Just in case we've forgotten that Rumsfeld Should Resign, the new Seymour Hersh piece, The Grey Zone, is up on The New Yorker site. It starts well:

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld's decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of elite combat units, and hurt America's prospects in the war on terror.

There's some fascinating stuff here. Rumsfeld, reacting in frustration to the legalistic hurdles to shooting suspected al Qaida targets whenever they were in our sites, found a workaround:

Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate "high value" targets in the Bush Administration's war on terror. A special-access program, or sap�\subject to the Defense Department's most stringent level of security�\was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. The program would recruit operatives and acquire the necessary equipment, including aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps. America's most successful intelligence operations during the Cold War had been saps, including the Navy's submarine penetration of underwater cables used by the Soviet high command and construction of the Air Force's stealth bomber. All the so-called "black" programs had one element in common: the Secretary of Defense, or his deputy, had to conclude that the normal military classification restraints did not provide enough security.

"Rumsfeld's goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value target�\a standup group to hit quickly," a former high-level intelligence official told me. "He got all the agencies together�\the C.I.A. and the N.S.A.�\to get pre-approval in place. Just say the code word and go." The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser. President Bush was informed of the existence of the program, the former intelligence official said.

The people assigned to the program worked by the book, the former intelligence official told me. They created code words, and recruited, after careful screening, highly trained commandos and operatives from America's lite forces�\Navy seals, the Army's Delta Force, and the C.I.A.'s paramilitary experts. They also asked some basic questions: "Do the people working the problem have to use aliases? Yes. Do we need dead drops for the mail? Yes. No traceability and no budget. And some special-access programs are never fully briefed to Congress."

I look at the passage "Do the people working the problem have to use aliases? Yes. and think immediately of the untraceable "John Israel." Hersh quotes a former intelligence official as saying, "The rules are �eGrab whom you must. Do what you want.'"

This goes on for a while, but the CIA objected:

By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. "They said, �eNo way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan�\pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets�\and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets'"�\the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. "The C.I.A.'s legal people objected," and the agency ended its SAP involvement in Abu Ghraib, the former official said.

With the legally cautious out of the way, the Pentagon could do as it pleased. Hersh points to "The Arab Mind," a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai as the "bible" for neocons on how to deal with Arabs:

The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. "The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world," Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, "or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private." The Patai book, an academic told me, was "the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior." In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged�\"one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation."

I won't try to summarize the whole thing. But Hersh has done a remarkable job of outing a covert program run amok, a program that can only be stopped by its public outing since all the normal safeguards have failed.

The Pentagon reacts by calling the article "conspiratorial," a less than substantive response.

ALSO. Lost Pages has a good analysis of how torture practices abroad come home to roost: Forced to Stand:  An Expert Torture by Darius Rejali.

SEE ALSO, Newsweek's The Roots of Torture (via Atrios) and then go recover your sense of humor by reading Fafblog's piece on nation-wrecking.

Fafblog contemplates horror in non-fiction:
Horrorblogging

I mean how many times in this war can you talk about how "atrocities are horrible" or "atrocities are nightmarishly horrible" or "dear god please please stop these atrocities" before words like "atrocities" begin to have about as much rhetorical weight as words like "toaster pastries"?

What are we supposed to say at this point? Let's really, REALLY try to kill the terrorists now? That this latest death-maiming is really the last straw on the death-maiming camel's back? Giblets has become desensitized to reality at this point. Maybe the worst part about this is that reality is starting to desensitize me to fiction. Giblets is more likely to commit fictional violence now that he has seen so much real horror on television.

Brin

ZDNN: Your book is about how society becomes transparent, meaning that there are no blocks to information. Does that mean no privacy?

Brin:  That depends on how you define privacy. If it means anonymity -- walking in public with a blithe assurance no one knows who you are -- forget it.
MBR>Cameras are proliferating like locusts. In Britain they've tied in face-recognition systems to scan pedestrians in search of wanted criminals. Nothing you or I do will stop this. No law will prevent it. Banning the cameras will only drive this technology underground and ensure it's monopolized by some elite group.

But there's another kind of privacy. The security of your home. Your personal safety. The feeling that no one can persecute you, even if they know what goods you buy and where you've been. This kind of privacy has always depended on knowing more -- on being able to see and catch any Peeping Tom, on knowing the secrets of the elite so they don't dare persecute you, on being left alone because you are a free, knowledgeable and sovereign citizen, and therefore too powerful for anyone to capriciously abuse. Attempting to blind your enemies will fail, especially if they are mighty.

As the Washington Post notes in an editorial this morning, Rumsfeld's defense of a double-standard for treatment of prisoners endangers American soldiers:

Now Mr. Pace and Mr. Wolfowitz have said the techniques approved by Mr. Sanchez would be illegal if used on Americans; Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Myers say they are fine as applied to Iraqis. But there are not separate Geneva Conventions for Americans and for the rest of the world. We learned this week that the Pentagon approved the use of hooding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, intimidation by dogs and prolonged solitary confinement as legal under the Geneva Conventions. By defending that policy, Mr. Rumsfeld is further harming America's reputation while sanctioning the use of similar techniques on captured Americans around the world. Instead of defending their use, the administration should be disavowing them and rededicating itself to international law. 

If Rumsfeld can't understand that international law applies to him and to those under his command, he should be out of a job for that reason alone. There are a number of other reasons he should resign, but that one all by itself is sufficient.

But while he's still there, The New York Times has some suggestions for Bush and Rumsfeld:

There are things Mr. Bush can do quickly to demonstrate the American commitment to the decent treatment of Iraqi prisoners without jeopardizing the fairness of the coming trials of the soldiers charged with inexcusable actions at Abu Ghraib. The first is to drop the  Camp Redemption foolishness, remove the prisoners from Abu Ghraib  and raze the entire compound, a symbol of Saddam Hussein's reign of terror that has become a symbol of American brutality. Beyond that, the president should take these steps:

ŗOrder Mr. Rumsfeld to get military intelligence personnel out of the business of overseeing the detention and interrogation of Iraqi prisoners; an overwhelming majority of the prisoners have no intelligence value.

ŗBan private contractors from American military prisons.

ŗTake all of the available trained military prison guards and send them to Iraq to relieve the exhausted troops who are doing work for which they were never prepared.

ŗOrder Mr. Rumsfeld to  immediately issue new regulations that not only say  that prisoners and detainees must be treated according to the letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions, but also ban, one by one, the harsh practices inflicted on prisoners.

CACI UPDATE: The only puzzling work in the following passage, from the Globe and Mail's article "Fund may dump firms linked to Iraq prison scandal," is may:

CACI International Inc. and Titan Corp. may be removed from the Calvert Social Index, a list of "socially responsible" companies, following allegations their employees were involved in abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

The index's research department has recommended eliminating the companies from the list, research director Julie Gorte said.

Calvert Group uses the list to screen about $3.2-billion (U.S.) worth of investments in companies that meet its criteria for human rights, product safety, environmental impact and other issues, for inclusion in its Social Index Fund and other funds.

MEANWHILE, The New York Times has really grim statements by Specialist Jeremy Sivits  given last January (released by he attorney for another soldier) which portray an environment of casual, cheerful sadism at Abu Ghraib; torturing prisoners as a form of entertainment. While his testimony portrays the abuse as something kept secret from higher-ups, he is not discussing actual interrogation, but rather something purely recreational. For me, this makes his terstimony all the more horrifying. I wonder what will come out when has is court-martialed. He's going first because he has agreed to testify against others.

