Children don't even know what tolerance means
...and we'd better keep it that way, says one North Carolina congressman. Iris, who does most of the writing over at "Interfaith Nunnery," noticed Rep. Walter Jones' (R-NC) introduction of the "School Library Busybody Act of 2005," excuse me, "Parental Empowerment Act of 2005" (HR 2295), in the House. Her summary:

This legislation would create parent-based advisory boards to review at the local level material eyed for school libraries and classrooms. It would let parents, in blocks of five to 15, decide whether the country's youngest children are ready for controversial themes.

Jones' proposal would restrict federal education funds for states that fail to adopt guidelines for elementary-school book purchases.

This is the result of a constituent's complaint about the controversial book King&King, about two princes who meet and fall in love.

Iris provides links to the news item and the bill. From the North Carolina Kinston Free Press:

But it's families and the 'moral future of America,' Jones said, that this legislation strives to protect.

'Children don't even know what tolerance means,' he said. 'Parents who bring children into the world should not feel there's a social agenda in their schools.

Looks like you get a social agenda either way; some grownups don't know what tolerance means, either. There's your moral future of America.

You'd think there would be countless better issues for the elected and unelected busybodies of the world to focus on. But I guess the Iraq war, chemical plant security, bird flu virus, HIV, Darfur, North Korean WMD development, global warming and the Patriot Act are all taken care of.

Isn't the idea of a library to be a place where you can learn new things, and get exposed to new ideas? If you're so petrified they'll get the wrong idea -- read with them, and set aside the book if it bothers you so much. Please don't inflict your phobias on the rest of us.

For more on the library busybody phenomenon (but also more on the joys of libraries), check by "Interfaith Nunnery." The one downside to Iris' job as a children's librarian seems to be putting up with endless attempts to protect children's fragile little brains from one kind of "dangerous" concept or another. posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:20:00 PM -- |    

 
DeLay TRMPAC treasurer loses civil case
The noose tightens around DeLay's political future, the Houston Chronicle reports:

A state district judge ruled today that a political committee founded by U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was legally required to report more than $500,000 in corporate cash to state authorities because the money was raised to influence Texas elections. [...]

"I find that the contributions were used in connection with a campaign for elective office. Therefore, they were political contributions or campaign contributions within the meaning of ... the Election Code," visiting District Judge Joe Hart said in his ruling.

Via Charles Kuffner, who explains the significance of the ruling against TRMPAC:

That's huge, because the defense in the criminal case is that the money was spent on "administrative" expenses, not "campaign" expenses. A ruling for [TRMPAC treasurer] Ceverha would likely have led to a dismissal of at least some of the charges against the criminal defendants. The actual ruling strengthens the prosecution's case against them. Maybe this will increase the pressure on them to try to cut a deal.

For ongoing DeLay shenanigans coverage, check by Off the Kuff's "Scandalized!" topic. My own last post on DeLay's TRMPAC troubles was "Watching clowns climb out of a Volkswagen," which is still worth it just for that comment by Texas D.A. Ronnie Earle. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:05:00 AM -- |    

 
200 years ago: Meriwether Lewis sights the Rocky Mountains

On the afternoon of May 26, at the eastern end of the breaks, Lewis climbed the surrounding bluffs, a "fortieguing" task, but he thought himself "well repaid for any labour" when he reached the highest point in the neighborhood, because "from this point I beheld the Rocky Mountains for the first time."
--Stephen Ambrose, Undaunted Courage

Whilst I viewed those mountains, I felt a secret pleasure in finding myself so near the head of the - heretofore conceived - boundless Missouri. But when I reflected on the difficulties which this snowy barrier would most probably throw in my way to the Pacific Ocean, and the sufferings and hardships of myself and party in them, it in some measure counterbalanced the joy I had felt in the first moments in which I gazed on them. But, as I have always held it little short of criminality to anticipate evils, I will allow it to be a good, comfortable road until I am compelled to believe otherwise.
--Meriwether Lewis, Journals of Lewis and Clark

The sighting at the eastern end of the Missouri Breaks was a first strong intimation there would be no easy Northwest Passage, the hoped for water route to the Pacific that was the strategic object of the expedition. Those hopes would be dashed for good that August, when the headwaters of the Missouri River proved to be well short of mountain ranges still dividing the expedition from the Pacific Ocean.

