Much ado has been made about 2004’s first big-scale “blockbuster” film, The Day After Tomorrow. The movie has all the usual hallmarks of a summer popcorn flick – standard cookie-cutter characters, cheesy dialogue, some good solid destruction, and a ton of money spent on special effects. In short, it’s supposed to be a nicely diverting time-waster.
Directed by Roland Emmerich, who made Independence Day as well as Godzilla (you win some, you lose some), the film is about a new Ice Age triggered in only a week or so by global warming. The result is typical summer-movie death and disaster, with the trailers showing some very exciting-looking shots of twisters demolishing downtown Los Angeles and a tsunami drowning New York. (Of course, trailers are notorious for showing only the best parts of the movie, but that’s beside the point.)
Some environmental groups have glommed onto the film, pronouncing it to be a sort of wake-up call to the dangers of global warming. (It’s not like that hasn’t been done before. Look at Kevin Costner’s Waterworld. Actually, don’t look at it; it’s not very good.) Al Gore, the Ben & Jerry guys, and others have gone on record saying that the premise is rooted in accurate (if highly exaggerated) science and that basically everything in the movie is George W. Bush’s fault.
On the other side, detractors claim the film is little more than pseudo-science tree-hugging propaganda, and have compared it to the 1983 TV film The Day After, in which the Americans and Soviets annihilate each other in a nuclear war. They also point out that the film is “inspired” by a book written by alien-abduction claimant Whitley Streiber and conspiracy-theory radio host Art Bell, insinuating that a movie based on anything from these guys can’t possibly be taken seriously.
For their part, executives at 20th Century Fox are reportedly thrilled about the free publicity they’re getting from all this commotion.
But far from being some heavy-handed political polemic, it appears that The Day After Tomorrow is really just a summer disaster movie. No more, no less. (After all, sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar.) It’s a throwback to the sensational disaster flicks of the 1970s just as Independence Day was a throwback to the alien-invasion movies of the 1950s and 1960s. Like TV shows which breathlessly describe their plots as “ripped from today’s headlines” to bring in audiences, the screenwriters used global warming for the film’s hot topic (ha!).
The reviews are starting to come in, and like movies in general, some are good, some are bad, and some are average. But many say that people who get into screaming matches over the film’s supposed message are missing the point; that it’s just a big, splashy spectacle of a summer movie. So don’t make such a big deal about it, and if this kind of flick is your cup of tea, enjoy.
5/27/2004
5/25/2004
Too Little, Too Late
Throughout the last thirteen months of warfare in Iraq, a common criticism is that the Bush Administration had no plan and no strategy for dealing with the chaos. It was as if the White House and the Pentagon were in a permanent holding pattern, praying that they could keep the situation relatively under control until the magic date of June 30, scheduled to be the supposed “handover of sovereignty” to Iraqis. After that, whatever happens can be passed off as somebody else’s problem.
This endless dithering, based primarily on the hope that things would eventually get better, has taken its toll. Polls routinely show that a clear majority of Americans oppose President Bush’s Iraq policy, and indeed it is painfully clear that there is no policy, just stalling for time. After weeks in which he has largely let his staff do the talking – and after months in which the situation in Iraq disintegrated into a truly catastrophic quagmire – Bush himself went before the cameras last night to lay out his long-awaited plan for getting us out of this mess.
The address can be summed up in four words: too little, too late.
In his speech, with one eye firmly fixed on Election Day, Bush outlined his “five steps” to handing over power to Iraqis and getting out. As he put it, “We will hand over authority to a sovereign Iraqi government, help establish security, continue rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure, encourage more international support, and move toward a national election that will bring forward new leaders empowered by the Iraqi people.” In the midst of the cheerleading, listing the accomplishments while glossing over the setbacks, it is interesting to note that while Bush laid out goals, he did not in any way mention the process in making them happen aside from the vaguest of generalities. It’s as if all these things are expected to happen by themselves.
Bush claimed that despite the post-June 30 presence of 138,000 American soldiers, with more to come if needed and with no withdrawal timetable of any sort, “the occupation will end and Iraqis will govern their own affairs.” This one is simply laughable. American troops will be able to go where they want, when they want, and will not be answerable to any supposed Iraqi government. So in other words, the occupation will continue, no matter what it’s called. (Indeed, post-speech reaction in Iraq shows that the Iraqi people realize this all too well.) And when you get right down to it, the new Iraqi government will have almost no power to speak of.
The speech contained some moments of unintended humor, such as when he insisted that “at every stage, the United States has gone to the United Nations,” conveniently forgetting that the Administration was dragged kicking and screaming into doing so, finally bypassing the UN entirely when that body refused to provide a blank check for war.
He also attempted to blame the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal on “a few American troops,” and in a desperate effort to just make the whole thing go away, he proposed tearing down the Saddam-era prison in favor of one yet to be built. (It was, indeed, the only tangible proposal in the whole speech.) But the “anything goes” policies emanating from the highest ranks of the Pentagon which formed the basis of the abuse were quietly ignored.
What was not mentioned was quite significant: the never-found WMD arsenal (which, if you recall, was the ostensible reason for the invasion), the fact that the vast majority of Iraqis see us as occupiers rather than liberators, and, of course, the numerous policy failures which allowed the situation to degenerate as far as it has. Then again, Bush is notorious for never, ever, admitting that he or anyone around him have ever been wrong about anything, so that one was probably too much to hope for.
