“We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”

I’ve been waiting so very long to hear those words from an American president.

Barack Hussein Obama, 44th president of the United States.

I have faith that the American people and the leadership of President Obama will usher in the day when all of us — black and white, rich and poor, young and old — stand together and work to realize my father’s dream.

— Martin Luther King III, today

As for you, Mr. Bush, good riddance! You have shamed the United States and wrecked its credibility.

This country is better off without you. It has indeed been a long national nightmare under your (abuse of) power and assault on constitutional democracy. Go back home, amoral usurper, freedom-destroying pretender of a tyrant! Never again shall we have a leader of your caliber.

(With the man leaving office tomorrow, I just had to vent.)

“A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr. (4 April 1967)

The birds are out to get us, it appears. What are your demands, avian nemesis?

Israel has declared a unilateral cease-fire after three weeks of operations in Gaza, just three days before the inauguration of Barack Obama, which was all along the tacit deadline. Let us all hope that the bloodshed will end, on both sides. It may not be entirely over, but this is a good step forward.

Thomas Friedman, in a recent editorial, actually advocated what is essentially terrorism as good policy to fight the Islamist extremists, as a way of “educating” their kind. I’m actually impressed by the candor in his expression of what has been operative policy for years: fighting fire with flame. Allow me to quote this strategy, in the context of the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war: “when dealing with a nonstate actor ... nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians — the families and employers of the militants — to restrain [it] in the future.” The immediate implications of this standard are fairly clear, that is if we choose not to engage in hypocritical theatrics: battles between states cannot involve a resort to terror, whereas in an asymmetrical fight between a state and a group like Hezbollah (or Hamas) there is an underlying population that must be severely punished for having a militant group “nested among” it. Never mind that this, by definition, is collective punishment which, by an objective standard, constitutes a serious war crime. The real shock is that violating the laws of war, and reverting to the sacking and pillaging of a 16th century mode, is considered the proper way to fight the wars of the 21st century.

NOTE: I don’t think it’s worthwhile at all for people to go around spouting “genocide” at the events in Gaza, mostly because it’s unnecessarily evocative of the Nazi extermination, which is of course a totally unfair analogy, and is therefore inflammatory and not descriptive, e.g. simply a term of abuse with zero information content.

Instead, I’d like you, the reader, to engage in a small thought experiment: say Hamas was, somehow, doing to Israel what Israel is currently doing to Gaza. The latest figure of dead is over 1,000 people, about half civilians and a quarter women and children, and about 4,700 wounded, according to the most credible figures available on the record.

Yet these figures are, respectively, proportionally equivalent to 4,848 Israeli deaths (which would include over 2,000 civilians, of which over 1,000 would be women and children) and 22,560 wounded; and, in Gaza, proportionally equivalent to 3 deaths. Does anyone seriously believe that international news agencies and outlets would even bat an eyelash about the Palestinian victims versus unending, wall-to-wall coverage of the apocalyptic toll inflicted upon the Israelis? If not “genocidal,” how would it be described? Would we even call that a “war”?

To deny that would be to engage in severe moral hypocrisy and to believe that some people are really less than human.

The future of Israeli democracy looks very grim.

Egypt’s involvement in maintaining the system that has perpetuated the suffering of Gazans is nothing new. Avi Shlaim, in his book The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2001), wrote that by 1955 “Egyptian authorities [had] kept a quarter of a million Palestinian refugees incarcerated in a tiny strip of territory in Gaza” (p. 84), “around 300,000 Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war who had been demanding the right to be armed and organized into an army in preparation for recovery of their homeland” (pp. 126-27). (It remains one of the most densely populated areas in the world.) More recently, as Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa report in the Daily Star, a Lebanese daily, Cairo is “seen by many [within the Arab societies] as complicit in the Israeli campaign.”

Flash-forwarding to the present, the pressure on the Egyptian state has been very powerful, forcing it to take actions to help — however meagerly — alleviate the situation for civilians. For sixth months, Cairo had enforced the Israel-Hamas ceasefire until it broke down on Nov. 4 with a small Israeli strike. But with the crisis mounting, Egypt was forced to release some of the valve pressure. “Responding to pressure from the Arab world, Egypt ordered the opening of the Rafah crossing to absorb wounded Palestinians from Gaza,” wrote Yoav Stern in Ha’aretz. A few days earlier, immediately following the campaign’s start in late December, “crowds of Gazans breached the border wall with Egypt, … Egyptian forces, some firing in the air, tried to push them back into Gaza and an official said one border guard was killed,” reported an Associated Press dispatch.

One item in sharp focus has been the network of smuggling tunnels upon which Hamas and Gaza itself depends. Ewa Jasiewicz noted that the territory “is being kept alive through the smuggling of food, fuel and medicine through an exploitative industry of over 1000 tunnels” of which some “are reportedly big enough to drive through.” Jonathan Cook, reporting from Nazareth, wrote that Egypt “had little choice but to turn a blind eye” to the smuggling that was aiding Hamas, “despite being profoundly uncomfortable with an Islamic party ruling next door,” that is an inspiration to its own domestic Islamists.

Yossi Klein Halevi, in the New Republic, wrote that one possible “scenario” of Cast Lead — this was before the ground push began — was the return of the entire Gaza Strip to Egypt (“ideally”). Articulating the opinion of much of Western public opinion, Seumas Milne pointed out that Israel’s aim by year’s end (with crucial US backing) was to “overthrow” Hamas and not simply to defang its capacity for violence and terror. At this point, neither Egypt nor any other Arab state will be able to act as “mediator” (Zvi Bar’el and Robert Dreyfuss), and there will be no peace until there is no more Hamas, since any remnant force left will be, like Islamic Jihad, even more extremist and militant.

“For their part,” reflected Stephen Brown, “Muslim governments like Egypt and Jordan will probably make the proper noises denouncing the Israeli attack in order to placate the anti-Israeli protestors on their streets,” namely their populations. “In secret, however, they probably support the destruction of Hamas since it removes a dangerous Iranian ally from their neighbourhood.” Egypt and Jordan also happen to be the only surrounding countries to hold peace treaties with the Jewish state. Put another way, the threat of the so-called Shi’ite crescent was put forth by Daniel Levy, who wrote that Cairo “naturally sees the Hamas issue first through its own domestic prism of concern at the growth” of the Muslim Brotherhood — of which Hamas is its offshoot — the leading opposition group in Egypt. Concurring, Sara Roy wrote that one aim of the Israeli attack is to attempt to “foist Gaza onto Egypt” once and for all. Ghassan Khatib, “a Palestinian analyst,” echoing Roy, believed one “strategic aim” of Israel is “making Gaza Egypt’s responsibility,” as quoted by Cook. And according to Daniel Pipes, “[Hosni] Mubarak notwithstanding, Egyptians overwhelmingly want a strong tie to Gaza” — certainly plausible, since Egypt occupied the area until 1967.

