N.S.A. director says “dozens” of attacks thwarted.
C.I.A. Deputy Director Michael Morell resigns.
Turkish P.M. orders an end to riots in 24 hours.
Wildfires still burn along the Front Range in Colorado.
Severe weather moves across the country and hits the East Coast.
R.I.P. Miller Barber, 82, golf champion.
The Tigers lost in 10 to K.C. 3-2. (Valverde blew the save.)
Via Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice, secrecy takes over at Gitmo:
When the war court reconvenes this week, pretrial hearings in the case of an alleged al-Qaida bomber will be tackling a government motion that’s so secret the public can’t know its name.
It’s listed as the 92nd court filing in the death-penalty case against a Saudi man, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was waterboarded by CIA agents.
And in place of its name, the Pentagon has stamped “classified” in red.
It’s not the first classified motion in the case against the 48-year-old former millionaire from Mecca accused of orchestrating al-Qaida’s October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole warship off Yemen. Seventeen sailors were killed in the attack, and the prosecutor proposes to execute al-Nashiri, if he’s convicted.
Also on the docket for discussion this week is a classified defense motion that asks the Army judge to order the government to reveal information “related to the arrest, detention and interrogation” of al-Nashiri. By the time he got to Guantanamo in 2006, according to declassified investigations, CIA agents had held him at secret overseas prisons for four years during which, according to declassified accounts, he was waterboarded and interrogated at the point of a revving power drill and racked pistol.
But what makes the no-name government motion so intriguing is that those who’ve read it can’t say what it’s about, and those who haven’t don’t have a clue. Not even the accused, who, unless the judge rules for the defense, is not allowed to get an unclassified explanation of it – and cannot sit in on the court session when it’s argued in secret.
The motion was so secret that al-Nashiri’s Indianapolis-based defense attorney said members of the defense team would not characterize it over the phone. “Literally, I had to fly to Washington, D.C., to read it,” said attorney Rick Kammen of Indianapolis, a career death-penalty defender whom the Pentagon pays to represent al-Nashiri.
Mr. Kafka, your table is ready.
I seriously think that the only reason Congress hasn’t let President Obama close Gitmo isn’t because they’re worried about putting terrorists in the super-max prison in Colorado where they’ll never see more daylight than if they were in a box in the bottom of a well. It’s because there’s a bunch of people in Congress and across this country who think the Constitutional protections afforded to the accused is a whole lot of left-wing terrorist-hugging namby-pamby painty-waist pablum that only serves to spread love, peace and granola and put Real Americans in harm’s way, amirite?
Sheesh.
The New York Times is reporting that the NSA got a secret court order to get all of Verizon’s call records for a three-month period.
The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in April, directs a Verizon Communications subsidiary, Verizon Business Network Services, to turn over “on an ongoing daily basis” to the National Security Agency all call logs “between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”
The order does not apply to the content of the communications.
Verizon Business Network Services is one of the nation’s largest telecommunications and Internet providers for corporations. It is not clear whether similar orders have gone to other parts of Verizon, like its residential or cellphone services, or to other telecommunications carriers. The order prohibits its recipient from discussing its existence, and representatives of both Verizon and AT&T declined to comment Wednesday evening.
The four-page order was disclosed Wednesday evening by the newspaper The Guardian. Obama administration officials at the F.B.I. and the White House also declined to comment on it Wednesday evening, but did not deny the report, and a person familiar with the order confirmed its authenticity. “We will respond as soon as we can,” said Marci Green Miller, a National Security Agency spokeswoman, in an e-mail.
As the article points out, these are not wiretaps, and the scope of the order is so massive that it’s hard to imagine that they are looking for anything more than patterns. But it makes you wonder what they think they’re going to find when sifting through the virtual mountain of information.
This is being done under the authority of the PATRIOT Act, so from a political point of view, it’s going to be interesting to see who raises a stink about this from the GOP or Fox News. After all, they were all in favor of this kind of thing when it was first whooped through Congress. But it doesn’t matter if it’s a Democratic or a Republican administration: this huge scooping up of information had better have a really good reason behind it.
