Eliyho Matz on Fathers and Sons in Israeli-American Relations

Two Fathers, Two Sons and Two Presidents
By Eliyho Matz

[This article is dedicated to the memory of Michael Bergson Fichman Matz, godson of Peter H. Bergson.]

“Only trees have roots.”
George Steiner

The current May 2011 American/Israeli political crisis has been building up for the past 63 years, and maybe a few years longer if we consider FDR, the WWII President, as a component in this political-diplomatic entanglement and equation. In his May 20, 2011, speech at the State Department in Washington, President Barack Obama, tried politely to tell the people of Middle East region that the current changes in the region are recognized by America, at the same time mentioning to the Israeli nation that it will have to make some changes, too, that is, to move back to the pre-1967 borders, as part of a general political arrangement with the Palestinians.

The immediate response of the Israeli nation, led by its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been one of dismay. For we see that the Israeli nation of 2011, with its Prime Minister, are tragically trying to redefine the Israeli Zionist Jewish story by asking the Palestinians to recognize the Israeli nation as the national home of the Jewish people, as well as one that is Jewish and democratic. This new self-definition put forth by the Israeli Prime Minister makes no political sense, because, first, Israel has no constitution, and second, has never been the nation of all Jews. (Where are most of the Jews today? – definitely not in Israel.) What Israel is, is definitely the nation of the Israelis, and it should remain so and define itself as such. All Biblical and Talmudic arguments about the ancient Israelites, Hebrews, (etc.) are nonsensical in relation to the political reality of the nation today. The current Israeli population is represented by a mishmash of groups, and those who are Jewish became Jews during the last 2000 years. Even if there are some few Jews who claim an ancestry dating back to the Davidic Biblical period,* one has to be careful not to fall into this argument of Jewish ancestral antiquity when justifying the existence of the modern Israeli nation.

The Israeli nation established in 1948 as result of Political Zionism claimed sovereignty as an Israeli nation, and that was how the world (UN) saw it. Thus the decree that ended the British Mandate and the path of non-Jewish sovereignty signified the of the path of Political Zionism and started a new phase in the history of the Israeli nation and world Jewry. MAAZEL TOV!

The people who had led the Israelis to become a new sovereign nation were a) the chalutzim, or pioneers, who settled in Turkish-British Palestine; and b) the Palestinian and Stateless political activists in the United States during WWII. The story of the chalutzim is represented by Ben Gurion. The story of the political Palestinian and Stateless Jews in the US is represented by the Bergson Boys, also known as the Bergson Group. The Bergson Group included a core of the Irgun Tzvai Leumi (an illegal Palestinian underground terrorist organization active during the British Mandate), among whom was Yitshaq Ben-Ami (as mentioned above, the father of J-Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami). From 1940-1948, this group worked tirelessly to try to save the remnant of European Jewry, and to prepare the groundwork for an Israeli (Hebrew) republic. Without their work the United States, it is my firm belief that the Israeli nation would not have come about; it was their intense lobbying and organizational skills that prepared the groundwork for a new Israeli state.

The main group of Ben Gurion Zionists, as well as Benzion Netanyahu, one of the leaders of the New Zionist organization in the US (a Jabotinsky Zionist faction) and the father of the current Israeli Prime Minister, did not in fact seriously try to save Jews, but rather they were preoccupied with arguments over the future meaning of Zionism. Ben Gurion, who was the person who ultimately proclaimed the Declaration of Israeli Independence, did not really understand the inner meaning of that Declaration, which becomes obvious when one reads its text. Its irreconcilable contradictions remain unresolved till today. Of course the Israeli document represented an attempt to copy the American Declaration of Independence, but its authors lacked the depth of the Americans’ intellect and serious intent.

Mr. Benzion Natanyahu, who was among the leaders of America’s New Zionists, failed to do almost anything during the Holocaust to save Jews. Rather, he spent his precious time [researching and] writing the history of Abravanel.** Benzion Netanyahu also spent quite a bit of time criticizing the political work and the rescue attempts by the Bergson Group and actually published quite a few articles criticizing them.***

Thus we have sort of an interesting story here: the Bergson Boys, who agitated against the FDR administration and tried by political action to save European Jews, were attacked by every American Jewish organization (the FBI files on the Bergson Group during the years of WWII are filled with intriguing information given by informants of all the American Jewish organizations).

It was only because of the Group’s leadership, especially that of Peter Bergson but including others of the group, among them Yitshaq Ben Ami, that FDR eventually succumbed to the political pressure the Group exacted and created the War Refugee Board in 1944, whose purported intention was solely to save Jews, despite the fact that Jews were not mentioned in the Board’s name (another political trick of FDR). But the Bergson Group also had to bow to necessity: so that the American Jewish organizations would relinquish some of their pressure against them, Yitshak Ben-Ami was compelled to join the US military as a Bergson “kapurah yingel” (sacrifice). Ben Ami did so, survived the War, and following his discharge until 1948 dealt with some very important issues that helped secure the creation of the Israeli nation.

The success the Bergson Group had in America is a complex story, one that most American Jews know hardly anything about, and most American Jewish organizations would like to forget. But it is important to retell that it was the Bergson Group who convinced the American people that the struggle of the Palestinian Jews was like the American experience of independence. Their claim “It’s 1776 in Palestine” became their slogan, and it worked. Netanyahu senior missed the opportunity and never understood the meaning of the new Israeli sovereign nation (even though he came from the United States and settled in Jerusalem), always maintaining the belief that Israel should be the “Promised Land” for all Jews, not the UN recognized Israeli sovereign state.

So we have the stories of the fathers, Netanyahu and Ben-Ami. Now, what about the children? Working as a researcher and advisor to his father while he wrote his book, I met Jeremy when he was just in high school, and, if I remember, young Jeremy Ben-Ami was interested in politics since childhood and thus ended up in juxtaposition to where his father was. Jeremy is concerned with Jews, American Jewish behavior, and the future of the Israeli nation. But he lacks the spark of political understanding that his father had relating to what sort of a future the Middle East region has. In many ways, his J-Street organization reflects a total misunderstanding and the confusion characteristic of many American Jews, because it does not perceive the depth of the Palestinian Israeli conflict. It is the same with Benjamin Netanyahu. I guess he never stopped listening to his father’s nonsense about the “Jewish nation,” and he forgets that he only represents the Israeli sovereign nation, that has no constitution and no political direction other than for messianic dreams.

Finally, we move to the two Presidents. President Obama inherited the good qualities of FDR and maybe as great a crisis as FDR, and he is trying to solve some of America’s problems despite the Republican intransigence. Moreover, let us face reality here: Obama knows as well as FDR did the importance of the Middle East and its Saudi oil. Of course, Saudi oil is and has always been the secret agenda that no one openly discusses. It should be remembered that Harry Truman, who also understood the reality of the Middle East complexity including the importance of Saudi oil, hesitated before finally recognizing the new Israeli nation. So to help solve the Middle East problems today Obama will be assigning the Israelis a job: to get out of the Palestinian-conquered areas and return to the pre-1967 borders. It is a responsible American request.

However, that in itself will not solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. What will help to bring us closer to a solution is Peter Bergson’s political idea that the Middle East must consider uniting as a Middle Eastern Block, a political and economic block that will benefit the region and will produce more of a working solution to the region. Israel with its technological know-how, America with its political and military might, Saudi Arabia with its money, Turkey with its experienced democratic system (not perfect, but functional), can all help. That is what our President, Mr. Obama, should work on to achieve, and thus this new Middle Eastern political block will reflect a real new era in the Middle East.

Post-script: My father, who is a descendant of Khazars, comes from the town of Ostra (Ostrug) established more than one thousand years ago by Khazars who later converted to Judaism. Today this town is geographically located in the Western Ukraine. He escaped from Ostra, where most of his family was massacred by the Nazis. Eventually in 1943 he joined the Russian military might and ended his war service as a decorated soldier in Berlin only after its surrender. He then went to the Russian Far East and picked up my mother, and eventually he helped to organize the Exodus 1947 journey to Palestine.

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* For example, Yitshaq Ben-Ami in his book Years of Wrath, Days of Glory: Memoirs for the Irgun (New York: Robert Speller & Sons, 1982). Yitshaq was the father of Jeremy Ben-Ami, a founder of J-Street, the Jewish lobby group that advocates the return of Israel to its pre-1967 borders.

** B. Netanyahu: Don Isaac Abravanel: Statesman and Philosopher (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1968).

*** For example, see “The Fiasco of the Hebrew Committee” by B. Netanyahu [Zionews, July 1944]

Washington Post Outs the Arts Club of Washington

In this article by David Montgomery:

For reasons that defy logic, economics and social fashion, the little red brick house and its denizens endure here, on one of Washington’s least lovely downtown office blocks, like a bloom in a crack of the concrete canyon where I Street merges with Pennsylvania Avenue NW.

The green wood door is topped with an antique fan of leaded glass and adorned with a brass knocker worn smooth from use. Knock, and be admitted.