In essence, according to Benny Morris, the root problem is that the area under assault is “populated by 1.5 million impoverished, desperate Palestinians who are ruled by a fanatic regime and are tightly hemmed in by fences and by border crossings controlled by Israel and Egypt.” Yigal Walt avers that Egypt maintained most of the closings. Veteran Israeli activist Uri Avnery, on January 2, alleged that “the only opening to the word that is not dominated by Israel [in the Strip] is the border with Egypt” at Rafah, wherein the “Egyptian army has blocked the only way for food and medicines to enter, while surgeons operate on the wounded without anesthetics.” As the ground operation began, Ethan Bronner speculated that “any potential truce deal would probably include an increase in commercial traffic from and Egypt into Gaza, which is Hamas’s central demand”; the dilemma, therefore, is that developing “the Gaza economy under [the rule of] Hamas,” according to “Israeli leaders,” would “build up Hamas,” but otherwise “1.5 million Gazans” would continue “living in despair” — for their crime of voting the wrong party to power in January 2006. Also in the New York Times, reporter Steven Lee Myers observed that a “victory for Israel would make it easier for Egypt” and other so-called moderate governments “to declare common cause against Islamic militancy and its main sponsor … Iran.”

The war has caused several fissures and splits to develop: between the Arab states and their populations, between factions in a steadily disintegrating Palestinian polity (and society), and between electorally competing camps in Israel itself. Roi Ben-Yehuda quoted “columnist Mona Eltahawy,” who in “Egypt’s Al Masry Al Youm and Qatar’s Al Arab … lambast[ed] Hamas and the Arab world for their self-destructive addiction to Israel” by saying that Gazans “are victims equally of Hamas and Israel.” As the fight raged on in the streets, the UN stridently warned of a worsening “humanitarian crisis” (Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, a centrist candidate for Prime Minister next month, is on the record for claiming that no such crisis exists), though “Some medical supplies, ambulances and generators … got into Gaza from Egypt through the Rafah border crossing,” according to John Holmes, the “humanitarian chief.” On January 6, Yaakov Katz, in the Jerusalem Post, cited the work of Bezalel Treiber of the Defense Ministry in “opening … a humanitarian corridor from Gaza City to Kerem Shalom — located near the Egyptian border” but, in actuality, much further away than Rafah is to Egypt.

So far, Hamas has “preferred to endure a punishing US-led boycott, a devastating Israeli-Egyptian siege and increasingly bloody Israeli incursions rather than capitulate to US and European demands … that it accept the various strictures of the defunct 1993 Oslo agreement and the stillborn 2003 ‘road map,’” according to Mouin Rabbani. They have made the choice of sacrificing their own people for their ideo-theology. Meanwhile, US-Israeli-Egyptian cooperation against the regime in Gaza has led to a grievous strategic and moral defeat of Israeli deterrence power, horrific deprivation for the people with the misfortune to live in Gaza, and a propaganda victory for their ostensible leaders.

From The Jerusalem Post, dated 30 May 2007:

All civilians living in Gaza are collectively guilty for Kassam attacks on Sderot, former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu has written in a letter to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Eliyahu ruled that there was absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket launchings.

The letter, published in Olam Katan [Small World], a weekly pamphlet to be distributed in synagogues nationwide this Friday, cited the biblical story of the Shechem* massacre (Genesis 34) and Maimonides’ commentary (Laws of Kings 9, 14) on the story as proof texts for his legal decision.

According to Jewish war ethics, wrote Eliyahu, an entire city holds collective responsibility for the immoral behavior of individuals. In Gaza, the entire populace is responsible because they do nothing to stop the firing of Kassam rockets.

The former chief rabbi also said it was forbidden to risk the lives of Jews in Sderot or the lives of IDF soldiers for fear of injuring or killing Palestinian noncombatants living in Gaza.

Eliyahu could not be reached for an interview. However, Eliyahu’s son, Shmuel Eliyahu, who is chief rabbi of Safed, said his father opposed a ground troop incursion into Gaza that would endanger IDF soldiers. Rather, he advocated carpet bombing the general area from which the Kassams were launched, regardless of the price in Palestinian life.

“If they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand,” said Shmuel Eliyahu. “And if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000. If they still don’t stop we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop.”

I’m so glad I’m Ashkenazic.

*The modern-day city of Nablus, located in Israeli-occupied West Bank (Samaria).

A second front in the Israel-Hamas war may have opened up as rockets hit northern Israel, while Hamas-launched katyushas have penetrated deeper into Israeli territory, recently hitting 27 kilometers from Tel Aviv, targeting an IAF base. My earlier ambiguity is over. Hamas must be smashed totally so that more population centers of Israel are not opened up to attack or threat of attack. Meanwhile, in Gaza, the humanitarian situation has worsened with the recent blocking of Red Cross aid that has only in the last day gotten through, rescuing about 100 trapped civilians. The apparently extensive use of white phosphorous, an illegal chemical weapon, has gone underreported.

The political ramifications of everything that has gone on and continues to go on could not be more stark and vivid. In elections this February, Israelis are expected to put into power Binyamin Netanyahu (again), and we will see how that goes. Before making an editorial comment, it is important to note that, though the situation on the ground is in constant flux, a few steady patterns have emerged: any Israeli action, whether reactive or proactive, will be accompanied by a storm of publicity that will portray it as completely defensive and righteous; all reports to the contrary, even by respected humanitarian organizations, will be dismissed as irrelevant or the work of enemy propaganda; and each interested side (that is, the apologists for the Israelis and Palestinians) will provide a self-serving, partial narrative that will obscure and mystify rather than illuminate and examine.

A bitter truth is that no side has any rightful claim to a moral high ground, neither the residents of Gaza nor the citizens of Israel, for the actions of their respective leadership and the grievous toll of their weapons of state. Warfare is an amoral affair, it is regretful to say. There is much talk of the laws of war, but in the end survival is what counts; both sides are going to do whatever in their power for the sake of their own survival, their rhetoric notwithstanding.

My dispatches do not have datelines like “Jerusalem” or “Gaza City,” nor will they be very in-depth or regular, but I will call it as I see it.

The Zahal ground operation began last night.

It continues, “bisecting” Gaza as forces have spread; reports of more civilian casualties pile on. In Bitter Lemons, a site described as “Palestinian-Israeli crossfire,” Yossi Alpher writes that “neither Israel nor anyone else has a long-term workable strategy for dealing with Hamas in Gaza.” Alpher suggests that “alternative strategies … are worth recalling”:

One is to open up the Gaza passages and cease inflicting ineffective collective punishment on 1.5 million Gazans, making clear that Israel’s quarrel is only with the Hamas military and political leadership in Gaza and beyond. Once this operation is over, and assuming Israel emerges from it in a position of strength, that would be the time to take this step. Another is to seek direct talks with Hamas…”

“The Israeli attack has increased public sympathy and support for Hamas because it is the target of these attacks and because it is trying to fight back,” observed Ghassan Khatib, his Palestinian counterpart.

Toward the facts on the ground: it is hard to separate the winnow from the chaff, so to speak, e.g., the hasbara from the reality. My account of it all is that Israel has been aiming to remove Hamas from power in Gaza for the past two years, in which this is simply the surfacing of a long-standing policy of economic and military strangulation on the people of Gaza for voting the wrong people into power. The rocketing on the Negev is, I’m afraid, a pretext; Israel would not have tolerated it for so long if it were an immediate mortal threat.

