Author: jameswagner

American still held in secret detention without charges

UPDATE to a story I posted April 4:
The American software engineer arrested in mid-March, and being held without any charges, remains in federal prison in Oregon.
But, in spite of moans from the softy liberals, it’s really ok to round up citizens and hold them in secret detention as witnesses without any of the evidence needed to charge or prosecute them, according to the “Department of Justice.”

Legal analysts at the Center for National Security Studies, a civil liberties group, said they feared that the government was using the material witness statute as a form of preventive detention to buy time while officials searched for evidence, a practice that is illegal in the United States. The material witness statute is normally used to detain witnesses deemed to be flight risks.
“Jailing people who are simply under investigation is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime,” said Kate Martin, who runs the center in Washington.
Justice Department officials say their detention of material witnesses has been lawful, and critical to the battle against terrorism. “It is difficult for a person in jail or under detention to murder innocent people or to aid or abet in terrorism,” Attorney General John Ashcroft said.

My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of captivity.

how to avoid the word, “gay,” even if it’s your subject

After more than twenty years, we still can’t talk or write in a straight-forward manner in this country about a disease which has taken the lives of millions around the world. Why? Because we still can’t relate to sex or drugs as adults, and because we still think the disease belongs to the other.
But the people who compose the fundamentalist base of the administration in Washington now are taking seriously their mission to recreate the dark ages, or worse, and their impact will be disastrous. Ironically, considering the stright American world’s continued indifference to the threat of the disease, it seems that AIDS is now supposed to be treated by scientists as if it had nothing to do with anything but non-reproductive, heterosexual, marrried, abstemious couples (or possibly singles who remain perfectly chaste and drug-free all their lives).

Scientists who study AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases say they have been warned by federal health officials that their research may come under unusual scrutiny by the Department of Health and Human Services or by members of Congress, because the topics are politically controversial.
The scientists, who spoke on condition they not be identified, say they have been advised they can avoid unfavorable attention by keeping certain “key words” out of their applications for grants from the National Institutes of Health or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those words include “sex workers,” “men who sleep with men,” “anal sex” and “needle exchange,” the scientists said.

Following so many other threats originating in the Bush White House, this is just another augury for the virtually certain decline of American science under a repressive, brainless, xenophobic regime.
The pernicious effect of the political scrutiny of science and medicine will be to discourage certain projects altogether and to distory or adulturate those that somehow survive.

[Dr. Alfred Sommer, the dean of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University] said that if researchers feared that federal support for their work might be affected by politics, whether it was true or untrue, it could take a toll. “If people feel intimidated and start clouding the language they use, then your mind starts to get cloudy and the science gets cloudy,” he said, adding that the federal financing of medical research had traditionally been free from political influence.

not the stone age, but pretty nearly

We’ve thrown Baghdad back at least 100 years.
We can’t even find the government which we claimed was the objective for the death and destruction we have visited upon Iraq, and I won’t mention our failure to track down the weapons of mass destruction we claimed were the major immediate threat to U.S. security, but we have been remarkably successful in destroying the entire infrastructure of the capital city of five million people.
Baghdad’s public facilities once were of first world standard. Today the city has no electicity, no water, no sewage or trash collection, no police, no telephones. Thirty-five of the city’s thirty-eight hospitals are closed because of looting or arson.

Eleven days after US forces occupied the city and four days after their engineers were supposed to have begun working around the clock at the power plants, the lack of amenities is fueling the anti-American feeling in the streets. “They did the destroying, why can’t they repair them?” is the most common question.

Why? Our guys have been too busy securing the oil production facilities which are going to pay the big U.S. corporations to whom the White House is awarding lucrative post-war construction contracts.
The country is well rid of a dictator, but it was done in a way and at a cost whose legitimacy and worth is arguable at best. But for Iraquis, more important going forward is the identity of the forces which authored the change and the fact of their continued presence as occupiers. We have robbed Iraqis of their pride and they may not forgive us.
For more on the pulse of Iraq, see another commentary in today’s Independent, “A DANGEROUS GROUNDSWELL OF RESENTMENT IS BUILDING UP ON THE STREETS OF BAGHDAD.”

Then came one of those moments that you live through with every nerve of your body vibrating. I saw young men breaking away from the main crowd and running toward a street corner. There was some shouting. Then I spotted American helmets bobbing above the crowd. “Look, buddy, I’ve got the gun – now back off,” a voice shouted. An Iraqi man was confronting an American soldier. “Go ahead and shoot me. Go ahead,” the man said. A woman shouted into my face: “It’s about our pride. Its just about our pride.”

where’s the queer soldier’s yellow ribbon?

