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JROTC MUST GO!
Check out the new website:
http://www.jrotcmustgo.blogspot.com/
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NO on state Prop. 98!
San Francisco Tenants Union (415) 282-5525 www.sftu.org
Wealthy landlords and other right-wing operatives placed Prop. 98 on the state ballot. This is a dangerous and deceptive measure. Disguised as an effort to reform eminent domain laws and protect homeowners, Prop. 98 would abolish tenant protections such as rent control and just-cause eviction laws, and would end a number of other environmental protection and land use laws. [The catch is, that while it's true that the landlord can increase rents to whatever he or she wants once a property becomes vacant, the current rent-control law now ensures that the new tenants are still under rent-control for their, albeit higher, rent. Under the new law, there simply will be no rent control when the new tenant moves in so their much higher rent-rate can increase as much as the landlord chooses each year from then on!!! So, no more rent-control at all!!! Tricky, huh?...BW]
SAVE RENT CONTROL! NO ON PROP. 98!
http://leftinsf.com/blog/index.php/archives/2492
We All Hate that 98!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Phrt5zVGn0
READ ALL OF PROP. 98 at: http://yesprop98.com/read/?_adctlid=v%7Cwynx8c5jjesxsb%7Cwziq39twoqov52
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Stop fumigation of citizens without their consent in California
Target: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Senator Joe Simitian, Assemblymember Loni Hancock, Assemblymember John Laird, Senator Abel Maldonado
Sponsored by: John Russo
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/stop-fumigation-of-citizens-without-their-consent-in-california
Additional information is available at http://www.stopthespray.org
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Taking Aim schedule during the WBAI fund drive
Tuesday, May 20
11:00 am to noon and again from 5:00 to 6:00 pm - ET
8:00 to 9:00 am and again from 5:00 to 6:00 pm PT
Each show filled with new information, discussion and an excerpt from our
fund drive premium:
The Collapse of Bear Stearns and the Crisis of Fictive Capital
A riveting 4-part series, $100 donation to WBAI
Tuesday, May 27
5:00 to 6:00 pm Taking Aim contribution to the all-day Nakba special
Your contribution to WBAI supports the station that brings Taking Aim to
you.
Thanks,
Mya
Mya Shone/Ralph Schoenman
Taking Aim
http://www.takingaimradio.com
Contributions to Taking Aim enable us to continue our radio broadcasts,
expand our Internet sites, produce workbooks, pamphlets and books and
organize events. Make your checks payable to: Veritas Press
PO Box 6345, Vallejo, CA 94591
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) For an All-Organic Formula, Baby, That’s Sweet
By JULIA MOSKIN
May 19, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/us/19formula.html?ref=us
2) Philadelphia Police Seek to Fire 4 Over Videotaped Beating
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:07 p.m. ET
May 19, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Videotaped-Police-Beating.html?ref=us
3) Buffett’s Shopping Trip to Europe Draws a Crowd
By MARK LANDLER
May 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/business/worldbusiness/20buffett.html?ref=business
4) Let’s Be Serious
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
May 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/opinion/20herbert.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
5) The Most Curious Thing
By Errol Morris
[Please note, there are many powerful and disturbing Abu Ghraib photos with this article that could not be posted here…bw]
May 19, 2008, 10:56 pm
http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/the-most-curious-thing/?hp
6) Report Details Complaints Over Interrogations
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and SCOTT SHANE
May 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/washington/20cnd-detain.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1211306858-oQgn+3Z+DEx3/Spkcu6WuA
7) U.S. Says It Is Holding 500 Youths in Iraq
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/world/middleeast/20gitmo.html?ref=world
8) Makeshift Space for Inmates as Prisons Exceed Capacity
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
May 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/nyregion/20prisons.html?ref=nyregion
9) Merck Agrees to Settlement Over Vioxx Ads
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/business/21vioxx.html?ref=business
10) Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain
By SARA REISTAD-LONG
May 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/health/research/20brai.html?ref=health
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1) For an All-Organic Formula, Baby, That’s Sweet
By JULIA MOSKIN
May 19, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/us/19formula.html?ref=us
Amy Chase started feeding Similac Organic infant formula to her second son, Amos, as soon as he was born in November 2006.
“When I saw the organic at Publix, I bought it, no questions asked,” said Ms. Chase, a self-described “yoga mom” in Atlanta.
Like Ms. Chase, many American parents have rushed to embrace Similac Organic formula, even though it sells for as much as 30 percent more than regular Similac. In 2007, its first full year on sale, it captured 36 percent of the organic formula market, with sales of more than $10 million, according to Kalorama Information, a pharmaceutical-industry research firm. (Similac’s parent company, Abbott Laboratories, does not release sales figures for individual products.)
Parents may be buying it because they believe that organic is healthier, but babies may have a reason of their own for preferring Similac Organic: it is significantly sweeter than other formulas. It is the only major brand of organic formula that is sweetened with cane sugar, or sucrose, which is much sweeter than sugars used in other formulas.
No health problems in babies have been associated with Similac Organic. But to pediatricians, there are risks in giving babies cane sugar: Sucrose can harm tooth enamel faster than other sugars; once babies get used to its sweeter taste, they might resist less sweet formulas or solid foods; and some studies suggest that they might overeat, leading to rapid weight gain in the first year, which is often a statistical predictor of childhood obesity.
Asked about these concerns, Carolyn Valek, a spokeswoman for Abbott Nutrition, the division of Abbott Laboratories that makes Similac Organic, said that sucrose had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration and was considered “safe and well established.” Ms. Valek said that Similac Organic had no more sweetener than other formulas and that prolonged contact with any kind of sugar could cause tooth decay.
In Europe, where sudden increases in childhood obesity are a pressing public health issue, sucrose-sweetened formulas will be banned by the end of 2009, except when ordered by a doctor for babies with severe allergies. The 27 countries of the European Union adopted the new rules according to the recommendations of the group’s Scientific Committee on Food, which found that sucrose provided no particular nutritional advantages, could, in rare cases, bring about a fatal metabolic disorder, and might lead to overfeeding.
The F.D.A., however, which regulates infant formula, does not specify which sugars can be used, as long as they are already classified as safe. Nor does it set the amount of sugar per serving, as it does for fats and proteins.
Still, a number of pediatricians said they were surprised by the choice of sucrose.
“I would be very concerned about this as a pediatrician,” said Dr. Benjamin Caballero, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and an expert in risk factors for childhood obesity. “The issue is that sweet tastes tend to encourage consumption of excessive amounts,” Dr. Caballero said. Evidence shows that babies and children will always show a preference for the sweetest food available, he said, and they will eat more of it than they would of less-sweet food.
“This is how breakfast cereal manufacturers compete,” he said.
Ms. Valek of Abbot Nutrition said the company did not “optimize for taste” when developing infant formula. “Our primary focus is to support normal growth through optimal nutrition and quality ingredients,” she said.
Organic formula, with sales of about $20 million annually, makes up only a sliver of the $2.5 billion formula market, according to A.C. Nielsen, the market research company. Similac Organic, analysts say, is largely responsible for the nearly tenfold growth in sales of organic formula from 2005 to 2007. According to the federal Department of Agriculture, which regulates organic labeling, a product can be labeled organic when 95 percent of its ingredients are grown without the use of certain pesticides and herbicides.
All infant formulas contain added sugars, which babies need to digest the proteins in cow’s milk or soy. Other organic formulas, like Earth’s Best and Parent’s Choice, use organic lactose as the added sugar. Organic lactose must be extracted from organic milk, the global supplies of which have been severely stretched in the last three years, driving up the price of the lactose.
“The parents in my practice who would use organic formula are the same parents who would be worried about giving sweets to their babies,” said Dr. Jatinder Bhatia, a member of the nutrition committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “That organic formula would be sweeter might not be a health risk, but it certainly isn’t what the parents have in mind.”
Kim Kupferman, a technology consultant in San Leandro, Calif., said she tended to trust the organic label. Her 7-month-old daughter, Saige, eats Similac Organic and a few organic solid foods. “But sugar is a concern for us — that’s why we started her on vegetables rather than fruits, so she wouldn’t get used to the sweet taste first.” Ms. Kupferman said, adding that she might re-evaluate her choice of formula.
Many doctors have long believed that all sugars, from raw cane to highly processed high-fructose corn syrup, are nutritionally identical. But others disagree. Ivan de Araujo, a fellow at the John B. Pierce Laboratory at Yale University School of Medicine, a center for sensory research, said scientists were beginning to tease out the differences.
“Recent studies show that animals have a clear preference for sucrose over other sugars,” Dr. Araujo said. And eating sucrose, he said, generates future cravings for sucrose; other sugars tested, like fructose and glucose, do not have the same long-term effect.
However, Gary K. Beauchamp, director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, a nonprofit research institute, said there was no solid proof that early exposure to sweetness gave babies a greater taste for sugar later in life. “The taste for sweet may be pegged so high that it can’t go any higher,” Dr. Beauchamp said.
The overall question of whether sweeter foods are more appealing to babies has long since been resolved. “Babies love sweetness, and anyone selling a sweeter formula is going to have an advantage, because it would be harder to switch a baby to another formula once they get used to the taste,” said Dr. William J. Klish, director of the pediatric gastroenterology department at Baylor College of Medicine and a former chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ nutrition committee.
The sweeter taste of Similac Organic was observed by a professional sensory-tasting panel, commissioned by The New York Times to do a blind tasting of eight nationally available formulas, soy and dairy, organic and not. Seven of the formulas were as sweet as unsweetened apple juice, said Gail Civille, the director of Sensory Spectrum, which performed the tests. Ms. Civille said Similac Organic was the sweetest, with “the sweetness of grape juice or Country Time lemonade."
Doctors say that parents need not worry about the precise composition of formula, because the product over all has been proved safe and effective. But many questioned Similac’s choice of cane sugar, which has been gradually disappearing from infant formula since the 1950s.
“The entire enterprise of formula is the attempt is to make it as close as possible to human milk,” Dr. Beauchamp said. “Making sweeter formula so that babies like it more seems to me contrary to the ethos of organic food, as a doctor and as a grandfather.”
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2) Philadelphia Police Seek to Fire 4 Over Videotaped Beating
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:07 p.m. ET
May 19, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Videotaped-Police-Beating.html?ref=us
PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- Philadelphia's police commissioner said Monday that four officers will be fired and four others disciplined for their roles in the beatings of three shooting suspects, an encounter that was captured on videotape and drew widespread outrage.
Another eight officers who had physical contact with the suspects will undergo additional training on the department's policies concerning the use of force, Commissioner Charles Ramsey said. He said the police department made the disciplinary decisions after reviewing frames from enhanced tape of a video shot by a television news helicopter on May 5.
The video, shot by WTXF-TV, shows the suspects being pulled from their car on the side of the road and groups of officers kicking, punching and beating the men. A total of 19 officers -- 18 city police and one transit officer -- were involved.
Two of the officers being fired are relatively new to the force and can be terminated immediately, Ramsey said. Two others are being suspended without pay for 30 days with intent to dismiss.
Three other officers are being suspended and one sergeant is being demoted. A criminal investigation is continuing.
Police said they had been pursuing the car in connection with a triple shooting. The three men -- Brian Hall, 23, Pete Hopkins, 19, and Dwayne Dyches, 24, all of Philadelphia -- have been charged with attempted murder and related counts stemming from the shooting. Their attorneys have said they had nothing to do with it.
One of Dyches' attorneys said he suffered a welt on his head the size of a baseball and that one of his legs was seriously injured.
All three of the shooting suspects are black. Ramsey has denied allegations that the beatings were racially motivated and said at least one officer involved is black.
The beating occurred at the same time police were conducting an intense manhunt for a suspect in the slaying two days earlier of Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski, but Ramsey said Monday that there was no indication that any of the officers thought the suspect was among the three men in the car.
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3) Buffett’s Shopping Trip to Europe Draws a Crowd
By MARK LANDLER
May 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/business/worldbusiness/20buffett.html?ref=business
FRANKFURT — Warren E. Buffett may be one of the few Americans who can still afford to come to Europe for a shopping spree.
Undaunted by the dramatic decline of the dollar against the euro, Mr. Buffett, the billionaire investor, arrived here on Monday to begin a four-country tour of Europe, with a view toward buying family-owned companies.
“I would rather be doing this with the euro at 90 cents than at $1.50,” Mr. Buffett said at a crowded news conference at an airport hotel. But, he added, “If we can buy good businesses with good people at a good price, I’m not going to pass it up because I think a currency is too high.”
Mr. Buffett said he was making the rounds in a very public fashion because he and his holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, are less well known in Europe than in the United States, where his homespun letter to shareholders is treated like sacred writ by many investors.
“It’s a deferred shopping tour,” Mr. Buffett said, noting that he did not expect to sign any deals immediately.
To judge by his reception in Frankfurt, the man often called the Oracle of Omaha will find an eager audience in Europe. His news conference here seemed more suited to a rock star than a businessman, with 200 journalists, plus a phalanx of photographers and television news crews.
Reporters from Germany, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland wanted to know whether Mr. Buffett planned to buy companies in their countries, and if so, which ones. Yes, he replied, all those countries interested him. No, he said, he would not disclose the names of any potential targets.
