"Detainee" Questioning Was Faked

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has led the legal challenge of detainees' imprisonment and alleged abusive interrogation techniques, said Saar's claims support lawyers' suspicions that the official tours of Guantanamo were phony.

"They couldn't show people what they were really doing, because what they were really doing was illegal and inhumane," Ratner said. "It's such a fraud. It reminds me of the special concentration camps set up in World War II. They would take the Red Cross there to see there was an orchestra and all sorts of nice things."

More.

Ringo Top Five

1. Rain--In my opinion, the best drumming on a rock record.

2. I Feel Fine--Keeps the beat throughout. I love when he first comes in at 0:13 and when he comes back in at 1:21 after being absent for about three or four seconds.

3. Tomorrow Never Knows--I once read him described as sounding like some Vedic storm god on this song. He does.

4. Thank You Girl--Steady steady steady. Absolutely great on the fade.

5. Strawberry Fields Forever--About to lose control, but he never does.

Devils & Dust

This Tuesday.

Devils & Dust

Bruce Springsteen

I got my finger on the trigger
But I don't know who to trust
When I look into your eyes
There's just devils and dust
We're a long, long way from home, Bobbie
Home's a long, long way from us
I feel a dirty wind blowing
Devils and dust

I got God on my side
I'm just trying to survive
What if what you do to survive
Kills the things you love
Fear's a powerful thing
It can turn your heart black you can trust
It'll take your God filled soul
And fill it with devils and dust

Well I dreamed of you last night
In a field of blood and stone
The blood began to dry
The smell began to rise
Well I dreamed of you last night
In a field of mud and bone
Your blood began to dry
The smell began to rise

We've got God on our side
We're just trying to survive
What if what you do to survive
Kills the things you love
Fear's a powerful thing
It'll turn your heart black you can trust
It'll take your God filled soul
Fill it with devils and dust

Now every woman and every man
They want to take a righteous stand
Find the love that God wills
And the faith that He commands
I've got my finger on the trigger
And tonight faith just ain't enough
When I look inside my heart
There's just devils and dust

Well I've got God on my side
And I'm just trying to survive
What if what you do to survive
Kills the things you love
Fear's a dangerous thing
It can turn your heart black you can trust
It'll take your God filled soul
Fill it with devils and dust

It'll take your God filled soul

Fill it with devils and dust

Tom Friedman Is a Bad Writer Too

One of my least favorite columnists these days is Tom Friedman. He's been an apologist for the Iraq war from the beginning, from his so-called liberal perspective. Please, please, Tom, leave the Great Left Wing Conspiracy! We don't need you! I still read him more often than not, but reading him is like watching a victim of spousal abuse maintain faith in their abuser. Every column he writes now has the same structure--the Bush administration has screwed everything up, and lied about everything, but I know, in my heart of hearts, what they are really aiming for, and I forgive them for everything, especially if they will listen to me this one last time.

Then follows another Bush outrage, and Friedman writes the exact same column.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

I read From Beirut to Jerusalem, and I have to admit I found it interesting, especially when he wrote about Israel, but even then, I found him to be glib and facile on a lot of things, and since the war, he has gotten worse.

He has a new book out: The World Is Flat.

Here's a few paragraphs from a review by Matt Taibbi in New York Press (thanks Atrios):

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that's guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.

On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we're not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we're not in Kansas anymore.) That's the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that's all there is.

*****

Things are true because you say they are. The only thing that matters is how sure you sound when you say it. In politics, this allows America to invade a castrated Iraq in self-defense. In the intellectual world, Friedman is now probing the outer limits of this trick's potential, and it's absolutely perfect, a stroke of genius, that he's choosing to argue that the world is flat. The only thing that would have been better would be if he had chosen to argue that the moon was made of cheese.

More.

Marla Ruzicka, Rest in Peace

Today's Bob Herbert

What I Heard About Iraq

Wow.

Land of Hope and Dreams

I used to play this song for my brother, Christopher, in the hospital, in the days after he had just fallen asleep. It's a great song in its own right, but it always makes me feel like my brother is with me and watching out for me whenever I listen to it now.

