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62
3DHS / Family permission not enough
« on: April 26, 2008, 02:00:34 PM »
What the Family Would Let You See, the Pentagon Obstructs
Beyond the yellow rope is a grave that the family of Lt. Col. William G. Hall wanted to show you.
By Dana Milbank
Thursday, April 24, 2008; Page A03
Lt. Col. Billy Hall, one of the most senior officers to be killed in the Iraq war, was laid to rest yesterday at Arlington National Cemetery. It's hard to escape the conclusion that the Pentagon doesn't want you to know that.
The family of 38-year-old Hall, who leaves behind two young daughters and two stepsons, gave their permission for the media to cover his Arlington burial -- a decision many grieving families make so that the nation will learn about their loved ones' sacrifice. But the military had other ideas, and they arranged the Marine's burial yesterday so that no sound, and few images, would make it into the public domain.
That's a shame, because Hall's story is a moving reminder that the war in Iraq, forgotten by much of the nation, remains real and present for some. Among those unlikely to forget the war: 6-year-old Gladys and 3-year-old Tatianna. The rest of the nation, if it remembers Hall at all, will remember him as the 4,011th American service member to die in Iraq, give or take, and the 419th to be buried at Arlington. Gladys and Tatianna will remember him as Dad.
The two girls were there in Section 60 yesterday beside grave 8,672 -- or at least it appeared that they were from a distance. Journalists were held 50 yards from the service, separated from the mourning party by six or seven rows of graves, and staring into the sun and penned in by a yellow rope. Photographers and reporters pleaded with Arlington officials.
"There will be a yellow rope in the face of the next of kin," protested one photographer with a large telephoto lens.
"This is the best shot you're going to get," a man from the cemetery replied.
"We're not going to be able to hear a thing," a reporter argued.
"Mm-hmm," an Arlington official answered.
The distance made it impossible to hear the words of Chaplain Ron Nordan, who, an official news release said, was leading the service. Even a reporter who stood surreptitiously just behind the mourners could make out only the familiar strains of the Lord's Prayer. Whatever Chaplain Nordan had to say about Hall's valor and sacrifice were lost to the drone of airplanes leaving National Airport.
It had the feel of a throwback to Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, when the military cracked down on photographs of flag-draped caskets returning home from the war. Rumsfeld himself was exposed for failing to sign by hand the condolence letters he sent to the next of kin. His successor, Robert Gates, has brought some glasnost to the Pentagon, but the military funerals remain tightly controlled. Even when families approve media coverage for a funeral, the journalists are held at a distance for the pageantry -- the caisson, the band, the firing party, "Taps," the presenting of the flag -- then whisked away when the service itself begins.
Nor does the blocking of funeral coverage seem to be the work of overzealous bureaucrats. Gina Gray, Arlington's new public affairs director, pushed vigorously to allow the journalists more access to the service yesterday -- but she was apparently shot down by other cemetery officials.
Media whining? Perhaps. But the de facto ban on media at Arlington funerals fits neatly with an effort by the administration to sanitize the war in Iraq. That, in turn, has contributed to a public boredom with the war. A Pew Research Center poll earlier this month found that 14 percent of Americans considered Iraq the news story of most interest -- less than half the 32 percent hooked on the presidential campaign and barely more than the 11 percent hooked on the raid of a polygamist compound in Texas.
On March 29, a week before the raid on the polygamists' ranch, William G. Hall was riding from his quarters to the place in Fallujah where he was training Iraqi troops when his vehicle hit an improvised explosive device. He was taken into surgery, but he died from his injuries. The Marines awarded him a posthumous promotion from major to lieutenant colonel.
Newspapers in Seattle, where Hall had lived, printed an e-mail the fallen fighter had sent his family two days before his death.
"I am sure the first question in each of your minds is my safety, and I am happy to tell you that I'm safe and doing well," he wrote, giving his family a hopeful picture of events in Iraq. "I know most of what you hear on the news about Iraq is not usually good news and that so many are dying over here," the e-mail said. "That is true to an extent but it does not paint the total picture, and violence is not everywhere throughout the country. So please don't associate what you see on the news with all of Iraq.
"Love you and miss you," he wrote. "I'll write again soon."
Except, of course, that he didn't. And yesterday, his family walked slowly behind the horse-drawn caisson to section 60. In the front row of mourners, one young girl trudged along, clinging to a grown-up's hand; another child found a ride on an adult's shoulders.
It was a moving scene -- and one the Pentagon shouldn't try to hide from the American public.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/23/AR2008042303244.html?hpid=artslot
Beyond the yellow rope is a grave that the family of Lt. Col. William G. Hall wanted to show you.
By Dana Milbank
Thursday, April 24, 2008; Page A03
Lt. Col. Billy Hall, one of the most senior officers to be killed in the Iraq war, was laid to rest yesterday at Arlington National Cemetery. It's hard to escape the conclusion that the Pentagon doesn't want you to know that.
The family of 38-year-old Hall, who leaves behind two young daughters and two stepsons, gave their permission for the media to cover his Arlington burial -- a decision many grieving families make so that the nation will learn about their loved ones' sacrifice. But the military had other ideas, and they arranged the Marine's burial yesterday so that no sound, and few images, would make it into the public domain.
That's a shame, because Hall's story is a moving reminder that the war in Iraq, forgotten by much of the nation, remains real and present for some. Among those unlikely to forget the war: 6-year-old Gladys and 3-year-old Tatianna. The rest of the nation, if it remembers Hall at all, will remember him as the 4,011th American service member to die in Iraq, give or take, and the 419th to be buried at Arlington. Gladys and Tatianna will remember him as Dad.
The two girls were there in Section 60 yesterday beside grave 8,672 -- or at least it appeared that they were from a distance. Journalists were held 50 yards from the service, separated from the mourning party by six or seven rows of graves, and staring into the sun and penned in by a yellow rope. Photographers and reporters pleaded with Arlington officials.
"There will be a yellow rope in the face of the next of kin," protested one photographer with a large telephoto lens.
"This is the best shot you're going to get," a man from the cemetery replied.
"We're not going to be able to hear a thing," a reporter argued.
"Mm-hmm," an Arlington official answered.
The distance made it impossible to hear the words of Chaplain Ron Nordan, who, an official news release said, was leading the service. Even a reporter who stood surreptitiously just behind the mourners could make out only the familiar strains of the Lord's Prayer. Whatever Chaplain Nordan had to say about Hall's valor and sacrifice were lost to the drone of airplanes leaving National Airport.
It had the feel of a throwback to Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, when the military cracked down on photographs of flag-draped caskets returning home from the war. Rumsfeld himself was exposed for failing to sign by hand the condolence letters he sent to the next of kin. His successor, Robert Gates, has brought some glasnost to the Pentagon, but the military funerals remain tightly controlled. Even when families approve media coverage for a funeral, the journalists are held at a distance for the pageantry -- the caisson, the band, the firing party, "Taps," the presenting of the flag -- then whisked away when the service itself begins.
Nor does the blocking of funeral coverage seem to be the work of overzealous bureaucrats. Gina Gray, Arlington's new public affairs director, pushed vigorously to allow the journalists more access to the service yesterday -- but she was apparently shot down by other cemetery officials.
Media whining? Perhaps. But the de facto ban on media at Arlington funerals fits neatly with an effort by the administration to sanitize the war in Iraq. That, in turn, has contributed to a public boredom with the war. A Pew Research Center poll earlier this month found that 14 percent of Americans considered Iraq the news story of most interest -- less than half the 32 percent hooked on the presidential campaign and barely more than the 11 percent hooked on the raid of a polygamist compound in Texas.
On March 29, a week before the raid on the polygamists' ranch, William G. Hall was riding from his quarters to the place in Fallujah where he was training Iraqi troops when his vehicle hit an improvised explosive device. He was taken into surgery, but he died from his injuries. The Marines awarded him a posthumous promotion from major to lieutenant colonel.
Newspapers in Seattle, where Hall had lived, printed an e-mail the fallen fighter had sent his family two days before his death.
"I am sure the first question in each of your minds is my safety, and I am happy to tell you that I'm safe and doing well," he wrote, giving his family a hopeful picture of events in Iraq. "I know most of what you hear on the news about Iraq is not usually good news and that so many are dying over here," the e-mail said. "That is true to an extent but it does not paint the total picture, and violence is not everywhere throughout the country. So please don't associate what you see on the news with all of Iraq.
"Love you and miss you," he wrote. "I'll write again soon."
Except, of course, that he didn't. And yesterday, his family walked slowly behind the horse-drawn caisson to section 60. In the front row of mourners, one young girl trudged along, clinging to a grown-up's hand; another child found a ride on an adult's shoulders.
It was a moving scene -- and one the Pentagon shouldn't try to hide from the American public.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/23/AR2008042303244.html?hpid=artslot
64
3DHS / Bill would ban sales of Playboy, etc. on base
« on: April 24, 2008, 02:31:22 AM »
[This is one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard. ]
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/04/military_pornography_stores_042208w/
Bill: Stop selling Playboy, Penthouse on base
By Karen Jowers - Staff writer
Posted : Wednesday Apr 23, 2008 17:10:01 EDT
Concerned that the military is selling pornography in exchange stores in spite of a ban, one lawmaker has introduced a bill to clean up the matter.
?Our troops should not see their honor sullied so that the moguls behind magazines like Playboy and Penthouse can profit,? said Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., unveiling his House bill April 16.
His Military Honor and Decency Act would amend a provision of the 1997 Defense Authorization Act that banned sales of ?sexually explicit material? on military bases.
The new language would ?close existing loopholes? in regulations to bring the military ?into compliance with the intent of the 1997 law,? Broun said.
?Allowing sale of pornography on military bases has harmed military men and women by escalating the number of violent, sexual crimes, feeding a base addiction, eroding the family as the primary building block of society, and denigrating the moral standing of our troops both here and abroad,? Broun said.
Broun said he wants to bring the Defense Department into compliance with the intent of the 1997 law ?so that taxpayers will not be footing the costs of distributing pornography.?
Exchange officials noted that tax dollars are not used to procure magazines in the system?s largely self-funded operations.
But Broun?s spokesman John Kennedy contended that taxpayer dollars are involved ? ?used to pay military salaries, so taxpayer money is, in effect, being used to buy these materials,? he said.
Broun?s bill, which has 15 co-sponsors and has been referred to the House Armed Services Committee for consideration, would tighten the definition of pornography. One part of the provision states that if a print publication is a periodical, it would be considered sexually explicit if ?it regularly features or gives prominence to nudity or sexual or excretory activities or organs in a lascivious way.?
Previously, defense officials have said, they do not consider nudity in itself to be ?lascivious.?