But most depressingly, Bush continued to insist that the Iraqi insurgency is composed simply of a ragtag collection of “terrorists” and Saddam Hussein’s “elite guards,” rather than what it really is – a broad-based nationalist uprising aimed not at bringing back the bad old days but at throwing the Americans out. By doing so, and by seeing the conflict purely in black and white terms rather than as a complex state of affairs, he sows the seeds for more and bloodier failures.
“We must keep our focus,” Bush said, but that focus has been terribly lacking throughout this whole nightmare. The White House and the Pentagon had one goal in mind on invading Iraq: overthrowing Saddam Hussein. But once that was accomplished, there was no plan to deal with what would happen next. We have seen the consequences.
The thing we need right now is a clear sense of direction from the Bush Administration, one based not on phantom deadlines or re-election bids, but on a realistic plan to get us out of the military and diplomatic disaster which threatens to be the true legacy of George W. Bush. Unfortunately, that sense was nowhere on display last night.
This endless dithering, based primarily on the hope that things would eventually get better, has taken its toll. Polls routinely show that a clear majority of Americans oppose President Bush’s Iraq policy, and indeed it is painfully clear that there is no policy, just stalling for time. After weeks in which he has largely let his staff do the talking – and after months in which the situation in Iraq disintegrated into a truly catastrophic quagmire – Bush himself went before the cameras last night to lay out his long-awaited plan for getting us out of this mess.
The address can be summed up in four words: too little, too late.
In his speech, with one eye firmly fixed on Election Day, Bush outlined his “five steps” to handing over power to Iraqis and getting out. As he put it, “We will hand over authority to a sovereign Iraqi government, help establish security, continue rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure, encourage more international support, and move toward a national election that will bring forward new leaders empowered by the Iraqi people.” In the midst of the cheerleading, listing the accomplishments while glossing over the setbacks, it is interesting to note that while Bush laid out goals, he did not in any way mention the process in making them happen aside from the vaguest of generalities. It’s as if all these things are expected to happen by themselves.
Bush claimed that despite the post-June 30 presence of 138,000 American soldiers, with more to come if needed and with no withdrawal timetable of any sort, “the occupation will end and Iraqis will govern their own affairs.” This one is simply laughable. American troops will be able to go where they want, when they want, and will not be answerable to any supposed Iraqi government. So in other words, the occupation will continue, no matter what it’s called. (Indeed, post-speech reaction in Iraq shows that the Iraqi people realize this all too well.) And when you get right down to it, the new Iraqi government will have almost no power to speak of.
The speech contained some moments of unintended humor, such as when he insisted that “at every stage, the United States has gone to the United Nations,” conveniently forgetting that the Administration was dragged kicking and screaming into doing so, finally bypassing the UN entirely when that body refused to provide a blank check for war.
He also attempted to blame the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal on “a few American troops,” and in a desperate effort to just make the whole thing go away, he proposed tearing down the Saddam-era prison in favor of one yet to be built. (It was, indeed, the only tangible proposal in the whole speech.) But the “anything goes” policies emanating from the highest ranks of the Pentagon which formed the basis of the abuse were quietly ignored.
What was not mentioned was quite significant: the never-found WMD arsenal (which, if you recall, was the ostensible reason for the invasion), the fact that the vast majority of Iraqis see us as occupiers rather than liberators, and, of course, the numerous policy failures which allowed the situation to degenerate as far as it has. Then again, Bush is notorious for never, ever, admitting that he or anyone around him have ever been wrong about anything, so that one was probably too much to hope for.
But most depressingly, Bush continued to insist that the Iraqi insurgency is composed simply of a ragtag collection of “terrorists” and Saddam Hussein’s “elite guards,” rather than what it really is – a broad-based nationalist uprising aimed not at bringing back the bad old days but at throwing the Americans out. By doing so, and by seeing the conflict purely in black and white terms rather than as a complex state of affairs, he sows the seeds for more and bloodier failures.
“We must keep our focus,” Bush said, but that focus has been terribly lacking throughout this whole nightmare. The White House and the Pentagon had one goal in mind on invading Iraq: overthrowing Saddam Hussein. But once that was accomplished, there was no plan to deal with what would happen next. We have seen the consequences.
The thing we need right now is a clear sense of direction from the Bush Administration, one based not on phantom deadlines or re-election bids, but on a realistic plan to get us out of the military and diplomatic disaster which threatens to be the true legacy of George W. Bush. Unfortunately, that sense was nowhere on display last night.
5/21/2004
The Truth Comes Out
Yesterday, American troops and Iraqi policemen raided the home and offices of Ahmad Chalabi, seeking a dozen of his closest associates on fraud, theft, corruption and kidnapping charges. “Let my people go,” Chalabi thundered into the cameras like some Moses by the Tigris. And in one of the strongest signals yet that we have officially worn out our welcome in Baghdad, he added, “We are grateful to President Bush for liberating Iraq, but it is time for the Iraqi people to run their affairs.”