The respective casualty figures show clearly the actual balance of forces, nearly one hundred to one. It is remarkable how the rockets launched by Hamas, surely a detestable organization composed of frightening zealots, are simultaneously “unguided” and “aimed at civilians.” On the other hand—during war there are two sides obviously—as we’re told again and again, the Zahal does everything in its power to avoid civilian deaths and even texts militants to get out of the way before a neighborhood block is blown to smithereens. But, many wonder, how much of the picture that so many are given accords to the reality of the situation? Not much, regrettably.

There is much that is obscured. Gaza is closed off from foreign correspondents, so we really do not know what is really happening there. The infantry knows now. May God be with them. The first combat-related Israeli fatality has a name, Dvir Emanuelloff, and an age, 22, and a family. Why do Palestinians not have names, only anonymous statistics? I suppose in all of this, if I must take sides, it will be on the side of the cooler heads, Israeli and Palestinian, strong and weak, and not the fanatics.

Below, from an Israeli peacenik website, which says something to the effect of (translation by Google so it is very imperfect): All agreed on the government’s obligation to protect its citizens and ensure that residents of the South live in peace with no shooting. But even the government can not complete with turning the territory into a prison guard, in which citizens live terrible economic distress, to hunger threshold, as in Gaza.

מוסכם על הכול שחובת הממשלה להגן על אזרחיה ולהבטיח כי תושבי הדרום יחיו בשלווה ללא ירי. אבל אף ממשלה גם לא יכולה להשלים עם הפיכת שטחה לבית סוהר, בו חיים האזרחים במצוקה כלכלית נוראה, עד לסף רעב, כמו בעזה

I am no statistician, but that seems like a small sample and a large M.O.E. Nonetheless, it is clear that the same number of people in Israel want an immediate truce as those clamoring for a ground invasion, which would likely be calamitous. It appears the latter has been prepared. God help the Israelis of the Negev as well as the Palestinians in Gaza. But obviously it is not up to God, who in my view does not intervene, just watches things unfold.

It is strange, and sad, that so many people consider it a pro-Hamas position to decry the clearly criminal nature of the assaults. Why is not possible for so many commentators to hold in their heads the radical idea that to truly respect Israel means to hold it to a higher standard, and not allow it (i.e., the state) to go on its self-destructive path?

Israeli citizens might ponder the following words from Shakespeare [The Merchant of Venice] that I have slightly altered:

‘I am a Palestinian. Hath not a Palestinian eyes? Hath not a Palestinian hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Jew is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that…the villainy you teach me, I will execute; and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.’

-- Tariq Ali

Members of Iran’s small Jewish community staged a demonstration outside of the United Nations’ office in Tehran, to protest the Israel Defense Forces’ operation in the Gaza Strip.

The official Iranian news agency, IRNA, reported that community members, alongside Jewish parliamentarian Siamak Mara-Sedq, urged Israel to do its part to return quiet and security to the region.

The chairman of Iran’s Jewish Union, Rahmatullah Raafi, said the community had come out in support of the Palestinian people.

“We are here to express out support and sympathy for the Palestinian nation,” he said, adding that Muslim nations could rise up as a single large force against Israel. He also said that the victors of the current conflict were the residents of Gaza.

Israeli sources familiar with the Iranian Jewish community suspect that the demonstration was organized by the government in Tehran, and does not represent that actual stance of Iranian Jews.

Some 25,000 Jews still live in Iran. Many have visited Israel, where a large percentage of the community has immigrated in the past 30 years. Still, others prefer to remain in Iran. There are rarely reports of the community suffering from antagonism or aggression from their neighbors or from the government.

-- Ha’aretz

...we see a small and ugly truth emerging: Our southern cities have been hit by dozens of missiles, while Gaza sustained hundreds of dead. Almost half of them are civilians; almost half of them are the graduates of a police course who have nothing to do with Qassam rockets.

-- a pseudonymous writer in Yediot Aharonot

It is no truth at all if you ignore it or pretend it cannot be so!

Israel and its Arab antagonists have gone to war again. No, that’s not it. In a valiant defense of its citizens, Israeli forces have neutralized Hamas terrorist rocket launchers and other terror infrastructure. No, that can’t cut it. So how to make sense of it all?

For me, this is a replay of 2006, when Israel warred against Hezbollah, in the process killing about 1,000 Lebanese and wrecking much of the south of that country. It was horrifying, saddening, and quite maddening as well. Now the target is a similarly extremist group in an even more embattled piece of real estate. So far, at latest count, something like 270 Gazans have been killed out of a total population of 1.5 million. After the ceasefire ended many had a dread feeling something big was going to happen. Not for me: it was after the events that had preceded that by several months, like closing the crossings that blocked off international humanitarian aid, denying access to all foreign correspondents, etc.

Once again, this writer needs to attempt to take on an impartial, balanced approach and try to piece together the facts, but that proves difficult because my tribal allegiances are quite clear. Does my Jewish identity prevent me from looking at this situation with a clear head and clear conscience? The events of the last couple of days have constituted a huge propaganda victory for Hamas and other “Islamic resistance” movements the world over and, of course, throughout the entire Arab world. That said, Israel has the right to protect its citizens, as does any state. But when does “defense” stretch into oblivion? When does protection of people’s lives, much holier and sacrosanct in places like Sderot and Ashkelon (and, of late, Ashdod) than in Gaza City and other wards, mutate into a hideous exemplar of collective punishment?

Here are the facts, as best as can be ascertained: since 2006 (again, that year) Gaza has been under a state of siege and Israel proper — in a certain radius from Gaza — has been subjected to incessant rocket fire, by the hundreds if not thousands, from these Hamas militants, who were duly elected into power by the Gazans themselves in the January elections. There had been maybe a few Israeli casualties from these “rockets,” in reality makeshift cylinders with some explosive but no guidance system and they cause little physical harm except psychological distress and terror. The people of Sderot have suffered, there is no doubt; but how can it be denied that the people of Gaza have also suffered, indeed suffered a hundred times more?

Good reporters don’t, and cannot, “take sides.” More often than not, they will take pains to present as even-handed a picture, as neutral a picture, as possible. They will say things like: “In response to Hamas terrorist actions against Israel, the Israel Air Forces have commenced operations to take out Hamas; incidentally, nearly 300 casualties.” If one strays from that style, one becomes either an IAF spokesman or a Hamas apologist, and obviously that’s bullshit. Allow me to explain.

It is indisputable that Hamas is committed, by its charter, to destroy the Israeli state, especially by terroristic means like the obscene suicide bombings, which have thankfully ceased but may resume should things get worse. It is also not in dispute that since 2006, but probably earlier, a humanitarian crisis has befallen Gaza and the agent, regrettably and painfully, is Israel. The aim was clear: punish the people for electing Hamas into power, in a democratic election. The methods of punishment have been varied: closures of the main crossings, control of the borders so as to allow military incursions at will and with impunity, the use of sonic weapons to terrorize the population and, lastly, clearing out the foreign correspondents and international humanitarian aid. Only now has it morphed to an explicit stage: massive bombardment.

