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Showing posts with label U.S. News. Show all posts
Showing posts with label U.S. News. Show all posts
15 September 2010
Squirel!
03 September 2009
Yale Press Bans Images of Muhammad in New Book
August 13, 2009
By PATRICIA COHEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/books/13book.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=yale%20university%20press,%20danish%20islam&st=cse
It’s not all that surprising that Yale University Press would be wary of reprinting notoriously controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a forthcoming book. After all, when the 12 caricatures were first published by a Danish newspaper a few years ago and reprinted by other European publications, Muslims all over the world angrily protested, calling the images — which included one in which Muhammad wore a turban in the shape of a bomb — blasphemous. In the Middle East and Africa some rioted, burning and vandalizing embassies; others demanded a boycott of Danish goods; a few nations recalled their ambassadors from Denmark. In the end at least 200 people were killed.
So Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí.
The book’s author, Jytte Klausen, a Danish-born professor of politics at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., reluctantly accepted Yale University Press’s decision not to publish the cartoons. But she was disturbed by the withdrawal of the other representations of Muhammad. All of those images are widely available, Ms. Klausen said by telephone, adding that “Muslim friends, leaders and activists thought that the incident was misunderstood, so the cartoons needed to be reprinted so we could have a discussion about it.” The book is due out in November.
John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press, said by telephone that the decision was difficult, but the recommendation to withdraw the images, including the historical ones of Muhammad, was “overwhelming and unanimous.” The cartoons are freely available on the Internet and can be accurately described in words, Mr. Donatich said, so reprinting them could be interpreted easily as gratuitous.
He noted that he had been involved in publishing other controversial books — like “The King Never Smiles” by Paul M. Handley, a recent unauthorized biography of Thailand’s current monarch — and “I’ve never blinked.” But, he said, “when it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question.”
Reza Aslan, a religion scholar and the author of “No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam,” is a fan of the book but decided to withdraw his supportive blurb that was to appear in the book after Yale University Press dropped the pictures. The book is “a definitive account of the entire controversy,” he said, “but to not include the actual cartoons is to me, frankly, idiotic.”
In Mr. Aslan’s view no danger remains. “The controversy has died out now, anyone who wants to see them can see them,” he said of the cartoons, noting that he has written and lectured extensively about the incident and shown the cartoons without any negative reaction. He added that none of the violence occurred in the United States: “There were people who were annoyed, and what kind of publishing house doesn’t publish something that annoys some people?”
“This is an academic book for an academic audience by an academic press,” he continued. “There is no chance of this book having a global audience, let alone causing a global outcry.” He added, “It’s not just academic cowardice, it is just silly and unnecessary.”
Mr. Donatich said that the images were still provoking unrest as recently as last year when the Danish police arrested three men suspected of trying to kill the artist who drew the cartoon depicting Muhammad’s turban as a bomb. He quoted one of the experts consulted by Yale — Ibrahim Gambari, special adviser to the secretary general of the United Nations and the former foreign minister of Nigeria — as concluding: “You can count on violence if any illustration of the prophet is published. It will cause riots, I predict, from Indonesia to Nigeria.”
Aside from the disagreement about the images, Ms. Klausen said she was also disturbed by Yale’s insistence that she could read a 14-page summary of the consultants’ recommendations only if she signed a confidentiality agreement that forbade her from talking about them. “I perceive it to be a gag order,” she said, after declining to sign. While she could understand why some of the individuals consulted might prefer to remain unidentified, she said, she did not see why she should be precluded from talking about their conclusions.
Linda Koch Lorimer, vice president and secretary of Yale University, who had discussed the summary with Ms. Klausen, said on Wednesday that she was merely following the original wishes of the consultants, some of whom subsequently agreed to be identified.
Ms. Klausen, who is also the author of “The Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe,” argued that the cartoon protests were not spontaneous but rather orchestrated demonstrations by extremists in Denmark and Egypt who were trying to influence elections there and by others hoping to destabilize governments in Pakistan, Lebanon, Libya and Nigeria. The cartoons, she maintained, were a pretext, a way to mobilize dissent in the Muslim world.
Although many Muslims believe the Koran prohibits images of the prophet, Muhammad has been depicted through the centuries in both Islamic and Western art without inciting disturbances.
Rather than sign a joint editor’s note for the book and the removal of the images, Ms. Klausen has requested instead that a statement from her be included. “I agreed,” she said, “to the press’s decision to not print the cartoons and other hitherto uncontroversial illustrations featuring images of the Muslim prophet, with sadness. But I also never intended the book to become another demonstration for or against the cartoons, and hope the book can still serve its intended purpose without illustrations.”
Other publishers, including The New York Times, chose not to print the cartoons or images of Muhammad when the controversy erupted worldwide in February 2006.
Ms. Klausen said, “I can understand that a university is risk averse, and they will make that choice” not to publish the cartoons, but Yale University Press, she added, went too far in taking out the other images of Muhammad.
“The book’s message,” Ms. Klausen said, “is that we need to calm down and look at this carefully.”
August 13, 2009, 1:06 pm
Discussion: The Yale Press Decision Not to Publish Controversial Cartoons
By Patricia Cohen
Yale University Press decided to pull 12 controversial caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad from a forthcoming book after a number of experts on Islam and counterterrorism warned that reprinting them could cause violence. When the cartoons were published in 2005 and 2006, riots erupted around the world and more than 200 people were killed. The press withdrew the drawings as well all other images of the prophet from the book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” which details the entire controversy. Some argue that Yale University Press’s decision is a defeat for free expression and a victory for extremists. Others maintain the removal of the images is prudent given the risk of violence.
August 13, 2009
3:45 pm
The university should be apologizing to the author for not only removing the so-called “offensive” cartoons, but also removing other noted illustrative examples of Muhammed.
Central to the point, Muslim extremists are using their clout to forcefully bend the laws of the land to cater their specific needs, just witness Europe, Middle East, Asia. They should learn to assimilate and become part of the new country they selectively chose for themselves, and learn to live in harmony with their neighbors.
Censorship reflects society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. ~Potter Stewart
— FireInsideTheMan
4. August 13, 2009
5:11 pm
Apparently the post-modern university requires an outside panel to tell them what’s right. I would too if I didn’t have any convictions of my own.
— Stewart Trickett
5. August 13, 2009
5:28 pm
This strange and sad decision by Yale raises questions not only of academic freedom, but also of the role of universities and university presses in our culture. University presses provide a vehicle for disseminating scholarly research that is important to human knowledge and understanding, but not always commercially viable. As universities such as Yale grow into mega-corporations preoccupied with brand management, the university presses within them are squeezed by these pressures and their very integrity and reason for being are inherently subject to compromise. This could have happened at Harvard, Princeton, or Oxford University Press instead. It may well be for this reason that the author decided not to pull the book entirely, wishing to see her life’s work published in imperfect form rather than not published at all. The author has my sympathies, but my deepest concern is for all of us and for what other realms of knowledge and understanding will remain unpublished or even unexplored if this troubling trend continues.
— Ilsa Frank
6. August 13, 2009
6:02 pm
“The price of liberty is eternal vigilance”
Too bad the cowards at Yale are so afraid of being politically incorrect so they exercise self censorship
Milton had a few things to say on the subject as well.
Yale betrays the whole ethos of Western liberalism to the cause of convenience.
I’m with Ilsa.
— david wilder
7. August 13, 2009
6:41 pm
brave, brave Yale Press. I’m so proud.
— jeff hamren
8. August 13, 2009
7:33 pm
Probably Yale is partly funded by Saudi donations?
— Gerald Boisen
9. August 13, 2009
10:34 pm
Lux et veritas? Sad and scary tale…
— esthermiriam
10. August 13, 2009
10:36 pm
Brandeis has closed its fine art museum and wants to sell its collection, Yale edits out the visual from a work of scholarship about them — what is going on out there?
— esthermiriam
11. August 13, 2009
11:56 pm
Mr. Donatich justifies the Press’s acquiescence with the panel of authorities by equating publication of the images with having “blood on [his] hands.” But these anonymous advisers have nothing to gain and everything to lose from giving the Press the green light. Was the reverse question asked: who would be helped, and who might be protected, by Ms. Klausen’s contribution to the debate?
— Emily Satterthwaite
12. August 14, 2009
3:33 am
The cowardice and the tortured excuses are breathtaking. There is another point besides the obvious one of academic freedom and bowing to generalized intimidation. The book is an effort to examine these images and put them in a context of other images of Muhammad. By not printing these images, Yale University is effectively disassociating itself from this point of view. The sub-text is that these images are too offensive to even reprint. This undermines the author’s work. I wish some other university press would step forward and offer to publish the book as is. Or even better, a joint publication of a broad range of scholarly publishers.
— Robert Sadin
13. August 14, 2009
8:56 am
Yale’s decision sadly confirms the diminishing role of academia in expanding our understanding of the world around us. This is a complex story worth exploring fully without censorship!
— Sam Cruz
14. August 14, 2009
9:19 am
Not only is this proof of people knuckling under to the undue influence of religions (whatever ones they may be), it also shows how censorship rears its ugly head much too often in today’s world. In addition, can anyone reading this book really take any of it seriously when they do not print the very cartoons that the book is about? Is the Yale University Press going to now start printing art books with hundreds of high-grade blank pages because someone, somewhere, might object to a bit of Renaissance nudity. Titian beware! The invasion of the YUPies is near!
— David
15. August 14, 2009
10:47 am
Why blame Yale only? None of the U.S. newspapers or publication published those articles- but they did widespread reporting on it.
— Karan
16. August 14, 2009
12:28 pm
Well done! The most rational and decent desision made in a long time by those in the world of commications. In a culture bent on ratings and firing people up the simplicity in simply doing the right thing is without a doubt the most powerful. People need to be more reflective about their own behavior and right now I choose to think about the word - respect - and what it means, and then finding the power in this word, and then the act of being respectful, towards all things and all people.
Well done Yale Press, well done.
Ellen
— Ellen Shanley
17. August 14, 2009
3:23 pm
Way to go guys - stand up for academic freedom at all costs and then…..
Oops, my mistake - sorry about that.
— Charles Duwel
18. August 14, 2009
10:32 pm
The current administration at Yale, like an increasing number of their colleagues in the American academy, while continuing to wave their flags of pedagogical excellence fervently in a mild breeze, fold them away when the winds pick up. They believe in very little.
What they do seem to believe in and have done very well is raising money, and previously generous alumni who are upset by this nauseating display of academic cowardice and censorship should take note.
— Ben Ledbetter
19. August 15, 2009
10:10 am
The money trail is pretty clear. Yale is a partner to the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. I am sure they do not want to lose their $50 million gift from the Saudis by offending them with this book.
— Roberta Wagner
20. August 17, 2009
9:36 am
Will the Yale School of Medicine begin to censor their textbooks and language when discussing conditions concerning “private areas”? After all, everyone can see this material on the internet. That would be favorable over offending someone living near, say, the Indonesian embassy.
— Brian
21. August 17, 2009
12:23 pm
Yale is setting a frightening precedent as one of the leading academic presses in the country. In not publishing these images (not only the cartoons, but other widely viewed and available images of Muhammad), Yale Press believes it will protect people from the furor they incite – instead it is allowing such furor to trump reasonable discussion, debate and scholarly investigation, which is exactly what Ms. Klausen is arguing in her book: “The book’s message is that we need to calm down and look at this carefully.”
You can read more about how First Amendment advocates are responding to this at the National Coalition Against Censorship’s blog: http://ncacblog.wordpress.com.
— Claire
22. August 17, 2009
1:12 pm
This is the very definition of Cowardice.
— Christian in NYC
23. August 19, 2009
12:42 pm
To #8….i do believe that ex president whats his name and his father did at least drive by yale, but am uncertain as to what education they may have received there …and yes, as i recall, the ex pres. does have extremely warm relations with saudi arabia.
— FAL
By PATRICIA COHEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/books/13book.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=yale%20university%20press,%20danish%20islam&st=cse
It’s not all that surprising that Yale University Press would be wary of reprinting notoriously controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a forthcoming book. After all, when the 12 caricatures were first published by a Danish newspaper a few years ago and reprinted by other European publications, Muslims all over the world angrily protested, calling the images — which included one in which Muhammad wore a turban in the shape of a bomb — blasphemous. In the Middle East and Africa some rioted, burning and vandalizing embassies; others demanded a boycott of Danish goods; a few nations recalled their ambassadors from Denmark. In the end at least 200 people were killed.
So Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí.
The book’s author, Jytte Klausen, a Danish-born professor of politics at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., reluctantly accepted Yale University Press’s decision not to publish the cartoons. But she was disturbed by the withdrawal of the other representations of Muhammad. All of those images are widely available, Ms. Klausen said by telephone, adding that “Muslim friends, leaders and activists thought that the incident was misunderstood, so the cartoons needed to be reprinted so we could have a discussion about it.” The book is due out in November.
John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press, said by telephone that the decision was difficult, but the recommendation to withdraw the images, including the historical ones of Muhammad, was “overwhelming and unanimous.” The cartoons are freely available on the Internet and can be accurately described in words, Mr. Donatich said, so reprinting them could be interpreted easily as gratuitous.
He noted that he had been involved in publishing other controversial books — like “The King Never Smiles” by Paul M. Handley, a recent unauthorized biography of Thailand’s current monarch — and “I’ve never blinked.” But, he said, “when it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question.”
Reza Aslan, a religion scholar and the author of “No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam,” is a fan of the book but decided to withdraw his supportive blurb that was to appear in the book after Yale University Press dropped the pictures. The book is “a definitive account of the entire controversy,” he said, “but to not include the actual cartoons is to me, frankly, idiotic.”
In Mr. Aslan’s view no danger remains. “The controversy has died out now, anyone who wants to see them can see them,” he said of the cartoons, noting that he has written and lectured extensively about the incident and shown the cartoons without any negative reaction. He added that none of the violence occurred in the United States: “There were people who were annoyed, and what kind of publishing house doesn’t publish something that annoys some people?”
“This is an academic book for an academic audience by an academic press,” he continued. “There is no chance of this book having a global audience, let alone causing a global outcry.” He added, “It’s not just academic cowardice, it is just silly and unnecessary.”
Mr. Donatich said that the images were still provoking unrest as recently as last year when the Danish police arrested three men suspected of trying to kill the artist who drew the cartoon depicting Muhammad’s turban as a bomb. He quoted one of the experts consulted by Yale — Ibrahim Gambari, special adviser to the secretary general of the United Nations and the former foreign minister of Nigeria — as concluding: “You can count on violence if any illustration of the prophet is published. It will cause riots, I predict, from Indonesia to Nigeria.”
Aside from the disagreement about the images, Ms. Klausen said she was also disturbed by Yale’s insistence that she could read a 14-page summary of the consultants’ recommendations only if she signed a confidentiality agreement that forbade her from talking about them. “I perceive it to be a gag order,” she said, after declining to sign. While she could understand why some of the individuals consulted might prefer to remain unidentified, she said, she did not see why she should be precluded from talking about their conclusions.
Linda Koch Lorimer, vice president and secretary of Yale University, who had discussed the summary with Ms. Klausen, said on Wednesday that she was merely following the original wishes of the consultants, some of whom subsequently agreed to be identified.
Ms. Klausen, who is also the author of “The Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe,” argued that the cartoon protests were not spontaneous but rather orchestrated demonstrations by extremists in Denmark and Egypt who were trying to influence elections there and by others hoping to destabilize governments in Pakistan, Lebanon, Libya and Nigeria. The cartoons, she maintained, were a pretext, a way to mobilize dissent in the Muslim world.
Although many Muslims believe the Koran prohibits images of the prophet, Muhammad has been depicted through the centuries in both Islamic and Western art without inciting disturbances.
Rather than sign a joint editor’s note for the book and the removal of the images, Ms. Klausen has requested instead that a statement from her be included. “I agreed,” she said, “to the press’s decision to not print the cartoons and other hitherto uncontroversial illustrations featuring images of the Muslim prophet, with sadness. But I also never intended the book to become another demonstration for or against the cartoons, and hope the book can still serve its intended purpose without illustrations.”
Other publishers, including The New York Times, chose not to print the cartoons or images of Muhammad when the controversy erupted worldwide in February 2006.
Ms. Klausen said, “I can understand that a university is risk averse, and they will make that choice” not to publish the cartoons, but Yale University Press, she added, went too far in taking out the other images of Muhammad.
“The book’s message,” Ms. Klausen said, “is that we need to calm down and look at this carefully.”
August 13, 2009, 1:06 pm
Discussion: The Yale Press Decision Not to Publish Controversial Cartoons
By Patricia Cohen
Yale University Press decided to pull 12 controversial caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad from a forthcoming book after a number of experts on Islam and counterterrorism warned that reprinting them could cause violence. When the cartoons were published in 2005 and 2006, riots erupted around the world and more than 200 people were killed. The press withdrew the drawings as well all other images of the prophet from the book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” which details the entire controversy. Some argue that Yale University Press’s decision is a defeat for free expression and a victory for extremists. Others maintain the removal of the images is prudent given the risk of violence.
August 13, 2009
3:45 pm
The university should be apologizing to the author for not only removing the so-called “offensive” cartoons, but also removing other noted illustrative examples of Muhammed.
Central to the point, Muslim extremists are using their clout to forcefully bend the laws of the land to cater their specific needs, just witness Europe, Middle East, Asia. They should learn to assimilate and become part of the new country they selectively chose for themselves, and learn to live in harmony with their neighbors.
Censorship reflects society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. ~Potter Stewart
— FireInsideTheMan
4. August 13, 2009
5:11 pm
Apparently the post-modern university requires an outside panel to tell them what’s right. I would too if I didn’t have any convictions of my own.