?It?s not our intent to have an art magazine banned,? Kennedy said. ?Our intention is to enforce the 1997 law so that magazines are banned that feature nudity in a way to develop a prurient interest in a reader.?
He said Broun has specifically named Playboy and Penthouse because those two publications ?were always intended to be banned and will now be covered.?
Playboy was determined not to be sexually explicit by the Defense Department?s Resale Activities Board of Review.
Although Penthouse initially was banned, new ownership and a new editing team have revised its format, and the Defense Department board allowed it to return to exchanges after another review last year.
?Few people will contest the notion that Playboy and Penthouse and others are sexually explicit,? Kennedy said. ?However, DoD officials with a wink and a nod do not find that these rise to the definition.?
Kennedy said Broun ?is a medical doctor and ?addictionologist? who is familiar with the negative consequences associated with long-term exposure to pornography,? especially women in the military ?who have to deal with this.?
Until now, the board has been required to review only newly submitted material, and also reconsider material banned for at least five years, at the request of the publication.
Broun?s proposed legislation would require the Defense Department to annually review all material that is not deemed sexually explicit now, and is therefore allowed in military stores, to determine if it should be prohibited.
The board did not meet between 2000 and 2005, Broun said. In 2006, the Defense Department changed its policy to let banned material be resubmitted for review every five years.
Former Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione challenged the 1997 law in court, claiming it violated his free-speech rights by using government bureaucrats as censors.
A U.S. district court judge agreed and barred enforcement of the law. But a divided appeals court overruled, saying military exchanges are ?nonpublic forums in which the government may restrict the content of speech.?
The Supreme Court sided with the appeals court and declined to hear the case in June 1998.
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/04/military_pornography_stores_042208w/
Bill: Stop selling Playboy, Penthouse on base
By Karen Jowers - Staff writer
Posted : Wednesday Apr 23, 2008 17:10:01 EDT
Concerned that the military is selling pornography in exchange stores in spite of a ban, one lawmaker has introduced a bill to clean up the matter.
?Our troops should not see their honor sullied so that the moguls behind magazines like Playboy and Penthouse can profit,? said Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., unveiling his House bill April 16.
His Military Honor and Decency Act would amend a provision of the 1997 Defense Authorization Act that banned sales of ?sexually explicit material? on military bases.
The new language would ?close existing loopholes? in regulations to bring the military ?into compliance with the intent of the 1997 law,? Broun said.
?Allowing sale of pornography on military bases has harmed military men and women by escalating the number of violent, sexual crimes, feeding a base addiction, eroding the family as the primary building block of society, and denigrating the moral standing of our troops both here and abroad,? Broun said.
Broun said he wants to bring the Defense Department into compliance with the intent of the 1997 law ?so that taxpayers will not be footing the costs of distributing pornography.?
Exchange officials noted that tax dollars are not used to procure magazines in the system?s largely self-funded operations.
But Broun?s spokesman John Kennedy contended that taxpayer dollars are involved ? ?used to pay military salaries, so taxpayer money is, in effect, being used to buy these materials,? he said.
Broun?s bill, which has 15 co-sponsors and has been referred to the House Armed Services Committee for consideration, would tighten the definition of pornography. One part of the provision states that if a print publication is a periodical, it would be considered sexually explicit if ?it regularly features or gives prominence to nudity or sexual or excretory activities or organs in a lascivious way.?
Previously, defense officials have said, they do not consider nudity in itself to be ?lascivious.?
?It?s not our intent to have an art magazine banned,? Kennedy said. ?Our intention is to enforce the 1997 law so that magazines are banned that feature nudity in a way to develop a prurient interest in a reader.?
He said Broun has specifically named Playboy and Penthouse because those two publications ?were always intended to be banned and will now be covered.?
Playboy was determined not to be sexually explicit by the Defense Department?s Resale Activities Board of Review.
Although Penthouse initially was banned, new ownership and a new editing team have revised its format, and the Defense Department board allowed it to return to exchanges after another review last year.
?Few people will contest the notion that Playboy and Penthouse and others are sexually explicit,? Kennedy said. ?However, DoD officials with a wink and a nod do not find that these rise to the definition.?
Kennedy said Broun ?is a medical doctor and ?addictionologist? who is familiar with the negative consequences associated with long-term exposure to pornography,? especially women in the military ?who have to deal with this.?
Until now, the board has been required to review only newly submitted material, and also reconsider material banned for at least five years, at the request of the publication.
Broun?s proposed legislation would require the Defense Department to annually review all material that is not deemed sexually explicit now, and is therefore allowed in military stores, to determine if it should be prohibited.
The board did not meet between 2000 and 2005, Broun said. In 2006, the Defense Department changed its policy to let banned material be resubmitted for review every five years.
Former Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione challenged the 1997 law in court, claiming it violated his free-speech rights by using government bureaucrats as censors.
A U.S. district court judge agreed and barred enforcement of the law. But a divided appeals court overruled, saying military exchanges are ?nonpublic forums in which the government may restrict the content of speech.?
The Supreme Court sided with the appeals court and declined to hear the case in June 1998.
65
3DHS / Carter: Rice never told him not to speak to Hamas
« on: April 23, 2008, 04:20:06 PM »
Reuters
Carter says Secretary Rice "not telling truth"
By Matthew Bigg 31 minutes ago
ATLANTA (Reuters) - Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter on Wednesday accused Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice of not telling the truth about warnings she said her department gave Carter not to speak to Hamas before a Middle East trip.
The State Department has said U.S. Assistant Secretary of State David Welch, the top U.S. diplomat for the Middle East, issued the warning before Carter, a veteran of Middle East diplomacy, went on his trip last week.
Rice said in Kuwait on Tuesday: "We counseled President Carter against going to the region and particularly against having contact with Hamas."
"President Carter has the greatest respect for ... Rice and believes her to be a truthful person. However, perhaps inadvertently, she is continuing to make a statement that is not true," a statement issued by the Carter center in Atlanta said on Wednesday.
"No one in the State Department or any other department of the U.S. government ever asked him (Carter) to refrain from his recent visit to the Middle East or even suggested that he not meet with Syrian President (Bashar) Assad or leaders of Hamas," it said.
It said Carter attempted to call Rice before making the trip and a deputy returned his call since Rice was in Europe.
"They had a very pleasant discussion for about 15 minutes, during which he never made any of the negative or cautionary comments described above. He never talked to anyone else," the statement said.
Carter had already on Monday, in an interview with National Public Radio, described as "absolutely false" any suggestion he had been warned not to meet Hamas.
"PRIVATE CITIZEN"
"The United States is not going to deal with Hamas and we certainly told President Carter that we did not think that meeting with Hamas was going to help the Palestinians," Rice said Tuesday while attending a conference in Kuwait.
The White House backed Rice and said events after Carter's meeting showed Hamas' true character.
Carter "is a private citizen and he made a decision to not comply with what the State Department asked him to do," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters on Wednesday.
Perino made an apparent reference to an attack on Saturday in which a Palestinian suicide bomber and two other gunmen were killed when they attacked a border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel, wounding 13 Israeli soldiers.
"Actions speak louder than words," said Perino of Hamas.
Hamas, which controls Gaza, is viewed as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Israel.
Carter, who met Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Syria over the weekend, is trying to draw the Islamist group into peace talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
But Rice and other senior U.S. officials are concerned that Carter's meeting could confuse U.S.-brokered peace talks already moving at a slow pace between Abbas and Olmert.
Hamas won a 2006 election and briefly formed a unity government with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. It seized control of Gaza from Abbas' secular Fatah faction in fighting in June.
(Editing by Tom Brown)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080423/pl_nm/palestinians_israel_carter_dc
Carter says Secretary Rice "not telling truth"
By Matthew Bigg 31 minutes ago
ATLANTA (Reuters) - Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter on Wednesday accused Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice of not telling the truth about warnings she said her department gave Carter not to speak to Hamas before a Middle East trip.
The State Department has said U.S. Assistant Secretary of State David Welch, the top U.S. diplomat for the Middle East, issued the warning before Carter, a veteran of Middle East diplomacy, went on his trip last week.
Rice said in Kuwait on Tuesday: "We counseled President Carter against going to the region and particularly against having contact with Hamas."
"President Carter has the greatest respect for ... Rice and believes her to be a truthful person. However, perhaps inadvertently, she is continuing to make a statement that is not true," a statement issued by the Carter center in Atlanta said on Wednesday.
"No one in the State Department or any other department of the U.S. government ever asked him (Carter) to refrain from his recent visit to the Middle East or even suggested that he not meet with Syrian President (Bashar) Assad or leaders of Hamas," it said.
It said Carter attempted to call Rice before making the trip and a deputy returned his call since Rice was in Europe.
"They had a very pleasant discussion for about 15 minutes, during which he never made any of the negative or cautionary comments described above. He never talked to anyone else," the statement said.
Carter had already on Monday, in an interview with National Public Radio, described as "absolutely false" any suggestion he had been warned not to meet Hamas.
"PRIVATE CITIZEN"
"The United States is not going to deal with Hamas and we certainly told President Carter that we did not think that meeting with Hamas was going to help the Palestinians," Rice said Tuesday while attending a conference in Kuwait.
The White House backed Rice and said events after Carter's meeting showed Hamas' true character.
Carter "is a private citizen and he made a decision to not comply with what the State Department asked him to do," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters on Wednesday.
Perino made an apparent reference to an attack on Saturday in which a Palestinian suicide bomber and two other gunmen were killed when they attacked a border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel, wounding 13 Israeli soldiers.
"Actions speak louder than words," said Perino of Hamas.
Hamas, which controls Gaza, is viewed as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Israel.
Carter, who met Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Syria over the weekend, is trying to draw the Islamist group into peace talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
But Rice and other senior U.S. officials are concerned that Carter's meeting could confuse U.S.-brokered peace talks already moving at a slow pace between Abbas and Olmert.
Hamas won a 2006 election and briefly formed a unity government with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. It seized control of Gaza from Abbas' secular Fatah faction in fighting in June.
(Editing by Tom Brown)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080423/pl_nm/palestinians_israel_carter_dc
67
3DHS / Caught in the crossfire
« on: April 21, 2008, 10:38:30 AM »
GIs in Sadr City under fire from friends as well as foes
By Leila Fadel, McClatchy Newspapers Fri Apr 18, 3:27 PM ET
BAGHDAD ? Three weeks after U.S. troops were ordered into the sprawling Shiite Muslim slum of Sadr City to stop rockets from raining down on the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad's Green Zone, they're caught in crossfire between Shiite militiamen and the mostly Shiite Iraqi army.