Isaac Luria, a representative of the pro-Israel lobbying group J Street, also writes of the conflict about the conflict: “I felt immediate pressure from friends and family to pick a side. Did I think that Israel’s actions were fully justified or disproportionate? Did Hamas bring this on itself by firing rockets and provoking Israel or are the strikes an act of aggression against a people trapped in misery and poverty? Couldn’t I see who’s right and who’s wrong?” Luria concludes by saying, “Israel has a special place in my heart. I lived there last year while my wife was studying to be a rabbi. But I recognize that neither Israelis nor Palestinians have a monopoly on right or wrong. While there is nothing ‘right’ in raining rockets on Israeli families or dispatching suicide bombers, there is nothing ‘right’ in punishing a million and a half already-suffering Gazans for the actions of the extremists among them.”

Shortly before the flare-up, Nathan Jeffay, writing in The Forward, observed that the ceasefire that was broken right up to the bombings, both sides were left militarily strengthened, sharpening their knives: “For Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza after winning a 2006 election there, the cease-fire was a chance to stockpile its arsenal, increasing the number and capability of its rockets. On December 21, two days after the cease-fire ended, Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, reported to Israel’s Cabinet that it believes Hamas now has rockets that can reach a 25-mile radius from Gaza. This would mean they could hit the outskirts of Beersheba, Israel’s fourth largest city. It also brings the port city of Ashdod into range.”

Jeffay quoted Eyal Zisser, “a terrorism expert at Tel Aviv University,” who said, “Gaza is the only place in the Arab world where Islamists are in power, and they have shown themselves able to rule and to successfully negotiate and benefit from a cease-fire.” Jeffay adds that “the lull gave the army a chance to practice its range of possible responses to Hamas rockets, from targeted killings to a full-scale operation in Gaza. Security experts say it was a period of intense preparation. ‘The [Israel Defense Forces] will have prepared intelligence and used the chance for the training of troops,’ said Ely Karmon, former adviser to the Defense Ministry and senior researcher at the Institute for Counter-Terrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya.”

In the London Review of Books, Sara Roy wrote, also before the operation (“Cast Lead”), that “Israel’s siege has two fundamental goals. One is to ensure that the Palestinians there are seen merely as a humanitarian problem, beggars who have no political identity and therefore can have no political claims. The second is to foist Gaza onto Egypt.” After describing the economic strangulation at considerable length and detail, Roy noted: “The breakdown of an entire society is happening in front of us, but there is little international response beyond UN warnings which are ignored. … How can keeping food and medicine from the people of Gaza protect the people of Israel? How can the impoverishment and suffering of Gaza’s children — more than 50 per cent of the population — benefit anyone? International law as well as human decency demands their protection. If Gaza falls, the West Bank will be next.” It is superfluous to add that Sara Roy is the child of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust.

Developments are changing constantly. As of “press” time, Ha’aretz reports that Israeli Arabs are demonstrating, burning tires and Israeli flags. Not surprising, but a potential powder-keg: one-seventh of Israel’s population is Arab. This could quite possibly turn into another intifada if the bloodbath continues. Gideon Levy, one of the sharpest editorialists in the Israeli press, wrote immediately after the attacks started, “Once again, Israel’s violent responses, even if there is justification for them, exceed all proportion and cross every red line of humaneness, morality, international law and wisdom. What began yesterday in Gaza is a war crime and the foolishness of a country.”

Israel will doubtless suffer further attacks against its own citizens if words from people like Levy are ridiculed or ignored, the necessary, at times painful, voices of dissent that put a worthy nation on the right track if, and more often when, it goes perilously astray.

My sporadic postings are a sign to come of activity here for the near future: on break, in Connecticut and then Staten Island (through rest of the week), then back home but, otherwise, cannot guarantee regular insights or comments for the forseeable future. There might be a year-end recap or something like that down the pipe for the 31st but that is about all I can manage right now. Not than I am busy per se, but not of a bloggy mind lately.

“You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”

“There’s room at the top they are telling you still/But first you must learn to smile as you kill, if you want to be like the folks on the hill.”

“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.”

— John Lennon (Oct. 9, 1940 – Dec. 8, 1980)

“At this season of THE WINTER SOLSTICE may reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.”

— a sign in Olympia, Washington Legislative Bldg., soon found lying in a ditch after it was removed

Link to the story here.

As a mostly secular, agnostic Jew with (non-Hollywood) kabbalistic leanings, there is much I sympathize with there: no afterlife, an appreciation and awe of and for the wonder and beauty of the world and nature, and an understanding that the myths and superstitious practices and traditions that are a part of all religious belief can harden the hearts of humanity and trap their minds. But by that very token an atheistic look at the world, in my view, is very bleak, and does not have any space — a needed one — for a deeper understanding of the spiritual world and what it can offer.

I clipped this photo off of CNN yesterday, apparently an anti-Pakistan demonstration quite recently in Mumbai.

Look at this man’s rage. I understand it, but given the current realities it is also worrisome. Because it reminds me of some of the feelings I felt and saw right after 9/11, and I remember well the hate-driven crimes, hundreds of them, in the atrocities’ wake because of that very real, explicable rage.

These truly are frightful, horrid times to live in, to see the kind of barbarity we were all witness to, directly or not, last week.

“We are very angry. We saw blood and mayhem for three days. I heard the gunfire all night. The fear has now turned into rage. Anger is a good thing; it shakes us out of our indifference and inaction. We stand up and demand answers from our leaders.

“The collective anger of a population is a powerful force. But as a young and outraged citizen of India, I am afraid of the direction our anger is taking. When all fingers point toward Pakistan, I am filled with a sense of dread. It is chilling to hear two nuclear powers use the language of war.”

— from a letter to the editor of the New York Times, written Nov. 30 and published Dec. 2, by Devika Narayan

“Of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks. It was clear that they were killed on the 26th itself. It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again,” he said.

— an anonymous Mumbai mortician on the special treatment for the Israeli victims

Here is a message from the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), which is a “twenty-year-old civil rights group that advocates ‘for the integration of Islam into American pluralism, and for a positive, constructive relationship between American Muslims and their representatives’” (via John Nichols):

MPAC expresses its condolences to the Jewish community and the various other communities whose members were involved in the tragic series of terrorist attacks in recent days. MPAC has sent letters of condolences to the Indian embassy, and encourages people of all faiths and nationalities to stand together against those who seek to divide our communities.

Media reports indicate that more than 150 people have been killed in the attacks. Those responsible for these brutal and immoral attacks should be swiftly brought to justice. Islam considers the use of terrorism to be unacceptable for any purpose.”

The madness in Mumbai is hard to put into a simple posting, reactions and thoughts. I remember well in July 2006, when the city was last attacked by fanatics. The events of the past few days are clearly much worse, in scope and scale. It is just too horrible what some people are capable of doing to other human beings, their own flesh and blood. Only animals are capable of doing what those mad marauding murderers did, truly. There is not much else to say about it, for me at least. It looks like the commandos are fighting off the remaining perpetrators, and there was something about a Chabad house.