Imagine a dinner at which an 18-month-old who has just apprehended the meaning of her brother's whoopee cushion tries to explain to you what she has discovered. The explanation involves a fair amount of explanation, (in)appropriate sounds effects, and gestures; all this delivered very earnestly. Life is strange.

According to the BBC, young cicadas taste like canned asperagus. And if you are into that sort of thing, because we are expecting a large hatching of 17-year cicadas in the Northeast, this summer will be a time of good eating:

It makes things easier for people who like to eat them - young cicadas are said to taste like canned asparagus.

But curious diners should take advantage of the glut as the next monster swarm is due in 2021.

Gee. It never would have occurred to me to wonder how they would taste. Seventeen years ago, when the last cicada swarm occurred, I was living in Brooklyn. No one mentioned eating them. I guess I missed out.

For those at a loss as to how to cook them, the Washington Post (back on April 16th) offered a few helpful suggestions: one easy way to serve cicada is apparently sauted with butter and parsley.

To harvet your prey, the WP suggests the following method:

There they will molt, taking about an hour to squeeze out of their dust-colored skins. Once they have broken free, it is your moment to strike: Pluck the creamy white adults off the trees. Gather as many as you desire for the culinary adventures ahead. Admire their red eyes and furled wings.

Do hurry. The exoskeletons of the newly molted adults will turn black within about 12 hours and harden over the next couple days. Once that happens, the cicadas remain eminently edible but they lose their soft-shell cachet. They're also easier to apprehend in their just-molted stage. 

And here's a more elaborate thought:

At Fahrenheit, a restaurant in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Georgetown, cicadas almost made the menu this year. "The soft-shelled cicada, it's done just like a soft-shelled crab," says executive chef Frank Belosic, describing how freshly molted cicadas should be rolled in flour, pan-fried in olive oil, and finished with a sauce of white wine, butter and shallots. Served as an appetizer, the dish would have cost diners $10 or so.

But for those truly interested, Amazon offers a number of coockbooks on cooking with bugs: Eat-A-Bug Cookbook by David George Gordon, Creepy Crawly Cuisine: The Gourmet Guide to Edible Insects by Julieta Ramos-Elorduy, photographs by Peter Menzel, and Man Eating Bugs: The Art and Science of Eating Insects by Peter Menzel & Faith D'Aluisio. There is also a YA novel on this subject, Beetles, Lightly Toasted by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.

I haven't yet decided to bring up this subject with my children, though Elizabeth may discover the delights of cicada on her own.

UPDATE: Check out the Washington Post's Cicadacam! Don't they look yummy?

The Nicholas Berg story [link to NYT] is unfolding in interesting ways, and it seems to be very complex. Since this subject has already taken over my Onion thread, I thought I'd start a new thread here. My impression of the man, from superficial research, is that he's someome I would have liked who naively went to Iraq believing there were finacial opportunities in reconstruction.

Boston Globe: Mosul police chief denies detaining slain American Nicholas Berg:

Iraqi police never detained an American whose decapitated body was found last week in Baghdad, the police chief said Thursday, despite U.S. insistence that Nicholas Berg was held by local authorities here shortly before he disappeared last month.

The FBI:

Mr. Berg was interviewed by FBI Agents at an Iraqi Police Station in Mosul, Iraq, while in the custody of the Iraqi Police. Mr. Berg told Agents that he had entered Iraq through Jordan for the purpose of establishing working relationships and to acquire contracts for his business. After a thorough review of records, the FBI relayed to the U.S. military and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that no derogatory information was developed about Mr. Berg that would warrant further detention by the Iraqi Police. During interviews with Mr. Berg, FBI Agents and CPA officials emphasized to him the dangerous environment that exists in Iraq, and encouraged him to accept CPAÅfs offer to facilitate his safe passage out of Iraq. Mr. Berg refused these offers. The CPA coordinated with the Iraqi police for Mr. BergÅfs release on 4/6/04. He also refused government offers to advise his family and friends of his status.

AP [in the NJ Star Ledger]:

On April 5, the Bergs sued the government in federal court in Philadelphia, contending their son was being held illegally. In a writ filed that day in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, the Bergs said the State Department told them their son "is currently detained in Mosul, Iraq, by the United States military" and that American diplomats "no longer" had "any authority or power to intervene" on his behalf.

Berg was released the day after the suit was filed. His family said he told them he had not been mistreated. They did not hear from him after April 9 -- when violence flared in Iraq because of the U.S. Marines' siege of Fallujah and a Shi'a uprising in the south.

Several days later, diplomats received an e-mail from Berg's family that "noted he had not been in contact," Shannon said.

It does seem to me that it is not a coincidence that Berg seems to have been bagged by his murderers only days after his parents' lawsuit sprung him from jail. The NYT mentions troublesome jailhouse rumors that required giving him his own cell:

He conjectured that [the FBI's] questions arose from some Farsi literature and a book about Iran that he had. Mr. Berg wrote that after four days he was transferred to a cellblock that included prisoners charged with petty offenses and suspected "war criminals."

"Word had spread due to the presence of certain items amongst my stuff that I was Israeli," Mr. Berg wrote. "So I felt a bit like Arlo Guthrie walking into a jail full of mother rapers and father stabbers as an accused litterbug."

The American military police, in fact, "were pretty stand-up," he wrote. "They heard the chants of Yehudien, Israelein, and told the I.P. prison staff to put me in my own cell."

"I did get on much friendlier terms with the other prisoners after they discovered I could speak a little Arabic and verified I didn't have horns or anything," Mr. Berg said.

UPDATE: For reasons best known to Google, this entry seems to have attracted over 2,000 visitors directed here by search engines. Welcome people. Do have a look around the rest of this weblog.

FURTHER UPDATE: There is a Nicholas Berg Memorial web site that has stories from people who knew him. Also, a memorial fund has been set up. You can donate to it via PayPal.

I've been awaiting the new issue of The Onion to see what their staff could do with recent events. Well, it's out:

What Do You think: Iraqi Prisoner Abuse

Point Counterpoint features a debate, of sorts, on the wisdom of killing wheelchair bound people with missiles.

MEANWHILE, for a change of pace, CNN is reporting on UFOs: Mexican Air Force pilots film unidentified objects. I am tempted to find a way to weave this story into recent discussions of mercenaries and the activities of private military firms. But I won't because I'm sure some of you might not realize that I was kidding.

FURTHER TO THE SUBJECT OF HUMOR, about.com has a collection of Donald Rumsfeld jokes compiled by Daniel Kurtzman from latenight TV shows (which I never see because I go to bed early). My favorite is this one:

President Bush said he will not punish Donald Rumsfeld. Which is good, because no one wants to see pictures of a naked, old man." —Craig Kilborn

5/23/04 UPDATE
See my new post on John Israel.

For the second time today, my correspondent lidiavolgina has dug me up a good link. In this case, she points me to a new story that discusses whether the "John Israel" mentioned in the Taguba report is an Israeli os another name; that "John Israel" is a pseudonym. Regular readers of this blog will remember that there is some question of by whom he was employed.