A throng of maybe 100 is sipping wine and nibbling chicken liver pate and skewered sea scallops. Most are dressed in black tie or evening gowns. Some of the dinner jackets are adorned with medals, indicating that the wearer is a military man. Many are spiced with colorful vests or adventurous cummerbunds, suggesting a free spirit. One of the freest spirits is art professor Edward “Eddie” Purcell III, who has cast aside all thought of a tux in favor of a full-length red silk 1950s vintage Chinese smoking robe.

Almost anything goes at the Arts Club of Washington, whose clubhouse is the quarters where James Monroe lived for a few months as president, in 1817, while the White House was being rebuilt following the British barbecue of 1814.

“The thing about the Arts Club, either you get it or you don’t,” says Robert Sacheli, club program chairman. “We have a lot of eccentric people here. We’re very proud of that. We encourage eccentricity.”

The bohemian side of the Social Register started calling this house home in 1916. Some of the same upper-crusty social folkways continue to be pursued, along with an artistic mission that seems equal parts anachronistic and vital. At a time when arts funding is being cut everywhere else, and private galleries are closing or moving to other parts of town, the Arts Club’s nearly $1 million annual budget is stable. The money goes to arts-related programming, historic preservation and club activities. The club hosts monthly openings for four artists in its four exhibit spaces, presents weekly free music concerts and sponsors scholarships and literary prizes. The public is welcome six days a week.

It must be the only club in this still-clubby town that is for members only — and for everybody else. This paradox is the beginning of a long list of reasons why the Arts Club makes no sense — and therefore why it survives. It is at once whimsically un-Washington and profoundly old Washington.

What Netanyahu Should Tell US Congress

A friend of mine, a professional negotiator, suggested this approach for a Netanyahu "miracle" speech in Washington:

The Israeli Prime Minister should announce the he is willing to negotiate with the Palestinian Prime Minister for an independent Palestinian state, at once, without any preconditions for either side. Everything would be on the table--for the Israelis as well as the Palestinians. He would be willing to stay on in Washington, to go to Camp David, to move talks to Jerusalem, wherever Abbas wants. He would stay as long as it took to reach an agreement--just as at Camp David. President Obama could mediate, or not, as he saw fit.

Can we make peace? "Yes, we can!"

If the Palestinians responded to the offer with intransigence, that would be their decision, not Israel's.

In my opinion, Israel could then unilaterally declare borders prior to the September 1st recognition of the state of Palestine by the UN.

If there were to be a border war after that--well, even the US fought a border clash with Britain in 1812...it would not pose an existential struggle for either side.

Eliyho Matz on the Future of Israeli-Eskimo Co-Operation

A Warm Israeli Nation Welcomes Cool Eskimo People
Special News Release
by Feature Contributor Eliyho Matz


The first wave of converted Jewish Zionist Inupiaq (pronounced In-you-pack) Eskimos have immigrated to Israel. They were converted to Judaism by native Alaskan Reform rabbi Kerach ben Mayim. The Jewish Agency assisted in their transfer, supplying high-cooled jet airplanes that were developed by Israeli/American new age technologies. The Israeli government named the operation “Igloo Wings” recalling previous such missions carried out at the birth of the Israeli state, when Yemenite Jews were brought from Yemen on operation “Magic Carpet,” Moroccan Jews on operation “Flying Atlas,” and Iraqi Jews on operation “Baghdadi Nights.” The Reform Jewish Inupiaq Eskimo congregation, “Mogen Dovid North Star White Ice Cubes,” which is located in the Arctic Circle, was established in 2005. The congregation has in its vicinity a natural hot water hole that is shared with the polar bears and is used alternatively as a mikveh (ritual bath).

This wave of conversion started a number of years ago after an Israeli couple, tarmilaim travelers, visiting the Arctic area were attacked by a polar bear in a tragedy that resulted in the death of the husband, Avi. Avi was buried in a large ice cube at the Arctic Circle. Eventually his wife, Sarit, married a local Inupiaq who converted to Judaism. Mr. Sly Seal started studying Jewish ethics and religious studies via the internet using his Apple ipod, and he has been developing a wide range of contacts via Twitter and Facebook. According to Sly, the Jewish network Sh’makolenu has been helpful, too. Sarit has been developing her own innovative network called e-yenta.com.

Intrigued by Mr. Seal’s enthusiastic conversion, other Inupiaq couples joined in the Eskimo Judaization process, and that is how the congregation developed. As a result of intense lobbying by an Israeli shaliach (representative) sent from Jerusalem by the Jewish Agency, a number of converted residents of the Inupiaq community responded to the strong Zionist appeal and decided to move to Israel and make Aliyah.

However, some technical details had been overlooked. One of the main issues for the Israeli government was how to handle the conversion process of the Eskimos. The leader of the Jewish Agency, Mr. Nathan S., who himself had spent a number of years in the Siberian permafrost region, promised a swift resolution. He consulted with the great Rabbi Bear of Alaska, as well as Chief Rabbi White Tiger of Siberia. Because of their type of ethnicity and the lifestyle involved, the Israeli government agreed to adjust its absorption policies and practices to accommodate the Eskimos.

These Jewish Eskimos who arrived on the first wave were housed in a large abandoned ice factory. The inner space of the ice factory was altered to accommodate six igloos and a synagogue made entirely of ice, maintaining an icy cool atmosphere year round. A debate which emerged among the Jewish Agency chiefs concerning whether to use this place as a tourist attraction or leave it just as an absorption center did not result in any immediate conclusions. Other cultural issues that were raised as a result of this Arctic/Zionist transaction have yet to be resolved. The settlement of these new Jewish Zionists amidst the ongoing Middle East regional hostilities has led to additional verbal criticisms of the new Israeli/Eskimo policy. But meanwhile, a consensus has been reached by the Eskimo/Zionist leaders in their belief that their arrival in Israel would help toward the cooling of militancy in the region, as well as in the temperament of its inhabitants. The Israeli Navy Seals immediately jumped into the fray and, appreciating the special skills of these newcomers, have taken on a mission to adopt and train them. The Seals will begin teaching the Eskimos how to fish and dive in the deep cool waters of the Mediterranean Sea, as well as in the warm waters of the Red Sea. (Plans are also in the works to introduce them to the shallow salty waters of the Dead Sea.) The Navy Seals, as well as other elite Israeli forces, will provide first-hand training to the new Jewish Zionist Eskimos in order for them to grasp the new challenges of their life in the Middle East. In return, the Seals also expect to benefit from their unique lifestyle experiences, including seal hunting in the Arctic, as well as other cold weather activities.

A few cultural problems that popped up with the arrival of the Eskimos still will have to be resolved. For example, Israeli ice cream is called Eskimo, and ices are called Artik. The Jewish Eskimos are working out some sort of deal with the Israeli government which, in a special session of the Knesset honoring the Eskimos, passed a decree (the constitutional process would have taken too long) that from now on both these items, Eskimo and Artik, would have to be renamed in order not to insult the Zionist Jewish Eskimos. This issue aside, these new immigrants were warmly welcomed by all Israeli citizens, including by the Chassids who loaned them their beaver hats for Shabbos services. Other Israeli Zionists have contributed Israeli clothing and other schmatas imported from China to help enable this new group of Jewish Zionist settlers to adapt quickly to this dynamic society and region.

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All rights reserved, including movie rights, by the Frozen News Agency, eliyho_matz@yahoo.com.

Robert Spencer on Nakba Attacks Against Israel

From FrontPage.com:

“The leaders of these violent demonstrations,” explained Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, “their struggle is not over the 1967 borders but over the very existence of Israel, which they describe as a catastrophe that must be resolved. It is important that we look with open eyes at the reality and be aware of whom we are dealing with and what we are dealing with.”

Indeed. And what they are dealing with is precisely what has been obscured, ignored, and denied, by Western governments and the mainstream media, for decades now. The Obama administration is just the latest U.S. administration to assume that Israel’s enemies can be negotiated with and placated with some agreement. The fact that every such compromise has failed never shakes this core belief, or leads policy analysts to realize that Israel is dealing with an unappeasable jihadist enemy.

No state has ever successfully reached a negotiated settlement with a jihadist enemy who avows a religious obligation to destroy it. So why is Israel constantly expected to be the first? Barack Obama and virtually everyone else in power in America and Europe assume that the violent demonstrators who breached Israel’s borders on Sunday will ultimately be pacified once a Palestinian state is set up. Yet as Hamas is now merging with the “moderates” of Fatah with whom Obama and others have been dealing, it is useful to recall that the Hamas Charter of August 1988 declares that “nothing is loftier or deeper in nationalism than waging Jihad against the enemy and confronting him when he sets foot on the land of the Muslims.” When will this Jihad end? The Hamas Charter quotes Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood: “Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors.”

R. Tripp Evans on Grant Wood

From the Marfield Prize National Award for Arts Writing lecture about his new biography of the American artist, at the Arts Club of Washington:

The National Award for Arts Writing, the Marfield Prize, is given annually by the Arts Club of Washington to recognize excellence in writing about the arts for a broad audience. A monetary prize ($10,000 for the current year) is given to the author of a book published in the previous year about visual, performing, media, or literary arts. Intended to help increase access to the arts, the Award celebrates prose that is lucid, luminous, clear, and inspiring, and creates a strong connection with arts and artists.

