Random Music

Somehow, there are days when certain songs and pieces of music run through my mind. Today was one of those days. Here is Ghost Town Orange's interior soundtrack for May 7, 2004:

A Day in the Life (Beatles)

I saw a film today oh boy
The English Army had just won the war
A crowd of people turned away
But I just had to look
Having read the book.

Dig those cacophonous layers of sound!

Cucamonga (Chill Wills)

I found this forgotten song at UCLA's 'friends of the library' [or whatever they call it] sale about 20 years ago. It was a single piece of mimeographed, folded and faded sheet music. [If they recognized that it was by Chill Wills they probably would have kept it for the Library's Special Collection!] I don't have the lyrics handy, but I made a neat Latin American-sounding arrangement of it in a MIDI editing program. Maybe I'll share it with you someday. :-)

UPDATE

7 May 2004 11:10 pm CDT:
Here is an MP3 of my Simtunes arrangement of 'Cucamonga' [just 1 verse, no lyrics yet]:

Right-click on the button, 'Save file as . . .'
It's a little too stacatto, but Simtunes doesn't have a good way to sustain notes. I'll test the link in the morning when I should have bandwidth available to try a download. [I'm at 83% of capacity today--this mp3 takes up over one fifth of my daily download bandwidth!]

Southern Man (Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young)

I saw cotton and I saw black, tall white mansions and little shacks.
Southern man, when will you pay them back?
I heard screaming and bullwhips cracking, how long? How long?

Southern man, better keep your head. Don't forget what your good book said.
Southern change gonna come at last, now your crosses are burning fast, Southern man.

This song uses the American South as a scapegoat for the racism prevalent everywhere in the country at the time. Listen to that high-pitched guitar chord shrieking over and over--all that tension building up--when and where will it be released?

Let There be Light, Lord God (William M. Vories, lyrics 1909 and Charles H. C. Zeuner, music 1832)

Let there be light, Lord God of hosts!
Let there be widom on the earth!
Let broad humanity have birth!
Let there be deeds instead of boasts.

Within our passioned hearts instill
the calm that ends strain and strife.
Make us your ministers of life.
Purge us from lusts that curse and kill.

Give us the peace of vision clear
to see each other's good our own,
to joy and suffer not alone:
the love that casts out all fear.

Let woe and waste of warfare cease,
that useful labor yet may build
its homes with love and laughter filled!
God give your wayward children peace!

[I altered the wording a little to eliminate some of the obsolete language. I do not find 'thees' and 'thous' especially holy.]

Father, let me dedicate All this year to you
In whatever earthly state You will have me be
Not from sorrow, pain, or care Freedom dare I claim;
This alone shall be my prayer: Glorify Your name.
--from New Year's Hymn by Lawrence Tuttiett, 1864 (alt.)

Iraq interrogators: 'Cooks and drivers'

The Guardian strikes again--this time in a report by Julian Borger about one of the private contractors with experience in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib--'Cooks and drivers were working as interrogators':

Many of the prisoners abused at the Abu Ghraib prison were innocent Iraqis picked up at random by US troops, and incarcerated by under-qualified intelligence officers, a former US interrogator from the notorious jail told the Guardian.
Torin Nelson, who served as a military intelligence officer at Guantánamo Bay before moving to Abu Ghraib as a private contractor last year, blamed the abuses on a failure of command in US military intelligence and an over-reliance on private firms. He alleged that those companies were so anxious to meet the demand for their services that they sent "cooks and truck drivers" to work as interrogators.

"Military intelligence operations need to drastically change in order for something like this not to happen again," Mr Nelson said. He spoke to the Guardian in a series of interviews by phone and email.

He claimed that "many of the detainees at the prison are actually innocent of any acts against the coalition and are being held until the bureaucracy there can go through their cases and verify their need to be released."

"One case in point is a detainee whom I recommended for release and months later was still sitting in the same tent with no change in his status."

Mr Nelson said that the same systemic problems were also responsible for large numbers of Afghans being mistakenly swept into Guantánamo Bay. He estimated that "30-40%" of the inmates at the controversial prison camp had no connection to terrorism.

Meanwhile, in Iraq:

As a witness in an ongoing investigation, Mr Nelson said he could not talk about the abuses of specific prisoners at Abu Ghraib, but he said the nature of the detention system makes the imprisonment and abuse of innocent people all but inevitable.

"A unit goes out on a raid and they have a target and the target is not available; they just grab anybody because that was their job," Mr Nelson said, referring to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq. "The troops are under a lot of stress and they don't know one guy from the next. They're not cultural experts. All they want is to count down the days and hopefully go home. They take it out on the nearest person they can't understand."