PS: Al Gore tweeted that the order was “obscenely outrageous,” thereby assuring its approval by the Orcosphere.
Five people were killed as more tornadoes hit Oklahoma.
Totally unpredictable: Fears of civil war in Iraq after 1,000 dead in May.
Wildfires in New Mexico force evacuations.
Feds have a “person of interest” in the latest ricin-mail case.
Medicare has more money than predicted.
The Tigers lost to Baltimore in a wild finish, 7-5.
Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.
Taliban reject peace talks after drone strike kills one of their own.
Average U.S. household still struggling to get rich.
More tornadoes hit Oklahoma.
R.I.P. Andrew Greeley, theologian and critic of Catholic doctrine.
The Tigers lose another one to the Pirates 1-0.
U.S. General: “Not feasible” to destroy the Taliban.
NYC Mayor Bloomberg got a threatening letter laced with poison.
Seven killed when trailer strikes minivan in upstate New York.
President Obama to nominate James Comey to head FBI.
R.I. Gov. Chafee, once GOP, to join Democrats.
The Tigers lost again to the Pirates 5-3
Last Inspection — James Dao of the New York Times writes on preparing soldiers for the final journey.
The soldier bent to his work, careful as a diamond cutter. He carried no weapon or rucksack, just a small plastic ruler, which he used to align a name plate, just so, atop the breast pocket of an Army dress blue jacket, size 39R.
“Blanchard,” the plate read.
Capt. Aaron R. Blanchard, a 32-year-old Army pilot, had been in Afghanistan for only a few days when an enemy rocket killed him and another soldier last month as they dashed toward their helicopter. Now he was heading home.
But before he left the mortuary here, he would need to be properly dressed. And so Staff Sgt. Miguel Deynes labored meticulously, almost lovingly, over every crease and fold, every ribbon and badge, of the dress uniform that would clothe Captain Blanchard in his final resting place.
“It’s more than an honor,” Sergeant Deynes said. “It’s a blessing to dress that soldier for the last time.”
About 6,700 American service members have died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and almost every one of their remains have come through the Dover Port Mortuary. Yet only since 2009 have journalists been allowed to photograph coffins returning from the war zones, the most solemn of rites at this air base. The intimate details of the process have been kept from public view.
But recently the Air Force, which oversees the mortuary, allowed a reporter and a photographer to observe the assembling of dress uniforms for those who have died. A small slice of the process, to be sure, but enough to appreciate the careful ritual that attends the war dead of the United States military.
And enough to glimpse the arc of two long wars.
Housed in a partly unheated building before the wars began, the mortuary moved into a new 72,000-square-foot building in 2003 after the invasion of Iraq. Then, as the wars expanded, so did the mortuary staff: from 7 workers in 2001 to more than 60 today.
War also brought, for a time, unrelenting work. During the peak of fighting in Iraq in 2006 and 2007, 10 to 20 bodies arrived here each day, and embalmers often worked all night to get remains home on time.
“I have deployed to Afghanistan,” said Col. John M. Devillier, the commander of Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations. “But I’ve seen more war here.”
Furthering the Lie — Michelangelo Signorile on the Boy Scouts of America’s policy change: it empowers gay-bashing.
The ugliest lie about gay men is that we are likely to be predators and pedophiles, preying upon children. This twisted belief, backed by no facts but exploiting deep-seated myths and powerful fears about homosexuality, is still firmly embedded in our culture, as are lies about blacks, Jews and other groups demonized within our culture. It’s the lie that has kept many gay men from even interacting with teens and young children, fearful of being in the position of being wrongly accused of making sexual advances. It’s a lie that often inhibits organizing, depriving us of the intergenerational mentoring and self-esteem-building that is so important for any minority group that is discriminated against.
And it’s a lie that empowers bashers and draws blood on our streets.