To understand just why this is a big deal, it should be mentioned that two years ago, Chalabi was the toast of Washington. As the head of the Iraqi National Congress, a group of Iraqis living in exile out of the country, he had a single overriding vision – to overthrow Saddam Hussein and set up shop in Baghdad as the leader of a new Iraq. But he had virtually no support in Iraq, so to accomplish that, he needed some heavy-duty firepower to do the job for him.
So he came to America, whispering seductively into the ears of people high up in the neoconservative establishment that Hussein had a vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith and others all believed him hook line and sinker. And by a staggering coincidence, all were obsessed with the notion of “finishing the job” left over from the 1991 Gulf War, when the military drive to throw Iraq out of Kuwait refrained from going on to Baghdad. Combining that with the desire to seize control of Iraq’s oil and their grand schemes of remaking the Middle East, they were primed and ready to listen to Chalabi.
The Clinton Administration, which was also the recipient of INC reports, did not trust Chalabi or his cohorts, seeing them as craven opportunists who were more interested in taking power for themselves than anything else. Undeterred, Chalabi provided a couple of defectors who claimed to have worked at Iraqi WMD sites, and their words were splashed all over friendly media outlets. Other defectors (including Hussein’s son-in-law) who reported that all such weapons had been destroyed were ignored.
The fact that Chalabi was convicted of fraud and embezzlement and was a fugitive from justice in Jordan, the fact that he had not been in Iraq in decades, the fact that he had no backing among the Iraqi people – all were disregarded. He was telling people precisely what they wanted to hear, and that was all that mattered.
When George W. Bush became President in 2001, Chalabi’s allies ascended to power, and immediately began planning his long-dreamed invasion of Iraq. All the while, the INC kept feeding fantastic stories to the Administration, to Congress and to the American media, all of which were accepted without question. Secretary of State Colin Powell used the tales as the basis for his now-infamous presentation to the UN Security Council. (He has since disowned his own testimony as being based on “inaccurate and wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading” information.) Career analysts in the CIA and the State Department, who had dealt with Chalabi before and concluded that he could not be trusted, cautioned their superiors against putting so much stock in him, but their warnings were ignored.
When the invasion finally came in March 2003 and Baghdad fell, Chalabi got what he wanted. He was appointed to the handpicked Iraqi Governing Council and was groomed to be the next leader of Iraq.
But as the search for Hussein’s much-ballyhooed WMD dragged on and nothing was found, the relationship began to sour. The highest American ranks finally began to realize that Chalabi just might have fed them intentionally false information in a successful attempt to dupe Washington. (Oh, and those famous defectors provided by the INC? Turns out their supposed bombshells were wrong, they contradicted each other on key details, and in some cases they never worked at the supposed weapons sites at all.) For his part, Chalabi did not help matters when in February he bragged to the London Daily Telegraph that, “As far as we’re concerned we’ve been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important.”
As a result, he was eased out of power and marginalized. He remains on the IGC, but without authority, and his chances of becoming President of Iraq are now zero. His American funding, amounting to $335,000 a month, has been cut off.
So at long last, the truth about Chalabi finally comes out. He played us like Nintendo for his own purposes, telling people in power exactly what they wanted to hear. He had no compunctions about causing thousands of deaths and widespread destruction to get what he wanted.
This does not, however, let the Bush Administration off the hook. They were obsessed with the notion of “getting” Hussein at any cost and by any means necessary. Didn’t matter how it happened, as long as it happened. And so they willingly let themselves be conned like a backwoods tourist playing three-card monte in New York.
Chalabi said Hussein was bristling with terrible weapons, and he was believed. He said Hussein was in league with al Qaeda, and he was believed. He said American troops would be unconditionally welcomed as liberators, and he was believed. Anyone who pointed out that Chalabi was a power-hungry crook, that there was no evidence to support his claims, or that all might not go according to plan – they were simply ignored.
We are now paying the price for our leaders’ pathetic vendetta. We are paying for it with a sea of budgetary red ink which we are blithely handing off to our children. We are paying for it with our ruined international credibility. And most tragically, we are paying for it with the blood of our dead and wounded soldiers. Any Administration, Republican or Democratic, which allows itself to be so drastically hoodwinked does not deserve to remain in office.
To understand just why this is a big deal, it should be mentioned that two years ago, Chalabi was the toast of Washington. As the head of the Iraqi National Congress, a group of Iraqis living in exile out of the country, he had a single overriding vision – to overthrow Saddam Hussein and set up shop in Baghdad as the leader of a new Iraq. But he had virtually no support in Iraq, so to accomplish that, he needed some heavy-duty firepower to do the job for him.
So he came to America, whispering seductively into the ears of people high up in the neoconservative establishment that Hussein had a vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith and others all believed him hook line and sinker. And by a staggering coincidence, all were obsessed with the notion of “finishing the job” left over from the 1991 Gulf War, when the military drive to throw Iraq out of Kuwait refrained from going on to Baghdad. Combining that with the desire to seize control of Iraq’s oil and their grand schemes of remaking the Middle East, they were primed and ready to listen to Chalabi.
The Clinton Administration, which was also the recipient of INC reports, did not trust Chalabi or his cohorts, seeing them as craven opportunists who were more interested in taking power for themselves than anything else. Undeterred, Chalabi provided a couple of defectors who claimed to have worked at Iraqi WMD sites, and their words were splashed all over friendly media outlets. Other defectors (including Hussein’s son-in-law) who reported that all such weapons had been destroyed were ignored.