I hope you all had a great and wonderful Thanksgiving. There is a lot we take for granted in life, like life itself and the joy it brings every day, lest we forget. And the simple things we think are as certain as the sun rising the next morning. All for now.

I’m starting to see that the Left is already articulating a useful challenge for Obama to affect real change, the kind we were supposed to believe in, if not the beginnings of anxieties that Obama is simply going to govern as Clinton 2.0, with a few cosmetic tweaks — not too unreasonable if his cabinet picks are any indication. Michael Albert makes a good point: “…moderately redressing insanity isn’t what progressive Obama supporters meant by ‘change we can believe in.’” Katrina vanden Heuvel concurs, adding that the president-elect is a “centrist” and a “pragmatist,” both obviously true, almost to the point of dullness. If anyone is expecting anything radical or really transformative, exhale very, very soon because you will pass out before long from holding your breath. I think that these leftist voices should not worry too much; the election three weeks ago is still a major victory, by no means the end of the struggle but a good start. After all, center-right is preferable to hard right, which is what we’ve had for so long. The discussion brings to light a cold fact: there is no organized Left in the United States, aside from marginal writers and associations. Only a sustained, principled movement of people is going to affect change, not one man in the White House.

Before I write a book here, Happy Thanksgiving. There is still plenty to give thanks for, concerns and fears and dreads and doubts aside.

To the President-elect: Your posting on your latest video for your economic recovery plan says “Of the people, By the people,” so wouldn’t the logical inference mean a bold plan to nationalize the entire financial sector and put it under public ownership? I’m still waiting. (Don’t make promises you cannot or will not keep.)

Do it, Obama. Do it now.

“… the last of the last.” Honor our veterans today.

Once the self-congratulation is over, and we all sober up, there will come soon the time when we will awake to the realization that there is so much to do, so many problems to address, so many issues to confront, so many promises to keep. My hope is that the youth of this country who helped propel Obama to the White House will not fall into complacency, but instead — with “Yes, we can” as the rallying cry — really work to make this country the land it should be, to not betray our founders, to fulfill our birthright and hold our newly ascendant leadership accountable to the people.

There is no denying the historicity of this week. Let there be no denying the power of the American people to do the needed work that will make this nation a light unto others, and a decent place in which to live, and to build on the successes of social movements at home and abroad so that our own hopes and dreams can become the ways and means for the population at large. We shall pay “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” as was written in our Declaration of Independence. The world is watching. One man cannot do it alone, and we must not have any illusions that powerful forces of resistance and reaction await him in the corridors of power in Washington.

Above all, let us constructively critique, challenge, and push the new president to do right by us and, by virtue of our empire, the entire world.

(Image courtesy Patrick Moberg.)

We did it, America. It is still so hard to believe, but it happened.

Barack Hussein Obama will be the 44th president of the United States. I am so proud to be a citizen of this land. (Photo courtesy Andrew Sullivan.)

Because it should not matter. (Courtesy the Daily Dish via Dan Savage via Queerty via MollyGood via Gawker.)

“It is now indisputable that the president and vice-president of the United States engineered a de facto coup against the constitution after 9/11, declaring themselves above any law, any treaty, and any basic moral norm in their misguided mission to rid the world of evil. ... If I were to give one reason why I believe electing Barack Obama is essential tomorrow, it would be an end to this dark, lawless period in American constitutional government.”

— Andrew Sullivan, today

We leave that era behind tomorrow. So will begin the task of clearing away the wreckage and trying to make even basic progress. Perhaps it is not a hope in vain that the world will forgive us someday, for the damage we have done to ourselves and to the world.

The nation’s major newspapers have endorsed Obama by a margin of 240 to 114.

The nation’s college newspapers have endorsed him 63 to one.

A quick note on the rhetoric: according to present-day G.O.P. platitudes (expressed in latest advertising), “spreading the wealth” = government “handout.” Roll footage of welfare mothers and food stamps and you get the message. In reality, which is not where the Republican Party leadership, communications directors and campaign chiefs operate by any objective measure, any form of taxation by necessity spreads the wealth. The question is in which direction: upward or downward? In 2001 and 2003, as is common knowledge, we saw radical redistribution of wealth for the wealthiest 1 and .1 percent of Americans (what’s called “socialism for the rich”). That wasn’t a handout; instead it was billed as an “economic stimulus” plan. Likewise the recent corporate welfare plan was mostly termed a “bailout” or even a “rescue” package.

As many writers have pointed out, the Republican Party is not “anti-government,” just opposed on philosophical grounds to the functions of government that happen to serve the general public. So anything, however mild, that deviates from the script is attacked as foreign, “socialist,” “Marxist,” etc. From the standpoint of the reactionary right, which lest we forget has been a dominant force in our politics for about thirty years, what Obama is talking about is socialist. But it’s not the case that right-reactionaries — a.k.a. the prevailing majority of the Republican leadership and nearly its entire “base,” far out of mainstream American opinion — are really against socialism per se. They see no issue with socializing the risks and costs of the financial sector, for instance, or with nationalizing the banks. On the other hand, making things like health insurance more socialized is completely outrageous (not even Obama goes that far, given the lack of an organized Left in our political culture).

Back to these “handouts.” There is also a racial code at work, which should be not at all surprising. One of the many positive aspects of American society today is that we have progressed enough that explicit race appeals can no longer be made by any viable, major party or political platform. Hence the need for code, like “handout,” which conjures the picture of freeloading, shiftless blacks subsisting on their government check. The ghost of Lee Atwater remains, in the form of Rove protégé Steve Schmidt who has contributed to the annals of unprincipled nastiness in politics, breaking all sorts of records. With “spread the wealth,” we are demanded to think of the Soviet Union (somehow). Taxes are social policy and they’ve been that way since at least as far back as the first graduated code back in the Progressive Era, championed by radical socialists like Theodore Roosevelt — incidentally he’s McCain’s hero, so according to the prevailing (il)logic McCain is a socialist himself. The assumption buried in the discourse around this issue is that giving a handout to the wealthiest tiny fraction of the country “creates” wealth and that doing the same thing for the “lower brackets” is just throwing money away, “spreading” it uselessly and swearing allegiance to Lenin.

The premises of this entire campaign are absurd, no one is asking critical questions in the “mainstream,” the press is tongue-tied in their rhetoric of equanimity and forced “even-handedness” (i.e. objectivity), and the people as usual pay the price when they will get the government they pay for next week. I hope it isn’t McCain, and if it’s Obama I wish he will do the humane and sensible thing and not go down the triangulation road. His supporters have bought into his promises of “fundamental change,” and we will all see if he will (or can) really deliver, and what that change will mean. It won’t be a revolution, but perhaps this can be a useful first step toward a better America that lives up to its founding creed and the needs of its people.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

— George Santayana (1905)

From Roger Ebert’s column in the Oct. 2 Chicago Sun-Times:

I know that I sound just like a liberal, but at this point in history I am sick and tired of giant corporations running roughshod over decent people -- cutting their wages, polluting their work environment, denying them health care, forcing them to work unpaid overtime, busting their unions and other crimes we have never heard George Bush denouncing while he was cutting corporate taxes. I am sure lower taxes help corporations to function more profitably. Why is that considered progress, when many workers live in borderline poverty and executives have pissing contests over who has the biggest stock options? But enough. I have “Flash of Genius” to review.