Although it is still largely undocumented if any of the contractor named in the report of General Antonio Taguba were associated with the Israeli military or intelligence services, it is noteworthy that one, John Israel, who was identified in the report as being employed by both CACI International of Arlington, Virginia, and Titan, Inc., of San Diego, may not have even been a U.S. citizen. The Taguba report states that Israel did not have a security clearance, a requirement for employment as an interrogator for CACI. According to CACI's web site, "a Top Secret Clearance (TS) that is current and US citizenship" are required for CACI interrogators working in Iraq. In addition, CACI requires that its interrogators "have at least two years experience as a military policeman or similar type of law enforcement/intelligence agency whereby the individual utilized interviewing techniques."

Speculation that "John Israel" may be an intelligence cover name has fueled speculation whether this individual could have been one of a number of Israeli interrogators hired under a classified contract. Because U.S. citizenship and documentation thereof are requirements for a U.S. security clearance, Israeli citizens would not be permitted to hold a Top Secret clearance. However, dual U.S.-Israeli citizens could have satisfied Pentagon requirements that interrogators hold U.S. citizenship and a Top Secret clearance. Although the Taguba report refers twice to Israel as an employee of Titan, the company claims he is one of their sub-contractors. CACI stated that one of the men listed in the report "is not and never has been a CACI employee" without providing more detail. A U.S. intelligence source revealed that in the world of intelligence "carve out" subcontracts such confusion is often the case with "plausible deniability" being a foremost concern.

Wayne Madsen, the author of the article speculates that "shadowy group of former Israeli Defense Force and General Security Service (Shin Bet) Arabic-speaking interrogators were hired by the Pentagon under a classified 'carve out' sub-contract." It bears mentioning that Israel has some private military firms of its own. Here I quote from P. W. Singer's Corporate Warriors, p. 13-14: Several prominent firms are based in Israel, such as Levdan, which was active in the Congo; Ango-Sengu Ltd., which was reportedly in Angola; and Silver Shadows, which worked in Columbia. . . . . an Israeli military firm, Spearhead Ltd., is rumored to have provided combat training and support to the drug cartels and antigovernment militias. Globalsecurity.org also has an article on private military firms in Israel, though the focus of the article is primarily on the purveyors of hardware.

MEANWHILE, here is another ex-prisoner's account.

ALSO, Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com has a good close reading of Taguba's testimony in relation to Steve Stefanowicz and John Israel. He points out that one of the few facts known about John Israel is the London Telegraph's report that he has "left Iraq." Actually, there's one more thing we can be sure of: that, like Steven Stefanowicz, he has not yet been arrested for his role in this.

This morning, Army Major Gen. Antonio M. Taguba testified before the Senate Armed Services committee:

At the same time, questions about ultimate responsibility for control of the Abu Ghraib prison produced a disagreement between Taguba and Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

Taguba said that control had been turned over to military intelligence officials.

Cambone said that was incorrect, and it resided with the military police.

In a further disagreement, Taguba said it was against Army rules for intelligence troops to involve MPs in setting conditions for interrogations. Cambone said he believed it was appropriate for the two groups to collaborate.

Taguba also told the committee his investigation had not found "any order whatsoever, written or otherwise," that directed the military police to cooperate with intelligence forces at the prison.

Regardless of any disagreements, Cambone and others told the panel that troops in Iraq were under orders to abide by the Geneva Conventions, which dictate terms for humane treatment of prisoners.

"An order to soften up a detainee would not be a legal order, would it?" asked Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kansas.

"No sir," replied Lt. Gen. Lance F. Smith, the deputy director of the U.S. Central Command.

Taguba told the panel that his investigators had been told about participation by "other government agencies or contractors" in the abuse.

Other government agencies is a euphemism for the CIA.

Cambone, too, was asked whether he had any knowledge of CIA involvement in the abuse at Abu Ghraib.

"There were people brought by agency personnel to that place. ... There may have been interrogations conducted by the agency personnel while they were there," he said.

CNN seems to be reading the testimony as a confirmation of the Bad Apples hypothesis since there were no direct written orders for torture. The AP seems to see it differently: as a confirmation that the failure was throughout the heirarchy because there were no written orders for the degree of collaboration between the military police and military intelligence that was expected by the administration.

I enjoy the wryness of The Financial Times. They have a nice write-up on the CACI conference call of the other day:

Wall Street asks the easy questions

Wall Street stock analysts have taken considerable heat for the deference they showed chief executives during the bull market years. So, given the chance to question executives from the company that employed private interrogators implicated in the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Observer would think they would do a bit of hard-nosed interrogating themselves.

Not a chance.

During a conference call last week hosted by CACI, the Virginia-based contractor named in an Army report, most analysts struck a gentle tone with chief executive J.P. London. Some, such as John Mahoney of Raymond James, were effusive in their praise.

"I think you're doing an excellent job and I appreciate how you're dealing with this," Mahoney said, refering to the matter as a "quote-unquote scandal".

Mahoney's affection was all the more remarkable since CACI has not disciplined or suspended any of its employees working in Iraq, including one who an Army general recommended be fired for his alleged role in the abuses.

That employee was still at work and doing "a damned fine job" in Iraq, according to CACI's president of US operations Ken Johnson, who thanked Mahoney for an "excellent question".

Mahoney recommends purchase of CACI stock:

NEW YORK, May 7 (New Ratings) - In a research note published yesterday, analyst John T Mahoney of Raymond James maintains his "strong buy" rating on CACI International Inc (CA8A.ETR). The target price is set to $55.00.

I feel I really need to ask: Is Mahoney crazy?

MEANWHILE, a prosector from the Nuremburg trials weighs in with a NYT letter to the editor:

To the Editor:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's declaration that the United States supports the rule of law was gratifying (excerpts from the Congressional hearing, May 8). It might have been more convincing if  we had not repudiated the International Criminal Court and continued to pressure other countries into guaranteeing that no American would ever be sent to The Hague for war crimes or crimes against humanity.

Credibility suffers when we approve international law, but only for others.

BENJAMIN B. FERENCZ

New Rochelle, N.Y., May 8, 2004 The writer was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

(Via bellatrys in the Electrolite comments).

IN THE COMMENTS, lidiovolgina points us toward a new piece in the Guardian: Brutality: the home truths

In an interview with an online magazine, Corrections.com, last January, Lane McCotter described Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison at the centre of the torture scandal, as "the only place we agreed as a team was truly closest to an American prison".

Rarely has a truer word been spoken. And rarely has there been a more appropriate person than McCotter to utter them. He was head of Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 when Michael Valent, a prisoner diagnosed with schizophrenia died after he was strapped to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union said the first word that came to mind when she saw the chair was "torture". McCotter resigned as the scandal gathered pace, went into the lucrative world of private prison management and last year directed the reopening of Abu Ghraib. 

David's got the digital camera with him at Candadian sales conference. Otherwise, I would take a picture for you of the marvellous sunrise this morning. It rained over night; a band of thunderstorms passed through, and so the air is clean and humid and the yard is very wet and green. Leaking through the trees is an almost syruppy orange light. The sun, obscured by mist and trees has a buttery, edible aspect to it, or did a moment ago when I began this sentence. Now it has moved higher in the sky, clearing the thin layer of clouds on the horizon, and so, having stared at the sun to describe it, I now have the usual problem of afterimages obscuring my vision.