The fact that Chalabi was convicted of fraud and embezzlement and was a fugitive from justice in Jordan, the fact that he had not been in Iraq in decades, the fact that he had no backing among the Iraqi people – all were disregarded. He was telling people precisely what they wanted to hear, and that was all that mattered.
When George W. Bush became President in 2001, Chalabi’s allies ascended to power, and immediately began planning his long-dreamed invasion of Iraq. All the while, the INC kept feeding fantastic stories to the Administration, to Congress and to the American media, all of which were accepted without question. Secretary of State Colin Powell used the tales as the basis for his now-infamous presentation to the UN Security Council. (He has since disowned his own testimony as being based on “inaccurate and wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading” information.) Career analysts in the CIA and the State Department, who had dealt with Chalabi before and concluded that he could not be trusted, cautioned their superiors against putting so much stock in him, but their warnings were ignored.
When the invasion finally came in March 2003 and Baghdad fell, Chalabi got what he wanted. He was appointed to the handpicked Iraqi Governing Council and was groomed to be the next leader of Iraq.
But as the search for Hussein’s much-ballyhooed WMD dragged on and nothing was found, the relationship began to sour. The highest American ranks finally began to realize that Chalabi just might have fed them intentionally false information in a successful attempt to dupe Washington. (Oh, and those famous defectors provided by the INC? Turns out their supposed bombshells were wrong, they contradicted each other on key details, and in some cases they never worked at the supposed weapons sites at all.) For his part, Chalabi did not help matters when in February he bragged to the London Daily Telegraph that, “As far as we’re concerned we’ve been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important.”
As a result, he was eased out of power and marginalized. He remains on the IGC, but without authority, and his chances of becoming President of Iraq are now zero. His American funding, amounting to $335,000 a month, has been cut off.
So at long last, the truth about Chalabi finally comes out. He played us like Nintendo for his own purposes, telling people in power exactly what they wanted to hear. He had no compunctions about causing thousands of deaths and widespread destruction to get what he wanted.
This does not, however, let the Bush Administration off the hook. They were obsessed with the notion of “getting” Hussein at any cost and by any means necessary. Didn’t matter how it happened, as long as it happened. And so they willingly let themselves be conned like a backwoods tourist playing three-card monte in New York.
Chalabi said Hussein was bristling with terrible weapons, and he was believed. He said Hussein was in league with al Qaeda, and he was believed. He said American troops would be unconditionally welcomed as liberators, and he was believed. Anyone who pointed out that Chalabi was a power-hungry crook, that there was no evidence to support his claims, or that all might not go according to plan – they were simply ignored.
We are now paying the price for our leaders’ pathetic vendetta. We are paying for it with a sea of budgetary red ink which we are blithely handing off to our children. We are paying for it with our ruined international credibility. And most tragically, we are paying for it with the blood of our dead and wounded soldiers. Any Administration, Republican or Democratic, which allows itself to be so drastically hoodwinked does not deserve to remain in office.
5/19/2004
With This Ring I Thee Wed
Earlier this week in Massachusetts, gay and lesbian couples, some of whom have been in committed relationships for decades, started getting married at courthouses and clerk’s offices to the cheers of onlookers. Despite the apocalyptic warnings of gay-marriage opponents, fire and brimstone did not rain down, the earth did not open up and swallow everyone whole, and predatory homosexuals did not whisper into the ears of impressionable children, “Join us, all this can be yours.” When I turned on the news, instead of moral rot and the nation going to hell in a hand basket all I saw were people who love each other very much.
Just look at Tanya McCloskey and Marcia Kadish, who got married in Cambridge shortly after the clerk’s office opened for business Monday morning. They emerged from City Hall to applause and congratulations, their faces radiant and happy, their souls aglow.
Oratory is heard for hours on end as to how gay and lesbian weddings “threaten” marriage, as if straight marriages across the country will magically fall apart if two men or two women get hitched. For his part, right-wing radio personality Michael Reagan went so far as to opine that if gay marriage is allowed, no straight person in America will be allowed to get married without having at least one gay experience first. President Bush also weighed in on the issue, favoring second-class citizenship for gays and lesbians by denying them the right to get married.
The opponents of gay marriage claim that marriage is reserved solely for straight people, one man and one woman. Gays and lesbians are not allowed. If they really want the legal benefits of marriage, they can join in a civil union (if that is allowed in the first place) and hope for the best. The problem with this, of course, is that it treats gays and lesbians as unworthy of the full benefits of marriage. Telling people “no marriage for you, but here’s a civil union instead” contains more than a whiff of the “separate but equal” doctrine used for decades to justify racial segregation. Now it’s used to justify sexual segregation.
Despite what gay-marriage opponents claim, the basis of a successful marriage is not one set of XX chromosomes and one of XY. Just ask Britney Spears or anyone else who gets married in a drunken fog only to get it annulled within hours or days. Nor is it based on the ability to make a baby, as anyone who has ever undergone fertility treatments or adopted a child will testify. A successful marriage, rather, is based on two people who share love, trust, support and a determination to combine their lives.
Finding that special someone with whom you want to share your life is already all too rare. As we are constantly reminded, the divorce rate in America has hovered around fifty percent for the last few years. Is the solution really to bar a specific class of people from getting married in the first place?