— Stewart Trickett
5. August 13, 2009
5:28 pm
This strange and sad decision by Yale raises questions not only of academic freedom, but also of the role of universities and university presses in our culture. University presses provide a vehicle for disseminating scholarly research that is important to human knowledge and understanding, but not always commercially viable. As universities such as Yale grow into mega-corporations preoccupied with brand management, the university presses within them are squeezed by these pressures and their very integrity and reason for being are inherently subject to compromise. This could have happened at Harvard, Princeton, or Oxford University Press instead. It may well be for this reason that the author decided not to pull the book entirely, wishing to see her life’s work published in imperfect form rather than not published at all. The author has my sympathies, but my deepest concern is for all of us and for what other realms of knowledge and understanding will remain unpublished or even unexplored if this troubling trend continues.
— Ilsa Frank
6. August 13, 2009
6:02 pm
“The price of liberty is eternal vigilance”
Too bad the cowards at Yale are so afraid of being politically incorrect so they exercise self censorship
Milton had a few things to say on the subject as well.
Yale betrays the whole ethos of Western liberalism to the cause of convenience.
I’m with Ilsa.
— david wilder
7. August 13, 2009
6:41 pm
brave, brave Yale Press. I’m so proud.
— jeff hamren
8. August 13, 2009
7:33 pm
Probably Yale is partly funded by Saudi donations?
— Gerald Boisen
9. August 13, 2009
10:34 pm
Lux et veritas? Sad and scary tale…
— esthermiriam
10. August 13, 2009
10:36 pm
Brandeis has closed its fine art museum and wants to sell its collection, Yale edits out the visual from a work of scholarship about them — what is going on out there?
— esthermiriam
11. August 13, 2009
11:56 pm
Mr. Donatich justifies the Press’s acquiescence with the panel of authorities by equating publication of the images with having “blood on [his] hands.” But these anonymous advisers have nothing to gain and everything to lose from giving the Press the green light. Was the reverse question asked: who would be helped, and who might be protected, by Ms. Klausen’s contribution to the debate?
— Emily Satterthwaite
12. August 14, 2009
3:33 am
The cowardice and the tortured excuses are breathtaking. There is another point besides the obvious one of academic freedom and bowing to generalized intimidation. The book is an effort to examine these images and put them in a context of other images of Muhammad. By not printing these images, Yale University is effectively disassociating itself from this point of view. The sub-text is that these images are too offensive to even reprint. This undermines the author’s work. I wish some other university press would step forward and offer to publish the book as is. Or even better, a joint publication of a broad range of scholarly publishers.
— Robert Sadin
13. August 14, 2009
8:56 am
Yale’s decision sadly confirms the diminishing role of academia in expanding our understanding of the world around us. This is a complex story worth exploring fully without censorship!
— Sam Cruz
14. August 14, 2009
9:19 am
Not only is this proof of people knuckling under to the undue influence of religions (whatever ones they may be), it also shows how censorship rears its ugly head much too often in today’s world. In addition, can anyone reading this book really take any of it seriously when they do not print the very cartoons that the book is about? Is the Yale University Press going to now start printing art books with hundreds of high-grade blank pages because someone, somewhere, might object to a bit of Renaissance nudity. Titian beware! The invasion of the YUPies is near!
— David
15. August 14, 2009
10:47 am
Why blame Yale only? None of the U.S. newspapers or publication published those articles- but they did widespread reporting on it.
— Karan
16. August 14, 2009
12:28 pm
Well done! The most rational and decent desision made in a long time by those in the world of commications. In a culture bent on ratings and firing people up the simplicity in simply doing the right thing is without a doubt the most powerful. People need to be more reflective about their own behavior and right now I choose to think about the word - respect - and what it means, and then finding the power in this word, and then the act of being respectful, towards all things and all people.
Well done Yale Press, well done.
Ellen
— Ellen Shanley
17. August 14, 2009
3:23 pm
Way to go guys - stand up for academic freedom at all costs and then…..
Oops, my mistake - sorry about that.
— Charles Duwel
18. August 14, 2009
10:32 pm
The current administration at Yale, like an increasing number of their colleagues in the American academy, while continuing to wave their flags of pedagogical excellence fervently in a mild breeze, fold them away when the winds pick up. They believe in very little.
What they do seem to believe in and have done very well is raising money, and previously generous alumni who are upset by this nauseating display of academic cowardice and censorship should take note.
— Ben Ledbetter
19. August 15, 2009
10:10 am
The money trail is pretty clear. Yale is a partner to the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. I am sure they do not want to lose their $50 million gift from the Saudis by offending them with this book.
— Roberta Wagner
20. August 17, 2009
9:36 am
Will the Yale School of Medicine begin to censor their textbooks and language when discussing conditions concerning “private areas”? After all, everyone can see this material on the internet. That would be favorable over offending someone living near, say, the Indonesian embassy.
— Brian
21. August 17, 2009
12:23 pm
Yale is setting a frightening precedent as one of the leading academic presses in the country. In not publishing these images (not only the cartoons, but other widely viewed and available images of Muhammad), Yale Press believes it will protect people from the furor they incite – instead it is allowing such furor to trump reasonable discussion, debate and scholarly investigation, which is exactly what Ms. Klausen is arguing in her book: “The book’s message is that we need to calm down and look at this carefully.”
You can read more about how First Amendment advocates are responding to this at the National Coalition Against Censorship’s blog: http://ncacblog.wordpress.com.
— Claire
22. August 17, 2009
1:12 pm
This is the very definition of Cowardice.
— Christian in NYC
23. August 19, 2009
12:42 pm
To #8….i do believe that ex president whats his name and his father did at least drive by yale, but am uncertain as to what education they may have received there …and yes, as i recall, the ex pres. does have extremely warm relations with saudi arabia.
— FAL
01 September 2009
For Longtime Captives, a Complex Road Home
September 1, 2009
By BENEDICT CAREY
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/health/01psych.html?ref=global-home
Jaycee Dugard has suffered sexual abuse, neglect and emotional manipulation to an extent hard to imagine, according to the charges in the case involving her abduction. But therapists say the biggest challenge facing Ms. Dugard, who was found last week after 18 years in captivity, may be switching families.
“Her captor was her primary relationship, and the father of her two children, and at some level separation may be difficult for all of them,” said Douglas F. Goldsmith, executive director of the Children’s Center in Salt Lake City. Dr. Goldsmith added that any therapy “has to be mindful that there are three victims, not one, and that they will be entering a new life together.”
About two-thirds of children who are kidnapped or abused suffer lingering mental problems, most often symptoms of post-traumatic stress and depression.
Recent studies have found that about 80 percent of victims do show significant improvement in mood after three to four months of trauma-focused weekly therapy. Still, given the information available so far, experts say Ms. Dugard and her two children face an unusually complex task.
Her stepfather, Carl Probyn, says she has already told her mother of feeling guilt that she bonded with the man who kidnapped her when she was 11. She and her children will have to learn to connect with and trust her first family, the one from which she was taken in 1991.
“The way I think about this case is that it is an extreme version of a phenomenon that is really not that uncommon: a child engaged in an abusive relationship when young and, not knowing any better, coming to accept it as their life, adapting as best they can,” said Lucy Berliner, director of the trauma program at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. “Certainly every case is different, but we now have some proven interventions we can use.”
Therapists say Ms. Dugard’s transition to a new life is likely to take some time, probably years. Elisabeth Fritzl, the Austrian woman held in a dungeon by her father for 24 years, has reportedly undergone extensive therapy and still struggles mentally, 16 months after she was freed.
And Shawn Hornbeck, abducted in Missouri at age 11 in 2002 and held captive for four years, told reporters nearly two years after being freed that he was still learning to cope with the emotional effects.
By contrast, Elizabeth Smart, the young woman in Utah who was kidnapped at age 14 in 2002 and held for nine months, is now reportedly doing well, a student at Brigham Young University. When she was reunited with her family, she told CNN last week, “we just spent time as a family, which was like — it was the best thing I could have done.”
The main challenge in all such cases, experts say, is breaking the bond with the captor and abuser. David Wolfe, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Toronto, has studied victims and some perpetrators of long-term abusive relationships.
In these cases, as in many kidnappings, perpetrators work hard to win the trust of their victims. “It’s a common element,” Dr. Wolfe said. “The child is frightened, and the perpetrator works to gain or regain the child’s confidence, to come across as a really good person: ‘I’m not going to hurt you, everything’s going to be O.K.’ and so on.
“So the child never knows when to fight or run,” he continued. “Do I wait and it’ll get worse? Or do I believe him and I won’t be hurt?”
Humans are wired to form social bonds, and such scraps of kindness can deepen even a relationship built on manipulation and abuse. Some victims have profoundly ambivalent feelings toward abusive captors, psychologists say, and tend to do better when they acknowledge their mixed feelings. Thinking of the perpetrator as a monster feels unfair; on the other hand, it would be wrong to call him merely misguided.
Once victims have shaken the influence of a perpetrator and re-established trust with loved ones, they can better learn through therapy how to ease the impact of their ordeal, said John A. Fairbank, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at Duke and co-director of the U.C.L.A.-Duke University National Center for Child Traumatic Stress.
The most rigorously tested therapy is called trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy. In weekly sessions over three to four months, people learn how to examine and refute suspect assumptions about their ordeal. One of the most common of these is “I can’t trust anyone anymore.” Another is “It’s my fault I didn’t resist more.”
“Of course it is not their fault, and we communicate that,” said Dr. Berliner, the Seattle therapist. “But at the same time, in many cases they did go along, they did make decisions not to fight or run, and we help people examine why they made those decisions — to understand that judging themselves harshly in retrospect might not be fair to the child they were in that moment.”
Typically, people in trauma-focused therapy also learn methods to regulate the strength of their emotions. These methods include simple breathing and relaxation techniques, as well as mindfulness, an exercise in allowing an emotion to take hold and pass without acting on it.
Finally, victims often work with the therapist to build a narrative, oral or written, of the entire ordeal, then file it as a chapter of their lives rather than the entire story. If appropriate, they may also “relive” the experience multiple times until its emotional power wanes. This approach is not for everyone — it seems to make some people more distraught — but experts say it can be helpful in some patients.
So far, Jaycee Dugard seems to be doing just as her fellow abductee Ms. Smart advised: staying with family, keeping herself and her children away from public scrutiny. Those are good instincts, therapists say.
“It’s not like resilience is out of the question in a case like this,” said Dr. Judith A. Cohen, medical director of the Center for Traumatic Stress in Children and Adolescents at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh. “In a lot of kidnapping cases, people do remarkably well, and this woman has already shown amazing survival skills.
“That she managed to survive for so long suggests that she might do well in the years to come.”
Police Find Bone Fragment
SAN FRANCISCO — Law enforcement officials in the Bay Area community of Antioch said Monday that a bone fragment had been found in the search of a house neighboring the property of Phillip Garrido, the man charged with abducting Ms. Dugard. But a spokesman for the county sheriff said it was not clear if the fragment was human.
Searchers have been looking for evidence not only in the Dugard case but also in a string of murders in the area. The authorities suspect that Mr. Garrido had access to the neighbor’s property, and may have lived there, in 2006.
By BENEDICT CAREY
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/health/01psych.html?ref=global-home
Jaycee Dugard has suffered sexual abuse, neglect and emotional manipulation to an extent hard to imagine, according to the charges in the case involving her abduction. But therapists say the biggest challenge facing Ms. Dugard, who was found last week after 18 years in captivity, may be switching families.
“Her captor was her primary relationship, and the father of her two children, and at some level separation may be difficult for all of them,” said Douglas F. Goldsmith, executive director of the Children’s Center in Salt Lake City. Dr. Goldsmith added that any therapy “has to be mindful that there are three victims, not one, and that they will be entering a new life together.”
About two-thirds of children who are kidnapped or abused suffer lingering mental problems, most often symptoms of post-traumatic stress and depression.
Recent studies have found that about 80 percent of victims do show significant improvement in mood after three to four months of trauma-focused weekly therapy. Still, given the information available so far, experts say Ms. Dugard and her two children face an unusually complex task.
Her stepfather, Carl Probyn, says she has already told her mother of feeling guilt that she bonded with the man who kidnapped her when she was 11. She and her children will have to learn to connect with and trust her first family, the one from which she was taken in 1991.
“The way I think about this case is that it is an extreme version of a phenomenon that is really not that uncommon: a child engaged in an abusive relationship when young and, not knowing any better, coming to accept it as their life, adapting as best they can,” said Lucy Berliner, director of the trauma program at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. “Certainly every case is different, but we now have some proven interventions we can use.”
Therapists say Ms. Dugard’s transition to a new life is likely to take some time, probably years. Elisabeth Fritzl, the Austrian woman held in a dungeon by her father for 24 years, has reportedly undergone extensive therapy and still struggles mentally, 16 months after she was freed.
And Shawn Hornbeck, abducted in Missouri at age 11 in 2002 and held captive for four years, told reporters nearly two years after being freed that he was still learning to cope with the emotional effects.
By contrast, Elizabeth Smart, the young woman in Utah who was kidnapped at age 14 in 2002 and held for nine months, is now reportedly doing well, a student at Brigham Young University. When she was reunited with her family, she told CNN last week, “we just spent time as a family, which was like — it was the best thing I could have done.”
The main challenge in all such cases, experts say, is breaking the bond with the captor and abuser. David Wolfe, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Toronto, has studied victims and some perpetrators of long-term abusive relationships.
In these cases, as in many kidnappings, perpetrators work hard to win the trust of their victims. “It’s a common element,” Dr. Wolfe said. “The child is frightened, and the perpetrator works to gain or regain the child’s confidence, to come across as a really good person: ‘I’m not going to hurt you, everything’s going to be O.K.’ and so on.
“So the child never knows when to fight or run,” he continued. “Do I wait and it’ll get worse? Or do I believe him and I won’t be hurt?”
Humans are wired to form social bonds, and such scraps of kindness can deepen even a relationship built on manipulation and abuse. Some victims have profoundly ambivalent feelings toward abusive captors, psychologists say, and tend to do better when they acknowledge their mixed feelings. Thinking of the perpetrator as a monster feels unfair; on the other hand, it would be wrong to call him merely misguided.
Once victims have shaken the influence of a perpetrator and re-established trust with loved ones, they can better learn through therapy how to ease the impact of their ordeal, said John A. Fairbank, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at Duke and co-director of the U.C.L.A.-Duke University National Center for Child Traumatic Stress.
The most rigorously tested therapy is called trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy. In weekly sessions over three to four months, people learn how to examine and refute suspect assumptions about their ordeal. One of the most common of these is “I can’t trust anyone anymore.” Another is “It’s my fault I didn’t resist more.”
“Of course it is not their fault, and we communicate that,” said Dr. Berliner, the Seattle therapist. “But at the same time, in many cases they did go along, they did make decisions not to fight or run, and we help people examine why they made those decisions — to understand that judging themselves harshly in retrospect might not be fair to the child they were in that moment.”
Typically, people in trauma-focused therapy also learn methods to regulate the strength of their emotions. These methods include simple breathing and relaxation techniques, as well as mindfulness, an exercise in allowing an emotion to take hold and pass without acting on it.
Finally, victims often work with the therapist to build a narrative, oral or written, of the entire ordeal, then file it as a chapter of their lives rather than the entire story. If appropriate, they may also “relive” the experience multiple times until its emotional power wanes. This approach is not for everyone — it seems to make some people more distraught — but experts say it can be helpful in some patients.
So far, Jaycee Dugard seems to be doing just as her fellow abductee Ms. Smart advised: staying with family, keeping herself and her children away from public scrutiny. Those are good instincts, therapists say.
“It’s not like resilience is out of the question in a case like this,” said Dr. Judith A. Cohen, medical director of the Center for Traumatic Stress in Children and Adolescents at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh. “In a lot of kidnapping cases, people do remarkably well, and this woman has already shown amazing survival skills.
“That she managed to survive for so long suggests that she might do well in the years to come.”
Police Find Bone Fragment
SAN FRANCISCO — Law enforcement officials in the Bay Area community of Antioch said Monday that a bone fragment had been found in the search of a house neighboring the property of Phillip Garrido, the man charged with abducting Ms. Dugard. But a spokesman for the county sheriff said it was not clear if the fragment was human.
Searchers have been looking for evidence not only in the Dugard case but also in a string of murders in the area. The authorities suspect that Mr. Garrido had access to the neighbor’s property, and may have lived there, in 2006.
15 July 2009
Will What We Don't Know (or Care to Know) Hurt Us?
Note for Readers: This article comes from TomDispatch. It is available on-line at http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175092/are_afghan_lives_worth_anything_
Mourning Michael Jackson, Ignoring the Afghan Dead
By Tom Engelhardt
It was a blast. I'm talking about my daughter's wedding. You don't often see a child of yours quite that happy. I'm no party animal, but I danced my 64-year-old legs off. And I can't claim that, as I walked my daughter to the ceremony, or ate, or talked with friends, or simply sat back and watched the young and energetic enjoy themselves, I thought about those Afghan wedding celebrations where the "blast" isn't metaphorical, where the bride, the groom, the partygoers in the midst of revelry die.
In the two weeks since, however, that's been on my mind -- or rather the lack of interest our world shows in dead civilians from a distant imperial war -- and all because of a passage I stumbled upon in a striking article by journalist Anand Gopal. In "Uprooting an Afghan Village" in the June issue of the Progressive magazine, he writes about Garloch, an Afghan village he visited in the eastern province of Laghman. After destructive American raids, Gopal tells us, many of its desperate inhabitants simply packed up and left for exile in Afghan or Pakistani refugee camps.