Lately, Maddie and I've been watching the Ken Burns documentary "Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery." It's a lovely, lovely piece of work that I can't recommend highly enough -- a great story well told by people who care about it, from Stephen Ambrose to William Least Heat Moon to Dayton Duncan. In the telling and the journals of the expeditionaries, you glimpse the personalities of Lewis, the educated brooder, of Clark, the soldier and frontiersman, of their many competent, dauntless corpsmen such as Joseph Ordway, or of Sacagawea, the calm interpreter, a girl on a thousand mile trek with a baby on her back -- "better than any white flag," as Least Heat Moon put it.

The sheer beauty of the land they traversed, by turns majestic, gentle, and mysterious, is the constant companion to the story. The impact of the land was sometimes palpable in Lewis' journal, as in this famous entry:

As we passed on, it seemed as if those scenes of visionary enchantment would never have an end.

Compared to what came later, the expedition was generally prudent and decent with the Native Americans it encountered, and humbled by the challenges nature presented, from grizzlies to mountain ranges to snow and wind and rain. Part of the poignancy of the story comes in realizing how soon awestruck discovery would yield to an inexorable flood tide of settlers washing across the land. But that, too, was the point:

The work we are now doing is, I trust, done for posterity in such a way that they need not repeat it. We shall delineate with correctness the great arteries of this country. Those who come after us will fill up the canvas we begin.
-- Thomas Jefferson

We should renew our efforts to fill that canvas well, to care for a land that has nourished us, to preserve the American experiment, and make that experiment a success.


Resources
A small sample of the current outpouring of online exhibits about the Lewis and Clark Expedition:

The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (University of Nebraska, Virginia)
Lewis and Clark: Illustrations from the Journals (American Philosophical Society Library)
Lewis and Clark: Mapping the West (Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History)
Discovering Lewis and Clark: "a hyperhistory in progress"
Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation
Lewis and Clark in Montana (State of Montana)
Lewis and Clark Bicentennial (United States)
Lewis and Clark: The National Bicentennial Exhibition (Missouri Historical Society)
In the footsteps of Lewis and Clark (Sierra Club)
White Cliffs of the Missouri (edbrenegar.typepad.com) ...Lewis' "scenes of visionary enchantment"

posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:00:00 PM -- |    

 
Worth reading
A few things I've found worthwhile, but couldn't put together a decent post of my own about:

Jonathan Mermin: The media's independence problem (World Policy Journal, via "realitique").
Mermin's thesis:

...journalists continue to be incapable of focusing on an issue or perspective on U.S. foreign policy that has not first been identified or articulated in official Washington debate.

Read the article for candid admissions by Jim Lehrer, David Ignatius, and Judith Miller that they either might like to take back, or worse, might not want to. Mermin argues that the Washington press corps (or, as the "realitique" post title would have it, "corpse") has let their dependence on officially and/or reputably sourced debate blind them to glaring cognitive dissonances right in front of them:

Independent journalism would not have waited (and the wait continues) for an official source to point out that the failure to secure suspected WMD sites revealed, if not unfathomable incompetence, the fraudulent nature of the president’s purported concern about Iraq giving such weapons to terrorists.

Many may say "so what else is new?" -- and Mermin is one of them, pointing out that the same things happened during the Viet Nam War. Whether it's new or not, Mermin describes the problem well.

Anthony Cox ("Black Triangle"): One study does not give the answer (via Harry's Place)
Discusses alternative Iraqi death count figures -- Lancet (~98000, +/- 92,000) vs. UN (~24,000 +/- ~6,000). As the post notes, Tim Lambert makes the point that the Lancet study includes excess deaths from disease, while the UN study does not. While taking issue with Lambert's title ("Lancet Study Vindicated") Cox makes a good point here:

It is important to note that the confidence intervals of the Lancet report completely encapsulate the confidence intervals of the UN report, which means the two studies are not necessarily contradictory. However, the UN report has a larger sample size in its favour making it more likely to contain the true number.

Carlin Romano: The Pope's Sins of Omission (Chronicle of Higher Education, via Avedon Carol)
Romano, a theologian who ran afoul of Ratzinger's Council for the Doctrine of Faith, provides some details about Ratzinger's desertion (later than I thought: after Hitler's death), and recommends a book I'll be looking for -- "Hitler Youth", by Michael Kater, who documents that there were a lot of German Catholic youths who were considerably braver in opposing Nazi Germany than Ratzinger was. True, no doubt. Romano's verdict -- buried in the text -- may be a just one, but it also seems to suggest flaunting one's moral outrage is mandatory: "Lack of indignation, rather than complicity, is the sin of omission in [Ratzinger's] reminiscences." He also concludes: "The biography of Benedict XVI should trouble any who believe the pope ought to be a morally inspiring figure, like Jesus himself." That's setting the bar pretty high, but maybe a pope deserves to be measured by it.