No, discrimination is never the answer. Love and happiness, not DNA, is the basis of marriage. Love is in the air in the Bay State, and I for one applaud it. More states should follow Massachusetts’ lead.
Just look at Tanya McCloskey and Marcia Kadish, who got married in Cambridge shortly after the clerk’s office opened for business Monday morning. They emerged from City Hall to applause and congratulations, their faces radiant and happy, their souls aglow.
Oratory is heard for hours on end as to how gay and lesbian weddings “threaten” marriage, as if straight marriages across the country will magically fall apart if two men or two women get hitched. For his part, right-wing radio personality Michael Reagan went so far as to opine that if gay marriage is allowed, no straight person in America will be allowed to get married without having at least one gay experience first. President Bush also weighed in on the issue, favoring second-class citizenship for gays and lesbians by denying them the right to get married.
The opponents of gay marriage claim that marriage is reserved solely for straight people, one man and one woman. Gays and lesbians are not allowed. If they really want the legal benefits of marriage, they can join in a civil union (if that is allowed in the first place) and hope for the best. The problem with this, of course, is that it treats gays and lesbians as unworthy of the full benefits of marriage. Telling people “no marriage for you, but here’s a civil union instead” contains more than a whiff of the “separate but equal” doctrine used for decades to justify racial segregation. Now it’s used to justify sexual segregation.
Despite what gay-marriage opponents claim, the basis of a successful marriage is not one set of XX chromosomes and one of XY. Just ask Britney Spears or anyone else who gets married in a drunken fog only to get it annulled within hours or days. Nor is it based on the ability to make a baby, as anyone who has ever undergone fertility treatments or adopted a child will testify. A successful marriage, rather, is based on two people who share love, trust, support and a determination to combine their lives.
Finding that special someone with whom you want to share your life is already all too rare. As we are constantly reminded, the divorce rate in America has hovered around fifty percent for the last few years. Is the solution really to bar a specific class of people from getting married in the first place?
No, discrimination is never the answer. Love and happiness, not DNA, is the basis of marriage. Love is in the air in the Bay State, and I for one applaud it. More states should follow Massachusetts’ lead.
5/17/2004
Deeper and Deeper
The Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal just keeps getting worse.
Last week’s high-profile hearings by the Senate Armed Services Committee featured numerous instances in which the official line, that the abuses were committed solely by rogue soldiers who kept their superiors in the dark, fell apart in the wake of testimony by said superiors that, well, maybe they did know about it here and there. For his part, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in his Senate testimony earlier this month, repeatedly claimed that he didn’t know any details about the abuses until late March, when he read the specific charges, and he certainly never authorized or encouraged anything like this.
Now we have Seymour Hersh, who originally broke the scandal in last month’s New Yorker, with a new claim of something appalling: that a secret Pentagon program code-named Copper Green “encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq.”
And who signed off on this program? None other than Donald Rumsfeld.
The program, on which President Bush was reportedly briefed, was designed to take away responsibility for prisoner interrogation in Iraq from the CIA and give it to the Pentagon, bringing the environment more into line with the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A former intelligence officer quoted in Hersh’s article described the program as “grab whom you must, do what you want.” (For the record, a Pentagon press release vociferously criticized the Hersh report, calling it “outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture.”)
According to Hersh, military intelligence officers took over the interrogation process and were given free rein to do whatever they wanted. With so many interrogators, contractors and others walking around Abu Ghraib out of uniform, even the military officer supposedly in charge of the prison, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, was unsure who was who. The end result, according to a Pentagon consultant, was one in which “the ends justify the means.”
As for Rumsfeld’s denials, Hersh says the secretary was notified of the abuses just days after military policeman Joseph Darby blew the whistle two months earlier. It may well be that Rumsfeld simply ignored those reports, believing them to be routine interrogation procedures under the new rules. (In the aftermath of the revelations, the Pentagon supposedly revised the interrogation policies to explicitly prohibit such abuses, although it’s far more telling that most of the attention was given to barring photography.)
As if all that wasn’t enough, it was also revealed that the Pentagon program was rooted in a memo by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, written shortly after the 9/11 attacks, in which he claimed that al Qaeda prisoners were not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention. “In my judgment,” Gonzales wrote, “this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.”
“Quaint?” The prohibition of torture and other physical pressures is “quaint?”
Then again, the Bush Administration has always claimed that al Qaeda prisoners held at Guantanamo were not subject to the Geneva Convention’s protections. And since the object of the secret Pentagon program was to “Gitmo-ize” the operations at Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons, we should not be terribly surprised that the situation spun out of control as spectacularly as it did.
In a way, the Abu Ghraib scandal is indicative of the Iraq mess as a whole; the Administration marched us into this situation with ideological blinders firmly in place, refusing to even consider the possibility that all might not go exactly as according to plan. The only response to anything going wrong is a desperate attempt to spin the story into something – anything – less damaging.
But when this spin-proof scandal emerged (after all, it’s kind of difficult to put a happy face on physical and sexual abuse), the White House dug in and refused to hold anyone other than grunt-level soldiers accountable. The problem is that this approach no longer works. It is now public knowledge that these tactics were approved by those higher up the chain of command, and it remains to be seen how (or indeed if) the Administration will react.