The predator lie tells young boys, gay and straight, to be suspect and fearful of adult gay men. And the BSA, adopting a new policy allowing gay scouts but not gay scoutmasters, is now furthering the lie in more powerful way. The message from the BSA to a scout who might be thinking he is gay is that he better hope he isn’t because he will grow up to be a predator. The Boy Scouts is telling gay boys that they won’t be able to be trusted around children when they become adults and that they’ll be booted from the organization. Perhaps worse than that, the BSA is telling straight scouts that the gay scout who comes out to them, or whom they might learn about, will grow up to be a predator. And that is exactly the kind of vicious demagoguery that feeds discrimination and violence.
Many well-meaning people worked hard to get this change, and sometimes, in the thick of battle, anything that makes your opponents angry — and this change is surely not making the anti-gay, evangelical right happy — seems like a big win. Most of them see the change as falling far short but as a pragmatic, incremental step that they hope will lead to end of the of the entire ban soon. And true, scouts who learn they are gay and state that publicly, or who are outed by others, now may not experience being ejected by the BSA (though the details of all this still seem quite murky).
But continuing to ban lesbian den mothers and gay scoutmasters is sending a horrible message to American youth, including the scouts, gay and straight.
Don’t Give In — Leonard Pitts, Jr. on surrendering to terrorism.
I have not seen the video.
Not saying I won’t, but for now, I’ve chosen not to. To rush online and seek out cell phone footage of two fanatics with machetes who butchered a British soldier in London Wednesday, to watch them standing there, hands painted red with his blood, speaking for the cameras, would feel like an act of complicity, like giving them what they want, like being a puppet yanked by its strings.
Sometimes, especially in the heat of visceral revulsion, we forget an essential truth about terrorism. Namely, that the people who do these things are the opposite of powerful. Non-state sponsored terror is a tactic chosen almost exclusively by the impotent.
These people have no inherent power. They command no armies, they boss no economies, their collective arsenals are puny by nation-state standards. No, what they have is a willingness to be random, ruthless and indiscriminate in their killing.
But they represent no existential danger. The United States once tore itself in half and survived the wound. Could it really be destroyed by men using airliners as guided missiles? Britain was once bombed senseless for eight months straight and lived to tell the tale. Could it really be broken by two maniacs with machetes?
Of course not.
No, terrorism’s threat lies not in its power, but in its effect, its ability to make us appalled, frightened, irrational, and, most of all, convinced that we are next, and nowhere is safe. Here, I’m thinking of the lady who told me, after 9/11, that she would never enter a skyscraper again. As if, because of this atrocity, every tall building in America — and how many thousands of those do we have? — was suddenly suspect. And I’m thinking of my late Aunt Ruth who, at the height of the anthrax scare, required my uncle to open the mail on the front lawn, after which she received it wearing latex gloves.
I am also thinking of the country itself, which, in response to the 9/11 attacks, launched two wars — one more than necessary — at a ruinous cost in lives, treasure and credibility that will haunt us for years.
Doonesbury — Expensive graduation.
President Obama’s speech on ending the open-ended GWOT:
In a much-anticipated speech at the National Defense University, Mr. Obama sought to turn the page on the era that began on Sept. 11, 2001, when the imperative of preventing terrorist attacks became both the priority and the preoccupation. Instead, the president suggested that the United States had returned to the state of affairs that existed before Al Qaeda toppled the World Trade Center, when terrorism was a persistent but not existential danger. With Al Qaeda’s core now “on the path to defeat,” he argued, the nation must adapt.
“Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue,” Mr. Obama said. “But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. It’s what our democracy demands.”
The politics of this perpetual war may be the hardest part. We have become so used to the drumbeat of invade and occupy from the neocons and the armchair generals who never wore the uniform or picked up anything more than a cigar that moving in any other direction sounds like retreat to them. But for the sake of our country, our treasure, and the lives of the people who are the ones who will have to fight, the war that we were whooped into and then lied to in order to perpetuate it must end, and the speech Mr. Obama gave yesterday was the first indication that it will.
White House acknowledges four Americans were killed by drones..
Car bomb kills 12 in Pakistan.
British soldier killed in London by cleaver-wielding attacker.