I still stand by my defense of Ratzinger's choices -- or lack thereof -- as a boy. But I'm also reminded that's a fairly narrow argument. What is it Richard Lugar says of John Bolton? Oh: "There is no evidence that he has broken laws or engaged in serious ethical misconduct." (Actually, there is, but you get the point.)

Noah Feldman: Ugly Americans: The laws of a war against evil (The New Republic)
On the pretext of reviewing of two reference books about Abu Ghraib and related issues, Noah Feldman manages to be calmly outraged and passionately analytical about the moral and practical dimensions of those failures. He's particularly good in discussing and ultimately rejecting use of the principle of "reciprocity" -- what I do/don't do to you, you can/cannot do to me -- as a justification for waiving Geneva Conventions for Afghan and Al Qaeda combatants (since they didn't respect those conventions themselves). Indeed, he rightly turns the notion on its head:

Reciprocity extends also to my desire to convince other parties, third parties, that agreements are worth keeping, even when such parties might be able to get away with violating them. Just as important, reciprocity includes the proposition that I have an interest to signal that I am the kind of person or entity who keeps agreements in spirit as well as in letter.

The rule of law, understood from this perspective of reciprocal interest in keeping to the rules, is not only a good in itself. It is also a tool for promoting a habit of rule-following that serves the interests of stability. [...]

When it came to international law, detention, and interrogation, the Bush administration failed to understand why reciprocity is valuable, even when the immediate enemy is never going to comply. This was not only moral obtuseness. It was also something worse, for the consequentialist (and all strategists are consequentialists): a profound and damaging error of judgment.

Human rights: not just a good idea, but one that worked for us -- or used to. Excerpts don't do justice to Feldman's essay, I think; have a look.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:50:00 PM -- |    

 
Foot dragging and stonewalling in Afghanistan
Like Jim Henley, I was struck by this observation in Tim Golden's Sunday New York Times report ("Army Faltered in Investigating Detainee Abuse"):

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 military agency involved is the Criminal Investigation Command (CID),* and this isn't the first time I've noticed a certain lack of alacrity in their work in Afghanistan.

Foot dragging on the Gardez 7 case
Last September, another homicide at the hands of U.S. soldiers -- about two weeks after the Times Bagram homicide report in 2003 -- came to light in a case known as the "Gardez 7" after the seven surviving witnesses (see "Yet more bad apples"). Acting on what was likely purposely misleading information in an intra-Afghan power struggle, U.S. soldiers took eight Afghan soldiers prisoner. Writing for the L.A. Times ("U.S. Probing Alleged Abuse of Afghans"),** reporters Craig Pyes and Mark Mazzetti describe what happened next :

Alleged American mistreatment of the detainees included repeated beatings, immersion in cold water, electric shocks, being hung upside down and toenails being torn off, according to Afghan investigators and an internal memorandum prepared by a United Nations delegation that interviewed the surviving soldiers.

They also beat one Afghan, Jamal Naseer, so badly over the next two weeks that he died. As with the Bagram case reported last weekend, there are reports the victim was unable to walk on his own on the final day of his life, and of severe injuries around his knees.

And as with the Bagram case, Army investigators seem to need large, brightly colored arrows pointing to evidence before they'll go find it or do much with it. It took Afghan prosecutors and a freelance journalist to come up with the eyewitness accounts the CID needed:

The case of the "Gardez 7," as CID officials dubbed it, was filed away as unfounded because investigators had no records, victims' names or witnesses, said Christopher E. Coffey, an Army detective based at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. [...]

Coffey said that with the new information, the CID would pursue charges of murder and of abuse of a person in U.S. custody.

"We're trying to figure out who was running the base," Coffey said. "We don't know what unit was there. There are no records. The reporting system is broke across the board. Units are transferred in and out. There are no SOPs [standard operating procedures] ... and each unit acts differently."

Troop rotations admittedly complicate the story. The unit that took the Afghan soldiers prisoner was from the 20th Special Forces group from Birmingham, AL. That group was officially replaced on March 15, 2003, by the 3rd Special Forces Group from Ft. Bragg, N.C. -- two days before Jamal Naseer died.

Still, I'd think that between seven eyewitnesses, and photographs of soldiers in each of the units, a reasonably hard working investigator would have a pretty decent shot at identifying the culprits. But there have been no further public developments in the case that I'm aware of since last September.