He and she are not supposed to even be there, but they are. Moreover, like their comrades, most queers on duty in the Persian Gulf have lovers and partners at home anxious about their welfare, yet neither these soldiers and sailors nor those who most love them and now wait for them here can show that they care for each other.
The NYTimes yesterday:

At a time when thousands of Americans are planning for the return of their loved ones from the Middle East, there is a subset that remains largely invisible. The government’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which forbids gays in the military to be open about their sexual orientation, has caused an unknown number of couples to have their farewells behind closed doors, to plan similarly discreet homecomings and, in the time between, to resort to sterile or anonymous messages as a way of staying in touch.
With their hearts and lives in upheaval, the gay partners of troops in the gulf voice frustration that they have not received the benefits that married couples get, or the same level of emotional support.

What follows are excerpts from the stories of two couples. The first:

A woman in the Northeast, whose lesbian partner of eight years is an officer on a ship that has been at war, does not have access to family briefings offered at the nearby base on the status of the ship’s crew. But even if she did, “I wouldn’t be comfortable going there: I’d be worried about what questions would be asked of me.”
She is also troubled by the thought that if her partner was incapacitated, she would not be the first person contacted by the military. “We’ve got to navigate through this crazy system virtually alone,” she said.

The second story is that of a Washington lawyer, partner for five years of a soldier now deployed in the gulf, who describes the difficulties which cannot be overcome by their planning, their wills and mutual powers of attorney.

“It wasn’t a goodbye kiss at the base like I saw on TV for so many other people,” the lawyer said. “We’ve learned to make adjustments.”

Since the soldier departed for his current duty, his partner has felt left out, even among professional colleagues whose spouses are overseas, because he has to remain protective of his partner’s anonimity.

The lawyer was plainly eager to tell his story, but spent several minutes making sure that any account he gave a reporter would be scrubbed of details that could identify the partner.
In daily e-mail messages, the lawyer said, he must choose his words carefully, and avoid gender references. He does not end those messages with his name.
“I write it and I censor it as I go along,” he said. “But I say ‘I love you.'”

both sides feeling the pinch

We came as conquerors, and the conquered know it. Now they are asking questions, tomorrow they may want to do more.
Robert Fisk has been in Iraq, in Baghdad itself, since well before the war began, and what he sees is not the success being reported by the American media. He asks the righteous new overlords in Mesopotamia, if America was campaigning for human rights in Iraq, and if America insisted that the guilty, the war criminals, would be brought to trial, where are those rights being defended, and why haven’t we apprehended the felons?

17 April 2003
It’s going wrong, faster than anyone could have imagined. The army of “liberation” has already turned into the army of occupation. The Shias are threatening to fight the Americans, to create their own war of “liberation”.
At night on every one of the Shia Muslim barricades in Sadr City, there are 14 men with automatic rifles. Even the US Marines in Baghdad are talking of the insults being flung at them. “Go away! Get out of my face!” an American soldier screamed at an Iraqi trying to push towards the wire surrounding an infantry unit in the capital yesterday. I watched the man’s face suffuse with rage. “God is Great! God is Great!” the Iraqi retorted.
“Fuck you!”

The people of Baghdad have been ordered to stay in their homes from dusk to dawn.

Lockdown. It’s a form of imprisonment. In their own country. Written by the command of the 1st US Marine Division, it’s a curfew in all but name.
If I was an Iraqi and I read that,” an Arab woman shouted at me, “I would become a suicide bomber.” And all across Baghdad you hear the same thing, from Shia Muslim clerics to Sunni businessmen, that the Americans have come only for oil, and that soon – very soon – a guerrilla resistance must start. No doubt the Americans will claim that these attacks are “remnants” of Saddam’s regime or “criminal elements”. But that will not be the case.

But the main thrust of Fisk’s argument is the observation that the coalition has done virtually nothing to apprehend the leaders of Sadaam Hussein’s regime, or its agents of terror, and very little to protect the country’s infrastrucure at any level, with the single, all-too-telling exception of the oil sector.

Why, Iraqis are asking, did the United States allow the entire Iraqi cabinet to escape? And they’re right. Not just the Beast of Baghdad and his two sons, Qusay and Uday, but the Vice-President, Taha Yassin Ramadan, the Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s personal adviser, Dr A K Hashimi, the ministers of defence, health, the economy, trade, even Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the Minister of Information . . . .
. . . .
So the people of Baghdad are asking who is behind the destruction of their cultural heritage: the looting of the archaeological treasures from the national museum; the burning of the entire Ottoman, Royal and State archives; the Koranic library; and the vast infrastructure of the nation we claim we are going to create for them.
Why, they ask, do they still have no electricity and no water? In whose interest is it for Iraq to be deconstructed, divided, burnt, de-historied, destroyed? Why are they issued with orders for a curfew by their so-called liberators?