Women secretly taped at West Point.
Anthony Weiner running for mayor in New York City.
The Tigers beat the Indians 11-7.
President Obama sacked Steven Miller, the acting head of the IRS.
Deadly tornadoes hit Texas.
The White House released hundreds of e-mails related to the Benghazi! talking points.
Iraq — Bomb attacks in Baghdad killed more than 35 people.
Syria — The U.N. condemned the government for attacking civilians.
Yet another military officer in charge of controlling sexual harassment is busted for it.
Clone to home — Stem cells recovered from cloned embryos.
The Tigers lost to the Astros 7-5.
Afghan commandos step into the fight.
Justice Department defends its seizure of phone records at AP.
Abortion doctor convicted of murder avoids death penalty.
Inspector General report on the IRS says there’s still a problem.
American accused of spying ejected from Russia.
The Tigers beat the Astros 6-2.
Via the New York Times:
Federal investigators secretly seized two months of phone records for reporters and editors of The Associated Press in what the news organization said Monday was a “serious interference with A.P.’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news.”
The A.P. said that the Justice Department informed it on Friday that law enforcement officials had obtained the records for more than 20 telephone lines of its offices and journalists, including their home phones and cellphones. It said the records were seized without notice sometime this year.
The organization was not told the reason for the seizure. But the timing and the specific journalistic targets strongly suggested they are related to a continuing government investigation into the leaking of information a year ago about the Central Intelligence Agency’s disruption of a Yemen-based terrorist plot to bomb an airliner.
The disclosures began with an Associated Press article on May 7, 2012, breaking the news of the foiled plot; the organization had held off publishing it for several days at the White House’s request because the intelligence operations were still unfolding.
In an angry letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Monday, Gary Pruitt, the president and chief executive of The A.P., called the seizure, a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into its news gathering activities.
There had better be a pretty damn good reason for this, and they better have had both warrants and the probable cause to back it up.
Assuming they have that — something we can’t take for granted since the Obama administration seems to be following the Bush playbook of using the GWOT as their cover — then the AP is being a little bit over the top with their response. The Justice Department went after phone records, not the conversations themselves, which law enforcement does quite often… if every case on Law & Order is to be believed.
From a political point of view, it’ll be fun to see how the wingers react. They are always saying the librul media protects the rights of terrorists, and here’s the secret gay Muslim Kenyan socialist going after the press for their records. If Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales had done this, they would have been saving America.
Not the First — Long before Jason Collins came out, there was Glenn Burke. Allen Barra in The Atlantic tells the story of the first major league out gay baseball player.
A few months back, the Baltimore Ravens’ Brendon Ayanbadejo, an outspoken advocate for LGBT rights, told USA Today that he thought the first player in the three major sports to out himself would be a baseball player: “The religious roots are a lot deeper in basketball and football. With that being said, I think baseball players are more open-minded.”
What Ayanbadejo didn’t know was that one baseball player already had. This week’s coming out by NBA player Jason Collins is momentous, but the Jackie Robinson of gay rights was Glenn Burke, who played for the Los Angeles Dodgers and Oakland A’s from 1976 to 1979. He tried to change sports culture three decades ago—but back then, unlike now, sports culture wasn’t ready for a change.
Burke made no secret of his sexual orientation to the Dodgers front office, his teammates, or friends in either league. He also talked freely with sportswriters, though all of them ended up shaking their heads and telling him they couldn’t write that in their papers. Burke was so open about his sexuality that the Dodgers tried to talk him into participating in a sham marriage. (He wrote in his autobiography that the team offered him $75,000 to go along with the ruse.) He refused. In a bit of irony that would seem farcical if it wasn’t so tragic, one of the Dodgers who tried to talk Burke into getting “married,” was his manager, Tommy Lasorda, whose son Tom Jr. died from AIDS complications in 1991. To this day, Lasorda Sr. refuses to acknowledge his son’s homosexuality.