"I've read reports from capturing units where the capturing unit wrote, "the target was not at home. The neighbour came out to see what was going on and we grabbed him," he said.

According to Mr Nelson's account, the victims' very innocence made them more likely to be abused, because interrogators refused to believe they could have been picked up on such arbitrary grounds.

This whole war in Iraq has gone wrong on so many levels. It makes me sick to think that this evil has been done in our name.

Red Cross saw 'widespread abuse'

The February 2004 report of the International Red Cross regarding abuse of Iraqi prisoners has been leaked to the Wall Street Journal. The Red Cross doesn't release these reports to the public, but here's the BBC story about the report-- Red Cross saw 'widespread abuse':

Mr Kraehenbuehl [director of operations, Pierre Kraehenbuehl] said that the alleged abuses were not isolated cases and not particular to the Abu Ghraib prison.
'We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a pattern and a system,' he said.
Mr Kraehenbuehl said that over the last year the Red Cross had repeatedly warned the Bush administration that the conditions at the Abu Ghraib needed changing.
'Our findings were discussed at different moments between March and November 2003, either in direct face-to-face conversations or in written interventions,' he said. "

Of course, anyone paying attention knew this was going on. Here is an article by Dana Priest and Barton Gellman from the Washington Post of December 26, 2002--U.S. Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations | 'Stress and Duress' Tactics Used on Terrorism Suspects Held in Secret Overseas Facilities :

Those who refuse to cooperate inside this secret CIA interrogation center are sometimes kept standing or kneeling for hours, in black hoods or spray-painted goggles, according to intelligence specialists familiar with CIA interrogation methods. At times they are held in awkward, painful positions and deprived of sleep with a 24-hour bombardment of lights -- subject to what are known as "stress and duress" techniques.

Those who cooperate are rewarded with creature comforts, interrogators whose methods include feigned friendship, respect, cultural sensitivity and, in some cases, money. Some who do not cooperate are turned over -- "rendered," in official parlance -- to foreign intelligence services whose practice of torture has been documented by the U.S. government and human rights organizations.

Canadian imperialists are trying to surround US

From CBC--Nova Scotia votes to invite Turks and Caicos to join it

Nova Scotia's three political parties voted unanimously Wednesday [21 April 2004] to invite Turks and Caicos to join the province, if the Caribbean islands ever become part of Canada.

Rush Limbaugh the lying dope-addict is still as horrible as ever

Transcript excerpts of Limbaugh's radio show May 6 (from Media Matters for America)--in which he praises the torture of Iraqi prisoners--Maybe the people who ordered this are pretty smart.:

All right, so we're at war with these people. And they're in a prison where they're being softened up for interrogation. And we hear that the most humiliating thing you can do is make one Arab male disrobe in front of another. Sounds to me like it's pretty thoughtful. Sounds to me in the context of war this is pretty good intimidation -- and especially if you put a woman in front of them and then spread those pictures around the Arab world. And we're sitting here, "Oh my God, they're gonna hate us! Oh no! What are they gonna think of us?" I think maybe the other perspective needs to be at least considered. Maybe they're gonna think we are serious. Maybe they're gonna think we mean it this time. Maybe they're gonna think we're not gonna kowtow to them. Maybe the people who ordered this are pretty smart. Maybe the people who executed this pulled off a brilliant maneuver. Nobody got hurt. Nobody got physically injured. But boy there was a lot of humiliation of people who are trying to kill us -- in ways they hold dear. Sounds pretty effective to me if you look at us in the right context.

The thing though that continually amazes -- here we have these pictures of homoeroticism that look like standard good old American pornography, the Britney Spears or Madonna concerts or whatever, and yet the Libs upset about the mistreatment of these prisoners thought nothing of sitting back while mass graves were being filled with three to 500,000 Iraqis during the Saddam Hussein regime.

Emphasis from Media Matters for America.

A few comments here: Mr. Limbaugh is lying when he says "Nobody got hurt." He obviously has not read the Taguba report.

Also, our credibility as a nation that values human rights has been hurt. The "Libs" that Limbaugh criticize are the people that have consistently supported Amnesty International and criticized our pragmatic "statesmen" like Kissinger and Rumsfeld when they supported authoritarian regimes over the decades. These pragmatic, "brilliant statesmen" are the ones responsible for the training in torture techniques that the United States provided at the School of the Americas for our Latin American brothers. As long as the United States is led by men that think we are above international law, we will be seen as the bullies that we are.

I am amused that Mr. Limbaugh admits his fascination with homoerotic pornography. What will we tell the children?