“This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. …

“Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

“The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

“Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men. … [T]here must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. …

“[T]here must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments; there must be an end to speculation with other people’s money… If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we cannot merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline… I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.…

“We face the arduous days that lie before us in the warm courage of national unity; with the clear consciousness of seeking old and precious moral values; with the clean satisfaction that comes from the stern performance of duty of old and young alike. … We do not distrust the future of essential democracy. The people of the United States have not failed. … They have asked for discipline and direction under leadership. They have made me the present instrument of their wishes. … In this dedication of a Nation we humbly ask the blessing of God. May He protect each and every one of us.”

—President Franklin Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1933)

Update #2: “Senior White House officials played a central role in deliberations in the spring of 2002 about whether the Central Intelligence Agency could legally use harsh interrogation techniques while questioning an operative of Al Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah, according to newly released documents,” reported the New York Times on Sept. 25 (Mark Mazzetti, “Bush Aides Linked to Talks on Interrogations”). “Current and former officials have said that the C.I.A. began using harsh interrogation methods on Mr. Zubaydah in Thailand weeks before the Justice Department formally authorized the interrogation program in a secret memo dated Aug. 1, 2002. ... A fierce dispute erupted between the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. during the spring and summer of 2002, as F.B.I. officials objected to the harsh treatment and ultimately withdrew from Mr. Zubaydah’s interrogation.” The papers, given to the paper by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), have not been posted on the NYT website. In related news, William Glaberson, Times correspondent at Gitmo, reported that prosecutor Lieutenant Colonel Darrel Vandeveld stepped down:

The defense lawyer in the case, Maj. David J. R. Frakt of the Air Force Reserve, said Colonel Vandeveld ‘could no longer continue to serve ethically as a prosecutor.’ He said Colonel Vandeveld had had disputes with his superiors about whether to give him information that might help the defense. The chief prosecutor, Col. Lawrence J. Morris of the Army, said Colonel Vandeveld had asked to leave the prosecutor’s office for personal reasons and said, ‘there are no grounds for his ethical qualms.’ The dispute is the latest to stir up the war crimes system here, which has been plagued with prior defections from the prosecution office, judicial rulings that there was unlawful command influence over some cases and assertions of political influence from a former chief prosecutor.”

Shocker.

As you can plainly see, Barack Obama wants to raise your taxes. Not.

Zubayda story update: the American Psychological Association, in an 8,792 to 6,157 vote (59 to 41 percent), decided Sept. 17 “to prohibit consultation in the interrogations of detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, or so-called black sites operated by the Central Intelligence Agency overseas” (Benedict Carey, New York Times, A23). The decision “may help to settle a long debate within the profession” over the fact that APA-affiliated psychologists, such as Mitchell and Jessen, “have helped military and C.I.A. interrogators evaluate detainees, plan questioning strategy and judge its psychological costs.”

The APA’s “ethics code, while condemning a list of coercive techniques adopted in the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism campaign,” Carey adds—adopting their terminology, if I may add, such as coercive and anti-terrorism, “has allowed some consultation ‘for national security-related purposes.’” What are these purposes related to national security? We never find out. But, again, one must ask: What could conceivably be considered to be related to national security by this administration, in any possible, law-bending and law-breaking way? Everything.

Senator Joe Biden (D-Del.) exits after a rousing speech at The College of Wooster, Sept. 17, 2008; out of a town of 26,000 (Wooster, Ohio, the seat of Wayne County, which has voted Republican in every election since 1964) about 4,500 people were in attendance. (Photo courtesy Heather Hunt)

Yes we can.

It is a strange serendipity to have Senator Biden come to your campus (Sept. 17, Wooster, Ohio, my college town—hopefully it will get media play) and, on the randomizer, hearing this:

“Now the senator came down here
Showing ev’ryone his gun,
Handing out free tickets
To the wedding of his son.
An’ me, I nearly got busted
An’ wouldn't it be my luck
To get caught without a ticket
And be discovered beneath a truck.
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end,
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again.”
(1966)

As it happens, the College Dems distributed free tickets. No word yet on any wedding ceremonies (unless we’re talking about Bristol and Levi Johnston).

On this date almost 3,000 of our countrymen were murdered in the name of God by a fanatical organization that persists, spread like a cancer because we reacted to those attacks by wielding a sledgehammer against a nest of hornets. Where do we go from here? Several facts must be put forward at the outset: (1) much of the Islamic world has seen our actions as a war against their religion, (2) our actions around the world have made us less safe and have failed to destroy the Qaeda threat, and (3) there has thankfully not been an attack on American soil in seven years. The second and third seem to contradict, but both are true.

It may be worth recalling the words of Jean-Marie Colombani, who wrote an editorial entitled “Nous sommes tous Américains” (“We are all Americans”) in the Sept. 13, 2001, issue of Le Monde. “How can we not feel … deep solidarity with this people and this country, the United States, which we are so close and to whom we owe our freedom, and thus our solidarity.” My apologies for the translation, which is entirely the result of plugging the French into a Web applet, with the help of my own reading. “In the eyes of the American public and its leaders, Islamism, in all its forms, may be appointed as the new enemy.” The hijackers had “a barbaric logic of a new nihilism” that the “grand majority of Muslim believers” abhor and reject, Colombani added. The “madness” of the extremists “is never a force that can remake the world.”

By December 7, 1948, the attack on Pearl Harbor had been avenged; the hole in the ground remains in so many symbolic ways an open wound yet to heal, its perpetrator yet to be brought to the light of justice. To the memory of the living and the dead: Never forgive, never forget.

Here we go again. (Ike is now a Category 3 storm.)

“In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president.”

— Sen. John McCain

Country First™!

As the first military commission trial at Guantanamo began this past July, after years of simmering intramural feuds and administration stonewalling, I was privileged to speak with one of the attorneys for Abu Zubaydah, allegedly al Qaeda’s “number three” official. I wanted to know how the case was going, who Zubaydah is, and about the military tribunals that the responsible men and women in Washington have set up before the world. The attorney, a gruff-sounding but amicable fellow named George Brent Mickum, spoke with me by telephone.

“The security classification is top secret,” Mickum said. “Anything that I’ve learned through my client I can’t tell you.” Apparently, I had asked about some of the specifics of the case, specifically what Mickum knew about the CIA’s involvement. Late last year, a controversy erupted over an incident in late 2003, when staffers at our Central Intelligence Agency destroyed several incriminating videotaped interrogations of Zubaydah. But if it were really true that our G-men were waterboarding him, it wouldn’t have been the first time Zubaydah knew brute force at the hands of mysterious captors. Much is also mysterious about him. In his testimony before a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) in March 2007, of which I obtained an unclassified transcript, Zubaydah drew a distinction between military and civilian targets and claimed to oppose Bin Laden’s tactics, which he viewed as reactionary.

