Yesterday, Senator Russ Feingold introduced a resolution to censure President Bush for breaking the law by illegally wiretapping American citizens.
As most of you know, Sen. Feingold is and has been a breath of fresh air in that he is a Democrat who shares progressive values and has the spine to stand up for what he thinks is the right thing to do. I can recall some 25 years ago when I was in school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, that his name was mentioned often and in favorable tones among state politicos who valued his insight, integrity and honesty.
I share the same feelings about his colleague, (who happens to be a Republican) Senator John McCain. You may recall that these two authored the “Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002”, commonly referred to as the “McCain-Feingold Act”. This bill was passed in 2002 and was challenged in the Supreme Court by, among others, the Democratic party to which Mr. Feingold belongs as well as a host of others all along the political spectrum. For more on Campaign Reform, please see, e.g.,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_reform#Bipartisan_Campaign_Reform_Act_of_2002
It should be noted that Senator McCain has, by speaking his mind and acting accordingly, caused some consternation among his “conservative” base in Arizona. See, e.g., http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1421461/posts . Apparently, it is permissible to be a Republican if you also must qualify as an obedient lap-dog. An obedient lap-dog Senator McCain is not.
Sen. Feingold has also come under fire from some in his own party for having initially voting against the war in Iraq and against the Patriot Act (the only Democrat to do so) not because he disagreed with what President Bush’s conception – keep terrorists at bay here in this Country – but rather in the execution of that conception. Sadly prescient, he. If we only knew then what we know now… Senator Feingold is above reproach in his political stances even if one disagrees with them, a remote possibility, but a possibility nonetheless. One can rest easy knowing that he is voting after giving all sides to an issue a fair hearing and an opportunity to be heard and with the knowledge that his position has been carefully considered. That, after all, is really all we can ask of our representatives in Congress, so many of whom are more concerned with reelection and pleasing their corporate constituencies.
Senator Feingold appeared with George Stephanopoulos of ABC’s “This Week” program on Sunday morning. He explained why the censure was necessary:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Tomorrow in the Senate, you're going to introduce a resolution to censure George W. Bush. Let me show that to our viewers.
It says, "Resolved that the United States Senate does hereby censure George W. Bush, president of the United States, and does condemn his unlawful authorization of wiretaps of Americans."
That is a big step. Why are you taking it now?
FEINGOLD: It's an unusual step. It's a big step, but what the president did by consciously and intentionally violating the Constitution and laws of this country with this illegal wiretapping, has to be answered.
There can be debate about whether the law should be changed. There can be debate about how best to fight terrorism. We all believe that there should be wiretapping in appropriate cases -- but the idea that the president can just make up a law, in violation of his oath of office, has to be answered .
STEPHANOPOULOS: But as you know, the president says he was acting on his inherent authority under the Constitution -- and even your resolution acknowledges that no federal court has ruled that a president does not have that authority as commander in chief.
So aren't you jumping the gun?
FEINGOLD: Not at all. You know, we've had a chance here for three months to look at whether there's any legal basis for this -- and they're using shifting legal justifications.
First, they try to argue that, somehow under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, they can do this. It's pretty clear that they can't.
Then there's the argument that somehow the military authorization for Afghanistan allowed this. This has basically been laughed out of the room in the Congress.
So the last resort is to somehow say that the president has inherent authority to ignore the law of the United States of America.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Inherent authority...
FEINGOLD: And that has a consequence that the president could even order the assassination of American citizens if that's the law.
So there is no sort of independent, inherent authority that allows the president to override the laws passed by the Congress of the United States.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So if you're so convinced -- if you're so convinced -- that the president has broken the law, why not file an article of impeachment?
FEINGOLD: Well, you know, that's an option that we could look at, if somebody thought that was a really good idea.
There are other options out there.
In fact, this conduct is right in the strike zone. Even though the founding fathers, they didn't have strike zones; they didn't have baseball -- but this is right in the strike zone of the concept of high crimes and misdemeanors.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So are you pulling your punch?
FEINGOLD: We have to consider: Is it best for the country to start impeachment proceedings? Is it best for the country to consider removing the president from office?
We're not mandated to impeach a president who has broken the law, but I think we are required to do our job to live up to our oath of office and say, "Wait a minute, there has to be" -- at least as a first step -- "some accountability."
STEPHANOPOULOS: But...
FEINGOLD: Proper accountability is a censuring of the president
-- saying: "Mr. President, acknowledge that you broke the law, return to the law, return to our system of government."
That's what I think we should do.
The fact sheet put out by Senator Feingold’s office is direct and to the point.
# # #
FACT SHEET FROM U.S. SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLDON HIS RESOLUTION TO CENSURE THE PRESIDENT
Senator Feingold’s resolution of censure condemns the President for breaking the law by authorizing an illegal wiretapping program, and for misleading Congress and the American people about the existence and legality of that program.
The President Broke the Law by Wiretapping Outside of FISA
It Is Illegal to Wiretap Without the Requisite Warrant or Court Order: The law is clear that the criminal wiretap statute and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) “shall be the exclusive means by which electronic surveillance . . . and the interception of domestic wire, oral, and electronic communications may be conducted.”
FISA Has an Emergency Exception: The Administration has indicated that it ignored FISA because the application process takes too long. In fact, in an emergency where the Attorney General believes that surveillance must begin before a court order can be obtained, FISA permits him to immediately authorize the surveillance as long as the government goes to the court within 72 hours. Prior to 2001, the emergency wiretap period was only 24 hours. The Administration requested and received the increase to 72 hours in intelligence authorization legislation that passed in late 2001.
FISA Provides for Wartime Situations: FISA also permits the Attorney General to authorize warrantless electronic surveillance in the United States during the 15 days following a declaration of war, to allow time to consider any amendments to FISA necessitated by a wartime emergency.
The Administration Has Used FISA Thousands of Times Since 9/11: Administration officials have criticized FISA, but they have obtained thousands of warrants approved by the FISA court since 9/11, and have almost never had a warrant request rejected by that court.
The President Made Misleading Arguments Defending his Wiretapping Program
Military Force Resolution Did Not Authorize Wiretapping: The President has argued that Congress gave him authority to wiretap Americans on U.S. soil without a warrant when it passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force after September 11, 2001. There is no language in the resolution and no evidence to suggest that it was intended to give the President authority to order these warrantless wiretaps. Warrantless domestic surveillance is not an “incident of war” akin to detaining an enemy soldier on the battlefield as the Administration has argued.
In fact, Congress passed the Patriot Act just six weeks after September 11 to expand the government’s powers to conduct surveillance of suspected terrorists and spies. Yet the Administration did not ask for, nor did the Patriot Act include, any change to FISA’s requirement of judicial approval for wiretaps of Americans in the United States.
Prohibition on Wiretapping Limits Executive Power: The President’s assertion of inherent executive power is also wrong. The President has extensive authority when it comes to national security and foreign affairs, but given the clear prohibition in FISA, that authority does not include the power to wiretap American citizens on American soil without a warrant.
Executive Branch Review of Wiretapping Is Not Enough: The President has argued that periodic executive branch review provides an adequate check on the program. But Congress when it passed FISA explicitly rejected the idea that the executive branch should be fully entrusted to conduct national security wiretaps on its own – a power that the executive had abused in the past. In addition, the Administration has said that NSA employees decide whose communications to tap. Executive branch employees are no substitute for FISA Court judges. (emphasis mine)
Congress Did Not Approve This Program: The extremely limited briefings of the President’s warrantless surveillance programs to a handful of Congressional leaders did not constitute Congressional oversight, much less approval. In fact, the failure of the President to keep the Congressional Intelligence Committees “fully and currently informed of all intelligence activities” was a violation of the National Security Act.
The President Made Misleading Public Statements about Administration Wiretapping
“Finally, we need to renew the critical provisions of the Patriot Act that protect our civil liberties. The Patriot Act was written with clear safeguards to ensure the law is applied fairly. The judicial branch has a strong oversight role. Law enforcement officers need a federal judge's permission to wiretap a foreign terrorist's phone, a federal judge's permission to track his calls, or a federal judge's permission to search his property. Officers must meet strict standards to use any of these tools. And these standards are fully consistent with the Constitution of the U.S.”
--President George Bush, June 9, 2005, in Columbus, Ohio
“A couple of things that are very important for you to understand about the Patriot Act. First of all, any action that takes place by law enforcement requires a court order. In other words, the government can't move on wiretaps or roving wiretaps without getting a court order. Now, we've used things like roving wiretaps on drug dealers before. Roving wiretaps mean you change your cell phone. And yet, we weren't able to use roving wiretaps on terrorists. And so what the Patriot Act said is let's give our law enforcement the tools necessary, without abridging the Constitution of the United States, the tools necessary to defend America.”
--President George Bush, July 14, 2004, in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin
“Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.”
--President George Bush, April 20, 2004, in Buffalo, New York
Here’s the Resolution in its entirety in .pdf format: http://feingold.senate.gov/censureresolution.pdf
Yesterday, Sen. Feingold appeared on CNN to discuss his Senate Resolution to censure President Bush. Again, he agrees with the conception that terrorists should be listened in on and stopped before they can do damage to our country (again). It is in the execution that President Bush has failed at:
http://www.cnn.com/video/player/player.html?url=/video/politics/2006/03/13/feingold.bush.censure.cnn
He perseveres, as should we, in discovering how this country can sit back and watch as its Constitution is destroyed. As far as the present issue is concerned, it is high time that we realize that our constitution is under attack, and not just by Al-Qaeda.
It is under serious threat by this President who, under the cloak of executive privilege and presumed power as commander in chief of our armed forces, thinks and acts like he can do anything he wants to whomever he wants. The “outing” of Valerie Plame was just one incident.
In case the administration’s spinmeisters spun that one past you, a member of the Bush administration leaked the name of a CIA operative to the Washington Post because her husband, Joe Wilson, had criticized as untrue the administration’s claim that Iraq had sought to acquire nuclear material from the African country of Niger.
Today, Vanity Fair reported that former Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee says it is reasonable to assume former State Department official Richard L. Armitage is likely the source who revealed CIA operative Valerie Plame's name to Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/13/AR2006031301904_pf.html
By all accounts from respected journalists who cover Washington, there is a climate of fear among those who would criticize the administration that pervades what kind of news we hear out of Washington. Just how successful has President Bush been in intimidating journalists and others who would ask “Why?” Perhaps that self-censorship is just a little less now than it was, but that is only because President Bush’s ratings have dropped to an all-time low – people in all those red states are finally waking up to discover that President Bush is NOT on the side of the “little guy”, and so perhaps it is safe to start talking freely again – maybe. And if all those “conservatives” have seen enough, perhaps some of them will have the intellectual and intestinal fortitude to walk their talk.
Those Congressmen that choose to stand up to Bush and the power-elites in Washington will, in the end, be the true heroes for us in these days of national agony. They will be remembered as the true Progressives. We will stop using labels that have been defined out of existence such as “liberal” or “conservative”. Instead, we will vote and arrange our political lives in accordance to what we believe are the right things to do and steps to take, regardless of party affiliation and single-issue interest groups and always upholding the law. And if the law is wrong then change it. But we cannot have a sitting President blatantly and cheerfully cynically tell us to our faces that he is above the law. Even President Nixon tried to cover-up his approval of the break-in of a political opponent’s psychiatrist’s office at the Watergate. We know from the experience in Germany in the 1930s, Russia in the 1940s-50s and China under Mao in the 1960s what can happen when a government becomes centered around men and not laws that were enacted by the people’s elected representatives.
What is going on now is the re-enactment of nothing less than Dr. Josef Goebbels’ “Big Lie” theory: if you repeat a lie with earnest intention (I do not question President Bush’s earnest intent) often enough, people will start to take that lie as the truth. And so it was in Germany in the 1930s and 40s. We are fortunate today to have a (mainly) free press unlike Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia or Maoist China so that the machinations that trigger calls for the censure of the President of the United States can see the light of day despite their best efforts to the contrary. Hopefully our government has not set up concentration camps or gulags for journalists or others who might have been deemed, in a different time in a different place “undesirable”.
Let there be no doubt, however, that we are at a precipice: what we are talking about at the core is how people think about their government, and accordingly how they interact with it - whether it is through newspapers, the internet or talk over coffee at Starbucks. President Bush, under the cover of a thus-far compliant, malleable Republican Congress, has thus far been able to spin, wheedle and avoid any real popular reaction to what he has done to this country. With a complicit Republican-controlled Congress, he has cut off the access to information that would allow those who would protect and defend our country from finding out the truth about the run-up to the war as well as the illegal wiretapping that is taking place. This must end. It must come out from under the rug.
In addition to the Senate Resolution introduced by Senator Feingold, similar resolutions were introduced in December in the House of Representatives by Hon. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee concerning the lies and deception that were practiced on the people of the United States on the run-up to the Iraq War by President Bush and Vice-President Cheney and others. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-conyers/the-constitution-in-crisi_b_12626.html?p=3 Representative Conyers has called for the establishment of a special committee to investigate the activities of the Bush Administration.
“Over 55,000 people have signed up to become Citizen Cosponsors of my House Resolution 635 which would create a Special Committee to investigate whether any crimes committed by the Bush Administration rise to the level of impeachment. The creation of a special committee is the same deliberative step taken by former Judiciary Committee Chairman, Sam Ervin, to review the Nixon Administration's conduct prior to deciding whether to pursue articles of impeachment. If you haven't signed yet, or know others who should, this is the link.” http://www.conyersblog.us/
Those resolutions are based on facts and law contained in the Investigative Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff, the executive summary of which you can download here: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/downloads/section1.pdfIts title is The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War (This Report is 273 pages.)Full Report
While the investigation is incomplete, President Bush has admitted facts that, if true, would constitute a prima facie violation of (at least) the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. What is more troubling is that the Bush administration is not cooperating with Congress in trying to get to the bottom of any of these issues, choosing instead to allow Congress and the electorate (us) to operate in the dark, with only a few brave souls willing to stand up and be counted. And Senators McCain and Feingold and Representative Conyers are those souls.
Censuring the president is a reasonable first step in condemning the president's actions in regard to illegal wiretapping. Now it's up to us to show broad public support for Senator Feingold's resolution.
Please consider signing this petition asking Congress to join the call for censure: http://political.moveon.org/censure/
14 March 2006
White House documents prove that Bush deceived the nation
Friday, March 03, 2006
White House documents prove that Bush deceived the nation
The fine investigative reporter at the National Journal, Murray Waas, has revealed further documentary evidence that George Bush, his Vice President, and closest advisors engaged in a campaign of deception in the months before the invasion of Iraq. Those who've been following the Downing Street memo story may remember that, when it first appeared, many apologists for the President were heard to say that it was not really decisive; that critics were guilty of reading too much into it; that it was not the "smoking gun" (ever elusive). Since then, a small mountain of documents and supporting testimony has piled up, always pointing in the same direction...toward a conspiracy, on both sides of the Atlantic, to deceive the public about whether Saddam Hussein was in fact known to be a threat.
Now we learn about some of the most embarrassing documents of all, intelligence reports created for George Bush himself. In his new report, Waas reveals the existence of two Presidential Summaries given to Bush by George Tenet, in Oct. 2002 and Jan. 2003. These Summaries were based upon National Intelligence Estimates that shot holes in the case for war that the administration had been making.
Bush and his minions, like Condoleezza Rice, have always insisted that Bush simply did not know that various intelligence agencies had expressed doubts about these matters. The information, they claim, was buried so deep in the NIEs that it went unremarked. Therefore, by this account, Bush did not lie to the nation. He was just woefully underinformed about the state of the evidence (which, you'll recall, he expressed certainty about).
The idea was always ludicrous, even though plenty of people have pretended to believe it. In any case, Bush and Cheney have been busted now. Bush not only received these one-page Summaries of the NIEs, he also read them in Tenet's presence. These Summaries highlighted the very doubts in question, and one of them flatly contradicted a key part of Bush's case for attacking Iraq.
The article at National Journal is very much worth reading in full. Although scandals galore now circle the White House like jets around a snow-bound O'Hare airport, jostling for attention, this one has the potential to shatter the remaining shreds of Bush's credibility among his few remaining die-hard supporters.
What are these Presidential Summaries? The first, in Oct. 2002, advised Bush that several agencies strongly dissented from the claims that his administration had already been making about intercepted aluminum tubes. In fact, a second Memo that circulated in January among high-ranking members of the Administration repeated the earlier warning that the aluminum tubes could not be assumed to be part of a nuclear weapons program.
The one-page October 2002 President's Summary specifically told Bush that although "most agencies judge" that the use of the aluminum tubes was "related to a uranium enrichment effort... INR and DOE believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons uses."
The lengthier NIE -- more than 90 pages -- contained significantly more detail describing the disagreement between the CIA and the Pentagon's DIA on one hand, which believed that the tubes were meant for centrifuges, and State's INR and the Energy Department, which believed that they were meant for artillery shells. Administration officials had said that the president would not have read the full-length paper....