The answer isn’t in the text of his essay. Instead, Fisk ends with a warning which has other thoughtful authors these days.

So I’ll make an awful prediction. That America’s war of “liberation” is over. Iraq’s war of liberation from the Americans is about to begin. In other words, the real and frightening story starts now.

a Robert Ashley for the ages

For a taste of what people will be talking about and, yes, singing, twenty years from now, not unlike the way that the music of Donizetti or Verdi was popularly enjoyed in nineteenth-century Italy, head for The Kitchen tomorrow evening (Saturday). Robert Ashley is the prophet of modern opera, even if he is still not properly honored in his own country.
We sat in the front row this evening, next to his wonderful colleague, Mikel Rouse, for a performance of Ashley’s latest work, “Celestial Excursions,” an extraordinarily fresh music-theater take on those we usually try to avoid calling “the old.”
From The Village Voice “Choices” section:

Old people–a community so marginalized it doesn’t even have a future to look forward to–are the subject of Ashley’s “Celestial Excursions,” which has its domestic premiere tonight. America’s most inventive and ambitious opera composer seamlessly interweaves several natural-language recitatives (performed by Thomas Buckner, Sam Ashley, and Joan La Barbara, among others), pop-song nostalgia, pre-recorded electronics, and “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s homey piano playing into what should be a witty, moving, and densely textured meditation on aging, memory, and the great unknown.

From the review by the almost-impossible-to-please Anne Midgette, in the NYTimes:

His five central characters (including himself), seated at card tables with microphones, speak or sing fragments or long episodes of meaningful past, out of context: pieces of story like tiles fallen from their mosaic, lovely and broken.
What he creates is a dream state that’s brought into relation to the outside world only through structural conventions. The characters, for example, come together in a meeting at an assisted-living center, with Mr. Ashley as the group leader trying to impose some kind of meaningful order out of the waves of feeling welling around him.
Their monologues are also grouped into episodes that have the appearance of traditional musical forms, if not their sound: a deft, intricate quartet juxtaposing speech and song; a big ballad-aria, “Lonely Lady,” which is spoken by Mr. Ashley. But there’s never a resolution; the music intensifies, climaxes, ebbs, while Joan Jonas, a performance artist, enacts a sequence of dreamlike images at the back of the stage. Imposing form on feeling is every artist’s task; in this piece, age is the threat to this difficult act, and attempts at structure seem like thin walls seeking to hold back shifting sands.

Ashley himself is now in his early seventies, but his music, his texts and his entire conception belongs to all the ages.

pitching for peace, caught in a war

Tim Robbins’ credentials as a baseball fan are impeccable, but it appears that at least part of the baseball establishment is no fan of Tim Robbins.
Ok, most of us know the facts already, but now we’ve “Nuke” Laloosh‘s own account. He didn’t just speak softly and he wasn’t carrying a big bat, but Robbins got his own bully pulpit a couple of days ago when he delivered a fiery speech before the National Press Club in Washington.

For all of the ugliness and tragedy of 9-11, there was a brief period afterward where I held a great hope, in the midst of the tears and shocked faces of New Yorkers, in the midst of the lethal air we breathed as we worked at Ground Zero, in the midst of my children’s terror at being so close to this crime against humanity, in the midst of all this, I held on to a glimmer of hope in the naive assumption that something good could come out of it.
I imagined our leaders seizing upon this moment of unity in America, this moment when no one wanted to talk about Democrat versus Republican, white versus black, or any of the other ridiculous divisions that dominate our public discourse. I imagined our leaders going on television telling the citizens that although we all want to be at Ground Zero, we can’t, but there is work that is needed to be done all over America. Our help is needed at community centers to tutor children, to teach them to read. Our work is needed at old-age homes to visit the lonely and infirmed; in gutted neighborhoods to rebuild housing and clean up parks, and convert abandoned lots to baseball fields. I imagined leadership that would take this incredible energy, this generosity of spirit and create a new unity in America born out of the chaos and tragedy of 9/11, a new unity that would send a message to terrorists everywhere: If you attack us, we will become stronger, cleaner, better educated, and more unified. You will strengthen our commitment to justice and democracy by your inhumane attacks on us. Like a Phoenix out of the fire, we will be reborn.
And then came the speech: You are either with us or against us. And the bombing began. And the old paradigm was restored as our leader encouraged us to show our patriotism by shopping and by volunteering to join groups that would turn in their neighbor for any suspicious behavior.
In the 19 months since 9-11, we have seen our democracy compromised by fear and hatred. Basic inalienable rights, due process, the sanctity of the home have been quickly compromised in a climate of fear. A unified American public has grown bitterly divided, and a world population that had profound sympathy and support for us has grown contemptuous and distrustful, viewing us as we once viewed the Soviet Union, as a rogue state.