It is awarded to one book published in America during the previous year, and judged by distinguished writers of fiction and poetry. It is one of the country’s largest literary prizes given to a single author and is the only one of its kind in the country.

Inaugurated in 2006, the $10,000 prize is paid through an endowment established by long-time Arts Club member Jeannie S. Marfield in honor of Florence Berryman and Helen Wharton.

2010 Winner

R. Tripp Evans, Grant Wood: A Life (Alfred A. Knopf)

The Arts Club of Washington has named R. Tripp Evans the recipient of the fifth annual National Award for Arts Writing for his biography Grant Wood: A Life. (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).

Mr. Evans is a professor of art history at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. Grant Wood: A Life examines the ways in which collective national identity emerges from the unstable ground of myth. In this case, the myth is that of a presumably all-American, homespun artist whose life and art, most famously the painting “American Gothic”, have become stubborn icons for traditional small-town American values. Evans explores the contradiction between Wood’s folksy public image as “America’s Painter” and the realities of his European training, sophisticated use of art-historical sources, complex family relationships and closeted homosexuality.

Finalists
Yunte Huang, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History (W. W. Norton & Company)

Jamie MacVicar, The Advance Man (Bear Manor Media)

Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot GRRRL Revolution (Harper Perennial)

Judges
Michael Martone, professor of English and director, Creative Writing Program, University of Alabama; E. Ethelbert Miller, poet; Katherine Neville, novelist

Submitting Books for Consideration
To be eligible for the next award cycle, books must be written in English and originally published in the United States in 2011. Only non-fiction books by single, living authors will be considered. Anthologies, works of poetry and fiction, and books for children are not eligible. Manuscripts, monographs, and self-published books are also outside the scope of this award. Books may be memoirs, criticism, biographies, or histories, on the subject of any artistic discipline: visual (including painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, crafts, architecture), performing (including theater, music, and dance), literary (including poetry, fiction, storytelling, and playwriting), and media (including film and video, computer-generated arts, and new forms).

Publishers, agents, or authors may submit books for consideration. There is no fee to enter. Three copies of a book, plus the required entry form, should be submitted between July 1 and our deadline of October 1, 2011. Galleys are acceptable for books scheduled to be published in the final two months of the year. Please do not include promotional materials. All submitted material becomes the property of the Arts Club and will not be returned. Entry forms will be available for download here later this spring.

You can buy the book from Amazon.com here:

Bin Laden Photos -- The FOIA Process Begins

Bin Laden Photos -- The FOIA Process Begins

Bin Laden Photo Update: 5/11/11

Bin Laden Photo Update: 5/11/11 -- from FOIABlog.

Happy Israeli Independence Day!

Tom Tomorrow on Bush Torture & Bin Laden

I don't usually read Daily Kos, but this Tom Tomorrow comic made me smile: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/09/973635/-The-True-Story.

Greg Sheridan on bin Laden's Death & Aftermath

From Rupert Murdoch's The Australian, an interesting analysis, which I hope might reach readers of his Wall Street Journal. An excerpt:

A political miscalculation is easier to believe than the most miraculously perfect and clean special operations episode in the history of modern warfare.

Another interpretation has it that the Americans did tell the Pakistanis about the operation just after it began. It was too late then for them to tip off bin Laden, but it meant they could pull back their own soldiers and air force and prevent them reacting. That is also plausible.

There are a lot of other theories swirling around.

Indonesian terrorist Umar Patek, the Jemaah Islamiah commander who was integral to the Bali bombing which killed 202 people, including 88 Australians, was arrested in Pakistan a few months ago. He had been in Abbottabad. It is known he was in Pakistan to make contact with al-Qa'ida, which has helped JI in the past. According to some sources, Patek visited bin Laden at the compound in Abbottabad.

If so, it was Patek who led the Americans to bin Laden. But if Patek did visit bin Laden, how then is it that the world's most wanted terrorists didn't change his residence as soon as the Indonesian was arrested in January?

Did the ISI assure bin Laden of his safety and then betray him? Or was bin Laden in effect a prisoner in Abbottabad?

This is all very speculative. It is difficult to have confidence in any of the speculation, but nor is it easier to have faith in the detail of the official explanation, which has changed quite a lot in the various iterations.

If the Pakistanis did play a role in actively giving bin Laden to the Americans, it would make up for a lot of the grief they have caused Washington in recent years. It also makes it much easier for Barack Obama to pull the US out of Afghanistan sooner rather than later. And it occurs against a framework of US Defence Secretary Robert Gates leaving his job and General David Patraeus, the American commander in Afghanistan, being switched to head the Central Intelligence Agency.

Gates's replacement is Leon Panetta, the CIA director. The US intelligence community, as opposed to the military, has long been pessimistic about Afghanistan and inclined to leave there as soon as decently possible.

A Pakistani gift of bin Laden would assist this development and pay dividends for everybody, including the Pakistanis, who now believe the American involvement in Afghanistan is radicalising their society as well as limiting their strategic options in Afghanistan.

Invitation to an Art Exhibition in Memory of Polly Evans, May 26th, Washington, DC

At the Louise-Lisner-Dickson-Hurt Home. Open to the Public. Invitation here: http://www.lldhhome.org/artshow1.html

Keith Koffler on the Banned bin Laden Photo

From White House Dossier:

I believe the Obama White House thinks the planet beyond Western Europe has our kind of rational, compassionate mindset. But the world has a very different mindset. If we took Bin Laden’s mangled corpse and strung it up on a flagpole at Ground Zero, half the population overseas would think this a perfectly reasonable approach.

But we can’t even release a photo.

In what way is the picture of the Terrorist King with his cerebellum dribbling out the side of his head going to inspire future Jihadists? Sure, there will be some angry ululating, but after that dies down, the message is clear: this is what the United States does to bad guys. Don’t be one.

It’s not spiking the football. How silly. It’s a lesson and a warning. Our enemies and their potential recruits understand that Bin Laden played a risky game, and lost. The photos would not shock them. Why shouldn’t America blow half his head off? That’s what they’d do to us.

Bin Laden is not a particularly sympathetic figure in the Arab world anymore. The photo would give sustenance to those seeking a better Arab world, a graphic message that the past is dead.

And then their are the conspiracies. The Arab street, and many other streets, think the sunrise is a conspiracy. We have left an indelible question mark in the minds of some around the world about whether we really got Bin Laden. The conflicting accounts we offered about the operation only accentuate the sense of a fictional story poorly told.

Gosh, some reasonable Americans took years to believe Elvis was dead. Jim Morrison of the Doors is still held by some to be in some shack in the south of France prying escargots out of their shells and laying down new rock music tracks.

Without the photo, Osama lives on. What better way to recruit the next generation of terrorists, gullible types who can be convinced that harems of willing virgins await their murderous self-immolation?

And what about us Americans. Don’t we have the right to see this? Don’t we have the right to see our worst enemy crushed by our brave protectors? Why, Mr. President, do you and some of the others in the elite ruling class grant yourselves permission to gain closure, while denying it to the rest of us?

Charles Crawford on the Death of Osama bin Laden

From CharlesCrawford.biz:

Most of the moral and legal burbling on whether it was right for the US special forces to shoot Bin Laden ("extrajudicial execution/killing" seems to be one the favourite phrases used) utterly misses the point.

Which is that the whole operation depended on brave beyond belief soldiers walking into a potential death-trap and hoping that Bin Laden was not only evil but also lazy and/or stupid.

Thus it must have been quite plausible that the whole shabby 'mansion' where Bin Laden lurked had been wired to explode in case of ultimate need, killing its inhabitants and their attackers alike.

Why did this not happen? Maybe Bin Laden was too cowardly to contemplate it, or too cocksure that his 'hiding in plain sight' plan was impenetrable?

Or maybe he wanted to do it but never got round to it, as getting sufficient TNT into the complex might have aroused suspicion?

Or maybe there were booby-traps in place but such was the skill of the SEALs that the AQ people got no chance to trigger them?

One way or the other, imagine the thoughts flashing through the minds of the yound US soldiers as they worked there way up through the dark chaotic building, driving forward to complete the mission from sheer discipline and courage, yet wondering whether when they threw open one final room the whole place would be vapourised - with them going too.

That final door is flung open. My God - there he is. Smirking in the corner with some woman. Maybe he has booby-trapped the room or has had time to put on a suicide belt.

This is no time for polite negotiation or reading Bin Laden his rights.

Bang. Bang.

End it. And hope to get out alive.

As it happens, we have one spectacular historical example of this explosive suicide involving massed Muslims, this time as the attacking troops.

It came 202 years ago to the month, on May 31 1809 on Čegar Hill, not far from Niš in central Serbia. Turkish forces closed in on Serbian 'insurgents' led by Stevan Sindjelic. Rather than surrender Sindjelic blew up his own gunpowder depot, obliterating himself and his own troops plus a goodly number of Turks.

To mark their costly victory and to warn off local Serbs from trying any more insurrections, the Turks built a tower of Serbian skulls in Niš and sent back Serbian scalps stuffed with cotton as tribute to the Sultan. Nice.