Burke, who also died of AIDS-related causes in 1995, came out to the world outside baseball in a 1982 article for Inside Sports and even followed it up shortly after with an appearance on The Today Show with Bryant Gumbel. But his story was greeted by the rest of the news media and the baseball establishment, including Burke’s former teammates and baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, with silence. Even his superb autobiography, Out at Home, which published the year he died, failed to stir open conversation about homosexuality in sports. Practically no one in the sports-writing community would acknowledge that Burke was gay or report stories that followed up on his admission.
He told People magazine while promoting his book in 1995, “My mission as a gay ballplayer was the breaking of a stereotype … I think it worked … They can’t ever say now that a gay man can’t play in the majors, because I’m a gay man and I made it.”
And yet Burke is remembered less today as a pioneer for gay rights and more as the man who, along with Dusty Baker, invented the “high five.”
The media in general and the sports media in particular found Burke’s homosexuality an inconvenient truth. He told People, “I think everyone just pretended not to hear me. It just wasn’t a story they were ready to hear.”
Eighteen years later they still haven’t heard him.
It’s His Problem — Andrew O’Hehir on President Obama’s cowardice at Gitmo.
So it is that Obama, more than four years after signing an executive order to shut down the Guantánamo prison, found himself a few days ago mumbling defensively to the White House press corps that it might be time to “re-engage with Congress” on the issue. “It is not a surprise to me that we’ve got problems in Guantánamo,” he added. Well, it freakin’ well shouldn’t be, Mr. President. From the moment Obama became a presidential candidate in 2007, he campaigned vigorously against Guantánamo as a pillar of the flawed and failed Bush-Cheney war policy. He won the election and signed that executive order in his third day on the job, and then – once it became clear that House Republicans would be delighted to use the issue to depict him as a crypto-Muslim, terrorist-coddling pantywaist – let the whole thing drop. The rest of us, I’m afraid, mostly assumed that the right guy was in office and the right thing would be done eventually, and moved on.
But decisions made in the name of political expediency have a tendency to come back and bite you in the ass. (If Machiavelli never said that, he should have.) As the Economist put it this week, the current hunger strike at Guantánamo, which began as a small dissent movement in February and now includes most of the camp’s detainees, has shamed Obama and forced America and the world to face “one of his most glaring failures.” Military officials admit that 100 of the 166 Guantánamo prisoners are now refusing food, while lawyers and activists in contact with the detainees say the real number is closer to 130. At least 23 men in the camp are reportedly being strapped into a chair twice a day and force-fed Ensure nutritional supplement — through a plastic tube passed through the nose and into the stomach – in order to keep them alive. Three to five others in more serious condition have apparently been hospitalized. (The Miami Herald has an online chart showing the progress of the strike, using the official statistics.)
How many of these detainees, who’ve decided they’d rather die than face indefinite imprisonment with no prospect of either release or trial, are dedicated al-Qaida extremists? It’s obviously a loaded question, and I suppose the real answer is that no one knows. But here’s what we do know: Of the 166 prisoners still at Guantánamo, 86 have been officially cleared for release, either to their home countries or somewhere else. In fact, many of those were designated for release years ago, under the Bush administration, and they are still locked up. There’s nothing close to an adequate explanation for that fact, but we can evidently blame a combination of bureaucratic inertia, excessive caution and the fact that almost no one gives a crap about a few dozen Arab and/or Muslim men who used to be suspected terrorists and now constitute a national embarrassment.
They Ain’t Cheap — Andy Borowitz reports on the N.R.A’s budget woes.
National Rifle Association C.E.O. Wayne LaPierre used his opening speech at the N.R.A.’s national convention today to highlight several challenges facing the organization, including what he called “the rising cost of Senators.”
“Over the past few years, we’ve seen the price of purchasing a Senator surge astronomically,” he told the N.R.A. faithful. “Unless something is done to make Senators more affordable, the ability of a tiny lobbying group to overrule the wishes of ninety per cent of the American people will be in jeopardy.”
The days are over, he said, when “you could buy a Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) for little more than pocket change.”
“Now it costs thousands to purchase a marginally effective Senator like Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.),” he said.