Last week’s high-profile hearings by the Senate Armed Services Committee featured numerous instances in which the official line, that the abuses were committed solely by rogue soldiers who kept their superiors in the dark, fell apart in the wake of testimony by said superiors that, well, maybe they did know about it here and there. For his part, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in his Senate testimony earlier this month, repeatedly claimed that he didn’t know any details about the abuses until late March, when he read the specific charges, and he certainly never authorized or encouraged anything like this.
Now we have Seymour Hersh, who originally broke the scandal in last month’s New Yorker, with a new claim of something appalling: that a secret Pentagon program code-named Copper Green “encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq.”
And who signed off on this program? None other than Donald Rumsfeld.
The program, on which President Bush was reportedly briefed, was designed to take away responsibility for prisoner interrogation in Iraq from the CIA and give it to the Pentagon, bringing the environment more into line with the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A former intelligence officer quoted in Hersh’s article described the program as “grab whom you must, do what you want.” (For the record, a Pentagon press release vociferously criticized the Hersh report, calling it “outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture.”)
According to Hersh, military intelligence officers took over the interrogation process and were given free rein to do whatever they wanted. With so many interrogators, contractors and others walking around Abu Ghraib out of uniform, even the military officer supposedly in charge of the prison, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, was unsure who was who. The end result, according to a Pentagon consultant, was one in which “the ends justify the means.”
As for Rumsfeld’s denials, Hersh says the secretary was notified of the abuses just days after military policeman Joseph Darby blew the whistle two months earlier. It may well be that Rumsfeld simply ignored those reports, believing them to be routine interrogation procedures under the new rules. (In the aftermath of the revelations, the Pentagon supposedly revised the interrogation policies to explicitly prohibit such abuses, although it’s far more telling that most of the attention was given to barring photography.)
As if all that wasn’t enough, it was also revealed that the Pentagon program was rooted in a memo by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, written shortly after the 9/11 attacks, in which he claimed that al Qaeda prisoners were not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention. “In my judgment,” Gonzales wrote, “this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.”
“Quaint?” The prohibition of torture and other physical pressures is “quaint?”
Then again, the Bush Administration has always claimed that al Qaeda prisoners held at Guantanamo were not subject to the Geneva Convention’s protections. And since the object of the secret Pentagon program was to “Gitmo-ize” the operations at Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons, we should not be terribly surprised that the situation spun out of control as spectacularly as it did.
In a way, the Abu Ghraib scandal is indicative of the Iraq mess as a whole; the Administration marched us into this situation with ideological blinders firmly in place, refusing to even consider the possibility that all might not go exactly as according to plan. The only response to anything going wrong is a desperate attempt to spin the story into something – anything – less damaging.
But when this spin-proof scandal emerged (after all, it’s kind of difficult to put a happy face on physical and sexual abuse), the White House dug in and refused to hold anyone other than grunt-level soldiers accountable. The problem is that this approach no longer works. It is now public knowledge that these tactics were approved by those higher up the chain of command, and it remains to be seen how (or indeed if) the Administration will react.
5/07/2004
Friendless
It had to happen eventually. After ten seasons of the “I’ll Be There for You” theme song, a couple of hundred episodes and enough coffee to set the hardest heart aflutter with caffeine overload, Friends had its grand finale last night. Even with the truly monstrous level of hype with which NBC flogged the upcoming show for weeks, we all knew this particular series could not possibly end on an unhappy note, and we were not disappointed. (Note: If you missed it, here come some spoilers, so you may want to skip this until you do see it. If you did see it, or if you didn’t and don’t care, read on.)
To recap: Monica and Chandler became the proud parents of twins via adoption and headed to their new life in Westchester, Phoebe and her new husband Mike resolved to have kids of their own, and Ross and Rachel finally ended up together. (He really was her lobster after all.) Even Gunther, after pining away for Rachel for most of the series, finally confessed his love only to be shot down. Only Joey did not have a life-changing event in the finale, but take heart -- a spinoff in which he moves to Los Angeles is coming this fall.
Friends gave us quite a few memorable moments over its ten-year run. Ross gave away his first ex-wife when she married her girlfriend in a ceremony officiated by Newt Gingrich’s sister, drove off the second when he mistakenly said Rachel’s name during the ceremony, and then divorced the third one (Rachel herself) after a drunken Las Vegas wedding. Chandler and Monica fell in love, scrambled to hide their relationship, brought it out into the open, got married, dealt with infertility and decided to adopt. (To which one of my son’s favorite babysitters, who was herself adopted, cheered, “Adoption rules!”)
Joey played a doctor on Days of Our Lives until the writers killed him off by dropping him down an elevator shaft, got the lead in a horrendously bad detective show where his sidekick was a robot, and along the way slept with every woman in sight. Rachel became a high-powered fashion executive, hired a hunky assistant solely for his looks (it seems the sexual harassment rules of the '90s never quite found their way into her office), and had a daughter out of wedlock. Phoebe became the surrogate mother for her brother’s triplets, made a music video, and tried to seduce Chandler, all while having the same delightfully ditzy presence through the years.
Me, I’m still wondering how everyone was able to afford those big Manhattan apartments while working as...well, nothing, apparently, as everyone always had time to hang out in a coffee shop in the middle of the day.