Parts of the tower are still there: The Tower of Skulls. I had a jolly dinner in Belgrade recently with one of Sindjelic's proud descendants.

So, Washington. Stop faffing about with these wimpy photographs and furtive so-called burials at sea.

Show your true respect for the finest Islamic warrior traditions. Get out a hack saw and the bricks and mortar - and start building.

President Obama's Remarks in NYC

Well, listen, the main reason I came here is because I heard the food is pretty good.

But to the Commissioner, to Mayor Giuliani -- who obviously performed heroic acts almost 10 years ago -- but most of all, to all of you, I wanted to just come up here to thank you.

This is a symbolic site of the extraordinary sacrifice that was made on that terrible day almost 10 years ago.  Obviously we can't bring back your friends that were lost, and I know that each and every one of you not only grieve for them, but have also over the last 10 years dealt with their family, their children, trying to give them comfort, trying to give them support.

What happened on Sunday, because of the courage of our military and the outstanding work of our intelligence, sent a message around the world, but also sent a message here back home that when we say we will never forget, we mean what we say; that our commitment to making sure that justice is done is something that transcended politics, transcended party; it didn’t matter which administration was in, it didn’t matter who was in charge, we were going to make sure that the perpetrators of that horrible act -- that they received justice.

So it’s some comfort, I hope, to all of you to know that when those guys took those extraordinary risks going into Pakistan, that they were doing it in part because of the sacrifices that were made in the States.  They were doing it in the name of your brothers that were lost.

And finally, let me just say that, although 9/11 obviously was a high water mark of courage for the New York Fire Department and a symbol of the sacrifice, you guys are making sacrifices every single day.  It doesn’t get as much notoriety, it doesn’t get as much attention, but every time you run into a burning building, every time that you are saving lives, you're making a difference.  And that's part of what makes this city great and that's part of what makes this country great.

So I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart and on behalf of the American people for the sacrifices that you make every single day.  And I just want to let you know that you're always going to have a President and an administration who’s got your back the way you’ve got the backs of the people of New York over these last many years.

So God bless you.  God bless the United States of America.

And with that, I'm going to try some of that food.  All right?  Appreciate you.  Thank you.

!Feliz Cinco de Mayo!

Steve Clemons on the bin Laden Photo Ban

Many American intelligence officials began to think some years ago that he was dead already. A senior FBI agent once asked me, "you don't really believe he is still alive do you?"

If that is what high level Americans in the terror-tracking business thought, what does President Obama think that those through the Arab world will think.

Not releasing a photo of some sort furthers a bad trend of governments -- that the public doesn't have a right to know, that governments are better stewards of the truth and of basic information than the public. It is undemocratic and stiflingly paternalistic.

Wikileaks was a market reaction to the massive expansion of official secrecy not just in the US but elsewhere in the world.

President Obama's decision to hold back the bin Laden photo/s only aggravates this trend.

MosFilm Classics Go Online

On this MosFilm YouTube channel... (ht Robin Shapiro)

BTW, you can read the article I wrote about my tour of MosFilm, for this blog in 2005, here.

Four Questions Following the Death of Osama bin Laden

1. Who shot Osama bin Laden?

2. Why did Americans like Judy Woodruff, Diane Sawyer, and Leon Panetta wear black on television, following his death? (Panetta even wore a black tie on PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer).

3. How could bin Laden have been living in Abbottabad, Pakistan for six years without CIA knowledge or permission?

4. Why is the US government acting afraid, instead of victorious?

Fouad Ajami on the Death of Osama bin Laden

From his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Osama Bin Laden, Weak Horse:

When our remarkable soldiers gave him a choice, Osama bin Laden gave them a fight. Fittingly, he was not in a cave. He had grown up in the urban world of Jeddah, and he was struck down in a perfectly urban setting, a stone's throw from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, in odd proximity to a military academy, in a visible and large compound. He had outlived his time and use, and doubtless Pakistani intelligence was now willing to cast him adrift.

Thoughts on the Death of Osama bin Laden

1. President Obama deserves credit.

Without question, President Obama did the right thing. Two Presidents before Obama flinched when it came to Osama bin Laden. President Bill Clinton let him escape in the 1990s, while President George W. Bush let him escape in the 21st Century. It may have taken two years, but President Obama succeeded where the others failed. One may nitpick, or ask "What took so long?" Others may have found the Presidential announcement off-key.

However, any concerns about the circumstances should not take anything away from the fact that, for whatever reason, for whatever motive, President Obama succeeded where others before him had failed.

2. It is a real blow to Al Qaeda.

Those who maintain that this doesn't matter, or that bin Laden was not that important, don't understand the dynamics of revolutionary political movements. As bin Laden himself said, people bet on the strong horse against the weaker horse. Simply by staying alive for a decade with a price on his head, bin Laden defied the might and power and indeed legitimacy of the United States. Like Che Guevara, he came to symbolize anti-Americanism. He and his allies had blown up the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, downtown London, and sponsored attacks all over the world: Madrid, Bali, Algeria, Tunisia, Iraq, Israel, Russia, China, Turkey--thumbing his nose at everyone. This chutzpah alone gave Al Qaeda a following. With the killing of the Al Qaeda leader, America has finally shown the world that bin Laden didn't get away with it.

3. It is a tonic for the United States.

It makes concrete President Obama's campaign slogan, "Yes, we can!"

For almost decade, Americans have lived in fear: afraid to name the enemy's ideology; afraid to put terrorists on trial; afraid to fly; afraid to go into government buildings; afraid to close down Guantanamo, afraid even to think. The fear became contagious, creating a morale-sapping decade in which American commerce and industry--once the envy of the world--became a basket case. Likewise, government agencies ceased to function properly as scandals swirled from Hurricane Katrina, to the failure to prosecute Wall Street executives for fraud after the largest financial collapse in US history, to cheating scandals on standardized tests, to the failure to try and execute Major Nidal Hasan immediately after the Ft. Hood massacre--an open-and-shut case, if there ever was one.

Yes, the climate of fear resulted from a failure of leadership, institutionalized cowardice among political parties, business, and the citizenry. Now, the killing of bin Laden ought to permit American fear to be replaced by American confidence--and the rebuilding of shattered American institutions in the public, private, and non-profit sectors.

4. It is not a partisan issue.

This should go without saying. Bin Laden didn't attack Democrats or Republicans, he didn't attack Bush or Clinton--he attacked America. Likewise, all Americans were victims of the 9/11 attacks--not only families of those killed at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon or Flight 93. They suffered most directly, but the target was all of us.

5. It took much too long.

If this had happened in 2002, America could have celebrated. As it didn't, America can only be relieved. While cliches such as "better late than never" or Churchill's line that "Americans always do the right thing, after they have exhausted every alternative option" might seem apropos, they are not good enough.

With bin Laden finally dead, America must not flinch from rigorous self-examination, and an honest accounting for the mistakes of the past decade, in order to answer the question Bernard Lewis posed in another context: What Went Wrong?

To learn from our mistakes, first we must admit them.

Chistopher Hitchens on the Death of Osama bin Laden

Glad that Hitch has lived to see it. From Slate:

If you tell me that you are staying in a rather nice walled compound in Abbottabad, I can tell you in return that you are the honored guest of a military establishment that annually consumes several billion dollars of American aid. It's the sheer blatancy of it that catches the breath.

There's perhaps some slight satisfaction to be gained from this smoking-gun proof of official Pakistani complicity with al-Qaida, but in general it only underlines the sense of anticlimax. After all, who did not know that the United States was lavishly feeding the same hands that fed Bin Laden? There's some minor triumph, also, in the confirmation that our old enemy was not a heroic guerrilla fighter but the pampered client of a corrupt and vicious oligarchy that runs a failed and rogue state.

Elsewhere in Slate, Daniel Byman analyzes the future of al-Qaida after Osama bin Laden, John Dickerson discusses the president's proactive role in the assassination, and William Saletan uncovers some holes in the raid narrative. Also, David Weigel describes the scene outside the White House following Obama's announcement, Anne Applebaum applauds America's use of human intelligence over expensive technologies, and Brian Palmer examines Bin Laden's burial at sea. For the most up-to-date-coverage, visit The Slatest. Slate's complete coverage is rounded up here.

But, again, we were aware of all this already. At least we won't have to put up with a smirking video when the 10th anniversary of his best-known atrocity comes around. Come to think of it, though, he hadn't issued any major communiqués on any subject lately (making me wonder, some time ago, if he hadn't actually died or been accidentally killed already), and the really hateful work of his group and his ideology was being carried out by a successor generation like his incomparably more ruthless clone in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. I find myself hoping that, like Zarqawi, Bin Laden had a few moments at the end to realize who it was who had found him and to wonder who the traitor had been. That would be something. Not much, but something.

In what people irritatingly call "iconic" terms, Bin Laden certainly had no rival. The strange, scrofulous quasi-nobility and bogus spirituality of his appearance was appallingly telegenic, and it will be highly interesting to see whether this charisma survives the alternative definition of revolution that has lately transfigured the Muslim world. The most tenaciously lasting impression of all, however, is that of his sheer irrationality. What had the man thought he was doing? Ten years ago, did he expect, let alone desire, to be in a walled compound in dear little Abbottabad?