But the one-page summary, several senior government officials said in interviews, was written specifically for Bush, was handed to the president by then-CIA Director George Tenet, and was read in Tenet's presence.
In addition, Rice, Cheney, and dozens of other high-level Bush administration policy makers received a highly classified intelligence assessment, known as a Senior Executive Memorandum, on the aluminum tubes issue. Circulated on January 10, 2003, the memo was titled "Questions on Why Iraq Is Procuring Aluminum Tubes and What the IAEA Has Found to Date."
The paper included discussion regarding the fact that the INR, Energy, and the United Nations atomic energy watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, all believed that Iraq was using the aluminum tubes for conventional weapons programs.
So the defense thus far against the charge of lying, that Bush was too lazy or foolish to read the full NIE about the very grounds for war that he was trumpeting, now becomes irrelevant. For those who've forgetten, it was only a few days after reading this Presidential Summary that Bush said, in a speech in Cincinnati
Evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his 'nuclear mujahedeen' -- his nuclear holy warriors.... Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.
I write this from Cincinnati, where these words still hang like diesel fumes over the city. They still turn my stomach, as I walk to and from work every day. During the fall and winter of 2002/2003, Bush administration officials continued to make similar claims about the notorious aluminum tubes (some of which Waas documents). As I remarked to friends at the time, those claims gradually backed away ever so slightly from the initial claims of absolute certainty that the tubes could be used ONLY for a nuclear centrifuge. It was clear even at the time that Bush & Co. were under pressure to admit that the tubes's existence proved nothing, yet they were unwilling to do more than admit a small possibility that the tubes could have other uses.
Many of us suspected that the President was being intellectually dishonest. The earlier release of the NIE should have proven beyond reasonable doubt that was exactly what the administration was up to. In any case these Presidential Summaries now confirm it decisively. George Bush deliberately lied, in Cincinnati as elsewhere, and he was joined by Cheney, Powell, Rice, and others.
How sensitive is the revelation that this Summary absolutely contradicts Bush's public statements in the run up to war?
But the Bush administration steadfastly continued to refuse to declassify the President's Summary of the NIE, which in the words of one senior official, is the "one document which illustrates what the president knew and when he knew it." The administration also refused to furnish copies of the paper to congressional intelligence committees.
You may perhaps recall that when those words were uttered by Howard Baker in Senate hearings about Nixon, they were intended to throw up a roadblock on the path toward impeachment. The idea was that it would prove virtually impossible, once the Senate began pursuing that path, to find decisive evidence regarding what Nixon and knew and when, so as to pin him down. It didn't turn out that way, but at the moment it appeared to be the best possible stalling tactic. Yet here, a generation later but still suffering under the rule of many of those same rascals, we have documentary evidence of what Bush knew and when he knew it.
As for the second Presidential Summary we now know Bush received, in January 2003, it advised the President that ALL intelligence agencies agreed that it was highly improbable that Saddam Hussein was remotely likely to attack the United States except if he thought the U.S. was about to topple him from power. As Waas also points out, other senior members of the administration as well as some Congressmen received similar briefings.
According to interviews and records, Bush personally read the one-page summary in Tenet's presence during the morning intelligence briefing, and the two spoke about it at some length. Sources familiar with the summary said it was highly significant that the president was informed that it was the unanimous conclusion of the intelligence agencies participating in the production of the January 2003 NIE that Saddam was unlikely to consider attacking the U.S. unless Iraq was attacked first.
Cheney received virtually the same intelligence information, according to the same records and interviews. The president's summaries have been shared with the vice president as a matter of course during the Bush presidency.
The conclusion among intelligence agencies that Saddam was unlikely to consider attacking the United States unless attacked first was also outlined in Senior Executive Intelligence Briefs, highly classified daily intelligence papers distributed to several hundred executive branch officials and to the congressional intelligence oversight committees.
During the second half of 2002, the president and vice president repeatedly cited the threat from Saddam in their public statements.
Indeed, last year when I drew up an overview of the development of the Administration's rhetoric about Iraq for this website, I identified 10 distinct phases. Of these, Phase 4 was that period in which Bush Co. raised the level of alarm about Iraqi WMD claims by focusing on the imminent threat that Hussein posed to attack the US (and the rest of the world). As far as I could see, this Phase began around the start of February, 2003.
What this underlines, I think, is that the administration's propaganda began to focus to an extraordinary degree on Saddam Hussein's alleged intentions to attack the U.S. in the two months before our invasion of Iraq--and this occured shortly after Bush read and discussed a Presidential Summary that stated as flatly as possible that no such intention was perceptible to any of our intelligence agencies.
The White House declined to comment for this story. In a statement, Frederick Jones, a spokesman for the National Security Council said, "The president of the United States has talked about this matter directly, as have a myriad of other administration officials. At this juncture, we have nothing to add to that body of information."
When you've lied your way into a deep dark hole, there comes a time when it makes some sense to shut up. Don't let us shut up about these revelations. They're potentially quite important for public perception of the President.
posted by smintheus # 7:22 PM 0 comments
White House documents prove that Bush deceived the nation
The fine investigative reporter at the National Journal, Murray Waas, has revealed further documentary evidence that George Bush, his Vice President, and closest advisors engaged in a campaign of deception in the months before the invasion of Iraq. Those who've been following the Downing Street memo story may remember that, when it first appeared, many apologists for the President were heard to say that it was not really decisive; that critics were guilty of reading too much into it; that it was not the "smoking gun" (ever elusive). Since then, a small mountain of documents and supporting testimony has piled up, always pointing in the same direction...toward a conspiracy, on both sides of the Atlantic, to deceive the public about whether Saddam Hussein was in fact known to be a threat.
Now we learn about some of the most embarrassing documents of all, intelligence reports created for George Bush himself. In his new report, Waas reveals the existence of two Presidential Summaries given to Bush by George Tenet, in Oct. 2002 and Jan. 2003. These Summaries were based upon National Intelligence Estimates that shot holes in the case for war that the administration had been making.
Bush and his minions, like Condoleezza Rice, have always insisted that Bush simply did not know that various intelligence agencies had expressed doubts about these matters. The information, they claim, was buried so deep in the NIEs that it went unremarked. Therefore, by this account, Bush did not lie to the nation. He was just woefully underinformed about the state of the evidence (which, you'll recall, he expressed certainty about).
The idea was always ludicrous, even though plenty of people have pretended to believe it. In any case, Bush and Cheney have been busted now. Bush not only received these one-page Summaries of the NIEs, he also read them in Tenet's presence. These Summaries highlighted the very doubts in question, and one of them flatly contradicted a key part of Bush's case for attacking Iraq.
The article at National Journal is very much worth reading in full. Although scandals galore now circle the White House like jets around a snow-bound O'Hare airport, jostling for attention, this one has the potential to shatter the remaining shreds of Bush's credibility among his few remaining die-hard supporters.
What are these Presidential Summaries? The first, in Oct. 2002, advised Bush that several agencies strongly dissented from the claims that his administration had already been making about intercepted aluminum tubes. In fact, a second Memo that circulated in January among high-ranking members of the Administration repeated the earlier warning that the aluminum tubes could not be assumed to be part of a nuclear weapons program.
The one-page October 2002 President's Summary specifically told Bush that although "most agencies judge" that the use of the aluminum tubes was "related to a uranium enrichment effort... INR and DOE believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons uses."
The lengthier NIE -- more than 90 pages -- contained significantly more detail describing the disagreement between the CIA and the Pentagon's DIA on one hand, which believed that the tubes were meant for centrifuges, and State's INR and the Energy Department, which believed that they were meant for artillery shells. Administration officials had said that the president would not have read the full-length paper....
But the one-page summary, several senior government officials said in interviews, was written specifically for Bush, was handed to the president by then-CIA Director George Tenet, and was read in Tenet's presence.
In addition, Rice, Cheney, and dozens of other high-level Bush administration policy makers received a highly classified intelligence assessment, known as a Senior Executive Memorandum, on the aluminum tubes issue. Circulated on January 10, 2003, the memo was titled "Questions on Why Iraq Is Procuring Aluminum Tubes and What the IAEA Has Found to Date."
The paper included discussion regarding the fact that the INR, Energy, and the United Nations atomic energy watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, all believed that Iraq was using the aluminum tubes for conventional weapons programs.
So the defense thus far against the charge of lying, that Bush was too lazy or foolish to read the full NIE about the very grounds for war that he was trumpeting, now becomes irrelevant. For those who've forgetten, it was only a few days after reading this Presidential Summary that Bush said, in a speech in Cincinnati
Evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his 'nuclear mujahedeen' -- his nuclear holy warriors.... Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.
I write this from Cincinnati, where these words still hang like diesel fumes over the city. They still turn my stomach, as I walk to and from work every day. During the fall and winter of 2002/2003, Bush administration officials continued to make similar claims about the notorious aluminum tubes (some of which Waas documents). As I remarked to friends at the time, those claims gradually backed away ever so slightly from the initial claims of absolute certainty that the tubes could be used ONLY for a nuclear centrifuge. It was clear even at the time that Bush & Co. were under pressure to admit that the tubes's existence proved nothing, yet they were unwilling to do more than admit a small possibility that the tubes could have other uses.
Many of us suspected that the President was being intellectually dishonest. The earlier release of the NIE should have proven beyond reasonable doubt that was exactly what the administration was up to. In any case these Presidential Summaries now confirm it decisively. George Bush deliberately lied, in Cincinnati as elsewhere, and he was joined by Cheney, Powell, Rice, and others.
How sensitive is the revelation that this Summary absolutely contradicts Bush's public statements in the run up to war?
But the Bush administration steadfastly continued to refuse to declassify the President's Summary of the NIE, which in the words of one senior official, is the "one document which illustrates what the president knew and when he knew it." The administration also refused to furnish copies of the paper to congressional intelligence committees.
You may perhaps recall that when those words were uttered by Howard Baker in Senate hearings about Nixon, they were intended to throw up a roadblock on the path toward impeachment. The idea was that it would prove virtually impossible, once the Senate began pursuing that path, to find decisive evidence regarding what Nixon and knew and when, so as to pin him down. It didn't turn out that way, but at the moment it appeared to be the best possible stalling tactic. Yet here, a generation later but still suffering under the rule of many of those same rascals, we have documentary evidence of what Bush knew and when he knew it.
As for the second Presidential Summary we now know Bush received, in January 2003, it advised the President that ALL intelligence agencies agreed that it was highly improbable that Saddam Hussein was remotely likely to attack the United States except if he thought the U.S. was about to topple him from power. As Waas also points out, other senior members of the administration as well as some Congressmen received similar briefings.
According to interviews and records, Bush personally read the one-page summary in Tenet's presence during the morning intelligence briefing, and the two spoke about it at some length. Sources familiar with the summary said it was highly significant that the president was informed that it was the unanimous conclusion of the intelligence agencies participating in the production of the January 2003 NIE that Saddam was unlikely to consider attacking the U.S. unless Iraq was attacked first.
Cheney received virtually the same intelligence information, according to the same records and interviews. The president's summaries have been shared with the vice president as a matter of course during the Bush presidency.
The conclusion among intelligence agencies that Saddam was unlikely to consider attacking the United States unless attacked first was also outlined in Senior Executive Intelligence Briefs, highly classified daily intelligence papers distributed to several hundred executive branch officials and to the congressional intelligence oversight committees.
During the second half of 2002, the president and vice president repeatedly cited the threat from Saddam in their public statements.
Indeed, last year when I drew up an overview of the development of the Administration's rhetoric about Iraq for this website, I identified 10 distinct phases. Of these, Phase 4 was that period in which Bush Co. raised the level of alarm about Iraqi WMD claims by focusing on the imminent threat that Hussein posed to attack the US (and the rest of the world). As far as I could see, this Phase began around the start of February, 2003.
What this underlines, I think, is that the administration's propaganda began to focus to an extraordinary degree on Saddam Hussein's alleged intentions to attack the U.S. in the two months before our invasion of Iraq--and this occured shortly after Bush read and discussed a Presidential Summary that stated as flatly as possible that no such intention was perceptible to any of our intelligence agencies.
The White House declined to comment for this story. In a statement, Frederick Jones, a spokesman for the National Security Council said, "The president of the United States has talked about this matter directly, as have a myriad of other administration officials. At this juncture, we have nothing to add to that body of information."
When you've lied your way into a deep dark hole, there comes a time when it makes some sense to shut up. Don't let us shut up about these revelations. They're potentially quite important for public perception of the President.
posted by smintheus # 7:22 PM 0 comments
13 March 2006
The Key to a Clean Break? It's DELETE
Dial 'O' for Over
The Key to a Clean Break? It's DELETE.
By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 5, 2006; D01
It all started with the cell phone. They met at a party. He was from Nicaragua. She was half Peruvian. She gave him her cell phone number. He gave her his. They fell in love. Soon, they were engaged. No wedding date. Just a promise.
Then things started to crumble. He went back to Nicaragua for a visit. Two long months, he waited. But she never called his cell phone.
So when he returned to Wheaton, he did what he felt was necessary.
He DELETED her.
No conversation. No Dear Susan letter. No explanation. No angry confrontation that ended in a fit of tears with doors slammed.
Just the push of a couple of buttons.
And just like that, it was over.
She didn't even know that she had been deleted.
"I call it being terminated," the deleter, Mel Gutierriez, 28, says. "When you are upset, you just have to delete them."
Her number was gone and so was she. Because in today's society, cell phone numbers are crucial. They are like people. They live and they die. They breathe in those little cases people carry around with them -- in pockets, in purses, in compartments in the car, attached to belts and pants. Waiting on nightstands.
Holding little secrets like little black books.
Holding desires.
Holding power. With a button, a number -- and a person's very existence -- can be DELETED or IGNORED.
Not long ago, when phones were attached to the wall, there was a mystery to their rings. People could not be blocked, nor could they be deleted. Back then, phones were simple. No games. You dialed the number. If somebody was there, they answered. If they were not, the phone rang until you decided to hang up.
There was no call screening, no Caller ID. People were not banished with a DELETE button.
Now society brings with it the constant ringing of phones, the beeping of computers, the robotic voices saying who is behind the ring. Communication has become sanitized and with it, personal relationships have become clinical. You are in or you are out, based upon whether they like you. Question: Why won't they take the call? Answer: Because you have been blocked or deleted.
"Every group and every tribe has some method of shunning and throwing people out," says James Katz, director of the center for mobile communication studies at Rutgers University and author of the book "Magic in the Air," about how people use mobile phones in their lives, which is set to be released in May.
"In our high-tech era, deleting somebody from your cell phone book is the equivalent of throwing them out and shunning them." When you have been DELETED, you are banished into the netherworld of wherever cell phone numbers go, a realm between this world and the next.
Cell phone numbers have become the people they represent. "Indeed, when people lose their cell phones, it's like losing their minds," Katz says. "And they forget who their friends are because they have lost their cell phones."
In Katz's research, he found that cell phones ringing in the middle of the night from secret callers often are the precursors to breakups. "Many young people have told me how a boyfriend or girlfriend will grab the phone when they are not around and go through the 'Recent Call' list. Or in some cases, pry it from hands and demand they explain who that was."
In the past, he said, those clues were more -- shall we say -- physical. "There used to be jokes about lipstick on the collar or some strange blonde's hair on the man's jacket. Those would be low-tech and low-frequency-success techniques to check up on other people, but now in our digital-mobile age, there are very big digital fingerprints all over technology to trace what you have been doing."
Ernesto Alegria, a 30-year-old taekwondo instructor, says cell phones have been disastrous to his "playa" action. "Say you have a girlfriend. You know she is going to go through the phone and check the numbers," he says, leaning on the counter of a cell phone kiosk in Wheaton Mall. "In my case, I don't use my phone, I use somebody else's cell phone to call another girl. Pay phones work better."
With Stacy Fink, 21, it wasn't a number that got her in trouble. You see, she didn't think her boyfriend had it in him to snoop, to go through her cell phone, her personal information.
One night she was sleeping. He saw the text message.
Her face turns red. She won't repeat what it said. But that night she was out on the street. "My boyfriend kicked me out in the middle of the night. I didn't think he was going to go through my phone. I forgot to delete it," she says wistfully. Now, she has no worries about deleting numbers or messages: "I don't have a boyfriend."
Instead, she watches her girlfriends spy for unknown numbers in the digital black books of their boyfriends. They "check numbers and they call the numbers," she says. "If it's a guy who answers, they hang up. If it's a girl, they ask what's going on. They get caught because they forgot to delete the numbers."
The DELETE button has the power to alter existence. Now you are there. Push an unforgiving button. Now you are gone, absolutely. (Imagine if the noble Lady Macbeth had within her grasp the noble cell phone. She may not have had so much trouble with the damned spot.)
Bridgett, 22, who doesn't want her last name used because she wants her cell phone business private, is trying to explain. There she sits, hanging out in the mall. Pink shirt, pink lipstick. Gold shoes. Swinging her legs, which are dangling from the counter of a cell phone kiosk. And, yeah, she admits, she has DELETED people. What's the problem with that?