One early dawn in August 2008, writes Gopal, American helicopters first descended on Garloch for a six-hour raid:
"The Americans claim there were gunshots as they left. The villagers deny it. Regardless, American bombers swooped by the village just after the soldiers left and dropped a payload on one house. It belonged to Haiji Qadir, a pole-thin, wizened old man who was hosting more than forty relatives for a wedding party. The bomb split the house in two, killing sixteen, including twelve from Qadir's family, and wounding scores more... The malek [chief] went to the province's governor and delivered a stern warning: protect our villagers or we will turn against the Americans."
That passage caught my eye because, to the best of my knowledge, I'm the only person in the U.S. who has tried to keep track of the wedding parties wiped out, in whole or part, by American military action since the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan in November 2001. With Gopal's report from Garloch, that number, by my count, has reached five (only three of which are well documented in print).
The first occurred in December of that invasion year when a B-52 and two B-1B bombers, wielding precision-guided weapons, managed, according to reports, to wipe out 110 out of 112 revelers in another small Afghan village. At least one Iraqi wedding party near the Syrian border was also eviscerated -- by U.S. planes back in 2004. Soon after that slaughter, responding to media inquiries, an American general asked: "How many people go to the middle of the desert... to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?" Later, in what passed for an acknowledgment of the incident, another American general said: "Could there have been a celebration of some type going on?... Certainly. Bad guys have celebrations." Case closed.
Perhaps over the course of an almost eight-year war in Afghanistan, the toll in wedding parties may seem modest: not even one a year! But before we settle for that figure, evidently so low it's not worth a headline in this country, let's keep in mind that there's no reason to believe:
* I've seen every article in English that, in passing, happens to mention an Afghan wedding slaughter -- the one Gopal notes, for instance, seems to have gotten no other coverage; or
* that other wedding slaughters haven't been recorded in languages I can't read; or
* that, in the rural Pashtun backlands, some U.S. attacks on wedding celebrants might not have made it into news reports anywhere.
In fact, no one knows how many weddings -- rare celebratory moments in an Afghan world that, for three decades, has had little to celebrate -- have been taken out by U.S. planes or raids, or a combination of the two.
Turning the Page on the Past
After the Obama administration took office and the new president doubled down the American bet on the Afghan War, there was a certain amount of anxious chatter in the punditocracy (and even in the military) about Afghanistan being "the graveyard of empires." Of course, no one in Washington was going to admit that the U.S. is just such an empire, only that we may suffer the fate of empires past.
When it comes to wedding parties, though, there turn out to be some similarities to the empire under the last Afghan gravestone. The Soviet Union was, of course, defeated in Afghanistan by some of the very jihadists the U.S. is now fighting, thanks to generous support from the CIA, the Saudis, and Pakistan's intelligence services. It withdrew from that country in defeat in 1989, and went over its own cliff in 1991. As it happens, the Russians, too, evidently made it a habit to knock off Afghan wedding parties, though we have no tally of how many or how regularly.
Reviewing a book on the Soviet-Afghan War for the Washington Monthly, Christian Caryl wrote recently:
"One Soviet soldier recalls an instance in 1987 when his unit opened fire on what they took to be a 'mujaheddin caravan.' The Russians soon discovered that they had slaughtered a roving wedding party on its way from one village to another -- a blunder that soon, all too predictably, inspired a series of revenge attacks on the Red Army troops in the area. This undoubtedly sounds wearily familiar to U.S. and NATO planners (and Afghan government officials) struggling to contain the effects from the 'collateral damage' that is often cited today as one of the major sources of the West's political problems in the country."
And, by the way, don't get me started on that gloomy companion rite to the wedding celebration: the funeral. Even I haven't been counting those, but that doesn't mean the U.S. and its allies haven't been knocking off funeral parties in Afghanistan (and recently, via a CIA drone aircraft, in Pakistan as well).
Following almost two weeks in which the U.S. (and global) media went berserk over the death of one man, in which NBC, for instance, devoted all but about five minutes of one of its prime-time half-hour news broadcasts to nothing -- and I mean nothing -- but the death of Michael Jackson, in which the President of the United States sent a condolence letter to the Jackson family (and was faulted for not having moved more quickly), in which 1.6 million people registered for a chance to get one of 17,500 free tickets to his memorial service... well, why go on? Unless you've been competing in isolation in the next round of Survivor, or are somehow without a TV, or possibly any modern means of communication, you simply can't avoid knowing the rest.
You'd have to make a desperate effort not to know that Michael Jackson (until recently excoriated by the media) had died, and you'd have to make a similarly desperate effort to know that we've knocked off one wedding party after another these last years in Afghanistan. One of these deaths -- Jackson's -- really has little to do with us; the others are, or should be, our responsibility, part of an endless war the American people have either supported or not stopped from continuing. And yet one is a screaming global headline; the others go unnoticed.
You'd think there might, in fact, be room for a small headline somewhere. Didn't those brides, grooms, relatives, and revelers deserve at least one modest, collective corner of some front-page or a story on some prime-time news show in return for their needless suffering? You'd think that some president or high official in Washington might have sent a note of condolence to someone, that there might have been a rising tide of criticism about the slow response here in expressing regrets to the families of Afghans who died under our bombs and missiles.
Here's the truth of it, though: When it comes to Afghan lives -- especially if we think, correctly or not, that our safety is involved -- it doesn't matter whether five wedding parties or 50 go down, two funerals or 25. Our media isn't about to focus real attention on the particular form of barbarity involved -- the American air war over Afghanistan which has been a war of and for, not on, terror.
Now, we're embarked on a new moment -- the Obama moment -- in Afghanistan. More than seven-and-a-half years into the war, in a truly American fashion, we're ready to turn the page on the past, to pretend that none of it really happened, to do it "right" this time around. We're finally going to bring the Afghans over to our side.
We're ready to light out for the territories and start all over again. American troops are now moving south in force, deep into the Pashtun (and Taliban) areas of Afghanistan, and their commanders -- a passel of new generals -- are speaking as one from a new script. It's all about conducting a "holistic counterinsurgency campaign," as new Afghan commander General Stanley A. McChrystal put it in Congressional testimony recently. It's all about "hearts and minds"(though that old Vietnam-era phrase has yet to be resuscitated). It's all about, they say, "protecting civilians" rather than killing Taliban guerrillas; it's all about shaping, clearing, holding, building, not just landing, kicking in doors, and taking off again; it's all about new "rules of engagement" in which the air war will be limited, and attacks on the Taliban curbed or called off if it appears that they might endanger civilians (even if that means the guerrillas get away); it's all about reversing the tide of the war so far, about the fact that civilian casualties caused by air attacks and raids have turned large numbers of Afghans against American and NATO troops.
The commander of the Marines just now heading south, Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, typically said this:
"We need to make sure we understand that the reason we're here is not necessarily the enemy. The reason we're here is the people. What won the war in al-Anbar province [Iraq] and what changed the war in al-Anbar was not that the enemy eventually got tired of fighting. It's that the people chose a side, and they chose us... We'll surround that house and we'll wait. And here's the reason: If you drop that house and there's one woman, one child, one family in that house -- you may have killed 20 Taliban, but by killing that woman or that child in that house, you have lost that community. You are dead to them. You are done."
The Value of a Life
As it happens, however, the past matters -- and keep this in mind (it's what the wedding-party-obliteration record tells us): To Americans, an Afghan life isn't worth a red cent, not when the chips are down.
Back in the Vietnam era, General William Westmoreland, interviewed by movie director Peter Davis for his Oscar-winning film Hearts and Minds, famously said: "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient."
In those years, there were many in the U.S., including Davis, who insisted very publicly that a Vietnamese life had the same value as an American one. In the years of the Afghan War, Americans -- our media and, by its relative silence, the public as well -- turned Westmoreland's statement into a way of life as well as a way of war. As one perk of that way of life, most Americans have been able to pretend that our war in Afghanistan has nothing to do with us -- and Michael Jackson's death, everything.
So he dies and our world goes mad. An Afghan wedding party, or five of them, are wiped off the face of the Earth and even a shrug is too much effort.
Here's a question then: Will what we don't know (or don't care to know) hurt us? I'm unsure whether the more depressing answer is yes or no. As it happens, I have no answer to that question anyway, only a bit of advice -- not for us, but for Afghans: If, as General McChrystal and other top military figures expect, the Afghan War and its cross-border sibling in Pakistan go on for another three or four or five years or more, no matter what script we're going by, no matter what we say, believe me, we'll call in the planes. So if I were you, I wouldn't celebrate another marriage, not in a group, not in public, and I'd bury my dead very, very privately.
If you gather, after all, we will come.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.
[Note: I documented as fully as I could the previous Afghan wedding slaughters in "The Wedding Crashers: A Short Till-Death-Do-Us-Part History of Bush's Wars" (July 2008). And here's a selection of TomDispatch pieces on related subjects, if you're interested in reading more: "Slaughter, Lies, and Video in Afghanistan" (September 2008), "What Price Slaughter?" (May 2007), "The Billion-Dollar Gravestone" (May 2006), "Catch 2,200: 9 Propositions on the U.S. Air War for Terror" (May 2006), and former U.S. diplomat John Brown's "Our Indian Wars Are Not Over Yet" (January 2006). You might also visit filmmaker Robert Greenwald's website Rethink Afghanistan.] To view these articles check out Tom's website today!
Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt
Mourning Michael Jackson, Ignoring the Afghan Dead
By Tom Engelhardt
It was a blast. I'm talking about my daughter's wedding. You don't often see a child of yours quite that happy. I'm no party animal, but I danced my 64-year-old legs off. And I can't claim that, as I walked my daughter to the ceremony, or ate, or talked with friends, or simply sat back and watched the young and energetic enjoy themselves, I thought about those Afghan wedding celebrations where the "blast" isn't metaphorical, where the bride, the groom, the partygoers in the midst of revelry die.
In the two weeks since, however, that's been on my mind -- or rather the lack of interest our world shows in dead civilians from a distant imperial war -- and all because of a passage I stumbled upon in a striking article by journalist Anand Gopal. In "Uprooting an Afghan Village" in the June issue of the Progressive magazine, he writes about Garloch, an Afghan village he visited in the eastern province of Laghman. After destructive American raids, Gopal tells us, many of its desperate inhabitants simply packed up and left for exile in Afghan or Pakistani refugee camps.
One early dawn in August 2008, writes Gopal, American helicopters first descended on Garloch for a six-hour raid:
"The Americans claim there were gunshots as they left. The villagers deny it. Regardless, American bombers swooped by the village just after the soldiers left and dropped a payload on one house. It belonged to Haiji Qadir, a pole-thin, wizened old man who was hosting more than forty relatives for a wedding party. The bomb split the house in two, killing sixteen, including twelve from Qadir's family, and wounding scores more... The malek [chief] went to the province's governor and delivered a stern warning: protect our villagers or we will turn against the Americans."
That passage caught my eye because, to the best of my knowledge, I'm the only person in the U.S. who has tried to keep track of the wedding parties wiped out, in whole or part, by American military action since the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan in November 2001. With Gopal's report from Garloch, that number, by my count, has reached five (only three of which are well documented in print).
The first occurred in December of that invasion year when a B-52 and two B-1B bombers, wielding precision-guided weapons, managed, according to reports, to wipe out 110 out of 112 revelers in another small Afghan village. At least one Iraqi wedding party near the Syrian border was also eviscerated -- by U.S. planes back in 2004. Soon after that slaughter, responding to media inquiries, an American general asked: "How many people go to the middle of the desert... to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?" Later, in what passed for an acknowledgment of the incident, another American general said: "Could there have been a celebration of some type going on?... Certainly. Bad guys have celebrations." Case closed.
Perhaps over the course of an almost eight-year war in Afghanistan, the toll in wedding parties may seem modest: not even one a year! But before we settle for that figure, evidently so low it's not worth a headline in this country, let's keep in mind that there's no reason to believe:
* I've seen every article in English that, in passing, happens to mention an Afghan wedding slaughter -- the one Gopal notes, for instance, seems to have gotten no other coverage; or
* that other wedding slaughters haven't been recorded in languages I can't read; or
* that, in the rural Pashtun backlands, some U.S. attacks on wedding celebrants might not have made it into news reports anywhere.
In fact, no one knows how many weddings -- rare celebratory moments in an Afghan world that, for three decades, has had little to celebrate -- have been taken out by U.S. planes or raids, or a combination of the two.
Turning the Page on the Past
After the Obama administration took office and the new president doubled down the American bet on the Afghan War, there was a certain amount of anxious chatter in the punditocracy (and even in the military) about Afghanistan being "the graveyard of empires." Of course, no one in Washington was going to admit that the U.S. is just such an empire, only that we may suffer the fate of empires past.
When it comes to wedding parties, though, there turn out to be some similarities to the empire under the last Afghan gravestone. The Soviet Union was, of course, defeated in Afghanistan by some of the very jihadists the U.S. is now fighting, thanks to generous support from the CIA, the Saudis, and Pakistan's intelligence services. It withdrew from that country in defeat in 1989, and went over its own cliff in 1991. As it happens, the Russians, too, evidently made it a habit to knock off Afghan wedding parties, though we have no tally of how many or how regularly.
Reviewing a book on the Soviet-Afghan War for the Washington Monthly, Christian Caryl wrote recently:
"One Soviet soldier recalls an instance in 1987 when his unit opened fire on what they took to be a 'mujaheddin caravan.' The Russians soon discovered that they had slaughtered a roving wedding party on its way from one village to another -- a blunder that soon, all too predictably, inspired a series of revenge attacks on the Red Army troops in the area. This undoubtedly sounds wearily familiar to U.S. and NATO planners (and Afghan government officials) struggling to contain the effects from the 'collateral damage' that is often cited today as one of the major sources of the West's political problems in the country."
And, by the way, don't get me started on that gloomy companion rite to the wedding celebration: the funeral. Even I haven't been counting those, but that doesn't mean the U.S. and its allies haven't been knocking off funeral parties in Afghanistan (and recently, via a CIA drone aircraft, in Pakistan as well).
Following almost two weeks in which the U.S. (and global) media went berserk over the death of one man, in which NBC, for instance, devoted all but about five minutes of one of its prime-time half-hour news broadcasts to nothing -- and I mean nothing -- but the death of Michael Jackson, in which the President of the United States sent a condolence letter to the Jackson family (and was faulted for not having moved more quickly), in which 1.6 million people registered for a chance to get one of 17,500 free tickets to his memorial service... well, why go on? Unless you've been competing in isolation in the next round of Survivor, or are somehow without a TV, or possibly any modern means of communication, you simply can't avoid knowing the rest.
You'd have to make a desperate effort not to know that Michael Jackson (until recently excoriated by the media) had died, and you'd have to make a similarly desperate effort to know that we've knocked off one wedding party after another these last years in Afghanistan. One of these deaths -- Jackson's -- really has little to do with us; the others are, or should be, our responsibility, part of an endless war the American people have either supported or not stopped from continuing. And yet one is a screaming global headline; the others go unnoticed.
You'd think there might, in fact, be room for a small headline somewhere. Didn't those brides, grooms, relatives, and revelers deserve at least one modest, collective corner of some front-page or a story on some prime-time news show in return for their needless suffering? You'd think that some president or high official in Washington might have sent a note of condolence to someone, that there might have been a rising tide of criticism about the slow response here in expressing regrets to the families of Afghans who died under our bombs and missiles.
Here's the truth of it, though: When it comes to Afghan lives -- especially if we think, correctly or not, that our safety is involved -- it doesn't matter whether five wedding parties or 50 go down, two funerals or 25. Our media isn't about to focus real attention on the particular form of barbarity involved -- the American air war over Afghanistan which has been a war of and for, not on, terror.
Now, we're embarked on a new moment -- the Obama moment -- in Afghanistan. More than seven-and-a-half years into the war, in a truly American fashion, we're ready to turn the page on the past, to pretend that none of it really happened, to do it "right" this time around. We're finally going to bring the Afghans over to our side.
We're ready to light out for the territories and start all over again. American troops are now moving south in force, deep into the Pashtun (and Taliban) areas of Afghanistan, and their commanders -- a passel of new generals -- are speaking as one from a new script. It's all about conducting a "holistic counterinsurgency campaign," as new Afghan commander General Stanley A. McChrystal put it in Congressional testimony recently. It's all about "hearts and minds"(though that old Vietnam-era phrase has yet to be resuscitated). It's all about, they say, "protecting civilians" rather than killing Taliban guerrillas; it's all about shaping, clearing, holding, building, not just landing, kicking in doors, and taking off again; it's all about new "rules of engagement" in which the air war will be limited, and attacks on the Taliban curbed or called off if it appears that they might endanger civilians (even if that means the guerrillas get away); it's all about reversing the tide of the war so far, about the fact that civilian casualties caused by air attacks and raids have turned large numbers of Afghans against American and NATO troops.
The commander of the Marines just now heading south, Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, typically said this:
"We need to make sure we understand that the reason we're here is not necessarily the enemy. The reason we're here is the people. What won the war in al-Anbar province [Iraq] and what changed the war in al-Anbar was not that the enemy eventually got tired of fighting. It's that the people chose a side, and they chose us... We'll surround that house and we'll wait. And here's the reason: If you drop that house and there's one woman, one child, one family in that house -- you may have killed 20 Taliban, but by killing that woman or that child in that house, you have lost that community. You are dead to them. You are done."
The Value of a Life
As it happens, however, the past matters -- and keep this in mind (it's what the wedding-party-obliteration record tells us): To Americans, an Afghan life isn't worth a red cent, not when the chips are down.
Back in the Vietnam era, General William Westmoreland, interviewed by movie director Peter Davis for his Oscar-winning film Hearts and Minds, famously said: "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient."