A small wild rabbit just ran by. At first I thought it was a squirrel, until I saw the tail. Because of the atmospheric conditions, the train whistle from the center of Chappaqua carries better than usual, though it is almost drowned out by the chirping of many kinds of birds. The air smells like a greenhouse: a humid and powerfully green and growing smell.

Today I resolve to try to stay off the Internet until I have delt with matters at hand. I'm sipping coffee sweetened with a spoon of blackstrap molasses, a taste I'm quite fond of now. (Yes, I'm back on coffee; but the molasses adds more calcium to my body than the caffeine can carry off.)

After days nearly two weeks of contemplating Abu Ghraib, the afterimages are obscuring my view of day-to-day life. Perhaps I will buy plants today. I remember a time about eight or nine years ago when I had spent way too much time with computers and I went outside in the yard. I saw some ants, tiny ants. I marvelled at how high-rez they were, how many indentifiable ants could be in such a small space. I wonder what I will observe today.

MEANWHILE, in my email I find this announcement about our friend Paul Levinson:

Paul Levinson will be on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" this coming Wednesday (May 12), in their second hour (3PM in most areas of the country) talking for about 45 minutes about his new nonfiction book:

CELLPHONE The Story of the World's Most Mobile Medium, and How It Has Transformed Everything!

In the New York area, the segment will air on Wednesday May 12 in the 3PM-4PM hour, on WNYE, 91.5FM. Check your local radio listings (or http://www.npr.org/wheretohear/?prgId=5) for time and station in your area.

And if you miss the broadcast, the interview should be available on the Web at http://www.npr.org/programs/totn/ after 6PM Wednesday evening.

Horror editor and critic Paula Guran [url fixed] has a new blog. She rants about the state of reviewing.

Okay, so I am glancing through my new issue of LOCUS (#520) and I come across a favorable review of a book that does not even deserve ink in the magazine. Am I the only reviewer in the world who wants to pick up other reviewers by their (no doubt ass-like) ears and shake sense into them?

Probably.

No one else is prone to such violence (except the occasional author and possibly a publisher or two, but they tend to be passionless or at least publicly polite about review) over something that Really Does Not Matter. What I write or anyone writes about a book has incredibly little impact on the buying public.

Maybe THATÅfs my problem.

Feh.

Hers is a healthy response to reading book reviews, one that leads to serious and intelligent people devoting their copious free time to reviewing books. She's wrong that reviews have no impact, but that's OK.

This is a blog to watch.

(Via Locus.)

The new New Yorker piece is up:
CHAIN OF COMMAND by SEYMOUR M. HERSH How the Department of Defense mishandled the disaster at Abu Ghraib.

I read some of it last night. Here's a choice bit:

One lingering mystery is how Ryder could have conducted his review last fall, in the midst of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, without managing to catch it. (Ryder told a Pentagon press briefing last week that his trip to Iraq Ågwas not an inspection or an investigation. . . . It was an assessment.Åh) .. .

Ryder may have protected himself, but Taguba did not. ÅgHeÅfs not regarded as a hero in some circles in the Pentagon,Åh a retired Army major general said of Taguba. ÅgHeÅfs the guy who blew the whistle, and the Army will pay the price for his integrity. The leadership does not like to have people make bad news public.Åh

We have a subscription to The New Yorker, but last week's issue with Hersh's first story came only as an empty wrapper. (Got to call the subscription office today.) I'd read it online, but I wanted to look at the hardcopy, as that is a better medium for deeper contemplation.

Kicking around the living room, I noticed the Feb. 16 & 23rd issue (a special anniversary double issue) which has in it a fascinating piece by David Grann, "The Brand: the Most Violent Prison Gang in America." It concerns the prison gang the Aryan Brotherhood, also known as The Brand, and it is in its way as eye-opening as Hersh's recent pieces and I think sheds some light on an American crisis that underpins the current prison scandal. It appeared only in the print edition of The New Yorker (so you'll just have to get ahold of a copy of the magazine to read it) but there is an online interview with Grann about the piece available on The New Yorker's web site. There's a lot of other information available online about the Aryan Brotherhood, for example, FBI files. But I've already decided that this is not an area in which I want to develop an expertise.

However, here is the general upshot of the Grann article:

Authorities had once dismissed the Aryan Brotherhood as a fringe white-supremacist gang; now however, they concluded that what prisoners had claimed for decades was true -- namely that the gang's hundred or so members, all convicted felons, had gradually taken control of large parts of the nation's maximum security prisons, ruling over thousands of inmates and transforming themselves into a powerful criminal organization.

The Brand, authorities say, established drug-trafficking, prostitution, and extortion racket in prisons throughout the country. Its leaders, often working out of barren cells in solitary confinement, allegedly ordered scores of stabbings and murders. They killed rival gang members; they killed blacks and homosexuals and child molesters; they killed snitches; they killed people who stole their drugs, or owed them a few hundred dollars; they killed prison guards; they killed for hire and for free; they killed, most of all, to impose a culture of terror that would solidify their power. And because the Brotherhood is far more cloistered than other gangs, it was able to operate largely with impunity for decades -- and remains all but invisible to the outside world.

What he describes is a prison system in which the internal workings are increasingly under control of the most violent inmates who gain and retain control by the most brutal methods and are able to do so because the legal system takes little interest in prosecuting "N.H.I." crimes (No Humans Involved), "because the victims are considered to be as unsympathetic as the preps." Once members of the Brotherhood started getting paroled, thus expanding the organizations criminal reach out into our world, law enforcement became more concerned. Apparently, things had gotten as far as the Brotherhood planning bombings:

. . . a longtime reputed A.B. member confided to authorities that he had been approached at the supermax [an ultra-maximum security prison] in Colorado by the gang and asked for technical help in making bombs. The gang, he was informed, was planning terrorist attacks on federal facilities across the United States. "It's becoming irrational," he told authorities after declining to help. "They're talking about car bombs, truck bombs, and mail bombs."

Just when the Brotherhood seemed poised to take a particularly violent turn, Jessner unleashed the United States Marshals. Nearly four decades after the gang was born, it found itself under seige.

Discussion of where things went wrong in Abu Ghraib has focused largely on the inexperience of those running the place, on the disintegration of the chain of command, of where things are wrong elsewhere in military prisons or in prisons holding terrorists. And there is also an occasional chorus in the background, saying that this is what all American prisons are like; that The Man behaves like this everywhere. There is something to these positions.

However, what I get out of Grann's article is that the American civilian prison system is facing a crisis of a type that teaches prison guards and those running prisons that the legally sanctioned methods of controlling inmates don't work; teaches them that their charges are subhuman savages not deserving of the legal protections they enjoy. From my reading of Grann's article, it seems to me that the rise of the Aryan Brotherhood could have been prevented if the legal system had been willing to investigate and prosecute "N. H. I." crimes; that this tale of American prisons illustrates Samuel Johnson's maxim An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere. And the contagion of cruelty from civilian prisons to military prisons illustrated Martin Luther King's transmutation of Johnson's maxim, Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

While human rights abuses perpetrated by jailers occur in American prisons, and such problems do have relevance to Abu Ghraib, it seems to me that the crisis Grann describes, and its effects on the penal system have at least as much to do with what happened to produce the current scandal in Iraq.

MEANWHILE, The Wall Street Journal has the Red Cross Report. And here's the WSJ story that goes with it.

PS: Here's a good joke from Dohiyi Mir:

Q: What do you call it when the "best SecDef ever" is fired?
A: A very good start.