"When you talk to someone like a friend and they do something, you be like, bam ," she says, pushing an imaginary button on an imaginary cell phone. "Like just delete the number from the phone. When you are mad at somebody, take the aggression out and delete all their numbers and all their photos. You be like, 'I'm done.' Then later, you get a call. And you are like, 'Who are you?' "
Apologizing. Making up a story, blaming the lack of communication, the lapse, on technical difficulties. "You know what? My phone got messed up, but I'll put your number back in," she says to the DELETED person, promising to give him existence again in her phone.
But psych !
"I just pretend to put the number back." Because she and her cell phone have moved on.
The Key to a Clean Break? It's DELETE.
By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 5, 2006; D01
It all started with the cell phone. They met at a party. He was from Nicaragua. She was half Peruvian. She gave him her cell phone number. He gave her his. They fell in love. Soon, they were engaged. No wedding date. Just a promise.
Then things started to crumble. He went back to Nicaragua for a visit. Two long months, he waited. But she never called his cell phone.
So when he returned to Wheaton, he did what he felt was necessary.
He DELETED her.
No conversation. No Dear Susan letter. No explanation. No angry confrontation that ended in a fit of tears with doors slammed.
Just the push of a couple of buttons.
And just like that, it was over.
She didn't even know that she had been deleted.
"I call it being terminated," the deleter, Mel Gutierriez, 28, says. "When you are upset, you just have to delete them."
Her number was gone and so was she. Because in today's society, cell phone numbers are crucial. They are like people. They live and they die. They breathe in those little cases people carry around with them -- in pockets, in purses, in compartments in the car, attached to belts and pants. Waiting on nightstands.
Holding little secrets like little black books.
Holding desires.
Holding power. With a button, a number -- and a person's very existence -- can be DELETED or IGNORED.
Not long ago, when phones were attached to the wall, there was a mystery to their rings. People could not be blocked, nor could they be deleted. Back then, phones were simple. No games. You dialed the number. If somebody was there, they answered. If they were not, the phone rang until you decided to hang up.
There was no call screening, no Caller ID. People were not banished with a DELETE button.
Now society brings with it the constant ringing of phones, the beeping of computers, the robotic voices saying who is behind the ring. Communication has become sanitized and with it, personal relationships have become clinical. You are in or you are out, based upon whether they like you. Question: Why won't they take the call? Answer: Because you have been blocked or deleted.
"Every group and every tribe has some method of shunning and throwing people out," says James Katz, director of the center for mobile communication studies at Rutgers University and author of the book "Magic in the Air," about how people use mobile phones in their lives, which is set to be released in May.
"In our high-tech era, deleting somebody from your cell phone book is the equivalent of throwing them out and shunning them." When you have been DELETED, you are banished into the netherworld of wherever cell phone numbers go, a realm between this world and the next.
Cell phone numbers have become the people they represent. "Indeed, when people lose their cell phones, it's like losing their minds," Katz says. "And they forget who their friends are because they have lost their cell phones."
In Katz's research, he found that cell phones ringing in the middle of the night from secret callers often are the precursors to breakups. "Many young people have told me how a boyfriend or girlfriend will grab the phone when they are not around and go through the 'Recent Call' list. Or in some cases, pry it from hands and demand they explain who that was."
In the past, he said, those clues were more -- shall we say -- physical. "There used to be jokes about lipstick on the collar or some strange blonde's hair on the man's jacket. Those would be low-tech and low-frequency-success techniques to check up on other people, but now in our digital-mobile age, there are very big digital fingerprints all over technology to trace what you have been doing."
Ernesto Alegria, a 30-year-old taekwondo instructor, says cell phones have been disastrous to his "playa" action. "Say you have a girlfriend. You know she is going to go through the phone and check the numbers," he says, leaning on the counter of a cell phone kiosk in Wheaton Mall. "In my case, I don't use my phone, I use somebody else's cell phone to call another girl. Pay phones work better."
With Stacy Fink, 21, it wasn't a number that got her in trouble. You see, she didn't think her boyfriend had it in him to snoop, to go through her cell phone, her personal information.
One night she was sleeping. He saw the text message.
Her face turns red. She won't repeat what it said. But that night she was out on the street. "My boyfriend kicked me out in the middle of the night. I didn't think he was going to go through my phone. I forgot to delete it," she says wistfully. Now, she has no worries about deleting numbers or messages: "I don't have a boyfriend."
Instead, she watches her girlfriends spy for unknown numbers in the digital black books of their boyfriends. They "check numbers and they call the numbers," she says. "If it's a guy who answers, they hang up. If it's a girl, they ask what's going on. They get caught because they forgot to delete the numbers."
The DELETE button has the power to alter existence. Now you are there. Push an unforgiving button. Now you are gone, absolutely. (Imagine if the noble Lady Macbeth had within her grasp the noble cell phone. She may not have had so much trouble with the damned spot.)
Bridgett, 22, who doesn't want her last name used because she wants her cell phone business private, is trying to explain. There she sits, hanging out in the mall. Pink shirt, pink lipstick. Gold shoes. Swinging her legs, which are dangling from the counter of a cell phone kiosk. And, yeah, she admits, she has DELETED people. What's the problem with that?
"When you talk to someone like a friend and they do something, you be like, bam ," she says, pushing an imaginary button on an imaginary cell phone. "Like just delete the number from the phone. When you are mad at somebody, take the aggression out and delete all their numbers and all their photos. You be like, 'I'm done.' Then later, you get a call. And you are like, 'Who are you?' "
Apologizing. Making up a story, blaming the lack of communication, the lapse, on technical difficulties. "You know what? My phone got messed up, but I'll put your number back in," she says to the DELETED person, promising to give him existence again in her phone.
But psych !
"I just pretend to put the number back." Because she and her cell phone have moved on.
The End of French Jewry?
The End of French Jewry?
by Gabrielle Birkner
After the horrific murder of Ilan Halimi and three subsequent anti-Semitic attacks, pressure to flee growing for some, and dismissed by others.
Noam Chelly was a baby when his family emigrated from Tunisia to France, settling in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles -- the enclave sometimes called "Little Jerusalem" by its Jewish residents.
The recent abduction and murder of a young French Jew, Ilan Halimi, followed last weekend by three anti-Semitic attacks in Sarcelles, has convinced Chelly, an 18-year-old high school senior, to move to Israel. Chelly's choice is emblematic of the perception -- alternately embraced and rejected among French Jewry -- that there is no future for France's nearly 600,000 Jews.
"I can no longer live here," said Chelly, who plans to make aliyah and join the Israeli army by the end of the year. "There are too many problems, too much noise, and since Ilan's murder things have only gotten worse. There is more and more aggression against Jews -- verbal and physical."
In Sarcelles, during one 24-hour period last Friday and Saturday, Eliahou Brami, the 17-year-old son of a local rabbi was attacked, his nose broken; 18-year-old Yacob Boccara was insulted by a group of five men, who stole his cell phone; and a 28-year-old man, wearing a kipa, suffered a dislocated shoulder after he was verbally and physically assaulted by four men.
The third victim was carrying a young child at the time of the attack, during which perpetrators said they "wanted to kill him like Halimi," according to Marc Djebali, president of the Sarcelles Jewish community.
French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, following a meeting Sunday with Sarcelles Jewish leaders and the victims of last weekend's anti-Semitic attacks, announced that security would be tightened at Jewish institutions in the suburb north of Paris. Sarkozy said that police presence would be reinforced and video surveillance expanded in light of the incidents, according to an Agence France-Presse report. Jews comprise about 20 percent of Sarcelles' approximately 60,000 residents.
News of the attacks there came as chilling details of Halimi's murder continued to emerge. On Saturday, Youssef Fofana, the suspected ringleader of the gang French officials say kidnapped Halimi for ransom -- and for three weeks reportedly tortured the 23-year-old cell phone salesman, stabbing him in the throat, burning him with cigarettes, and dousing him with acid -- was extradited to France from the Ivory Coast, where he fled after the murder.
Halimi was not rich, but the band of kidnappers -- at least 19 suspects, including Fofana, are in French custody -- assumed otherwise because he was Jewish. Though the central motivation for the abduction appears to have been pecuniary, the kidnapping and murder were predicated on an ethnic stereotype, and are therefore being prosecuted as hate crimes.
"I've thought a lot about moving to Israel, and my parents urged me to think about it carefully because life is difficult there," said Chelly, an observant Jew. "Now I've made my decision, now it's definite."
An "atmosphere of anti-Semitism" has many French Jews pondering moving to Israel, said Rabbi Simon Barchichat, who works at La Griba, a Jewish school in Sarcelles.
"There is fear," he said. "There is disgust, and if they can leave, they do."
During the second intifada, a spike in anti-Semitic incidents in France prompted an influx in French Jews making aliyah, and Rabbi Barchichat expected that the Halimi murder could have a similar effect.
Some Jewish community leaders suggested that the impact may be particularly acute in communities like Sarcelles, where Jews live amid large populations of poor Arab and sub-Saharan African immigrants and where cross-cultural relations are often tense. The suspects in the Halimi case are predominantly Arab and black Muslims.
Yet others dismiss the run-for-the-hills approach as alarmist and counterproductive.
"They are not thinking this through," Djebali said, noting that emigration does nothing to combat the hatred that fuels bias attacks. "They are anguished, they are sad ... but if they leave, the problem will repeat itself elsewhere because the world today is very open."
Yonathan Arfi, who sits on the board of directors of the French Jewish community umbrella group, CRIF, urged caution against drawing the conclusion that the Halimi murder is "a signal of the end."
"We have to realize that this was something very isolated," said Arfi, who lives in Paris and is the immediate past president of France's politically active Jewish student union, UEJF. "It's not something common, and it was not even something imaginable before it happened."
He added that the French government's swift and aggressive response to Halimi's murder and the enormous outpouring of sympathy from the nation's non-Jewish community has proved that Jews do have a future in France.
"We've shared with the French population something very strong, very deep," he said.
Arfi compared the outcry over Halimi's murder to the national uproar in 1890s France in response to the dubious treason allegations against Captain Albert Dreyfus, a Jew whose conviction would become a symbol of French anti-Semitism. The national response to the so-called "Dreyfus Affair" ultimately united in horror Jews and non-Jews in France, Arfi said.
"In a way, when something so terrifying happens, it can also have a positive impact," he said. "Maybe it will make French society change the way it considers minorities."
However, Miriam Sebbah, 43, a Riverdale resident who grew up in Marseille and whose family still lives there, insisted that to look for anti-Semitism's silver lining is to deny the facts on the ground.
"When I talk to my mom, I say, 'Be careful where you go, be careful when you go," Sebbah said. "But she says that it doesn't matter because everybody knows who's Jewish."
She and her husband, Dan, a Paris native, were among about 150 area residents to attend a memorial prayer vigil in front of the French consulate in Manhattan Sunday, March 5. The ceremony, held in Halimi's honor, was organized by Amcha: The Coalition for Jewish Concerns, headed by Rabbi Avi Weiss of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale.
Sebbah surmised that by next month, when Halimi's murder is no longer front-page news, many French Jews "are going to forget."
"They'll say, 'Life is good here,'" she said. "Right now people say, 'We're going to make aliyah, we're going to make aliyah,' but how many people actually go?"
This article originally appeared in The Jewish Week.
by Gabrielle Birkner
After the horrific murder of Ilan Halimi and three subsequent anti-Semitic attacks, pressure to flee growing for some, and dismissed by others.
Noam Chelly was a baby when his family emigrated from Tunisia to France, settling in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles -- the enclave sometimes called "Little Jerusalem" by its Jewish residents.
The recent abduction and murder of a young French Jew, Ilan Halimi, followed last weekend by three anti-Semitic attacks in Sarcelles, has convinced Chelly, an 18-year-old high school senior, to move to Israel. Chelly's choice is emblematic of the perception -- alternately embraced and rejected among French Jewry -- that there is no future for France's nearly 600,000 Jews.
"I can no longer live here," said Chelly, who plans to make aliyah and join the Israeli army by the end of the year. "There are too many problems, too much noise, and since Ilan's murder things have only gotten worse. There is more and more aggression against Jews -- verbal and physical."
In Sarcelles, during one 24-hour period last Friday and Saturday, Eliahou Brami, the 17-year-old son of a local rabbi was attacked, his nose broken; 18-year-old Yacob Boccara was insulted by a group of five men, who stole his cell phone; and a 28-year-old man, wearing a kipa, suffered a dislocated shoulder after he was verbally and physically assaulted by four men.
The third victim was carrying a young child at the time of the attack, during which perpetrators said they "wanted to kill him like Halimi," according to Marc Djebali, president of the Sarcelles Jewish community.
French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, following a meeting Sunday with Sarcelles Jewish leaders and the victims of last weekend's anti-Semitic attacks, announced that security would be tightened at Jewish institutions in the suburb north of Paris. Sarkozy said that police presence would be reinforced and video surveillance expanded in light of the incidents, according to an Agence France-Presse report. Jews comprise about 20 percent of Sarcelles' approximately 60,000 residents.
News of the attacks there came as chilling details of Halimi's murder continued to emerge. On Saturday, Youssef Fofana, the suspected ringleader of the gang French officials say kidnapped Halimi for ransom -- and for three weeks reportedly tortured the 23-year-old cell phone salesman, stabbing him in the throat, burning him with cigarettes, and dousing him with acid -- was extradited to France from the Ivory Coast, where he fled after the murder.
Halimi was not rich, but the band of kidnappers -- at least 19 suspects, including Fofana, are in French custody -- assumed otherwise because he was Jewish. Though the central motivation for the abduction appears to have been pecuniary, the kidnapping and murder were predicated on an ethnic stereotype, and are therefore being prosecuted as hate crimes.
"I've thought a lot about moving to Israel, and my parents urged me to think about it carefully because life is difficult there," said Chelly, an observant Jew. "Now I've made my decision, now it's definite."
An "atmosphere of anti-Semitism" has many French Jews pondering moving to Israel, said Rabbi Simon Barchichat, who works at La Griba, a Jewish school in Sarcelles.
"There is fear," he said. "There is disgust, and if they can leave, they do."
During the second intifada, a spike in anti-Semitic incidents in France prompted an influx in French Jews making aliyah, and Rabbi Barchichat expected that the Halimi murder could have a similar effect.
Some Jewish community leaders suggested that the impact may be particularly acute in communities like Sarcelles, where Jews live amid large populations of poor Arab and sub-Saharan African immigrants and where cross-cultural relations are often tense. The suspects in the Halimi case are predominantly Arab and black Muslims.
Yet others dismiss the run-for-the-hills approach as alarmist and counterproductive.
"They are not thinking this through," Djebali said, noting that emigration does nothing to combat the hatred that fuels bias attacks. "They are anguished, they are sad ... but if they leave, the problem will repeat itself elsewhere because the world today is very open."
Yonathan Arfi, who sits on the board of directors of the French Jewish community umbrella group, CRIF, urged caution against drawing the conclusion that the Halimi murder is "a signal of the end."
"We have to realize that this was something very isolated," said Arfi, who lives in Paris and is the immediate past president of France's politically active Jewish student union, UEJF. "It's not something common, and it was not even something imaginable before it happened."
He added that the French government's swift and aggressive response to Halimi's murder and the enormous outpouring of sympathy from the nation's non-Jewish community has proved that Jews do have a future in France.
"We've shared with the French population something very strong, very deep," he said.
Arfi compared the outcry over Halimi's murder to the national uproar in 1890s France in response to the dubious treason allegations against Captain Albert Dreyfus, a Jew whose conviction would become a symbol of French anti-Semitism. The national response to the so-called "Dreyfus Affair" ultimately united in horror Jews and non-Jews in France, Arfi said.
"In a way, when something so terrifying happens, it can also have a positive impact," he said. "Maybe it will make French society change the way it considers minorities."
However, Miriam Sebbah, 43, a Riverdale resident who grew up in Marseille and whose family still lives there, insisted that to look for anti-Semitism's silver lining is to deny the facts on the ground.
"When I talk to my mom, I say, 'Be careful where you go, be careful when you go," Sebbah said. "But she says that it doesn't matter because everybody knows who's Jewish."
She and her husband, Dan, a Paris native, were among about 150 area residents to attend a memorial prayer vigil in front of the French consulate in Manhattan Sunday, March 5. The ceremony, held in Halimi's honor, was organized by Amcha: The Coalition for Jewish Concerns, headed by Rabbi Avi Weiss of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale.
Sebbah surmised that by next month, when Halimi's murder is no longer front-page news, many French Jews "are going to forget."
"They'll say, 'Life is good here,'" she said. "Right now people say, 'We're going to make aliyah, we're going to make aliyah,' but how many people actually go?"
This article originally appeared in The Jewish Week.
12 March 2006
Finding the Meaning of Life, Along With a 7% Return - New York Times
Finding the Meaning of Life, Along With a 7% Return - New York Times: "March 12, 2006
Everybody's Business
Finding the Meaning of Life, Along With a 7% Return
By BEN STEIN
ONE of the funniest movies I have ever seen is 'Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.' In one scene, a conglomerate's senior executives are meeting and one of them is invited to report on the sixth item on the agenda: the meaning of life.