The name game soon exhausted, Mr. Buffett was asked about the secrets to his investing success (stay away from things you do not understand), his view of the credit crisis (only a quarter to a half finished), and his political preference (he is backing Barack Obama over John McCain).
Mr. Buffett said he was not shunning investments in the United States, pointing out his role in helping to finance the $23 billion acquisition of Wrigley, the chewing gum maker, by the candy giant, Mars.
But having steered clear of foreign investments for most of his career, Mr. Buffett said he viewed Europe as more fertile ground than emerging markets in Asia or elsewhere. His minimum requirement for acquisitions, he said, was $75 million in pretax earnings.
“You want to fish in a pond where the fish are,” he said, “and Europe is a much better pond.”
On Monday, Mr. Buffett mingled with the owners of German companies at a reception in Frankfurt. He is to go to Lausanne, Switzerland, on Tuesday, followed by Madrid on Wednesday and Milan on Thursday. He is being accompanied by Eitan Wertheimer, an Israeli businessman who sold his family’s metal-working company, Iscar, to Berkshire Hathaway in 2006.
Mr. Buffett said he would be open to a major acquisition, and with some $35 billion, Berkshire Hathaway could afford to buy some extremely large family-owned enterprises.
“I hope that when the time comes,” he said, “they recognize that in Berkshire Hathaway they can find things they can’t find anywhere else.”
Among the German companies rumored to be on Mr. Buffett’s shopping list is Haribo, which makes chewy candies in the shape of bears. As it happened, there were little packets of Haribo bears at the news conference, though Mr. Buffett said he knew nothing about the company.
“I like candy in general,” he said, picking up a packet. “I’m pretty favorably disposed toward candy.”
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4) Let’s Be Serious
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
May 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/opinion/20herbert.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
The general election is about to unfold and we’ll soon see how smart or how foolish Americans really are. The U.S. may be the richest country on earth, but the economy is tanking, its working families are in trouble, it is bogged down in a multitrillion-dollar war of its own making and the price of gasoline has nitwits siphoning supplies from the cars and trucks of strangers.
Four of every five Americans want the country to move in a different direction, which makes this presidential election, potentially, one of the most pivotal since World War II.
And yet there’s growing evidence that despite the plethora of important issues, the election may yet be undermined by the usual madness — fear-mongering, bogus arguments over who really loves America, race-baiting, gay-baiting (Ohmigod! They’re getting married!) and the wholesale trivialization of matters that are not just important, but extremely complex.
In his book, “Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed?,” Jared Bernstein reminds us that the economic expansion from 2000 to 2006 was something less than nirvana for working people. The economy grew by 15 percent during that period, and the official rates of joblessness and inflation were low. But as most of us know, the benefits of that expansion were skewed to the high end of the economic ladder.
Mr. Bernstein, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, writes: “Over the course of this highly touted economic expansion, poverty is up, working families’ real incomes are down and some key prices are growing a lot faster than the average.”
Steven Greenhouse, the labor correspondent for The Times, has also written a book that examines, among other things, the imbalance in the way the benefits from the expansion have been distributed. In “The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker,” he says:
“This is a decade during which the American economy has thrived by many measures, with corporate profits and C.E.O. salaries soaring, yet wages have languished for most workers, and health and pension coverage has grown worse.”
Let the candidates wrestle with this issue of increasing economic inequality, rather than President Bush’s spurious and deeply offensive rant comparing advocates of international diplomacy with those who appeased Hitler and the Nazis.
Let the candidates wrestle with the war without end in Iraq that is not just destroying lives but is taking a toll on this nation’s soul. The war is sapping the resources and energy needed for the hard work of putting the U.S. back on a sound socioeconomic footing.
And the way we are treating the troops belies the pretty words that never get farther than a bumper sticker.
The country that professes to be so proud of its men and women in uniform is playing Russian roulette with their lives by sending them into the war zone for three, four and even more tours. Stop-loss, the involuntary extension of an individual’s term in the military (making them subject to still more combat duty), is another dangerous affront to those who have already given so much.
The Houston Chronicle did a long takeout on Sunday on the suicide in March 2007 of an Army recruiting sergeant, Nils Aron Andersson — just one day after his marriage to Carry Walton. Sgt. Andersson, 25, had spoken of the many horrors that he had encountered in Iraq and was deeply depressed. He shot himself while sitting in his pickup in a parking garage. Distraught, Ms. Walton bought a 9-millimeter handgun at a sporting goods store the next day and killed herself.
Suicides have become a big problem for the military. Combat does terrible things to people. An independent study by the RAND Corporation found that nearly 20 percent of the troops who returned from tours in Iraq or Afghanistan reported symptoms of major depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.
Let the candidates talk about these things. Let them talk about the fact that the Bush administration, which has pushed the troops so unmercifully, opposes a bill (sponsored by Senator Jim Webb and widely supported in Congress) that would expand the education benefits of veterans who have served since Sept. 11, 2001.
Let them talk about health coverage, which is a scandal, and the vanishing American pension. Let them offer competing plans for rebuilding the American infrastructure and creating real employment opportunities for the newest generation of workers. Let them go at it over energy policy.
Forget the foolishness for a change. No Willie Hortons this year. No Swift boats. No attacks on John McCain like the mugging he endured at the hands of the Bush crowd in South Carolina some years ago.
For once, let the election be serious. Show the hacks and the hypocrites the door. Argue substance. And then let the people decide.
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5) The Most Curious Thing
By Errol Morris
[Please note, there are many powerful and disturbing Abu Ghraib photos with this article that could not be posted here…bw]
May 19, 2008, 10:56 pm
http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/the-most-curious-thing/?hp
The following essay shows how a photograph aided and abetted a terrible miscarriage of justice. I invite readers to offer their own interpretation of the considerable amount of material contained in the footnotes.
“Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice; “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!”
– Lewis Carroll, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”
“How can you say she’s a good person?” I am sitting in an editing-room in Cambridge, Mass. arguing with one of my editors. I reply, “Well, exactly what is it that she did that is bad?” We are arguing about Sabrina Harman, one of the notorious “seven bad apples” convicted of abuse in the notorious Abu Ghraib scandal. My editor becomes increasingly irritable. (I have that effect on people.) He looks at me as you would a child. “What did she do that is bad? Are you joking?” And then he brings up the trump card, the photograph with the smile. “How do you get past that? The smile? Just look at it. Come on.”
The question kept coming up. How do you explain the smile? What does it mean? Not only is she smiling, she is smiling with her thumbs-up – over a dead body. The photograph suggests that she may have killed the guy, and she looks proud of it. She looks happy.
I should back up a moment.
This is one of the central images in a rogue’s gallery of snapshots, a photograph taken at Abu Ghraib prison in the fall of 2003. It is a photograph taken by Chuck Graner of Sabrina Harman – posed and looking into the lens of the camera.
In my filmed interview for my documentary “Standard Operating Procedure” Sabrina explains her thumbs-up and her smile:[1]
SABRINA HARMAN: I kind of picked up the thumbs-up from the kids in Al Hilla, and so whenever I would get into a photo, I never know what to do with my hands… So any kind of photo, I probably have a thumbs-up because it’s just — I just picked it up from the kids. It’s just something that automatically happens. Like when you get into a photo, you want to smile. It’s just, I guess, something I did.
*******
And indeed I have 20 or so photos of Harman – from Abu Ghraib and from al Hilla, where she had been stationed before Abu Ghraib – in which she is smiling with her thumb up.[2] I felt that showing 10 or 20 thumbs-up photographs didn’t really explain that one photograph. It’s fine to say that all ducks quack, but why is this duck quacking in that one instance? I needed to know: Why is she smiling with her thumb up in that photograph? Somehow her explanation, “It’s just something I did,” wasn’t satisfactory. It bothered me.
Here is another excerpt with another quote about the thumb:
ERROL MORRIS: Why did you take these pictures – Graner of you and you of Graner?
SABRINA HARMAN: It was just to say, “Hey, look, it’s a dead guy. We’re with a dead guy.” It wasn’t anything — I guess we weren’t really thinking, “Hey, this guy has family,” or anything like that, or “Hey, this guy was just murdered.” It was just, “Hey, it’s a dead guy, it’d be cool to get a photo next to a dead person.” I mean that was it. That was the extent of that one… I know it looks bad. I mean, even when I look at [the photographs], I go, “Oh Jesus, that does look pretty bad.” [But] if a soldier sees somebody dead, normally they’ll take photos of it. I don’t know why, maybe it’s a curiosity thing or if they see something odd, they’ll take a photo of it. Just to say “Hey, look where I’ve been, look what I’ve seen.”
ERROL MORRIS: Maybe you can’t believe it yourself?
SABRINA HARMAN: I can’t believe they murdered the guy.
Wait just one second. Murdered?
And who are they?
What does the photograph really show? What are we looking at? A smile? A murder? And if it is a murder, who is the killer?
I would like to answer these questions.
*******
The story behind the photograph starts on Oct. 27, 2003, a little over a week before it was taken. On that day, two Iraqi employees of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) were killed in a bomb explosion outside the organization’s office in Baghdad.[3] Very early in the morning on Nov. 4, 2003, a group of Navy Seals (an acronym for Sea-Air-Land units) apprehended Manadel al-Jamadi, who was suspected of having provided explosives for the Oct. 27 bombing.
He wasn’t taken to Abu Ghraib immediately. First, he was brought to Camp Pozzi, an interrogation center adjacent to the Baghdad International Airport. Camp Pozzi was operated by the Seals but was also used by the C.I.A. Several hours later he was moved to Abu Ghraib – for some prisoners, an intermediate stop before rendition to Jordan.[4]
He was placed first in a holding cell on Tier 4B, interrogated, and then taken to the shower room on Tier 1B, adjacent to Tier 1A, the soon-to-be notorious hard site, where many of the prisoner-abuse photographs were taken. Certain details about what happened early that morning are well known from various investigations and reports. Here are two of them: (1) al-Jamadi walked into the shower room under his own power, and (2) one hour later al-Jamadi was dead.
What happened to him?
We know what happened initially from the accounts of three M.P.’s: Mark Nagy, Jason Kenner, and Walter (Tony) Diaz. Al-Jamadi was put in a stress position, a “Palestinian hanging” — a low-budget crucifixion without the nails. His arms were handcuffed behind him and then the handcuffs were suspended from a window frame. [5,6,7] (As a prisoner becomes weaker and weaker, greater and greater pressure is put on the arms, potentially pulling them out of the sockets.) He is left alone in the room with a C.I.A. interrogator, Mark Swanner, and a C.I.A. translator, identified in various reports as Clint C. [8]
Some background. Abu Ghraib was in the middle of the Sunni triangle, a battleground for the insurgency. Mortars were lobbed into the prison compound on a daily basis. After two soldiers were killed in September 2003 by a mortar attack, most soldiers avoided taking showers in the outdoor facilities. It was just too dangerous. Prisoners in the tent compounds ringed with razor wire were not so fortunate. They had nowhere to go. Abu Ghraib was also a battleground in a military turf war – M.P.’s commanded by Lt. Col. Jerry Phillabaum, M.I.’s (military intelligence) commanded by Col. Thomas Pappas plus the various independent (non-military) contractors: CACI [9] interrogators, Titan [10] interpreters and an assortment of other groups: F.B.I., C.I.D., C.I.A., D.I.A., and Task Force 121. A blizzard of acronyms. There were rules for M.P.’s, rules for M.I., rules for O.G.A., but most significantly, this rule: Stay out of other people’s way, particularly O.G.A.
And some relevant nomenclature. The C.I.A. and various associated groups are referred to in the military as O.G.A. – Other Government Agencies. Curiously, “O.G.A.” also refers to prisoners not “logged” into the system, prisoners without identification numbers. The fact that they are not logged into the system rendered them officially “not there,” even though they were. Another term captures their status of “being there” and “not being there.” They are called “ghosts” – ghost detainees and ghost interrogators. Many soldiers refer to Swanner’s interrogation of al-Jamadi as “an O.G.A. interrogating an O.G.A.” – preserving the sinister double anonymity of the scene in the shower room.
Sgt. Hydrue Joyner, the NCOIC [non-commissioned officer in charge] on the day shift sums up:
HYDRUE JOYNER: When I first got there [to Abu Ghraib] and they first told me about O.G.A., I’m like, “Wait a minute, you don’t add these people to the actual count? Like if I have 50 detainees, but I have these five O.G.A.’s, I don’t really have 55 detainees, I only have 50?” They say, “Yes.” I said, “Well, what about the five souls that are in those cells?” “They’re not there.” “Well yes they are, because I can see them.” “Yeah, you can see them, but they’re not there.” “All right man, hey, whatever works for you, whatever makes you sleep at night, O.K.” And that’s how we ran it because that’s what we were told.
*******
Back in the shower room. Approximately one hour had gone by. Mark Swanner, the C.I.A. interrogator, called for assistance. [11] Al-Jamadi was “sagging” and Swanner wanted him tied “a little higher.” Three M.P.’s on the tier — Sgt. Dennis Stevanus, Sgt. Walter (Tony) Diaz and Specialist Jeff Frost — were called in to help out.
It was about 7 a.m.[12]
Al-Jamadi was unresponsive. The hood was removed. Almost immediately, blood started streaming from his nose. He was dead.