This is the new gulag

Sidney Blumenthal in the Guardian--This is the new gulag:

Bush has created a global network of extra-legal and secret US prisons with thousands of inmates

"My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture," said Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defence on Tuesday. "I don't know if it is correct to say what you just said, that torture has taken place, or that there's been a conviction for torture. And therefore I'm not going to address the torture word."
He confessed he had still not read the March 9 report by Major General Antonio Taguba on "abuse" at the Abu Ghraib prison.

Get with the program: Ghost Town Orange has already read the report. Rumsfeld hasn't read the Taguba report? Bush should fire him! Back to the quote:

Some highlights: " ... pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape ... sodomising a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick ... "

The same day that Rumsfeld added his contribution to the history of Orwellian statements by high officials, the Senate armed services committee was briefed behind closed doors for the first time not only about Abu Ghraib, but about military and CIA prisons in Afghanistan. It learned of the deaths of 25 prisoners and two murders in Iraq; that private contractors were at the centre of these lethal incidents; and that no one had been charged. The senators were given no details about the private contractors. They might as well have been fitted with hoods.

If the Bushites keep power, this sort of talk will be called "premature anti-fascism;" we're not allowed to criticize our dear leaders until the "war on terror" has been won. Mr. Blumenthal worked at the White House in the good old days (i.e., when Bill Clinton was President.)

And phony Ralph Nader will claim there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans.

New Lewis and Clark postage stamps

I need a break from the bad news; unfortunately the United States Postal Service is making me unhappy with their attempt at picking my pocket:

To commemorate the bicentennial of the official launch of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the U.S. Postal Service will issue three 37-cent self-adhesive stamps. One stamp features an image of the two valiant leaders of the expedition standing on a promontory surveying the countryside, available in a pane of twenty stamps. The two additional stamps feature individual portraits of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark painted by Michael J. Deas in a style reminiscent of early 19th-century portraits of the two explorers. Ten each of these stamp portraits are included in a special 32-page prestige booklet entitled "Lewis & Clark: The Corps of Discovery, 1804-1806," available for $8.95. In addition to the stamps, the booklet contains informative text, historic illustrations and scenic photographs. Ron Fisher, a Lewis & Clark enthusiast who visited many of the expedition's sites and first wrote about the Corps of Discovery in 1970, wrote the text.

Why do I say they are trying to pick my pocket? The face value of the 20 stamps in the booklet is $7.40. They charge $8.95 for it--$1.55 above face value. Even if I do not want the booklet--I just want the stamps to use on my mail--I do not have the option of just buying the stamps at face value. And the limited printing and distribution of this issue will create an artificial scarcity, so I will never see this stamp on incoming mail. So I'll just have to be satisfied posting the hastily cut-and-pasted picture of the stamps here at Ghost Town Orange.

The frames of these stamps look like the classic engraved US postage stamps of the 1920s and early 1930s; the vignettes of these stamps feature paintings by Michael J. Deas, who also designed the stamps. Aren't they beautiful? Pity I won't see them in the mail.

We were slaves in the American kitchens

Here is another story (this is from the Independent of South Africa) we will not find in the SCLM*:We were slaves in the American kitchens:

New Delhi - A group of 20 Indians who ran away from a United States military camp in Iraq, where they worked in the kitchen, claim they were abused for nine months, it was reported on Tuesday.

The men from southern Kerala state paid 75 000 rupees (about R11 700) each for visas to Kuwait in August 2003. They were cheated by employment agents and landed in Baghdad.

One man, Hameed, said they were taken to a US military camp in Mosul where they were told that they had been bought to work in the kitchen, the Hindustan Times newspaper reported.

"We were slaves in the American kitchens. We barely got two hours of sleep. Any slip-ups and we were tortured for days," Hameed said.

While Hameed alleged they were often used as shields when their camp was attacked by Iraqi militia, his brother Shahjahan said they were forced to cook pork despite being Muslim.

The men said they were not allowed to call or write home, but were told 12 000 rupees (about R1 800) would be sent to India every month.

They got their chance to escape when their camp was attacked at the end of April. An Iraqi truck driver took them to Baghdad from where they travelled to Fallujah, Jordan, Doha, finally arriving in Mumbai on April 28.

* So-called liberal media

Afghanistan: US coalition leaflets put aid workers at greater risk

The Guardian is again proving to be one of the best newspapers in the world. Here's a report by Ewen MacAskill--Pentagon forced to withdraw leaflet linking aid to information on Taliban:

The US-led coalition in Afghanistan has distributed leaflets calling on people to provide information on al-Qaida and the Taliban or face losing humanitarian aid.
The move has outraged aid organisations who said their work is independent of the military and it was despicable to pretend otherwise.

[snip]

The leaflets were distributed by US forces in Zabul province, which borders Pakistan and where the Taliban have regained control of several districts.