American soldiers who try to move around this urban area, even in the U.S. Army's state-of-the-art Stryker armored vehicles, risk being ambushed. The soldiers in a platoon from the 25th Infantry Division quickly learned that holding a position puts them in the line of fire from both the Mahdi Army militia and the U.S.-backed Iraqi forces.
The American soldiers can't go on the offensive from the run-down two-story house they commandeered in south Sadr City, but must hunker down and wait to get shot at.
An Iraqi family evacuated the house just before the fighting started. It has rats and clogged toilets but no electricity or hot water, and no air conditioning or heating. The American soldiers have had one shower and barely a change of clothes since they got here.
Things got a lot worse last weekend, when bullets started flying at the house, targeting soldiers on the rooftop and in the rooms on the second floor.
"Where's it coming from?" the soldiers on the roof shouted to one another.
"I think it's coming from the north and west," one soldier said over the radio. "Is the Iraqi army shooting at us?"
Three times that day, the Iraqi army unit just up the road from the house was told to hold its fire because its erratic shots were hitting the house that its American allies occupied.
Three times, the Iraqis kept right on shooting.
"They told them to stop shooting," Lt. Adam Bowen , the platoon leader, told his men of the 3rd platoon, Bravo Company , 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team of the 25th Infantry Division, from Schofield Barracks, Hawaii .
More shots rang out.
"Well, that lasted," said Sgt. David Stine , 28, of Iola, Ill. , laughing.
One floor below, in a green pastel living room decorated with a picture of a Japanese garden and a bouquet of plastic roses, Spc. Matthew Fisher of Evansville, Ill. , pointed his weapon out the window, searching for snipers on the rooftops.
His buddies call him "I Spy" because of his knack for spotting things and sometimes seeing things that aren't there.
Bullets slammed into the green pastel door with a small window at the top, where Sgt. Jared Hicks , 23, of Three Rivers, Mich. , stood guard behind a pile of bricks taken from the roof of the house, the muzzle of his rifle poking through the broken glass.
Just before 4 p.m. , Bravo Company's commander went to the Iraqi army checkpoints up the road to demand that the Iraqis stop shooting.
Fisher looked out his window at the rooftops and saw a military-age man running on the roof across from him.
"Is that IA or JAM?" he asked, using the initials for the Iraqi army and for Jaysh al Mahdi, the Arabic name of anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.
The Americans couldn't shoot until they were sure who was on the roof. Fisher looked at the sky and saw a flock of pigeons flying back and forth, following the directions of a man waving a flag. It appeared that militia groups were signaling each other.
CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE
Three weeks ago, Bowen's 3rd platoon was doing what it regarded as peacekeeping patrols, meeting local officials and tribal leaders in a relatively peaceful area north of Taji, which is about 12 miles north of Baghdad , checking out suspicious vehicles and searching for weapons caches.
Bowen and his men were sent to Baghdad after the Iraqi government launched a major offensive against Shiite militias in the southern port city of Basra. The Mahdi Army held off the government forces in Basra and neighboring provinces, then went on the offensive in Sadr's biggest stronghold, Sadr City, a slum in northeast Baghdad that's home to some 2.5 million people.
The Sadrists maintain that their Shiite rivals in the government of U.S.-backed Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki are trying to undercut their power and popularity before provincial elections planned for October. The Sadrists, with a populist appeal to poor and marginalized Shiites, are likely to dominate Iraq's southern Shiite provinces in the elections.
Whatever the origin of Iraq's latest violent convulsions, American soldiers appear to have been dragged into the fight, backing the Shiite government against the Shiite Sadrists.
"It ticks you off it all started as an Iraqi offensive and now . . . it's definitely linked to Basra," said Lt. Col. Dan Barnett , the commander of the 1st Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, who's heading the American efforts in Sadr City. "I don't think it's over."
Bowen's 3rd platoon soldiers liked what they were doing in Taji, but in Sadr City, residents view U.S. soldiers as occupiers and worry that wherever the Americans are, trouble will follow.
"Before we came out here, I considered us peacekeepers, but now we're considered the bad guys," said Staff Sgt. Travis Evans , 33, of Seattle .
Outside the platoon's commandeered house, residents looked curiously at the U.S. soldiers who'd suddenly become their neighbors. Children picked through the garbage out front: khaki plastic bags from the young soldiers' preserved meals and bottles filled with urine because the toilets weren't working. The laughing children were quickly shooed away.
The platoon was supposed to stay just 96 hours. Now there's no end in sight.
"I guess we didn't expect this much resistance for their cause," Evans said.
HOME, HOT MEALS AND FAMILY
Amid the shooting at the roof and the second floor, Bowen was fighting his own battle against the stopped-up toilets on the ground floor. His weapons were duct tape and a pipe. Closing off the top of the pipe with the tape, he used the makeshift plunger to unclog the Eastern-style toilets, porcelain holes in the floor.
"It's times like this I realize the duality of war," he said. "The guys upstairs are shooting at people, and we're trying to figure out how to shove poop down a hole."
Bowen went to work pushing the human waste of his soldiers.
For the men of the 3rd platoon, life in Sadr City has been predictable boredom pierced by moments of sheer terror. In the 16 days they'd been in the district, they'd had one 12-hour break and suffered through an ambush by the Mahdi Army that destroyed one of their vehicles and nearly killed some of their men.
They lie on the uncomfortable sofas in the heat and talk about home, real toilets, hot meals and girlfriends, their wives and their children.
They borrowed toy guns from a store attached to the home, which provides a livelihood for the family that lives here, aimed the toys at one another and joked about their situation.
Over the radio, the soldiers heard that Sadr's brother-in-law had been killed, and that the assassination could increase the violence. They were told not to refer to the enemy as JAM but as insurgents or special groups.
"That's retarded," Bowen said. They were caught in a political crossfire as well as a real one.
"I hate Sadr City," Bowen said. Before his stint here, he'd sympathized with Iraqis who lived in misery and detested foreign occupation. "It's always the poor and lower middle class that fight. Look at us."
Now he finds it hard to sympathize, with bullets flying at his men.
Over the radio, a soldier reworked the words to Gloria Gaynor's song "I will survive."
"There once was a man, he was petrified," he sang. "He was scared every time he heard a ricochet off his vehicle."
'TELL HIM TO STOP COMING HERE'
The next day, the shooting died down and a bald-headed Iraqi dressed in a dishdasha, a long flowing gray robe, bravely walked up to the door of the house and called out to the U.S. soldiers with the only English word he knew.
"Mister!" he said.
Through an interpreter, the man, who said his name was Abu Youssef , told the soldiers that this was his home and he wanted to return.
"Joe, tell him we aren't leaving until the area is safe," Bowen told his interpreter.
The man looked confused. He'd split his family among three homes just before the fighting began March 25 .
"Will you leave tomorrow?" he asked.
"My daughters are in school; they need to study; can I get their books?" he said. The soldiers asked the interpreter, nicknamed "Joe," to go through the house and give Abu Youssef books. Joe handed them over in a plastic bag through a crack in the door, barring the man from his home.
"Please watch the cigarettes," Abu Youssef said, referring to his little store, which the Americans called Wal-Mart . "I have no money."
He returned one more time and asked to take the cigarettes to sell and support his family until he could come home.
"Tell him to stop coming here," Bowen said.
Bowen said he didn't feel bad for seizing Abu Youssef's home. "They have the power to stop this shit and no one does. The power is in the people; it's always been with the people, but no one wants to stand up."
"I'd blow up half my house to get back inside," said Cpl. David Morelock of Greeneville, Tenn.
Spc. Brodie Berkenbile , 20, of Athens, Tenn. , said he'd fire a sniper rifle at people from his rooftop if a foreign army took over. But this is different.
"We're trying to help them," he said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20080418/wl_mcclatchy/2913904
By Leila Fadel, McClatchy Newspapers Fri Apr 18, 3:27 PM ET
BAGHDAD ? Three weeks after U.S. troops were ordered into the sprawling Shiite Muslim slum of Sadr City to stop rockets from raining down on the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad's Green Zone, they're caught in crossfire between Shiite militiamen and the mostly Shiite Iraqi army.
American soldiers who try to move around this urban area, even in the U.S. Army's state-of-the-art Stryker armored vehicles, risk being ambushed. The soldiers in a platoon from the 25th Infantry Division quickly learned that holding a position puts them in the line of fire from both the Mahdi Army militia and the U.S.-backed Iraqi forces.
The American soldiers can't go on the offensive from the run-down two-story house they commandeered in south Sadr City, but must hunker down and wait to get shot at.
An Iraqi family evacuated the house just before the fighting started. It has rats and clogged toilets but no electricity or hot water, and no air conditioning or heating. The American soldiers have had one shower and barely a change of clothes since they got here.
Things got a lot worse last weekend, when bullets started flying at the house, targeting soldiers on the rooftop and in the rooms on the second floor.
"Where's it coming from?" the soldiers on the roof shouted to one another.
"I think it's coming from the north and west," one soldier said over the radio. "Is the Iraqi army shooting at us?"
Three times that day, the Iraqi army unit just up the road from the house was told to hold its fire because its erratic shots were hitting the house that its American allies occupied.
Three times, the Iraqis kept right on shooting.
"They told them to stop shooting," Lt. Adam Bowen , the platoon leader, told his men of the 3rd platoon, Bravo Company , 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team of the 25th Infantry Division, from Schofield Barracks, Hawaii .
More shots rang out.
"Well, that lasted," said Sgt. David Stine , 28, of Iola, Ill. , laughing.
One floor below, in a green pastel living room decorated with a picture of a Japanese garden and a bouquet of plastic roses, Spc. Matthew Fisher of Evansville, Ill. , pointed his weapon out the window, searching for snipers on the rooftops.
His buddies call him "I Spy" because of his knack for spotting things and sometimes seeing things that aren't there.
Bullets slammed into the green pastel door with a small window at the top, where Sgt. Jared Hicks , 23, of Three Rivers, Mich. , stood guard behind a pile of bricks taken from the roof of the house, the muzzle of his rifle poking through the broken glass.
Just before 4 p.m. , Bravo Company's commander went to the Iraqi army checkpoints up the road to demand that the Iraqis stop shooting.
Fisher looked out his window at the rooftops and saw a military-age man running on the roof across from him.
"Is that IA or JAM?" he asked, using the initials for the Iraqi army and for Jaysh al Mahdi, the Arabic name of anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.
The Americans couldn't shoot until they were sure who was on the roof. Fisher looked at the sky and saw a flock of pigeons flying back and forth, following the directions of a man waving a flag. It appeared that militia groups were signaling each other.
CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE
Three weeks ago, Bowen's 3rd platoon was doing what it regarded as peacekeeping patrols, meeting local officials and tribal leaders in a relatively peaceful area north of Taji, which is about 12 miles north of Baghdad , checking out suspicious vehicles and searching for weapons caches.
Bowen and his men were sent to Baghdad after the Iraqi government launched a major offensive against Shiite militias in the southern port city of Basra. The Mahdi Army held off the government forces in Basra and neighboring provinces, then went on the offensive in Sadr's biggest stronghold, Sadr City, a slum in northeast Baghdad that's home to some 2.5 million people.
The Sadrists maintain that their Shiite rivals in the government of U.S.-backed Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki are trying to undercut their power and popularity before provincial elections planned for October. The Sadrists, with a populist appeal to poor and marginalized Shiites, are likely to dominate Iraq's southern Shiite provinces in the elections.
Whatever the origin of Iraq's latest violent convulsions, American soldiers appear to have been dragged into the fight, backing the Shiite government against the Shiite Sadrists.
"It ticks you off it all started as an Iraqi offensive and now . . . it's definitely linked to Basra," said Lt. Col. Dan Barnett , the commander of the 1st Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, who's heading the American efforts in Sadr City. "I don't think it's over."
Bowen's 3rd platoon soldiers liked what they were doing in Taji, but in Sadr City, residents view U.S. soldiers as occupiers and worry that wherever the Americans are, trouble will follow.
"Before we came out here, I considered us peacekeepers, but now we're considered the bad guys," said Staff Sgt. Travis Evans , 33, of Seattle .
Outside the platoon's commandeered house, residents looked curiously at the U.S. soldiers who'd suddenly become their neighbors. Children picked through the garbage out front: khaki plastic bags from the young soldiers' preserved meals and bottles filled with urine because the toilets weren't working. The laughing children were quickly shooed away.
The platoon was supposed to stay just 96 hours. Now there's no end in sight.
"I guess we didn't expect this much resistance for their cause," Evans said.
HOME, HOT MEALS AND FAMILY
Amid the shooting at the roof and the second floor, Bowen was fighting his own battle against the stopped-up toilets on the ground floor. His weapons were duct tape and a pipe. Closing off the top of the pipe with the tape, he used the makeshift plunger to unclog the Eastern-style toilets, porcelain holes in the floor.
"It's times like this I realize the duality of war," he said. "The guys upstairs are shooting at people, and we're trying to figure out how to shove poop down a hole."
Bowen went to work pushing the human waste of his soldiers.
For the men of the 3rd platoon, life in Sadr City has been predictable boredom pierced by moments of sheer terror. In the 16 days they'd been in the district, they'd had one 12-hour break and suffered through an ambush by the Mahdi Army that destroyed one of their vehicles and nearly killed some of their men.
They lie on the uncomfortable sofas in the heat and talk about home, real toilets, hot meals and girlfriends, their wives and their children.
They borrowed toy guns from a store attached to the home, which provides a livelihood for the family that lives here, aimed the toys at one another and joked about their situation.
Over the radio, the soldiers heard that Sadr's brother-in-law had been killed, and that the assassination could increase the violence. They were told not to refer to the enemy as JAM but as insurgents or special groups.
"That's retarded," Bowen said. They were caught in a political crossfire as well as a real one.
"I hate Sadr City," Bowen said. Before his stint here, he'd sympathized with Iraqis who lived in misery and detested foreign occupation. "It's always the poor and lower middle class that fight. Look at us."
Now he finds it hard to sympathize, with bullets flying at his men.
Over the radio, a soldier reworked the words to Gloria Gaynor's song "I will survive."
"There once was a man, he was petrified," he sang. "He was scared every time he heard a ricochet off his vehicle."
'TELL HIM TO STOP COMING HERE'
The next day, the shooting died down and a bald-headed Iraqi dressed in a dishdasha, a long flowing gray robe, bravely walked up to the door of the house and called out to the U.S. soldiers with the only English word he knew.
"Mister!" he said.
Through an interpreter, the man, who said his name was Abu Youssef , told the soldiers that this was his home and he wanted to return.
"Joe, tell him we aren't leaving until the area is safe," Bowen told his interpreter.
The man looked confused. He'd split his family among three homes just before the fighting began March 25 .
"Will you leave tomorrow?" he asked.
"My daughters are in school; they need to study; can I get their books?" he said. The soldiers asked the interpreter, nicknamed "Joe," to go through the house and give Abu Youssef books. Joe handed them over in a plastic bag through a crack in the door, barring the man from his home.
"Please watch the cigarettes," Abu Youssef said, referring to his little store, which the Americans called Wal-Mart . "I have no money."
He returned one more time and asked to take the cigarettes to sell and support his family until he could come home.
"Tell him to stop coming here," Bowen said.
Bowen said he didn't feel bad for seizing Abu Youssef's home. "They have the power to stop this shit and no one does. The power is in the people; it's always been with the people, but no one wants to stand up."
"I'd blow up half my house to get back inside," said Cpl. David Morelock of Greeneville, Tenn.
Spc. Brodie Berkenbile , 20, of Athens, Tenn. , said he'd fire a sniper rifle at people from his rooftop if a foreign army took over. But this is different.
"We're trying to help them," he said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20080418/wl_mcclatchy/2913904
68
3DHS / Booming economy
« on: April 20, 2008, 07:42:11 PM »
Economic Scene
For Many, a Boom That Wasn?t
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: April 9, 2008
How has the United States economy gotten to this point?
It?s not just the apparent recession. Recessions happen. If you tried to build an economy immune to the human emotions that produce boom and bust, you would end up with something that looked like East Germany.
The bigger problem is that the now-finished boom was, for most Americans, nothing of the sort. In 2000, at the end of the previous economic expansion, the median American family made about $61,000, according to the Census Bureau?s inflation-adjusted numbers. In 2007, in what looks to have been the final year of the most recent expansion, the median family, amazingly, seems to have made less ? about $60,500.
This has never happened before, at least not for as long as the government has been keeping records. In every other expansion since World War II, the buying power of most American families grew while the economy did. You can think of this as the most basic test of an economy?s health: does it produce ever-rising living standards for its citizens?
In the second half of the 20th century, the United States passed the test in a way that arguably no other country ever has. It became, as the clich? goes, the richest country on earth. Now, though, most families aren?t getting any richer.
?We have had expansions before where the bottom end didn?t do well,? said Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard economist who studies the job market. ?But we?ve never had an expansion in which the middle of income distribution had no wage growth.?
More than anything else ? more than even the war in Iraq ? the stagnation of the great American middle-class machine explains the glum national mood today. As part of a poll that will be released Wednesday, the Pew Research Center asked people how they had done over the last five years. During that time, remember, the overall economy grew every year, often at a good pace.
Yet most respondents said they had either been stuck in place or fallen backward. Pew says this is the most downbeat short-term assessment of personal progress in almost a half century of polling.
The causes of the wage slowdown have been building for a long time. They have relatively little to do with President Bush or any other individual politician (though it is true that the Bush administration has shown scant interest in addressing the problem).
The slowdown began in the 1970s, with an oil shock that raised the cost of everyday living. The technological revolution and the rise of global trade followed, reducing the bargaining power of a large section of the work force. In recent years, the cost of health care has aggravated the problem, by taking a huge bite out of most workers? paychecks.
Real median family income more than doubled from the late 1940s to the late ?70s. It has risen less than 25 percent in the three decades since. Statistics like these are now so familiar as to be almost numbing. But the larger point is still crucial: the modern American economy distributes the fruits of its growth to a relatively narrow slice of the population. We don?t need another decade of evidence to feel confident about that conclusion.
Anxiety about the income slowdown has flared at various times over the past three decades. It seemed to crescendo in the first half of the 1990s, when voters first threw George H. W. Bush out of office, then, two years later, did the same to the Democratic leaders of Congress. Pat Buchanan went around preaching a kind of pitchfork populism during the 1996 New Hampshire Republican primary ? and he won it.
Then came a technology bubble that made everything seem better, for a time. Record-low oil prices in the 1990s helped, too. So did the recent housing bubble, allowing families to supplement their incomes by taking equity out of their homes.
Now, though, we appear to be out of bubbles. It?s hard to see how the economy will get back on track without some fundamental changes. This, I think, can fairly be considered the No. 1 economic project awaiting the next president.
Fortunately, there is an obvious model waiting to be dusted off. The income gains of the postwar period didn?t just happen. They were the product of a deliberate program to build up the middle class, through the Interstate highway system, the G. I. Bill and other measures.
It?s easy enough to imagine a new version of that program, with job-creating investments in biomedical research, alternative energy, roads, railroads and education. On the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama all mention ideas like these.
But there is still a lack of strategic seriousness to the discussion, as Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution notes. After all, the United States spends a lot of money on education already but has still lost its standing as the country with the highest college graduation rate in the world. (South Korea and a couple of other countries have passed us, while Japan, Britain and Canada are close behind.)
The same goes for public works. Spending on physical infrastructure is at a 20-year high as a share of gross domestic product, but too much of the money is spent on the inefficient pet programs championed by individual members of Congress. Pork barrel spending does not add up to a national economic strategy.
Health care and taxes will have to be part of the discussion, too. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel of the National Institutes of Health pointed out to me that a serious effort to curtail wasteful medical spending would directly help workers. It would spare them from paying the insurance premiums and taxes that now cover that care.
The tax code, meanwhile, has become far more favorable to high-income workers at the same time that they ? and they alone ? have received large pretax raises. That doesn?t make much sense, does it?
It?s a pretty big to-do list. But it?s a pretty big problem. Since the economy now seems to be in recession, and since recessions inevitably bring their own pay cuts, my guess is that the problem will look even bigger by the time the next president takes office.
E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/09/business/09leonhardt.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
For Many, a Boom That Wasn?t
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: April 9, 2008
How has the United States economy gotten to this point?
It?s not just the apparent recession. Recessions happen. If you tried to build an economy immune to the human emotions that produce boom and bust, you would end up with something that looked like East Germany.
The bigger problem is that the now-finished boom was, for most Americans, nothing of the sort. In 2000, at the end of the previous economic expansion, the median American family made about $61,000, according to the Census Bureau?s inflation-adjusted numbers. In 2007, in what looks to have been the final year of the most recent expansion, the median family, amazingly, seems to have made less ? about $60,500.
This has never happened before, at least not for as long as the government has been keeping records. In every other expansion since World War II, the buying power of most American families grew while the economy did. You can think of this as the most basic test of an economy?s health: does it produce ever-rising living standards for its citizens?
In the second half of the 20th century, the United States passed the test in a way that arguably no other country ever has. It became, as the clich? goes, the richest country on earth. Now, though, most families aren?t getting any richer.