Diaz, the ranking sergeant, describes the tension in the room.
WALTER DIAZ: The O.G.A. — We just look at each other and we were like — It was kind of like a silence for a while. We were like, you know, what happened here? And I look at him and I told him, “Hey listen, this is on you guys. I don’t know what you guys did to him, but you know, this guy is dead.”
Stevanus provides some additional information about the O.G.A.’s demeanor: “After we found out he was dead, they were nervous; they didn’t know what the hell to do. The short, fat O.G.A. guy said, “No one’s ever died on me before when I interrogated them.” [13]
Swanner [14] called on his cell phone for assistance and several other C.I.A. officers arrived.[15] It’s presumably not O.K. to kill prisoners. Several additional M.P.’s arrived, including Capt. Christopher Brinson. Capt. Donald Reese and Lt. Col. Steve Jordan. Jordan soon notified Colonel Pappas, the commander of the prison. [16]
The top brass at the prison — essentially everyone who was anyone — were present and involved in a heated discussion of what to do next.[17] According to Jordan, Pappas made it clear that he wasn’t going to take the fall for what amounted to the death of an O.G.A. prisoner. [18,19]
Hydrue Joyner described [20] the scene as a version of the movie “Weekend at Bernie’s,” where two sad-sack employees pretend that their murdered boss is still alive so that they can avoid being implicated in his death. Indeed, when al-Jamadi was finally entered into the prison log book on November 5, 2003 (since he was a “ghost” detainee without an identification number), he was simply identified as “Bernie.” A good joke.
The body started to smell. By mid-afternoon, a decision was made to pack him in a body bag, ice him down and lock him in the shower room over night while the various M.I. and O.G.A. officers decided what to do next. [21] One thing is absolutely clear. No one wanted to be implicated in al-Jamadi’s death. He became the proverbial “hot potato,” passed quickly from one person to another, until he could be finally disposed of. Many soldiers were involved, but the finger pointing started at Abu Ghraib and has gone on ever since.
There were two keys to the shower room. One was held by Brinson, the second one was left in the 1B office tended by Specialist Megan Ambuhl and Sgt. Ivan (“Freddie”) Frederick. Specialist Sabrina Harman and Cpl. Chuck Graner got the second key from Frederick, let themselves into the 1B shower room and took the two thumbs-up photographs with the corpse.
Harman took the picture of Graner smiling with thumbs up and Graner took the picture of Harman smiling with thumbs up. They left, locked the door, and then Sabrina returned with Frederick later that evening (Nov. 4) and took additional photographs of the corpse, some 14 or 15 of them. These, unlike the thumbs-up photographs taken earlier that evening, are relatively unknown — even though they provide unmistakable evidence of the gruesome treatment al-Jamadi received: broken teeth, a mangled lip, contusions, bruises, the cartilage of his nose crushed, a gash under his right eye.
Here is Harman’s account of the aftermath of the death.
SABRINA HARMAN: When we got to the prison, Captain Brinson had a meeting in the main office with all of us. [22] He said there was a prisoner who had died in the shower, and he died of a heart attack. And he told us that he was on ice, and he was in the shower in tier 1B. That was pretty much it for that. And then we went upstairs. Sergeant Frederick got the key and we just checked him out and took photos of him. Kind of realized right away that there was no way he died of a heart attack because of all the cuts and blood coming out of his nose.
I asked Sabrina whether she thought from the beginning that it was a homicide.
SABRINA HARMAN: It took a while. Like, you started undoing the bandages and looking closely. Like, you see his knees were bruised; his thighs were bruised [around] his genitals. He had restraint marks on his wrists. What else? You had to look close. They did a really good job cleaning him up. I mean, he had ice all over his body, so unless you removed things, you couldn’t really see the actual physical damage that they had done.
And then:
SABRINA HARMAN: You don’t think your commander [Brinson] is going to lie to you about something, first of all. And then you realize wait, maybe he did lie because there’s no way somebody would die of a heart attack and have all these injuries. It just didn’t add up.
*******
The following morning M.I. and O.G.A. were finally able to come to some agreement:[23] the corpse was wheeled out on a gurney with an I.V. in its arm. Ostensibly, the reason for the subterfuge was to prevent a riot — to fool the prisoners into thinking that this was a medical emergency rather than a murder. But clearly, the deception was not just for the prisoners. Soldiers were lied to as well. [24]
An autopsy was done several days later; a full report didn’t appear for several months. It was only after the Abu Ghraib photographs were leaked to C.I.D. (the Criminal Investigation Division of the Army) that C.I.D., C.I.A., O.I.G. (Office of Inspector General) and the NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigative Service) started a joint investigation. Eventually the death of al-Jamadi was also taken up by the various military and civil commissions set up to investigate the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
It is clear that there was a death and an attempted cover-up. But what is not clear is what happened that morning in the 1B shower room. The investigations do not provide answers. Who is responsible for his death? Did the C.I.A., C.I.D. and M.I. intend not only to cover the fact of it but also to obscure who was responsible?
So many different groups were involved – the Navy Seals who brought him to Abu Ghraib, the C.I.A. operatives who questioned him there, the M.P.’s who assisted the O.G.A. interrogators and translator — the lone interrogator who was in the cell with him at the end, and the M.I. guys who arrived immediately following his death.
Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, told me about a meeting he had with Robert Kennedy in the mid-1960s. It concerned Vietnam, and the $64,000 question: What would John F. Kennedy have done in Vietnam had he lived? R.F.K.’s answer was: J.F.K. would have gotten us out of Vietnam. He would have waited until after the ‘64 elections, and then “fuzzed it up.” [25]
Fuzzing it up is a common practice in government. You hide intention and responsibility. You have one person say one thing, and another person the exact opposite. You create a blizzard of paper, so much paper that actual evidence is lost in the glut. And of course, you deny anything and everything you can deny — particularly the obvious. (Denying the obvious is always popular.) You produce noise, distraction and confusion. People rarely think of this as a well-established bureaucratic technique, but it is a tried and true methodology.
With “detention operations” and abuse, there was not one investigation, but multiple investigations blending one in to the other, all assigned a little piece of the puzzle. There were investigations by Congress, by the military and by the Department of Defense. It is the story of the blind men and the elephant. Each is given a piece of an elephant to examine, and then asked to infer the nature of the beast. Not surprisingly, they can’t piece together a conception of the whole from the individual parts. Maj.Gen. Antonio M. Taguba [26] was asked to examine the M.P.’s but go no further. (It was an Article 15-6 investigation into the conduct of the 800th M.P. brigade. He did go further and was eventually censured by the military for having done so.) Maj. Gen. George R. Fay and Lt. Gen. Anthony R. Jones examined M.I. operations.[27] Lt. Gen. Randall Schmidt and Brig. Gen. John T. Furlow — detainment operations at Guantanomo. The Schlesinger Report — Department of Defense detainment operations at Abu Ghraib. The Green Report — possible wrongdoing by the upper-level command in Bagdad. And so on and so forth. Thirteen government reports in all. [28]
The investigations accomplish what R.F.K. talked about with Ellsberg. They fuzz it up. Fuzz it up to the point where no one can even ask the relevant questions, let alone expect relevant answers.
There are discussions and arguments about what really caused al-Jamadi’s death: the injuries caused by the Seals when they arrested him, the brutality of the interrogations in Baghdad and the subsequent interrogations at Abu Ghraib. Let’s try to simplify all of this: What was his physical condition when he was escorted to the shower room in 1B? This is answered in a statement given by Specialist Jason Kenner, who escorted him to the shower room on 1B. [29]
“I did not see any injuries on the prisoner,” Kenner said.
On NOV 03, I was assigned as the runner of tier 1B of the “hard site” at Abu Ghraib Prison… At approximately 0430-0500 hrs, a person from OGA came to the office located near the intake point of tier 4B and advised me that they had a prisoner… The prisoner did not appear to be in distress. He was walking fine and his speech was normal. SSG NAGY AND SGT DIAZ were in and out of the area when the prisoner was brought in. Within minutes of placing the prisoner in the holding cell, the translator and interrogator began to yell at him. They were yelling at the prisoner to find where some weapons were. The prisoner was responding to the yelled questions in Arabic but I could not understand what he was saying… I could see the prisoner in the corner of the cell in a seated position like a scared child with the translator and interrogator leaning over him yelling at him… The OGA personnel then advised SSG NAGY and myself to “take the prisoner to tier one.” Upon this request we placed the prisoner in an orange jumpsuit, handcuffed his hands behind his back and shackled his feet. We used steel handcuffs and shackles to secure the prisoner. At this time I did not see any injuries on the prisoner.
Kenner’s statement is also a curious blend of the personal and anonymous. But it comes alive at several moments. One of them sticks with me: “I could see the prisoner in the corner of the cell … like a scared child.”
*******
We know much more about what happened after al-Jamadi’s death – the arrival of Captain Brinson, the decisions to pack the body with ice and to remove the body with an I.V. in its arm — even though there are no photographs of any of this. [30]
But that evening, the photographs started, and we know — almost second by second — what happened. We know because of the photo time-lines created by C.I.D. expert Brent Pack. (Details from the timeline are provided below. The order of the photographs may not explain the smile but they help us to understand the photographs themselves and what happened that night.)
Sixteen hours after the M.P.’s first become aware of al-Jamadi’s death, Charles Graner and Sabrina Harman go into the shower-room. They are there for six minutes, between 11:32 p.m. and 11:38 p.m. Graner takes the photograph with Sabrina posing at 11:35 p.m. (Baghdad Time) with her thumb up. Sabrina takes the photograph of Graner at 11:38, about three minutes later. Did Graner ask Harman to pose for the thumbs-up photograph, and then ask her to take a photograph of him, posing in the same way? Did they reflexively take turns photographing each other as they had in many other situations? Surely, photography must have provided relief from the tedium as well as the horror.
Harman returns with Frederick (her commanding officer) from 1:18 a.m. to 1:24 a.m — 100 minutes later. She takes additional detailed forensic photographs. All of these photographs are in stark contrast to the thumbs-up-and-smile photographs taken when she first went into the shower room. In the final photograph, taken at 1:23, she removes the bandage from al-Jamadi’s eye, so she can photograph the gash underneath. The timeline of the photographs is compatible with my view of Harman’s intentions. These are not photographs taken out of boredom. She is there to photograph the evidence. This is no heart attack victim.
It is an odd and eventful night.[31] It is a night of photographs that includes the prisoner known as the Hooded Man; photographs of the prisoner (Haj-Ali or “Clawman”) who later claimed that he was the Hooded Man;[32] and photographs of the corpse of al-Jamadi. Significantly, the Hooded Man is brought in by a C.I.D. officer who tells Frederick, “Do anything you need to do short of killing him.” [33] The comment becomes even more interesting because it is made on the same day that al-Jamadi died.
There will always be questions about why any of these photographs were taken. Were they simply yet one more way to humiliate and dehumanize the prisoners? Were they soldiers’ trophies from the war in Iraq? An attempt to collect evidence against the military?
I asked Harman specifically about the pictures she took of al-Jamadi’s body.
SABRINA HARMAN: It was to prove to anybody who looked at this guy, “Hey, I was just lied to. This guy did not die of a heart attack. Look at all these other existing injuries that they tried to cover up.” [34]
*******
Of course, the injuries themselves are not proof that Swanner killed him. Perhaps it was Swanner and Clint C., the translator. Perhaps the Navy Seals broke his ribs and those injuries were exacerbated by and in turn aggravated the effects of the Palestinian hanging. And then how do you parcel out the blame? Seals, C.I.A., M.P.’s? Couldn’t it have been a combination of all three? The cumulative result of all the injuries? And therefore no one is responsible? Could it be that al-Jamadi was just unlucky? The injuries were such that no one injury caused his death; it was an unlucky combination of all of them. Well, that’s argued in one investigation after another, but there is a needle hidden in one of these haystacks of paper. It is titled “Memorandum for the Record,” written by Clifford Nivling, Office of Inspector General Special Investigator. He quotes Cmdr. Joe Hodge, the Deputy Chief Medical Examiner for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP). Hodge had written a report in January 2004 on al-Jamadi’s death in which he states, “the manner of death is homicide.” [35] Here he elaborates to an investigator on his original analysis:
Specifically, Dr. Hodge was asked whether the injuries al-Jamaidi sustained, i.e. broken ribs, contusion to the lung, etc., would have eventually resulted in his death, absent undergoing interrogation(s). Hodge replied that the position al-Jamaidi was placed for interrogation at Abu Ghraib prison, together with the hood placed over his head, was “part and parcel of the homicide.” He explained that the pulmonary injuries al-Jamadi sustained were “not enough” to cause his death… Dr. Hodge said he recently reviewed the case with his colleagues at AFIP and they agreed that the pulmonary injuries al-Jamaidi received most likely did not result from the multiple punches reportedly received while being subdued by U.S. Navy SEAL Team 7 (ST-7) personnel… He said that punching would have resulted in external contusions to the body, which was not evident. Dr. Hodge said al-Jamaidi’s internal injuries were more consistent with the “slow deliberate application of force,” such as would have resulted from someone kneeling on his chest, or holding al-Jamaidi down by placing the heels of someone’s boots on his chest…
(The memorandum is dated June 18, 2004; the alternate spelling “al-Jamaidi” is from the document.)