One of the leaflets, showing an Afghan carrying a bag of provisions, reads: "In order to continue the humanitarian aid, pass over any information related to Taliban, al-Qaida or Gulbuddin organisations to the coalition forces." The latter reference is to the renegade warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is believed to have allied himself with the Taliban.

Fourteen aid workers were killed in Afghanistan last year; eleven have been killed thus far this year.

The Pentagon admits this was a mistake (gasp!) and promises it won't happen again.

Telling the truth ain't good enough for the 7 of diamonds

Jonathan Steele in the Guardian: Why being right on WMD is no consolation to Iraqi scientist labelled enemy of America

By any measure Amer al-Saadi ought to feel vindicated. The dapper British-educated scientist who was the Iraqi government's main link to the United Nations inspectors before the US invasion repeatedly insisted that Iraq had destroyed its weapons of mass destruction years earlier.

David Kay, the American inspector who headed the Iraq Survey Group and was sure he would find such weapons when he went to Iraq after the war, now accepts Dr Saadi was right. So does Hans Blix, the chief UN inspector, who up to a month before the war still thought Iraq might have had WMD.

Yet, astonishingly, Dr Saadi does not know of their change of mind or of the political fallout their views have caused in western countries. He is like a lottery winner who is the last person to be told he has hit the jackpot.

Held in solitary confinement in an American prison at Baghdad's international airport, Dr Saadi is denied the right to read newspapers, listen to the radio, or watch television.

[snip]

Barely three days after the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down by US troops in central Baghdad Dr Saadi approached the Americans and became the first senior Iraqi to hand himself in. It was the last time his wife saw him.

He was sure he would soon be released, Mrs Saadi says. He was a scientist who had never been part of Saddam's terror apparatus, or even a member of the Ba'ath party.

CIA interrogators have repeatedly interviewed him. Had there been any WMD to discover Dr Saadi would have had an obvious incentive to reveal their location once the regime had collapsed. But from the reports of the Iraq Survey Group it can only be assumed that he has maintained his line that they were eliminated long ago.

Dr Saadi is described officially by the Americans as an "enemy prisoner of war". This allows them to detain him indefinitely without access to a lawyer or visiting rights from his family until George Bush declares the war to be over. Whether he is still held out of spite or to hide Washington's embarrassment is not clear. He has already been in custody for more than a year.

His CIA interrogators have finished their work and apparently feel awkward about his continued detention.

"My handlers have appealed to higher authorities for my release but it seems it's political and God doesn't meddle in politics," Dr Saadi wrote in one letter.

If Dr Saadi has to wait for President Bush to declare that the war is over to be freed, he may never get out of prison. How can this be just?

Dr Saadi was the liaison man with the UN weapons inspectors when they went back to work in November 2002.

At the UN in February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell said that Dr Saadi did not cooperate with the inspectors; instead his job was to "deceive; not to disarm, but to undermine the inspectors; not to support them, but to frustrate them and to make sure they learn nothing."
Of course, now we know that most of Powell's presentation to the UN was BS. But Dr. Saadi will rot in prison because the Bush administration can not admit it was wrong about anything.

Can anyone tell me why President Bush should be re-elected? He is an idiot.

20th-century Conflict Map

From the Nobel e-Museum: Click Here to go to the Conflict Map. (Flash required)
Here's how the Nobel e-Museum describes this interactive map:

In the course of the 20th century, mankind experienced some of the most devastating wars of all times. Where did these wars take place? Have some regions experienced more wars than others? Who were the main protagonists in these conflicts? This map gives you the opportunity to answer these questions. It displays wars with at least 1,000 military battle deaths.

The Nobel Peace Prize celebrated its centennial in 2001. Where did the Laureates and nominees come from? How many Africans have received the prize? Alongside the map on wars you will find statistics showing the geographical distribution of Peace Prize nominees and Laureates since 1901.

You can move a slider on the right side of the screen to change the scale of the map. A slider below the map can change the years displayed. When you position the cursor over war on the map, you can read about that conflict.

U.S. Army report on Iraqi prisoner abuse

The full text of Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba's
report on Iraqi prisoner abuse. Rather than focus on the misbehavior at the Abu Ghraib Prison, I notice that Maj. Gen. Taguba praised a few servicemen for doing the right thing:

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

a. (U) Master-at-Arms First Class William J. Kimbro, US Navy Dog Handler, knew his duties and refused to participate in improper interrogations despite significant pressure from the MI personnel at Abu Ghraib.
b. (U) SPC Joseph M. Darby, 372nd MP Company discovered evidence of abuse and turned it over to military law enforcement.
c. (U) 1LT David O. Sutton, 229th MP Company, took immediate action and stopped an abuse, then reported the incident to the chain of command.