The eager executive responds: 'Yeah, I've had a team working on this over the past few weeks, and what we've come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts.
One: People aren't wearing enough hats. Two: Matter is energy. In the universe there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person's soul. However, this 'soul' does not exist ab initio as orthodox Christianity teaches; it has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved owing to man's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.'
The first comment from his colleagues: 'What was that about hats again?'
This comes to mind because, a few days ago, I was on the set of a television production at an outdoor location near Placerville, Calif., between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe. We were in a long-disused gas station that had been run into ruin. I played a sort of ghostly, maybe not-quite-real gas station owner, and with a very talented sidekick named Bill I gave ethics advice to an automaker's employees as they wandered in.
So far, so good. The problem was that a cold rain was falling, and the roof did not serve to keep it out. Then it started snowing. A high wind was blowing, and we were painfully cold and standing in slush. There was mud everywhere. Back at my motel, the hot water did not work for a long time.
Anyway, to keep my mind occupied with thoughts other than self-pity — a special curse in my life — I tried to think of how to build an income portfolio that yielded close to 7 percent a year with modest leverage.
I thought of that because, someday far in the future, I want to live on my savings, and a yield of 7 percent would be helpful, to put it mildly. To arrive at that portfolio, I did what I always do. I called my co-author and dear friend, Phil DeMuth, and asked him to do it.
A few days later, I was on a flight from Los Angeles to Miami. My fellow passengers were driving me insane. (A plane is a flying asylum these days.) The man next to me was ripping pages from a magazine, making a horrible sound — why do people do that? The man in front of me had his seat back as far as it would go, so that his dyed orange hair was in my lap. His wife was yakking across the aisle with an accent hideous enough to make Dracula run for cover.
I felt as if I were coming down with pneumonia from my stay in the slush. I had to write some notes on a speech I was to give later. Wow, I thought, am I suffering. Wow, I thought, no one appreciates me. Here I am hard at work on a flying madhouse. My wife is at an Oscar party. Our son is at the new apartment I have just rented for him with the proceeds of my hard work — and, of course, like all American children, he never thanks Mom and Pop for anything. Then I arrived in Miami and my driver did not know his way around. We got stuck in traffic on Interstate 95. Terrible. I felt beaten down. And then, and then. ...
I got to my hotel, the Breakers, and everything was great. The lobby was beautiful. The room was fabulous. The ocean breeze was heavenly. My bed was firm and warm. I turned on the Oscars and, though they make me want to vomit, I was still happy — and suddenly, I realized that I had been looking at it all wrong.
I was working in Placerville in mud and slush. I was not being worked to death, or lined up in mud and slush and shot like three of my grandfather's cousins were by the Nazis. I was not in the Hürtgen Forest dodging tree bursts from German 88's. I was on a set, maybe getting a little cold.
The hotel? Well, even though it lacked instant hot water, I had a warm bed and a view of the freeway. And the rude people on the plane? Well, we were on a plane — not in a cattle car, not in steerage. And my wife? Let's remember that she puts up with me: Enough said. And my ungrateful son? Hey, he's an American child, that's all, and by definition has no clue of how good he has it. And how different is he from me?
I love the Breakers; there is no better hotel. But it occurs to me that all of America is like the Breakers compared with what history has dished up, especially to us Jews. I wish I could get that spirit into my son.
When I was in college, in my fabulous fraternity, Alpha Delta Phi, we had an Episcopalian prayer before each meal, and it sums up what I think about what makes you really rich: For the gifts we are about to receive, please Lord, make us truly grateful. Because, to be grateful, as Phil DeMuth says, is to get rich not just quickly, but instantly. For the gift that is my work life in America, dear Lord, please make me truly grateful.
Oh, and the news about the hats? Here is Phil's portfolio. We don't vouch for the soundness of these securities. And their yield may fall as events unfold and problems occur, so there are risks. Some, as you can see, are European, so there is currency risk, too. But for now, they have a heck of a yield — though not as high as the yield of gratitude, which carries no risks.
Call it the Stein-DeMuth 7 Percent Solution (well, really, the DeMuth 7 Percent Solution). It's sorted by sector, and includes percentage yields for each stock.
REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT TRUSTS Lexington Corporate Properties Trust, 7.1 percent; and Healthcare Realty Trust, 7.1.
MASTER LIMITED PARTNERSHIPS Teppco Partners, 7.6; and MarkWest Energy Partners, 7.3.
UTILITIES Peoples Energy, 5.9; Enel of Italy, 8.0; UIL Holdings, 6.0; Telecom New Zealand, 11.3; United Utilities of Britain, 6.8.
ROYALTY TRUSTS Great Northern Iron Ore Properties, 9.4; and Permian Basin, 10.3.
OTHER UST, the tobacco company, 5.5; ConAgra Foods, 5.3; the Deluxe Corporation, the printer of checks and business forms, 6.6; and Allied Capital, the business development firm, 7.7.
I do not claim that these yield numbers are immutable, but for now you can have a rockin' good time with them. They might actually make up an average yield above 7 percent. Put the excess into hats.
Ben Stein is a lawyer, writer, actor and economist. E-mail: ebiz@nytimes.com.
Everybody's Business
Finding the Meaning of Life, Along With a 7% Return
By BEN STEIN
ONE of the funniest movies I have ever seen is 'Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.' In one scene, a conglomerate's senior executives are meeting and one of them is invited to report on the sixth item on the agenda: the meaning of life.
The eager executive responds: 'Yeah, I've had a team working on this over the past few weeks, and what we've come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts.
One: People aren't wearing enough hats. Two: Matter is energy. In the universe there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person's soul. However, this 'soul' does not exist ab initio as orthodox Christianity teaches; it has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved owing to man's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.'
The first comment from his colleagues: 'What was that about hats again?'
This comes to mind because, a few days ago, I was on the set of a television production at an outdoor location near Placerville, Calif., between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe. We were in a long-disused gas station that had been run into ruin. I played a sort of ghostly, maybe not-quite-real gas station owner, and with a very talented sidekick named Bill I gave ethics advice to an automaker's employees as they wandered in.
So far, so good. The problem was that a cold rain was falling, and the roof did not serve to keep it out. Then it started snowing. A high wind was blowing, and we were painfully cold and standing in slush. There was mud everywhere. Back at my motel, the hot water did not work for a long time.
Anyway, to keep my mind occupied with thoughts other than self-pity — a special curse in my life — I tried to think of how to build an income portfolio that yielded close to 7 percent a year with modest leverage.
I thought of that because, someday far in the future, I want to live on my savings, and a yield of 7 percent would be helpful, to put it mildly. To arrive at that portfolio, I did what I always do. I called my co-author and dear friend, Phil DeMuth, and asked him to do it.
A few days later, I was on a flight from Los Angeles to Miami. My fellow passengers were driving me insane. (A plane is a flying asylum these days.) The man next to me was ripping pages from a magazine, making a horrible sound — why do people do that? The man in front of me had his seat back as far as it would go, so that his dyed orange hair was in my lap. His wife was yakking across the aisle with an accent hideous enough to make Dracula run for cover.
I felt as if I were coming down with pneumonia from my stay in the slush. I had to write some notes on a speech I was to give later. Wow, I thought, am I suffering. Wow, I thought, no one appreciates me. Here I am hard at work on a flying madhouse. My wife is at an Oscar party. Our son is at the new apartment I have just rented for him with the proceeds of my hard work — and, of course, like all American children, he never thanks Mom and Pop for anything. Then I arrived in Miami and my driver did not know his way around. We got stuck in traffic on Interstate 95. Terrible. I felt beaten down. And then, and then. ...
I got to my hotel, the Breakers, and everything was great. The lobby was beautiful. The room was fabulous. The ocean breeze was heavenly. My bed was firm and warm. I turned on the Oscars and, though they make me want to vomit, I was still happy — and suddenly, I realized that I had been looking at it all wrong.
I was working in Placerville in mud and slush. I was not being worked to death, or lined up in mud and slush and shot like three of my grandfather's cousins were by the Nazis. I was not in the Hürtgen Forest dodging tree bursts from German 88's. I was on a set, maybe getting a little cold.
The hotel? Well, even though it lacked instant hot water, I had a warm bed and a view of the freeway. And the rude people on the plane? Well, we were on a plane — not in a cattle car, not in steerage. And my wife? Let's remember that she puts up with me: Enough said. And my ungrateful son? Hey, he's an American child, that's all, and by definition has no clue of how good he has it. And how different is he from me?
I love the Breakers; there is no better hotel. But it occurs to me that all of America is like the Breakers compared with what history has dished up, especially to us Jews. I wish I could get that spirit into my son.
When I was in college, in my fabulous fraternity, Alpha Delta Phi, we had an Episcopalian prayer before each meal, and it sums up what I think about what makes you really rich: For the gifts we are about to receive, please Lord, make us truly grateful. Because, to be grateful, as Phil DeMuth says, is to get rich not just quickly, but instantly. For the gift that is my work life in America, dear Lord, please make me truly grateful.
Oh, and the news about the hats? Here is Phil's portfolio. We don't vouch for the soundness of these securities. And their yield may fall as events unfold and problems occur, so there are risks. Some, as you can see, are European, so there is currency risk, too. But for now, they have a heck of a yield — though not as high as the yield of gratitude, which carries no risks.
Call it the Stein-DeMuth 7 Percent Solution (well, really, the DeMuth 7 Percent Solution). It's sorted by sector, and includes percentage yields for each stock.
REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT TRUSTS Lexington Corporate Properties Trust, 7.1 percent; and Healthcare Realty Trust, 7.1.
MASTER LIMITED PARTNERSHIPS Teppco Partners, 7.6; and MarkWest Energy Partners, 7.3.
UTILITIES Peoples Energy, 5.9; Enel of Italy, 8.0; UIL Holdings, 6.0; Telecom New Zealand, 11.3; United Utilities of Britain, 6.8.
ROYALTY TRUSTS Great Northern Iron Ore Properties, 9.4; and Permian Basin, 10.3.
OTHER UST, the tobacco company, 5.5; ConAgra Foods, 5.3; the Deluxe Corporation, the printer of checks and business forms, 6.6; and Allied Capital, the business development firm, 7.7.
I do not claim that these yield numbers are immutable, but for now you can have a rockin' good time with them. They might actually make up an average yield above 7 percent. Put the excess into hats.
Ben Stein is a lawyer, writer, actor and economist. E-mail: ebiz@nytimes.com.
11 March 2006
London Free Press - Local News - Hate website fine a first
London Free Press - Local News - Hate website fine a first: "Hate website fine a first
A Human Rights ruling says Internet servers are as liable as their clients for hate material.
By RANDY RICHMOND, FREE PRESS REPORTER
For the first time in Canada, an Internet service provider has been found guilty and fined for hosting websites that spread hate messages against blacks, Jews and Muslims.
In the landmark ruling by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal yesterday, southern Ontario's white supremacy movement also took a hit, with two leaders and one group found guilty of violating the Canadian Human Rights Act and ordered to pay $8,000 in fines and compensation.
The Internet service provider, Affordable Space. com, was fined $5,000.
'The ruling sends a very strong message that Internet servers, if they are aware there is hate content and don't take timely action to remove it, can be held liable,' said Ottawa lawyer Richard Warman, who filed the complaint in February 2002.
The ruling was the third victory in as many tries for Warman in efforts to shut down Internet hate and a boost to his complaints against several other London-area white supremacists.
'I am absolutely thrilled,' he said. 'This is proof human rights laws work.'
The ruling also shows that online pseudonyms, used by both men in the case, are no protection against the law, said Monette Maillet, the Canadian Human Rights Commission lawyer who argued the case before the tribunal.
'The ruling shows Canadians have no tolerance for hate,' Maillet said.
In the ruling, ex-Londoner James Scott Richardson was fined $1,000 for several Internet postings, including one calling for attacks on Jewish and Muslim agencies, temples and residences.
Longtime white supremacy leader Alex"
A Human Rights ruling says Internet servers are as liable as their clients for hate material.
By RANDY RICHMOND, FREE PRESS REPORTER
For the first time in Canada, an Internet service provider has been found guilty and fined for hosting websites that spread hate messages against blacks, Jews and Muslims.
In the landmark ruling by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal yesterday, southern Ontario's white supremacy movement also took a hit, with two leaders and one group found guilty of violating the Canadian Human Rights Act and ordered to pay $8,000 in fines and compensation.
The Internet service provider, Affordable Space. com, was fined $5,000.
'The ruling sends a very strong message that Internet servers, if they are aware there is hate content and don't take timely action to remove it, can be held liable,' said Ottawa lawyer Richard Warman, who filed the complaint in February 2002.
The ruling was the third victory in as many tries for Warman in efforts to shut down Internet hate and a boost to his complaints against several other London-area white supremacists.
'I am absolutely thrilled,' he said. 'This is proof human rights laws work.'
The ruling also shows that online pseudonyms, used by both men in the case, are no protection against the law, said Monette Maillet, the Canadian Human Rights Commission lawyer who argued the case before the tribunal.
'The ruling shows Canadians have no tolerance for hate,' Maillet said.
In the ruling, ex-Londoner James Scott Richardson was fined $1,000 for several Internet postings, including one calling for attacks on Jewish and Muslim agencies, temples and residences.
Longtime white supremacy leader Alex"
10 March 2006
The REAL Sordid Tale
The following is an email exchange that took place over the course of a couple of days, March 9-10, 2006. The first email I present here is my initial comment to the piece of Jew-hate (or antisemitic, whichever term you like; I use Jew-hate so as not to confuse the target for another semitic group)written by one "Edwin Decker" whom I believe is actually the editor of the San Diego CityBeat Magazine, Dave Rolland. The rest is in chronological order, verbatim copy from Outlook. This guy is really out of touch: he wants to be able to criticize whichever religious group he pleases at the moment, claiming not to care about any of it, claiming that all religions are cults (including Judaism) and that, essentially, whoever gets damaged because of religion deserves it because religion is ab initio bad. There's some circular reasoning for ya, Dave! Could it be that after you beat up the Muslims a couple of weeks ago (you gave away your motivation there) that you had to find a Jew to criticize. My, how convenient to pick on a Lubavitcher Jew who just so happens to be a reggae singer, and a good one at that--passing good vibes to everyone, Muslim, Jew and Christian alike. I wonder what San Diego Magazine might say about this; or the U-T?
-----Original Message-----
From: I Randolph S Shiner [mailto:irsslex@pacbell.net]
Sent: Thursday, 09 March, 2006 22:57
To: 'editor@sdcitybeat.com'
Subject: Edwin Decker's Sordid Tale
Sir, Edwin Decker’s screed against Matisyahu (“Sordid Tales”, 3/8/06) is a piece of Jew-hate, though he certainly did give it an apt title. His writing and this piece in particular is indeed sordid. Would Mr. Decker have had the balls to say the same thing about a strict Muslim? My guess is that would he be afraid that he and your paper would be the targets of riots and death threats as we saw earlier this year in Europe. Certain European newspapers published images of the Prophet Mohammed, something that is apparently against the Koran. No, Mr. Decker picked on a young Jewish man (when was the last time you saw a Jew start a riot except over his Aunt’s too-hard matzo-balls?) who is trying his best to follow the rules of his religion, is hurting no-one, and more importantly is spreading a good word around through his music. The people that come to see him play should know that he cannot shake hands with women, and accept his reasons at face value. Certainly he does not need to justify his religious beliefs and actions to the likes of Edwin Decker. Send him back under the rock from whence he came.
I. Randolph S. Shiner, Esq.
And the response:
-----Original Message-----
From: davidr@sdcitybeat.com [mailto:davidr@sdcitybeat.com]
Sent: Thursday, 09 March, 2006 23:10
To: irsslex@pacbell.net
Subject: RE: Edwin Decker's Sordid Tale
I guess you didn't read my diatribe against crazy muslims and equally crazy
christians two weeks ago.
Dave Rolland, editor
And then my turn:
-----Original Message-----
From: I Randolph S Shiner [mailto:irsslex@pacbell.net]
Sent: Thursday, 09 March, 2006 23:17
To: 'davidr@sdcitybeat.com'
Subject: RE: Edwin Decker's Sordid Tale
Only one difference: Jews don't force others to accept their beliefs through proselytizing or violence. The other groups (or elements of them) you mention do.
I. Randolph S. Shiner, Esq.
-----Original Message-----
From: davidr@sdcitybeat.com [mailto:davidr@sdcitybeat.com]
Sent: Thursday, 09 March, 2006 23:29
To: irsslex@pacbell.net
Subject: RE: Edwin Decker's Sordid Tale
My point was that my paper isn't afraid to offend Muslims.