In those years, there were many in the U.S., including Davis, who insisted very publicly that a Vietnamese life had the same value as an American one. In the years of the Afghan War, Americans -- our media and, by its relative silence, the public as well -- turned Westmoreland's statement into a way of life as well as a way of war. As one perk of that way of life, most Americans have been able to pretend that our war in Afghanistan has nothing to do with us -- and Michael Jackson's death, everything.
So he dies and our world goes mad. An Afghan wedding party, or five of them, are wiped off the face of the Earth and even a shrug is too much effort.
Here's a question then: Will what we don't know (or don't care to know) hurt us? I'm unsure whether the more depressing answer is yes or no. As it happens, I have no answer to that question anyway, only a bit of advice -- not for us, but for Afghans: If, as General McChrystal and other top military figures expect, the Afghan War and its cross-border sibling in Pakistan go on for another three or four or five years or more, no matter what script we're going by, no matter what we say, believe me, we'll call in the planes. So if I were you, I wouldn't celebrate another marriage, not in a group, not in public, and I'd bury my dead very, very privately.
If you gather, after all, we will come.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.
[Note: I documented as fully as I could the previous Afghan wedding slaughters in "The Wedding Crashers: A Short Till-Death-Do-Us-Part History of Bush's Wars" (July 2008). And here's a selection of TomDispatch pieces on related subjects, if you're interested in reading more: "Slaughter, Lies, and Video in Afghanistan" (September 2008), "What Price Slaughter?" (May 2007), "The Billion-Dollar Gravestone" (May 2006), "Catch 2,200: 9 Propositions on the U.S. Air War for Terror" (May 2006), and former U.S. diplomat John Brown's "Our Indian Wars Are Not Over Yet" (January 2006). You might also visit filmmaker Robert Greenwald's website Rethink Afghanistan.] To view these articles check out Tom's website today!
Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt
19 June 2009
In New York, Number of Killings Rises With Heat
June 19, 2009
By ANDREW W. LEHREN and AL BAKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/nyregion/19murder.html?hp
A young boxer was shot dead outside a Bronx bodega at 3:30 a.m. on a Saturday last August. Weeks later, a 59-year-old woman was beaten to death on a Saturday night on the side of a Queens highway. On the last Sunday in September, violence exploded as five men were killed in a spate of shootings and stabbings between midnight and 6 a.m.
Seven homicides in New York City. None connected in any way but this: They happened during the summer months, when the temperatures rise, people hit the streets, and New York becomes a more lethal place.
There were more homicides in September than in any other month last year: 52. Next highest was August, with 51. Variations, of course, exist. There were 48 homicides last March, for instance.
Still, the prime time for murder is clear: summertime. Indeed, it is close to a constant, one hammered home painfully from June to September across the decades. And the breakdown of deadly brutality can get even more specific. September Saturdays around 10 p.m. were the most likely moments for a murder in the city.
The summer spike in killings is just one of several findings unearthed in an analysis by The New York Times of multiyear homicide trends. The information — detailing homicides during the years 2003 to 2008 — was compiled mainly from open-records requests with the New York Police Department, and a searchable database of details on homicides in the city during those years is available online for readers to explore at nytimes.com/nyregion.
Of course, the dominant and most important trend involving murder in New York has been the enormous decline in killings over the last 15 years, to levels not seen since the early 1960s.
Still, hundreds of people are killed every year in the city, and The Times’s findings provide insights about who is killed in New York, as well as who does the killing, where murders occur and why.
Women, for instance, are less likely to be either victims or killers. Those who were killed — at least 73 women were in 2008 — were almost always murdered by someone they knew — boyfriends, husbands or relatives. From 2003 to 2008, the number of women killed each year by strangers was in the single digits — excluding cases in which the police do not know if the killer knew the victim. Last year, as few as eight women died at the hands of strangers.
Brooklyn — as it has since at least 2003 — led all boroughs in the number of homicides last year, with 213. Last year, the 73rd Precinct, which includes the neighborhoods of Ocean Hill and Brownsville, had the largest death toll, 31. The bloodiest block in Brooklyn was in the 77th Precinct, in Crown Heights, bounded by Schenectady Avenue, Sterling Place, Troy Avenue and St. Johns Place. But the borough with the most homicides per capita was the Bronx.
More often than not, the weapon of choice is a firearm. Each year the percentage of people killed by firearms hovers around 60 percent. Though slightly less than in recent years, at least 56 percent of last year’s homicides were committed with these weapons.
Of all the trends to emerge, the time for killing was among the most enduring.
In New York, the trend goes back well before the years covered in the database — at least as far as 1981, according to an analysis of reports by the city medical examiner’s office done by Steven F. Messner, a criminology professor at the State University of New York at Albany. And he believes it stretches back much further than that.
Nationally, in the early 1980s, scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed a decade’s worth of homicide data across the nation, and found that while suicides peak in the spring, homicides swell between July and September.
A prime reason murder peaks during this time has to do with the routines of people’s lives, according to Professor Messner.
“Homicides vary with social acting,” he said. “It evolves from interactions.”
Summer is when people get together. More specifically, casual drinkers and drug users are more likely to go to bars or parties on weekends and evenings, as opposed to a Tuesday morning. These people in the social mix, flooding the city’s streets and neighborhood bars, feed the peak times for murder, experts say.
And the trend occurs in other cities, in places like Chicago, Boston and Newark, according to criminologists.
Some of the same trends are on display around Christmastime and are believed to be behind the slight increases in murder that occur then, criminologists say.
Thomas D. Nerney, who retired in 2002 as a detective in the New York Police Department’s Major Case Squad, said the patterns were well known within the department.
Assigned as a detective in Brooklyn from 1972 to 1986, he said that on a hot summer night or in the holiday season, a similar set of factors seemed to be behind the killings: a chance to socialize and to drink or use drugs.
He recalled the late 1970s and early ’80s in Brooklyn, when the heavier homicide caseloads seemed to come as neighborhoods got hotter.
“We had so many of them,” Mr. Nerney said. “They would be on rooftops. There might be somebody who lured someone somewhere; you would have a sex-related killing or a revenge killing. Rooftops or backyards.”
The Times analysis, when compared with Professor Messner’s findings from 1981, shows that increasingly, more victims were killed between midnight and 8 a.m. in recent years than in the past.
According to the professor’s study of homicides in Manhattan, 29 percent of the 1,826 victims in 1981 were killed between midnight and 8 a.m. More recently, from 2006 through 2008, 39 percent of all homicide victims were killed during those hours, the Times analysis shows.
Also, as the number of homicides has shrunk, the data shows that more are occurring on weekends. From 2003 to 2008, 36 percent of all victims were killed on Saturday or Sunday, the analysis shows.
Failing to understand the basic connection between time of year and homicide rates can lead law enforcement agencies to faulty conclusions about what is happening in the streets — and it can affect their strategies.
In St. Louis, a 1990s-era gun buyback program begun each fall was thought by some to be behind a drop in violence. But as Richard Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, studied the program’s impact, he found that the annual crime reductions were more attributable to the normal seasonal ebbing in homicide and assaults.
In New York, Vincent Henry, a retired police sergeant who now teaches criminology and who has studied the department’s Compstat program, in which computerized data is used for more efficient policing, said that time was one of many factors in making decisions about staffing and when and how to deploy officers.
But that was not always the case.
In the early 1990s, police managers altered the working hours for various groups of detectives, including those tracking narcotics cases and those seeking to arrest criminals wanted on open warrants.
It seemed to the top officials at the time that too many officers were keeping bankers’ hours — ending their shifts at dusk and taking weekends off — and not working closely enough with counterparts.
Jack Maple, a former police deputy commissioner who helped develop Compstat, wrote a book, “The Crime Fighter,” in which he detailed the issues of the day. He described the shortfall this way: “Unfortunately, the bad guys work around the clock.”
And in the summer months, the bad guys tend to be deadliest.
By ANDREW W. LEHREN and AL BAKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/nyregion/19murder.html?hp
A young boxer was shot dead outside a Bronx bodega at 3:30 a.m. on a Saturday last August. Weeks later, a 59-year-old woman was beaten to death on a Saturday night on the side of a Queens highway. On the last Sunday in September, violence exploded as five men were killed in a spate of shootings and stabbings between midnight and 6 a.m.
Seven homicides in New York City. None connected in any way but this: They happened during the summer months, when the temperatures rise, people hit the streets, and New York becomes a more lethal place.
There were more homicides in September than in any other month last year: 52. Next highest was August, with 51. Variations, of course, exist. There were 48 homicides last March, for instance.
Still, the prime time for murder is clear: summertime. Indeed, it is close to a constant, one hammered home painfully from June to September across the decades. And the breakdown of deadly brutality can get even more specific. September Saturdays around 10 p.m. were the most likely moments for a murder in the city.
The summer spike in killings is just one of several findings unearthed in an analysis by The New York Times of multiyear homicide trends. The information — detailing homicides during the years 2003 to 2008 — was compiled mainly from open-records requests with the New York Police Department, and a searchable database of details on homicides in the city during those years is available online for readers to explore at nytimes.com/nyregion.
Of course, the dominant and most important trend involving murder in New York has been the enormous decline in killings over the last 15 years, to levels not seen since the early 1960s.
Still, hundreds of people are killed every year in the city, and The Times’s findings provide insights about who is killed in New York, as well as who does the killing, where murders occur and why.
Women, for instance, are less likely to be either victims or killers. Those who were killed — at least 73 women were in 2008 — were almost always murdered by someone they knew — boyfriends, husbands or relatives. From 2003 to 2008, the number of women killed each year by strangers was in the single digits — excluding cases in which the police do not know if the killer knew the victim. Last year, as few as eight women died at the hands of strangers.
Brooklyn — as it has since at least 2003 — led all boroughs in the number of homicides last year, with 213. Last year, the 73rd Precinct, which includes the neighborhoods of Ocean Hill and Brownsville, had the largest death toll, 31. The bloodiest block in Brooklyn was in the 77th Precinct, in Crown Heights, bounded by Schenectady Avenue, Sterling Place, Troy Avenue and St. Johns Place. But the borough with the most homicides per capita was the Bronx.
More often than not, the weapon of choice is a firearm. Each year the percentage of people killed by firearms hovers around 60 percent. Though slightly less than in recent years, at least 56 percent of last year’s homicides were committed with these weapons.
Of all the trends to emerge, the time for killing was among the most enduring.
In New York, the trend goes back well before the years covered in the database — at least as far as 1981, according to an analysis of reports by the city medical examiner’s office done by Steven F. Messner, a criminology professor at the State University of New York at Albany. And he believes it stretches back much further than that.
Nationally, in the early 1980s, scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed a decade’s worth of homicide data across the nation, and found that while suicides peak in the spring, homicides swell between July and September.
A prime reason murder peaks during this time has to do with the routines of people’s lives, according to Professor Messner.
“Homicides vary with social acting,” he said. “It evolves from interactions.”
Summer is when people get together. More specifically, casual drinkers and drug users are more likely to go to bars or parties on weekends and evenings, as opposed to a Tuesday morning. These people in the social mix, flooding the city’s streets and neighborhood bars, feed the peak times for murder, experts say.
And the trend occurs in other cities, in places like Chicago, Boston and Newark, according to criminologists.
Some of the same trends are on display around Christmastime and are believed to be behind the slight increases in murder that occur then, criminologists say.
Thomas D. Nerney, who retired in 2002 as a detective in the New York Police Department’s Major Case Squad, said the patterns were well known within the department.
Assigned as a detective in Brooklyn from 1972 to 1986, he said that on a hot summer night or in the holiday season, a similar set of factors seemed to be behind the killings: a chance to socialize and to drink or use drugs.
He recalled the late 1970s and early ’80s in Brooklyn, when the heavier homicide caseloads seemed to come as neighborhoods got hotter.
“We had so many of them,” Mr. Nerney said. “They would be on rooftops. There might be somebody who lured someone somewhere; you would have a sex-related killing or a revenge killing. Rooftops or backyards.”
The Times analysis, when compared with Professor Messner’s findings from 1981, shows that increasingly, more victims were killed between midnight and 8 a.m. in recent years than in the past.
According to the professor’s study of homicides in Manhattan, 29 percent of the 1,826 victims in 1981 were killed between midnight and 8 a.m. More recently, from 2006 through 2008, 39 percent of all homicide victims were killed during those hours, the Times analysis shows.
Also, as the number of homicides has shrunk, the data shows that more are occurring on weekends. From 2003 to 2008, 36 percent of all victims were killed on Saturday or Sunday, the analysis shows.
Failing to understand the basic connection between time of year and homicide rates can lead law enforcement agencies to faulty conclusions about what is happening in the streets — and it can affect their strategies.
In St. Louis, a 1990s-era gun buyback program begun each fall was thought by some to be behind a drop in violence. But as Richard Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, studied the program’s impact, he found that the annual crime reductions were more attributable to the normal seasonal ebbing in homicide and assaults.
In New York, Vincent Henry, a retired police sergeant who now teaches criminology and who has studied the department’s Compstat program, in which computerized data is used for more efficient policing, said that time was one of many factors in making decisions about staffing and when and how to deploy officers.
But that was not always the case.
In the early 1990s, police managers altered the working hours for various groups of detectives, including those tracking narcotics cases and those seeking to arrest criminals wanted on open warrants.
It seemed to the top officials at the time that too many officers were keeping bankers’ hours — ending their shifts at dusk and taking weekends off — and not working closely enough with counterparts.
Jack Maple, a former police deputy commissioner who helped develop Compstat, wrote a book, “The Crime Fighter,” in which he detailed the issues of the day. He described the shortfall this way: “Unfortunately, the bad guys work around the clock.”
And in the summer months, the bad guys tend to be deadliest.
11 June 2009
Hate Crimes and Extremist Politics
Personally, I can not even believe that this is a real conversation, and I've seen it on CNN as well. Would restricting people's civil rights really make them act any different? No, it would only make them act out more in defense of what they are losing. Extreme actions are the reasons there are more terrorist attacks in other countries, because non-violent options like communicating have been restricted. Sure there are nutbags, but there always will be and there isn't any way to stop that! Do I personally like hate speech? No, I believe in allowing people to live their lives as best befits their belief system, but the idea of the government defining what speech is lawful and what isn't terrifies me! If we can't talk than we are no better than extremists who have given up speaking for violent actions.
June 11, 2009, 12:29 pm
BY: The Editors
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/hate-crimes-and-extremist-politics/
The killing of George Tiller, the abortion doctor in Wichita, Kan., and the attack on the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington yesterday have raised questions yet again about the role that extremist propaganda sites play in inciting violence among some militant believers. In both cases, the suspect arrested was well-known among fringe “communities” on the Web.
Most legal scholars and many experts on extremist violence in the U.S. oppose reining in of such sites, or restrictions on extremist speech generally. Should the United States consider tighter restrictions on hate speech? In the meantime, how should law enforcement agencies respond?
Phyllis B. Gerstenfeld, criminal justice professor
Chip Berlet, Political Research Associates
Eric Hickey, criminology professor
Edward J. Eberle, comparative law professor
Eugene O’Donnell, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Don’t Overreact
Phyllis B. Gerstenfeld is a professor and chairman of the criminal justice department at California State University, Stanislaus. She is the author of “Hate Crimes: Causes, Controls and Controversies.”
Although violent extremism is nothing new, either in the United States or abroad, it continues to present several daunting challenges to those who wish to prevent it.
Some of those challenges are legal. It is often difficult to balance the protection of civil liberties, especially freedom of expression, with the desire to avoid bloodshed. Those charged with enforcing the laws have sometimes overstepped the bounds of their authority—and have infringed upon First Amendment rights—when they have attempted to investigate or silence extremists.
Some challenges are policy related. How many resources ought to be allocated to fighting the terrible but uncommon instances of hate-fueled violence? Furthermore, a very large majority of those who attack others because of their victims’ race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or other characteristics are not hard-core bigots who join supremacist groups or expound their views in websites or manifestos. Even if we could somehow focus effectively on people like James Von Brunn or Scott Roeder, most bias crimes would continue unchecked.
In recent years, extremist propaganda has been cloaked so as to appear more mainstream and less radical.
And some challenges are empirical. We still know only a little bit about what factors influence a small number of people to act on their hatreds. There is, unfortunately, no shortage of extremist propaganda. In recent years, much of that propaganda has been cloaked so as to appear more mainstream and less radical. Some white supremacist groups claim that they don’t hate anybody, they simply love white people. Extremist political parties that recently won seats in the European Parliament did so on anti-immigration and economic platforms not very different from those of the more conventional parties. It is unclear to what extent extremist rhetoric, whether veiled or not, inspires violent behavior.
One thing that ought to be remembered is that attacks like the murder of George Tiller and the shooting at the Holocaust Memorial Museum are rare. We should take care not to rush blindly into creating “solutions” that are ill-suited to the real problems, that result in poor distributions of scarce resources, or that violate basic freedoms.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Link Between Theory and Violent Action
Chip Berlet is a senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a group based in Somerville, Mass., that studies extremist and authoritarian movements. He is co–author, with Matthew N. Lyons, of “Right-Wing Populism in America.”
The alleged shooter at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum spread historical white supremacist views and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories through a Web site that included the hoax document “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and a link to a Holocaust denial Web site.
The attack demonstrates why it is a mistake to ignore bigoted conspiracy theories. Law enforcement needs to enforce laws against criminal behavior. Vicious bigoted speech, however, is often protected by the First Amendment. We do not need new laws or to encourage government agencies to further erode our civil liberties. We need to stand up as moral people and speak out against the spread of bigoted conspiracy theories. That’s not a police problem, that’s our problem as people responsible for defending a free society.
Demagogues and conspiracy theorists use the same four “tools of fear.” These are 1) dualism; 2) scapegoating; 3) demonization; and 4) apocalyptic aggression.
It is the combination of demagogic demonization and widespread scapegoating that is so dangerous.