Osama Bin Laden is Dead.

It's a relief.

It's nice news.

Yet, it comes a little late.

From Pakistan's DAWN newspaper's account:

Residents said they were astounded to learn bin Laden had been in their midst. One neighbour said an old man had been living in the compound for the past 10 years.

“He never mixed much, he kept a low profile,” said the neighbour, Zahoor Ahmed.

“It’s hard to believe bin Laden was there. We never saw any extraordinary movements,” said another neighbour, Adress Ahmed.

Abbottabad has long been a cool, leafy retreat from the heat of the Pakistan plains.

It was founded by a British army officer, James Abbott, in the mid-nineteenth century as the British were pushing the bounds of their Indian empire into the northwestern hills inhabited by Pashtun tribes.

Today, the town is home to a Pakistani military academy and its surrounding hills are dotted with summer homes.

Sohaib Athar, whose online profile says he is an IT consultant taking a break from the rat race, sent out a stream of live updates on Twitter about the movement of helicopters and blasts without realising it was a raid on bin Laden.

When he learnt who had been killed, he tweeted: “Uh oh, there goes the neighbourhood.”
But it might take more to convince many people that bin Laden is dead.

One soldier on patrol near the compound said there had been talk before of bin Laden’s death, only for it to be proven untrue.

“It’s not clear if he was killed or not,” the soldier said.

Link to Google Maps view of site (ht Tom Gross).
Amateur video of Osama Bin Laden's hideout from YouTube (ht Sohaib Athar) :

Score: Donald Trump 1, President Barack Obama 0.

Long-form Birth Certificate PDF on White House website.

Chinese Credit Ratng Agency Downgrades USA

Read report here.

Document of the Week: Wikileaks Guantanamo Files

Read them here. From the introduction:

Mohammed al-Qahtani (ISN 063), a Saudi regarded as the planned 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks, was subjected to a specific torture program at Guantánamo, approved by defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. This consisted of 20-hour interrogations every day, over a period of several months, and various other "enhanced interrogation techniques," which severely endangered his health. Variations of these techniques then migrated to other prisoners in Guantánamo (and to Abu Ghraib), and in January 2009, just before George W. Bush left office, Susan Crawford, a retired judge and a close friend of Dick Cheney and David Addington, who was appointed to oversee the military commissions at Guantánamo as the convening authority, told Bob Woodward that she had refused to press charges against al-Qahtani, because, as she said, "We tortured Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture." As a result, his numerous statements about other prisoners must be regarded as worthless.

Abd al-Hakim Bukhari (ISN 493), a Saudi imprisoned by al-Qaeda as a spy, who was liberated by US forces from a Taliban jail before being sent, inexplicably, to Guantánamo (along with four other men liberated from the jail) is regarded in the files as a member of al-Qaeda, and a trustworthy witness.

Abd al-Rahim Janko (ISN 489), a Syrian Kurd, tortured by al-Qaeda as a spy and then imprisoned by the Taliban along with Abd al-Hakim Bukhari, above, is also used as a witness, even though he was mentally unstable. As his assessment in June 2008 stated, "Detainee is on a list of high-risk detainees from a health perspective ... He has several chronic medical problems. He has a psychiatric history of substance abuse, depression, borderline personality disorder, and prior suicide attempt for which he is followed by behavioral health for treatment."

These are just some of the most obvious cases, but alert readers will notice that they are cited repeatedly in what purports to be the government's evidence, and it should, as a result, be difficult not to conclude that the entire edifice constructed by the government is fundamentally unsound, and that what the Guantánamo Files reveal, primarily, is that only a few dozen prisoners are genuinely accused of involvement in terrorism.

The rest, these documents reveal on close inspection, were either innocent men and boys, seized by mistake, or Taliban foot soldiers, unconnected to terrorism. Moreover, many of these prisoners were actually sold to US forces, who were offering bounty payments for al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects, by their Afghan and Pakistani allies -- a policy that led ex-President Musharraf to state, in his 2006 memoir, In the Line of Fire, that, in return for handing over 369 terror suspects to the US, the Pakistani government “earned bounty payments totalling millions of dollars.”

Uncomfortable facts like these are not revealed in the deliberations of the Joint Task Force, but they are crucial to understanding why what can appear to be a collection of documents confirming the government's scaremongering rhetoric about Guantánamo -- the same rhetoric that has paralyzed President Obama, and revived the politics of fear in Congress -- is actually the opposite: the anatomy of a colossal crime perpetrated by the US government on 779 prisoners who, for the most part, are not and never have been the terrorists the government would like us to believe they are.

Happy Easter!

"Let Bradley Manning Go!" Singers Disrupt Obama Event

They sang this song:

Dear Mr. President we honor you today sir

Each of us brought you $5,000

It takes a lot of Benjamins to run a campaign

I paid my dues, where's our change?

We'll vote for you in 2012, yes that's true

Look at the Republicans -- what else can we do?

Even though we don't know if we'll retain our liberties

In what you seem content to call a free society

Yes it's true that Terry Jones is legally free

To burn a people's holy book in shameful effigy

But at another location in this country

Alone in a 6x12 cell sits Bradley

23 hours a day (and) night

The 5th and 8th Amendments say this kind of thing ain't right

We paid our dues, where's our change?

Michael Maren on Greg Mortenson's Unworthy Cause

From Michael Maren's blog:

A lot of the hand wringing over the Greg Mortenson scandal has been a lament over the damage he has done to the “worthy” cause of building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  But the cause is crap, and the faster Greg and his foundation disappear the better.

What the 60 Minutes piece made clear is that what The Central Asia Institute does primarily is build buildings.  Call them schools. Call them warehouses. Call them what you want, but a building is NOT a school. A building is a monument. A building gives you something made of stones to show your donors.  But you don’t need a building to have a school. 

You need teachers. You need books. You need a community’s dedication to educating its children. If a community does not have the resources to build a school in the first place, it will not have to resources to maintain it. As the empty school buildings attest, CAI was not paying for teachers and administrators to run the schools.  They were paying for bricks and mortar — They were investing in their own fund raising.

For a school or any development project to be successful, it must evolve from the strong desires of a community. The community must be able to dedicate the resources necessary to carry out the project. Of course, these communities can’t build school buildings, but they hire a teacher and buy a few books. The evolution process is slow. It requires a huge shift in attitudes and priorities. Placing a building in a community doesn’t accomplish any of this.

Plopping a building into a community doesn’t change anything except the landscape. It makes donors feel good. It gives the charities something to photograph for their brochures.  But in the end it’s all just a pile of rocks. Good riddance Greg Mortenson and your self-serving, self rightous crusade.

Bill Black: Fiat Justitia Ruat Caelum (Let Justice be Done, Though the Heavens Fall)

Bill Black: Fiat Justitia Ruat Caelum (Let Justice be Done, Though the Heavens Fall)

William Black on the Financial Crisis

From Marketplace:

RYSSDAL: Well then to the question I think a lot of people have, and especially after reading the piece in The Times today: Why hasn't anybody gone to jail?

BLACK: Well little people have gone to jail. And of course the answer is they haven't looked.

RYSSDAL: They, regulators?

BLACK: Well, good point. They, the regulators and they, the FBI, have not investigated, which is why this trifecta was necessary. If you go back to the savings and loan crisis, when we had the inevitable national commission to look at the causes, they had available to them in the public records, a thousand successful felony prosecutions, several thousand successful enforcement actions, and about 800 successful civil suits. And that provided all kinds of facts. Nothing like that exists

RYSSDAL: What about the argument, though, that the financial system is so fragile still, and these cases so complicated, that we can't really tear things apart with substantive investigations and prosecutions because it will all fall apart again?

BLACK: Yeah, that's an excellent point. We should leave felons in charge of our largest financial institutions as a means of achieving financial stability.

RYSSDAL: See, that's funny because I was expecting you to come back with -- I don't know, JPMorgan earned $5 billion last quarter. How shaky can they be?

BLACK: Well, they didn't earn $5 billion. What we did was change the accounting rules to hide the losses and then we did an amazing amount of off-budget sheet stuff through the Fed. But if you note, you'll see that most of the recent earnings were because they reduced their loss reserves, which is exactly how they created fictional income during the run up to the crisis.

RYSSDAL: What do you think, though, of the Dodd-Frank financial reform regulations out there?

BLACK: Well it wasn't designed to deal with the causes of the crisis. It doesn't deal with causes of the crisis. It won't prevent future crises.

RYSSDAL: So have we wasted this crisis?

BLACK: Yes, in the sense that you're supposed to learn from them. We're not learning the right lessons. In fact, we're learning the wrong lessons. And that kind of failure to learn is almost always due to ideology getting in the way of facts. We've got to get back to American pragmatism, use what works. And boy, this current system does not work.

RYSSDAL: William Black teaches law and economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Thanks a lot.

Jon Krakauer's Three Cups of Deceit, about Greg Mortenson

A new e-book, available for download from Byliner.com.

Happy Passover!

Michael Maren: Is 3 Cups of Tea a Fraud?