Mr. LaPierre was followed at the podium by the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, the rock musician Ted Nugent, and several other people who would not pass background checks.
Doonesbury — Grade deflation.
President Obama will try again to close Gitmo.
Also, the president backs the way the FBI handled the Boston bombers.
Victims ID’d in Afghanistan cargo plane crash.
Witnesses and satellite photos show extent of Nigerian massacre.
It’s Markey vs. Gomez in Massachusetts primary for the Senate.
FDA says morning-after pill safe for 15 and up.
The Tony nominations are out. (Missed again.)
R.I.P. Deanna Durbin, 91, film star of the ’40′s.
The Tigers beat the Twins 6-1.
Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.
U.N. Secretary General appeals to Syria to open up to chemical weapons inspectors.
Iraq — A series of car bombs killed at least 23 people in Shi’ite areas.
Afghan leader confirms cash payments by the C.I.A.
FBI visits Boston bombing suspects widow.
Supreme Court rejects Alabama appeal of immigration law.
Red River crest in North Dakota lowered again.
The Netherlands will get its first king in 120 years.
The Tigers beat the Twins 4-3.
Stop Watching the News — Farhad Manjoo offers a respite from the breaking news.
Inspired by the events of the past week, here’s a handy guide for anyone looking to figure out what exactly is going on during a breaking news event. When you first hear about a big story in progress, run to your television. Make sure it’s securely turned off.
Next, pull out your phone, delete your Twitter app, shut off your email, and perhaps cancel your service plan. Unplug your PC.
Now go outside and take a walk for an hour or two. Maybe find a park and sit on a bench, reading an old novel. Winter is just half a year away—have you started cleaning out your rain gutters? This might be a good time to start. Whatever you do, remember to stay hydrated. Have a sensible dinner. Get a good night’s rest. In the morning, don’t rush out of bed. Take in the birdsong. Brew a pot of coffee.
Finally, load up your favorite newspaper’s home page. Spend about 10 minutes reading a couple of in-depth news stories about the events of the day. And that’s it: You’ve now caught up with all your friends who spent the past day and a half going out of their minds following cable and Twitter. In fact, you’re now better informed than they are, because during your self-imposed exile from the news, you didn’t stumble into the many cul-de-sacs and dark alleys of misinformation that consumed their lives. You’re less frazzled, better rested, and your rain gutters are clear.
[...]
We get stories much faster than we can make sense of them, informed by cellphone pictures and eyewitnesses found on social networks and dubious official sources like police scanner streams. Real life moves much slower than these technologies. There’s a gap between facts and comprehension, between finding some pictures online and making sense of how they fit into a story. What ends up filling that gap is speculation. On both Twitter and cable, people are mostly just collecting little factoids and thinking aloud about various possibilities. They’re just shooting the shit, and the excrement ends up flying everywhere and hitting innocent targets.
For a lot of people, it’s exciting to get caught up in a fast-breaking story. I’d like to tell you that the next time something big breaks, I’ll stay away from Twitter. I hope that I do. But I worry that’s just my news hangover talking. For all the blind alleys, I do have a lot of fun following the news in real time, and I find it hard to stay away. Maybe you do, too. If you’re that sort of person, feel free to stay glued to Twitter and cable. Just be sure to exercise caution about what you tweet and retweet—after last night, I know I’ll be able to do at least that much. And just remember, for all the time you spend online, you won’t be any better informed than a guy who spent all day cleaning his gutters.
A Balanced Approach to Fear — Zachary Karabell at The Atlantic looks at how America reacts to mass destruction.
In the reaction to the Boston bombings, we are seeing, at least for now, an outburst of balanced outrage. I lived in Boston for seven years in the 1990s. It was a tough place — not threatening, just tough. Removed from the years of busing that had brought out the us-versus-them worst, it wasn’t yet as gentrified and reborn after the multibillion-dollar Big Dig. The DNA of cities takes a while to change, and you could feel in the many reactions from Bostonians that they were hurt, angry, and determined to catch whoever did it. But they were equally determined to keep going without making too many compromises about their lives. The city was shut down on Friday to make it easier for law enforcement to do their job, but for a very specific reason, not some generalized fear.