AND DON'T MISS Michael Brub on Joe Lieberman:

For Abu Ghraib presents us with a real moral crisis, and by "real" I mean "as opposed to the moral crisis posed by oral sex in the Oval Office." (Which, by the way, was sleazy and colossally stupid, though not quite unconstitutional. For the record, I oppose oral sex in the Oval Office, and I promise to work to stop it whenever it occurs. But I mention this only because Lieberman's denunciation of Clinton from the Senate floor is what got him a spot on the Gore ticket and a shot at national prominence in the first place.) To put this another way: this is the worst military and geopolitical scandal in a generation, and anyone who doesn't realize it just isn't worth taking seriously-- about this or anything else.

(Via Atrios.)

AND ALSO, go read Fafblog's Conscience: the next greatest threat in the war on terror. This satire captures the distilled essence of some of the more loathesome arguments I've seen out there on the web in places I won't link to:

Were the atrocities committed in Abu Ghraib horrifying? Indeed. But more horrifying still would be a military unable or unequipped to deal with the Forces of Terror. Americans have seen the torture and the raping, certainly, but they haven't seen the intelligence gleaned from said torture and raping - and the lives saved, pipelines constructed, and schools built because of that intelligence. Can the West really afford to have an Iraqi insurgent's pride in his unexposed genitalia - his unexposed, terrorist genitalia - come between US troops and a shipment of arms bound for a Baathist cell? Can American children sleep safely if a prisoner's unelectrocuted testicles - unelectrocuted Islamist testicles - prevent him from confessing the location of a suicide bomber, or his participation in late night Black Sabbaths to summon Beelzebub amongst a coven of witches?

See the preprint of Afshar's paper on IRIMS here.

This morning, I received a note from physicist Shahriar S. Afshar, whose experiment I discussed in my post Quantum Mechanics: Not Just a Matter of Interpretation (April 26th).

He says:

Dear Kathryn,

Having read some of the comments on your Blog, I wanted to quickly inform you that:

1) A peer-reviewed publication of my experiment is upcoming within the next 1-2 months.
2) A popular science magazine is doing a story on my experiment and it will appear within the next few weeks.
3) I am in the process of setting up a web page dedicated to the experiment and will probably set up a chat forum within the next couple of months.
4) Other experiments are on the way.
5) There may be a seminar set up for Fall on Bohr-Einstein debate, and I will also give a talk on my experiment.
6) I am under an embargo at this time and cannot make public statements on the experiment, results, and its implications, but will at length discuss them in 2-3 separate papers within the next few months. . . .

Best regards,

Shahriar S. Afshar

Here's another close reading of the Taguba report, this time by someone who says I am a former Military Intelligence Analyst/Interrogator of 15 years service. Some of the points made will be familiar to those who've been following this; some are over my head; but this one is clear enough:

5. Why is the Taguba report classified Secret/NOFORN (no Foriegn governement dissemination) when it is a formal US Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) investigation ?:

TORTURE REPORT MAY HAVE BROKEN CLASSIFICATION RULES http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/2004/05/050504.html Posted May 5, 2004 09:33 PM PST By classifying an explosive report on the torture of Iraqi prisoners as "Secret," the Pentagon may have violated official secrecy policies, which prohibit the use of classification to conceal illegal activities.

My Comment: I suggest it had been classified SECRET/NOFORN because of the oblique, passing references that clearly indicate sanctioned, systemic, patently criminal, multi-theatre practices since at least 9/11 discussed above in para 2 & 3.

Interesting stuff.

Via Phil Carter, a news release from the Department of Defense:

General Officer Announcements

The Chief of Staff, Army announces the assignment of the following general officers:

Major General James W. Parker, Director, Center for Operations, Plans and Policy, United States Special Operations Command, MacDill Air Force Base, Florida to Commanding General, United States Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center, Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Major General Antonio M. Taguba, Deputy Commanding General (Support), Third United States Army, Camp Doha, Kuwait to Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Readiness, Training and Mobilization, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs, Washington, DC.

Brigadier General John C. Woods, Deputy Director for Operations, National Military Command Center, J-3, The Joint Staff, Washington, DC to Deputy Commanding General, Combined Arms Center for Training, United States Army Training and Doctrine Command, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Carter remarks:

Uh... doesn't this guy need to stay in the CENTCOM area of responsibility for some reason? Wouldn't he be a good resource to keep in theater for investigators to talk to? I don't understand the timing or wisdom of this move. I should be clear that I don't think there's anything improper here. This is almost surely a normal personnel move, to be conducted during the summer reassignment season. However, the timing couldn't be worse, could it?

MEANWHILE, The family of Staff Sergeant Ivan "Chip" Frederick, have sent up a web site for his defense which includes a "Free Chip Frederick" petition. The site could get interetsing as things progress. Kevin Drum and others have speculated that Frederick's attorney was the source of the leaked Taguba report. I'm not sure I believe that because of the unsavory portrait the report paints of Frederick. But in any case, the family is working aggressively on his defense.

UPDATE 5/11/04: The
NYT on the transfer:

The Pentagon announced Friday that he would soon take a new post in Washington as a deputy assistant secretary for reserve affairs, a move that in Army culture is not seen as a major promotion.

Having never, um, actually tried to get pregnant (the furthest I ever went was thinking about trying, and that was sufficient) I don't feel I ought to comment over at Chez Miscarriage, an excellent blog on infertility, but this annecdote is too good not to blog:

I had an appointment with [my massage therapist] yesterday. I did everything he asked - I contemplatively sipped the herbal tea, I directed the intention of my breath into the soles of my feet, I closed my eyes and visited my quiet place. I even acquiesced to a new ritual, the pre-massage consumption of organic apricots. But as I sat there in his office, sipping the tea and politely declining more apricots lest there not be enough for his next client, my massage therapist did a bad, bad thing.

Chris Isaak randomly sings:
ÅgMasseuse did a bad bad thing / Masseuse did a bad bad thing.Åh

God, I hate it when he does that. Can somebody please tell Chris to shut up?

So anyway, all of a sudden, my massage therapist asserted, "I know why you're having miscarriages."

I knew right then that it was going to be bad. His statement had the air of impending social disaster about it, just like "Well, as long as we're being honest," or "I didn't want to tell you this before, but." Nothing good could possibly follow an introduction like that.

I quietly ate another apricot.

He said, "Your focus is too small. You're not open to the universe."

This is tragically funny, which is, I think, the spirit in which it is given. Read the rest. It is really fine black humor which is at the same time illuminating about the real feelings of a real person.

MEANWHILE, Kevin Maroney, who is sitting in our livingroom, directs our attention to a fine rant from Ornicus: Media Revolt: A Manifesto. Go read. Enjoy!

A week after a scandal broke involving photos of American troops torturing Iraqi prisoners, Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, & Root is pulling the plug on private electronic communications with the folks back home, apparently at the request of the Department of Defence. See, for example, this note from military blogger ginmar:

I might be getting transferred within the next week to another post. At the very least, KBR is not allowing any private computers on their system for the next ninety days. There might be one other option, but if you don't hear from me for a while...God, I don't know what I'll do about the kitty.

. . . I told them when I got here that I couldn't drive. They insisted on giving me a license. Now they're angry at me because I'm not comfortable driving. Go figure. The fact that this happened almost immediately after SB and I had an argument about it and then it came to someone else's attention is purely coincidental, I'm sure.