Michael Maren writes:

The feel-good foreign aid story of the decade may be an elaborate hoax. The man whose best selling book has been required reading in grade schools around the country appears to be a liar, liar, pants on fire con artist. (Two years ago my son’s entire school read the book.)

“Significantly, Mortenson’s origin story — of being saved by a remote village in Afghanistan and promising to build a school for them — appears to be a fabrication.”

The man who Mortenson identified as one of his Taliban captors is in fact a research director of a respected think tank in Islamabad.

“And according to “60 Minutes,” Mortenson’s charity, the Central Asia Institute, has spent more money in the the U.S. talking about education in Pakistan and Afghanistan than actually building and supporting schools there.”

If even some of these allegations are true, Mortenson’s transgression makes James Frey’s fabrications look like piddling inaccuracies. In the end, who cares if Frey made up his story? Oprah had her feelings hurt and a lot of inspiration-seeking readers of memoir were tricked into reading a novel. I expect that Mortenson will argue, eventually, that he’s done a lot of good for the people of Afghanistan, that his ends justify his means. But now, even his ends need to be called into question.

And in any case, the ends don’t justify the means. And it does matter if his we-are-the-world take on the helping impoverished people is a fiction. Because there are real people out there with real needs and the world has a moral obligation to do something about it, not just get the warm and fuzzies over a self-created hero of charity like Greg Mortenson.

LATE BREAKING: From Mortenson “I stand by the information conveyed in my book,” … “and by the value of CAI’s work in empowering local communities to build and operate schools that have educated more than 60,000 students.”

Dear Greg, and what’s your message to the millions of American students who read your book? It’s okay to lie and make up stories to turn yourself into a hero?

In addition: Mortenson was slated to win the $100,000.00 Grawemeyer Education prize from the University of Louisville in September.

Time Mag: “Looks like Mortenson’s writing has the potential to be shattered into a million little pieces.”

BTW, I wrote about Greg Mortenson and his relationship with the US military in Afghanistan, personified by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen, in July 2009. I said at the time:

Admiral Michael G. Mullen gives serious cause to worry about our military strategy in Central Asia, if he really has fallen for the self-serving promotional pablum Greg Mortensen has peddled to gullible customers with such success in his best-sellers...

For some reason, 60 Minutes failed to mention Mortenson's funding by the US Department of Defense.

Latino Veterans React to Proposed Ken Burns PBS Vietnam Show

Defend the Honor
April 16, 2011
Defend The Honor Advisory on Ken Burns/PBS

Attention Latino and Latina Vietnam War veterans, families and extended community

Yes, we know - our loyal Defenders of the Honor have been sending us messages about Ken Burns and PBS reaching out to Latino and Latina Vietnam War veterans. Unlike the 2007 Ken Burns/PBS WWII documentary debacle that left out the Latino and Latina experience, this time they might have a different interest in filming a documentary on the Vietnam War. Many of our Defenders of the Honor are rightfully outraged that Burns, who had a track record of excluding Latinos in his work long before the 2007 WWII documentary, is still being allowed to document an important event in American history. Many feel that he has failed repeatedly and that he should never again be trusted. (He still thinks the protests of 2007 were a "misunderstanding" on our part. And one high-placed public broadcasting official called it a "dust-up" - an indication that she still does not get it.) They also question the sincerity of PBS' commitment to diversity, after the disastrous handling of The War.

Defend the Honor welcomes attempts to include stories of Latinos and Latinas in our nation's historical narrative. However, DTH also believes that those who choose to collaborate with Florentine Films, Burns' production company-- or with any others-- should proceed with caution.  

Here is the back story: On March 28, 2011, the Associated Press reported "PBS said the 10-12 hour film by Burns and longtime partner Lynn Novick will be broadcast in 2016. Burns said his film will tell the human stories of Americans and Vietnamese affected by the war, along with those of Americans who protested against it.  He said that four decades after the war's end, most people have opinions about it but few truly know its history."

It remains to be seen if the "human stories of Americans" will follow the same path as THE WAR film.  In his funding request proposals for the 2007 WWII film, Burns is specific on what the film would focus on.  His proposal stated: "The series will celebrate American diversity, telling the stories of ordinary Americans (from our four chosen towns) of many different ethnic and racial backgrounds, individuals who are both representative and singular. In doing so, the film will demonstrate the war's indisputable impact on the transformation of America into a more perfect union, while at the same time acknowledging the difficult challenges faced by ethnic minorities in a segregated society."  Until Defend the Honor and others protested the exclusion of Latinos, Ken Burns did not find Latino and Latina WWII veterans to be "ordinary Americans" who fought in the war, much less helped in the "transformation of America into a more perfect union."  In the end, in response to the protests, other than several minutes of pasted on images of Hispanics, Burns left our community out of his final public/corporate funded film.  The accompanying book had no mention of Latinos. 

Knowing of Burn's history of omitting our rightful place in history relative to  our military service record in wars and military conflicts around the world, will our "American" Latino and Latina Vietnam War veterans and their families,  respond to Ken Burns/PBS?  Maybe yes, maybe no. 

The questions, concerns and reservations surrounding Ken Burns venture into the Vietnam War are many, especially when it comes to the "human stories" of Latino and Latina veterans who served during the Vietnam War era, as well as those involved in the Chicano movement who protested the war.

We must never forget that over 170,000 Latinos and Latinas served or fought in Vietnam, of which, more than 3,070 made the ultimate sacrifice. Thousands more were wounded, exposed to Agent Orange and/or suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. 

The toll taken on our Vietnam veterans and their families continue to be felt to this day.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas where veterans have been demanding the building of a veteran hospital.  The absence of a veteran hospital forces veterans to travel 250 miles to San Antonio for medical treatment.

We have thousands of Vietnam War stories that need to be told by filmmakers, writers, playwrights and ordinary Latinos and Latinas who are interested in remembering our warriors.

We encourage everyone concerned with any and all facets of the Vietnam War and its impact on the Latinos and Latina community to voice their opinions, personal stories and documentation on family members who were directly or indirectly impacted by this war.

We issue the following cautions:

·         All material written by individuals about the Vietnam War should be copyrighted before it is released to Ken Burns, PBS, businesses or corporations seeking to represent our Latino and Latina veterans and families in books, film or other media.
·         Do not enter into a relationship with the above mentioned entities without a formal contract that specifies ownership of intellectual property associated with any and all material related to the Latino and Latina Vietnam War experience. 
·         Do not allow your material or personal story to be placed in a secondary role in any Vietnam War film production as was done with Latinos by Ken Burns The WAR. His excuse was that he had "artistic license" to do whatever he pleased.
·         Review your material and interest in sharing your stories with existing Latino and Latina veteran's organizations, filmmakers and book authors so that they may assist and guide you with information and resources related to your Vietnam War experience.
·         Communicate openly with your state or national legislative representatives if you feel your material on the history, courage and sacrifice of our Latino and Latina Vietnam War veteran is not being treated with respect and dignity by a public funded entity.

Defend The Honor encourages all Latinos and Latinas to write and document as many Vietnam War stories as possible so that no one can deny our existence or service to our country. 

Furthermore, we express our profound thanks to those few who have written books, archived stories, produced films and theater productions on the experiences of our Latino and Latina Vietnam War veterans.

 

Gus Chavez and Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, co-founders and co-chairs, Defend theHonor 

Why I Don't Believe Thomas Friedman

On February 26, 1999, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman published an anti-Amazon.com article hyping Lyle Bowlin of Cedar Falls, Iowa as an alternative bookseller. Friedman declared:

Well, if you really want to be ''concerned'' about the levels of some of these profitless Internet stocks, such as Amazon.com, you should pay less attention to Mr. Greenspan and more attention to what's going on in a small house in Cedar Falls, Iowa.

There, a single Iowa family, headed by Lyle Bowlin, is re-creating Amazon.com in a spare bedroom. I tell you this not because they're an immediate threat to Amazon.com, but to underscore just how easy it is to compete against Amazon.com, and why therefore I'm dubious that Amazon and many other Internet retailers will ever generate the huge profits that their stock prices suggest.

Luckily, in 1999. I was a satisfied Amazon author, and a satisfied Amazon customer. So I bought some Amazon.com stock. This was contrary to Friedman's advice:

Because his profit margins are razor-thin, Mr. Bowlin, like Amazon, needs repeat buyers. Amazon gets them by offering useful information about books. Mr. Bowlin does it by offering any government-certified nonprofit organization a donation of 10 percent of the purchase price of any book that any nonprofit or its members buy through him.

So the next time your broker tells you that this or that Internet retailing stock is actually worth some crazy multiples, just think for a moment about how many Lyle Bowlins there already are out there, and how many more there will be, to eat away at the profit margins of whatever Internet retailer you can imagine. It only costs them $150 a month and they can do it as a hobby!

Or think about it like this: For about the cost of one share of Amazon.com, you can be Amazon.com.