Abu Zubaydah, an alias for Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn Tariq among 35 others, “was severely injured in 1992 when he was fighting Afghan communists,” Mickum said, “hit with a mortar shell.” This is confirmed by several other sources, including the transcript of the CSRT hearing; in various accounts, he was greviously wounded by gunfire and shelling in Faisalabad, Pakistan. It is also alleged that Zubaydah is mentally ill. It almost approaches the absurd to extract actionable intelligence from a physically and mentally compromised figure such as Zubaydah, but the Kafkaesque nature of Gitmo and the entire extralegal superstructure of the “war on terror” defies empirical minds. “None of this makes any sense,” Mickum said with some exasperation. “The government does what it does and justifies it after the fact.”

A lot of information is already on the public record. Much of the supporting material in Mickum’s petition to get his client the writ of habeas corpus overlaps with mine, including Katherine Eban’s illuminating report in Vanity Fair. In it, Eban describes how, like the subjects in Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments, interrogators thought they had the imprimatur of respected scientific authority on their side.

Eban tells the story of how the CIA took over from the FBI’s successful “rapport-building” and substituted terror and domination for actual intelligence. This was done by using a program called SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) that trains soldiers to withstand torture at the enemy’s hands, and “reverse-engineering” these torture techniques—lifted wholesale from the Communist Chinese—to be used on detainees captured by the US military. Referring to the Chinese torture tactics manual, Mickum explained: “We have adopted it lock, stock and barrel. All we did was translate it into English and change the title.”

Zubaydah was the first Qaeda suspect to be captured and became the test case for an international system of CIA-run “black site” dungeons and the attendant methodology of medieval cruelty masked by 21st-century rhetoric of a “new kind” of war against barbarians plotting against us from caves. “Torture was the modus operandi,” said Mickum. “There were no limits.” Indeed, throughout the copious literature spelling out in macabre detail all of the legalistic wrangling, it is apparent that — scared witness of an impending terror attack — interrogators around the world in the archipelago of CIA detention camps (“black sites”) were intent on getting whoever they could capture to say anything. According to Mickum, “They were desperately afraid that there would be another attack, [and] desperately felt they needed to get intel.” The operative rule was to “extract pieces of information from the lowliest guy and then fill in the picture of who our enemy is.” Geneva protections were obstacles to the approach, therefore ignored.

In Jane Mayer’s much-acclaimed book, “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals” (2008), the reader is treated with the sheer scale of depravity and lawlessness that has characterized every major aspect of this administration’s approach to fighting terrorism. Zubaydah “would set the precedent for the abuse of U.S.-held prisoners, transforming U.S. practices starting with the CIA, but eventually spreading through the U.S. military, too” (p. 140). Abu Zubaydah himself “had left fingerprints all over Al Qaeda operations for years.” According to the 9/11 Commission report and other sources, Zubaydah ran two training camps for his “defensive jihad” and had conflicts with Bin Laden, whose agenda was more fanatical.

What is most noteworthy about all of the escapades is the role of the medical profession, chiefly psychologists, in helping legitimate torture and other coercion — even methods known to produce nothing but bullshit — to extract valuable and actionable intelligence, ostensibly to save lives. As Eban records, “Psychologists, working in secrecy, had actually designed the tactics and trained interrogators in them while on contract to the C.I.A.,” adding that the “central role” belonged to James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Both had been versed in the SERE methods. “We are proud of the work we have done for our country,” Eban quotes them as saying in a joint press release. Eban quotes Steve Kleinman, described as “an Air Force Reserve colonel and [an] expert in human-intelligence operations,” as declaring somberly that Mitchell-Jessen “have caused more harm to American national security than they’ll ever understand.”

In a serious attempt to find out the identity of Zubaydah and his actual role, I spent long hours amassing information and putting together the pieces. The end-result seems to be a study in contradictory claims, but more or less a clear picture emerges. According to a BBC News profile, Abu Zubaydah “had used at least 37 aliases” — another one of which was Abd Al-Hadi Al-Wahab — “and was considered a master of disguise.” His shape-shifting repute is repeated elsewhere. The top source for Zubaydah’s notoriety as a world-class terrorist is Ahmed Ressam, “an Algerian witness,” who alleged that Zubaydah was the “chief recruiter” for al Qa’ida, and that he was behind “a thwarted plot to bomb hotels [in Jordan] during millennium celebrations” (hereafter “the millennium plot”).

An Associated Press dispatch also relied upon Ressam’s testimony, which again alluded to Zubaydah’s role as a recruiter and middle-management operative. We also read of Zubaydah’s “combat skills and organizational talent that pushed him to the top ranks” of Osama bin Laden’s global criminal enterprise. Born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on March 12, 1971, he “developed a unique talent in mortars and other heavy weaponry” and “was apparently named bin Laden’s second deputy in 1995, responsible for screening recruits and devising terrorist plans” on a logistical basis. He was not a policy-maker; he was simply tasked to carry out the wishes of Bin Laden and his second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri. Yet, for some reason, Zubaydah “doesn’t appear on the FBI’s list of top wanted terrorists.” “Jordanian military documents” also allege that Zubaydah “recruited Raed Hijazi,” who was himself “named as a recruiter of suspects in plots to bomb U.S. Embasses in Paris and Sarajevo.”

Also, the AP reported that Zubaydah “is believed to have been a field commander for the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, in which 17 U.S. sailors were killed”; his co-operative was a man named Khader Abu-Hosher, another Palestinian. Along with Jordanian tourist hotels, other targets of the foiled millennium plot were Israeli draws like the “site on the Jordan River where Jesus Christ was believed to have been baptized.” “In September 2000,” Zubaydah “was found guilty of conspiracy to carry out terror attacks in Jordan” and “sentenced in absentia to 15 years of hard labor.”

A lengthy report in Time magazine put forward a rap sheet connecting Zubaydah with someone named Omar al-Faruq, a Kuwaiti who, after “three months of psychological interrogation tactics … finally broke down” and, “according to a secret CIA summary of the interview, al-Faruq confessed that he was, in fact, al-Qaeda’s senior representative in Southeast Asia.” The Time report breathlessly continues, “Then came an even more shocking confession: according to the CIA document, al-Faruq said two senior al-Qaeda officials, Abu Zubaydah and Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, had ordered him to ‘plan large-scale attacks against U.S. interests in Indonesia, Malaysia, (the) Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam and Cambodia.’ … Fearing an attack could come at any moment, al-Faruq’s interrogators relayed his revelations to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center [hereafter “CTC”] in Langley, Va. … Al-Faruq’s threatened attacks never occurred.”

Abu Zubaydah was captured almost by accident, with the crucial aid of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency — for a price. “On the outskirts of Pakistan’s militant tribal area” in a city called Faisalabad, Mayer wrote that ISI “officers had noticed had noticed a caravan carrying several exceptionally tall burka-clad women who turned out to be male Islamic extremists in disguise. … For a bribe, their driver gave away their destination. This enabled the U.S. government to mount a major surveillance operation on their neighborhood. In the NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, translators and analysts among the agency’s 38,000 employees pored over every fragment of electronic information vacuumed by enormously powerful eavesdropping equipment trained on the spot, until they could pinpoint what they believed was a nest of top Al Qaeda suspects” (p. 140).