Edited to add: Screw it. No matter what it takes, I will get to my email.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden remarks:

Email from a friend with contacts among American troops in Iraq prompts me to wish some journalist would investigate reports that the military has ordered KBR, which provides net connectivity for US camps and bases in Iraq, to cut off all soldiersf ginessentialh access to email and the net for the next 90 days.

The Bush administration has faced rising criticism over the course of the week, with many calling for the resignation of Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld. Vice President Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton before his departure to become the Vice President of the United States.

"No, we are not in the background investigation business," J.P. London, chief executive of CACI, said in an interview Thursday. -- NYT

Our cable modem connection is still down, so I'm on a fairly slow dialup connection. [Fixed now. Hooray! -KC]

So I have only the most superficial idea of what came out yesterday in Rumsfeld's testimony, but it seems that Rumsfeld is aware of some of the same material Sy Hersh alluded to.

There is an eloquent opinion piece on the hearings in the NYT this morning:

The destructive stress created by the administration's lack of preparation was distressingly evident yesterday, when the hearings revealed that the members of the Army Reserve military police detachment stationed at Abu Ghraib had been sent to Iraq without being trained as ordinary prison guards, much less for the nightmarish duty they would face. Mr. Rumsfeld and other Pentagon witnesses said those untrained part-time soldiers had been put under the supervision of military intelligence officers who farmed out interrogation work to private contractors. That inexplicable chain of shifted responsibility violated not just any sort of common sense, but also military rules.

Although the Army's own report said the guards had been told by intelligence officers and their consultants to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation by depriving them of sleep and subjecting them to pain and humiliation, Mr. Rumsfeld said he "cannot conceive" that they thought their actions were condoned or encouraged. When he insisted that the normal rules for handling prisoners were in effect, several senators reminded him that he had said in January 2002 that suspected terrorists were not covered by the Geneva Convention.

Mr. Rumsfeld told the senators that his remarks about ignoring the international rules on the treatment of prisoners applied only to people captured in Afghanistan, not Iraq. That was a fine distinction some of the minimally prepared guards at Abu Ghraib may not have grasped, particularly since they were never instructed on the rules of the Geneva Convention. Like most Americans, however, they had heard their commander in chief paint the war in Iraq as an antiterrorism campaign.

MEANWHILE, more details are emerging about CACI's Steve Stefanowicz. He has a sweetheart in Adelaide, Australia, to whom he wants to return. Strategically, that would be a smart move, since it would take him out of the reach of the long arm of the law: if the Bush administration decided to use what frail legal bases Bremer left standing for disciplining civilian contractors, Stefanowicz would have to be charged either in Iraq or in the U. S. And given the legal twilight under which contractors could be charged, it is doubtful that an extradition would either be asked for or granted. Here's Stefanowicz  as chronicled in  The Australian:

  STEVE Stefanowicz, the civilian at the centre of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal enveloping the White House, wrote to an Adelaide friend on Thursday, saying he wanted to leave Iraq.

"It's safe to say I've seen enough for a lifetime here in Iraq and it's definitely time to come home," the 35-year-old said in an email.

Friends contacted yesterday by The Weekend Australian say Stefanowicz, a former US navy reservist, wants to return to his life in Adelaide, where he became engaged to an Australian and worked in IT sales for 18 months until October 2001.

"He's coming back to Australia shortly - he feels like Adelaide is his home," said one acquaintance from the IT industry.

Apparently, the emerging Stefanowicz excuse is his anger about 9/11:

But friends in Adelaide say it was the shock of the September 11 attacks in New York that spurred him to volunteer for active duty in the Middle East.

"He'd been in touch with some of his reserve friends in the US, and they'd said to come back (because) there are a lot of things moving on this," the friend said. "He's a heck of a nice guy but when he saw (September 11) happen he felt he had to go forward and join on a more permanent basis."

A week after the September 11 attacks, Stefanowicz's reaction was reported in an Adelaide newspaper.

"It was one of the most incredible and most devastating things I have ever seen," he said. "I have been in constant contact with my family and friends in the US and the mood was very solemn and quiet. But this is progressing into anger."

The Philadelphia Daily News is reporting  that in 2001, Stephanowicz told a friend he was going to work for the CIA:

Meanwhile, another Australian friend told the Daily News in an e-mail that in fall 2001 "Steve announced to all of his friends that he was leaving Adelaide to return to America to work for the Central Intelligence Agency."

"The events of 9/11 had nothing to do with his motivation to return to the U.S.," South Philadelphia native Sam Krupsky, now an executive with the Australian Rail Track Corp., wrote. "He was out of work and out of luck, and left because he had no prospects here." . . .

The CIA did not immediately return a call from the Daily News to its headquarters in Langley, Va. Typically, the secretive spy agency does not comment on personnel matters.

Krupsky, the Australian rail-track worker who was born in Philadelphia and who moved to Adelaide in the mid-1970s to play semi-pro basketball, cast doubt on Stefanowicz's skills.

"Steve tried hard for a couple of months to find a job here, but was always unsuccessful because he kept freaking out all of his potential employers," Krupsky wrote. He said Stefanowicz had boasted to friends on his arrival in Australia that he'd turned down a job offer from the CIA.

LYNNDIE ENGLAND UPDATE, from CNN yesterday:

Army Pfc. Lynndie England -- the woman seen smiling next to naked Iraqi prisoners in several photographs that have sparked outrage around the world -- was charged Friday by the military with assaulting Iraqi detainees and conspiring to mistreat them.

England is now the seventh soldier to be charged in the widening scandal.

She faces four charges: committing an indecent act; assaulting Iraqi detainees on multiple occasions; conspiring with Spc. Charles Graner to "maltreat Iraqi detainees" and committing acts "prejudicial to good order and discipline and were of nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces through her mistreatment of Iraqi detainees."

The charges must be taken up in an Article 32 investigation, a process similar to a civilian grand jury, before they can be sent to a general court-martial.

If the case is referred to court-martial and she is convicted, England may face official reprimand, forfeiture of pay or confinement, among other penalties.  . . .

England and Graner are members of the 372nd Military Police Company, which was sent to Iraq to help guard Iraqi prisoners.

Attorney Roy G. Hardy, who appeared with family members Friday, said England is five months pregnant and that Graner is the father.

"She did have a relationship with him," Hardy said. He would not comment on the status of the couple now beyond saying, "There is a current relationship, although I don't think they get to spend much time together."

Weirder and weirder. So they guy posing in the pictures with her is her boyfriend. And regarding Graner, doesn't anyone in this whole mess do background checks? Why is this being left to the press after-the-fact?

QUIZ QUESTION: Why hasn't Stefanowicz been arrested yet?

ALSO: Further to the general subject of Iraq, do go read several fine posts from our friends, the Nielsen Haydens. From Patrick: If we only had a press [blogged above], �gJust a Few Bad Apples�h Watch, and from Teresa, User base persistence. Also their recent comments sections on posts invovling Iraq are especially thoughtful.

AN INAPPROPRIATE USE OF THE PASSIVE VOICE: From CNN, Bremer: 'Something should have been done earlier'. Perhaps Bremer would like to rephrase that using active verbs.