I was among those who posted comments on the NY Times website taking issue with Friedman's analysis. He had so many complaints that the Times published a follow-up on March 9, 1999:

I recently wrote a column about Lyle Bowlin, who, for about $150 a month, had managed to put together a Web site that could compete with Amazon.com for selling books. Mr. Bowlin was underselling Ama zon.com (and making a profit!) while running the whole operation out of a spare bedroom in his home in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Well, the column elicited the usual range of skeptical responses from experts, who argued that Mr. Bowlin's operation was just a fluke, or that he wasn't calculating his costs properly, or that Amazon.com would soon crush him and all other would-be little-guy competitors.

Well, to all of you I say: YOU'RE WRONG.

Lyle Bowlin's internet bookshop, hyped by Friedman (reportedly a family relation of some kind) went out of business. But Amazon didn't. It's trading today at $179 per share. Amazon not only dominates the book business, it is a major player in the rapidly growing cloud computing field. Amazon is currently valued at approximately $80 billion.

One title you won't see on a Thomas Friedman book, I imagine: Money Talks, B.S. Walks.

outside the box: michelle rhee: a glossarhee, 2nd edition

outside the box: michelle rhee: a glossarhee, 2nd edition: "Rheewrite:  to write something again in order to embellish or falsify an existing document. Rheelay:  to receive and pass on misinfo..."

Agustin Blazquez at Emory University

Here's my friend, the leading Cuban-American documentary filmmaker you've never heard of, presenting CHE: The Other Side of an Icon to Dr. Mary Grabar's class on March 16th.

His film is now on sale on DVD at Amazon.com:
Here's my review:

*****
When working as an actor in the Cuban film industry as a young man, filmmaker Agustin Blazquez met Che Guevara personally. The revolutionary legend had come to shake hands with the cast and crew of his film, and Blazquez was among those granted an audience. Not too long afterwards, Guevara was dead in the jungles of Latin America...and Blazquez subequently fled as a political exile--a story I hope he will one day tell on film, as it is as gripping as any novel. So he knows about Che, both as a Cuban culture worker for the revolution, and later as a refugee from Communism.

For his seventh documentary on Cuba, his beloved homeland, Blazquez compares the legend of Che with the reality of his legacy. Although Cuban-American audiences have been exposed to this side of Che before, much of it was new and surprising to me, a non-Cuban viewer.

Blazquez traces Che's route from Argentine leftism, to Cuban guerilla warfare, to execution of prisoners, to international terrorism. Underlying the film is a convincing case that Che Guevara is a spiritual father to Osama bin Laden. As evidence, Blazquez documents a foiled Guevara plot to bomb New York City in the 1960s, that had it succeeded, would have been America's first 9/11.

The film is powerful, compelling, and should be seen by anyone interested in Cuba, international terrorism--or the terrible power of an iconic image.

Cisco Stock Chart After Flip Death Sentence

From Yahoo! Finance, this snapshot of market reaction to Cisco CEO John Chambers' decision to kill the Flip camera:

Mobile Opportunity: The Real Lesson of Cisco's Billion-Dollar Flip Debacle

Mobile Opportunity: The Real Lesson of Cisco's Billion-Dollar Flip Debacle:

Cisco is an outstanding company, and an excellent place to work. But it screams respectable enterprise hardware supplier. To someone from a funky consumer company, going there would feel like having your heart ripped out and replaced with a brick.

Then there were the business practices to contend with. As an enterprise company, Cisco is used to long product development cycles, direct sales, and high margins to support all of its infrastructure. A consumer business thrives on fast product cycles, sales through retailers, and low margins used to drive volume. Almost nothing in Cisco's existing business practices maps well to a consumer company. But it's not clear that Cisco understood any of that.

The transition to Cisco management happened at a terrible time for Flip. Just when the company's best people should have been focused obsessively on their next generation of camera goodness, their management was given new responsibilities, and Cisco started "helping out" with ideas like using Flip cameras for videoconferencing -- something that had nothing to do with Flip's original customers and mission.

If Pure Digital had remained independent, would it have innovated quickly enough? Maybe not; it's very hard for a young company to think beyond the product that made it successful. But merging with Cisco, and going through all of the associated disruptions, probably made the task almost impossible.

I'm sure that as the Flip team members get their layoff notices, we'll start to hear a lot more inside scoop. But in the meantime, this announcement by Cisco looks like a classic case of an enterprise company that thought it knew how to make consumer products, and turned out to be utterly wrong.

That's not an unusual story. It's almost impossible for any enterprise company to be successful in consumer, just as successful consumer companies usually fail in enterprise. The habits and business practices that make them a winner in one market doom them in the other.

The lesson in all of this: If you're at an enterprise company that wants to enter the consumer market, or vice-versa, you need to wall off the new business completely from your existing company. Different management, different financial model, different HR and legal.

You might ask, if the businesses need to be separated so thoroughly, why even try to mix them? Which is the real point.

The other lesson of the Flip failure is that we should all be very skeptical when a big enterprise company says it's going consumer. Hey Intel, do you really think you can design phones? (link) Have you already forgotten Intel Play? (link)

I'll give the final word to Harry McCracken (link): "You can be one of the most successful maker of enterprise technology products the world has ever known, but that doesn’t mean your instincts will carry over to the consumer market. They’re really different, and few companies have ever been successful in both."

Flip Video Camera Founder on Cisco's Death Sentence

Jon Kaplan, former Flip CEO, interviewed by Kara Swisher, of Boomtown.com from a link on the Wall Street Journal Venture Capital Blog. Kaplan says a high point for Flip was when President Obama's daughters used his camera at the inauguration in 2009:

Congressional Budget Deal Fully Funds NPR

From Current Blog:

As expected, CPB lost digital funding, recession aid to stations and radio interconnection money in the budget agreement for the remainder of the fiscal year, finally hammered out last week on Capitol Hill. The bill, H.R. 1473, zeros out $25 million in station "fiscal stabilization" grants and $25 million for replacement and upgrade of the radio infrastructure, and reduces digital spending from $36 million to $6 million. There's also a small — .2 percent — across-the-board trim for all non-defense discretionary spending. Main appropriation for FY11, $445 million. One reported sticking point in the contentious negotiations was a provision to prohibit federal funding for NPR; the Democrats managed to kill that.

Aaaaaaargh...

Although I predicted this would happen on KCRW's "To the Point" radio program hosted by Warren Olney on February 15, 2011, I'm disappointed to have been proven right.

DOCUMENT OF THE WEEK: Glenn Greenwald on Bradley Manning & Barack Obama

From Salon.com:

For that reason, as The Guardian reports this morning, a letter signed by "more than 250 of America's most eminent legal scholars" that "includes leading figures from all the top US law schools, as well as prominent names from other academic fields" -- featuring "Laurence Tribe, a Harvard professor who is considered to be America's foremost liberal authority on constitutional law"; who "taught constitutional law to Barack Obama and was a key backer of his 2008 presidential campaign"; and "joined the Obama administration last year as a legal adviser in the justice department, a post he held until three months ago" -- not only denounces Manning's detention but also the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner's personal responsibility for it:

[Tribe] told the Guardian he signed the letter because Manning appeared to have been treated in a way that "is not only shameful but unconstitutional" as he awaits court martial in Quantico marine base in Virginia. . . . Tribe said the treatment was objectionable "in the way it violates his person and his liberty without due process of law and in the way it administers cruel and unusual punishment of a sort that cannot be constitutionally inflicted even upon someone convicted of terrible offences, not to mention someone merely accused of such offences".

The harsh restrictions have been denounced by a raft of human rights groups, including Amnesty International, and are being investigated by the United Nations' rapporteur on torture. . . .

The intervention of Tribe and hundreds of other legal scholars is a huge embarrassment to Obama, who was a professor of constitutional law in Chicago. Obama made respect for the rule of law a cornerstone of his administration, promising when he first entered the White House in 2009 to end the excesses of the Bush administration's war on terrorism. . . .

The protest letter, published in the New York Review of Books, was written by two distinguished law professors, Bruce Ackerman of Yale and Yochai Benkler of Harvard. They claim Manning's reported treatment is a violation of the US constitution, specifically the eighth amendment forbidding cruel and unusual punishment and the fifth amendment that prevents punishment without trial.

In a stinging rebuke to Obama, they say "he was once a professor of constitutional law, and entered the national stage as an eloquent moral leader. The question now, however, is whether his conduct as commander in chief meets fundamental standards of decency."

Professor Benkler, echoing the point that I've repeatedly emphasized as I believe it to be the most important one, said "Manning's conditions were being used 'as a warning to future whistleblowers'." Indeed, Manning's treatment lacks even a pretense of justification; it -- just like the Obama administration's unprecedented war on whistle-blowers -- is clearly meant to threaten and intimidate future individuals of conscience who, like Manning, might consider exposing government deceit, corruption and illegality: one of the few remaining avenues for learning what the Government does.

Aside from what conduct like this reveals about Obama, it also severely undermines the ability of the U.S. to exercise any shred of moral leadership in the world.

Text of the letter, as published in the New York Review of Books, below:

Private Manning’s Humiliation
APRIL 28, 2011
Bruce Ackerman and Yochai Benkler

Bradley Manning is the soldier charged with leaking US government documents to Wikileaks. He is currently detained under degrading and inhumane conditions that are illegal and immoral.