If the Navy Seals didn’t kill al-Jamadi nor cause the injuries that resulted in his death, and if, according to Jason Kenner, al-Jamadi “…did not appear to be in distress,” how did he die? And one additional question: Is it just a homicide or a murder?
The term “homicide” does not tell us about the nature of the crime. It only tells us that one man killed another. It doesn’t tell us whether it is involuntary manslaughter or murder. However, there is ample reason to call the death of al-Jamadi a murder. A Palestinian hanging is torture. It is illegal. It is a felony. Beating a prisoner is illegal. It is also a felony. Ultimately, intent is not an issue. Under felony-murder statutes, a homicide that occurs during the commission of a felony is a murder, pure and simple.
*******
Al-Jamadi had already been dead for at least 12 hours before Harman got the key from Frederick, the NCOIC of the tier that evening. She went into the shower room with Graner and posed for the thumbs-up picture. The photographs were taken with two different cameras. She left and returned with Frederick and then took additional forensic photographs. She was there to provide evidence of what happened to al-Jamadi.
This letter was written by Harman to Kelly, her partner, on Nov. 9, a couple of days after al-Jamadi’s corpse was wheeled out of Abu Ghraib with an I.V. in its arm and an oxygen mask slapped on its face.
Kelly,
…I’m not sure how to feel. I have a lot of anxiety. I think something is going to happen either with me not making it or you doing something wrong. I think too much. I hope I’m wrong, but if not, know that I love you and you are and always will be my wife. I hate being so scared. I hate anxiety. I hate the unknown. We might be under investigation. I’m not sure, there’s talk about it. Yes, they do beat the prisoners up and I’ve written this to you before. I just don’t think it’s right and never have. That’s why I take the pictures – to prove the story I tell people. No one would ever believe the shit that goes on. No one. The dead guy didn’t bother me, even took a picture with him doing the thumbs-up. But that’s when I realized it wasn’t funny anymore, that this guy had blood in his nose. I didn’t even have to check his ears and I already knew it was not a heart attack they claimed he died of. He bled to death from some cause of trauma to his head. I was told when they took him out they put an IV in him and put him on a stretcher like he was alive to fool the people around – they said the autopsy came back “heart attack.” It’s a lie. The whole military is nothing but lies…
Sabrina wasn’t involved with al-Jamadi’s death, and she wasn’t part of the cover up. Nevertheless, she was accused of several crimes.
SABRINA HARMAN: They tried to charge me with the destruction of government property — which I don’t understand. And then maltreatment, of taking the photos of a dead guy. But he’s dead, so I don’t know how that’s maltreatment. And then altering evidence for removing the bandage from his eye to take a photo of it, and then I placed it back. In my Article 32 [court-martial], Captain Reese came out and said when he died, they cleaned him all up and then stuck the bandages on. So he was already dead when they stuck the bandages on. So it’s not really altering evidence, they had already done that for me, so they had to drop that charge. So in order to make the other charges stick, they would have to bring in the photos, [and] they didn’t want to bring up the dead guy at all, the O.G.A., because obviously they covered up a murder and that would just make them look bad, so they dropped all the charges pertaining to the O.G.A. in the shower. [36]
ERROL MORRIS: They charged you with tampering with evidence after they tampered with evidence?
SABRINA HARMAN: Altering evidence, yes… Well, my first lawyer wanted me to plead guilty to all these, and there was no way I was going to plead guilty to any of these charges, especially that one out of all of them, especially that one, so… When he died, they cleaned him all up, got the blood away and made him look all nice. And then they put the bandages in place where they were in the photos, in the first one. And then they tried to charge me with removing the bandage, taking the photo and putting it back. And they charged me with altering evidence…
ERROL MORRIS: You were tampering with the already tampered evidence?
SABRINA HARMAN: Guilty.
I asked Harman about the officers who were involved.
SABRINA HARMAN: All I know is that Captain Brinson was involved and [Lieutenant] Colonel Jordan was involved. And Captain Reese was there… And then I heard from other people, the guards, how [the body] was taken out, which was with an I.V. on a stretcher.
ERROL MORRIS: An I.V.?
SABRINA HARMAN: They physically put an I.V. in his arm and took him out on a stretcher.
ERROL MORRIS: Why would they do that?
SABRINA HARMAN: They were trying to fool the prisoners around him, thinking he was just sick.
ERROL MORRIS: Trying to fool everybody, I guess.
SABRINA HARMAN: Well, we all knew he was dead, but not how he died. That didn’t come out until later. …They would have done a good job covering it up if the photos weren’t there.
Is Sabrina Harman a good person or a bad person? You tell me. She was part of the nightmare of abuse at Abu Ghraib, but her own act of defiance — her act of civil disobedience — was to take these photographs, to provide proof of what others were trying to deny.
But her smile still made me feel uneasy. And it was because of my continuing uneasiness with the smile that I contacted Paul Ekman, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of California, San Francisco. Ekman is an expert on facial expressions and has written many books, including “Emotions Revealed, Unmasking the Face” and “Telling Lies.” I asked him to help explain Harman’s smile.
(Oliver Sacks has written, “No one in the world has studied facial expressions as deeply as Paul Ekman. In ‘Emotions Revealed’ he presents — clearly, vividly, and in the most accessible way — his fascinating observations about the covert expressions of emotions we all encounter hundreds of times daily, but so often misunderstand or fail to see. There has not been a book of such range and insight since Darwin’s famous ‘Expression of the Emotions’ more than a century ago.” His work is also prominently featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink.”)
I sent him a CD with over 20 pictures of Harman, including the thumbs-up picture with al-Jamadi’s corpse. It is labeled picture No. 2728.
PAUL EKMAN: In picture 2728 she is showing a social smile or a smile for the camera. The signs of an actual enjoyment smile are just not there. There’s no sign of any negative emotion. She’s doing what people always do when they pose for a camera. They put on a big, broad smile, but they’re not actually genuinely enjoying themselves. We would see movement in the eye cover fold. That’s the area of the skin below the eyebrow before the eyelid. And it moves slightly down only with genuine enjoyment. … In one of her pictures I get a chance to see her with no emotion on her face. That’s picture 4034. So I can see what the eye cover fold looks like when she’s not smiling. And it’s just the same as with the smile. That’s the crucial difference between what I call a Duchenne smile, the true smile of enjoyment, named after the French neurologist who first made this discovery in 1862, and the forced smile, the social smile.
(In “Emotions Revealed” Ekman quotes Duchenne: “The emotion of frank joy is expressed on the face by the combined contraction of the zygomaticus major muscle and the orbicularis oculi. The first obeys the will but the second is only put in play by the sweet emotions of the soul… The muscle around the eye does not obey the will; it is only brought into play by a true feeling, an agreeable emotion. Its inertia in smiling, unmasks a false friend.”)
ERROL MORRIS: So 4034 is the comparison picture?
PAUL EKMAN: Yes. That’s the picture I used for comparison. She’s getting something out of a box, and has a black beanie on her head. O.K.? If you go back to the first picture, 2728, and you look at the eye cover fold on that one, if it was an enjoyment smile, the amount of skin between the upper eyelid and the brow would be considerably reduced. We’ve got a lot of data on that and some published articles. It’s the clue. It’s a fairly subtle clue that most people don’t attend to. But it’s the only reliable clue that the muscle called the orbicularis oculi pars lateralis isn’t activated. It’s an involuntary muscle. It only gets activated in nearly all people when there’s genuine enjoyment.
ERROL MORRIS: And you don’t see that in Sabrina’s smile?
PAUL EKMAN: No. It’s just what people put on their face when someone’s going to take a photograph of them, a big, broad smile. The crucial thing is, there’s no sign that she’s really feeling genuine enjoyment while this picture’s being taken. Nor is there any sign that she feels any other emotion, no sign of sadness, no fear, no disgust, and no contempt. It’s just a “say cheese” smile.
ERROL MORRIS: It makes me think the “say cheese” smile was “invented” just for photography.
PAUL EKMAN: Oh, no, no. People do this all the time. This is a very broad smile. It’s the zygomaticus major. That’s the muscle that pulls the lip corners up obliquely. And she’s contracted it to its maximum. In the typical polite smile, the smile you give a host for a dinner party, when you’re going home and telling them you really enjoyed yourself, but you didn’t, you would employ the same zygomaticus muscle, but it wouldn’t be contracted as much. It would be inappropriate to give this broad a smile for most polite-smile situations. This broad smile only occurs with genuine enjoyment or when you’re posing for a camera. Unless you’re Philip Roth — all of the photos for his recent book show him with a totally serious, non-smiling face.
ERROL MORRIS: Just once again so I can be sure I understand. You can distinguish the “say cheese” smile from genuine smiling, the smile of enjoyment.
PAUL EKMAN: Absolutely. It’s the absence of the orbicularis oculi par lateralis. That muscle orbits the eye completely. It pulls up the cheek and it produces crow’s feet wrinkles. However, when you get a big broad smile, like she’s doing, that pushes the cheeks up anyhow. And it will produce crow’s feet wrinkles just on its own. So the only reliable clue as to whether orbicularis oculi par lateralis has acted is to look above the eye. No muscle can lower that skin other than the orbicularis oculi. The smiling-muscle, zygomaticus, can’t affect it. So you can put on as big a smile as you want, and the cover fold skin will not come down.
*******
In “Emotions Revealed,” Ekman provides a graphic photo-illustration of the difference between the Duchenne smile, the real smile and the social smile. “At first glance it might seem that the only difference between these photos is that the eyes are narrower in photo B, but if you compare A and B carefully you will see a number of differences. In B, which shows real enjoyment with a Duchenne smile, the cheeks are higher, the contour of the cheeks has changed, and the eyebrows have moved down slightly. These are all due to the action of the outer part of the muscle that orbits the eye.”
When the smile is much broader, there is only one clue that distinguishes between enjoyment and non-enjoyment smiles. A broad smile, such as in photo C pushes up the cheeks, gathers the skin under the eye, narrows the eye aperture and even produces crow’s-feet wrinkles. All of this without any involvement of the muscle that orbits the eye.
Comparison photo D shows the eyebrow and eye cover-fold (the skin between the eyelid and the eyebrow) have been pulled down by the muscle orbiting the eye. Photo D is a broad enjoyment smile, while C is a very broad non-enjoyment smile. Photo C, incidentally, is a composite photograph made by pasting D from the lower eyelids down on to the neutral photograph E.
Photo F is another composite photograph, in which the smiling lips from picture D have been pasted on to the neutral photograph E. Human beings can not produce the expression shown in photo F. It should look strange to you, and the reason it looks so strange is because when the smile is this broad it produces all the changes in the cheeks and eyes that you see in D.” I made this composite illustration to underline the fact that very broad smiles change not only the lips but also the cheeks and the skin below the eyes.
*******
ERROL MORRIS: I should tell you why I’m asking all of these questions.
PAUL EKMAN: Yes, I’m curious.
ERROL MORRIS: I’ve just finished this movie on the Abu Ghraib photographs. And I believe that many of the photographs have been misunderstood – for many reasons and in many different ways. The picture of Sabrina Harman smiling with her thumb up above the body of an Iraqi prisoner — we know his name, Manadel al-Jamadi. People saw this picture and were horrified. They took her smile as a smile of enjoyment, a smile of pleasure.
PAUL EKMAN: So what’s the explanation of why she has the smile and the thumbs up?
ERROL MORRIS: Her explanation is that she did it all the time. People took her picture and she would have the same goofy smile and the same thumbs-up, again and again and again and again and again.
PAUL EKMAN: Well, there are a lot of them.
ERROL MORRIS: I often think about Sabrina being a woman, a gay woman in the military, trying to show that she is in command, a master of her emotions – not cowed by her experiences but in control. Of course, when people see that photograph, they do not see Sabrina. They see the smile.
PAUL EKMAN: Well, here’s what I think happens when the typical viewer looks at this picture. One, you’re horrified by the sight of this dead person. Most of us haven’t seen a dead person. Certainly not in that state. If you’ve seen a dead person, you’ve seen them in an open casket where they’re made to look like they’re alive. Do you know how “horror” is defined?
ERROL MORRIS: Tell me.
PAUL EKMAN: “Horror,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is the combination of disgust and terror. So I think “horror” is the right word. It’s a horrible sight, and it instills horror. And then you see, right next to that, someone having a good time. Most people will not realize that’s a “say cheese” smile. They’ll think, because of the broadness of the smile and the thumbs-up gesture, they’re having a good time. That’s what makes this a damning picture to the typical viewer.
I’ll add one more thing. When we see someone smile, it is almost irresistible that we smile back at them. Advertisers know that. That’s why they link products to smiling faces. And when we smile back, we begin to actually experience some enjoyment. So this photograph makes us complicit in enjoying the horrible. And that’s revolting to us.
So why it is such an upsetting photograph is not just because we see someone smiling in the context of the horrible, but that when we look at her, we begin to have to resist smiling ourselves. So it’s a terrible, terrible picture for that reason alone.
*******
Here is Ekman’s mechanism: Harman is smiling. We see her smile and can’t help smiling ourselves. Smile and the whole world smiles with you. Smiling is contagious. But when we see the dead man, we recoil in horror. Our “almost irresistible” need to smile makes us feel complicit in the man’s death. We “transfer” those feelings to Harman. We think her smile makes her complicit.