I wrote this first thing this morning but havenÅft been able to upload it until now. Our cable modem connection is down. -KC

This morning I'm going to talk about SOMETHING ELSE. I've been intending to do that for several mornings, but the Taguba report hit the web, derailing me. I stated writing about mercenaries and private military firms on March 10th, now nearly two months ago, jumping off from Atrios's post about N4610 and its mercenary passengers. When I started it, I never dreamed I would end up writing daily updates about our "civilian contractors" in Iraq and their involvement in war crimes. But enough about that. My cable modem connection is down and so I can't update you on the unfolding horror (at least not without walking to the other room to use David's slow dial-up connection).

Let's talk a bit about science fiction instead. David and I are trying to finish our space opera anthology, lest it get bumped out of the 2005 schedule. I have a hard time with changes in subject matter and it usually takes me a at least three days to shift from one major project to another. By nature I am a binge worker -- unencumbered by children, I work intensely on something for, say, 18 hours a day, for three days straight. This kind of work pattern can lead to fast burnout, but I've also done a lot of my best work that way. But now it's been nearly seven years since my life has availed me of that kind of time. Instead, most often I do my work while being constantly interrupted. (When Geoffrey was still living in the house and Peter was small, one day Geoffrey got mad because his practice time was being interrupted more than once an hour by me asking for help with Peter. He became even more upset when I burst out laughing and said, "how often do you think I'm interrupted? Once every five minutes? Once a minute? More than once a minute?") This pattern of attention and interruption works reasonably well for something open-ended like blogging but much less well for more goal-oriented projects. My accommodation with it is that I find my children interesting and intellectually stimulating, and so I try to take what they give me for my intellectual projects rather then resenting the interruption.

But space opera, let's talk about space opera. One issue that emerges when selecting stories for an anthology like this is that space opera is by definition fiction on a broad, sweeping canvas and that short stories are by their nature much more limited in scope. The pieces we'll use will tend to be novellas, but this book will be only half the length of The Hard SF Renaissance, and so the longer the stories, the fewer writers represented. Our working definition of space opera will have to accommodate the conflict between the genre of space opera and the genre of the short story -- an interesting problem to have.

Last weekend, we went to the Fantastic Genre's Conference in New Paltz, NY. It was an academic conference put together by Heinz Insu Fenkel and John Langen. It had three simultaneous tracks of programming, academic papers, readings, and panels. In addition to David and I, it was attended by John Clute, Elizabeth Hand, Michael Swanwick, Ellen Datlow, Delia Sherman, Michael Cisco, Jeffrey Ford, Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, Greg Frost, Farah Mendelsohn, Paul Witcover, and others. It was held in SUNY New Paltz's Lecture Center, so all of the program rooms would seat at least 100 more than attended any given event. The set-up worked out well for being there with the kids. Also, people were very helpful, so I got to see a good bit more of the program than I had expected.

Peter and Elizabeth did a lot of coloring with felt pens. Peter drew some fabulous monsters, and Elizabeth did a lot of self-illumination. I now have some idea of what she'll look like when she's a teenager and covered with tatoos.

I had reading in which I read both from fiction drafts and from my web log and talked about blogging as "sketching" in Rudy Rucker's transrealist sense. And I pointed out that the protagonist in my blog, as written, is a much more empowered protagonist than the woman very much like me that I had written in a fiction draft two year ago. In the long run, it is my intention to pull together my "sketches" of my life as material for the novel I will some day finish. But as I said at the conference, I already see what a difference transrealist sketching makes in the flow of events. People are more empowered than we can imagine.

I was on a panel with John Clute and Farah Mendelsohn which was partly about space opera, though we were required to wander from this topic sooner than I wanted. Clute was talking in Clutian abstractions about the new British space opera as a type of "postimperial arena fiction," and it came to me as I sat there on the panel, that especially in the context of current events -- in which the leading export of the UK is private military services -- and in the context of an inherently military literature like space opera, we need to interrogate what we mean by "postimperial." Neither the political situation nor the fiction speak to a framing of this postimperialism as we're all down at the mouth because we don't rule the world anymore. But neither is our situation the old imperialism returned. It is something new, something different, and I think something that does not yet have a name.

M. John Harrison's Light, a book I had been meaning to read, came up on the panel as an important work of the new British space opera. We'd sent our review copy out for review, so when we got home I ordered a Gollancz trade paperback and it arrived nearly immediately. (Thank you Amazon Canada.)

I've read a little less than half and am perplexed. People whose taste and judgement I respect rave about this book. I am an experienced, intelligent reader of science fiction. I feel well-able to recognize and appreciate aesthetic stances I disagree with, which I expected to be the case with Light. But so far, I haven't found much to agree or disagree with; I haven't found much at all. What I've been reading seems to me like an early draft of a Phil Dick pastiche. I feel as though I must be reading a different book than the one Jeff VanDerMeer read which he described as a brilliant book completely without padding. I feel I've been sifting through the packing peanuts and still haven't found the book. Can someone help me out here? Is there some key to understanding this that I have missed? Why am I having this reaction? It seems to me that part of the problem may be a matter of context: Trying to read the Taguba report and alternating that with an occasional chapter of a book with no sympathetic characters may be a bad idea. But surely I should be getting more out of this, even so?

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Well. The sun's gone out. First thing to happen when a sky falls. -- Eyore in a Winnie the Pooh video playing in the background.

Josh Marshall refers to an appearance by Seymour Hersh on O'Reilley in which Hersh raises an interesting point:

HERSH: Mr. O'Reilly, this is a generation -- you know back -- you and I in our days, if we had something, you know, we came back from war.� We would�take our pictures and hide them behind the socks in the drawer�and look at them once in a while.

This is a generation that sends stuff on CDs, sends it around.� Some kid right now is negotiating with some European magazine.�-- You know, I can't say that for sure, but it's there.�-- It's out there.� And the Army knows it.

And sure enough, the Washington Post has obtained a CD with additional photos on it:

The collection of photographs begins like a travelogue from Iraq. Here are U.S. soldiers posing in front of a mosque. Here is a soldier riding a camel in the desert. And then: a soldier holding a leash tied around a man's neck in an Iraqi prison. He is naked, grimacing and lying on the floor.

Mixed in with more than 1,000 digital pictures obtained by The Washington Post are photographs of naked men, apparently prisoners, sprawled on top of one another while soldiers stand around them. There is another photograph of a naked man with a dark hood over his head, handcuffed to a cell door. And another of a naked man handcuffed to a bunk bed, his arms splayed so wide that his back is arched. A pair of women's underwear covers his head and face.  . . .

The pictures obtained by The Post include shots of soldiers simulating sexually explicit acts with one another and shots of a cow being skinned and gutted and soldiers posing with its severed head. There are also dozens of pictures of a cat's severed head.

Other photographs  show wounded men and corpses. In one, a dead man is lying in the back of a truck, his shirt, face and left arm covered in blood. His right arm is missing. Another photograph shows a  body, gray and decomposing. A young soldier is leaning over the corpse, smiling broadly and giving the "thumbs-up" sign.

And in another picture a young woman lifts her shirt, exposing her breasts. She is wearing a white band with numbers on her wrist, but it is unclear whether she is a prisoner. 

(What's with the "dozens of pictures of a cat's severed head"? Can this get any weirder?)

MEANWHILE, I continue to be astonished by the depths of the right's denial in relation to this scandal. Rumsfeld and Limbaugh say the kind of things one might expect from them. But, this guy should win some sort of prize for creativity. He's paddled his boat WAY up de Nial! (Thanks Joel!)