The basic dynamics remain the same no matter the ideological leanings of the demonizers or the identity of their targets. It is the combination of demagogic demonization and widespread scapegoating that is so dangerous. In such circumstances, angry allegations can quickly turn into apocalyptic aggression and violence targeting scapegoated groups like Jews or immigrants. Meanwhile, our ability to resolve disputes through civic debate and compromise is hobbled.
Apocalyptic aggression is fueled by right-wing pundits who demonize scapegoated groups and individuals in our society, implying that it is urgent to stop them from wrecking the nation. Some angry people in their audience already believe conspiracy theories in which the same scapegoats are portrayed as subversive, destructive or evil. Add in aggressive apocalyptic ideas that suggest time is running out and quick action mandatory, and you have a perfect storm of mobilized resentment threatening to rain bigotry and violence across the United States.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Infiltrate and Monitor Hate Groups
Eric Hickey is a professor in the Department of Criminology, California State University, Fresno.
Unlike the more common mass murderers in American society who usually are individually motivated by mental illness to kill, extremists have their own niche of chaos. To date, acts of hate murder (akin to random acts of hate violence where killing does not occur) are sporadically committed by only a handful of offenders yet they represent groups of individuals who share common hatred toward other groups based upon religious beliefs, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
What can be done to identify extremists who may be preparing to carry out acts of violence? We need to do a better job of infiltrating and monitoring their groups. Police often are aware of such individuals because they are vocal and do not hide their hate, and they often use the Internet or even hold public rallies to espouse their views. It’s during times of economic stress and social and political change that hate groups tend to attract those who feel marginalized or threatened.
In our democratic society we pride ourselves on being allowed the freedom to gather and espouse whatever we wish so long as we do not incite others to commit acts of violence. But we also, as a society, have the right to monitor such groups to ensure public safety.
The problem in doing that is we create a less democratic society. Or, we can provide more security for potential targets and institute gun control measures like those in Canada and England. Neither of these options, however, will do much to stop violent acts, even though they give us a greater sense of security.
Another approach is to create more public awareness of these groups and solicit public assistance in identifying anyone who may be at risk for acting out. But these “big brother” campaigns serve mostly to heighten public fears but ultimately do little to stop hate crimes. Watchfulness and adherence to rule of law is really the only way to keep hate-based crimes to a minimum. One only has to look around the world to see far worse situations.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What Speech Laws Say
Edward J. Eberle is a professor at the Roger Williams University School of Law and author of “Dignity and Liberty: Constitutional Visions in Germany and the United States.”
The United States is perhaps the only country in the world that allows for protection of hate speech. Much of this has to do with the idea that a free exchange of ideas is important and that allowing speech — even hate-filled speech — can be a safety valve that helps prevent outbreaks of violence.
Under this view, speech needs to be regulated only when it will present a clear and present danger, as when it is a direct incitement to violence. The only exception to this is obscenity, which is unprotected speech even when there is no concrete demonstration of harm.
More restrictive speech laws in other nations reflect different values placed on dignity and personal reputation.
By contrast, most other countries of the world consider hate speech to be an unprotected category of speech. This is the case in all the European countries, like Germany, France, Britain, etc., and also Canada.
That view reflects the different values those legal systems place on factors like the norm of human dignity and personal reputation as well as the experience of the Holocaust. In the U.S., we follow an individualist model of a right to self-determination and expression. For the Europeans and others, there is also a right to speak your mind, but there are some bounds based on respect of others.
One of the leading cases in Germany is the “Holocaust Denial Case” (1990) where the Constitutional Court upheld the denial of a group’s right to protest that Germans had never persecuted Jews or committed the Holocaust. The court stated that this was hate speech, a denigration of a group based on ethnicity and race. In a different case, “Denial of Responsibility for World War II” (1994), the court found that a book observing that Germany was not responsible for World War II was protected speech, as this was a work of research and history and was not defamatory. In a major Canadian case, the constitutional court there ruled that a high school teacher could be censured and fired for using hate speech in the classroom.
Yet most European countries find obscenity to be protected speech unless it demeans women, harms youth or incites violence. As with most things, there are underlying social norms that guide the complexion of the law.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Mental Health Factor
Eugene O’Donnell is a lecturer at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He was a former officer in the New York Police Department, a prosecutor with the district attorney offices in Brooklyn and Queens, and a police academy instructor.
It is impossible to ignore the mental health dimension in the Holocaust Museum attack and an earlier assault at the Federal Reserve headquarters by James von Brunn. There may also be serious mental health issues with Scott Roeder, the killer of Dr. Tiller.
Extended post-release mental health supervision should be explored — in some cases, for the whole life of the ex-convict.
There is a gaping hole in our mental health infrastructure which will not be easy to fill, but needs urgent examination and action. Far too many potentially dangerous people are left to fend for themselves. Even when there are concerned family members or friends in their lives, these guardians are often worn out from trying to help, or do not know where to get dependable care.
We continue to leap at the chance to declare actions criminal despite the fact that attacks like this museum shooting are rooted in an extremely irrational and bizarre world view, and are thus outside the scope of traditional criminal notions of “punishment” and “correction.” And of course, even where the criminal justice system is utilized, extended post-release mental health supervision needs to explored, in some cases for the whole life of the ex-convict.
This is not to trivialize the danger of domestic hate groups which certainly exist and need to be ceaselessly monitored. But local police departments have mostly extricated themselves from the business of spying on individuals suspected of political extremism. This is because many departments were accused of abuses in conducting surveillance on, for example, members of the Communist Party and individuals tied to black nationalist activities. In some places, including New York City, police departments cannot even be present at or record rallies conducted by persons espousing hateful objectives.
As always, protecting the rights of an individual, while safeguarding society as a whole, presents an exquisite challenge, with the dangers of stifling individual expression balanced against the wider harm than can occur if we do not get that balance right.
June 11, 2009, 12:29 pm
BY: The Editors
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/hate-crimes-and-extremist-politics/
The killing of George Tiller, the abortion doctor in Wichita, Kan., and the attack on the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington yesterday have raised questions yet again about the role that extremist propaganda sites play in inciting violence among some militant believers. In both cases, the suspect arrested was well-known among fringe “communities” on the Web.
Most legal scholars and many experts on extremist violence in the U.S. oppose reining in of such sites, or restrictions on extremist speech generally. Should the United States consider tighter restrictions on hate speech? In the meantime, how should law enforcement agencies respond?
Phyllis B. Gerstenfeld, criminal justice professor
Chip Berlet, Political Research Associates
Eric Hickey, criminology professor
Edward J. Eberle, comparative law professor
Eugene O’Donnell, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Don’t Overreact
Phyllis B. Gerstenfeld is a professor and chairman of the criminal justice department at California State University, Stanislaus. She is the author of “Hate Crimes: Causes, Controls and Controversies.”
Although violent extremism is nothing new, either in the United States or abroad, it continues to present several daunting challenges to those who wish to prevent it.
Some of those challenges are legal. It is often difficult to balance the protection of civil liberties, especially freedom of expression, with the desire to avoid bloodshed. Those charged with enforcing the laws have sometimes overstepped the bounds of their authority—and have infringed upon First Amendment rights—when they have attempted to investigate or silence extremists.
Some challenges are policy related. How many resources ought to be allocated to fighting the terrible but uncommon instances of hate-fueled violence? Furthermore, a very large majority of those who attack others because of their victims’ race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or other characteristics are not hard-core bigots who join supremacist groups or expound their views in websites or manifestos. Even if we could somehow focus effectively on people like James Von Brunn or Scott Roeder, most bias crimes would continue unchecked.
In recent years, extremist propaganda has been cloaked so as to appear more mainstream and less radical.
And some challenges are empirical. We still know only a little bit about what factors influence a small number of people to act on their hatreds. There is, unfortunately, no shortage of extremist propaganda. In recent years, much of that propaganda has been cloaked so as to appear more mainstream and less radical. Some white supremacist groups claim that they don’t hate anybody, they simply love white people. Extremist political parties that recently won seats in the European Parliament did so on anti-immigration and economic platforms not very different from those of the more conventional parties. It is unclear to what extent extremist rhetoric, whether veiled or not, inspires violent behavior.
One thing that ought to be remembered is that attacks like the murder of George Tiller and the shooting at the Holocaust Memorial Museum are rare. We should take care not to rush blindly into creating “solutions” that are ill-suited to the real problems, that result in poor distributions of scarce resources, or that violate basic freedoms.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Link Between Theory and Violent Action
Chip Berlet is a senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a group based in Somerville, Mass., that studies extremist and authoritarian movements. He is co–author, with Matthew N. Lyons, of “Right-Wing Populism in America.”
The alleged shooter at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum spread historical white supremacist views and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories through a Web site that included the hoax document “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and a link to a Holocaust denial Web site.
The attack demonstrates why it is a mistake to ignore bigoted conspiracy theories. Law enforcement needs to enforce laws against criminal behavior. Vicious bigoted speech, however, is often protected by the First Amendment. We do not need new laws or to encourage government agencies to further erode our civil liberties. We need to stand up as moral people and speak out against the spread of bigoted conspiracy theories. That’s not a police problem, that’s our problem as people responsible for defending a free society.
Demagogues and conspiracy theorists use the same four “tools of fear.” These are 1) dualism; 2) scapegoating; 3) demonization; and 4) apocalyptic aggression.
It is the combination of demagogic demonization and widespread scapegoating that is so dangerous.
The basic dynamics remain the same no matter the ideological leanings of the demonizers or the identity of their targets. It is the combination of demagogic demonization and widespread scapegoating that is so dangerous. In such circumstances, angry allegations can quickly turn into apocalyptic aggression and violence targeting scapegoated groups like Jews or immigrants. Meanwhile, our ability to resolve disputes through civic debate and compromise is hobbled.
Apocalyptic aggression is fueled by right-wing pundits who demonize scapegoated groups and individuals in our society, implying that it is urgent to stop them from wrecking the nation. Some angry people in their audience already believe conspiracy theories in which the same scapegoats are portrayed as subversive, destructive or evil. Add in aggressive apocalyptic ideas that suggest time is running out and quick action mandatory, and you have a perfect storm of mobilized resentment threatening to rain bigotry and violence across the United States.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Infiltrate and Monitor Hate Groups
Eric Hickey is a professor in the Department of Criminology, California State University, Fresno.
Unlike the more common mass murderers in American society who usually are individually motivated by mental illness to kill, extremists have their own niche of chaos. To date, acts of hate murder (akin to random acts of hate violence where killing does not occur) are sporadically committed by only a handful of offenders yet they represent groups of individuals who share common hatred toward other groups based upon religious beliefs, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
What can be done to identify extremists who may be preparing to carry out acts of violence? We need to do a better job of infiltrating and monitoring their groups. Police often are aware of such individuals because they are vocal and do not hide their hate, and they often use the Internet or even hold public rallies to espouse their views. It’s during times of economic stress and social and political change that hate groups tend to attract those who feel marginalized or threatened.
In our democratic society we pride ourselves on being allowed the freedom to gather and espouse whatever we wish so long as we do not incite others to commit acts of violence. But we also, as a society, have the right to monitor such groups to ensure public safety.
The problem in doing that is we create a less democratic society. Or, we can provide more security for potential targets and institute gun control measures like those in Canada and England. Neither of these options, however, will do much to stop violent acts, even though they give us a greater sense of security.
Another approach is to create more public awareness of these groups and solicit public assistance in identifying anyone who may be at risk for acting out. But these “big brother” campaigns serve mostly to heighten public fears but ultimately do little to stop hate crimes. Watchfulness and adherence to rule of law is really the only way to keep hate-based crimes to a minimum. One only has to look around the world to see far worse situations.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What Speech Laws Say
Edward J. Eberle is a professor at the Roger Williams University School of Law and author of “Dignity and Liberty: Constitutional Visions in Germany and the United States.”
The United States is perhaps the only country in the world that allows for protection of hate speech. Much of this has to do with the idea that a free exchange of ideas is important and that allowing speech — even hate-filled speech — can be a safety valve that helps prevent outbreaks of violence.
Under this view, speech needs to be regulated only when it will present a clear and present danger, as when it is a direct incitement to violence. The only exception to this is obscenity, which is unprotected speech even when there is no concrete demonstration of harm.
More restrictive speech laws in other nations reflect different values placed on dignity and personal reputation.
By contrast, most other countries of the world consider hate speech to be an unprotected category of speech. This is the case in all the European countries, like Germany, France, Britain, etc., and also Canada.
That view reflects the different values those legal systems place on factors like the norm of human dignity and personal reputation as well as the experience of the Holocaust. In the U.S., we follow an individualist model of a right to self-determination and expression. For the Europeans and others, there is also a right to speak your mind, but there are some bounds based on respect of others.
One of the leading cases in Germany is the “Holocaust Denial Case” (1990) where the Constitutional Court upheld the denial of a group’s right to protest that Germans had never persecuted Jews or committed the Holocaust. The court stated that this was hate speech, a denigration of a group based on ethnicity and race. In a different case, “Denial of Responsibility for World War II” (1994), the court found that a book observing that Germany was not responsible for World War II was protected speech, as this was a work of research and history and was not defamatory. In a major Canadian case, the constitutional court there ruled that a high school teacher could be censured and fired for using hate speech in the classroom.
Yet most European countries find obscenity to be protected speech unless it demeans women, harms youth or incites violence. As with most things, there are underlying social norms that guide the complexion of the law.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Mental Health Factor
Eugene O’Donnell is a lecturer at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He was a former officer in the New York Police Department, a prosecutor with the district attorney offices in Brooklyn and Queens, and a police academy instructor.
It is impossible to ignore the mental health dimension in the Holocaust Museum attack and an earlier assault at the Federal Reserve headquarters by James von Brunn. There may also be serious mental health issues with Scott Roeder, the killer of Dr. Tiller.
Extended post-release mental health supervision should be explored — in some cases, for the whole life of the ex-convict.
There is a gaping hole in our mental health infrastructure which will not be easy to fill, but needs urgent examination and action. Far too many potentially dangerous people are left to fend for themselves. Even when there are concerned family members or friends in their lives, these guardians are often worn out from trying to help, or do not know where to get dependable care.
We continue to leap at the chance to declare actions criminal despite the fact that attacks like this museum shooting are rooted in an extremely irrational and bizarre world view, and are thus outside the scope of traditional criminal notions of “punishment” and “correction.” And of course, even where the criminal justice system is utilized, extended post-release mental health supervision needs to explored, in some cases for the whole life of the ex-convict.
This is not to trivialize the danger of domestic hate groups which certainly exist and need to be ceaselessly monitored. But local police departments have mostly extricated themselves from the business of spying on individuals suspected of political extremism. This is because many departments were accused of abuses in conducting surveillance on, for example, members of the Communist Party and individuals tied to black nationalist activities. In some places, including New York City, police departments cannot even be present at or record rallies conducted by persons espousing hateful objectives.
As always, protecting the rights of an individual, while safeguarding society as a whole, presents an exquisite challenge, with the dangers of stifling individual expression balanced against the wider harm than can occur if we do not get that balance right.
Holocaust Museum Gunman a Longtime Foe of Government
June 11, 2009
By DAVID STOUT
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/us/11shoot.html?scp=2&sq=holocaust%20museum%20shooting&st=cse
WASHINGTON — An 88-year-old white supremacist with a rifle walked into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, one of the capital’s most visited sites, on Wednesday afternoon and began shooting, fatally wounding a security guard and sending tourists scrambling before he himself was shot, the authorities said.
The gunman was identified by law enforcement officials as James W. von Brunn, who embraces various conspiracy theories involving Jews, blacks and other minority groups and at one point waged a personal war with the federal government.
The gunman and the security guard were both taken to nearby George Washington University Hospital, with Mr. von Brunn handcuffed to a gurney, witnesses said. The guard, Stephen T. Johns, died a short time later. Museum officials said he had worked there for six years; The Associated Press reported his age as 39.
Mayor Adrian M. Fenty said Mr. von Brunn was in critical condition. Chief Cathy L. Lanier of the Washington police said the gunman walked into the museum’s main entrance shortly before 1 p.m. and began shooting without warning. At least one security guard was returning fire; a total of five or six shots are believed to have been fired.
Officials and others who track conspiracy theorists have long been familiar with Mr. von Brunn, whose latest address is believed to be in Eastern Maryland, in part because he maintains a Web site. (Wednesday night, only an archived version of the site was available.) He has claimed variously to be a member of Mensa, the high-I.Q. society; to have played varsity football at a Midwestern college, where he earned a degree in journalism; to have been a PT boat commander in World War II; and to be a painter and an author.
Mr. von Brunn has also claimed to have been victimized by a court system run by Jews and blacks.
Before Wednesday, he was best known to law enforcement officials for having walked into the Washington headquarters of the Federal Reserve System on Dec. 7, 1981, with a bag slung over the shoulder of his trench coat. A guard chased him to the second floor, where the Fed’s board was meeting, and found a revolver, a hunting knife and a sawed-off shotgun in the bag.
Mr. von Brunn, who lived in Lebanon, N.H., at the time, told the police he wanted to take board members hostage to focus news media attention on their responsibility for high interest rates and the nation’s economic difficulties. He was convicted in 1983 and served several years in prison on attempted kidnapping, burglary, assault and weapons charges.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization based in Alabama, said Wednesday that Mr. von Brunn is a racist and anti-Semite with “a long history of associations with prominent neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers.”
Rabbis Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and Abraham Cooper, an associate dean, said in a statement that the attack at the museum showed “that the cancer of hatred, bigotry and anti-Semitism is alive and well in America.”
“It is deeply disturbing that one of America’s most powerful symbols of the memory of the Holocaust was selected as the site of the attack just days after President Obama accompanied Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel to the Buchenwald death camp,” they said.