Ekman also emphasizes that Sabrina’s smile does not reflect her underlying emotions. That we can infer little or nothing from it. In her letter of Nov. 9 Sabrina herself tells us she was faking a smile. This is a continuation of the letter (quoted above) written only a couple of days after al-Jamadi’s death.
…if I want to keep taking pictures of those events – I even have short films – I have to fake a smile every time. I hope I don’t get in trouble for something I haven’t done. I hate this. I hate being away from home and I hate half the people I’m surrounded by. They’re idiots. I can’t be here. I don’t want to be a part of the Army, because it makes me one of them. I don’t like it here. I don’t like what we do.
Ironically, when the army was looking for a scapegoat for its crimes, it was precisely this “false image” that they chose to exploit to their advantage. In a sense, Harman was deliberately falsifying the evidence of her own photographs to seem more at home than she was. Then the military turned her strategy on its head, saying that her “exceptional” depravity was deplorable, and something that they needed to weed out and punish. And thus Sabrina Harman’s photographs became part of the evidence used against her in military court.
*******
I hung up the phone, but something was still bothering me, so I called Ekman back five minutes later.
ERROL MORRIS: One other question occurred to me. Take these two smiles, the “say cheese” smile and the smile of genuine pleasure. Wouldn’t natural selection have built into our perceptual apparatus the ability to quickly discriminate between the two?
PAUL EKMAN: Well, it apparently hasn’t. One has to try reasoning backwards, “There must not have been any advantage to being able to tell the difference between the two.” The most important thing in terms of adaptation is for you to know that the other person is either actually or simulating enjoyment. And that was more important than whether they really were enjoying themselves. The fossil record doesn’t tell us much about social life. All one can do is to say there is no really good facial signal that evolved. Now when people laugh in a phony way, that’s a little easier to pick up. But even then, most of us want to hear good news. We don’t want to hear bad news. So we’re tuned to it. We’re very attracted to smiles. They’re very salient. But telling the feigned from the genuine, we’re not good at that for any emotion, for anger, fear. It takes quite a lot to train a professional, a National Security or law enforcement professional (we do quite a bit of that) to be able to distinguish between the two. There are no clear-cut obvious signs. So what must have been important was to know what a person was intending, not what they were feeling.
ERROL MORRIS: Do you think some people are better than others at discriminating?
PAUL EKMAN: We know that there are, but they are less than one percent. And we’ve tested over 10,000 people from every walk of life, from C.I.A. to arbitrators to judges to social workers, psychiatrists. About a half of one percent pick this stuff up without being specially trained.
ERROL MORRIS: I guess a smile is so powerful, that in that picture it becomes the dominant element.
PAUL EKMAN: That’s right. That’s why this picture is so revolting, not because we think she is having a good time, because we get hooked into it. We want to smile back.
******
There are many photographs of al-Jamadi’s body, but it is the photograph of Harman with his body that stands out among them, the photograph of a pretty American girl who is alive and a battered Iraqi man who is dead. The photograph misdirects us. We become angry at Harman, rather than angry at the killer.
We see al-Jamadi’s body, but we don’t see the act that turned him from a human being into a corpse. We don’t understand what the photograph means, nor what it is about.
Instead of asking: Who is that man? Who killed him? The question becomes, Why is this woman smiling? It becomes the important thing — if not the only thing. The viewer assumes that Harman is in some way responsible — or if not responsible, in some way connected to the murder — and is gloating over the body. How dare she? Isn’t she in the same photograph as the body? Looming over the corpse? And even if she is not guilty, she stands in (in the viewer’s imagination) for those who are.
And so we are left with a simple conundrum. Photographs reveal and they conceal. We know about al-Jamadi’s death because of Sabrina Harman. Without her photographs, his death would likely have been covered up by the C.I.A. and by the military. Yes, at first I believed that Harman was complicit. I believed that she was implicated in al-Jamadi’s death. I was wrong. I, too, was fooled by the smile.
Abu Ghraib is all about the blame game. M.P.’s blaming M.I. M.I. blaming the civilian contractors. And everyone blaming the “bad apples.” Harman didn’t murder al-Jamadi. She provides evidence of a crime, evidence that this was no heart attack victim. She took photographs to show that “the military is nothing but lies.” At the very least, to show that she had been lied to by her commanding officer. It is now our job to make sure that her photographs are used to prosecute the people truly responsible for al-Jamadi’s death.
When Alice parts company with the Cheshire cat, she is unsure what to do next. “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” The cat is still smiling, an enigmatic smile. And its last remarks provide a warning for us as well.
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“–so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
Epilogue: Many people have asked me about whether Sabrina Harman has expressed remorse. She has expressed regret, not remorse — regret about the thumbs up and the smile. In “Standard Operating Procedure,” she says, “I know it looks bad.” But she has said more: “No soldier thinks when they’re taking a picture with someone who has died, this is going to be shown to their family or in the press. If they did think that, I’m sure that nobody would ever take a photograph like that. I regret it. I don’t do it anymore. I’ll tell you that. I keep my hands in my pockets when I get my photo taken.”
*******
FOOTNOTES
[1] Sabrina Harman was paid for her time and for permission to reprint portions of her letters from Abu Ghraib. I interviewed her twice in Boston, Mass. The filmed interviews were on March 6, 2006 and Dec. 10, 2006. In addition, there have been numerous phone conversations with her and her lawyers.
[2] Some of these additional pictures are included in “Exposures,” The New Yorker article adapted from my book with Philip Gourevitch: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/24/080324fa_ fact_gourevitch
[3] Bomb Explodes at ICRC Headquarters in Baghdad, story posted on ICRC Web site:
http://www.redcross.org/article/0,1072,0_332_1829,00.ht ml
[4] In some cases, OGA [Other Government Agencies] sent prisoners for further interrogation to “client-states,” like Jordan. According to LTC Steve Jordan, “All they were doing was using the Abu Ghraib facility as a holding area. And sometimes they would bring them out there because they would use the linguistic support of the 205th MI brigade there at the JDIC [Joint Detention and Interrogation Center]. And then if they decided, ‘Hey, we’re not going to keep this person; we’re going to render them out.’ I was aware of at least three or four folks that they rendered out through Amman, Jordan. Now where they went to, I don’t know, sir… I asked somebody, and they said, “We’ve got a flight that goes to Amman, Jordan.” And that flight was the OGA flight, the CIA flight. And that’s how their people came in and out of country that I was aware of, was through facilities over in Amman.”
[5] SPC Jason Kenner, Sworn Statement, March 18, 2004, CID, file # 0237-03-CID259-61219: “The interrogator told us that he did not want the prisoner to sit down and wanted him shackled to the wall. I got some leg irons and shackled the prisoner to the wall by attaching one end of the leg irons to the bars on the window and the other end to the prioner’s handcuffs.”
[6] Sgt. Walter A. Diaz, Interview Report, April 7, 2004, Office of Inspector General (OIG), Case 2003-7423-IG, Death of Manadal Al-Jamadi: “Diaz said the OGA personnel told them to handcuff al-Jamadi to the barred window. Diaz said they used two pairs of handcuffs and secured al-Jamadi in a standing position with his arms over and behind his head. Diaz says they removed the leg shackles before leaving the shower-room.”
[7] Sgt. Mark M. Nagy, Interview Report, April 3, 2004, OIG, Case 2003-7423-IG, Death of Manadal Al-Jamadi: “Al-Jamadi might have been able to kneel from the position, but his arms would have been stretched up and behind him.”
[8] Mr. Mark Swanner, CID Agent’s Investigation Report, ROI # 0237-03-CID259-61219, Interview with Mr. Mark Swanner, Mr. Clint C. and “Steve”: About 1510, 05 Nov 03, SA J.D. Stewart interviewed Mr. Mark Swanner who stated that he, Mr. Clint C. and Steve were part of a team along with SEAL Team 7 on a mission to apprehend Mr. Al-Jamadi at his residence… At approximately 0530, Mr. Swanner, and Mr. Clint C. resumed the interrogation of Mr. Al-Jamadi. Some time around 0700, while answering a question, Mr. Al-Jamadi’s head slumped over to the side. Mr. Swanner stated Mr. Al-Jamadi’s chest was not moving, so he removed his hood to further observe his condition. At this point Mt. Clint C. summoned the Military Police to seek medically assistance for Mr. Al-Jamadi. At this point, both men left the interrogation cell.
[9] CACI is a civilian defense contractor. CACI supplied interrogators for Abu Ghraib. CACI is the actual name of the corporation. It is an acronym for a name that is no longer in use, “Consolidated Analysis Center, Incorporated.”
[10] Titan is another civilian defense contractor. Titan supplied interpreters.
[11] In Jane Mayer’s 2005 article in The New Yorker: “For most of the time that Jamadi was being interrogated at Abu Ghraib, there were only two people in the room with him. One was an Arabic-speaking translator for the C.I.A. working on a private contract, who has been identified in military-court papers only as ‘Clint C.’ He was given immunity against criminal prosecution in exchange for his cooperation. The other person was Mark Swanner.” There were, however, two interrogations. One was on 4B, the subsequent one was in the 1B shower-room. That is where he died.
[12] SPC Jason Kenner, Sworn Statement, March 18, 2004, CID, file # 0237-03-CID259-61219: “At approximately 0430-0500 hrs, a person from OGA came to the office located near the intake point of tier 4B and advised me that they had a prisoner.” Sgt. Walter A. Diaz, Interview Report, April 7, 2004, Office of Inspector General (OIG), Case 2003-7423-IG, Death of Manadal Al-Jamadi: “Diaz said he opened the door to let Al-Jamadi and the OGA personnel in around 5am, and he (Diaz) notified SSG Nagy that they had a new prisoner.”
[13] Dennis E. Stevanus, Sworn Statement, March 24, 2004, CID, File #: 0024-04-CID389-80640: Q: Describe the demeanor of the OGA personnel before and after the interrogation? A: Before, they were normal as like every other day. They took their gear off and grab[bed] a cup of coffee. Then they just went into the room. Afterwards, before we found out he was dead; they were just normal like every other day when they are finished with interviews. After we found out he was dead, they were nervous; they didn’t know what the hell to do. The short fat OGA guy said, “No one’s ever died on me before when I interrogated them.”
Q: Did the OGA personnel make any statement about what happened?
A: They said the guy just quit talking and slouched down. When I told them I was calling my NCOIC, the short OGA guy got on the phone and started calling somebody.
[14] Brinson Interview Report: “Brinson recalled an OGA interrogator and an interpreter were on-site when he arrived at the scene. He described the interrogator as shorter than the interpreter, and heavy set.”
[15] The official reports are unclear about how many people were in the room when al-Jamadi died. Diaz emphasizes that Swanner was alone in the room with al-Jamadi. Errol Morris interview with Walter Diaz, April 22, 2006:
WALTER DIAZ: There were two CIA guys at the beginning, but when they were interrogating this one guy [al-Jamadi] there was only one.
ERROL MORRIS: So when you were asked [to come into the shower-room] there was only one guy in the room?
WALTER DIAZ: Yes. There was only one guy in the room… Two guys brought him in – two CIA guys °©– but during the interrogation there was only one guy.
[16] Article 32 Transcript U.S. v. Harman, June 24, 2004:
DONALD REESE: I did see him after he died. His body was on the top tier as you walk into the cellblock to the left. It was on the top left side of the tier. I was called by CPT Brinson, Officer in Charge (OIC) of the wing, and he told me that we had a situation and that I should come up to see what was going on… The body was clothed and laying on the floor. COL Pappas, LTC Jordan and some OGA guys were present looking at the body.
[17] Errol Morris interview with Walter Diaz, April 22, 2006:
WALTER DIAZ: So that’s what I told him, “Listen sir, I don’t know what happened. You guys in charge of this. I don’t know what happened, I don’t know what’s going to happen.” So that’s when he took his cell phone, went out and started calling his people, I guess. And then as soon as that happened, I went and called my NCOIC, called him up on the radio. “Hey, sir, you need to respond here quick. We got this situation going on here.” And then he was like, “Oh, what is it?” Because, you know, it was early in the morning, nothing went on. I said, “You need to get here now.” He said, “What is it? Tell me?” I said, “Well, I think we have a dead guy here.” And that’s when they all started running and trying to find what was going on. And then matter of time, you had medics, you had the entire chain of command right there trying to figure out what was going on.
ERROL MORRIS: By the entire chain of command, whom do you mean? Who was there? Who shows up?
WALTER DIAZ: Well, we had a colonel that showed up.
ERROL MORRIS: Jordan?
WALTER DIAZ: Colonel Jordan, yeah, he was in charge of the MIs. He came in; the medics came in. Later, Captain Reese came in, Captain Brinson, First Sergeant. You had everybody showed up. Platoon sergeant, Sergeant Snider, everybody showed up.
[18] Captain Christopher R. Brinson, Interview Report, April 5, 2004, OIG, Case 2003-7423-IG, Death of Iraqi Detainee: “Brinson advised that he did not assume control of the situation surrounding al-Jamadi’s death. He stated he was in charge of the MPs and considered al-Jamadi an OGA and Military Intelligence (MI) matter.
