Salgado, 17 Times
April 26th, 2009 § 1 Comment
Full view of the Serra Pelada gold mine Brazil, 1986 (Sebastião Salgado)
The Guardian‘s resident oaf Michael Tomasky recently disparaged the fact that Hugo Chavez presented Barack Obama with Eduardo Galeano’s classic The Open Veins of Latin America with the sneer: ‘We all know what kind of things he writes’. We all do, but it is not clear Tomasky does. Galeano writes things of the following kind. It is literature of the most elevated variety. It is prose that rings. This is from an essay introducing An Uncertain Grace, a collection of Sebastião Salgado’s photography:
1. Are these photographs, these figures of tragic grandeur, carvings in stone or wood by a sculptor in despair? Was the sculptor the photographer? Or God? Or the Devil? Or earthly reality?This much is certain: it would be difficult to look at these figures and remain unaffected. I cannot imagine anyone shrugging his shoulder, turning away unseeing, and sauntering off, whistling.
2. Hunger looks like the man that hunger is killing. The man looks like the tree the man is killing. The trees have arms, the people, branches. Wizened bodies, gnarled: trees made of bones, the people of knots and roots that writhe under the sun. The trees and the people, ageless. All born thousands of years ago – who knows how many? – and still they are standing, inexplicably standing, beneath a heaven that forsakes them.
3. This world is so sad that the rainbows come out in black and white and so ugly that the vultures fly upside down after the dying. A song is sung in Mexico:
Se va la vida por el agujero Como la mugre por el lavadero. [Life goes down the drain Like dirt in the sink.]
And in Colombia they say:
El costo de la vida sube y sube y el valor de la vida baja y baja. [The more the cost of living goes up the less life is worth.]
But light is a secret buried under the garbage and Salgado’s photographs tell us that secret.
Torture? It probably killed more Americans than 9/11
April 26th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
A US major reveals the inside story of military interrogation in Iraq in this report by Patrick Cockburn, winner of the 2009 Orwell Prize for journalism
The use of torture by the US has proved so counter-productive that it may have led to the death of as many US soldiers as civilians killed in 9/11, says the leader of a crack US interrogation team in Iraq.
“The reason why foreign fighters joined al-Qa’ida in Iraq was overwhelmingly because of abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and not Islamic ideology,” says Major Matthew Alexander, who personally conducted 300 interrogations of prisoners in Iraq. It was the team led by Major Alexander [a named assumed for security reasons] that obtained the information that led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa’ida in Iraq. Zarqawi was then killed by bombs dropped by two US aircraft on the farm where he was hiding outside Baghdad on 7 June 2006. Major Alexander said that he learnt where Zarqawi was during a six-hour interrogation of a prisoner with whom he established relations of trust.
The liberal supremacists
April 24th, 2009 § 3 Comments
‘Whether they like it or not, Dawkins, Amis, Hitchens and company have become weapons in the war on terror,’ writes Terry Eagleton, bane of the New Atheists. Don’t miss his delightfully scathing debunking of Dawkins here.
One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies. This, surely, is the acid test of any liberal creed. Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant. A community of the broad-minded is a pleasant place, but requires no great moral effort. The key issue is how the liberal state copes with those who reject its ideological framework. It is fashionable today to speak of being open to the “Other”. But what if the Other detests your openness as much as it does your lapdancing clubs?
There is no quarrel about how to treat those whose scorn for liberal values takes the form of blowing the legs off small children. They need to be locked up. But socialists as well as Islamists reject the liberal state, so what is to be done about them? Are they to be indulged only until they successfully challenge the state, at which point they too will find themselves behind bars with the zealots of al-Qaida?
Caught on tape
April 24th, 2009 § 1 Comment
‘An extraordinary scoop exposes Democrat Jane Harman and the murky inner workings of Washington politics,’ Richard Silverstein reports. Democracy Now is AWOL once again, by the way. It is too busy covering grizzly bears and some such struff.
Jeff Stein, a reporter for Congressional Quarterly, has broken an amazing scooprevealing that Democratic member of congress Jane Harman was caught red-handed on a National Security Agency wiretap colluding with an Israeli “agent” to get a reprieve for two alleged spies working for Aipac, the American-Israel public affairs committee. The quid pro quo for Harman – according to the CQ revelations – was that the agent would arrange for wealthy Democratic party donor Haim Saban to threaten the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, with withdrawing funding unless Pelosi made Harman the chair of the House’s powerful intelligence committee.
Harman vehemently denies the story – telling CQ that its claims “have no basis in fact” – and says she never contacted the Justice Department on the Aipac Two’s behalf. (There are other agencies within the executive branch, I note.) But she does not deny the conversation took place with the Israeli “agent,” who she has inferred was affiliated with Aipac. In 2006, I reported that Saban did threaten Pelosi, precisely as Harman had requested. No wonder Pelosi didn’t take kindly to being swatted around. She was so ticked off by the assault that it backfired, and she put Harman in a deep freeze. The latter never got the gold ring she’d sought.
Rant against Hypocrisy
April 23rd, 2009 § Leave a Comment
If Israel is not a racist state, if Zionism is not a racist ideology, then I do not speak English.
