaten and seemed to have trouble walking, some witnesses said.
The early interviews also included statements by two of the interpreters that they had been so troubled by the abusive behavior of some interrogators that they had gone to the noncommissioned officer in charge of the military intelligence group, Staff Sergeant Loring, to complain. One of the interrogators, Specialist Damien M. Corsetti, refused to speak to the agents at all, and another told of the guards' beating one of the detainees who died.
Even so, investigators failed to interview some crucial witnesses, including the officer in charge of the interrogators, Captain Wood, and the commander of the military police company, Captain Beiring. They also neglected an interrogator who had been present for most of Mr. Dilawar's questioning. When he finally went to investigators at his own initiative, he described one of the worst episodes of abuse.
Many of the guards who later provided important testimony were also initially overlooked. Computer records and written logs that were supposed to record treatment of the detainees were not secured and later disappeared. Blood taken from Mr. Habibullah was stored in a butter dish in the agents' office refrigerator, from which it was only recovered - or "seized" as a report explains it - when the office was later moved.
The record of the investigation indicated that Army investigators almost entirely stopped interviewing witnesses within three weeks after Mr. Dilawar's death. And although Major Bovarnick, the detention center's legal adviser, said he told Captain Beiring after the first death "that there would be no shackling to the ceiling ever again," the issue was largely ignored in the initial investigation.
While the Army's criminal inquiry continued, General McNeill ordered a senior officer, Col. Joseph G. Nesbitt, to conduct a separate, classified examination of procedures at the detention center. That led to changes including prohibitions against the shackling of prisoners for sleep deprivation and interrogators' making physical contact with detainees.
Documents from the criminal investigation suggested that Colonel Nesbitt was also dismissive of the notion that the two deaths pointed to wider wrongdoing. He concluded that military police guards at the detention center "knew, were following and strictly applying" proper rules on the use of force, documents showed, and he cited a "conflict between obtaining accurate, timely information and treating detainees humanely."
Senior officials at the Criminal Investigation Command's headquarters took a different view. On April 15, 2003, they rejected the field agents' proposal to close the case, sending it back "for numerous investigative, operational, administrative and security classification-related issues, which required additional work, pursuit, clarification or scrutiny." Four months later, the headquarters officials reassigned the case to the task force that eventually implicated the 27 soldiers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/international/asia/22abuse.html?pagewanted=3&th&emc=th
How Glad I am to be Alive
How Glad I am to be Alive,
it's better than the alternatives.
How Glad I am to see this world,
A little better today than yesterday.
How Divine is this world;
And how spiritual is the quest;
to make it better for all the rest.
How complete my rest,
when I've done good.
How I've cheated myself,
when I cheat another.
How, religion is something,
that is inward, uplifting.
How religious zealots,
destroy religion.
I am an Eye.
And what I see belongs to another.
It is a gift and a loan.
And I don't begrudge one moment.
I just seek to open it.
Chris
The word corruption has been nearly rendered meaningless by the more recent forms it takes. How can one distinguish a bribe from the pay a Congressman gets when he/she wears two hats? When a man like Roy Blunt or Tom DeLay, or their friends such as the Abramoff I've profiled before, have such tight connections to organizations that are promoting their agenda that it is impossible to tell whether he is married to the special interests or merely married to someone who represents those special interests, the results soon start to show themselves in legistlation and politics. Yes, our porker politics requires that our politicians be prostitutes to special interests, but they could try being a little more discreet about their dalliances. Do they have to be so shameless? When Democrats were the majority the special interests used to court both parties. They were all prostitutes to different interests, but at least they seemed to have a sense of shame about it. Not so today. Maybe it's my imagination or Maybe I'm just cynical, but this is not just sleaze. It's rather wholesale. And guess whose paying for all this sleaze. Well maybe not -- it's being financed with debt. And they've learned how to get the corporations to compromise with each other and make money in the process. At least the roads will get paved, the trains will run on time (once AMTRACK is buried) and the bombs will get dropped. Perpetual war anyone? 1984 is twenty years late. Maybe I'm wrong, please convince me that I am? Some have tried, but all they do is make my BS detector go off and sends me researching more stuff that makes me sick.