It’s been said for years that we have ample tools via law enforcement agencies to guard against attacks and pursue those who undertake them. The Boston response is classic law enforcement, with the FBI leading the way, the police doing the vital work, and untold numbers of volunteers and responders adding to the mix.
Terror is not an act per se; it’s the creation of fear via an act. It’s been said that Russia is relatively immune to terror, even after a number of gruesome and far more lethal episodes in recent years. In 2004, a school in Beslan was seized by Chechen fighters. When Russian troops stormed the school, nearly 400 people died. Yet that had little discernible impact on Russian attitudes or behavior. Russians are largely impervious to the effects of terror attacks because they don’t expect perfect security. They expect a world fraught with peril, and probably too much, though their history suggests that peril is the norm. Hence random acts of terror don’t terrorize.
For the Birds — Brian Kimmerling on what birds tell us about the world we live in.
A bird-watcher is a kind of pious predator. To see a new bird is to capture it, metaphorically, and a rare bird or an F.O.Y. (First of the Year, for the uninitiated) is a kind of trophy. A list of birds seen on a given day is also a form of prayer, a thanksgiving for being alive at a certain time and place. Posting that list online is a 21st-century form of a votive offering. It’s unclear what deity presides.
There was prestige in knowing birds in ancient Rome, and there is prestige today. There are also competitive insect enthusiasts and tree connoisseurs and fungus aficionados, but they lack the cultural stature and sheer numbers of bird-watchers. There are 5.8 million bird-watchers in the United States, slightly more than the number of Americans in book clubs or residents of Wisconsin. That’s a huge army of primitive hunter-mystics decked out in sturdy hiking boots and nylon rain gear, consulting their smartphones to identify or imitate a particular quarry.
There is nothing especially new about them except for their gear. Two hundred years ago the heartland teemed with second sons of wealthy European families who could have stayed home dissipating in traditional style, but chose to go to the New World and find a new animal instead. Reporting your sightings to the Audubon Society is decidedly less glamorous than dispatching a new specimen to a museum in Paris or London, but it’s a kindred enterprise.
Today’s birders are not exploring new territory geographically, as the early naturalists did; rather, they are contouring the frontiers of climate change. It’s April, and the kitchen-window bird observer is limbering up, too. Are the birds nesting early, nesting late? (Do they know something we don’t?) The reporting such observers do is crucial.
And what are today’s birds telling us? The Audubon Society estimates that nearly 60 percent of 305 bird species found in North America in winter are shifting northward and to higher elevations in response to climate change. For comparison, imagine the inhabitants of 30 states — using state residence as a proxy for species of American human — becoming disgruntled with forest fires and drought and severe weather events, and seeking out suitable new habitat.
The Audubon Society’s estimates rest largely on data supplied by volunteers in citizen-science projects like the Christmas Bird Count (first proposed in 1900, nine years after the first known use of the word “bird-watcher,” to set the hobby apart from the more traditional Christmas pastime of shooting birds). The birds in question have shifted an average of 35 miles north over a period of about 40 years — seemingly insignificant in human terms, but a major move ecologically.
[Ed. note: I still have my well-worn, well-used copy of Roger Tory Peterson's A Field Guide to the Birds from 1962.]
Doonesbury — Social media is the enemy.
A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.
The sweeping, 577-page report says that while brutality has occurred in every American war, there never before had been “the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.” The study, by an 11-member panel convened by the Constitution Project, a legal research and advocacy group, is to be released on Tuesday morning.
Debate over the coercive interrogation methods used by the administration of President George W. Bush has often broken down on largely partisan lines. The Constitution Project’s task force on detainee treatment, led by two former members of Congress with experience in the executive branch — a Republican, Asa Hutchinson, and a Democrat, James R. Jones — seeks to produce a stronger national consensus on the torture question.