I don’t quite know why, but hypocrisy is the element in political discourse which catalyses my most murderous responses. Perhaps it’s because I like language, or respect it, and believe it shouldn’t be raped.
Torture Tape Implicates UAE Royal Sheikh
April 23rd, 2009 § 1 Comment
Police in Uniform Join In as Victim Is Whipped, Beaten, Electrocuted, Run Over by SUV. An ABC exclusive by Vic Walter, Rehab El-Buri, Angela Hill and Brian Ross.
What Clash of Civilizations? They say the East and West meet in UAE. For once I’m inclined to believe it. We aren’t so different after all! There is a warning here for readers of Sheikh-themed romances. Watch out! This is what you might end up with.
(UPDATE: The Observer reports that the Sheikh has been accused of 25 other similar attacks)
A video tape smuggled out of the United Arab Emirates shows a member of the country’s royal family mercilessly torturing a man with whips, electric cattle prods and wooden planks with protruding nails.
A man in a UAE police uniform is seen on the tape tying the victim’s arms and legs, and later holding him down as the Sheikh pours salt on the man’s wounds and then drives over him with his Mercedes SUV.
In a statement to ABC News, the UAE Ministry of the Interior said it had reviewed the tape and acknowledged the involvement of Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan, brother of the country’s crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed. « Read the rest of this entry »
Police and PM in dock over arrest of terrorist suspects
April 23rd, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Surprise, surprise! The British state cried wolf again. ‘Case against Muslim men amounted to one email and handful of telephone conversations’, report By Jonathan Brown, Robert Verkaik and Kim Sengupta. Also check out this brilliant indictment of the ‘war on terror’ by Zbigniew Brzezinski.
The case against 12 Muslim men involved in what Gordon Brown described as a “major terrorist plot” amounted to one email and a handful of ambiguous telephone conversations, it emerged last night after all the men were released without charge.
Eleven Pakistani students and one British man were freed after extensive searches of 14 addresses in North-west England failed to locate evidence of terrorist activity, according to security sources. Police did not find any explosives, firearms, target lists, documents or any material which could have been used to carry out an attack. Yesterday, the Government’s own reviewer of terrorism legislation said he would investigate the case.
The Home Office said it would deport the 11 Pakistani men, who are aged 22 to 38 and were in Britain on student visas, because the Government believed they represented a threat to national security.
Harman-AIPAC–The Saga Continues
April 22nd, 2009 § Leave a Comment
The internet is really coming into its own, and there seems to be a full on confrontation between the bloggers and MSM–and the blogs are winning! (Here I would exclude the stellar investigative work by CQ‘s Jeff Stein of course, without which none of this would be possible). In the past this story would have been buried after a day or two of attention. Today the bloggers won’t let it die, and as a result the MSM is forced to pay it more attention (as in the CNN interview below). Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz are as usual on the case with panache, as is Glenn Greenwald. Pat Lang has an excellent guest editorial by Robert Willman on his blog, and Juan Cole is also following up. David Corn is also spotlighting new developments. Here is a the most succint summary of new developments from Zachary Roth of TPM, who also published an excellent timeline of the case among other stories.
Some recent developments in the fast-moving Harman-AIPAC story to update you on…
- Nancy Pelosi told reporters that she was briefed “a few years ago” by the NSA that they had wiretapped Harman, but wasn’t told what was found, and never alerted Harman.
- CQ‘s Jeff Stein, who broke the original story Monday, now reports that the NSA wiretapped what appears to be a separate, later conversation between Harman and the “suspected Israeli agent.” In this second conversation, Harman’s interlocutor informed Harman that “Pelosi went ballistic” when a major Democratic fundraiser told Pelosi that unless she made Harman the chair of the Intelligence committee, Pelosi would “get no more contributions from me.” (The fundraiser has since been identified as the California businessman Haim Saban.) The conversation was picked up as part of an investigation into the suspected agent.
If Arab Oil Runs Out
April 22nd, 2009 § 2 Comments
As’ad Abu Khalil on the perversions brought by Arab oil.
What has oil madness brought to the Arab person? What can we say about the accumulated billions that have gone to support the Western banks and corporations hostile to our interests, or to buy arms for America to use to support those servile regimes, or for the sake of subjugating those who raise their voices against Israel. Is there anyone among us who will yearn for Arab oil and its political actions, if the oil runs out?
« Read the rest of this entry »
Free the torturers – and the rapists too!
April 21st, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Trust a Python to bring insight to a generally insane debate. ‘If Dick Cheney can trumpet the ‘success’ of his torture policies without fear of retribution, why can’t us ordinary criminals?’, asks A Killer, aka Terry Jones.
I am over the moon about President Obama’s recent publication of the Bush administration’s torture memos. They come as a breath of fresh air for those of us banged up in Cook County Jail.
Obama’s announcement that “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past” is the most reassuring news most of us here have heard in a long time.
Speaking as a multiple rapist and serial killer, I welcome the president’s clear view that “this is a time for reflection, not retribution”. Absolutely. We have indeed been “through a dark and painful chapter in our history” (in my case 17 years in the super-secure lockdown facility).