The show mirrored trends in the entertainment industry, not always for the better. As TV turned to the anorexic look, Rachel and Monica both changed from perfectly attractive and curvy women who were constantly inundated with men to shrill, bony stick figures who couldn’t get arrested. The allegedly Jewish characters of Ross and Monica always had Christmas trees everywhere with an occasional menorah or Jewish star barely visible in the background. Why couldn’t we see an episode where Ross takes his son Ben to synagogue or Monica has everyone over for a Passover Seder? (Ross did, however, dress up as the “Holiday Armadillo” to teach Ben about Chanukah.)
But, in the end, when you got right down to it, Friends was about six people who always stuck it out through thick and thin, navigating plot points both reasonable and ridiculous, uttering jokes ranging from classic gags to the occasional clunker. And as much as we wanted to smack them from time to time, they ended up being just regular people, with neuroses and bizarre personalities just like everyone else.
So let’s raise a cup of our favorite coffee to Friends. As long as it lives on in syndication, continuing to make the show’s creators and stars filthy rich, it will continue to be part of television history. And I still want to know if that orange couch from Central Perk will go to the Smithsonian.
To recap: Monica and Chandler became the proud parents of twins via adoption and headed to their new life in Westchester, Phoebe and her new husband Mike resolved to have kids of their own, and Ross and Rachel finally ended up together. (He really was her lobster after all.) Even Gunther, after pining away for Rachel for most of the series, finally confessed his love only to be shot down. Only Joey did not have a life-changing event in the finale, but take heart -- a spinoff in which he moves to Los Angeles is coming this fall.
Friends gave us quite a few memorable moments over its ten-year run. Ross gave away his first ex-wife when she married her girlfriend in a ceremony officiated by Newt Gingrich’s sister, drove off the second when he mistakenly said Rachel’s name during the ceremony, and then divorced the third one (Rachel herself) after a drunken Las Vegas wedding. Chandler and Monica fell in love, scrambled to hide their relationship, brought it out into the open, got married, dealt with infertility and decided to adopt. (To which one of my son’s favorite babysitters, who was herself adopted, cheered, “Adoption rules!”)
Joey played a doctor on Days of Our Lives until the writers killed him off by dropping him down an elevator shaft, got the lead in a horrendously bad detective show where his sidekick was a robot, and along the way slept with every woman in sight. Rachel became a high-powered fashion executive, hired a hunky assistant solely for his looks (it seems the sexual harassment rules of the '90s never quite found their way into her office), and had a daughter out of wedlock. Phoebe became the surrogate mother for her brother’s triplets, made a music video, and tried to seduce Chandler, all while having the same delightfully ditzy presence through the years.
Me, I’m still wondering how everyone was able to afford those big Manhattan apartments while working as...well, nothing, apparently, as everyone always had time to hang out in a coffee shop in the middle of the day.
The show mirrored trends in the entertainment industry, not always for the better. As TV turned to the anorexic look, Rachel and Monica both changed from perfectly attractive and curvy women who were constantly inundated with men to shrill, bony stick figures who couldn’t get arrested. The allegedly Jewish characters of Ross and Monica always had Christmas trees everywhere with an occasional menorah or Jewish star barely visible in the background. Why couldn’t we see an episode where Ross takes his son Ben to synagogue or Monica has everyone over for a Passover Seder? (Ross did, however, dress up as the “Holiday Armadillo” to teach Ben about Chanukah.)
But, in the end, when you got right down to it, Friends was about six people who always stuck it out through thick and thin, navigating plot points both reasonable and ridiculous, uttering jokes ranging from classic gags to the occasional clunker. And as much as we wanted to smack them from time to time, they ended up being just regular people, with neuroses and bizarre personalities just like everyone else.
So let’s raise a cup of our favorite coffee to Friends. As long as it lives on in syndication, continuing to make the show’s creators and stars filthy rich, it will continue to be part of television history. And I still want to know if that orange couch from Central Perk will go to the Smithsonian.
5/04/2004
Not the Way a Liberator Behaves
For a full year, in the face of ferocious international disbelief and skepticism, the Administration has tried to sell the invasion of Iraq as a war of liberation, not of occupation. The Iraqi people, it was said over and over again, were freed from the darkness of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny and brought into the light of American emancipation. With a relentless public-relations endeavor, the White House has valiantly attempted to put the best face on an ever-mounting military and diplomatic disaster.
All these efforts have now been destroyed.
The revelation that American soldiers physically and sexually abused Iraqi prisoners at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison (which, in a bitter irony, was the main torture chamber used by Saddam’s regime) has demolished America's image in Iraq and much of the Arab world. We are now seen as torturers, worse than simple occupiers and certainly not liberators. Every photograph showing grinning American men and women posing with naked Iraqis and forcing them into sexual poses is a guaranteed recruiting poster for the insurgency which has wreaked so much havoc on the occupation.
The disclosure that American military brass in Iraq not only knew this was happening but actually approved it merely adds another layer of disgust. Weeks ago, the Pentagon issued a secret internal report detailing the abuse; a few soldiers directly implicated were quietly disciplined and everything was hushed up. It never even reached Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s desk.