And this was just his warm-up.

“The Madness of George Dubya”

Leave it to the British to make us laugh about the war. If we’re all real good, maybe we’ll even wind up seeing this delicious lampoon, inspired by our real life little kingy and the fictional Stanley Kubrick movie, “Dr. Strangelove.”

“[The Madness of George] Dubya” — part vaudeville, part farce, part cabaret — has become the newest emblem of the frustration and ambivalence felt by some Britons at being drawn into a war as the principal allies of an American administration that provokes incredulity and resentment rather than loyalty among many of them.
“It’s undoubtedly anti-Bush,” Mr. Butcher said, “but to understand it as an anti-American diatribe is to miss the point.” To describe it as topical might be an understatement, too. From its conception to its first production took less than three weeks, he said.
The United States, Mr. Butcher said, justified a war on Iraq by “a series of palpable hoaxes” that left him “increasingly flabbergasted by the shameless, manipulative cynicism of the whole approach.” He was so incensed that starting late in December he resolved to cast, write and stage his revue, which opened just over two weeks later, on Jan. 14, in the Theatro Technis fringe theater in north London. It opened in the West End last Monday.
. . . .
Some characters seem to be caricatures of American politicians whose own words have already made them seem like caricatures to some of their critics. “All you have to do is transcribe their utterances, and it needs very little embellishment,” Mr. Butcher said. “You couldn’t invent it.”
The British characters, by contrast, are more or less bumblers dragged along in the powerful American wake. Prime Minister Tony Blear is preoccupied by a real estate deal — a real-life scandal that swirled around Prime Minister Tony Blair’s wife, Cherie, last year. Group Captain Windbreak is the very model of British deference as he seeks to dissuade General Kipper from ordering a nuclear strike. “Quite so,” he murmurs, as the American officer demurs. “See your point.”

The NYTimes account concludes with the revelation that the very fresh review necessarily incorporates an element of news, because of the speed of events in Iraq. Each day’s performance is updated with new jokes.

scaring us to keep us in line

We just returned home from an art opening at the Whitney at Altria, across the street from Grand Central Station on Park Avenue.
As we left the reception at 9 pm we were shocked to see several NYC police vans disgorging a number of SWAT cops (with flack jackets and huge automatic rifles). Moments later we were inside the subway station where we found “camouflaged” national guardsmen on alert throughout the concorse, stationed rigidly at ten foot intervals from each other, also handling automatic rifles and looking anything but relaxed. I mean, there was a lot of armor on the east end of 42nd Street tonight! Thousands of people passed these warriors on their way to the trains, and no one seemed to notice the honor guard.
As I write this no information is available on the internet which would suggest anything out of the ordinary was happening tonight. No one but Barry and I ever seem to see these creatures, these horrific scenes, and no one but Barry and I ever seem to be disturbed by their significance.
Why is it that we as New Yorkers, if not just as Americans, can be made to pay every cent of the cost of our own military occupation while we have no say about its necessity or its nature? This is a subjugation which exists at the whim of some vague higher authority not accountable even to the citizenry of the nation. Whether as New Yorkers or as Americans, we are not given an adequate reason either for its presence or for the fluctuating burden of its insult. In fact we are not even told it is there, as is attested by the otherwise inexplicable ignorance of my neighbors on the subject.
In the case of the specific shock and awe of this evening’s “alert,” could it be simply the consequence of our once again becoming too relaxed for the good of those at the helm of the state, too inadequate to the need of the fascists in Washington to continually remind us of the absolute necessity of their regime?
Apparently we will never know. No one is really asking the question, and the American media least of all.
And yet. As we passed by the huge windows of the gallery we had just left, on our way to the subway, a large number of the young artists and friends of artists who were still inside the space were literally pressing their noses to the glass in their astonishment at the horrible paramilitary scene outside to which they found themselves witness. Are we finally paying attention? Maybe we will wake up in time.