While the task force did not have access to classified records, it is the most ambitious independent attempt to date to assess the detention and interrogation programs. A separate 6,000-page report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s record by the Senate Intelligence Committee, based exclusively on agency records, rather than interviews, remains classified.
“As long as the debate continues, so too does the possibility that the United States could again engage in torture,” the report says.
The use of torture, the report concludes, has “no justification” and “damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive.” The task force found “no firm or persuasive evidence” that these interrogation methods produced valuable information that could not have been obtained by other means. While “a person subjected to torture might well divulge useful information,” much of the information obtained by force was not reliable, the report says.
We know that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld believed it was perfectly acceptable to engage in torture. They thought it was justified, just as they thought going to war in Iraq was justified. And I am sure that they thought that even if it wasn’t and if they thought it was illegal, they knew that they would never be called to account for it.
And they were right.
This editorial in the New York Times by a prisoner at Gitmo is going to get a lot of pixels.
One man here weighs just 77 pounds. Another, 98. Last thing I knew, I weighed 132, but that was a month ago.
I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity.
I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.
The prisoner, Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, dictated his story over an “unclassified” phone line through a translator.
I am certain the orcosphere will attack the Times for giving the man the opportunity to speak; how dare they let a dangerous terrorist mock the First Amendment? Except if the man’s story is to be believed, he was in the wrong place in the wrong time and no one has been able to prove he’s guilty of anything more than that. But, hey, it’s not like we lock up innocent people, right?
All Gitmo has done is give our enemies something to point at and call us hypocrites for demanding that other countries live up to our standards of justice when we don’t do it in Cuba. (Funny how we always seem to have these double standards when it comes to anything to do with Cuba; i.e. the worthless and counterproductive embargo that was meant to put an end to a dictatorship when we have robust trade and friendly relations with equally repressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia and China.)
President Obama was right to try to close Gitmo as his first executive order more than five years ago. The fact that Congress won’t allow it is testimony to the cowardice of the big bad butch Republicans who are afraid that a 135-pound laborer from Yemen will take over the Supermax prison in Colorado and turn it into a terrorist cell.
U.S. general says Afghan president putting U.S. troops at risk.
Senate panel passes assault weapon ban.
President Obama’s charm offensive continues.
Deadly standoff in upstate New York ends.
Contamination of water wells at N.C. Marine base started in the 1940′s.
Dow keeps going up and up.
I watched the Very Serious People on Morning Joe discuss the filibuster led by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), and of course everyone pulled out the YouTube clip of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and made the comparison. It works only if you cast Adam Sandler as Mr. Smith.
Anyway, the basis of Mr. Paul’s filibuster was that he couldn’t get a yes or no answer out of Attorney General Eric Holder and the White House as to whether or not they would rule out using a drone against an American citizen here on American soil. Seeing as how that is a hypothetical of the highest order, seeing as how this or any administration would probably not like to make a hard and fast statement on something like that — what about Pearl Harbor or September 11 — and seeing as how no matter what Mr. Holder or the president said they wouldn’t believe them in the first place, the exercise Mr. Paul went through was an entertaining footnote to a pointless discussion. It chewed up time on C-SPAN, it was a shiny object for the cable guys, and since nothing much else is going on in Washington — it’s snowing, I hear — and there aren’t any missing white women to hunt for, it was better than watching Bruce Boxleitner sell hair replacement kits on cable.
And, of course, does anyone doubt that if this had been under the administration of George W. Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney and a Democratic senator took to the floor of the Senate to talk for 13 hours to filibuster the nomination of John Yoo as the director of the CIA, we wouldn’t have the flaming gasbags of Fox News and the orcosphere calling for his immediate expulsion and a one-way ticket to Gitmo for doubting the methods of the never-ending War on Terra?
It doesn’t really matter who’s in the White House. The defense system we have is in place if it’s a Democrat or a Republican. The only difference is who gets to point the fingers when they want to distract us from the fact that we Americans are killing a lot of people using roughly the same methods we use to download a movie on Netflix. That’s more disturbing than listening to Rand Paul drone on.