-----Original Message-----
From: I Randolph S Shiner [mailto:irsslex@pacbell.net]
Sent: Friday, 10 March, 2006 15:45
To: 'davidr@sdcitybeat.com'
Subject: RE: Edwin Decker's Sordid Tale
Dave:
I appreciate that. But I guess that my point is that you don't need a REASON to offend Muslims. Rioting over cartoons? Ridiculous. That's enough to make fun of. I give you the following site to show you the sense of humor of Jews (Israeli and others) in that regard: http://www.boomka.org/
I trust that as an editor, you follow world politics, society and culture. Have you been following what is happening, for example, in France lately? There was a torture and killing of a young Jewish kid only because he was Jewish. And the neighbors (also Muslim) knew what was happening and did nothing. This month, people were beaten up very badly because they were Jews. (It’s Muslim attackers in every case, and they come right out and say that the attacks are done because they hate Jews.)
The success of Jewish people in many areas of our society far out of proportion to our percentage of the population (2%) has made us that much more open to hate crimes and general distrust that has lingered forever in Christian societies all over the world and, yes, here in the US. Call it envy, call it jealousy, whatever you want. The history is there.
Matisyahu has likewise found unlikely success as a reggae singer. He carries with him who he is (like Marley was a true Rastafarian, not some pretender), and he is a Lubavitcher, which is an extremely Orthodox segment of the Jewish community. I am afraid that our Muslim brothers have given Orthodoxy a bad name. These are pious people and follow the Torah (the five books of Moses) to the letter, with the notable exceptions of stoning people and burning carcasses of dead animals in synagogue, among many, many others. But they don’t go rioting like “Orthodox” Muslims. I can imagine them not really caring about what somebody wrote about God, since only God has the final say on what is sacrilege. This is not to say they would sit still if someone would try to destroy (physically) a Torah scroll. Nor would I, and I am far from Orthodox.
Please take a few minutes and visit this site: www.adl.org . That may give you a little more idea of the power of words to add to the climate of hate that already exists in this country, and not just against Jews. But the climate of anti-semitism (Jew-hate) is higher now than any time in the last 50 years. Much of this is as the result of the acts of Israel in defending herself from Muslim terrorists and nutbags like the President of Iran (and Hamas) who has called for the annihilation of Israel and its Jewish citizens, all of which is on top of and in combination with already extant anti-Semitism.
Be well.
Randy Shiner
I. Randolph S. Shiner, Esq.
-----Original Message-----
From: David Rolland [mailto:davidr@sdcitybeat.com]
Sent: Friday, 10 March, 2006 16:14
To: irsslex@pacbell.net
Cc: Ed Decker
Subject: Re: Edwin Decker's Sordid Tale
I hear ya, man, but I have a hard time getting all wrapped up in who's more victimized than someone else -- because I think all religions are cults (including Judaism) and all religious people are brainwashed victims of their own religions. I think it's ALL insanity. Religion breed intolerance and zealotry. How many people have suffered and died throughout the centuries because of religion? It's all for nothing. I'm sick of it all. I've lost the will to be understanding of "religious differences." I blame all of them.
-----Original Message-----
From: I Randolph S Shiner [mailto:irsslex@pacbell.net]
Sent: Friday, 10 March, 2006 16:58
To: 'David Rolland'
Subject: RE: Edwin Decker's Sordid Tale
You're entitled to your opinion. So am I. Don't print hateful stuff.
I. Randolph S. Shiner, Esq.
-----Original Message-----
From: I Randolph S Shiner [mailto:irsslex@pacbell.net]
Sent: Thursday, 09 March, 2006 22:57
To: 'editor@sdcitybeat.com'
Subject: Edwin Decker's Sordid Tale
Sir, Edwin Decker’s screed against Matisyahu (“Sordid Tales”, 3/8/06) is a piece of Jew-hate, though he certainly did give it an apt title. His writing and this piece in particular is indeed sordid. Would Mr. Decker have had the balls to say the same thing about a strict Muslim? My guess is that would he be afraid that he and your paper would be the targets of riots and death threats as we saw earlier this year in Europe. Certain European newspapers published images of the Prophet Mohammed, something that is apparently against the Koran. No, Mr. Decker picked on a young Jewish man (when was the last time you saw a Jew start a riot except over his Aunt’s too-hard matzo-balls?) who is trying his best to follow the rules of his religion, is hurting no-one, and more importantly is spreading a good word around through his music. The people that come to see him play should know that he cannot shake hands with women, and accept his reasons at face value. Certainly he does not need to justify his religious beliefs and actions to the likes of Edwin Decker. Send him back under the rock from whence he came.
I. Randolph S. Shiner, Esq.
And the response:
-----Original Message-----
From: davidr@sdcitybeat.com [mailto:davidr@sdcitybeat.com]
Sent: Thursday, 09 March, 2006 23:10
To: irsslex@pacbell.net
Subject: RE: Edwin Decker's Sordid Tale
I guess you didn't read my diatribe against crazy muslims and equally crazy
christians two weeks ago.
Dave Rolland, editor
And then my turn:
-----Original Message-----
From: I Randolph S Shiner [mailto:irsslex@pacbell.net]
Sent: Thursday, 09 March, 2006 23:17
To: 'davidr@sdcitybeat.com'
Subject: RE: Edwin Decker's Sordid Tale
Only one difference: Jews don't force others to accept their beliefs through proselytizing or violence. The other groups (or elements of them) you mention do.
I. Randolph S. Shiner, Esq.
-----Original Message-----
From: davidr@sdcitybeat.com [mailto:davidr@sdcitybeat.com]
Sent: Thursday, 09 March, 2006 23:29
To: irsslex@pacbell.net
Subject: RE: Edwin Decker's Sordid Tale
My point was that my paper isn't afraid to offend Muslims.
-----Original Message-----
From: I Randolph S Shiner [mailto:irsslex@pacbell.net]
Sent: Friday, 10 March, 2006 15:45
To: 'davidr@sdcitybeat.com'
Subject: RE: Edwin Decker's Sordid Tale
Dave:
I appreciate that. But I guess that my point is that you don't need a REASON to offend Muslims. Rioting over cartoons? Ridiculous. That's enough to make fun of. I give you the following site to show you the sense of humor of Jews (Israeli and others) in that regard: http://www.boomka.org/
I trust that as an editor, you follow world politics, society and culture. Have you been following what is happening, for example, in France lately? There was a torture and killing of a young Jewish kid only because he was Jewish. And the neighbors (also Muslim) knew what was happening and did nothing. This month, people were beaten up very badly because they were Jews. (It’s Muslim attackers in every case, and they come right out and say that the attacks are done because they hate Jews.)
The success of Jewish people in many areas of our society far out of proportion to our percentage of the population (2%) has made us that much more open to hate crimes and general distrust that has lingered forever in Christian societies all over the world and, yes, here in the US. Call it envy, call it jealousy, whatever you want. The history is there.
Matisyahu has likewise found unlikely success as a reggae singer. He carries with him who he is (like Marley was a true Rastafarian, not some pretender), and he is a Lubavitcher, which is an extremely Orthodox segment of the Jewish community. I am afraid that our Muslim brothers have given Orthodoxy a bad name. These are pious people and follow the Torah (the five books of Moses) to the letter, with the notable exceptions of stoning people and burning carcasses of dead animals in synagogue, among many, many others. But they don’t go rioting like “Orthodox” Muslims. I can imagine them not really caring about what somebody wrote about God, since only God has the final say on what is sacrilege. This is not to say they would sit still if someone would try to destroy (physically) a Torah scroll. Nor would I, and I am far from Orthodox.
Please take a few minutes and visit this site: www.adl.org . That may give you a little more idea of the power of words to add to the climate of hate that already exists in this country, and not just against Jews. But the climate of anti-semitism (Jew-hate) is higher now than any time in the last 50 years. Much of this is as the result of the acts of Israel in defending herself from Muslim terrorists and nutbags like the President of Iran (and Hamas) who has called for the annihilation of Israel and its Jewish citizens, all of which is on top of and in combination with already extant anti-Semitism.
Be well.
Randy Shiner
I. Randolph S. Shiner, Esq.
-----Original Message-----
From: David Rolland [mailto:davidr@sdcitybeat.com]
Sent: Friday, 10 March, 2006 16:14
To: irsslex@pacbell.net
Cc: Ed Decker
Subject: Re: Edwin Decker's Sordid Tale
I hear ya, man, but I have a hard time getting all wrapped up in who's more victimized than someone else -- because I think all religions are cults (including Judaism) and all religious people are brainwashed victims of their own religions. I think it's ALL insanity. Religion breed intolerance and zealotry. How many people have suffered and died throughout the centuries because of religion? It's all for nothing. I'm sick of it all. I've lost the will to be understanding of "religious differences." I blame all of them.
-----Original Message-----
From: I Randolph S Shiner [mailto:irsslex@pacbell.net]
Sent: Friday, 10 March, 2006 16:58
To: 'David Rolland'
Subject: RE: Edwin Decker's Sordid Tale
You're entitled to your opinion. So am I. Don't print hateful stuff.
I. Randolph S. Shiner, Esq.
SORDID TALES
Note: I was sitting, more or less minding my own business (as much as that is possible when you subscribe to Google's 'alert' feature)last night when this article came across my desktop. Read it, but be warned that it is (at least to my sensibilities)a piece of patent Jew-hate. I thereafter began a bit of a correspondence with the editor of the San Diego CityBeat, from whence this piece of trash came. My emails, together with his replies, follow in a separate post. This is indeed a "sordid tale". You'll see what I mean.
SORDID TALES
Hasidic rapper should have known better
by Edwin Decker
I was in the gym, on the exercise bicycle, reading Rolling Stone, when I laughed so hard I nearly fell off my bike. The article was about Matisyahu—the reggae, pop, hip-hop, beatboxing orthodox Jewish fellow who’s currently blowing up the circuit. The article, like everything else written about Matisyahu, explored the lingering question that follows him everywhere he goes. That question is this: How does an orthodox Jew front a reggae, hip-hop, pop band without contradicting his orthodoxy?
Anyone who knows anything about Hasidism knows they’ve got a lot of rules. It’s a religion chock full of rules, really, many of which would make being in a hip-hop, pop, reggae outfit highly complicated. For instance, according to Hasidic law, Matisyahu (born Mathew Miller) must not have contact with women to whom he is not related. Which means he can’t even shake their hands when they want his autograph.
“It’s hard to [say no] to every other person who comes up to you,” he complained in the RS interview. “It can come off as disrespectful.”
When I read that quote, I laughed so hard my left foot actually careened off the pedal and my body sharply tilted leftward as I thought to myself, Did he really say that? “Come off as”? It can come off as disrespectful? As if it’s not actually disrespectful, it just sorta appears that way. Well, I have news for you, Matis: When you refuse to shake someone’s hand simply because she’s a woman—that’s what disrespectful is, you twit. That is the essence of disrespectful. It is the poster-encounter for disrespectful. Next to “disrespectful” in the dictionary there’s a picture of a Hasidic Jew lurching back in horror at a woman’s outstretched hand.
Come off as?
Picture the scene: It was a great show. You rocked the house. And you just finished shaking the hands of 35 filthy rasta-dudes, half of whom don’t wash their hands when they use the toilet, and then this adoring post-pubescent female approaches you—telling you how much she loves you, how your music changed her, and how, maybe, it even saved her life. Then she extends her hand to you for some gorgeous human-to-human contact and you actually, unbelievably, somehow have the brick-like balls to tell her no.
Come off as, my ass.
At best, Hasidic Jews treat women like they are second-class citizens, at worse like diseased whorehouse gerbils that were once stowed in certain customers’ assholes. Can you imagine what that must do to the collective psyche of Jewish women? That and all these other execrable tenets—like how females must sit in the back seat of the car when other males are present, or how they’re generally not allowed to speak unless spoken to, and how they must cut their hair when they marry so as not to risk attracting other men. It’s a fucking institution of disrespect, man, and so far from come off as that I almost laughed myself right off an exercise bike. Do you know how hard it is to fall off a stationary bike?
I know what you’re thinking, Matis. You’re thinking it’s not your fault. You’re thinking that these are the rules of your religion, and you must obey them. But you weren’t born into Hasidism. You adopted it when you were 20 years old. I would understand better if you were born into it, brainwashed at birth to believe that all this misogynistic rooster-shit you abide by somehow brings you closer to Hashem. But you weren’t born into it. You chose Hasidism. You observed it. You researched it. You saw how they treated women and still said, “Yup, this is the religion for me.” You even read the Talmud, with its embarrassingly vulgar regard for women: Such as Shabbat 33b, which states women are “light minded”; or Swidler 3, which claims, “A woman is a pitcher of filth with its mouth full of blood”; or Kiddushin 49b, which says, “Ten measures of speech descended to the world; women took nine,” which means, in lay terms, They talk too goddamn much. All this left you with little doubt that this was a culture that does not respect women, meaning your disrespect for them is not incidental. So, please, please, please, Matisyahu, would you stick your come off as right up the place where the gefilte fish don’t swim?
There is a line in the RS story that I found telling: “In accordance with Jewish law, [Matisyahu] has had to stop stage-diving at shows so as to avoid the risk of contact with women he is not related to.”
The part of that sentence that interests me is “has had to stop.” Because it means that, at least for a while, he had been stage diving. So why, all of a sudden, did this become an issue? My guess is somewhere along the road he received a phone call from one of the elders telling him to stop.
Imagine, if you would, that phone call…
Brring.
“Hello.”
“Hello, Mathew, it is I, the Grand Exalted Imperial Highness of Hasid. Do you have a minute?”
“Of course, your greatness.”
“This thing you do, where you leap into the crowd and then body surf across it. You must stop immediately.”
“But why, your imperialness?”
“Because there are women out there who are not related to you, you schmendrick! Some of them are menstruating, fer crissake!” “Yeech!”
“That’s right ‘Yeech.’ Oh, and also, Mathew?”
“Yes.”
“Do you do that ‘roof is on fire’ bit?”
“Yes, your eminence.”
“What, are you on the crack?! You can’t say that. You must fetch pail and help extinguish the fire. Thou shalt never let thy neighbor’s roof burn freely. Nor shall we compare roofs to incestuous fornicators. What were you thinking? I’m just so disappointed in you, Mathew. Reggae? Really!? Why couldn’t you play the klezmer music like a nice Jewish boy? Klezmer is a great music, Mathew. I never tire of ‘Hava Nagila.’ Why won’t you play ‘Hava Nagila?!’”
3/8/06
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© 2003-2006 Southland Publishing, All Rights Reserved
SORDID TALES
Hasidic rapper should have known better
by Edwin Decker
I was in the gym, on the exercise bicycle, reading Rolling Stone, when I laughed so hard I nearly fell off my bike. The article was about Matisyahu—the reggae, pop, hip-hop, beatboxing orthodox Jewish fellow who’s currently blowing up the circuit. The article, like everything else written about Matisyahu, explored the lingering question that follows him everywhere he goes. That question is this: How does an orthodox Jew front a reggae, hip-hop, pop band without contradicting his orthodoxy?
Anyone who knows anything about Hasidism knows they’ve got a lot of rules. It’s a religion chock full of rules, really, many of which would make being in a hip-hop, pop, reggae outfit highly complicated. For instance, according to Hasidic law, Matisyahu (born Mathew Miller) must not have contact with women to whom he is not related. Which means he can’t even shake their hands when they want his autograph.
“It’s hard to [say no] to every other person who comes up to you,” he complained in the RS interview. “It can come off as disrespectful.”
When I read that quote, I laughed so hard my left foot actually careened off the pedal and my body sharply tilted leftward as I thought to myself, Did he really say that? “Come off as”? It can come off as disrespectful? As if it’s not actually disrespectful, it just sorta appears that way. Well, I have news for you, Matis: When you refuse to shake someone’s hand simply because she’s a woman—that’s what disrespectful is, you twit. That is the essence of disrespectful. It is the poster-encounter for disrespectful. Next to “disrespectful” in the dictionary there’s a picture of a Hasidic Jew lurching back in horror at a woman’s outstretched hand.
Come off as?
Picture the scene: It was a great show. You rocked the house. And you just finished shaking the hands of 35 filthy rasta-dudes, half of whom don’t wash their hands when they use the toilet, and then this adoring post-pubescent female approaches you—telling you how much she loves you, how your music changed her, and how, maybe, it even saved her life. Then she extends her hand to you for some gorgeous human-to-human contact and you actually, unbelievably, somehow have the brick-like balls to tell her no.
Come off as, my ass.
At best, Hasidic Jews treat women like they are second-class citizens, at worse like diseased whorehouse gerbils that were once stowed in certain customers’ assholes. Can you imagine what that must do to the collective psyche of Jewish women? That and all these other execrable tenets—like how females must sit in the back seat of the car when other males are present, or how they’re generally not allowed to speak unless spoken to, and how they must cut their hair when they marry so as not to risk attracting other men. It’s a fucking institution of disrespect, man, and so far from come off as that I almost laughed myself right off an exercise bike. Do you know how hard it is to fall off a stationary bike?