[19] Errol Morris interview with Lt. Colonel Steve Jordan, Aug. 5, 2007:
STEVE JORDAN: Colonel Pappas looked at me and said, “You know, I’m not going down alone for this.” I said, “Sir, going down for what? The guy’s an insurgent and he died.” I said, “We didn’t even know he was here. They brought him out. They failed to let anybody know, and they took him right in and started processing him. And started interrogating. And he said, “Alright, when the team leader gets here, bring him. We need to handle this.” “Roger that sir.”
[20] Errol Morris interview with Sgt. Hydrue Joyner, May 20, 2006:
HYDRUE JOYNER: Oh, okay. Yeah, I called him Bernie. You ever see that movie, “Weekend at Bernie’s?” I don’t want to spoil it for you. Go rent that and you’ll understand what I’m talking about. But for you folks out there that knew what I’m talking about, when Bernie surfaced, if you will, again that happened on my day off. I come in the next day°©
ERROL MORRIS: Hey wait a second. All this happens on your day off?
HYDRUE JOYNER: I’m telling you, everything happened on my day off. Everything that happened on my day off. You know, I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it happened on my day off. So I come in after being off that day, and I’m going there and relieve°©I think it was Sabrina that briefed me on it. And at 4:00 in the morning, your brain hasn’t really started to function yet. It still hasn’t decided if it wants to be awake or not. So she’s telling me yeah, this, that and the other happened and I’m like, “What is that smell?” You know, we been in Iraq for a while and you can pretty much filter out certain senses. But I’m like, “Something just don’t smell right, what is that smell?” And just as sure as I’m sitting right here, she says, “Oh, that’s the dead guy in the cell.” “Oh, okay.” And she goes on about five minutes past it. “Wait a minute, did you just…°©What did I hear you say?” “There’s a dead guy in there.” I had to wipe the°©…clean out my eyes and out my ears. “Did you say there’s a dead guy in the shower?” She said, “Yes.” I said, “Are you playing with me? Am I getting punked?” “No.” So I goes over to the shower and it was locked. The shower room is never locked, there’s a padlock on the lock. Like, “What the hell is that, and why is there water coming out of there? “He’s on ice.” “What the hell do you mean, he’s on ice? What is he doing dead, and why is he still here?” And apparently the guy was in some kind of interrogation and doing the interrogation, the man just died and that was it. That’s the story I got, and I was like, “Wait, whoa, somebody…°©You don’t just die, you know, in the middle of talking to somebody.” It just doesn’t seem…°©It doesn’t happen every day. So she was like, “No, he was in the middle of interrogating and just expired. Ceased to exist.” And I’m like, “And they left him here?” And, “Yeah, they left him there and put him on ice because we don’t have a morgue. Where you going to take him?” You know, I guess, I guess that was the thinking. And I’m like, “Oh my goodness, this is not good. This can’t be…°©No, this ain’t good.” So lo and behold, I get the story and yeah, he died in interrogation and they put him on ice and a decision, I guess, was being made of how they were going to move him out without everybody thinking the man had just died. I’m like, “Oh Lord, have mercy.” And I’m thinking to myself in the back of my head, “Oh, thank God I was off yesterday.” The only thing…°©Yeah, I mean, the man’s dead, that’s wrong, you know, I don’t know him but I feel sorry for his passing. But it didn’t happen while I was working, so you got to take your victories where you can get them. So I was like, “Whew.” But yeah, Bernie expired on my day off.
[21]. Captain Christopher R. Brinson, Interview Report, April 5, 2004, OIG, Case 2003-7423-IG, Death of Iraqi Detainee: “Brinson stated that sometime after he arrived at the scene, a senior OGA person, whose name was Steve, arrived. He knew Steve from previous dealings at the prison with OGA detainees that were housed in the wing and tier reserved for sensitive prisoners of interest to OGA and MI. Brinson related that officer in charge of MI, Lieutenant Colonel Jordan, also came to the scene that morning and discussed with Steve what to do with al-Jamadi’s body. As a result of those discussions, Steve advised Brinson that OGA would be removing the body from the prison. However, Steve subsequently informed Brinson that he could not move the body on that day and inquired whether Brinson could obtain ice to ice the body to delay composition.”
[22] According to Sabrina Harman, most of the nightshift was present: Harman, Wisdom, Jones, Graner, Frederick, Javal Davis, Cathcart, Hubbard, Megan Ambuhl, Stephens, Goodman and Escalante.
[23] Captain Christopher R. Brinson, Interview Report, April 5, 2004, OIG, Case 2003-7423-IG, Death of Iraqi Detainee: “Brinson advised that OGA and MI developed a plan intended to remove Al-Jamadi’s body from the prison without alarming or upsetting other prisoners. The plan was to place a bandage over Al-Jamadi’s bloody eye and inserting an intravenous line in one arm, placing Al-Jamadi on a gurney, without the body bag, and moving him out to an ambulance that would take him out of the prison. This plan was to be carried out the day after Al-Jamadi died.”
[24] Errol Morris filmed interview with Walter Diaz, April 22, 2006:
WALTER DIAZ: Well, what that, they didn’t want to find out, other people, that there were other prisoners, they didn’t really want to make them think that yeah, we’re killing people here. And we didn’t want to start no riots or nothing like that. So what they did, within the compound, they trying to cover it up. They actually called an ambulance, medics came in, and actually put in an IV, a fake IV on this guy, and took him on the stretcher. Make him seem like he was actually sick when they were transporting him. So they did a couple things just to°©but that was for the site, though, that was to make it seem like nothing’s happened here, everything’s okay. This guy, he’s still alive, he’s just sick, we going to take him to the hospital.
And as far as trying to cover up for Army-wise, I don’t know if that really happens. I don’t know if they intended to do that, I never figured out what happened after that.
ERROL MORRIS: To do what? Intended to do…°©I’m sorry?
WALTER DIAZ: To cover up. I don’t know what the OGAs did to try and cover it up. I don’t know the story about that. Once he left the site, we had no idea what was going on.
[25] Interview with Daniel Ellsberg, November 13, 2003:
DANIEL ELLSBERG: In ’67 [Bobby Kennedy] told me the President was determined not to send ground combat troops. And he said, I don’t know what he would have done in the event, you know, a year or two away. But I know what he intended to do, and he was determined not to send ground combat units. And I knew that he had had those units recommended to him by McNamara and others, virtually everyone else, in ’61. And he rejected them. He sent only advisers, who are much less likely to suffer casualties. So they weren’t as much of a commitment. So I could believe that was his intention, not to send ground combat units.
So I said to Bobby, rather impudently, “What made him so smart?” There was whap on the table and I jumped a little bit, and he hit the table again. And he said, “Because we were there! We were there in 1951,” I believe it was. “We were there and we saw what happened to the French.” And my brother was determined – “not to let that happen to us.” And I said, soberly then, “Would he have been prepared to lose Saigon? To see Saigon go Communist?” Because that’s the test. And Bobby said, “We would have fuzzed it up. We would have tried for a Laotion type of solution.” And I knew what that meant. And he went on, he said, “A coalition government, an international conference, so we’d have other people making this deal, making this arrangement — not just us.
[26] PDF of the report: http://www.npr.org/iraq/2004/prison_abuse_report.pdf
[27] PDF of the report: http://www.news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/dod/fay82504rpt. pdf
[28] Through 2005, the Department of Defense cites twelve government reports. “Formica’s investigation was one of 12 major investigations and reports DoD has done,” the defense official said. “The 12 investigations have yielded 492 recommendations, almost all of which have been implemented,” he said. http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=160 17
As of June 2006, the Minnesota Human Rights cites seventeen major investigations, of which thirteen were conducted by the military. The remaining investigations were conducted by the FBI, UN, Red Cross and Intelligence Science Board.
http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/OathBetrayed/general-inves tigations.html
[29] SPC Jason Kenner, Sworn Statement, March 18, 2004, CID, file # 0237-03-CID259-61219. The statement is part of the Navy SEALs investigation into al-Jamadi’s death. Kenner has no reason to lie. He is in no way linked to the death of al-Jamadi, but it is clear that his statement is important to the defense attorneys for the Navy SEALs because it clears the SEALs of direct involvement in al-Jamadi’s death.
[30] SSG Mark N. Nagy Interview Report, 4/3/2004, OIG, Case: 2003-7423-IG, Death of Iraqi Detainee: Nagy related that Captain Christopher Brinson arrived on the scene within one-half hour of Diaz notifying Nagy of the death, whereupon Brinson reportedly took control from that point on. Nagy said that Brinson was responsible for icing the body down and arranging for the body’s removal.”
[31] The first photographs of al-Jamadi are taken less than one-half hour after the central, iconic photograph of the Iraq War – the two pictures of “the Hooded Man” on the box with wires – taken only a second apart at 11:01 PM. And then Sabrina takes (what is for me) the most powerful photograph from Abu Ghraib. It is taken with Graner’s camera, rather than her own. It is a picture of Ivan Frederick looking at the most infamous photograph of the Iraq War – the picture of the hooded man – displayed on the screen of his own camera with the hooded man standing in the distance. I try to imagine what he is thinking, what he sees. What the image means to him? It has existed as an image for only a couple of seconds. It is being seen for the first time by one person °©– before it has been transmitted and re-transmitted around the world hundreds of million times and is seen by perhaps a billion people.
[32] http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/15/will-the-rea l-hooded-man-please-stand-up/
[33] This statement is part of Ivan Frederick’s Record of Trial, 20 October 2004, p.285:
IVAN FREDERICK: I in turn looked over on 1 Bravo side and I seen Agent Romero [CID] over there. So I asked him, I went over and talked to him and I asked him what was going on with this particular detainee, and he told me that he had some valuable intelligence about the remains of four American soldiers and who possibly killed them. So I said, “Well, what do you want done to him?” He said, “I really don’t give a … just as long as you don’t kill him.” So then I went over and I just stood there and looked at him for a while. I seen these wires hanging from the wall inside the shower. I walked by them many times, so I just took one and wrapped it around his finger.
[34] Indeed, Brinson claimed to investigators that al-Jamadi had not been beaten. Captain Christopher R. Brinson, Interview Report, April 5, 2004, OIG, Case 2003-7423-IG, Death of Iraqi Detainee: Brinson stated that suspicion about the manner in which al-Jamadi might had died led him to look at the victim’s mouth and nose, using his “sure-fire” flashlight, and noted he saw no blood or signs that al-Jamadi had bit his tongue. This allayed his concern that the deceased might have been beaten.”
[35] In the “Final Autopsy Report,” signed by Dr. Hodge and dated Jan. 9, 2004,“According to investigating agents, interviews taken from individuals present at the prison during the interrogation indicate that a hood made of synthetic material was placed over the head and neck of the detainee. This likely resulted in further compromise of effective respiration. Mr. Al-jamadi was not under the influence of drugs of abuse or ethanol at the time of death. The cause of death is blunt force injuries of the torso complicated by compromised respiration. The manner of death is homicide.”
[36] Among the many charges listed in Sabrina’s charge sheet dated March 20, 2004. “Charge VI, Violation of the UCMG, Article 134, Indecent Acts, Specification #1: In that Specialist Sabrina D. Harman, U.S. Army, did, at or near Baghdad Central Correctional Facility, Abu Ghraib Iraq, between on or about 1 August and on or about 31 October 2003, desecrate a human corpse by entering the Baghdad Central Correctional Facility Morgue, and unzipping a body bag in which a corpse was contained, and posing for photographs with the said corpse… Specification #3: In that Special Sabrina D. Harman, U.S. Army, did, at or near Baghdad Central Correctional Facility, Abu Ghraib Iraq, between on or about November 2003 desecrate a human corpse by entering a shower-room where the corpse was covered by ice, opening the body bag in which the corpse was contained and taking pictures of the said corpse.” These charges were eventually dropped.
*******
Acknowledgments: I have benefited from many conversations with Philip Gourevitch, my researchers Amanda Branson Gill and Rosie Branson Gill, Ann Petrone, and my wife, Julia Sheehan. Charles Silver read many drafts of this essay and provided ideas and suggestions. Elizabeth Shelburne, Karen and George Grimsrud, and Alice Truax have been helpful with editing. I read Jane Mayer’s pioneering reporting in The New Yorker. It encouraged me to look further into the circumstances of al-Jamadi’s death. Brent Pack, a forensic investigator for the Criminal Investigation Division of the Army, created the time-line diagrams.
A major problem here is that few people have been willing to look past the photographs into the reality of Abu Ghraib. Sabrina Harman was not involved in al-Jamadi’s death. I know this from hundreds of documents and sources. Someone in a blog wrote: “Who cares about these people?” Quite simply, I care. In learning about Sabrina Harman and the death of al-Jamadi, we can learn more about Abu Ghraib. I believe that the failure to prosecute any C.I.A. personnel for the death of al-Jamadi may lead to the highest echelons of the government. Investigating small things can often teach us about the big things that stand behind them.