?We have had expansions before where the bottom end didn?t do well,? said Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard economist who studies the job market. ?But we?ve never had an expansion in which the middle of income distribution had no wage growth.?
More than anything else ? more than even the war in Iraq ? the stagnation of the great American middle-class machine explains the glum national mood today. As part of a poll that will be released Wednesday, the Pew Research Center asked people how they had done over the last five years. During that time, remember, the overall economy grew every year, often at a good pace.
Yet most respondents said they had either been stuck in place or fallen backward. Pew says this is the most downbeat short-term assessment of personal progress in almost a half century of polling.
The causes of the wage slowdown have been building for a long time. They have relatively little to do with President Bush or any other individual politician (though it is true that the Bush administration has shown scant interest in addressing the problem).
The slowdown began in the 1970s, with an oil shock that raised the cost of everyday living. The technological revolution and the rise of global trade followed, reducing the bargaining power of a large section of the work force. In recent years, the cost of health care has aggravated the problem, by taking a huge bite out of most workers? paychecks.
Real median family income more than doubled from the late 1940s to the late ?70s. It has risen less than 25 percent in the three decades since. Statistics like these are now so familiar as to be almost numbing. But the larger point is still crucial: the modern American economy distributes the fruits of its growth to a relatively narrow slice of the population. We don?t need another decade of evidence to feel confident about that conclusion.
Anxiety about the income slowdown has flared at various times over the past three decades. It seemed to crescendo in the first half of the 1990s, when voters first threw George H. W. Bush out of office, then, two years later, did the same to the Democratic leaders of Congress. Pat Buchanan went around preaching a kind of pitchfork populism during the 1996 New Hampshire Republican primary ? and he won it.
Then came a technology bubble that made everything seem better, for a time. Record-low oil prices in the 1990s helped, too. So did the recent housing bubble, allowing families to supplement their incomes by taking equity out of their homes.
Now, though, we appear to be out of bubbles. It?s hard to see how the economy will get back on track without some fundamental changes. This, I think, can fairly be considered the No. 1 economic project awaiting the next president.
Fortunately, there is an obvious model waiting to be dusted off. The income gains of the postwar period didn?t just happen. They were the product of a deliberate program to build up the middle class, through the Interstate highway system, the G. I. Bill and other measures.
It?s easy enough to imagine a new version of that program, with job-creating investments in biomedical research, alternative energy, roads, railroads and education. On the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama all mention ideas like these.
But there is still a lack of strategic seriousness to the discussion, as Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution notes. After all, the United States spends a lot of money on education already but has still lost its standing as the country with the highest college graduation rate in the world. (South Korea and a couple of other countries have passed us, while Japan, Britain and Canada are close behind.)
The same goes for public works. Spending on physical infrastructure is at a 20-year high as a share of gross domestic product, but too much of the money is spent on the inefficient pet programs championed by individual members of Congress. Pork barrel spending does not add up to a national economic strategy.
Health care and taxes will have to be part of the discussion, too. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel of the National Institutes of Health pointed out to me that a serious effort to curtail wasteful medical spending would directly help workers. It would spare them from paying the insurance premiums and taxes that now cover that care.
The tax code, meanwhile, has become far more favorable to high-income workers at the same time that they ? and they alone ? have received large pretax raises. That doesn?t make much sense, does it?
It?s a pretty big to-do list. But it?s a pretty big problem. Since the economy now seems to be in recession, and since recessions inevitably bring their own pay cuts, my guess is that the problem will look even bigger by the time the next president takes office.
E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/09/business/09leonhardt.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
69
Culture Vultures / Gulliver's Travels
« on: April 20, 2008, 06:58:08 PM »
50 greatest books
Gulliver's Travels
VICTORIA GLENDINNING
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
April 19, 2008 at 12:00 AM EDT
Gulliver's Travels is one of the best and most important books in the world. First published in London, anonymously, in 1726, it was a howling success, passed from hand to hand among the political class and general readers, and immediately translated into French and German. Voltaire thought it was wonderful.
By the 20th century, heavily expurgated and abbreviated, Gulliver's Travels had survived, but chiefly as a story for children. There is a double irony in this. The first is that it is a savage adult satire on hypocrisy, corruption in politics, the insanity of war and the barbarism that underlies so-called civilization. Swift also exploited ? uncomfortably, for the reader ? his obsessional disgust with the gross animality of human nature.
The second irony is that some of the bits which were commonly cut out are precisely those which would delight children, who find lavatory humour the funniest thing in the world, and would enjoy the Yahoos discharging their excrement onto Gulliver's head from the trees. And in Lilliput, the land of the little people, Gulliver puts out a great fire in the Emperor's palace in three minutes with his torrential stream of urine.
The humour of scale is not, however, always exploited benignly. In Brobdingnag, where the people are huge and Gulliver a Tom Thumb, a woman's "monstrous breast," 16 feet in circumference with a nipple the size of Gulliver's head, is so spattered with giant spots, pimples and freckles "that nothing could be more nauseous."
Gulliver's Travels
Enlarge Image
Related Articles
From the archives
* Martin Levin: Introducing the 50 greatest books series
* First entry: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
* Second entry: In Search of Lost Time
* Third entry: On the Origin of Species
* Fourth entry: The Divine Comedy
* Fifth entry: The Republic
* Sixth entry: Don Quixote
* Seventh entry: Ulysses
* Eighth entry: Das Kapital
* Ninth entry: The Confessions of St. Augustine
* 10th entry: Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince
* 11th entry: The Great Gatsby
* 12th entry: Middlemarch
* 13th entry: The Wealth of Nations
* 14th entry: The Interpretation of Dreams
* Submit your thoughts: Which would you pick?
The Globe and Mail
The Yahoos, too, are nauseating: crude, aggressive, stinking, gibbering creatures who recognize Gulliver at once as one of their species, even if he is a "clean, civilized, reasoning Yahoo." This sort of thing made Victorian critics, not surprisingly, loathe Gulliver's Travels. Thackeray, to take just one example, wrote that Swift was "filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene." And indeed, if it were just a matter of scatology, and of Gulliver among the little people and then the big people, and even if Gulliver (and each one of us) is a Yahoo under the surface, the work would be little more than a Rabelais-inspired curiosity. But there is more in it than that.
The Houyhnhnms, who are innocent, kindly, talking horses, have no word for "lying." They gather from Gulliver that it means "saying the thing that was not," and cannot imagine the point of it. The Houyhnhnms have no idea what "war" means, until Gulliver describes in unforgettably ghastly terms how people make their young men cut to pieces other young men whom they do not even know. Why ever would they do this, ask the Houyhnhnms. So Gulliver must explain "differences of opinion, especially if it be of things indifferent," and the passions of wanting, and having.
It's a first-person narrative, unpretentious and deadpan. There is no preaching, and no conclusions are drawn, either by Gulliver or by the fantastical peoples and creatures he encounters. Swift, his rage and despair barely controlled by his art, exposes what we humans do, and what we are like. Even though some of the political and doctrinal references were designed to be decoded by his contemporaries, the implications are disturbingly universal. Swift demonstrates the ludicrousness of conflict by substituting everyday issues ? like the bitter dissension in Lilliput between the wearers of high heels and the wearers of low heels, and the war between Lilliput and Blefescu, costing thousands of innocent lives, about whether boiled eggs should be opened at the little end or at the big end.
Swift was prescient. Gulliver predescribes, mockingly, a computer, and sees a system of warfare so terrible that it will destroy its inventors. But most poignant of all, as today we live longer and may lose our marbles before we lose our physical strength, is Gulliver's account of visiting the Struldbruggs on the island of Luggnagg. The Struldbruggs could not die. But they were "dead to all natural affection," peevish, degraded, forgetful of the names of even their dearest relations, incapable of rational speech. They were "the most mortifying sight I ever beheld."
This is just a taster. Please risk reading Gulliver's Travels. As William Hazlitt wrote, "It is an attempt to tear off the mask of imposture from the world; and nothing but imposture has a right to complain of it."
Victoria Glendinning is the author several biographies, including one of Jonathan Swift.
Next week: One Hundred Years of Solitude
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080418.w50greatestgulliver/BNStory/Entertainment/home
Gulliver's Travels
VICTORIA GLENDINNING
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
April 19, 2008 at 12:00 AM EDT
Gulliver's Travels is one of the best and most important books in the world. First published in London, anonymously, in 1726, it was a howling success, passed from hand to hand among the political class and general readers, and immediately translated into French and German. Voltaire thought it was wonderful.
By the 20th century, heavily expurgated and abbreviated, Gulliver's Travels had survived, but chiefly as a story for children. There is a double irony in this. The first is that it is a savage adult satire on hypocrisy, corruption in politics, the insanity of war and the barbarism that underlies so-called civilization. Swift also exploited ? uncomfortably, for the reader ? his obsessional disgust with the gross animality of human nature.
The second irony is that some of the bits which were commonly cut out are precisely those which would delight children, who find lavatory humour the funniest thing in the world, and would enjoy the Yahoos discharging their excrement onto Gulliver's head from the trees. And in Lilliput, the land of the little people, Gulliver puts out a great fire in the Emperor's palace in three minutes with his torrential stream of urine.
The humour of scale is not, however, always exploited benignly. In Brobdingnag, where the people are huge and Gulliver a Tom Thumb, a woman's "monstrous breast," 16 feet in circumference with a nipple the size of Gulliver's head, is so spattered with giant spots, pimples and freckles "that nothing could be more nauseous."
Gulliver's Travels
Enlarge Image
Related Articles
From the archives
* Martin Levin: Introducing the 50 greatest books series
* First entry: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
* Second entry: In Search of Lost Time
* Third entry: On the Origin of Species
* Fourth entry: The Divine Comedy
* Fifth entry: The Republic
* Sixth entry: Don Quixote
* Seventh entry: Ulysses
* Eighth entry: Das Kapital
* Ninth entry: The Confessions of St. Augustine
* 10th entry: Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince
* 11th entry: The Great Gatsby
* 12th entry: Middlemarch
* 13th entry: The Wealth of Nations
* 14th entry: The Interpretation of Dreams
* Submit your thoughts: Which would you pick?
The Globe and Mail
The Yahoos, too, are nauseating: crude, aggressive, stinking, gibbering creatures who recognize Gulliver at once as one of their species, even if he is a "clean, civilized, reasoning Yahoo." This sort of thing made Victorian critics, not surprisingly, loathe Gulliver's Travels. Thackeray, to take just one example, wrote that Swift was "filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene." And indeed, if it were just a matter of scatology, and of Gulliver among the little people and then the big people, and even if Gulliver (and each one of us) is a Yahoo under the surface, the work would be little more than a Rabelais-inspired curiosity. But there is more in it than that.