For nine months, Manning has been confined to his cell for twenty-three hours a day. During his one remaining hour, he can walk in circles in another room, with no other prisoners present. He is not allowed to doze off or relax during the day, but must answer the question “Are you OK?” verbally and in the affirmative every five minutes. At night, he is awakened to be asked again “Are you OK?” every time he turns his back to the cell door or covers his head with a blanket so that the guards cannot see his face. During the past week he was forced to sleep naked and stand naked for inspection in front of his cell, and for the indefinite future must remove his clothes and wear a “smock” under claims of risk to himself that he disputes.

The sum of the treatment that has been widely reported is a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee against punishment without trial. If continued, it may well amount to a violation of the criminal statute against torture, defined as, among other things, “the administration or application…of… procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality.”

Private Manning has been designated as an appropriate subject for both Maximum Security and Prevention of Injury (POI) detention. But he asserts that his administrative reports consistently describe him as a well-behaved prisoner who does not fit the requirements for Maximum Security detention. The brig psychiatrist began recommending his removal from Prevention of Injury months ago. These claims have not been publicly contested. In an Orwellian twist, the spokesman for the brig commander refused to explain the forced nudity “because to discuss the details would be a violation of Manning’s privacy.”

The administration has provided no evidence that Manning’s treatment reflects a concern for his own safety or that of other inmates. Unless and until it does so, there is only one reasonable inference: this pattern of degrading treatment aims either to deter future whistleblowers, or to force Manning to implicate Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in a conspiracy, or both.

If Manning is guilty of a crime, let him be tried, convicted, and punished according to law. But his treatment must be consistent with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. There is no excuse for his degrading and inhumane pretrial punishment. As the State Department’s P.J. Crowley put it recently, they are “counterproductive and stupid.” And yet Crowley has now been forced to resign for speaking the plain truth.

The Wikileaks disclosures have touched every corner of the world. Now the whole world watches America and observes what it does, not what it says.

President Obama was once a professor of constitutional law, and entered the national stage as an eloquent moral leader. The question now, however, is whether his conduct as commander in chief meets fundamental standards of decency. He should not merely assert that Manning’s confinement is “appropriate and meet[s] our basic standards,” as he did recently. He should require the Pentagon publicly to document the grounds for its extraordinary actions—and immediately end those that cannot withstand the light of day.

Bruce Ackerman
Yale Law School
New Haven, Connecticut

Yochai Benkler
Harvard Law School
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Additional Signers: Jack Balkin, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Alexander M. Capron, Norman Dorsen, Michael W. Doyle, Randall Kennedy, Mitchell Lasser, Sanford Levinson, David Luban, Frank I. Michelman, Robert B. Reich, Kermit Roosevelt, Kim Scheppele, Alec Stone Sweet, Laurence H. Tribe, and more than 250 others. A complete list of signers has been posted on the blog balkinization.

UPDATE: While Human Rights Watch has condemned other countries and leaders for similar types of torture and confinement, it has not to date condemned the Obama administration for Manning's treatment; instead, HRW has merely and meekly issued this press release asking for an explanation:

The US government should publicly explain the precise reasons behind extremely restrictive and possibly punitive and degrading treatment that Army Private First Class Bradley Manning alleges he has received while detained at the brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, said Human Rights Watch.

Better call it "Human Rights Don't Watch."

Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing

Just finished reading Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing, which contains the 1973 essay of the same name--an essay written at least one year before Robert Pirsig's application of the Koans to motorcycle maintenance.

I thought it holds up very well, especially Bradbury's main points: Don't write for money, don't write for critics, don't write for friends--write for yourself. Don't try to be highbrow, don't try to be crassly commercial--take the middle path. And do channel your emotions and personality and memories and imagination and obsessions and compulsions onto the page. When writing a story, let your characters drive the plot, not vice-versa. And listen to them, rather than tell them what to do. That's the Zen aspect, the conscious letting go that makes writing flow.

Finally, a word about discipline. Read a poem every day. And write every day. Bradbury wrote 1,000 words a day since he was in his twenties. He's now in his 90s. That's millions of words, hundreds of stories, and dozens of books.

Plus, he wrote the script for Melville's Moby Dick, directed by John Huston, in Ireland...so in a way, that makes Bradbury yet another Irish bard.

As Bradbury explains his technique: ""Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a land mine. The land mine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces back together. Now, it's your turn. Jump!""

Inspirational, simple, and fine. You can buy the book from Amazon, here:

Upstairs, Downstairs Returns to PBS

Upstairs Downstairs returned to PBS, on last night's Masterpiece Classic (the series formerly known as Mobil Masterpiece Theatre), as if to provide evidence for the widely-held belief that American public broadcasters have not had an idea in 30 years. But at least this had been a good idea originally, in the 1970s, and it withstood the test of time.

Upstairs Downstairs is likeable nostalgia, full of proper people doing the proper thing in the face of those who would do the unthinkable. Though not as good as the original ITV production, or ITV's Downton Abbey, this BBC sequel is still worth watching. Perhaps the broadcast might spark a revival of the classic serial form on American television. First go-round led to a number of American miniseries on commercial networks, many of which were pretty darn good...from ROOTS to NORTH AND SOUTH to WINDS OF WAR.

Ratings were high for the new Up Down in England, when broadcast this past Christmas, and I'm pretty sure PBS enjoyed a nice bump last night, as well. (UPDATE from TV by the numbers: "Arlington, VA, April 12, 2011 – PBS’ MASTERPIECE audience has increased by nearly 45% over last year. In addition,PBS’ most anticipated highlight of MASTERPIECE’s 40th season, 'Upstairs Downstairs,' was watched by an estimated 6.4 million viewers,based on Nielsen data from 53 metered markets.") Perhaps it could give network and cable programmers some ideas.

The theme music was familiar, but the set somewhat different, the cast somewhat different, the plot somewhat different, and the family completely different--the Hallam family, as opposed to the Bellamys. But this Son of The Forsyte Saga continues to draw, even with marked changes.

The current producers are no John Hawkesworth, whose deft and subtle touch was missed. The young leads were a little too gross in their behavior for this now older viewer to enjoy, but the seasoned troupers--Eileen Atkins & Jean Marsh from Upstairs, Downstairs (the original)--were hanging in there, chewing the scenery and providing a jolly good time for one and all. Art Malik makes a nice addition to the rep company, though the addition of Solomon the monkey may be gilding the lily, somewhat.

The little things seem to have been covered. Nice table settings, kitchen equipment, trays, sideboards, teapots, automobiles, and the like; as well as costumes--pornographic details that thrill Anglophile American audiences, and were a mainstay for Masterpiece Theatre.

I certainly felt a tingle of nostalgic longing when the theme music from Upstairs, Downstairs welled up on my television set in last night's production.

The script is not up to the original, but if it had been 13 episodes instead of 3, the writers would have had time to get up to speed. Miniseries tend to evolve over time.

The only off-putting note for this viewer was Laura Linney's introduction, which claimed that Upstairs, Downstairs almost didn't make it on the air at PBS in the 1970s because it dealt with the lives of upper-class and working-class Britons, which were thought not to interest American audiences. Complete rubbish!

Why PBS executives decided to raise their own sorry history, complete with a phony cover story, is beyond me. It detracted from my enjoyment of the show. Alistair Cooke would never have gone along with such a clumsy scheme...

In fact, I wrote about the case of the original Upstairs, Downstairs in my book, Masterpiece Theatre and the Politics of Quality (Scarecrow Press, 1999). PBS was opposed because they felt the series would be too popular, because it was too commercial. Here are the details:

Mobil bought Upstairs, Downstairs after chairman Rawleigh Warner--to whom the series was reportedly personally recommended by the Duchess of Bedford at a dinner party in London--suggested to [Mobil vp] Herb Schmertz that he consider the series for Masterpiece Theatre. Schmertz looked at it, liked it, and wanted to put it on the air. Frank Marshall, in his role as television consultant, also screened the series. He recalls recommended the series as "brilliant." Yet, Marshall says that getting the program broadcast on PBS was "a lot of work" because public television executives "had no confidence in the program." Richard Price--the salesman who represented London Weekend Television--said he had trouble because "CPB and PBS were extremely worried about the situation that commercial television programing was going to go into Masterpiece Theatre." [Producer] Christopher Sarson of WGBH was one of the doubters. When WGBH balked, Mobil dealt directly with Price and London Weekend Television to get around opposition within the Boston Station.

Herb Schmertz remembers WGBH refused "on principle"--because it would drive up the cost of other imports--to pay LWT [London Weekend Television] salesman Richard Price's asking price of $25,000 an episode. "I took care of Richard," he says. "GBH didn't know that. I took care of Richard because I thought he was getting screwed. That's true, I was willing to pay 25 [thousand], and GBH balked and said, "We can't. That'll screw up a lot of things." For them. Not me. So I said, "OK." But then I took care of Richard. I made a side deal with him."

There's more detail in my book, including copies of original documents from Mobil and PBS.

But aside from the shock of hearing Laura Linney's bright shining lie--which was part of PBS's filler and not really Upstairs Downstairs after all--I enjoyed the production thoroughly...