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6) Report Details Complaints Over Interrogations
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and SCOTT SHANE
May 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/washington/20cnd-detain.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1211306858-oQgn+3Z+DEx3/Spkcu6WuA
WASHINGTON — F.B.I. agents complained repeatedly, beginning in 2002, about the harsh interrogation tactics that military and C.I.A. interrogators were using in questioning terrorism suspects, like making them do dog tricks and parade in the nude in front of female soldiers, but their complaints appear to have had little effect, according to an exhaustive report released Tuesday by the Justice Department’s inspector general.
The report describes major and repeated clashes between F.B.I. agents and their counterparts over the rough methods being used on detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq — some of which, according to the inspector general, may have violated the Defense Department’s own policies at the time.
It also provides new insight into the intense debates at senior levels of the Justice Department, the Defense Department and the National Security Council over what should and should not be allowed — a debate in which the Defense Department prevailed.
The inspector general found that in a few instances, F.B.I. agents participated in interrogations using pressure tactics that would not have been permitted inside the United States. But the “vast majority” of agents followed the bureau’s legal guidelines and “separated themselves” from harsh treatment.
For instance, F.B.I. agents expressed “strong concerns” about the abusive treatment by the C.I.A. in 2002 of Abu Zubaydah, a senior Al Qaeda figure, leading to tense discussions between senior officials at the two agencies over how such important prisoners should be handled.
Still, the bureau “had not provided sufficient guidance to its agents on how to respond when confronted with military interrogators who used interrogation techniques that were not permitted by the F.B.I.,” and that fueled confusion and dissension, the report said.
“In sum, while our report concluded that the F.B.I. could have provided clearer guidance earlier, and while the F.B.I. and DoJ could have pressed harder for resolution of F.B.I. concerns about detainee treatment, we believe the F.B.I. should be credited for its conduct and professionalism in detainee interrogations in the military zones in Afghanistan,” in Iraq and at Guantánamo Bay, the report said. DoJ refers to the Justice Department, the bureau’s parent agency.
Jameel Jaffer, who tracks detainee issues for the American Civil Liberties Union, took a more critical stance. “The report confirms that senior F.B.I. officials knew as early as 2002 that other agencies were using abusive interrogation methods,” Mr. Jaffer said. “The report shows unequivocally, however, that the F.B.I.’s leadership failed to act aggressively to end the abuse.”
He said the report documents “a failure of leadership” at the bureau, and “only underscores the pressing need for an independent and comprehensive investigation of prisoner abuse.”
The report said that several senior Justice Department Criminal Division officials raised concerns with the National Security Council in 2003 about the military’s treatment of detainees, but saw no changes as a result of their complaints.
John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, declined to be interviewed by the inspector general’s office of the department he had headed, an unusual refusal and one that hampered investigators’ attempts to learn of discussions inside the council, the report said.
A Pentagon spokesman had no immediate comment on the report.
The inspector general’s office started its investigation in late 2004, following widespread public attention to the question of detainee treatment spurred by graphic photographs of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The American Civil Liberties Union, through a lawsuit, also unearthed numerous internal e-mail messages from the bureau about agents’ complaints of rough interrogation tactics at Guantánamo Bay, which proved central in the Justice Department’s review.
The investigation examined about a half-million documents and included surveys of 1,000 F.B.I. agents regarding their experiences with interrogation tactics by military and C.I.A. interrogators, as well as interviews with hundreds of other bureau personnel, officials said. The investigation centered on the accounts of what the agents witnessed in the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and how those complaints were handled. The Justice Department’s inspector general does not have jurisdiction over the Pentagon.
The bulk of the report was completed last year, but its public release by the inspector general was bottled up for months because of concerns from the Defense Department about the disclosure of sensitive information centering on interrogation tactics. The final report from the inspector general, unlike some earlier terrorism investigations, was released with relatively few blacked-out sections.
The bureau stationed agents at Guantánamo Bay and other military detention sites to assist in the questioning of detainees taken into custody after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but the rough tactics by military interrogators soon became a major source of friction between the bureau and sister agencies. Agents complained to superiors beginning in 2002 that the tactics they had seen in use yielded little actual intelligence, prevented them from establishing a rapport with detainees through more traditional means of questioning, and might violate bureau policy or American law.
One bureau memorandum spoke of “torture techniques” used by military interrogators. Agents described seeing things like inmates handcuffed in a fetal position for up to 24 hours, left to defecate on themselves, intimidated by dogs, made to wear women’s underwear and subjected to strobe lights and extreme heat and cold.
Ultimately, the bureau ordered its agents not to participate in or remain present when such tactics were used. But that directive was not formalized until May 2004, and it governed only the bureau’s own agents. Robert S. Mueller III, director of the F.B.I., told Congress that he was not made aware of his agents’ concerns until 2004.
Democrats in Congress have been anxiously awaiting the findings from the inspector general as they seek to push for answers from the Bush administration about how interrogation policies were developed. Representative Jerrold Nadler, the New York Democrat who leads a House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution and civil right, told reporters on Monday, in advance of the report’s release, that he sensed a “a reluctance to confront senior administration officials” about interrogation policies from the bureau and elsewhere. He said the report should help answer key questions about how policies were executed.
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7) U.S. Says It Is Holding 500 Youths in Iraq
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/world/middleeast/20gitmo.html?ref=world
The American military is holding about 500 juveniles in detention centers in Iraq and has about 10 detained at the military base at Bagram, Afghanistan, the United States has told the United Nations.
A total of 2,500 people under the age of 18, almost all in Iraq, have been detained for periods of up to a year or more since 2002, the United States reported last week to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. Most are believed to be 16 or 17.
Civil liberties groups like the International Justice Network and the American Civil Liberties Union denounced the detentions as a violation of treaty obligations.
The United States confirmed a periodic report on its compliance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child that “as of April 2008, the United States held about 500 juveniles in Iraq.”
“The juveniles that the United States has detained have been captured engaging in anticoalition activity, such as planting improvised explosive devices, operating as lookouts for insurgents or actively engaged in fighting against U.S. and coalition forces,” the report said.
The report said that of the 2,500 juveniles jailed since 2002, all but 100 had been picked up in Iraq. Of the remainder, most were in Afghanistan. The report also says it has held eight juveniles, ages 13 to 17, at its detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
“It remains uncertain the exact age of these individuals, as most of them did not know their date of birth or even the year they were born,” the report says. But military doctors who evaluated them believed that three were under age 16. Six were released, and two are now adults facing war-crimes charges.
A Canadian, Omar Khadr, now 21, was captured in July 2002 and is charged with murder. He is accused of throwing a grenade that killed an American Special Forces soldier. Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan who the military says is about 23, faces charges of attempted murder in connection with a 2002 grenade attack that wounded two American soldiers.
The American report pointed out, “Although age is not a determining factor in whether or not we detain an individual under the law of armed conflict, we go to great lengths to attend to the special needs of juveniles while they are in detention.”
In Bagram, a military spokesman, First Lt. Richard K. Ulsh of the Marines, said on Sunday, “There are no detainees being held under the age of 16, and, without getting into specifics due to the frequent fluctuation in the number of detainees being held, we can tell you that there are currently less than 10 detainees being held under the age of 18.”
Jamil Dakwar, director of the A.C.L.U.’s Human Rights Program, released a statement expressing his dismay.
“It is shocking to know that the U.S. is holding hundreds of juveniles in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even more disturbing that there is no comprehensive policy in place that will protect their rights as children,” it said.
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8) Makeshift Space for Inmates as Prisons Exceed Capacity
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
May 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/nyregion/20prisons.html?ref=nyregion
New York’s federal prisons are letting inmates sleep in areas not originally designed for inmate beds — like television rooms — because of overcrowding in excess of 50 percent, according to correspondence with the Federal Bureau of Prisons released on Monday by Senator Charles E. Schumer.
According to Harley G. Lappin, the director of the bureau, more than 5,700 inmates were in New York federal prisons on an average day in the 2007 fiscal year, far above the recommended population of 3,600.
Each of New York’s four federal prisons is at least 50 percent over capacity, with the federal prison in Ray Brook at a high of 61.2 percent over.
The prisons in Ray Brook, in Essex County, and Otisville, in Orange County, are the two federal institutions in New York State now housing inmates in areas not designed for sleeping, Mr. Lappin said. That information came in response to questions by Mr. Schumer’s office.
A spokesman for Mr. Schumer, Josh Vlasto, said that a representative for Mr. Schumer visited Otisville, met with the warden and saw the overcrowding and short staffing firsthand. That, Mr. Vlasto said, prompted Mr. Schumer to ask for the report.
Systemwide, federal prisons are operating at 37 percent above capacity, according to the bureau. But that average disguises a large range: from a low of 10 percent over capacity in minimum-security prisons to a high of 49 percent in high-security institutions. The other two categories are low-security prisons, which are 33 percent over capacity, and medium-security prisons, which are at 47 percent over capacity.
But New York State prisons are strained in large part because federal prisons make an effort to keep prisoners close to their home communities.
The prison population, both state and federal, has been steadily increasing since the early 1980s, partly because of the length of sentences, which for comparable low-level crimes are more severe than they are in European nations.
New York ranks fourth among states in the size of the total prison population, behind California, Texas and Florida.
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9) Merck Agrees to Settlement Over Vioxx Ads
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/business/21vioxx.html?ref=business
HARRISBURG, Pa. — The drug maker, Merck & Company, has agreed to pay $58 million as part of a multistate settlement of accusations that its ads for the once-popular painkiller Vioxx deceptively played down the health risks.
The agreement announced Tuesday also calls for Merck to submit all new TV commercials for its drugs to the Food and Drug Administration for review.
The civil settlement ends investigations by 29 states and the District of Columbia into Merck’s advertising practices involving Vioxx, Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett said.
Vioxx was taken off the market in 2004 after research showed it doubled the risk of heart attacks and strokes. That triggered thousands of lawsuits against Merck, which is based in Whitehouse Station, N.J. A pending $4.85 billion settlement would end the bulk of those personal injury suits.
Thanks to aggressive marketing through direct-to-consumer television ads begun in 1999, hundreds of thousands of consumers demanded Vioxx prescriptions before doctors had a chance to understand the side effects, Mr. Corbett said.
“Consumers need clear information about the risks associated with prescription drugs so that they can make well-informed decisions about their health care,” Mr. Corbett said.
An F.D.A. spokeswoman did not immediately return a telephone message seeking comment Tuesday.
The agreement calls for Merck to submit all new TV commercials for its drugs to the agency for review and follow through with any changes the agency recommends before airing them for seven years. Additionally, for a 10-year period Merck must comply with any F.D.A. recommendations to delay television advertising for newly approved pain medications.
Merck is also prohibited from “ghostwriting,” a practice in which people who worked for the company or were otherwise connected to it allegedly wrote positive articles and studies about Vioxx, Mr. Corbett said.
Merck is not admitting any wrongdoing under the settlement and defended its marketing of Vioxx in a statement Tuesday.
“Today’s agreement enables Merck to put this matter behind us and focus on what Merck does best, developing new medicines,” said Bruce Kuhlik, Merck’s executive vice president and general counsel.
A Corbett spokesman, Kevin Harley, said the settlement does not require court approval.
Most of the settlement cost will be covered by a $55 million pretax charge that Merck said it took in the first quarter.
Pennsylvania officials could not immediately provide a breakdown of how the $58 million will be divided.
In February, Merck agreed to pay $671 million to settle claims it overcharged the government for Vioxx and three other popular drugs and bribed doctors to prescribe its drugs. The announcement by federal prosecutors was one of the biggest U.S. health care fraud settlements ever.
In addition to Pennsylvania, the states included in Tuesday’s settlement are Arkansas, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin.
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10) Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain
By SARA REISTAD-LONG
May 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/health/research/20brai.html?ref=health
When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong.
Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.
The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, “Progress in Brain Research.”
Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer’s disease, for example, strikes 13 percent of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful.
“It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing,” said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.”
For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.
When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students.
“For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,” said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. “But for older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another.”
Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention, like others’ yawning and fidgeting, may help you assess the speaker’s real impact.
“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” Dr. Hasher said. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”
In a 2003 study at Harvard, Dr. Carson and other researchers tested students’ ability to tune out irrelevant information when exposed to a barrage of stimuli. The more creative the students were thought to be, determined by a questionnaire on past achievements, the more trouble they had ignoring the unwanted data. A reduced ability to filter and set priorities, the scientists concluded, could contribute to original thinking.
This phenomenon, Dr. Carson said, is often linked to a decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex. Studies have found that people who suffered an injury or disease that lowered activity in that region became more interested in creative pursuits.
Jacqui Smith, a professor of psychology and research professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the current research, said there was a word for what results when the mind is able to assimilate data and put it in its proper place — wisdom.
“These findings are all very consistent with the context we’re building for what wisdom is,” she said. “If older people are taking in more information from a situation, and they’re then able to combine it with their comparatively greater store of general knowledge, they’re going to have a nice advantage.”
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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Iowa: Lawsuit Filed Over Raid
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Midwest
The nation’s largest single immigration raid, in which nearly 400 workers at an Agriprocessors Inc. meat processing plant in Postville were detained on Monday, violated the constitutional rights of workers at a meatpacking plant, a lawsuit contends. The suit accuses the government of arbitrary and indefinite detention. A spokesman for the United States attorney’s office said he could not comment on the suit, which was filed Thursday on behalf of about 147 of the workers. Prosecutors said they filed criminal charges against 306 of the detained workers. The charges include accusations of aggravated identity theft, falsely using a Social Security number, illegally re-entering the United States after being deported and fraudulently using an alien registration card.