The Houyhnhnms, who are innocent, kindly, talking horses, have no word for "lying." They gather from Gulliver that it means "saying the thing that was not," and cannot imagine the point of it. The Houyhnhnms have no idea what "war" means, until Gulliver describes in unforgettably ghastly terms how people make their young men cut to pieces other young men whom they do not even know. Why ever would they do this, ask the Houyhnhnms. So Gulliver must explain "differences of opinion, especially if it be of things indifferent," and the passions of wanting, and having.
It's a first-person narrative, unpretentious and deadpan. There is no preaching, and no conclusions are drawn, either by Gulliver or by the fantastical peoples and creatures he encounters. Swift, his rage and despair barely controlled by his art, exposes what we humans do, and what we are like. Even though some of the political and doctrinal references were designed to be decoded by his contemporaries, the implications are disturbingly universal. Swift demonstrates the ludicrousness of conflict by substituting everyday issues ? like the bitter dissension in Lilliput between the wearers of high heels and the wearers of low heels, and the war between Lilliput and Blefescu, costing thousands of innocent lives, about whether boiled eggs should be opened at the little end or at the big end.
Swift was prescient. Gulliver predescribes, mockingly, a computer, and sees a system of warfare so terrible that it will destroy its inventors. But most poignant of all, as today we live longer and may lose our marbles before we lose our physical strength, is Gulliver's account of visiting the Struldbruggs on the island of Luggnagg. The Struldbruggs could not die. But they were "dead to all natural affection," peevish, degraded, forgetful of the names of even their dearest relations, incapable of rational speech. They were "the most mortifying sight I ever beheld."
This is just a taster. Please risk reading Gulliver's Travels. As William Hazlitt wrote, "It is an attempt to tear off the mask of imposture from the world; and nothing but imposture has a right to complain of it."
Victoria Glendinning is the author several biographies, including one of Jonathan Swift.
Next week: One Hundred Years of Solitude
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080418.w50greatestgulliver/BNStory/Entertainment/home
70
3DHS / GAO:" United States Lacks a Comprehensive Plan to Destroy the Terrorist Threat"
« on: April 18, 2008, 04:21:00 PM »GAO Slams Bush on Terrorism - says Al Qaeda attack likely and we have no plan
Posted by Max Bergmann
Here is the title of a report from the Government Accountability Office on combating terrorism released today:
The United States Lacks a Comprehensive Plan to Destroy the Terrorist Threat and Close the Safe Haven in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
That is not some line buried in the report. That is the title. Wow.
This GAO report may be the most damning condemnation of the Bush administration's counter-terrorism efforts. The report goes on to say that the Bush administration has failed to develop any plan to address the Al Qaeda threat. Worse, the report finds that Al Qaeda is now able to attack the United States and represents the "most serious" threat to this country.
The report's opinion of the Bush administration efforts speaks for itself:
The United States has not met its national security goals to destroy the terrorist threat and close the safe haven in Pakistan?
Not only have we not met our goals but we have no plan to meet our goals:
No comprehensive plan for meeting U.S. national security goals in the FATA has been developed, as stipulated by the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism (2003), called for by an independent commission (2004), and mandated by congressional legislation (2007). Furthermore, Congress created the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) in 2004 specifically to develop comprehensive plans to combat terrorism. However, neither the National Security Council (NSC), NCTC, nor other executive branch departments have developed a comprehensive plan that includes all elements of national power?diplomatic, military, intelligence, development assistance, economic, and law enforcement support?called for by the various national security strategies and Congress.
Al Qaeda can now attack the United States:
?we found broad agreement, as documented in the unclassified 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), State and embassy documents, as well as among Defense, State, and other officials, including those operating in Pakistan, that al Qaeda had regenerated its ability to attack the United States and had succeeded in establishing a safe haven in Pakistan?
Al Qaeda in Pakistan is the most serious threat:
al Qaeda?s central leadership, based in the border area of Pakistan, is and will remain the most serious terrorist threat to the United States? al Qaeda is now using the Pakistani safe haven to put the last element necessary to launch another attack against America into place?
Al Qaeda is using the Pakistan tribal areas to put the finishing touches on its plans to attack the United States. A DNI assessment from earlier in 2008 reports troubling findings:
al Qaeda is now using the Pakistani safe haven to put the last element necessary to launch another attack against America into place, including the identification, training, and positioning of Western operatives for an attack. It stated that al Qaeda is most likely using the FATA to plot terrorist attacks against political, economic, and infrastructure targets in America ?designed to produce mass casualties, visually dramatic destruction, significant economic aftershocks, and/or fear among the population."
http://www.democracyarsenal.org/2008/04/gao-slams-bush.html
http://www.hcfa.house.gov/110/GAO041708.pdf
71
3DHS / T.Boone Pickens and wind farms
« on: April 18, 2008, 11:56:14 AM »
http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1719800520080418
Mesa Air is the company he's started for wind farms.
"the equivalent of building two commercial scale nuclear power plants"
Mesa Air is the company he's started for wind farms.
"the equivalent of building two commercial scale nuclear power plants"
72
3DHS / Nat'l Defense University calls Iraq war 'a major debacle'
« on: April 18, 2008, 03:28:29 AM »
Pentagon institute calls Iraq war 'a major debacle' with outcome 'in doubt'
By Jonathan S. Landay and John Walcott, McClatchy Newspapers Thu Apr 17, 8:38 PM ET
WASHINGTON ? The war in Iraq has become "a major debacle" and the outcome "is in doubt" despite improvements in security from the buildup in U.S. forces, according to a highly critical study published Thursday by the Pentagon's premier military educational institute.
The report released by the National Defense University raises fresh doubts about President Bush 's projections of a U.S. victory in Iraq just a week after Bush announced that he was suspending U.S. troop reductions.
The report carries considerable weight because it was written by Joseph Collins , a former senior Pentagon official, and was based in part on interviews with other former senior defense and intelligence officials who played roles in prewar preparations.
It was published by the university's National Institute for Strategic Studies , a Defense Department research center.
"Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a major debacle," says the report's opening line.
At the time the report was written last fall, more than 4,000 U.S. and foreign troops, more than 7,500 Iraqi security forces and as many as 82,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed and tens of thousands of others wounded, while the cost of the war since March 2003 was estimated at $450 billion .
"No one as yet has calculated the costs of long-term veterans' benefits or the total impact on service personnel and materiel," wrote Collins, who was involved in planning post-invasion humanitarian operations.
The report said that the United States has suffered serious political costs, with its standing in the world seriously diminished. Moreover, operations in Iraq have diverted "manpower, materiel and the attention of decision-makers" from "all other efforts in the war on terror" and severely strained the U.S. armed forces.
"Compounding all of these problems, our efforts there (in Iraq ) were designed to enhance U.S. national security, but they have become, at least temporarily, an incubator for terrorism and have emboldened Iran to expand its influence throughout the Middle East ," the report continued.
The addition of 30,000 U.S. troops to Iraq last year to halt the country's descent into all-out civil war has improved security, but not enough to ensure that the country emerges as a stable democracy at peace with its neighbors, the report said.
"Despite impressive progress in security, the outcome of the war is in doubt," said the report. "Strong majorities of both Iraqis and Americans favor some sort of U.S. withdrawal. Intelligence analysts, however, remind us that the only thing worse than an Iraq with an American army may be an Iraq after a rapid withdrawal of that army."
"For many analysts (including this one), Iraq remains a 'must win,' but for many others, despite obvious progress under General David Petraeus and the surge, it now looks like a 'can't win.'"
The report lays much of the blame for what went wrong in Iraq after the initial U.S. victory at the feet of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld . It says that in November 2001 , before the war in Afghanistan was over, President Bush asked Rumsfeld "to begin planning in secret for potential military operations against Iraq ."
Rumsfeld, who was closely allied with Vice President Dick Cheney , bypassed the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the report says, and became "the direct supervisor of the combatant commanders."
" . . . the aggressive, hands-on Rumsfeld," it continues, "cajoled and pushed his way toward a small force and a lightning fast operation." Later, he shut down the military's computerized deployment system, "questioning, delaying or deleting units on the numerous deployment orders that came across his desk."
In part because "long, costly, manpower-intensive post-combat operations were anathema to Rumsfeld," the report says, the U.S. was unprepared to fight what Collins calls "War B," the battle against insurgents and sectarian violence that began in mid-2003, shortly after "War A," the fight against Saddam Hussein's forces, ended.
Compounding the problem was a series of faulty assumptions made by Bush's top aides, among them an expectation fed by Iraqi exiles that Iraqis would be grateful to America for liberating them from Saddam's dictatorship. The administration also expected that " Iraq without Saddam could manage and fund its own reconstruction."
The report also singles out the Bush administration's national security apparatus and implicitly President Bush and both of his national security advisers, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley , saying that "senior national security officials exhibited in many instances an imperious attitude, exerting power and pressure where diplomacy and bargaining might have had a better effect."
Collins ends his report by quoting Winston Churchill , who said: "Let us learn our lessons. Never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. . . . Always remember, however sure you are that you can easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think that he also had a chance."
To read the report:
www.ndu.edu/inss/Occasional_Papers/OP5.pdf
http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20080418/wl_mcclatchy/2913186;_ylt=AhhHdocxhKqeCrJYOOA2ueas0NUE
By Jonathan S. Landay and John Walcott, McClatchy Newspapers Thu Apr 17, 8:38 PM ET
WASHINGTON ? The war in Iraq has become "a major debacle" and the outcome "is in doubt" despite improvements in security from the buildup in U.S. forces, according to a highly critical study published Thursday by the Pentagon's premier military educational institute.
The report released by the National Defense University raises fresh doubts about President Bush 's projections of a U.S. victory in Iraq just a week after Bush announced that he was suspending U.S. troop reductions.
The report carries considerable weight because it was written by Joseph Collins , a former senior Pentagon official, and was based in part on interviews with other former senior defense and intelligence officials who played roles in prewar preparations.
It was published by the university's National Institute for Strategic Studies , a Defense Department research center.
"Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a major debacle," says the report's opening line.
At the time the report was written last fall, more than 4,000 U.S. and foreign troops, more than 7,500 Iraqi security forces and as many as 82,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed and tens of thousands of others wounded, while the cost of the war since March 2003 was estimated at $450 billion .
"No one as yet has calculated the costs of long-term veterans' benefits or the total impact on service personnel and materiel," wrote Collins, who was involved in planning post-invasion humanitarian operations.
The report said that the United States has suffered serious political costs, with its standing in the world seriously diminished. Moreover, operations in Iraq have diverted "manpower, materiel and the attention of decision-makers" from "all other efforts in the war on terror" and severely strained the U.S. armed forces.