Opened in 1993, the museum is situated near the Mall and the Potomac River. Since its dedication, it has had nearly 30 million visitors, including more than 8 million schoolchildren and 85 heads of state, the museum says on its Web site.
Like all public buildings in the capital, the museum has heavy security, with visitors required to pass through metal detectors. But someone determined to enter a building with a firearm can sometimes do so. In July 1998, a gunman killed two police officers and wounded a tourist in the Capitol.
Museum officials issued a statement expressing shock and grief over Wednesday’s attack and said the museum would be closed Thursday in honor of Mr. Johns.
On Wednesday evening, President Obama issued a statement saying, in part, “This outrageous act reminds us that we must remain vigilant against anti-Semitism and prejudice in all its forms.”
Brian Knowlton and Theo Emery contributed reporting.
By DAVID STOUT
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/us/11shoot.html?scp=2&sq=holocaust%20museum%20shooting&st=cse
WASHINGTON — An 88-year-old white supremacist with a rifle walked into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, one of the capital’s most visited sites, on Wednesday afternoon and began shooting, fatally wounding a security guard and sending tourists scrambling before he himself was shot, the authorities said.
The gunman was identified by law enforcement officials as James W. von Brunn, who embraces various conspiracy theories involving Jews, blacks and other minority groups and at one point waged a personal war with the federal government.
The gunman and the security guard were both taken to nearby George Washington University Hospital, with Mr. von Brunn handcuffed to a gurney, witnesses said. The guard, Stephen T. Johns, died a short time later. Museum officials said he had worked there for six years; The Associated Press reported his age as 39.
Mayor Adrian M. Fenty said Mr. von Brunn was in critical condition. Chief Cathy L. Lanier of the Washington police said the gunman walked into the museum’s main entrance shortly before 1 p.m. and began shooting without warning. At least one security guard was returning fire; a total of five or six shots are believed to have been fired.
Officials and others who track conspiracy theorists have long been familiar with Mr. von Brunn, whose latest address is believed to be in Eastern Maryland, in part because he maintains a Web site. (Wednesday night, only an archived version of the site was available.) He has claimed variously to be a member of Mensa, the high-I.Q. society; to have played varsity football at a Midwestern college, where he earned a degree in journalism; to have been a PT boat commander in World War II; and to be a painter and an author.
Mr. von Brunn has also claimed to have been victimized by a court system run by Jews and blacks.
Before Wednesday, he was best known to law enforcement officials for having walked into the Washington headquarters of the Federal Reserve System on Dec. 7, 1981, with a bag slung over the shoulder of his trench coat. A guard chased him to the second floor, where the Fed’s board was meeting, and found a revolver, a hunting knife and a sawed-off shotgun in the bag.
Mr. von Brunn, who lived in Lebanon, N.H., at the time, told the police he wanted to take board members hostage to focus news media attention on their responsibility for high interest rates and the nation’s economic difficulties. He was convicted in 1983 and served several years in prison on attempted kidnapping, burglary, assault and weapons charges.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization based in Alabama, said Wednesday that Mr. von Brunn is a racist and anti-Semite with “a long history of associations with prominent neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers.”
Rabbis Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and Abraham Cooper, an associate dean, said in a statement that the attack at the museum showed “that the cancer of hatred, bigotry and anti-Semitism is alive and well in America.”
“It is deeply disturbing that one of America’s most powerful symbols of the memory of the Holocaust was selected as the site of the attack just days after President Obama accompanied Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel to the Buchenwald death camp,” they said.
Opened in 1993, the museum is situated near the Mall and the Potomac River. Since its dedication, it has had nearly 30 million visitors, including more than 8 million schoolchildren and 85 heads of state, the museum says on its Web site.
Like all public buildings in the capital, the museum has heavy security, with visitors required to pass through metal detectors. But someone determined to enter a building with a firearm can sometimes do so. In July 1998, a gunman killed two police officers and wounded a tourist in the Capitol.
Museum officials issued a statement expressing shock and grief over Wednesday’s attack and said the museum would be closed Thursday in honor of Mr. Johns.
On Wednesday evening, President Obama issued a statement saying, in part, “This outrageous act reminds us that we must remain vigilant against anti-Semitism and prejudice in all its forms.”
Brian Knowlton and Theo Emery contributed reporting.
07 May 2009
Organize for Troy Davis!
The 30-day stay issued by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals expires on May 15th.
So now is the time for us to organize to save the life of Troy Anthony Davis. We're asking everybody to come out strong on May 19th – a day marked in human rights calendars across the world as the Global Day of Action for Troy Davis.
Whether you're holding a "Text TROY to 90999" sign on a busy street or organizing your local Amnesty chapter to hold a public demonstration or vigil, we need everybody to contribute their time on May 19th to make sure that the state of Georgia does not kill a man who may well be innocent. Register your Global Day of Action for Troy Davis activity or event now.
We know that time is short for organizing public events, but an execution date could be set as early as late May, so it is essential that action be taken soon. It's also really important that we get an accurate count of how many events and activities are taking place on May 19th, so we can share this information with officials in Georgia. Our emails and phone calls have gone a long way in buying Troy some much-needed time, but now we've got to take our action to the streets.
We appreciate the tens of thousands of you who have stood in Troy's corner while heart-stopping scenes have unfolded. On three separate occasions, Troy has been scheduled for execution. And on three separate occasions, his life was saved within a short period of time, even minutes, of his scheduled execution date.
Each time, those last minute stays came after people like you turned out by the thousands to rally in his defense. It was no coincidence. Troy's sister and long-time Amnesty activist, Martina Correia, has acknowledged Amnesty's powerful role in saving her brother's life each of those times.
Now here we are again with the clock winding down. While we can see little opportunity for legal recourse or second chances, we know that your advocacy has a strong record of making amazing things happen.
When we first introduced you to Troy Davis in early 2007, few people outside of Georgia knew about the injustice taking place. In the past two years, countless people have come to see Troy's case as a prime example of why the death penalty must be abolished – the risk of executing someone for a crime they did not commit is just too high.
We are serious when we say that we need everyone to support Troy Davis on May 19th by organizing their own event or awareness-raising activity.
After all, if you had 30 days left to fight for your life, wouldn't you want to know that you had thousands standing in your corner?
So now is the time for us to organize to save the life of Troy Anthony Davis. We're asking everybody to come out strong on May 19th – a day marked in human rights calendars across the world as the Global Day of Action for Troy Davis.
Whether you're holding a "Text TROY to 90999" sign on a busy street or organizing your local Amnesty chapter to hold a public demonstration or vigil, we need everybody to contribute their time on May 19th to make sure that the state of Georgia does not kill a man who may well be innocent. Register your Global Day of Action for Troy Davis activity or event now.
We know that time is short for organizing public events, but an execution date could be set as early as late May, so it is essential that action be taken soon. It's also really important that we get an accurate count of how many events and activities are taking place on May 19th, so we can share this information with officials in Georgia. Our emails and phone calls have gone a long way in buying Troy some much-needed time, but now we've got to take our action to the streets.
We appreciate the tens of thousands of you who have stood in Troy's corner while heart-stopping scenes have unfolded. On three separate occasions, Troy has been scheduled for execution. And on three separate occasions, his life was saved within a short period of time, even minutes, of his scheduled execution date.
Each time, those last minute stays came after people like you turned out by the thousands to rally in his defense. It was no coincidence. Troy's sister and long-time Amnesty activist, Martina Correia, has acknowledged Amnesty's powerful role in saving her brother's life each of those times.
Now here we are again with the clock winding down. While we can see little opportunity for legal recourse or second chances, we know that your advocacy has a strong record of making amazing things happen.
When we first introduced you to Troy Davis in early 2007, few people outside of Georgia knew about the injustice taking place. In the past two years, countless people have come to see Troy's case as a prime example of why the death penalty must be abolished – the risk of executing someone for a crime they did not commit is just too high.
We are serious when we say that we need everyone to support Troy Davis on May 19th by organizing their own event or awareness-raising activity.
After all, if you had 30 days left to fight for your life, wouldn't you want to know that you had thousands standing in your corner?
23 April 2009
Action Alert: Support Clemency for Troy Davis
It's not the end of the road for Troy Davis, but the news is not good.
Yesterday, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Troy Davis' bid for a new trial. In a 2-1 vote, the court cited technical reasons to reject Davis' petition for a hearing.
But all hope is not lost. Troy has 30 days to file another petition with the US Supreme Court.
Troy and his lawyers are doing everything they can to fight this decision from the inside. It is up to us to turn up the pressure on the outside. Even if you've taken action before, keep flooding Governor Perdue's office with emails demanding justice for Troy. And pass the action on to everyone you know. There is power in numbers and when you stand behind Troy Davis, you make the fight for justice even stronger!
P.S. Save the date — National Day of Solidarity for Troy Davis coming in May. We'll be in touch soon to let you know how you can support Troy in your own community!
28 December 2008
Sex slavery: Living the American nightmare
Shadowy multibillion-dollar industry far more widespread than expected
By Alex Johnson and Cesar Rodriguez
Reporters
msnbc.com and Telemundo
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28161210/?GT1=43001
updated 7:07 a.m. CT, Mon., Dec. 22, 2008
When FBI and immigration agents arrested a 28-year-old Guatemalan woman three months ago in Los Angeles, they announced that they had shut down one of the most elaborate sex trafficking rings in the country. It was also the family business.
The woman, Maribel Rodriguez Vasquez, was the sixth member of her family to be rounded up in the two-year multi-agency investigation. Vasquez, five of her relatives and three other Guatemalan nationals were charged with 50 counts, alleging that they lured at least a dozen young women — including five minors as young as 13 years old — to the United States with promises of good jobs, only to put them to work as prostitutes. All remain in custody as investigators attempt to unravel the complex case.
Vasquez — quickly dubbed the “L.A. Madam” — attracted attention because she had been featured on the fugitive-hunting television program “America’s Most Wanted.” But it was one of only a few such cases to be spotlighted by national media, contributing to the false impression that cases of immigrant sex trafficking are isolated incidents, law enforcement officials and advocates for immigrants say.
The reality is that human trafficking goes on in nearly every American city and town, said Lisette Arsuaga, director of development for the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking, a human rights organization in Los Angeles.
“Human trafficking is well hidden,” Arsuaga said. “I consider it a huge problem.”
Her assessment is shared by authorities in Bexar County, Texas, where the Sheriff’s Office has formed a task force with Shared Hope International, an anti-slavery organization founded by former Rep. Linda Smith, D-Wash. Bexar County is considered a crossroads of the cross-border Mexican sex slave trade because two Interstate highways that crisscross the state intersect there, some 150 miles from the Mexican border.
“I could go to a truck stop in South Texas right now and get on a CB radio and ask for some sweet stuff, and someone’s going to come out and offer something to sell,” Sheriff’s Deputy Chris Burchell said.
A $9.5 billion-a-year industry
Federal officials agree that the trafficking of human beings as sex slaves is far more prevalent than is popularly understood. While saying it is difficult to pinpoint the scope of the industry, given its shadowy nature, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials estimated that it likely generates more than $9.5 billion a year.
Last year alone, the FBI opened more than 225 human trafficking investigations in the United States. Figures for 2008 are not yet available, but in a coordinated nationwide sweep in July, federal, state and local authorities made more than 640 arrests and rescued 47 children in just three days.
In congressional testimony this year, FBI Director Robert Mueller called sex trafficking “a significant and persistent problem in the U.S. and around the world.”
Most cases involve “international persons trafficked to the United States from other countries,” who are generally less aware of their rights, probably do not speak English and are frightened to go to the authorities, he said. “Victims are often lured with false promises of good jobs and better lives and are then forced to work in the sex industry.”
While an increasing number of young men and boys are being forced into the commercial sex industry, more than 80 percent of victims are women and girls, the State Department estimated this year. Of those, 70 percent are forced into prostitution, stripping, pornography or mail-order marriage.
That allegedly was the case with the L.A. Madam.
Prosecutors said in court documents that the Vasquez ring sold Guatemalan women and girls to one another like slaves for several years. Ring members also would try to keep them in line by taking them to witch doctors who threatened to put curses on them and their families if they ran away, the prosecution said.
In one incident, three of the defendants repeatedly kicked and hit one of the victims to punish her for trying to escape, the documents allege.
“These young women were enticed into coming to this country by promises of the American dream, only to arrive and discover that what awaited was a nightmare,” said Robert Schoch, an ICE special agent.
A modern-day form of slavery
Less publicized cases reveal ordeals just as horrific.
In August, three owners and operators of Asian massage parlors in Johnson County, Kansas, near Kansas City, pleaded guilty to human trafficking of women they recruited from China and forced into prostitution.
Charging documents said the defendants, all Chinese nationals, arranged the women’s travel, meeting them at the Kansas City, Mo., airport and driving them directly to one of two massage parlors they operated in Overland Park. There, the women were forced to work from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. seven days a week performing “sexual services on male patrons in exchange for money.”
Occasionally, one of the women would be sent to a nearby apartment to provide “extended sexual services,” prosecutors said. Otherwise, they lived in the massage parlors, monitored 24 hours a day by surveillance cameras.
The case made it clear that “human trafficking is a modern-day form of slavery that reaches from the other side of the globe to the suburban Midwest,” U.S. Attorney John F. Wood said.
Last month, police in Nashville, Tenn., arrested two men and charged them with holding a young Mexican woman as a sex slave, driving her across Tennessee, Georgia and Florida, where she was forced to engage in prostitution with as many as seven men a day, court records said.
Investigators alleged that the woman, 22, was tortured, stabbed and cut with an ice pick to ensure her obedience. They said the men also threatened to kill her family in Mexico and her sister in Atlanta if she did not follow their orders.
“The account given by this woman is very, very disturbing,” said Don Aaron, a spokesman for the Nashville police.
Beatings, rapes and forced abortions
In New York, meanwhile, Consuelo Carreto Valencia, a 4-foot-10, 61-year-old grandmother, pleaded guilty in July to smuggling dozens of women from Mexico and violently coercing them to perform sex acts.
Prosecutors said that Valencia was the matriarch of an extensive prostitution ring based in Mexico. The victims were compelled to perform sex acts 12 hours a day and were subjected to beatings, rape and forced abortions, they said.
Valencia agreed to the guilty plea after her attorney, John S. Wallenstein, told her she could go to prison for life if she were convicted on all counts.
“I said the jurors are going to want to jump out of the jury box and tear you to pieces,” Wallenstein was quoted as saying.
Cases hard to build
But law enforcement officials say that such successes are relatively rare. Often, victims are too frightened to cooperate with investigators, and when they are willing to help, they often speak little or no English, making it problematic to present cases that commonly rest on one person’s word against that of another.
“We have cases come up all the time, but no one really knows about it because Hispanic illegal immigrants fear being deported,” said Sara Sherman, an anti-slavery activist with Free For Life Ministries in Nashville.
Sheriff’s Deputy Keith Bickford, coordinator of the Human Trafficking Task Force in Multnomah County, Ore., said “The girls need help,” but he said they are “so difficult to deal with that we don’t have anyone trained to deal with them.”
Catching ringleaders in the act is particularly difficult, said Minneapolis Deputy Police Chief Valerie Wurster.
“We don’t find people who are chained to beds,” Wurster said. “What we’re finding is people who are very frightened, who don’t have resources locally, being managed by someone who is telling them things that aren’t very true about the environment that they’re living in.”
Federal authorities said that because the victims of sex slavery are captive and cannot come forward, they need more help from the public.
The Justice Department maintains a human trafficking hotline at 1-888-428-7581, but there is a great deal of work left to do, said Carmen Pitre, executive director of the Task Force on Family Violence, an agency that supports victims of trafficking in Milwaukee.
“We’ve come to learn that cases of trafficking are all around us in plain sight,” Pitre said. “Today, you can buy a human being for $200 in any major city in the world.”
Copyright © 2008 msnbc.com and Telemundo
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28161210/?GT1=43001
MSN Privacy . Legal
© 2008 MSNBC.com
Shadowy multibillion-dollar industry far more widespread than expected
By Alex Johnson and Cesar Rodriguez
Reporters
msnbc.com and Telemundo
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28161210/?GT1=43001
updated 7:07 a.m. CT, Mon., Dec. 22, 2008
When FBI and immigration agents arrested a 28-year-old Guatemalan woman three months ago in Los Angeles, they announced that they had shut down one of the most elaborate sex trafficking rings in the country. It was also the family business.
The woman, Maribel Rodriguez Vasquez, was the sixth member of her family to be rounded up in the two-year multi-agency investigation. Vasquez, five of her relatives and three other Guatemalan nationals were charged with 50 counts, alleging that they lured at least a dozen young women — including five minors as young as 13 years old — to the United States with promises of good jobs, only to put them to work as prostitutes. All remain in custody as investigators attempt to unravel the complex case.
Vasquez — quickly dubbed the “L.A. Madam” — attracted attention because she had been featured on the fugitive-hunting television program “America’s Most Wanted.” But it was one of only a few such cases to be spotlighted by national media, contributing to the false impression that cases of immigrant sex trafficking are isolated incidents, law enforcement officials and advocates for immigrants say.
The reality is that human trafficking goes on in nearly every American city and town, said Lisette Arsuaga, director of development for the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking, a human rights organization in Los Angeles.
“Human trafficking is well hidden,” Arsuaga said. “I consider it a huge problem.”
Her assessment is shared by authorities in Bexar County, Texas, where the Sheriff’s Office has formed a task force with Shared Hope International, an anti-slavery organization founded by former Rep. Linda Smith, D-Wash. Bexar County is considered a crossroads of the cross-border Mexican sex slave trade because two Interstate highways that crisscross the state intersect there, some 150 miles from the Mexican border.