May 17, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/us/17brfs-LAWSUITFILED_BRF.html?ref=us
Senate Revises Drug Maker Gift Bill
By REUTERS
National Breifing | Washington
A revised Senate bill would require drug makers and medical device makers to publicly report gifts over $500 a year to doctors, watering down the standard set in a previous version. The new language was endorsed by the drug maker Eli Lilly & Company. Lawmakers said they hoped the support would prompt other companies to back the bill, which had previously required all gifts valued over $25 be reported. The industry says the gifts are part of its doctor education, but critics say such lavish gestures influence prescribing habits.
May 14, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/washington/14brfs-SENATEREVISE_BRF.html?ref=us
Texas: Sect Mother Is Not a Minor
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Southwest
Child welfare officials conceded to a judge that a newborn’s mother, held in foster care as a minor after being removed from a polygamous sect’s ranch, is an adult. The woman, who gave birth on April 29, had been held along with more than 400 children taken last month from a ranch run by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She was one of two pregnant sect members who officials had said were minors. The other member, who gave birth on Monday, may also be an adult, state officials said.
May 14, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/us/14brfs-SECTMOTHERIS_BRF.html?ref=us
Four Military Branches Hit Recruiting Goals
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Washington
The Marine Corps far surpassed its recruiting goal last month, enlisting 2,233 people, which was 142 percent of its goal, the Pentagon said. The Army recruited 5,681 people, 101 percent of its goal. The Navy and Air Force also met their goals, 2,905 sailors and 2,435 airmen. A Defense Department spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said that if the Marine Corps continued its recruiting success, it could reach its goal of growing to 202,000 people by the end of 2009, more than a year early.
May 13, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/us/13brfs-FOURMILITARY_BRF.html?ref=us
Texas: Prison Settlement Approved
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Southwest
A federal judge has approved a settlement between the Texas Youth Commission and the Justice Department over inmate safety at the state’s juvenile prison in Edinburg. The judge, Ricardo Hinojosa of Federal District Court, signed the settlement Monday, and it was announced by the commission Wednesday. Judge Hinojosa had previously rejected a settlement on grounds that it lacked a specific timeline. Federal prosecutors began investigating the prison, the Evins Regional Juvenile Center, in 2006. The settlement establishes parameters for safe conditions and staffing levels, restricts use of youth restraints and guards against retaliation for reporting abuse and misconduct.
May 8, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/us/08brfs-PRISONSETTLE_BRF.html?ref=us
Michigan: Insurance Ruling
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Midwest
Local governments and state universities cannot offer health insurance to the partners of gay workers, the State Supreme Court ruled. The court ruled 5 to 2 that Michigan’s 2004 ban against same-sex marriage also blocks domestic-partner policies affecting gay employees at the University of Michigan and other public-sector employers. The decision affirms a February 2007 appeals court ruling. Up to 20 public universities, community colleges, school districts and local governments in Michigan have benefit policies covering at least 375 gay couples.
May 8, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/us/08brfs-INSURANCERUL_BRF.html?ref=us
Halliburton Profit Rises
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
HOUSTON (AP) — Increasing its global presence is paying off for the oil field services provider Halliburton, whose first-quarter income rose nearly 6 percent on growing business in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, the company said Monday.
Business in the first three months of 2008 also was better than expected in North America, where higher costs and lower pricing squeezed results at the end of 2007.
Halliburton shares closed up 3 cents, at $47.46, on the New York Stock Exchange.
Halliburton said it earned $584 million, or 64 cents a share, in the three months that ended March 31, compared with a year-earlier profit of $552 million, or 54 cents a share. Revenue rose to $4.03 billion, from $3.42 billion a year earlier.
April 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/business/worldbusiness/22halliburton.html?ref=business
Illegal Immigrants Who Were Arrested at Poultry Plant in Arkansas to Be Deported
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Eighteen illegal immigrants arrested at a poultry plant in Batesville will be processed for deportation, but will not serve any jail time for using fake Social Security numbers and state identification cards, federal judges ruled. Magistrate Judge Beth Deere and Judge James Moody of Federal District Court accepted guilty pleas from 17 of those arrested last week at the Pilgrim’s Pride plant. Federal prosecutors dismissed the misdemeanor charges against one man, but said they planned to ask Immigration and Customs Enforcement to begin deportation proceedings against him. The guilty pleas will give the 17 people criminal records, which will allow prosecutors to pursue tougher penalties if they illegally return to the United States. They had faced up to up to two years in prison and $205,000 in fines. Jane Duke, a United States attorney, said her office had no interest in seeing those arrested serve jail time, as they were “otherwise law-abiding citizens.”
National Briefing | South
April 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/us/22brfs-002.html?ref=us
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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS AND INFORMATION
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Russell Means Speaking at the Transform Columbus Day Rally
"If voting could do anything it would be illegal!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8Lri1-6aoY
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Stop the Termination or the Cherokee Nation
http://groups.msn.com/BayAreaIndianCalendar/activismissues.msnw?action=get_message&mview=1&ID_Message=5580
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We Didn't Start the Fire
http://yeli.us/Flash/Fire.html
I Can't Take it No More
http://lefti.blogspot.com/2007_11_01_archive.html#9214483115237950361
The Art of Mental Warfare
http://artofmentalwarfare.com/pog/artofmentalwarfarecom-the-warning/
MONEY AS DEBT
http://video. google.com/ videoplay? docid=-905047436 2583451279
http://www.moneyasd ebt.net/
UNCONSTITUTIONAL
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6582099850410121223&pr=goog-sl
IRAQ FOR SALE
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6621486727392146155
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Port of Olympia Anti-Militarization Action Nov. 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOkn2Fg7R8w
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"They have a new gimmick every year. They're going to take one of their boys, black boys, and put him in the cabinet so he can walk around Washington with a cigar. Fire on one end and fool on the other end. And because his immediate personal problem will have been solved he will be the one to tell our people: 'Look how much progress we're making. I'm in Washington, D.C., I can have tea in the White House. I'm your spokesman, I'm your leader.' While our people are still living in Harlem in the slums. Still receiving the worst form of education.
"But how many sitting here right now feel that they could [laughs] truly identify with a struggle that was designed to eliminate the basic causes that create the conditions that exist? Not very many. They can jive, but when it comes to identifying yourself with a struggle that is not endorsed by the power structure, that is not acceptable, that the ground rules are not laid down by the society in which you live, in which you are struggling against, you can't identify with that, you step back.
"It's easy to become a satellite today without even realizing it. This country can seduce God. Yes, it has that seductive power of economic dollarism. You can cut out colonialism, imperialism and all other kind of ism, but it's hard for you to cut that dollarism. When they drop those dollars on you, you'll fold though."
—MALCOLM X, 1965
http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=987
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A little gem:
Michael Moore Faces Off With Stephen Colbert [VIDEO]
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/57492/
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LAPD vs. Immigrants (Video)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/qws/ff/qr?term=lapd&Submit=S&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Search&st=s
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Dr. Julia Hare at the SOBA 2007
http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeo9ewi/proudtobeblack2/
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"We are far from that stage today in our era of the absolute
lie; the complete and totalitarian lie, spread by the
monopolies of press and radio to imprison social
consciousness." December 1936, "In 'Socialist' Norway,"
by Leon Trotsky: “Leon Trotsky in Norway” was transcribed
for the Internet by Per I. Matheson [References from
original translation removed]
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/12/nor.htm
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Wealth Inequality Charts
http://www.faireconomy.org/research/wealth_charts.html
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MALCOLM X: Oxford University Debate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmzaaf-9aHQ
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"There comes a times when silence is betrayal."
--Martin Luther King
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YouTube clip of Che before the UN in 1964
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtATT8GXkWg&mode=related&search
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The Wealthiest Americans Ever
NYT Interactive chart
JULY 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/business/20070715_GILDED_GRAPHIC.html
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New Orleans After the Flood -- A Photo Gallery
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=795
This email was sent to you as a service, by Roland Sheppard.
Visit my website at: http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret
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[For some levity...Hans Groiner plays Monk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51bsCRv6kI0
...bw]
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Which country should we invade next?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3g_zqz3VjY
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My Favorite Mutiny, The Coup
http://www.myspace.com/thecoupmusic
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Michael Moore- The Awful Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeOaTpYl8mE
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Morse v. Frederick Supreme Court arguments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_LsGoDWC0o
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Free Speech 4 Students Rally - Media Montage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfCjfod8yuw
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'My son lived a worthwhile life'
In April 2003, 21-year old Tom Hurndall was shot in the head
in Gaza by an Israeli soldier as he tried to save the lives of three
small children. Nine months later, he died, having never
recovered consciousness. Emine Saner talks to his mother
Jocelyn about her grief, her fight to make the Israeli army
accountable for his death and the book she has written
in his memory.
Monday March 26, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2042968,00.html
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Introducing...................the Apple iRack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-KWYYIY4jQ
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"A War Budget Leaves Every Child Behind."
[A T-shirt worn by some teachers at Roosevelt High School
in L.A. as part of their campaign to rid the school of military
recruiters and JROTC--see Article in Full item number 4, below...bw]
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"200 million children in the world sleep in the streets today.
Not one of them is Cuban."
(A sign in Havana)
Venceremos
View sign at bottom of page at:
http://www.cubasolidarity.net/index.html
[Thanks to Norma Harrison for sending this...bw]
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FIGHTBACK! A Collection of Socialist Essays
By Sylvia Weinstein
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-fightback-intro.html
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[The Scab
"After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad,
and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with
which he made a scab."
"A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul,
a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue.
Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten
principles." "When a scab comes down the street,
men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and
the devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out."
"No man (or woman) has a right to scab so long as there
is a pool of water to drown his carcass in,
or a rope long enough to hang his body with.
Judas was a gentleman compared with a scab.
For betraying his master, he had character enough
to hang himself." A scab has not.
"Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.
Judas sold his Savior for thirty pieces of silver.
Benedict Arnold sold his country for a promise of
a commision in the british army."
The scab sells his birthright, country, his wife,
his children and his fellowmen for an unfulfilled
promise from his employer.
Esau was a traitor to himself; Judas was a traitor
to his God; Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country;
a scab is a traitor to his God, his country,
his family and his class."
Author --- Jack London (1876-1916)...Roland Sheppard
http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret]
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Sand Creek Massacre
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FEATURED AT NATIVE AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL:
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/local/16035305.htm
(scroll down when you get there])
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING
WRITER/FILMMAKER DONALD L. VASICEK REPORT:
http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/sandcreekmassacre.html
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FINALIST IN DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL COMPETITION (VIEW HERE):
http://www.docupyx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=41
VIEW "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FILM MOVIE OF THE WEEK FOR FREE HERE:
http://twymancreative.com/twymanc.html
On November 29, 1864, 700 Colorado troops savagely slaughtered
over 450 Cheyenne children, disabled, elders, and women in the
southeastern Colorado Territory under its protection. This act
became known as the Sand Creek Massacre. This film project
("The Sand Creek Massacre" documentary film project) is an
examination of an open wound in the souls of the Cheyenne
people as told from their perspective. This project chronicles
that horrific 19th century event and its affect on the 21st century
struggle for respectful coexistence between white and native
plains cultures in the United States of America.
Listed below are links on which you can click to get the latest news,
products, and view, free, "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" award-
winning documentary short. In order to create more native
awareness, particularly to save the roots of America's history,
please read the following:
Some people in America are trying to save the world. Bless
them. In the meantime, the roots of America are dying.
What happens to a plant when the roots die? The plant dies
according to my biology teacher in high school. American's
roots are its native people. Many of America's native people
are dying from drug and alcohol abuse, poverty, hunger,
and disease, which was introduced to them by the Caucasian
male. Tribal elders are dying. When they die, their oral
histories go with them. Our native's oral histories are the
essence of the roots of America, what took place before
our ancestors came over to America, what is taking place,
and what will be taking place. It is time we replenish
America's roots with native awareness, else America
continues its decaying, and ultimately, its death.
You can help. The 22-MINUTE SAND CREEK MASSACRE
DOCUMENTARY PRESENTATION/EDUCATIONAL DVD IS
READY FOR PURCHASE! (pass the word about this powerful
educational tool to friends, family, schools, parents, teachers,
and other related people and organizations to contact
me (dvasicek@earthlink.net, 303-903-2103) for information
about how they can purchase the DVD and have me come
to their children's school to show the film and to interact
in a questions and answers discussion about the Sand
Creek Massacre.
Happy Holidays!
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Vasicek,+Don
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
303-903-2103
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FEATURED AT NATIVE AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL:
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/local/16035305.htm
(scroll down when you get there])
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING
WRITER/FILMMAKER DONALD L. VASICEK REPORT:
http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/sandcreekmassacre.html
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FINALIST IN DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL COMPETITION (VIEW HERE):
http://www.docupyx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=41
VIEW "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FILM MOVIE OF THE WEEK FOR FREE HERE:
http://twymancreative.com/twymanc.html
SHOP:
http://www.manataka.org/page633.html
BuyIndies.com
donvasicek.com.Peace Articles at Libraryofpeace.org">
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