"Compounding all of these problems, our efforts there (in Iraq ) were designed to enhance U.S. national security, but they have become, at least temporarily, an incubator for terrorism and have emboldened Iran to expand its influence throughout the Middle East ," the report continued.
The addition of 30,000 U.S. troops to Iraq last year to halt the country's descent into all-out civil war has improved security, but not enough to ensure that the country emerges as a stable democracy at peace with its neighbors, the report said.
"Despite impressive progress in security, the outcome of the war is in doubt," said the report. "Strong majorities of both Iraqis and Americans favor some sort of U.S. withdrawal. Intelligence analysts, however, remind us that the only thing worse than an Iraq with an American army may be an Iraq after a rapid withdrawal of that army."
"For many analysts (including this one), Iraq remains a 'must win,' but for many others, despite obvious progress under General David Petraeus and the surge, it now looks like a 'can't win.'"
The report lays much of the blame for what went wrong in Iraq after the initial U.S. victory at the feet of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld . It says that in November 2001 , before the war in Afghanistan was over, President Bush asked Rumsfeld "to begin planning in secret for potential military operations against Iraq ."
Rumsfeld, who was closely allied with Vice President Dick Cheney , bypassed the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the report says, and became "the direct supervisor of the combatant commanders."
" . . . the aggressive, hands-on Rumsfeld," it continues, "cajoled and pushed his way toward a small force and a lightning fast operation." Later, he shut down the military's computerized deployment system, "questioning, delaying or deleting units on the numerous deployment orders that came across his desk."
In part because "long, costly, manpower-intensive post-combat operations were anathema to Rumsfeld," the report says, the U.S. was unprepared to fight what Collins calls "War B," the battle against insurgents and sectarian violence that began in mid-2003, shortly after "War A," the fight against Saddam Hussein's forces, ended.
Compounding the problem was a series of faulty assumptions made by Bush's top aides, among them an expectation fed by Iraqi exiles that Iraqis would be grateful to America for liberating them from Saddam's dictatorship. The administration also expected that " Iraq without Saddam could manage and fund its own reconstruction."
The report also singles out the Bush administration's national security apparatus and implicitly President Bush and both of his national security advisers, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley , saying that "senior national security officials exhibited in many instances an imperious attitude, exerting power and pressure where diplomacy and bargaining might have had a better effect."
Collins ends his report by quoting Winston Churchill , who said: "Let us learn our lessons. Never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. . . . Always remember, however sure you are that you can easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think that he also had a chance."
To read the report:
www.ndu.edu/inss/Occasional_Papers/OP5.pdf
http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20080418/wl_mcclatchy/2913186;_ylt=AhhHdocxhKqeCrJYOOA2ueas0NUE
73
3DHS / New CIA book mentions Oswald in Mexico
« on: April 18, 2008, 01:34:00 AM »
via http://warandpiece.com
Harpers' interviews Jeff Morley about his new CIA book, "Our Man in Mexico." Morley: " ...The book documents the previously unknown story of [Win]Scott?s friendship in the late 1940s with Philby, a genial British intelligence official who was actually a Soviet spy. Michael Scott showed me his father?s pocket calendars from 1946. ?Drinks with Kim,? his father had scrawled. They had dined out together, arranged play dates for their kids, and, at the office, organized covert operations against the Soviet Union. The book also provides the most detailed account yet of how Scott supervised the surveillance of Oswald, as Oswald was making contact with communist diplomatic officials in Mexico City in October 1963, six weeks before he allegedly killed President John F. Kennedy. When Scott died of natural causes in 1971, his longtime friend, James Angleton, the Agency?s legendary counterintelligence chief, went to Mexico City and seized the memoir and a trove of other material from Scott?s home office. (Angleton specialized in such ghoulish work. In October 1964, he had snagged the personal diary of Jack Kennedy?s favorite girlfriend, Mary Meyer, after she was murdered in Georgetown.) Angleton seized the manuscript and tapes because he wanted to make sure that Scott?s account of Oswald?s actions, before and after Kennedy was killed, never came into public view."
This interesting too:
5. The CIA?s destruction of the Oswald tape can?t help but bring to mind the recent story of the agency?s destruction of a videotape of the torture of Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubayda? Both stories reflect the same underlying reality: When a clandestine service is assigned the dirty work of a democratic power to combat a real threat (communism in 1963, Islamist terrorism today), that agency is loathe to disclose its sources and methods to those who seek real accountability. It?s worth noting that Jose Rodriguez, the covert operations chief that destroyed the torture tape, previously served as chief of station in Mexico City. Like Win Scott, he preferred to cover up material evidence in a criminal investigation rather than come clean for history. ...
Posted by Laura at 05:03 PM
[And here is the link to the article:]
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/04/hbc-90002849
Harpers' interviews Jeff Morley about his new CIA book, "Our Man in Mexico." Morley: " ...The book documents the previously unknown story of [Win]Scott?s friendship in the late 1940s with Philby, a genial British intelligence official who was actually a Soviet spy. Michael Scott showed me his father?s pocket calendars from 1946. ?Drinks with Kim,? his father had scrawled. They had dined out together, arranged play dates for their kids, and, at the office, organized covert operations against the Soviet Union. The book also provides the most detailed account yet of how Scott supervised the surveillance of Oswald, as Oswald was making contact with communist diplomatic officials in Mexico City in October 1963, six weeks before he allegedly killed President John F. Kennedy. When Scott died of natural causes in 1971, his longtime friend, James Angleton, the Agency?s legendary counterintelligence chief, went to Mexico City and seized the memoir and a trove of other material from Scott?s home office. (Angleton specialized in such ghoulish work. In October 1964, he had snagged the personal diary of Jack Kennedy?s favorite girlfriend, Mary Meyer, after she was murdered in Georgetown.) Angleton seized the manuscript and tapes because he wanted to make sure that Scott?s account of Oswald?s actions, before and after Kennedy was killed, never came into public view."
This interesting too:
5. The CIA?s destruction of the Oswald tape can?t help but bring to mind the recent story of the agency?s destruction of a videotape of the torture of Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubayda? Both stories reflect the same underlying reality: When a clandestine service is assigned the dirty work of a democratic power to combat a real threat (communism in 1963, Islamist terrorism today), that agency is loathe to disclose its sources and methods to those who seek real accountability. It?s worth noting that Jose Rodriguez, the covert operations chief that destroyed the torture tape, previously served as chief of station in Mexico City. Like Win Scott, he preferred to cover up material evidence in a criminal investigation rather than come clean for history. ...
Posted by Laura at 05:03 PM
[And here is the link to the article:]
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/04/hbc-90002849
74
3DHS / Not likely to rely on historians
« on: April 17, 2008, 01:35:39 PM »
Bush Library ?Will Rely Chiefly? On Design Firm Rather Than Historians To Showcase Policies
Bush?s presidential library, which will be housed at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, has received significant criticism because of an attached institute ? independent of the university ? that will sponsor programs designed to ?promote the vision of the president? and ?celebrate? Bush?s presidency. Even former Bush adviser Karl Rove has signed on as a ?critical resource? of administration history.
Continuing to ensure that partisan praise of Bush will trump academic scholarship in the library, advisers now say they ?will rely chiefly? on the design firm PRD Group, rather than historians, to showcase Bush?s policies as president. The Dallas Morning News reports:
Bush advisers say they plan to consult historians but will rely chiefly on the veteran design firm they hired to create a museum to showcase his life, works and policies.
Some who?ve studied presidential centers say the lack of independent voices in the design-exhibit process risks turning the library into little more than a promotional venue.
Harry Middleton, director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson presidential library, explained that the LBJ library learned the important lesson of having ?objective,? ?outside experts? (particularly when advising the library of a president defined by an unpopular war):
[Middleton] said he and fellow staffers in the 1971 opening of the LBJ museum at the University of Texas at Austin were too close to the former president to give a highly critical account of the controversies that defined his tenure ? especially the Vietnam War.
It wasn?t until 1982, when historians and other outside experts helped redesign the museum, that it fully explored how the war split the country. [?]
The second effort, made after LBJ died, was more objective than the first, Mr. Middleton said, convincing him that an advisory panel should have been used at the start.
Referring to the decision to hire the design firm, SMU history department chair Kathleen Wellman said ?an interpretive planner whose work will [have to] meet with Mr. Bush?s approval is not likely to involve historians. We do not seek the approval of the subjects of our work.?
A recent survey found that 98 percent of historians consider Bush?s presidency to be a failure and 61 percent said he is the worst president in history. So, it seems unlikely that Bush will take Middleton?s advice seeing as he has difficulty admitting mistakes.
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/04/16/bush-library-design/
Bush?s presidential library, which will be housed at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, has received significant criticism because of an attached institute ? independent of the university ? that will sponsor programs designed to ?promote the vision of the president? and ?celebrate? Bush?s presidency. Even former Bush adviser Karl Rove has signed on as a ?critical resource? of administration history.
Continuing to ensure that partisan praise of Bush will trump academic scholarship in the library, advisers now say they ?will rely chiefly? on the design firm PRD Group, rather than historians, to showcase Bush?s policies as president. The Dallas Morning News reports:
Bush advisers say they plan to consult historians but will rely chiefly on the veteran design firm they hired to create a museum to showcase his life, works and policies.
Some who?ve studied presidential centers say the lack of independent voices in the design-exhibit process risks turning the library into little more than a promotional venue.
Harry Middleton, director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson presidential library, explained that the LBJ library learned the important lesson of having ?objective,? ?outside experts? (particularly when advising the library of a president defined by an unpopular war):
[Middleton] said he and fellow staffers in the 1971 opening of the LBJ museum at the University of Texas at Austin were too close to the former president to give a highly critical account of the controversies that defined his tenure ? especially the Vietnam War.
It wasn?t until 1982, when historians and other outside experts helped redesign the museum, that it fully explored how the war split the country. [?]
The second effort, made after LBJ died, was more objective than the first, Mr. Middleton said, convincing him that an advisory panel should have been used at the start.
Referring to the decision to hire the design firm, SMU history department chair Kathleen Wellman said ?an interpretive planner whose work will [have to] meet with Mr. Bush?s approval is not likely to involve historians. We do not seek the approval of the subjects of our work.?
A recent survey found that 98 percent of historians consider Bush?s presidency to be a failure and 61 percent said he is the worst president in history. So, it seems unlikely that Bush will take Middleton?s advice seeing as he has difficulty admitting mistakes.