I know what you’re thinking, Matis. You’re thinking it’s not your fault. You’re thinking that these are the rules of your religion, and you must obey them. But you weren’t born into Hasidism. You adopted it when you were 20 years old. I would understand better if you were born into it, brainwashed at birth to believe that all this misogynistic rooster-shit you abide by somehow brings you closer to Hashem. But you weren’t born into it. You chose Hasidism. You observed it. You researched it. You saw how they treated women and still said, “Yup, this is the religion for me.” You even read the Talmud, with its embarrassingly vulgar regard for women: Such as Shabbat 33b, which states women are “light minded”; or Swidler 3, which claims, “A woman is a pitcher of filth with its mouth full of blood”; or Kiddushin 49b, which says, “Ten measures of speech descended to the world; women took nine,” which means, in lay terms, They talk too goddamn much. All this left you with little doubt that this was a culture that does not respect women, meaning your disrespect for them is not incidental. So, please, please, please, Matisyahu, would you stick your come off as right up the place where the gefilte fish don’t swim?
There is a line in the RS story that I found telling: “In accordance with Jewish law, [Matisyahu] has had to stop stage-diving at shows so as to avoid the risk of contact with women he is not related to.”
The part of that sentence that interests me is “has had to stop.” Because it means that, at least for a while, he had been stage diving. So why, all of a sudden, did this become an issue? My guess is somewhere along the road he received a phone call from one of the elders telling him to stop.
Imagine, if you would, that phone call…
Brring.
“Hello.”
“Hello, Mathew, it is I, the Grand Exalted Imperial Highness of Hasid. Do you have a minute?”
“Of course, your greatness.”
“This thing you do, where you leap into the crowd and then body surf across it. You must stop immediately.”
“But why, your imperialness?”
“Because there are women out there who are not related to you, you schmendrick! Some of them are menstruating, fer crissake!” “Yeech!”
“That’s right ‘Yeech.’ Oh, and also, Mathew?”
“Yes.”
“Do you do that ‘roof is on fire’ bit?”
“Yes, your eminence.”
“What, are you on the crack?! You can’t say that. You must fetch pail and help extinguish the fire. Thou shalt never let thy neighbor’s roof burn freely. Nor shall we compare roofs to incestuous fornicators. What were you thinking? I’m just so disappointed in you, Mathew. Reggae? Really!? Why couldn’t you play the klezmer music like a nice Jewish boy? Klezmer is a great music, Mathew. I never tire of ‘Hava Nagila.’ Why won’t you play ‘Hava Nagila?!’”
3/8/06
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© 2003-2006 Southland Publishing, All Rights Reserved
John Coltrane's Finest Hour
music box
John Coltrane's Finest Hour
Before he jumped into the aesthetic abyss.
By Stanley Crouch
Posted Friday, March 10, 2006, at 6:10 AM ET
Jazz is still the most original aesthetic form to emerge from the United States, but, after the big-band era of the 1930s, most jazz took place in small rooms that held about a hundred people. The sound systems were usually bad, the waitresses obnoxious, the drunks a pain in the backside, and there was little regard for the players as anything more than lower-rung entertainers. If the music was strong enough, however, the audience would quiet down or shout approval when something especially swinging was played. Unlike in today's more polished venues, the participation of the listeners was not forbidden, and people weren't expected to keep absolutely quiet until a song ended.
That is how it was when John Coltrane came to prominence and recorded some of his finest work in performance during the 1960s. Coltrane died in 1967 and has since achieved a mythic status that obscures the fact that he redefined jazz for the better and for the worse. The better meant an inspired use of minor modes, pentatonic scales, and original melodies that brought a brand new lyricism into the music, which can be heard quite clearly on Crescent, perhaps the greatest studio recording of mature Coltrane. The worse meant undisciplined and formless improvisations of epic length that were more about possession than inspired design—feeling, thought, and technique became lost in the overwhelming aesthetic event. That is why when Coltrane jumped off the cliff into hysteria, he began to lose his audience, which was not prepared, like the rock audience, for formless chaos.
The recent release of One Down, One Up, a 1965 radio performance, features Coltrane's finest group, the classic quartet that included pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones. It was recorded at the Half Note night club in New York and reminds those who were around then of what it was like to hear the band that was recharging the battery of the jazz aesthetic. New York writer Hattie Gossett remembers that, "Coltrane was an interesting contradiction because he was corny like. Very country. Backwoods. He was driving a Jaguar but he was still a country Negro. Suits didn't fit, white socks, pants too short. Then he would get up there and play all of this incredible music that was so complex you could get a headache from it if you weren't ready."
Part of the Coltrane myth is that he had no interest in entertainment and did not submit to its parameters. He is thought to have been too involved with his art to pay attention to what the club owners or the audiences wanted. This is not exactly true. Yes, he did play very long performances that would go beyond the 45-minute sets that most bands played. But one Friday night, when I asked him if he would play "Impressions," he told me: "Well, little brother, I would like to, but this is money night and I have to play 'My Favorite Things' every set or the club owner and the customers will not be very happy. But if I get a chance, I'll play it for you." There you have it; he was a working professional.
Coltrane was a simply dressed and modestly handsome man who could have passed for a deacon on the way to a prayer meeting. He didn't have the look of special authority one saw in Miles Davis, Philly Joe Jones, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Milt Jackson, Sonny Rollins, or Betty Carter. At best, he seemed like a humorless workman who had all the details of the job on his mind and had little interest in talking about anything outside of what he was about to do. Once he got to the bandstand, however, something unexpected happened.
On a first encounter with Coltrane, one could never believe the enormity of the force with which he and his musicians played. There was no talking. No announcements. I never saw Coltrane count off a tempo. He looked around, maybe smiled at his drummer, then put his mouth to his horn. What the saxophonist and his musicians did next was beyond material and beyond logic. With his band working under him, behind him, or encircling his sound, Coltrane would rock and roll like a rhythm-and-blues player as he pushed his saxophone forward and drew it back to him, sometimes going down on one knee. To the unprepared, the music might have sounded overstated, undisciplined, and hysterical, but it was not to become that until near the end, when the great quartet was broken up by Coltrane's naive submission to actual noise and incompetence.
Such sincere and overwrought mawkishness led to a recording like Om, which contains so much screaming and hollering that playing it was a good way to quickly clear the house after a party had reached its peak and tiresome people were still hanging around. But in its great moments, the John Coltrane Quartet appeared to have multiplied its instrumentation to three or four times its size, which was why its impact became so explosive: The pressure on the air was that of a big band at full blast. Many of its imitators, quite naturally, thought that playing loud and using modal forms would get the sound of that group onto their bandstands. Sorry. It wasn't about that.
The music could not be easily duplicated because it was the result of Coltrane's vast sonic experience. The saxophonist had evolved at a much more casual pace than his predecessors, not truly coming into his own until he had passed his 30th birthday. He had worked with three landmark thinkers. First, the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who was, with Charlie Parker, the twin fountainhead of the bebop revolution. Next, he worked nightly on the bandstand of Miles Davis, who redefined bebop and brought in simpler melodic materials. Finally, he worked with Thelonious Monk, probably the greatest thinker of them all, whose impact is felt most clearly in the solo that Coltrane improvises on Crescent and in the 16th-note rhythms from Monk's "Trinkle Tinkle," which the saxophonist used to the end of his life.
With all of that experience under his belt, Coltrane went on to reinterpret the basic elements of jazz: the 4/4 swing, the blues, the romantic or contemplative ballad, and Latin or Afro-Hispanic rhythms. One Down, One Up captures the band as Coltrane was staring into an aesthetic abyss but had yet to take the plunge. The playing documents him in the middle of making art before an audience and takes its place alongside his greatest performance recordings, perhaps the best of which is the two-volume Afro Blue/Impressions. The title track of One Down, One Up will give you the feeling of Coltrane, which is what most artists want to deliver after all the talk is done. As the troubled master himself said, "I never thought about whether or not people understand what I'm doing. The emotional reaction is all that matters. As long as there's some feeling of communication, it isn't necessary that it be understood."
Stanley Crouch is the author of The Artificial White Man and the forthcoming Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2137816/
John Coltrane's Finest Hour
Before he jumped into the aesthetic abyss.
By Stanley Crouch
Posted Friday, March 10, 2006, at 6:10 AM ET
Jazz is still the most original aesthetic form to emerge from the United States, but, after the big-band era of the 1930s, most jazz took place in small rooms that held about a hundred people. The sound systems were usually bad, the waitresses obnoxious, the drunks a pain in the backside, and there was little regard for the players as anything more than lower-rung entertainers. If the music was strong enough, however, the audience would quiet down or shout approval when something especially swinging was played. Unlike in today's more polished venues, the participation of the listeners was not forbidden, and people weren't expected to keep absolutely quiet until a song ended.
That is how it was when John Coltrane came to prominence and recorded some of his finest work in performance during the 1960s. Coltrane died in 1967 and has since achieved a mythic status that obscures the fact that he redefined jazz for the better and for the worse. The better meant an inspired use of minor modes, pentatonic scales, and original melodies that brought a brand new lyricism into the music, which can be heard quite clearly on Crescent, perhaps the greatest studio recording of mature Coltrane. The worse meant undisciplined and formless improvisations of epic length that were more about possession than inspired design—feeling, thought, and technique became lost in the overwhelming aesthetic event. That is why when Coltrane jumped off the cliff into hysteria, he began to lose his audience, which was not prepared, like the rock audience, for formless chaos.
The recent release of One Down, One Up, a 1965 radio performance, features Coltrane's finest group, the classic quartet that included pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones. It was recorded at the Half Note night club in New York and reminds those who were around then of what it was like to hear the band that was recharging the battery of the jazz aesthetic. New York writer Hattie Gossett remembers that, "Coltrane was an interesting contradiction because he was corny like. Very country. Backwoods. He was driving a Jaguar but he was still a country Negro. Suits didn't fit, white socks, pants too short. Then he would get up there and play all of this incredible music that was so complex you could get a headache from it if you weren't ready."
Part of the Coltrane myth is that he had no interest in entertainment and did not submit to its parameters. He is thought to have been too involved with his art to pay attention to what the club owners or the audiences wanted. This is not exactly true. Yes, he did play very long performances that would go beyond the 45-minute sets that most bands played. But one Friday night, when I asked him if he would play "Impressions," he told me: "Well, little brother, I would like to, but this is money night and I have to play 'My Favorite Things' every set or the club owner and the customers will not be very happy. But if I get a chance, I'll play it for you." There you have it; he was a working professional.
Coltrane was a simply dressed and modestly handsome man who could have passed for a deacon on the way to a prayer meeting. He didn't have the look of special authority one saw in Miles Davis, Philly Joe Jones, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Milt Jackson, Sonny Rollins, or Betty Carter. At best, he seemed like a humorless workman who had all the details of the job on his mind and had little interest in talking about anything outside of what he was about to do. Once he got to the bandstand, however, something unexpected happened.
On a first encounter with Coltrane, one could never believe the enormity of the force with which he and his musicians played. There was no talking. No announcements. I never saw Coltrane count off a tempo. He looked around, maybe smiled at his drummer, then put his mouth to his horn. What the saxophonist and his musicians did next was beyond material and beyond logic. With his band working under him, behind him, or encircling his sound, Coltrane would rock and roll like a rhythm-and-blues player as he pushed his saxophone forward and drew it back to him, sometimes going down on one knee. To the unprepared, the music might have sounded overstated, undisciplined, and hysterical, but it was not to become that until near the end, when the great quartet was broken up by Coltrane's naive submission to actual noise and incompetence.
Such sincere and overwrought mawkishness led to a recording like Om, which contains so much screaming and hollering that playing it was a good way to quickly clear the house after a party had reached its peak and tiresome people were still hanging around. But in its great moments, the John Coltrane Quartet appeared to have multiplied its instrumentation to three or four times its size, which was why its impact became so explosive: The pressure on the air was that of a big band at full blast. Many of its imitators, quite naturally, thought that playing loud and using modal forms would get the sound of that group onto their bandstands. Sorry. It wasn't about that.
The music could not be easily duplicated because it was the result of Coltrane's vast sonic experience. The saxophonist had evolved at a much more casual pace than his predecessors, not truly coming into his own until he had passed his 30th birthday. He had worked with three landmark thinkers. First, the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who was, with Charlie Parker, the twin fountainhead of the bebop revolution. Next, he worked nightly on the bandstand of Miles Davis, who redefined bebop and brought in simpler melodic materials. Finally, he worked with Thelonious Monk, probably the greatest thinker of them all, whose impact is felt most clearly in the solo that Coltrane improvises on Crescent and in the 16th-note rhythms from Monk's "Trinkle Tinkle," which the saxophonist used to the end of his life.
With all of that experience under his belt, Coltrane went on to reinterpret the basic elements of jazz: the 4/4 swing, the blues, the romantic or contemplative ballad, and Latin or Afro-Hispanic rhythms. One Down, One Up captures the band as Coltrane was staring into an aesthetic abyss but had yet to take the plunge. The playing documents him in the middle of making art before an audience and takes its place alongside his greatest performance recordings, perhaps the best of which is the two-volume Afro Blue/Impressions. The title track of One Down, One Up will give you the feeling of Coltrane, which is what most artists want to deliver after all the talk is done. As the troubled master himself said, "I never thought about whether or not people understand what I'm doing. The emotional reaction is all that matters. As long as there's some feeling of communication, it isn't necessary that it be understood."
Stanley Crouch is the author of The Artificial White Man and the forthcoming Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2137816/
"Al-Qaeda Undercover Soldier, U.S.A": Last Warning to American People -
Special Dispatch - Jihad & Terrorism Studies Project
March 10, 2006
No. 1112
Purported "Al-Qaeda Undercover Soldier, U.S.A": Last Warning to American People - Two Operations Will Occur; Your Homeland Security Agency Must Surrender; States Far Away From Washington, D.C. Such as Arizona Will Be Hit; We Await Orders From Our Commander Osama Bin Laden; America Will Be Brought to its Knees
To view this Special Dispatch in HTML, visit: http://www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD111206 .
On March 10, 2006, the Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF) posted, on the Islamic websites, a final warning to the American people, on behalf of "Rakan Ben Williams" who defines himself as "Al-Qaeda under cover soldier, USA [sic]."
It is not clear exactly who is behind this name. Moreover, according to a previous statement by GIMF public relations bureau director Saif Al-Din Al-Kinani on the GIMF Internet newscast Sout Al-Khilafa, GIMF is not affiliated with Al-Qaeda.(1)
But on November 8, 2005, the London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat reported: "The Global Islamic Media Front has threatened [the West] on the Internet by means of its new soldier, whom it calls Rakan Ben Williams, and whom it claims is a white Englishman who converted to Islam."(2)
Also, on November 24, 2005, the GIMF posted on the Islamic websites a similar warning, under the same name, that included an explicit threat to assassinate Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Australian Prime Minister John Howard, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and U.S. President George W. Bush, when the time comes, with a clear mention of the possibility of doing so after they complete their current terms of office. Although this communiqu×™ was directed to these leaders, it noted that it referred to all Western leaders, and included special mention of Berlusconi. At its conclusion, the communiqu×™ said that it had been written by "the one who thirsts for the blood of the Crusaders, the secret soldier of Al-Qaeda, Rakan Ben Williams, Italy (the Vatican)."(3)
In the following warning, Rakan Ben Williams warns that, unlike after the 9/11, Madrid, and London attacks, which are still being investigated, "[after] the coming attack there will be no one to analyze and investigate, because the mind and the heart will be unable to comprehend it... This will not be a single operation", the report added, "but two; one bigger than the other, but we will begin with the big one and postpone the bigger one, in order to see [how] diligent the American people is [in preserving] its life. If it chooses life, [it must] carry out the demands of the Muslims, and if it chooses death, then we are its best perpetrators." The warning appeared in Arabic and in English.
The following are excerpts from the original English version:(4)
The Last Warning to the American People (Rakan Ben Williams)
"I discern your wonder about this warning in which you do not quite recognize what to make of it. You are probably asking: Why would Al-Qaeda Organization announce its upcoming operations inside the mainland? Why the repeated warnings? Originally by the commander in Chief of Al-Qaeda (the victorious, by the grace of Allah), followed by the same warning through his trusted deputy, and now by Rakan Williams (Al-Qaeda’s under cover soldier in the west).
"What could be the theme?
"What exactly is being planned?
"Could it be another one of Al-Qaeda’s tricks?
"How would anyone in a right mind, while in the preparation stages, discloses the objectives? Let alone before completing the arrangements! Military experts would fully agree that such a disclosure would only come out from an insane.
"However, coming from Al-Qaeda, a disclosure like this reflects one thing and one thing alone: full faith and trust in Allah. Ultimate faith in Allah and His infinite power, He (Allah) is the only true protector and helper. The conviction in our men and their unexpected abilities to prepare and carry out such missions comes second to next in our trust in Allah.
"You ought not to be intolerably upset; for whoever survives this upcoming blow will have a probability to learn an amazing lesson in the art of conducting 'expeditions.'
There Will Be Two Operations in the U.S.