What of it? Well, this is why we can assume Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Gardez are merely what we know, rather than all there is. The story only came to light because Afghan officials, an American human rights group ("Crimes of War Project"), and a freelance journalist (Craig Pyes) followed up on a case involving Afghan soldiers, as opposed to luckless civilians or insurgents not entitled to Geneva Convention protections, if "military necessity" seemed to require that.

Stonewalling
The glacial pace of the U.S. military investigations is complemented by Defense Department stonewalling of Afghan officials who seem more eager to bring the perpetrators to justice. From the L.A. Times report:

Afghanistan's attorney general ordered that the case be fully investigated by military prosecutors. A request by Afghanistan's Army III Corps for an explanation of the incident from U.S. military officials received no response, according to documents in the Afghan report to the attorney general.

As Crimes of War Project's Andrew Dworkin pointed out in a commentary about the case, the U.S. and Afghanistan seem to have no "Status of Forces" agreement that specifies the U.S. military's obligations to a host country when an American soldier is accused of a crime. That may contribute to the stonewalling tactics:

In the absence of a Status of Forces Agreement, U.S. soldiers would be criminally liable under Afghan law for killing or torturing an Afghan national. The suggestion by Afghan military prosecutors that those responsible for the Gardez killing and torture be prosecuted in Afghanistan is legally credible, though politically unlikely.

"Cooperate and consult"
The stonewalling and arrogance go all the way to the top, of course. In Tuesday's Washington Post, Michael Fletcher reported ("Bush Rebuffs Karzai's Request on Troops"):

President Bush rebuffed Afghan President Hamid Karzai's effort to gain greater control over U.S. military operations in his country yesterday, as the two leaders endorsed an agreement allowing the United States to continue its policy of simply informing Afghan officials before launching raids in Afghanistan.

"In terms of more say over our military, our relationship is one of cooperate and consult," Bush said.

Bush also turned down Karzai's request for Afghanistan to take custody of its citizens being detained by the United States as suspected terrorists, saying that Afghanistan lacks facilities where the suspects "can be housed and fed and guarded."

Instead, Karzai got his marching orders to cut opium production.


=====
* The acronym is for "...Division," the original name of the branch.
** The article costs $3.95 to retrieve. Pyes also describes the events in Gardez in "A Torture Killing by U.S. Forces in Afghanistan" at the Crimes of War Project, which commissioned his investigative work. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:35:00 AM -- |    

 
Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny
Tim Golden had a two part series (In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates' Deaths, Army Faltered in Investigating Detainee Abuse) in the New York Times this weekend about two prisoners who died in U.S. custody at Bagram, Afghanistan, about how badly they were mistreated, and about how pathetic the investigation into their deaths was. One of the victims, Dilawar, was kneed so often just above the knees (a so-called "peroneal strike"), that the coroner said "I've seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus." She also used the word "pulpified."

I'd read about the case before. When the first reports about it surfaced a couple of years ago, there was a lot of chin pulling (including my own) about what had likely happened, why it had happened, what might justify it, et depressing cetera.

In the event, it was pitiful, shameful, and devoid of any shred of redeeming meaning. By the time Dilawar's martyrdom -- dozens of "peroneal strikes," chained to a ceiling overnight, sleep deprived, mocked, thirsty -- was nearly over, one soldier (Sergeant Yonushonis, not among those charged or responsible) recalls that "most of us were convinced that the detainee was innocent."

Even if he'd been Osama Bin Laden himself, what happened to him would have been wrong. But Dilawar, it turned out, really was just a skinny, scared cab driver, given up to the Americans by an Afghan warlord on a flimsy suspicion. Then mutual incomprehension, sadism, racism, and the United States of America cost him his life, an inch at a time. From the first article:

"He screamed out, 'Allah! Allah! Allah!' and my first reaction was that he was crying out to his god," Specialist Jones said to investigators. "Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny."

Other Third Platoon M.P.'s later came by the detention center and stopped at the isolation cells to see for themselves, Specialist Jones said.

It became a kind of running joke, and people kept showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out 'Allah,' " he said. "It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes."

It must have been all right with the chain of command, though:

...many of the Bagram interrogators, led by the same operations officer, Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, were redeployed to Iraq and in July 2003 took charge of interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison. According to a high-level Army inquiry last year, Captain Wood applied techniques there that were "remarkably similar" to those used at Bagram.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:45:00 AM -- |