Then CBS got hold of the report and the photos, publicizing them on 60 Minutes II. The reaction was immediate, and expected. President Bush declared he was shocked, shocked, that such a thing could happen, but steadfastly claimed that only “a few people” were involved. Fox über-pundit Bill O’Reilly and other conservative media voices, after taking a moment to mumble that yes, it’s terrible, the people who did this should be punished, ripped into CBS for reporting it.
The floodgates are now opening. More and more Iraqis are coming forward to say that they, too, were physically abused by their American captors. Women report rape and/or the threat of rape. Men report frequent beatings as a regular part of interrogation. Amnesty International’s report says that while allegations of such mistreatment are all too frequent, “virtually none...has been adequately investigated by the authorities.” The British newspaper The Guardian reported that when the Red Cross came to visit Abu Ghraib, their inspectors were kept away from the prison facilities. It was only in recent weeks that the American occupation authorities even released prisoner lists, ending months of agony for thousands of Iraqi families who literally did not know whether their loved ones were alive or dead.
Some might say that this is much ado about nothing, that the Iraqis in prison did terrible things and deserve what they get. While there is no doubt that Saddam’s regime did indeed commit heinous crimes against the Iraqi people, the basic truth remains that we are better than this. No self-respecting American soldier should ever take part in such activities, and no officer should ever sanction them. This is not the way a liberator behaves.
It will be very difficult for the American occupation authorities to recover from this blow to its credibility, but it is not impossible. The government should take the following steps, immediately if not sooner:
1. Punish those responsible for these outrages, not just the individuals who committed them but their superiors who allowed them to happen. The accountability should lead as far up the chain of command as needed; nobody should be immune due to their rank or position.
2. Open the prisons to unlimited inspection by human rights groups such as the Red Cross and Amnesty International. The short-term disgruntlement over this will be more than outweighed by being able to prove to the world that the abuses have stopped.
3. Allow prisoners to see their families. Post security guards if needed, but Iraqis need to be able to see that their loved ones are alive and well.
Sunshine has always been the best disinfectant. Once the abuses have been ended and the perpetrators have been disciplined – and get more than just a slap on the wrist – the better chance we have of regaining the trust of the Iraqi people and the Arab world.
Then again, as pretty much everything about the invasion and occupation of Iraq has been exposed as lies, deception, and wishful thinking, it may well be too late.
All these efforts have now been destroyed.
The revelation that American soldiers physically and sexually abused Iraqi prisoners at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison (which, in a bitter irony, was the main torture chamber used by Saddam’s regime) has demolished America's image in Iraq and much of the Arab world. We are now seen as torturers, worse than simple occupiers and certainly not liberators. Every photograph showing grinning American men and women posing with naked Iraqis and forcing them into sexual poses is a guaranteed recruiting poster for the insurgency which has wreaked so much havoc on the occupation.
The disclosure that American military brass in Iraq not only knew this was happening but actually approved it merely adds another layer of disgust. Weeks ago, the Pentagon issued a secret internal report detailing the abuse; a few soldiers directly implicated were quietly disciplined and everything was hushed up. It never even reached Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s desk.
Then CBS got hold of the report and the photos, publicizing them on 60 Minutes II. The reaction was immediate, and expected. President Bush declared he was shocked, shocked, that such a thing could happen, but steadfastly claimed that only “a few people” were involved. Fox über-pundit Bill O’Reilly and other conservative media voices, after taking a moment to mumble that yes, it’s terrible, the people who did this should be punished, ripped into CBS for reporting it.
The floodgates are now opening. More and more Iraqis are coming forward to say that they, too, were physically abused by their American captors. Women report rape and/or the threat of rape. Men report frequent beatings as a regular part of interrogation. Amnesty International’s report says that while allegations of such mistreatment are all too frequent, “virtually none...has been adequately investigated by the authorities.” The British newspaper The Guardian reported that when the Red Cross came to visit Abu Ghraib, their inspectors were kept away from the prison facilities. It was only in recent weeks that the American occupation authorities even released prisoner lists, ending months of agony for thousands of Iraqi families who literally did not know whether their loved ones were alive or dead.
Some might say that this is much ado about nothing, that the Iraqis in prison did terrible things and deserve what they get. While there is no doubt that Saddam’s regime did indeed commit heinous crimes against the Iraqi people, the basic truth remains that we are better than this. No self-respecting American soldier should ever take part in such activities, and no officer should ever sanction them. This is not the way a liberator behaves.
It will be very difficult for the American occupation authorities to recover from this blow to its credibility, but it is not impossible. The government should take the following steps, immediately if not sooner:
1. Punish those responsible for these outrages, not just the individuals who committed them but their superiors who allowed them to happen. The accountability should lead as far up the chain of command as needed; nobody should be immune due to their rank or position.
2. Open the prisons to unlimited inspection by human rights groups such as the Red Cross and Amnesty International. The short-term disgruntlement over this will be more than outweighed by being able to prove to the world that the abuses have stopped.
3. Allow prisoners to see their families. Post security guards if needed, but Iraqis need to be able to see that their loved ones are alive and well.
Sunshine has always been the best disinfectant. Once the abuses have been ended and the perpetrators have been disciplined – and get more than just a slap on the wrist – the better chance we have of regaining the trust of the Iraqi people and the Arab world.
Then again, as pretty much everything about the invasion and occupation of Iraq has been exposed as lies, deception, and wishful thinking, it may well be too late.
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