"Despite the fact that the New York, Washington, Madrid, and London expeditions have been carried out a few years back. The search for clues on how they were conducted in such a successful manner is still going on and reports upon reports are still being written about them. However, the next expedition might not find someone who can provide analysis for. The top intellects, strategists, and analysts, will be totally clueless as to how to explain what occurred. Let me also inform you that we are talking about two operations, not one. The scale of one of them is larger than the other but both are large and significant. However, we will start with the smaller, and temporarily put the larger on hold to see how serious the Americans are about their lives. Should you value your own life and security, accept Muslims’ demands, but if you shall prefer death (over giving in to Muslims’ demands). Then, we, by the grace of Allah, are the best in bringing it (death) to your door steps.
Bush and His Clan are Incapable of Protecting You
"Do not put your hopes on Bush and his clan, they are incapable of protecting you, and if they think they are, let them foil or stop the two upcoming operations, and punish those who are responsible for them. But if they could not identify and foil the devastating events coming your way, you must ask yourselves: How long will we continue allowing ourselves to be slaughtered with full advance knowledge of our fate?
"Let me now inform you why we opted to inform you about the two operations and your inability to stop them before they are carried out. The reason is simple; you cannot uncover or stop them except by letting them be carried out. Furthermore, the best you could do would be to accelerate the day of carrying out the operations. In other words, if we schedule the operation to take place tomorrow, the best you could do is to make it happen today.
Your Homeland Security Agency Must Surrender
"This indeed is a sweet situation to be in. It is a win-win all the way for us. It is the ultimate control and the most stunning way to stop an operation (accelerating it with the same impact). What we are saying is this: You will have a choice of either let us carry it out on our own schedule and with our own hands or allow your own intelligence apparatus to cause it to happen. This second choice will cause a level of dissatisfaction (with your decision makers) to reach its highest level. Therefore, your Homeland Security Agencies would have no choice but to surrender and wait for the inevitable to happen.
"I will not give any more clues; this is enough as a wake up call. Perhaps the American people will start thinking about the magnitude of the danger that is coming their way.
American States Far Away From Washington, D.C. are Helpless
"O’ you helpless Americans, especially those living in States far away from Washington, D.C.! Your country is comprised of many States that should not have anything to do with Muslims. Take the State of Arizona for example; what does this State have to do with killing Muslims in Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq? What interest of theirs serving, helping, and siding with the Jews and Israel?
"If some members of your Congress and Senate are being used as Jewish tools manipulated by Israel, why do you bear the consequences?
"Why do you bring death and destruction to your homes and lives in an apparent sacrifice for a handful of dishonest men and women?
"They took advantage of your state of unawareness to advance their own agenda. They have built and strengthened the State of Israel while bringing adversity and destruction to you in the process. Therefore, the net result for you is death, losses and insecurity. But for them is wealth, fine and secure life. You have sent your loved ones to die in the Hell of Iraq not to bring you security but to bring security to the State of Israel. But the sad thing is that the pain will not stop at the loss of your loved ones in Iraq or Afghanistan, but the pain will even be greater when death and destruction comes once more to you in your own homes, by the grace of Allah.
We are Awaiting Orders from Our Commander Osama Ben Laden
"The operations are ready to go, we are just waiting for orders from the commander in chief, Osama Ben Laden (may Allah preserve him). He will decide whether to strike or to hold. We swear by Allah that there are so many tricks and tactical maneuvers that will make your heads spin, by the grace of Allah. You will be brought to your knees, but not until you lose more loved ones and experience significant destruction.
"Now is the time to wake up and dust off this state of complacency and ineffectiveness to save yourselves and your loved ones from catastrophes sure to come your way. Remove war mongers from positions of power and throw them in prisons, where they belong. Rid yourselves of 'the Jewish pests' that brought nothing to you but adversity and loss of lives and wealth. They have deceived you for many years, it is time now you turn the table on them and make an example out of them.
"Rid yourselves of media crafters who deliberately kept you in the dark for so long and made a mockery of you before the rest of the world. Boycott NBC news and dismiss its Jewish CEO, Fred Silverman. Do the same to INC news and fire its Jewish owner, Leonard Goldstein, the same is true for CBS and its owner William Bailey. Find credible media outlets that bring nothing to you but facts. Unfortunately you won’t find any in your country. Do you know why? Because your rogue State fights any media dedicated to the truth, no matter how small it is.
Watch Al-Jazeera and Visit Mujahideen Websites to Get Educated
"Visit Mujahideen web sites to get to know who they are. You will see for yourselves that they are not what your media outlets made you believe they are. If you cannot do that, the least you could do is to watch Al-Jazeera Channel; there you might get 20% or less of the truth about the war zones. Resent the corrupted politicians in Washington, D.C. and demand justice, if they do not give in to your demands, you must declare autonomy so you may live in peace and security.
"This is the last warning you will receive from us. Consequently, if you ignore it, we regret to inform you that we will carry out devastating operations against the States of America and we will not show mercy whatsoever, you would have brought destruction to yourselves. Do not ever forget, you have rejected the truce which was offered to you by Muslims; you have supported the thieves of the white house and blessed their adventures. Therefore, you get nothing from us short of similar treatment; for only blood for blood.
"May Allah facilitate a way for us to spill the blood of the occupiers and cut off the heads of the aggressors. Allah has full power and control over all of His affairs, but most mankind knows not.
"Rakan Ben Williams
"Al-Qaeda under cover soldier
"USA"
Endnotes:
(1)MEMRI Special Dispatch 1038, "Islamist Website Design Contest: Winner Fires Missiles at U.S. Army Base in Iraq,"
December 1, 2005, http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP103805 .
(2) http://www.asharqalawsat.com/details.asp?section=1&issue=9842&article=332378 , November 8, 2005. (3)At the bottom was the GIMF symbol. See: http://www.alhesbah.org/v/showthread.php?t=40498 , November 24, 2005.
(4) http://www.asharqalawsat.com/details.asp?section=1&issue=9842&article=332378 , November 8, 2005.
*********************
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) is an independent, non-profit organization that translates and analyzes the media of the Middle East. Copies of articles and documents cited, as well as background information, are available on request.
MEMRI holds copyrights on all translations. Materials may only be used with proper attribution.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI)
P.O. Box 27837, Washington, DC 20038-7837
Phone: (202) 955-9070
Fax: (202) 955-9077
E-Mail: memri@memri.org
Search previous MEMRI publications at www.memri.org
March 10, 2006
No. 1112
Purported "Al-Qaeda Undercover Soldier, U.S.A": Last Warning to American People - Two Operations Will Occur; Your Homeland Security Agency Must Surrender; States Far Away From Washington, D.C. Such as Arizona Will Be Hit; We Await Orders From Our Commander Osama Bin Laden; America Will Be Brought to its Knees
To view this Special Dispatch in HTML, visit: http://www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD111206 .
On March 10, 2006, the Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF) posted, on the Islamic websites, a final warning to the American people, on behalf of "Rakan Ben Williams" who defines himself as "Al-Qaeda under cover soldier, USA [sic]."
It is not clear exactly who is behind this name. Moreover, according to a previous statement by GIMF public relations bureau director Saif Al-Din Al-Kinani on the GIMF Internet newscast Sout Al-Khilafa, GIMF is not affiliated with Al-Qaeda.(1)
But on November 8, 2005, the London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat reported: "The Global Islamic Media Front has threatened [the West] on the Internet by means of its new soldier, whom it calls Rakan Ben Williams, and whom it claims is a white Englishman who converted to Islam."(2)
Also, on November 24, 2005, the GIMF posted on the Islamic websites a similar warning, under the same name, that included an explicit threat to assassinate Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Australian Prime Minister John Howard, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and U.S. President George W. Bush, when the time comes, with a clear mention of the possibility of doing so after they complete their current terms of office. Although this communiqu×™ was directed to these leaders, it noted that it referred to all Western leaders, and included special mention of Berlusconi. At its conclusion, the communiqu×™ said that it had been written by "the one who thirsts for the blood of the Crusaders, the secret soldier of Al-Qaeda, Rakan Ben Williams, Italy (the Vatican)."(3)
In the following warning, Rakan Ben Williams warns that, unlike after the 9/11, Madrid, and London attacks, which are still being investigated, "[after] the coming attack there will be no one to analyze and investigate, because the mind and the heart will be unable to comprehend it... This will not be a single operation", the report added, "but two; one bigger than the other, but we will begin with the big one and postpone the bigger one, in order to see [how] diligent the American people is [in preserving] its life. If it chooses life, [it must] carry out the demands of the Muslims, and if it chooses death, then we are its best perpetrators." The warning appeared in Arabic and in English.
The following are excerpts from the original English version:(4)
The Last Warning to the American People (Rakan Ben Williams)
"I discern your wonder about this warning in which you do not quite recognize what to make of it. You are probably asking: Why would Al-Qaeda Organization announce its upcoming operations inside the mainland? Why the repeated warnings? Originally by the commander in Chief of Al-Qaeda (the victorious, by the grace of Allah), followed by the same warning through his trusted deputy, and now by Rakan Williams (Al-Qaeda’s under cover soldier in the west).
"What could be the theme?
"What exactly is being planned?
"Could it be another one of Al-Qaeda’s tricks?
"How would anyone in a right mind, while in the preparation stages, discloses the objectives? Let alone before completing the arrangements! Military experts would fully agree that such a disclosure would only come out from an insane.
"However, coming from Al-Qaeda, a disclosure like this reflects one thing and one thing alone: full faith and trust in Allah. Ultimate faith in Allah and His infinite power, He (Allah) is the only true protector and helper. The conviction in our men and their unexpected abilities to prepare and carry out such missions comes second to next in our trust in Allah.
"You ought not to be intolerably upset; for whoever survives this upcoming blow will have a probability to learn an amazing lesson in the art of conducting 'expeditions.'
There Will Be Two Operations in the U.S.
"Despite the fact that the New York, Washington, Madrid, and London expeditions have been carried out a few years back. The search for clues on how they were conducted in such a successful manner is still going on and reports upon reports are still being written about them. However, the next expedition might not find someone who can provide analysis for. The top intellects, strategists, and analysts, will be totally clueless as to how to explain what occurred. Let me also inform you that we are talking about two operations, not one. The scale of one of them is larger than the other but both are large and significant. However, we will start with the smaller, and temporarily put the larger on hold to see how serious the Americans are about their lives. Should you value your own life and security, accept Muslims’ demands, but if you shall prefer death (over giving in to Muslims’ demands). Then, we, by the grace of Allah, are the best in bringing it (death) to your door steps.
Bush and His Clan are Incapable of Protecting You
"Do not put your hopes on Bush and his clan, they are incapable of protecting you, and if they think they are, let them foil or stop the two upcoming operations, and punish those who are responsible for them. But if they could not identify and foil the devastating events coming your way, you must ask yourselves: How long will we continue allowing ourselves to be slaughtered with full advance knowledge of our fate?
"Let me now inform you why we opted to inform you about the two operations and your inability to stop them before they are carried out. The reason is simple; you cannot uncover or stop them except by letting them be carried out. Furthermore, the best you could do would be to accelerate the day of carrying out the operations. In other words, if we schedule the operation to take place tomorrow, the best you could do is to make it happen today.
Your Homeland Security Agency Must Surrender
"This indeed is a sweet situation to be in. It is a win-win all the way for us. It is the ultimate control and the most stunning way to stop an operation (accelerating it with the same impact). What we are saying is this: You will have a choice of either let us carry it out on our own schedule and with our own hands or allow your own intelligence apparatus to cause it to happen. This second choice will cause a level of dissatisfaction (with your decision makers) to reach its highest level. Therefore, your Homeland Security Agencies would have no choice but to surrender and wait for the inevitable to happen.
"I will not give any more clues; this is enough as a wake up call. Perhaps the American people will start thinking about the magnitude of the danger that is coming their way.
American States Far Away From Washington, D.C. are Helpless
"O’ you helpless Americans, especially those living in States far away from Washington, D.C.! Your country is comprised of many States that should not have anything to do with Muslims. Take the State of Arizona for example; what does this State have to do with killing Muslims in Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq? What interest of theirs serving, helping, and siding with the Jews and Israel?
"If some members of your Congress and Senate are being used as Jewish tools manipulated by Israel, why do you bear the consequences?
"Why do you bring death and destruction to your homes and lives in an apparent sacrifice for a handful of dishonest men and women?
"They took advantage of your state of unawareness to advance their own agenda. They have built and strengthened the State of Israel while bringing adversity and destruction to you in the process. Therefore, the net result for you is death, losses and insecurity. But for them is wealth, fine and secure life. You have sent your loved ones to die in the Hell of Iraq not to bring you security but to bring security to the State of Israel. But the sad thing is that the pain will not stop at the loss of your loved ones in Iraq or Afghanistan, but the pain will even be greater when death and destruction comes once more to you in your own homes, by the grace of Allah.
We are Awaiting Orders from Our Commander Osama Ben Laden
"The operations are ready to go, we are just waiting for orders from the commander in chief, Osama Ben Laden (may Allah preserve him). He will decide whether to strike or to hold. We swear by Allah that there are so many tricks and tactical maneuvers that will make your heads spin, by the grace of Allah. You will be brought to your knees, but not until you lose more loved ones and experience significant destruction.
"Now is the time to wake up and dust off this state of complacency and ineffectiveness to save yourselves and your loved ones from catastrophes sure to come your way. Remove war mongers from positions of power and throw them in prisons, where they belong. Rid yourselves of 'the Jewish pests' that brought nothing to you but adversity and loss of lives and wealth. They have deceived you for many years, it is time now you turn the table on them and make an example out of them.
"Rid yourselves of media crafters who deliberately kept you in the dark for so long and made a mockery of you before the rest of the world. Boycott NBC news and dismiss its Jewish CEO, Fred Silverman. Do the same to INC news and fire its Jewish owner, Leonard Goldstein, the same is true for CBS and its owner William Bailey. Find credible media outlets that bring nothing to you but facts. Unfortunately you won’t find any in your country. Do you know why? Because your rogue State fights any media dedicated to the truth, no matter how small it is.
Watch Al-Jazeera and Visit Mujahideen Websites to Get Educated
"Visit Mujahideen web sites to get to know who they are. You will see for yourselves that they are not what your media outlets made you believe they are. If you cannot do that, the least you could do is to watch Al-Jazeera Channel; there you might get 20% or less of the truth about the war zones. Resent the corrupted politicians in Washington, D.C. and demand justice, if they do not give in to your demands, you must declare autonomy so you may live in peace and security.
"This is the last warning you will receive from us. Consequently, if you ignore it, we regret to inform you that we will carry out devastating operations against the States of America and we will not show mercy whatsoever, you would have brought destruction to yourselves. Do not ever forget, you have rejected the truce which was offered to you by Muslims; you have supported the thieves of the white house and blessed their adventures. Therefore, you get nothing from us short of similar treatment; for only blood for blood.
"May Allah facilitate a way for us to spill the blood of the occupiers and cut off the heads of the aggressors. Allah has full power and control over all of His affairs, but most mankind knows not.
"Rakan Ben Williams
"Al-Qaeda under cover soldier
"USA"
Endnotes:
(1)MEMRI Special Dispatch 1038, "Islamist Website Design Contest: Winner Fires Missiles at U.S. Army Base in Iraq,"
December 1, 2005, http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP103805 .
(2) http://www.asharqalawsat.com/details.asp?section=1&issue=9842&article=332378 , November 8, 2005. (3)At the bottom was the GIMF symbol. See: http://www.alhesbah.org/v/showthread.php?t=40498 , November 24, 2005.
(4) http://www.asharqalawsat.com/details.asp?section=1&issue=9842&article=332378 , November 8, 2005.
*********************
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) is an independent, non-profit organization that translates and analyzes the media of the Middle East. Copies of articles and documents cited, as well as background information, are available on request.
MEMRI holds copyrights on all translations. Materials may only be used with proper attribution.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI)
P.O. Box 27837, Washington, DC 20038-7837
Phone: (202) 955-9070
Fax: (202) 955-9077
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Search previous MEMRI publications at www.memri.org
Iran 'grave concern', says Bush
Iran 'grave concern', says Bush
President George W Bush says the stand-off with Iran presents a "grave national security concern" for the US.
Mr Bush based this on the Iranian leader's threat to destroy Israel and Washington's belief that Tehran is seeking to develop nuclear weapons.
It is essential to resolve these issues diplomatically and "to deal with these threats today", Mr Bush said.
The five permanent UN Security Council members are meeting on Friday to discuss Iran's nuclear programme.
Ambassadors from US, UK, France, Russia and China are to work in private on a statement to put before the full council next week.
Meanwhile, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana has said that the war of words between Iran and US is "not in line with normal diplomacy".
Mr Solana lamented the escalation, including an Iranian threat to cause "harm and pain".
These kind of remarks... are always very inflammatory
Javier Solana
EU foreign policy chief
"These kind of remarks... are always very inflammatory. They are not in line with normal diplomacy. My concern is not such comments, but what reactions they could produce," he said.