*****

Bruce Springsteen

Grab your ticket and your suitcase
Thunder's rolling down the tracks
You don't know where you're goin'
But you know you won't be back
Darlin' if you're weary
Lay your head upon my chest
We'll take what we can carry
And we'll leave the rest

Big Wheels rolling through fields
Where sunlight streams
Meet me in a land of hope and dreams

I will provide for you
And I'll stand by your side
You'll need a good companion for
This part of the ride
Leave behind your sorrows
Let this day be the last
Tomorrow there'll be sunshine
And all this darkness past

Big wheels roll through fields
Where sunlight streams
Meet me in a land of hope and dreams

This train
Carries saints and sinners
This train
Carries losers and winners
This Train
Carries whores and gamblers
This Train
Carries lost souls
This Train
Dreams will not be thwarted
This Train
Faith will be rewarded
This Train
Hear the steel wheels singin'
This Train
Bells of freedom ringin'
This Train
Carries broken-hearted
This Train
Thieves and sweet souls departed
This Train
Carries fools and kings
This Train
All aboard

This Train
Dreams will not be thwarted
This Train
Faith will be rewarded
This Train
Hear the steel wheels singin'
This Train
Bells of freedom ringin'

More Theothugracy

Re: Maines speaks my mind.

Go Your Own Way

NOTE TO BG: Even though the subject matter of this song is sad, I have a very happy memory associated with it.

*****

Loving you
Isn't the right thing to do
How can I ever change things
That I feel

If I could
Maybe I'd give you my world
How can I
When you won't take it from me

You can go your own way
Go your own way
You an call it
Another lonely day
You can go your own way
Go your own way

Tell me why
Everything turned around
Packing up
Shacking up is all you wanna do

If I could
Baby I'd give you my world
Open up
Everything's waiting for you

You can go your own way
Go your own way
You an call it
Another lonely day
You can go your own way
go your own way

Karol Wotyla, Rest in Peace

We have just witnessed the passing of a truly great man.

We will not see the like of Karol Wotyla, Pope John Paul II, anytime soon. As a liberal ex-Catholic (or is it ex-liberal Catholic?), it's become sort of mandatory to first point out where I differed with him: his antiabortion stance (I am antiabortion, too, but uneasily pro-choice), his opposition to gay marriages and women in the priesthood, even his silencing of liberation theologians in the 1980s.

But these are petty, ultimately political differences. He was a warm, gentle man, who spoke Truth to power. Defying mere differences of "liberal" or "conservative," he spoke for the poor against the powerful, for social justice, grounded in unwavering Christianity. If there was a single man responsible for the fall of communism, it was him, not Mikhail Gorbachev or Ronald Reagan.

Even in disagreement, his voice was one I paid attention to.

On Friday night, I felt that I had to be at St. Patrick's Cathedral, as several hundred other New Yorkers felt. (I live in New York.) I didn't stay for mass, but I sat in a pew, praying for John Paul, alone in my thoughts, as the organ played. I found myself thinking of the one time I saw him. I was a high school freshman when he first visited New York City in 1979. As part of his visit, I am sure he said a few masses. (I seem to remember both Shea and Yankee Stadiums.) But I either could not get tickets or I wasn't ambitious enough; I forget which. I read somewhere that he was flying out of La Guardia.

So I rode my bike there. At the time, there was a small off-road that ran along one of the ends of the airport, guarded only by a metal fence. I was able to ride right up to the fence, and I was able to see him looking out of the airplane from his seat. There were maybe a dozen of us there, and he waved at us as the plane taxied for takeoff.

A lot of time has passed since then.

As I sat in St. Patrick's, I also thought about all the people I knew who had died too early--my mother and father, my brother, a friend from law school, a friend's girlfriend. I felt a great comfort in the quiet beauty of the cathedral, and I remembered fondly my childhood faith. (I still love the Catholic church!)

The weekend was spent with members of my new faith; I was in Poughkeepsie for the Representative Meeting of the New York Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends; it was sort of a "Quaker Jamboree" We "held the Pope in the Light," as is our custom when we pray for someone. I did not have access to TV or radio all day Saturday, so I did not find out he had passed until I bought the Sunday Times in Grand Central.

I was very touched by his reading the part of the Gospels where Jesus was taken off the Cross and laid in His tomb as he awaited his own time. John Paul was not scared at all of his death, and I know that he was granted the vision of Christ he sought.

Rest in Peace!