“I could go to a truck stop in South Texas right now and get on a CB radio and ask for some sweet stuff, and someone’s going to come out and offer something to sell,” Sheriff’s Deputy Chris Burchell said.
A $9.5 billion-a-year industry
Federal officials agree that the trafficking of human beings as sex slaves is far more prevalent than is popularly understood. While saying it is difficult to pinpoint the scope of the industry, given its shadowy nature, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials estimated that it likely generates more than $9.5 billion a year.
Last year alone, the FBI opened more than 225 human trafficking investigations in the United States. Figures for 2008 are not yet available, but in a coordinated nationwide sweep in July, federal, state and local authorities made more than 640 arrests and rescued 47 children in just three days.
In congressional testimony this year, FBI Director Robert Mueller called sex trafficking “a significant and persistent problem in the U.S. and around the world.”
Most cases involve “international persons trafficked to the United States from other countries,” who are generally less aware of their rights, probably do not speak English and are frightened to go to the authorities, he said. “Victims are often lured with false promises of good jobs and better lives and are then forced to work in the sex industry.”
While an increasing number of young men and boys are being forced into the commercial sex industry, more than 80 percent of victims are women and girls, the State Department estimated this year. Of those, 70 percent are forced into prostitution, stripping, pornography or mail-order marriage.
That allegedly was the case with the L.A. Madam.
Prosecutors said in court documents that the Vasquez ring sold Guatemalan women and girls to one another like slaves for several years. Ring members also would try to keep them in line by taking them to witch doctors who threatened to put curses on them and their families if they ran away, the prosecution said.
In one incident, three of the defendants repeatedly kicked and hit one of the victims to punish her for trying to escape, the documents allege.
“These young women were enticed into coming to this country by promises of the American dream, only to arrive and discover that what awaited was a nightmare,” said Robert Schoch, an ICE special agent.
A modern-day form of slavery
Less publicized cases reveal ordeals just as horrific.
In August, three owners and operators of Asian massage parlors in Johnson County, Kansas, near Kansas City, pleaded guilty to human trafficking of women they recruited from China and forced into prostitution.
Charging documents said the defendants, all Chinese nationals, arranged the women’s travel, meeting them at the Kansas City, Mo., airport and driving them directly to one of two massage parlors they operated in Overland Park. There, the women were forced to work from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. seven days a week performing “sexual services on male patrons in exchange for money.”
Occasionally, one of the women would be sent to a nearby apartment to provide “extended sexual services,” prosecutors said. Otherwise, they lived in the massage parlors, monitored 24 hours a day by surveillance cameras.
The case made it clear that “human trafficking is a modern-day form of slavery that reaches from the other side of the globe to the suburban Midwest,” U.S. Attorney John F. Wood said.
Last month, police in Nashville, Tenn., arrested two men and charged them with holding a young Mexican woman as a sex slave, driving her across Tennessee, Georgia and Florida, where she was forced to engage in prostitution with as many as seven men a day, court records said.
Investigators alleged that the woman, 22, was tortured, stabbed and cut with an ice pick to ensure her obedience. They said the men also threatened to kill her family in Mexico and her sister in Atlanta if she did not follow their orders.
“The account given by this woman is very, very disturbing,” said Don Aaron, a spokesman for the Nashville police.
Beatings, rapes and forced abortions
In New York, meanwhile, Consuelo Carreto Valencia, a 4-foot-10, 61-year-old grandmother, pleaded guilty in July to smuggling dozens of women from Mexico and violently coercing them to perform sex acts.
Prosecutors said that Valencia was the matriarch of an extensive prostitution ring based in Mexico. The victims were compelled to perform sex acts 12 hours a day and were subjected to beatings, rape and forced abortions, they said.
Valencia agreed to the guilty plea after her attorney, John S. Wallenstein, told her she could go to prison for life if she were convicted on all counts.
“I said the jurors are going to want to jump out of the jury box and tear you to pieces,” Wallenstein was quoted as saying.
Cases hard to build
But law enforcement officials say that such successes are relatively rare. Often, victims are too frightened to cooperate with investigators, and when they are willing to help, they often speak little or no English, making it problematic to present cases that commonly rest on one person’s word against that of another.
“We have cases come up all the time, but no one really knows about it because Hispanic illegal immigrants fear being deported,” said Sara Sherman, an anti-slavery activist with Free For Life Ministries in Nashville.
Sheriff’s Deputy Keith Bickford, coordinator of the Human Trafficking Task Force in Multnomah County, Ore., said “The girls need help,” but he said they are “so difficult to deal with that we don’t have anyone trained to deal with them.”
Catching ringleaders in the act is particularly difficult, said Minneapolis Deputy Police Chief Valerie Wurster.
“We don’t find people who are chained to beds,” Wurster said. “What we’re finding is people who are very frightened, who don’t have resources locally, being managed by someone who is telling them things that aren’t very true about the environment that they’re living in.”
Federal authorities said that because the victims of sex slavery are captive and cannot come forward, they need more help from the public.
The Justice Department maintains a human trafficking hotline at 1-888-428-7581, but there is a great deal of work left to do, said Carmen Pitre, executive director of the Task Force on Family Violence, an agency that supports victims of trafficking in Milwaukee.
“We’ve come to learn that cases of trafficking are all around us in plain sight,” Pitre said. “Today, you can buy a human being for $200 in any major city in the world.”
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24 December 2008
Bread of Life, Baked in Rhode Island
December 25, 2008
By KATIE ZEZIMA
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/25/business/smallbusiness/25sbiz.html?_r=1&hp
GREENVILLE, R.I. — To the Cavanagh family, the product they make at a nondescript plant here is just bread and water. But to millions at churches around the world, it is a sacred offering.
From a purely economic point of view, it is something that is almost just as rare: a seemingly recession-proof business.
With the exception of a decline during recent Catholic Church priest scandals, the Cavanagh Company’s business of making communion bread has been growing steadily for the last 65 years.
The bread is used as a sacramental offering that, for Catholics and some other Christians, represents the breaking of the bread at the Last Supper and the body of Christ.
The family-owned company makes about 80 percent of the communion bread used by the Catholic, Episcopal, Lutheran and Southern Baptist churches in the United States. It has a similar market share in Australia, Canada and Britain, and is now looking to expand to West Africa.
“We feel as though we’re a bakery, and all we’re making is bread,” said Andy Cavanagh, the company’s general manager, and part of the fourth generation of Cavanaghs to work here. “It’s not that we don’t have respect for what happens to it, but that transformation is out of our hands and takes place in a church. The best thing we can do is make sure the bread is perfect in every way possible.”
Some customers say the Cavanaghs have such a big market share because their product is about as close to perfect as earthly possible.
“It doesn’t crumb, and I don’t like fragments of our Lord scattering all over the floor,” said the Rev. Bob Dietel, an Episcopal priest.
Mr. Dietel uses Cavanagh altar bread at his parish, St. Aidan’s, in Camano Island, Wash. He likes that the large wafer, which he holds up and breaks during Mass, cracks cleanly.
A few years ago, the congregation switched to the wheat wafer the Cavanaghs make from the white.
“There’s a nice clean bread flavor, as opposed to the paste flavor you have with some other breads,” Mr. Dietel said.
His congregation buys about 6,000 wafers a year from a Seattle religious goods store. Traditionally, nuns, priests or members of a congregation baked altar bread. (In the Catholic tradition it is unleavened and contains only flour and water; other denominations, including Southern Baptists, allow the use of additional ingredients.)
In 1943, Andy’s great-grandfather, John Cavanagh Sr., an inventor, and grandfather, John Jr., were asked to help local Catholic nuns renovate their antiquated baking equipment. The men created new ovens and mixers for the nuns; then three years later, John Jr. and his brother Paul started making bread themselves.
They distributed all of it to Catholic churches and monasteries.
The Cavanaghs are Catholic and John Sr. let his sons run the business so he could concentrate on his first love, liturgical art. Crosses and paintings are showcased in a room in the Rhode Island offices.
For about 20 years, the Cavanagh bread was small, white and nearly transparent, intended to melt on the tongue. After the changes initiated in the church at the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, Catholic churches wanted the wafers to be thicker and chewable, like real bread.
The Cavanaghs started producing the wafers of today — usually whole wheat and sealed on the outside to prevent crumbs.
In 1970, Paul’s sons Brian and Peter joined the business and started expanding the company’s reach beyond New England and the Catholic Church, where fewer and fewer nuns were making bread.
The company will not disclose sales numbers, but says it makes about 850 million wafers each year, and that each wafer sells for less than a penny. Most of the company’s bread is sold wholesale to religious supply stores and Southern Baptist bookstores. In the Catholic Church the company sells to monasteries; the nuns then sell the bread to churches.
“It’s a source of income for us, but at the same time it’s a service to the parishes in the diocese,” said Sister Marilyn McGillan of the Sisters of the Precious Blood in Watertown, N.Y. Her monastery sells to about 100 churches in the Catholic Diocese of Ogdensburg, N.Y. “We’re like a clearinghouse for altar breads for our dioceses.”
There are plenty of varieties. The company sells both white and wheat flour wafers, in sizes ranging from one and one-eighth inches wide to nine inches wide. Some are double-thick, and all except the large ones can be embossed with designs including a cross or a lamb.
‘They’re the classic symbols of Christianity,” Andy Cavanagh said.
Brian and Peter Cavanagh still run the company, and expect Andy, 30, Peter’s son; and his two brothers, Dan, 31 and Luke, 28, to buy them out one day.
The family members pride themselves on having never had an argument over business. They eat lunch together daily, and business talk almost always turns into discussions about New England sports teams.
“When you emphasize family, the business falls into place,” Brian said.
Each brother has his own niche. Andy deals with the finances, Luke the Web site and Dan the machines.
Dan Cavanagh feels most at home in the large baking area.
In huge tubs, about 90 pounds of cake flour is mixed with about 13 gallons of water. The batter is then sent through a tube, where it is piped onto a large metal plate. Another plate clamps on top, and it goes through the oven. Each plate is like a “very large, 500-pound waffle iron,” Dan Cavanagh said.
After coming out of the oven, the wafers spend about 15 minutes in what amounts to a humidifier, so they do not become brittle. When sufficiently moist they roll down a tube and into a spinning cylinder that resembles the ones in bingo halls.
The wafers are then shot to a machine that either puts them in sleeves of 100 or counts them for bags of 250. Then they are boxed.
The bread for Southern Baptist churches is baked on the other side of the room. The mixing process is similar, except the dough contains oil. Since the bread rises, it is baked in a large rotating oven and comes out as small squares.
The wafers and bread are made in both white and whole wheat, but most congregations prefer the whole wheat variety because it has more flavor, the Cavanaghs said.
Business dropped about 10 percent after the clergy sexual abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church in 2002, according to the Cavanaghs. But it has picked up recently — perhaps because of the growing worldly concerns that come with a bad economy.
The company now sells church supplies including altars and pews in England and Australia, and is keeping an eye on the growing Catholic communities in Africa and South America.
But no matter where they do business, they say, the company will remain in Rhode Island, and in the family.
“It’s so gratifying to have it be a successful family business,” Brian Cavanagh said.
By KATIE ZEZIMA
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/25/business/smallbusiness/25sbiz.html?_r=1&hp
GREENVILLE, R.I. — To the Cavanagh family, the product they make at a nondescript plant here is just bread and water. But to millions at churches around the world, it is a sacred offering.
From a purely economic point of view, it is something that is almost just as rare: a seemingly recession-proof business.
With the exception of a decline during recent Catholic Church priest scandals, the Cavanagh Company’s business of making communion bread has been growing steadily for the last 65 years.
The bread is used as a sacramental offering that, for Catholics and some other Christians, represents the breaking of the bread at the Last Supper and the body of Christ.
The family-owned company makes about 80 percent of the communion bread used by the Catholic, Episcopal, Lutheran and Southern Baptist churches in the United States. It has a similar market share in Australia, Canada and Britain, and is now looking to expand to West Africa.
“We feel as though we’re a bakery, and all we’re making is bread,” said Andy Cavanagh, the company’s general manager, and part of the fourth generation of Cavanaghs to work here. “It’s not that we don’t have respect for what happens to it, but that transformation is out of our hands and takes place in a church. The best thing we can do is make sure the bread is perfect in every way possible.”
Some customers say the Cavanaghs have such a big market share because their product is about as close to perfect as earthly possible.
“It doesn’t crumb, and I don’t like fragments of our Lord scattering all over the floor,” said the Rev. Bob Dietel, an Episcopal priest.
Mr. Dietel uses Cavanagh altar bread at his parish, St. Aidan’s, in Camano Island, Wash. He likes that the large wafer, which he holds up and breaks during Mass, cracks cleanly.
A few years ago, the congregation switched to the wheat wafer the Cavanaghs make from the white.
“There’s a nice clean bread flavor, as opposed to the paste flavor you have with some other breads,” Mr. Dietel said.
His congregation buys about 6,000 wafers a year from a Seattle religious goods store. Traditionally, nuns, priests or members of a congregation baked altar bread. (In the Catholic tradition it is unleavened and contains only flour and water; other denominations, including Southern Baptists, allow the use of additional ingredients.)
In 1943, Andy’s great-grandfather, John Cavanagh Sr., an inventor, and grandfather, John Jr., were asked to help local Catholic nuns renovate their antiquated baking equipment. The men created new ovens and mixers for the nuns; then three years later, John Jr. and his brother Paul started making bread themselves.
They distributed all of it to Catholic churches and monasteries.
The Cavanaghs are Catholic and John Sr. let his sons run the business so he could concentrate on his first love, liturgical art. Crosses and paintings are showcased in a room in the Rhode Island offices.
For about 20 years, the Cavanagh bread was small, white and nearly transparent, intended to melt on the tongue. After the changes initiated in the church at the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, Catholic churches wanted the wafers to be thicker and chewable, like real bread.
The Cavanaghs started producing the wafers of today — usually whole wheat and sealed on the outside to prevent crumbs.
In 1970, Paul’s sons Brian and Peter joined the business and started expanding the company’s reach beyond New England and the Catholic Church, where fewer and fewer nuns were making bread.
The company will not disclose sales numbers, but says it makes about 850 million wafers each year, and that each wafer sells for less than a penny. Most of the company’s bread is sold wholesale to religious supply stores and Southern Baptist bookstores. In the Catholic Church the company sells to monasteries; the nuns then sell the bread to churches.
“It’s a source of income for us, but at the same time it’s a service to the parishes in the diocese,” said Sister Marilyn McGillan of the Sisters of the Precious Blood in Watertown, N.Y. Her monastery sells to about 100 churches in the Catholic Diocese of Ogdensburg, N.Y. “We’re like a clearinghouse for altar breads for our dioceses.”
There are plenty of varieties. The company sells both white and wheat flour wafers, in sizes ranging from one and one-eighth inches wide to nine inches wide. Some are double-thick, and all except the large ones can be embossed with designs including a cross or a lamb.
‘They’re the classic symbols of Christianity,” Andy Cavanagh said.
Brian and Peter Cavanagh still run the company, and expect Andy, 30, Peter’s son; and his two brothers, Dan, 31 and Luke, 28, to buy them out one day.
The family members pride themselves on having never had an argument over business. They eat lunch together daily, and business talk almost always turns into discussions about New England sports teams.
“When you emphasize family, the business falls into place,” Brian said.
Each brother has his own niche. Andy deals with the finances, Luke the Web site and Dan the machines.
Dan Cavanagh feels most at home in the large baking area.
In huge tubs, about 90 pounds of cake flour is mixed with about 13 gallons of water. The batter is then sent through a tube, where it is piped onto a large metal plate. Another plate clamps on top, and it goes through the oven. Each plate is like a “very large, 500-pound waffle iron,” Dan Cavanagh said.
After coming out of the oven, the wafers spend about 15 minutes in what amounts to a humidifier, so they do not become brittle. When sufficiently moist they roll down a tube and into a spinning cylinder that resembles the ones in bingo halls.
The wafers are then shot to a machine that either puts them in sleeves of 100 or counts them for bags of 250. Then they are boxed.
The bread for Southern Baptist churches is baked on the other side of the room. The mixing process is similar, except the dough contains oil. Since the bread rises, it is baked in a large rotating oven and comes out as small squares.
The wafers and bread are made in both white and whole wheat, but most congregations prefer the whole wheat variety because it has more flavor, the Cavanaghs said.
Business dropped about 10 percent after the clergy sexual abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church in 2002, according to the Cavanaghs. But it has picked up recently — perhaps because of the growing worldly concerns that come with a bad economy.
The company now sells church supplies including altars and pews in England and Australia, and is keeping an eye on the growing Catholic communities in Africa and South America.
But no matter where they do business, they say, the company will remain in Rhode Island, and in the family.
“It’s so gratifying to have it be a successful family business,” Brian Cavanagh said.
23 December 2008
Hanukkah Receives Kosher Pop Welcome
By JON PARELES
Published: December 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/arts/music/23mati.html?_r=1
Matisyahu deployed what may be the only large, mirrored, rotating dreidel in show business — a Jewish answer to a disco ball — at Webster Hall on Sunday night, the first night of Hanukkah. It was also the first of eight New York City shows for Matisyahu in his third annual Festival of Lights series, bringing different opening acts and guests each night. A large menorah was set up for a mid-concert lighting ceremony, with the blessings declaimed in Hebrew by an audience volunteer.
Matisyahu, who was born Matthew Miller, sings explicitly devotional songs about God, Moshiach (the Messiah) and Orthodox Jewish identity. By setting them to reggae, rock and hip-hop beats, and after working his way up the jam-band circuit, he also reaches listeners with their minds on more secular pursuits, like dancing and drugs. Simcha Levenberg, the M.C. who introduced him, drew big laughs with jokes about marijuana and LSD, although Matisyahu’s song “King Without a Crown” insisted, “If you’re trying to stay high, then you’re bound to be low.”