Mr Solana also said he did not rule out the possibility of sanctions against Iran. But he added that there was still time for diplomacy and said Europe didn't want to target the Iranian people.
Damning report
On Wednesday, the United Nations nuclear watchdog the IAEA decided to report Iran to the Security Council.
Iran has vowed to resist international pressure, insisting it has the right to civilian nuclear technology. It denies US and EU accusations that it is seeking to develop nuclear weapons.
The IAEA report, which was widely leaked to the media last week, said that the Iranians had begun feeding uranium gas into centrifuges, a first step in a process that can produce fuel for nuclear reactors or bomb material.
America's UN ambassador, John Bolton, told the BBC the issue would strongly test the council.
He said he could not predict whether there would be any consensus at the Security Council which faced, he said, a test as to its ability to deal with the threat of nuclear proliferation.
Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has said his country will "stand like steel" against any pressure.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/middle_east/4792860.stm
President George W Bush says the stand-off with Iran presents a "grave national security concern" for the US.
Mr Bush based this on the Iranian leader's threat to destroy Israel and Washington's belief that Tehran is seeking to develop nuclear weapons.
It is essential to resolve these issues diplomatically and "to deal with these threats today", Mr Bush said.
The five permanent UN Security Council members are meeting on Friday to discuss Iran's nuclear programme.
Ambassadors from US, UK, France, Russia and China are to work in private on a statement to put before the full council next week.
Meanwhile, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana has said that the war of words between Iran and US is "not in line with normal diplomacy".
Mr Solana lamented the escalation, including an Iranian threat to cause "harm and pain".
These kind of remarks... are always very inflammatory
Javier Solana
EU foreign policy chief
"These kind of remarks... are always very inflammatory. They are not in line with normal diplomacy. My concern is not such comments, but what reactions they could produce," he said.
Mr Solana also said he did not rule out the possibility of sanctions against Iran. But he added that there was still time for diplomacy and said Europe didn't want to target the Iranian people.
Damning report
On Wednesday, the United Nations nuclear watchdog the IAEA decided to report Iran to the Security Council.
Iran has vowed to resist international pressure, insisting it has the right to civilian nuclear technology. It denies US and EU accusations that it is seeking to develop nuclear weapons.
The IAEA report, which was widely leaked to the media last week, said that the Iranians had begun feeding uranium gas into centrifuges, a first step in a process that can produce fuel for nuclear reactors or bomb material.
America's UN ambassador, John Bolton, told the BBC the issue would strongly test the council.
He said he could not predict whether there would be any consensus at the Security Council which faced, he said, a test as to its ability to deal with the threat of nuclear proliferation.
Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has said his country will "stand like steel" against any pressure.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/middle_east/4792860.stm
Writely - Google Declares War on MS Office Suite
It was announced yesterday at the CeBit in Hanover, Germany that Google had purchased online word-processing firm Writely (www.writely.com) . When one visits the site, one is directed to another page that allows you to sign up for the service after they have completed the acquisition and the GUI has been converted. The question being bandied about is whether Google Office will replace MS Office which has been in existence for a very long time. The issue is moot. The question today is not what form the communications necessarily take, but how a piece of communication is prepared, in what form it is saved or savable to, how it is packeted for delivery to either a printer or digitally and last how it is transmitted, making the transfer of the thought of the writer therefore complete and thus accomplished. If people can see that Google gives them a better chance to accomplish what MS Office has, and does it for free, the war will not last very long, save for what will likely be a substantial amount of holdouts who do not want to see their documentation stored offsite or somewhere in the internet ether. It is those privacy and security concerns that will make or break Google Office.
Randy Shiner
Dan Farber: Showing it's more than a little interested in enabling people to handle office tasks over the Net, Google buys start-up Writely -- and the blogosphere swarms. While Writely doesn't suggest an full-fledged MS Office competitor, it fits into the notion of a bottoms-up Google Web 2.0 Office.
READ FULL STORY
Also: Why Writely is Microsoft's Pearl Harbor
Dion Hinchcliffe: One step closer to a Google Office suite
Richard Stiennon: Why should we trust them with our documents?
Garage-made wine challenges traditions
Garage-made wine challenges traditions
Winemaker shakes up Bordeaux wine region
By John Ward Anderson
The Washington Post
Updated: 10:20 p.m. ET March 9, 2006
SAINT-EMILION, France - He was a logger, a lifeguard, a disc jockey and a banker. But Jean-Luc Thunevin didn't strike it big until he started making red wine in his garage. From there, the Algerian-born high-school graduate began challenging upper-crust wine barons and their traditions, helping spur a revolt that experts argue will either revitalize the fabled Bordeaux region or drive it nearer to ruin.
In the beginning, Thunevin climbed into vats with his wife, Murielle, to slosh around in the grapes. He relied on friends to bend over tables in the driveway and pluck out leaves and stems in exchange for dinner.
But from that first vintage -- 1,291 bottles of 1991 Chateau Valandraud, which retailed for about $25 each -- evolved one of the most exclusive boutique wines in France, fetching as much as $500 a bottle. Today, Thunevin makes 11 different wines and sells about 1 million bottles a year in markets from Paris to Hong Kong, Moscow to New York.
To some wine lovers, Thunevin, 54, and other garagistes who use similar iconoclastic techniques represent the greatest threat facing Bordeaux and its reputation as the world's premier wine region.
But to others, stubborn defense of tradition in the face of tough overseas competition is a key reason for the decline of Bordeaux, which had a surplus of 200 million unsold bottles last year. They question whether the people who make Bordeaux wines have the gumption to change and compete. "We had success because we rediscovered some techniques that were used a long time ago that had been abandoned," Thunevin said. Among them: extensive pruning and thinning to concentrate grapes on the vine, and handpicking and sorting only the ripest fruit.
"It did not go over well with the historic winegrowers in the region, especially when Valandraud started selling for more than the top traditional wines," he said with a smile, his lips stained purple from a recent tasting. "But it forced all the big chateaux to take a second look at what they were doing, and that was useful because it helped them prepare for the future, for the American and Australian competition."
"There was jealousy from the historic properties," said Michel Bettane, one of the most influential wine critics in France. But Thunevin and a small band of garage winemakers "had brilliant ideas about wine making, and they were doing it better than anyone else, and now 80 percent of the best growers in Saint-Emilion are doing the same thing the garagistes did 10 or 12 years ago."
‘A standard taste’
Many traditionalists remain unconvinced, accusing Thunevin and other modernists of embracing an international trend toward standardization in wines. They say that too many winemakers are ignoring the unique characteristics of their vines and land in favor of technical, by-the-numbers production that will make all wines taste the same.
"A wine should tell you the story of the place it came from," said Jean-Claude Berrouet, the top winemaker at 12 vineyards, including Chateau Petrus, the most famous wine in the neighboring Pomerol region, and Napa Valley's high-browed Dominus Estate. Innovation and change are important, Berrouet said, but there should be limits on techniques that a winemaker can use and still be classified as a Bordeaux. "If I'm a conductor playing Mozart, can I add notes to it?" he asked. "Pretentious men do this."
"As long as I can make a living doing what I do, I will resist the move to a standard taste," Berrouet said. "But you need to be realistic, and the day you can't make a living, you have to change." Three decades ago, Bordeaux was one of the top fine wines all over the world. Then the world's taste buds started to change, and lighter, fruitier, less expensive wines from abroad -- particularly the United States, Australia and Chile -- won international acclaim.
Between 1999 and 2004, France's wine exports dropped 11 percent, while America's rose 49 percent, Chile's grew 96 percent, and Australia's exploded by 152 percent. Over the same period, France's share of world wine exports dropped from 25 percent to 19 percent, while the combined share of the other three countries grew from 13.5 percent to 25 percent.
‘Sunnier, fruitier’
In blind, international tastings, 80 percent of the people prefer "sunnier, fruitier" wines from the overseas vineyards, "and if you try to force the consumer to accept the very old style of Bordeaux, it's a disaster," said Hubert de Bouard, president of the St.-Emilion Winegrowers' Union. He is the eighth generation of his family to head Chateau Angelus, a Premier Grand Cru Classe wine that is ranked among the highest quality in France.
Members of the government's stodgy wine regulating agency, the Appellation d'Origine Controlee, accuse Bouard of being "a revolutionary," he said. Among his demands they cite is that French wines relax their regulations, change their labeling, modernize their production techniques and adjust their styles and tastes -- even allowing oak chips to be used in aging barrels for flavoring -- to compete in global markets.
In his demand for innovation, the aristocratic Bouard, 48, is an unlikely ally of Thunevin. Bouard has purchased vineyards in Spain and South Africa, and his teenage son is apprenticing at a vineyard in Argentina to better understand the importance of globalization. His logic is simple, he said. "You want to work, or you want to die?"
"I don't want to kill my tradition and roots," he said, "but if you want to protect your traditions, you have to be strong enough to understand that the world changes."
But to Yves Delol, 66, whose family has owned the modest Chateau Gueyrosse vineyard since 1870, modernist techniques that use additives "are like doping in sports." Other vineyards "are free to do it, but they should be transparent and say on the label that oak chips were added, because it's not a natural process," he said, waving gnarly hands that look like the vines they tend.
"You don't want to sell your soul and lose your individuality," added his daughter, Samuelle, 37, next in line to run the vineyard.
While French wines are under commercial assault abroad, their problems are being compounded at home by a health movement that has slashed national wine consumption in half, from an average 27 gallons per person a year in 1980 to 14 gallons in 2004. That has contributed to the unprecedented surplus in Bordeaux.
"We have to find a solution to simple problems -- there's too much wine, and too much of it is bad in quality," said Bettane, the wine critic.
‘Pushing your limits’
Those are problems Thunevin says he doesn't face, citing his willing to try new things -- -- such as his development of a kosher wine that critic Robert Parker claimed was "undeniably the finest red kosher wine in the world." It sells in the United States for more than $200 a bottle.
"It's not that, if you weren't born wealthy in a chateau, you can't make good wine," Thunevin said. "It's a question of pushing your limits."
"At the beginning, he crossed the road looking both ways -- everybody was fighting the modernists," said Michel Rolland, a renowned wine consultant who provides production advice to about 100 French winemakers -- including Thunevin -- and another two dozen vineyards in 13 countries.
"Jean-Luc is permanently looking for something new to do. Every year he's asking how is it possible to move and change?" Rolland said. "We need 200 Jean-Luc Thunevins in Bordeaux, but we have only one."
In fact, with his extraordinary success, Thunevin said, "My friends say, you're not so garage anymore. And I say it's a state of mind."
Special correspondent Marie Valla contributed to this report.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
Winemaker shakes up Bordeaux wine region
By John Ward Anderson
The Washington Post
Updated: 10:20 p.m. ET March 9, 2006
SAINT-EMILION, France - He was a logger, a lifeguard, a disc jockey and a banker. But Jean-Luc Thunevin didn't strike it big until he started making red wine in his garage. From there, the Algerian-born high-school graduate began challenging upper-crust wine barons and their traditions, helping spur a revolt that experts argue will either revitalize the fabled Bordeaux region or drive it nearer to ruin.
In the beginning, Thunevin climbed into vats with his wife, Murielle, to slosh around in the grapes. He relied on friends to bend over tables in the driveway and pluck out leaves and stems in exchange for dinner.
But from that first vintage -- 1,291 bottles of 1991 Chateau Valandraud, which retailed for about $25 each -- evolved one of the most exclusive boutique wines in France, fetching as much as $500 a bottle. Today, Thunevin makes 11 different wines and sells about 1 million bottles a year in markets from Paris to Hong Kong, Moscow to New York.
To some wine lovers, Thunevin, 54, and other garagistes who use similar iconoclastic techniques represent the greatest threat facing Bordeaux and its reputation as the world's premier wine region.
But to others, stubborn defense of tradition in the face of tough overseas competition is a key reason for the decline of Bordeaux, which had a surplus of 200 million unsold bottles last year. They question whether the people who make Bordeaux wines have the gumption to change and compete. "We had success because we rediscovered some techniques that were used a long time ago that had been abandoned," Thunevin said. Among them: extensive pruning and thinning to concentrate grapes on the vine, and handpicking and sorting only the ripest fruit.
"It did not go over well with the historic winegrowers in the region, especially when Valandraud started selling for more than the top traditional wines," he said with a smile, his lips stained purple from a recent tasting. "But it forced all the big chateaux to take a second look at what they were doing, and that was useful because it helped them prepare for the future, for the American and Australian competition."
"There was jealousy from the historic properties," said Michel Bettane, one of the most influential wine critics in France. But Thunevin and a small band of garage winemakers "had brilliant ideas about wine making, and they were doing it better than anyone else, and now 80 percent of the best growers in Saint-Emilion are doing the same thing the garagistes did 10 or 12 years ago."
‘A standard taste’
Many traditionalists remain unconvinced, accusing Thunevin and other modernists of embracing an international trend toward standardization in wines. They say that too many winemakers are ignoring the unique characteristics of their vines and land in favor of technical, by-the-numbers production that will make all wines taste the same.
"A wine should tell you the story of the place it came from," said Jean-Claude Berrouet, the top winemaker at 12 vineyards, including Chateau Petrus, the most famous wine in the neighboring Pomerol region, and Napa Valley's high-browed Dominus Estate. Innovation and change are important, Berrouet said, but there should be limits on techniques that a winemaker can use and still be classified as a Bordeaux. "If I'm a conductor playing Mozart, can I add notes to it?" he asked. "Pretentious men do this."
"As long as I can make a living doing what I do, I will resist the move to a standard taste," Berrouet said. "But you need to be realistic, and the day you can't make a living, you have to change." Three decades ago, Bordeaux was one of the top fine wines all over the world. Then the world's taste buds started to change, and lighter, fruitier, less expensive wines from abroad -- particularly the United States, Australia and Chile -- won international acclaim.
Between 1999 and 2004, France's wine exports dropped 11 percent, while America's rose 49 percent, Chile's grew 96 percent, and Australia's exploded by 152 percent. Over the same period, France's share of world wine exports dropped from 25 percent to 19 percent, while the combined share of the other three countries grew from 13.5 percent to 25 percent.
‘Sunnier, fruitier’
In blind, international tastings, 80 percent of the people prefer "sunnier, fruitier" wines from the overseas vineyards, "and if you try to force the consumer to accept the very old style of Bordeaux, it's a disaster," said Hubert de Bouard, president of the St.-Emilion Winegrowers' Union. He is the eighth generation of his family to head Chateau Angelus, a Premier Grand Cru Classe wine that is ranked among the highest quality in France.
Members of the government's stodgy wine regulating agency, the Appellation d'Origine Controlee, accuse Bouard of being "a revolutionary," he said. Among his demands they cite is that French wines relax their regulations, change their labeling, modernize their production techniques and adjust their styles and tastes -- even allowing oak chips to be used in aging barrels for flavoring -- to compete in global markets.
In his demand for innovation, the aristocratic Bouard, 48, is an unlikely ally of Thunevin. Bouard has purchased vineyards in Spain and South Africa, and his teenage son is apprenticing at a vineyard in Argentina to better understand the importance of globalization. His logic is simple, he said. "You want to work, or you want to die?"
"I don't want to kill my tradition and roots," he said, "but if you want to protect your traditions, you have to be strong enough to understand that the world changes."
But to Yves Delol, 66, whose family has owned the modest Chateau Gueyrosse vineyard since 1870, modernist techniques that use additives "are like doping in sports." Other vineyards "are free to do it, but they should be transparent and say on the label that oak chips were added, because it's not a natural process," he said, waving gnarly hands that look like the vines they tend.
"You don't want to sell your soul and lose your individuality," added his daughter, Samuelle, 37, next in line to run the vineyard.
While French wines are under commercial assault abroad, their problems are being compounded at home by a health movement that has slashed national wine consumption in half, from an average 27 gallons per person a year in 1980 to 14 gallons in 2004. That has contributed to the unprecedented surplus in Bordeaux.
"We have to find a solution to simple problems -- there's too much wine, and too much of it is bad in quality," said Bettane, the wine critic.
‘Pushing your limits’
Those are problems Thunevin says he doesn't face, citing his willing to try new things -- -- such as his development of a kosher wine that critic Robert Parker claimed was "undeniably the finest red kosher wine in the world." It sells in the United States for more than $200 a bottle.
"It's not that, if you weren't born wealthy in a chateau, you can't make good wine," Thunevin said. "It's a question of pushing your limits."
"At the beginning, he crossed the road looking both ways -- everybody was fighting the modernists," said Michel Rolland, a renowned wine consultant who provides production advice to about 100 French winemakers -- including Thunevin -- and another two dozen vineyards in 13 countries.
"Jean-Luc is permanently looking for something new to do. Every year he's asking how is it possible to move and change?" Rolland said. "We need 200 Jean-Luc Thunevins in Bordeaux, but we have only one."
In fact, with his extraordinary success, Thunevin said, "My friends say, you're not so garage anymore. And I say it's a state of mind."
Special correspondent Marie Valla contributed to this report.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
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