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/04/16/bush-library-design/
75
3DHS / Injured Ohio veterans get lower disability payments
« on: April 17, 2008, 04:02:58 AM »
Injured Ohio veterans get 2nd-lowest disability payments in nation
Posted by Brian Albrecht April 11, 2008 18:34PM
Categories: Congress, Health
Tracy Boulian/The Plain Dealer
A direct hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in Vietnam resulted in a 100 percent disability rating for Hank Vasil, 60, of Brook Park. But he's aware that other Ohio vets face the vagaries of a Department of Veterans Affairs system in which disability payments, based on ratings, vary between states. Ohio is near the bottom in average annual disability compensation.
If you're among the more than 85,000 Ohio veterans receiving disability payments, you might be tempted to heed the advice once given to America s 19th-century fortune seekers.
"Go west, young man . . . "
Say, to New Mexico, where 27,010 veterans get an average annual disability benefit that is $4,801 higher than the $8,090 Ohio gives to its vets.
Or to Oklahoma, where disabled vets receive $4,185 more than Ohio's in average yearly payments.
Or west. as in West Virginia, where the compensation is $3,857 higher.
According to the latest annual report issued by the Department of Veterans Affairs Veterans Benefit Administration, Ohio ranked second-to-last in the nation in disability compensation in 2006.
The state average annual disability benefit was only $112 higher than Indiana's, here 47,693 vets receive payments. It's a step up from 2005, when Ohio was dead last.
The longstanding issue of disparity in average annual disability payments between states heated up last year in hearings before the U.S. House Committee on Veterans Affairs.
Last week, Rep. Zack Space of Ohio, a member of the committee, introduced the Veterans Disability Fairness Act, which calls for increased scrutiny of the VA's compensation program.
"The veterans living in Ohio sacrificed as much as veterans living elsewhere," Space, a Democrat from Dover, said at the time. "There is no reason that a veteran here should receive less than veterans in other states."
Monthly tax-free disability payments are awarded to veterans for injuries they receive or diseases incurred while on active military duty.
Compensation is based on the severity of a disability, which is assigned a rating depending on a veteran's earning capacity. That rating is set in 10 percent increments, up to 100 percent for total disability.
Still, payment disparities exist between states. One factor cited by government reports is the difference in the way some VA workers evaluate disability claims. For example, a veteran with a post-traumatic stress disorder claim can be evaluated as being a little disabled in one state and a lot disabled in another.
Such a subjective process could result in a different disability-percentage rating and thus different benefit payments for veterans.
Government reports also note that disability benefits can vary according to a veteran s period in the military and branch of service and the degree of training for claims officers, as well as the percentage of veterans applying for and receiving compensation.
Also, those retiring from military careers tend to get higher payments, as do enlisted versus officer veterans.
"There should be a standard rate for all veterans across the U.S.," said Frank Anderson, 54, of East Cleveland, adding that he has a 100 percent disability from an automobile accident that occurred during his service in the Army.
Disabled veteran Hank Vasil said the lack of an effective method of transferring medical records from the military to the VA makes it harder to file disability claims and therefore can result in a disparity in payments.
Vasil, 60, who said he has worked as a veterans service representative for the state of Ohio, believes some vets don't get the benefits they should because they don't know how or choose not to apply.
"Veterans are ill-educated as to what their rights are," said Vasil. "Other times a lot of it has to do with a person's pride. He may feel he doesn't warrant it [a disability award], that somebody more severe should have it."
Space's bill would require the VA to collect and monitor regional data on disability ratings, review and audit the system used to rate disabilities and periodically evaluate the performance of individual raters.
"It's simply a matter of equity and fairness . . . standing up for what's right for those who stood up for our country," he said. "It's kind of hard to contest that."
"Gov. Ted Strickland is well aware that Ohio has historically been behind other states in the collection of veterans benefits, and that's why he has proposed establishing a Cabinet-level department of veterans affairs," said Keith Dailey, a spokesman for the governor.
He added that this department -- currently under consideration by the state legislature -- would work closely with county and local veterans service organizations to better provide our veterans and families with the tools they need to obtain the benefits that they have earned and which they deserve.
Additionally, the VA says it has taken steps to address the disparity of benefits between states, according to agency spokesman Steven Westerfeld.
Those steps include implementing national standardized training for rating specialists, standardizing the medical evaluation of disability claims, increasing oversight and review of rating decisions, and designing a procedure for routine monitoring of claims data to check for consistency.
The VA also is exploring ways to consolidate parts of the rating process into one location and developing a skills-certification process for the specialists who determine disability ratings, Westerfeld said.
But Army veteran Larry Scott, who runs the Web site vawatchdog.org, said there may be practical limits to what the VA can do.
Scott said the VA lacks a common training program and supervisor structure for claims officers.
"In theory, there should be one huge office handling all claims for all vets. That's physically impossible. It'll never be done," he said. "So what you have is kind of like McDonald's technically, all the restaurants have the same recipe, but you'll still get disparities in various parts of the country."
Vietnam vet Richard Healy, 61, of Lakewood, fears that legislative attempts to address the disparity issue would result in a one-size-fits-all rating system and remove interpretation of a disability based on an individual's medical or psychological condition and needs.
Healy said he has helped veterans file claims for the past 31 years on behalf of Disabled American Veterans and that energy should be put into making the current system work better and faster.
"Every one of us is different," he said. "If a doctor, for instance, says a veteran is minimally disabled for [post-traumatic stress disorder], what does 'minimally' mean?"
Interpretation is a big factor.
http://blog.cleveland.com/openers/2008/04/tracey_boulian_hank_vasil_of.html
Posted by Brian Albrecht April 11, 2008 18:34PM
Categories: Congress, Health
Tracy Boulian/The Plain Dealer
A direct hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in Vietnam resulted in a 100 percent disability rating for Hank Vasil, 60, of Brook Park. But he's aware that other Ohio vets face the vagaries of a Department of Veterans Affairs system in which disability payments, based on ratings, vary between states. Ohio is near the bottom in average annual disability compensation.
If you're among the more than 85,000 Ohio veterans receiving disability payments, you might be tempted to heed the advice once given to America s 19th-century fortune seekers.
"Go west, young man . . . "
Say, to New Mexico, where 27,010 veterans get an average annual disability benefit that is $4,801 higher than the $8,090 Ohio gives to its vets.
Or to Oklahoma, where disabled vets receive $4,185 more than Ohio's in average yearly payments.
Or west. as in West Virginia, where the compensation is $3,857 higher.
According to the latest annual report issued by the Department of Veterans Affairs Veterans Benefit Administration, Ohio ranked second-to-last in the nation in disability compensation in 2006.
The state average annual disability benefit was only $112 higher than Indiana's, here 47,693 vets receive payments. It's a step up from 2005, when Ohio was dead last.
The longstanding issue of disparity in average annual disability payments between states heated up last year in hearings before the U.S. House Committee on Veterans Affairs.
Last week, Rep. Zack Space of Ohio, a member of the committee, introduced the Veterans Disability Fairness Act, which calls for increased scrutiny of the VA's compensation program.
"The veterans living in Ohio sacrificed as much as veterans living elsewhere," Space, a Democrat from Dover, said at the time. "There is no reason that a veteran here should receive less than veterans in other states."
Monthly tax-free disability payments are awarded to veterans for injuries they receive or diseases incurred while on active military duty.
Compensation is based on the severity of a disability, which is assigned a rating depending on a veteran's earning capacity. That rating is set in 10 percent increments, up to 100 percent for total disability.
Still, payment disparities exist between states. One factor cited by government reports is the difference in the way some VA workers evaluate disability claims. For example, a veteran with a post-traumatic stress disorder claim can be evaluated as being a little disabled in one state and a lot disabled in another.
Such a subjective process could result in a different disability-percentage rating and thus different benefit payments for veterans.
Government reports also note that disability benefits can vary according to a veteran s period in the military and branch of service and the degree of training for claims officers, as well as the percentage of veterans applying for and receiving compensation.
Also, those retiring from military careers tend to get higher payments, as do enlisted versus officer veterans.
"There should be a standard rate for all veterans across the U.S.," said Frank Anderson, 54, of East Cleveland, adding that he has a 100 percent disability from an automobile accident that occurred during his service in the Army.
Disabled veteran Hank Vasil said the lack of an effective method of transferring medical records from the military to the VA makes it harder to file disability claims and therefore can result in a disparity in payments.
Vasil, 60, who said he has worked as a veterans service representative for the state of Ohio, believes some vets don't get the benefits they should because they don't know how or choose not to apply.
"Veterans are ill-educated as to what their rights are," said Vasil. "Other times a lot of it has to do with a person's pride. He may feel he doesn't warrant it [a disability award], that somebody more severe should have it."
Space's bill would require the VA to collect and monitor regional data on disability ratings, review and audit the system used to rate disabilities and periodically evaluate the performance of individual raters.
"It's simply a matter of equity and fairness . . . standing up for what's right for those who stood up for our country," he said. "It's kind of hard to contest that."
"Gov. Ted Strickland is well aware that Ohio has historically been behind other states in the collection of veterans benefits, and that's why he has proposed establishing a Cabinet-level department of veterans affairs," said Keith Dailey, a spokesman for the governor.
He added that this department -- currently under consideration by the state legislature -- would work closely with county and local veterans service organizations to better provide our veterans and families with the tools they need to obtain the benefits that they have earned and which they deserve.
Additionally, the VA says it has taken steps to address the disparity of benefits between states, according to agency spokesman Steven Westerfeld.
Those steps include implementing national standardized training for rating specialists, standardizing the medical evaluation of disability claims, increasing oversight and review of rating decisions, and designing a procedure for routine monitoring of claims data to check for consistency.
The VA also is exploring ways to consolidate parts of the rating process into one location and developing a skills-certification process for the specialists who determine disability ratings, Westerfeld said.
But Army veteran Larry Scott, who runs the Web site vawatchdog.org, said there may be practical limits to what the VA can do.
Scott said the VA lacks a common training program and supervisor structure for claims officers.
"In theory, there should be one huge office handling all claims for all vets. That's physically impossible. It'll never be done," he said. "So what you have is kind of like McDonald's technically, all the restaurants have the same recipe, but you'll still get disparities in various parts of the country."
Vietnam vet Richard Healy, 61, of Lakewood, fears that legislative attempts to address the disparity issue would result in a one-size-fits-all rating system and remove interpretation of a disability based on an individual's medical or psychological condition and needs.
Healy said he has helped veterans file claims for the past 31 years on behalf of Disabled American Veterans and that energy should be put into making the current system work better and faster.
"Every one of us is different," he said. "If a doctor, for instance, says a veteran is minimally disabled for [post-traumatic stress disorder], what does 'minimally' mean?"
Interpretation is a big factor.
http://blog.cleveland.com/openers/2008/04/tracey_boulian_hank_vasil_of.html