Once people have learned to institutionalize corruption (they aren't bribes they are campaign contributions. They aren't bribes they are payment rendered for services) the same soon starts to go for court nominees and administration officials. These two people being filibustered in the Senate -- as trial baloon nominations designed to break the power of the minority forever -- are noted not just for "right wing" beliefs, as for their "pro-business" decision history. They seem to be people who have never met a consumer interest they liked, nor met a corporative interest they didn't support.
Don't we all know people like that? I've been following these debates. The House narrowly averted dumping ethics rules to protect the kleptocracy there, and now we are seeing efforts to make sure that the courts move as far to the "right" as these Corporative Government folks want it to move. A country of corporations, run by corporations, and serving corporations. But who am I to complain? I'm supposed to support my President and Party; right wrong or indifferent. Every nominee deserves a rubber stamp -- I mean an "up or down vote."
My observation is that nobody is perfect. And there are reasons why the Senate has not done away with filibusters on Judicial Nominees before. And the whole debate is fascinating. I really don't expect you to agree or disagree with me on my word. I really want you folks to learn about the subject and form your own opinion. Advice and consent was also supposed to be a property for the rest of us too. We elect these guys -- in theory. Just remember that next time you hear a clever add or a clever -- but dishonest argument from someone on a talk show or a TV program.
There are a lot of things we could do to improve our energy situation. For the most part solutions lie all around us to reducing our need for oil and such. Paths like making better use of electronics communications, solar energy, hybrid cars, recycling, etceteras... have been around for years. And everything that we do has both demonstrated costs and demonstrated benefits. And yet at ever turn one sees people afraid to do what it takes to make these things reality? Why?
Promoters focus on the benefits of a new technology and try to minimize costs. Those who fear a technology focus on the dangers and risks. And there are always side effects to consider. Batteries are immensely useful, for hybrid cars for one example, but are full of poisonous materials that can pollute the environment once they are discarded. Solar Panels are still costly and often involve pollution creating manufacturing processes. Tele-commuting and Tele-Medicine are wonderful notions -- but who will pay for them? Our cars are safer, but at the cost of throwaway design where every repair is extremely costly. Nuclear power has it's advantages, but all of us have memories of the disasters in Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Risks seem to threaten us at every turn. It is easy to grow fearful and nix all change.
Well this is nothing new either. In ancient times the Chinese once had a thriving Merchant Marine and an awesome Navy, but they had a problem with Pirates on the seas on one ocean and bigger problems on their other borders, so they built a "bypass" -- a canal linking North and South. Commerce moved to the Canal, they walled off their ports in the East, and they used their Naval Funds to build palaces instead. Because of those decisions China was left out of the rise of the "Modern" world until the Modern World came in and nearly turned China into multiple colonies of the "Great Powers" who woke up in time.
Going back still further, the Roman Empire solved it's unity problems by accepting Christianity as a National Religion. Christians soon burned libraries and librarians world-wide and turned the people away from science, logic, and such antique notions as Freedom or Democracy. The Church determined what was true or not, and the people were instructed to "believe" without question what the Church Fathers taught. It was for that reason that the Roman Empire fell apart, not the Barbarians invading from all sides. The population plummetted and people died of plagues exacerbated by superstition and poor sanitation; all representing a decline in the civilization of the people living in the Empire and it's successor states. Progress is not inevitable.
At the same time just 40 years ago a lot of us were sure that we were going to die from a Nuclear Exchange. It didn't happen. Maybe we have no need to fear the Arabs so.
I'm not offering any solutions, but I am talking about fear versus courage. Courage requires people summoning something from the heart and deciding to make an effort, take a measured risk, for the future. Maybe just maybe, the world isn't falling apart and won't fall apart -- if we don't fall apart. Maybe Nuclear Energy can be made safe, maybe solar power can be made cheap, maybe we can start using Methane instead of filling the air with it. Maybe we'll muddle through after all. Let us hope. Let us work. Let us talk together, let us pray.
Chris :-)