“In the predawn hours [around 4 AM] of March 28,” Mayer continued, “dozens of armed CIA, FBI, and Pakistani law-enforcement and intelligence officers raided a shambling compound on the suburban outskirts of Faisalabad, taking Zubayda by surprise along with some twenty-five other suspected Al Qaeda followers, including one with a valid Arizona driver’s license. In an attempt to escape, Zubayda leapt from the roof to that of a neighboring house, where a gun battle ensued before he dropped twenty-five feet to the ground. By the time it was over, Zubayda had been shot in the thigh, stomach, and groin. A Pakistani doctor told [novice CIA officer John] Kiriakou that he’d never seen anyone with such egregious injuries survive. In truth, Zubayda had nearly slipped into sepsis in the back of a pickup truck where, unrecognized, he had been piled with several other wounded suspects after the gunfight. An agent with a flashlight identified him just in time to rush him to the hospital for resuscitation” (pp. 140-41).

“Zubayda left behind computers, cell phones, computer disks, phone books, and two Western-style bank cards for accounts in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. He also left behind a voluminous personal diary—in all, there were nearly 10,000 pages of potentially invaluable intelligence. Adding urgency, according to Kiriakou, were the remnants of a bomb that he and two other men had been building on a table, along with plans for what appeared to be an attack on a British school in Lahore. … What put Zubayda in CIA custody was not toughness, it was money. The Pakistani intelligence service bought the original tip leading to his whereabouts with a small bribe to the taxi driver. Afterward, the CIA bought Pakistan’s help for a much larger sum. A CIA source involved at the time disclosed, ‘We paid $10 million for Abu Zubayda.’ [$25 million, according to Mickum] He said the money went to the ISI” (p. 141).

“The FBI took him first to Faisalabad’s Allied Hospital and then to Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, 170 miles to the north,” wrote al Qaeda expert Jason Burke, in the Observer. From there “he was whisked by the CIA to Thailand where he was housed in a small, disused warehouse on an active airbase,” according to ABC News investigators Brian Ross and Richard Esposito.

After a few days of FBI interrogations in which “phenomenal” information was divulged (Mayer, p. 156), CIA-contracted military psychologists John Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen arrived with their SERE program, angered and frightened the FBI agents and completely destroyed any chance of getting at valuable information. Zubaydah was stripped naked, put in a cage, waterboarded repeatedly. “Once healthy,” Ross-Esposito wrote, Zubaydah “was slapped, grabbed, made to stand long hours in a cold cell, and finally handcuffed and strapped feet up to a water board under after 0.31 seconds he begged for mercy and began to cooperate.” His insanity worsened; he remains in prison without charge. On the bright side, he ID’d Jose Padilla, the suspected “dirty bomber,” gangbanger and U.S. citizen (ibid, p. 155).

Burke described Zubaydah as Bin Laden’s “most influential henchman,” “an apparently mild-mannered … bespectacled, slim-shouldered Arab” who “is trained in every weapon from kalashnikovs to heavy mortars to truck bombs” and possessed “a reputation for efficiency and ruthlessness.” In Burke’s account, Zubaydah was indeed a dangerous terrorist, “linked to British Islamists accused of being al-Qaeda operatives” and, from 1996, “was appointed ‘chief of operations’ … [of] the camps where thousands of volunteers flocking to bin Laden’s [jihadi] banner from across the Islamic world were to be trained.” Burke also cited Ressam, the captured Algerian terrorist. The 9/11 Commission report also leans heavily on Ressam’s testimony, perhaps coerced.

“The government has tried to suggest that all Islamic militants are al Qaeda,” Mickum said. “That’s ludicrous. Most of the camps were for defensive jihad, defense of Afghanistan and Kashmir.” In his testimony, Zubaydah concurred: “…if an aggressor or invader invades Muslim lands, no matter where, then it is every Muslim’s duty to defend the land against the invader.” He referred to Russia and Serbia as examples of aggressors against Muslims (Verbatim Transcript of CSRT Hearing for ISN 10016, Oral Statement, p. 9).

The story of Abu Zubaydah, a thirty-something schizoid who acted as a go-to intermediary and middle-man for logistics but not proven to have done operational planning on a terrorist attack, is in reality a story about ourselves and how we have acted around the world in the name of fighting barbarism. “I think we oversold [Zubaydah’s] value — the administration did — to the American public,” commented Ron Suskind, the author of “The One-Percent Doctrine” and “The Way of the World,” his latest. Abu Zubaydah is “psychologically imbalanced, he has multiple personalities. And he was not involved in various events that we thought he was involved in. During various bombings in the late ‘90s, he was not where we thought he would be.”

“Ultimately, we tortured an insane man and ran screaming at every word he uttered,” Suskind said.

The past is prologue. (Gustav nears landfall.)

Mayor Nagin has ordered a total evacuation, saying Gustav is much more powerful than Katrina. If FEMA once again fails, may God protect the people of New Orleans. (Above: the French quarter, courtesy Matthew Hinton/Agence France-Presse)

A moment of silence.

(Above, the Lower Ninth ward in 2008; courtesy In the Loop)

Sure to be buried underneath the ensuing avalanche of post-Speech commentary from the chattering heads of CNN and other outlets will be a tempered but iconic note of support from a seemingly unlikely source: GOP defector Susan Eisenhower. Here’s what her grandfather, a Republican president who presided over eight years of peace and prosperity, said 47 years ago, about the time Obama was born:

“A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

“Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Why can’t Obama say this? Was Eisenhower really a man of the so-called radical left, as our political culture would have it today?

“John was a wild man. He was funny, with a quick wit and he was intelligent. But he was intent on breaking every USNA regulation in our 4 inch thick USNA Regulations book. And I believe he must have come as close to his goal as any midshipman who ever attended the Academy. John had me ‘coming around’ to his room frequently during my plebe year. And on one occasion he took me with him to escape ‘over the wall’ in the dead of night. He had a taxi cab waiting for us that took us to a bar some 7 miles away. John had a few beers, but forbid me to drink (watching out for me I guess) and made me drink cokes. I could tell many other midshipman stories about John that year and he unbelievably managed to graduate though he spent the majority of his first class year on restriction for the stuff he did get caught doing. In fact he barely managed to graduate, standing 5th from the bottom of his 800 man graduating class.

“… I can verify that John has an infamous reputation for being a hot head. He has a quick and explosive temper that many have experienced first hand. Folks, quite honestly that is not the finger I want next to that red button. … He is not a moderate Republican. On some issues he is a maverick. But his voting record is far to the right. I fear for his nominations to our Supreme Court, and the consequent continuing loss of individual freedoms, especially regarding moral and religious issues. John is not a religious person, but he has taken every opportunity to ally himself with some really obnoxious and crazy fundamentalist ministers lately. I was also disappointed to see him cozy up to Bush because I know he hates that man.”

—Phillip Butler on John McCain, a fellow classman at the U.S. Naval Academy and a fellow P.O.W., explaining why he will not vote for him this November

End this war.

Search your feelings.