AN AFTERTHOUGHT: It occurs to me that these trophy photographers are the true embedded reporters whether they understand what they are reporting or not. And also, that if it weren't for digital media, most of the evidence would not have come to light. These are not the kind of shots where you send the roll home for our mom to develop at the corner drug store.

AND ALSO, please go read Rivka's excellent review essay on the  Taguba Report. She has a stronger stomach for that document than I do. (Via Electrolite.)

AND here's a new story of a video tape of another Geneva convention violation.

FINALLY, the SFGate has the account of one of the prisoners depicted. (Via Muslim Wakeup.)

So Whiskey Bar made the right call. The CACI employee discussed in the Taguba Report, Steven Stephanowicz, is indeed still on the job:

CACI in the Dark On Reports of Abuse: Employee Named in Army Report Still Working in Iraq, Company Says

Officials at CACI International Inc. fought back against allegations that one of its employees was involved in abusing detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, saying that it has not been notified of any problems, that the man is still at work and that he has been doing "a damn fine job."

Clearly exasperated, J.P. "Jack" London, the Arlington-based company's chief executive, said during a conference call Wednesday with investment analysts that he still had not received any information from the government about a report that said a CACI interrogator, an interpreter and two military intelligence officials were probably "either directly or indirectly responsible" for problems at the prison. . . .

L. Kenneth Johnson, CACI's president of U.S. operations, said that because the company had not received any instructions to change its activities at the prison, the company's employees remain at the site and continue to perform their duties. Johnson would not elaborate on the company's employees. A military official said there were four contract interrogators at Abu Ghraib and that all work for CACI.

WHY wasn't CACI notified? The Taguba report makes very specific recommendations. Why weren't they carried out? Who decided that this wasn't important enough to bother CACI about? Shouldn't that person be courtmartialed?

The investment website, Motley Fool, makes an interesting point about the situation:

In a conference call this morning, Chair, President, and CEO Jack London reiterated that it would take no action against the confirmed employee, unless it receives word from the government regarding the allegations. To date, the company has seen only press stories and copies of the leaked report, nothing official.

Even then, the company policy is to punish employees responsible for "illegal" activity. Sounds tough, but experts have pointed out that given the dubious legal standing of nonmilitary personnel in a war zone, it might be possible for a contractor to be legally inculpable, no matter how heinous the conduct.

So, perhaps CACI wasn't notified because someone already knew they wouldn't do anything because the contractor, exempt from the law by Bremer's order 17, had done nothing illegal since he was bound by no laws? Welcome to the Lookingglass world.

(And oh, by the way, who forgot to yank Stephanowicz's security clearance? The government is in charge of those, not the man's employer. If he still has a security clearance, NOW would be a good time to yank it. Better late than never!)

Let's have a round of applause for those who refused to participate in the abuse of prisoners:

From the Taguba Report:

4. (U) The individual Soldiers and Sailors that we observed and believe should be favorably noted include:

a. (U) Master-at-Arms First Class William J. Kimbro, US Navy Dog Handler, knew his duties and refused to participate in improper interrogations despite significant pressure from the MI personnel at Abu Ghraib.

b. (U) SPC Joseph M. Darby, 372nd MP Company discovered evidence of abuse and turned it over to military law enforcement.

c. (U) 1LT David O. Sutton, 229th MP Company, took immediate action and stopped an abuse, then reported the incident to the chain of command.

We need to make note of people like William J. Kimbro, the dog handler who refused to turn his dogs on prisoners (that seems to be the subtext of the commendation), despite strong pressure; and like the people who turned the abusers in. One wonders if there were other whistleblowers and people who refused to participate who were punished, rather than favorably noted, for their trouble.

(Via Green Voice Mail.)

UPDATE: See also Kevin Drum on this subject.

The Taguba Report, regarding  abuse of prisoners at  Abu Ghraib Prison is up on The Agonist. (Names of some of the witnesses have been removed to protect their privacy.)

Here are the parts about CACI:

In general, US civilian contract personnel  (Titan Corporation, CACI, etc�c), third country nationals, and local contractors  do not appear to be properly supervised within the detention facility at Abu  Ghraib.� During our on-site inspection, they wandered about with too much  unsupervised free access in the detainee area.� Having civilians in various  outfits (civilian and DCUs) in and about the detainee area causes confusion and  may have contributed to the difficulties in the accountability process and with  detecting escapes.�� (ANNEX 51, Multiple Witness Statements, and the  Personal Observations of the Investigation Team) . . .

[RECOMMENDATIONS] 11. (U) That Mr. Steven Stephanowicz, Contract  US Civilian Interrogator, CACI, 205th Military Intelligence  Brigade, be given an Official Reprimand to be placed in his  employment file, termination of employment, and generation of a derogatory  report to revoke his security clearance for the following acts which have been  previously referred to in the aforementioned findings:

• Made a false statement to the investigation team  regarding the locations of his interrogations, the activities during his  interrogations, and his knowledge of abuses.
• Allowed and/or instructed MPs, who were not trained in  interrogation techniques, to facilitate interrogations by 'setting conditions�h  which were neither authorized and in accordance with applicable  regulations/policy.� He clearly knew his instructions equated to physical  abuse.��

12. (U) That Mr. John  Israel, Contract US Civilian Interpreter, CACI, 205th  Military Intelligence Brigade, be given an Official Reprimand to be  placed in his employment file and have his security clearance reviewed by  competent authority for the following acts or concerns which have been  previously referred to in the aforementioned findings:

• Denied ever having seen interrogation processes in  violation of the IROE, which is contrary to several witness statements.
• Did not have a security clearance.

13. (U) I find that there is sufficient credible  information to warrant an Inquiry UP Procedure 15, AR 381-10, US Army  Intelligence Activities, be conducted to determine the extent of culpability of  MI personnel, assigned to the 205th MI Brigade and the Joint Interrogation and  Debriefing Center (JIDC) at Abu Ghraib (BCCF).� Specifically, I suspect that  COL Thomas M. Pappas, LTC Steve L. Jordan, Mr. Steven Stephanowicz,  and Mr. John Israel were either directly or  indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib (BCCF) and strongly  recommend immediate disciplinary action as described in the preceding paragraphs  as well as the initiation of a Procedure 15 Inquiry to determine the full extent  of their culpability.

Elsewhere in the report, John Israel is identified as an employee of the Titan Corp., indicating that this is probably  the contractaor that CACI disavows.

ALSO, Whiskey Bar continues to have great coverage of the whole mess.

MEANWHILE, Forbes quotes from a CACI conference call:

Defense contractor CACI International Inc. said Wednesday that allegations of abuse of Iraqi prisoners by its employees has caused no immediate economic impact on the company.

During a morning conference call, Chief Executive Jack London said he has not seen any formal documentation from the U.S. government confirming allegations that CACI employees were involved in the mistreatment of Iraq prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison 20 miles west of Baghdad.

Someone needs to call Chief Executive Jack London back, now that the report is available on the Agonist and on MSNBC, to see if he's read it yet and ask what he thinks.

AND HERE'S MORE ON CACI, from a completely different angle: CACI WHO? Some Thoughts on Who Prevents Transparency, Misplaces $3.3 Trillion and Profits from Prison Abuse in Iraq.

UPDATE: NPR has the unexpurgated version.