Matisyahu has built a career on analogies between Rastafarian roots reggae and Hasidic songs. Both are concerned with faith and survival struggles and have lyrics phrased in Biblical allusions; both draw on modal scales and melismatic vocal lines that can sound Middle Eastern. Near the end of the concert Matisyahu sang long, cantorial phrases while rocking back and forth, as if davening, or praying. Yet if his lyrics weren’t so clear about their references to Jewish history and the majesty of God, most of the time Matisyahu would simply be one more reggae-loving rocker.
In “Jerusalem,” which drew heartfelt singalongs, he worries about assimilation, singing, “Cut off the roots of your family tree/Don’t you know that’s not the way to be.” But the roots of his music are Afro-Caribbean and African-American. He uses Jamaican reggae and dancehall toasting, sometimes delivered with a Jamaican accent; he also uses hip-hop cadences and showed off his vocal beatboxing.
His band also segues into rock, for chiming marches that borrow their idealistic sound from U2. Matisyahu is less concerned with a musical heritage than with a religious one.
Album by album Matisyahu has expanded his music. Along with basic roots reggae he now uses faster, tongue-twisting dancehall toasting and the electronic beats and brooding chords of hip-hop. And he’s looking farther: Matisyahu joined Crystal Method, the thumping, rock-tinged electronica duo that opened the show, to sing and rap on a song from their next album, due in March.
Matisyahu rarely improves on his sources. His voice is thin and sometimes nasal, closer to Jack Johnson than to Bob Marley or Sting; his rhymes can be as awkward as they are earnest. But his band — which was augmented, for a few songs, by an Israeli oud player — carries simple vamps through multiple transformations, from meditations to shredding guitar solos. It’s music for believers, with a groove for everyone else.
Matisyahu is at Webster Hall, 125 East 11th Street, East Village, Tuesday and Thursday , and at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, 66 North Sixth Street, at Wythe Avenue, Saturday through Dec. 30. Tickets: (212) 307-7171 or ticketmaster.com.
Published: December 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/arts/music/23mati.html?_r=1
Matisyahu deployed what may be the only large, mirrored, rotating dreidel in show business — a Jewish answer to a disco ball — at Webster Hall on Sunday night, the first night of Hanukkah. It was also the first of eight New York City shows for Matisyahu in his third annual Festival of Lights series, bringing different opening acts and guests each night. A large menorah was set up for a mid-concert lighting ceremony, with the blessings declaimed in Hebrew by an audience volunteer.
Matisyahu, who was born Matthew Miller, sings explicitly devotional songs about God, Moshiach (the Messiah) and Orthodox Jewish identity. By setting them to reggae, rock and hip-hop beats, and after working his way up the jam-band circuit, he also reaches listeners with their minds on more secular pursuits, like dancing and drugs. Simcha Levenberg, the M.C. who introduced him, drew big laughs with jokes about marijuana and LSD, although Matisyahu’s song “King Without a Crown” insisted, “If you’re trying to stay high, then you’re bound to be low.”
Matisyahu has built a career on analogies between Rastafarian roots reggae and Hasidic songs. Both are concerned with faith and survival struggles and have lyrics phrased in Biblical allusions; both draw on modal scales and melismatic vocal lines that can sound Middle Eastern. Near the end of the concert Matisyahu sang long, cantorial phrases while rocking back and forth, as if davening, or praying. Yet if his lyrics weren’t so clear about their references to Jewish history and the majesty of God, most of the time Matisyahu would simply be one more reggae-loving rocker.
In “Jerusalem,” which drew heartfelt singalongs, he worries about assimilation, singing, “Cut off the roots of your family tree/Don’t you know that’s not the way to be.” But the roots of his music are Afro-Caribbean and African-American. He uses Jamaican reggae and dancehall toasting, sometimes delivered with a Jamaican accent; he also uses hip-hop cadences and showed off his vocal beatboxing.
His band also segues into rock, for chiming marches that borrow their idealistic sound from U2. Matisyahu is less concerned with a musical heritage than with a religious one.
Album by album Matisyahu has expanded his music. Along with basic roots reggae he now uses faster, tongue-twisting dancehall toasting and the electronic beats and brooding chords of hip-hop. And he’s looking farther: Matisyahu joined Crystal Method, the thumping, rock-tinged electronica duo that opened the show, to sing and rap on a song from their next album, due in March.
Matisyahu rarely improves on his sources. His voice is thin and sometimes nasal, closer to Jack Johnson than to Bob Marley or Sting; his rhymes can be as awkward as they are earnest. But his band — which was augmented, for a few songs, by an Israeli oud player — carries simple vamps through multiple transformations, from meditations to shredding guitar solos. It’s music for believers, with a groove for everyone else.
Matisyahu is at Webster Hall, 125 East 11th Street, East Village, Tuesday and Thursday , and at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, 66 North Sixth Street, at Wythe Avenue, Saturday through Dec. 30. Tickets: (212) 307-7171 or ticketmaster.com.
15 October 2008
Urgent Action: High court turns down Ga. death row inmate
Today, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Troy Anthony Davis' appeal. His fate is back in the hands of Georgia authorities who may seek a new execution date at any time.
The Supreme Court's decision to deny Troy Davis' petition means that no court of law will ever hold a hearing on the witnesses who have recanted their trial testimony in sworn affidavits.
Doubts about his guilt raised by these multiple witness recantations will never be resolved. An execution under such a cloud of doubt would undermine public confidence in the state's criminal justice system and would be a grave miscarriage of justice.
The state of Georgia can still do the responsible thing and prevent the execution of Troy Davis:
Write a letter to the editor calling on Georgia to stop the execution of Troy Davis!
Call on the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to reconsider its previous decision and grant clemency to Troy Davis.
Urge your friends and family to go to amnestyusa.org/troydavis or text TROY to 90999 to add their voices to the over 200,000 that have already taken action on this case.
Justices halted execution to consider appeal of conviction of killing cop
The Associated Press
updated 3:55 p.m. ET, Tues., Oct. 14, 2008
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way Tuesday for a man to be put to death for killing a police officer, despite calls from his supporters to reconsider the case because seven of nine key witnesses against him have recanted their testimony.
The high court granted Troy Davis a reprieve Sept. 23, less than two hours before his scheduled execution. But the justices declined Tuesday to give his appeal a full-blown hearing, clearing the last hurdle toward his death by lethal injection.
It was not immediately clear when his execution will take place.
Davis, 39, was sentenced to death for the 1989 murder of 27-year-old Mark MacPhail, a police officer in Savannah, Ga. But doubts about his guilt and a high-profile publicity campaign have won him the support of prominent advocates including former President Jimmy Carter and South Africa Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Options are few
Davis' legal team said it was frantically searching for other recourse, but those prospects seem dim.
"I think it's disgusting, terrible. I'm extremely disappointed," said Martina Correia, Davis' sister, when told about the decision. "Well, we still have to fight. We can't stop."
MacPhail's family said it was relieved by the ruling.
"I'm hoping that soon we will have some peace, that this will all be over," said MacPhail's mother, Anneliese MacPhail, who is 75.
MacPhail was working off-duty as a security guard at a bus station when he rushed to help a homeless man who had been pistol-whipped at a nearby parking lot. He and was shot twice when he approached Davis and two other men.
Witnesses identified Davis as the shooter at his 1991 trial.
New evidence
But Davis' lawyers say new evidence proves their client was a victim of mistaken identity. Besides those who have recanted their testimony, three others who did not testify have said Sylvester "Red" Coles — who testified against Davis at his trial — confessed to the killing.
Coles refused to talk about the case when contacted by The Associated Press during a 2007 court appearance and has no listed phone number.
Prosecutors have said the case is closed. They also say some of the witness affidavits simply repeat what a trial jury has already heard, while others are irrelevant because they come from witnesses who never testified.
A divided Georgia Supreme Court twice rejected his request for a new trial, and the pardons board turned down his bid for clemency last month after considering the case again.
Two hours before Davis' scheduled Sept. 23 execution, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the stay, sparking a celebration among Davis supporters.
"This is not over yet," said Davis, who sounded upbeat speaking to the crowd by phone. "This is the beginning of my blessing."
Davis' supporters blast decision
As word of the top U.S. court's latest decision trickled down Tuesday, Davis' supporters sent out dispatches blasting the move.
"It is disgraceful that the highest court in the land could sink so low when doubts surrounding Davis' guilt are so high," said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA, which has lobbied for the inmate's release.
Chatham County District Attorney Spencer Lawton, who has declined to speak to the media about the Davis case while it was still pending, broke his silence with a 14-page statement after the Supreme Court's decision.
In it, he said the witness recantations failed to meet the legal threshold required to call a new trial. The high rate of recantations, he said, also "invites a suggestion of manipulation, making it very difficult to believe."
In a telephone interview, Lawton said his reaction to the ruling was "ambivalence."
"I'm not a great fan of the death penalty," he said. "I wish of course that none of this had happened, but it has. And I've done what I had to do. The law is the law. It says you kill a police officer, you're subject to the death penalty."
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27179641/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MSN Privacy . Legal
© 2008 MSNBC.com
The Supreme Court's decision to deny Troy Davis' petition means that no court of law will ever hold a hearing on the witnesses who have recanted their trial testimony in sworn affidavits.
Doubts about his guilt raised by these multiple witness recantations will never be resolved. An execution under such a cloud of doubt would undermine public confidence in the state's criminal justice system and would be a grave miscarriage of justice.
The state of Georgia can still do the responsible thing and prevent the execution of Troy Davis:
Write a letter to the editor calling on Georgia to stop the execution of Troy Davis!
Call on the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to reconsider its previous decision and grant clemency to Troy Davis.
Urge your friends and family to go to amnestyusa.org/troydavis or text TROY to 90999 to add their voices to the over 200,000 that have already taken action on this case.
Justices halted execution to consider appeal of conviction of killing cop
The Associated Press
updated 3:55 p.m. ET, Tues., Oct. 14, 2008
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way Tuesday for a man to be put to death for killing a police officer, despite calls from his supporters to reconsider the case because seven of nine key witnesses against him have recanted their testimony.
The high court granted Troy Davis a reprieve Sept. 23, less than two hours before his scheduled execution. But the justices declined Tuesday to give his appeal a full-blown hearing, clearing the last hurdle toward his death by lethal injection.
It was not immediately clear when his execution will take place.
Davis, 39, was sentenced to death for the 1989 murder of 27-year-old Mark MacPhail, a police officer in Savannah, Ga. But doubts about his guilt and a high-profile publicity campaign have won him the support of prominent advocates including former President Jimmy Carter and South Africa Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Options are few
Davis' legal team said it was frantically searching for other recourse, but those prospects seem dim.
"I think it's disgusting, terrible. I'm extremely disappointed," said Martina Correia, Davis' sister, when told about the decision. "Well, we still have to fight. We can't stop."
MacPhail's family said it was relieved by the ruling.
"I'm hoping that soon we will have some peace, that this will all be over," said MacPhail's mother, Anneliese MacPhail, who is 75.
MacPhail was working off-duty as a security guard at a bus station when he rushed to help a homeless man who had been pistol-whipped at a nearby parking lot. He and was shot twice when he approached Davis and two other men.
Witnesses identified Davis as the shooter at his 1991 trial.
New evidence
But Davis' lawyers say new evidence proves their client was a victim of mistaken identity. Besides those who have recanted their testimony, three others who did not testify have said Sylvester "Red" Coles — who testified against Davis at his trial — confessed to the killing.
Coles refused to talk about the case when contacted by The Associated Press during a 2007 court appearance and has no listed phone number.
Prosecutors have said the case is closed. They also say some of the witness affidavits simply repeat what a trial jury has already heard, while others are irrelevant because they come from witnesses who never testified.
A divided Georgia Supreme Court twice rejected his request for a new trial, and the pardons board turned down his bid for clemency last month after considering the case again.
Two hours before Davis' scheduled Sept. 23 execution, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the stay, sparking a celebration among Davis supporters.
"This is not over yet," said Davis, who sounded upbeat speaking to the crowd by phone. "This is the beginning of my blessing."
Davis' supporters blast decision
As word of the top U.S. court's latest decision trickled down Tuesday, Davis' supporters sent out dispatches blasting the move.
"It is disgraceful that the highest court in the land could sink so low when doubts surrounding Davis' guilt are so high," said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA, which has lobbied for the inmate's release.
Chatham County District Attorney Spencer Lawton, who has declined to speak to the media about the Davis case while it was still pending, broke his silence with a 14-page statement after the Supreme Court's decision.
In it, he said the witness recantations failed to meet the legal threshold required to call a new trial. The high rate of recantations, he said, also "invites a suggestion of manipulation, making it very difficult to believe."
In a telephone interview, Lawton said his reaction to the ruling was "ambivalence."
"I'm not a great fan of the death penalty," he said. "I wish of course that none of this had happened, but it has. And I've done what I had to do. The law is the law. It says you kill a police officer, you're subject to the death penalty."
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27179641/
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07 October 2008
Global turmoil could reverse prosperity
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27058577/
Will the $700 billion bailout be enough to stem a worldwide financial crisis?
By David Cho and Binyamin Appelbaum
The Washington Post
updated 12:07 a.m. ET, Tues., Oct. 7, 2008
What went wrong?
Last week, the nation's political leaders said the financial system would collapse unless they passed a $700 billion rescue package for Wall Street. On Monday, the first day of trading after the plan passed, the financial system continued to melt down anyway.
Here's why: The plan developed by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. to buy troubled U.S. mortgage assets might not start for another month. And, despite its huge price tag, it already seems paltry compared with the scale of the rapidly evolving global crisis.
"People are realizing that the Paulson plan is not going to be nearly enough. It's not because the plan is ill-conceived. It looks like it's the right thing to do, but the problem is just growing astronomically," said Martin Evans, a professor of finance and economics at Georgetown University.
The bailout plan is focused on buttressing U.S. financial institutions. But it was global markets that plunged yesterday, as investors sold off commodities in Brazil, currency in Mexico, bank stocks in Russia and the short-term debt of the state of California.
Robert B. Zoellick, president of the World Bank, said the global financial system may have reached a "tipping point" -- the moment when a crisis cascades into a full-blown meltdown and becomes extremely difficult for governments to contain.
The mushrooming problems "will trigger business failures and possibly banking emergencies. Some countries will slip toward balance of payment crises," he said yesterday, speaking at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
The crisis threatens to reverse years of prosperity that financed the economic growth in developed and emerging countries through a global financial system that made credit widely available. Banks and governments were able to borrow money on an unprecedented scale by selling debt in new kinds of packages, allowing even the least credit-worthy consumers to borrow and spend.
China exported goods and then loaned the money back to the United States by buying those new debt packages. The story was similar for Russia, which exported massive amounts of energy to Europe, and for Brazil, which exported commodities including orange juice and sugar. All used the massive inflows of borrowed money from the developed world to fuel economic expansions and stock market bubbles.
Yesterday, trading on the major stock exchanges in Russia and Brazil was halted after prices crashed. China's major indexes fell about 5 percent. The bubbles appear to be bursting in rapid succession.
Faced with these developments, the markets have not been in a mood to cheer the passage of the Paulson rescue package. At one point yesterday, the Dow Jones industrial average had fallen nearly 800 points, more than 7 percent. It ended the day off 3.6 percent, below 10,000 for the first time since 2004.
"Quite frankly, what the market is looking for is some kind of coordinated action from central banks around the world." said Kathy Lien, director of currency research at GFT Forex. The Paulson plan, she added, is like a "Band-Aid for a problem that stretches way beyond the banking system now."
Treasury officials say that ramping up the rescue package will take time, and that they are working as fast as possible.
Yesterday, the department released the contracting rules for the asset managers they expect to hire to oversee its rescue program, requiring interested parties to apply by tomorrow. The Treasury also named Neel Kashkari as the interim assistant secretary of the Treasury for financial stability to oversee the rescue program until January when the next administration takes office.
Despite the mammoth bailout, Zoellick and other leaders are now urging central banks from the leading economies around the world to devise a coordinated response.
They don't have a lot of time.
It's been nearly three weeks since Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke warned lawmakers that the nation was at risk of a full-blown meltdown.
Since then, the same problems have afflicted Europe. Governments have bailed out five large financial firms, including two this weekend, triggering fears of additional bank collapses in Europe.
Hypo Real Estate, a German real estate lender, is collapsing under the weight of its own bad loans, forcing the German government and leading banks to announce Sunday that they would lend the company up to $68 billion.
The rescue follows the nationalization of one of England's largest real estate lenders, Bradford & Bingley. Iceland also has been forced to rescue one of its largest banks, Glitnir. And several European countries were forced to invest billions of dollars in Fortis, one of the largest banks on the Continent, in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to stave off its collapse. Fortis, too, has now been nationalized.
With confidence in banks basically shattered, governments increasingly have been forced to issue explicit guarantees that bank deposits will remain safe.
Ireland last week guaranteed all deposits and liabilities, totaling about $540 billion, at six domestic banks. The pledge included branches of the six banks outside of Ireland, and excluded branches of other banks in Ireland, raising concerns that deposits would now flow from rivals into the coffers of the six government-protected banks as investors fled to safety.
Germany promised Sunday to guarantee all private savings accounts, which hold at least $800 billion. Denmark yesterday announced that it would guarantee all deposits as well.
The economies of Ireland and Denmark have officially fallen into recession. Investors meanwhile are worried that Pakistan and Argentina might default on their debts. In India, the average interest on loans between banks jumped above 11 percent, reflecting a breakdown of trust.
The bailout has not even thawed critical segments of the U.S. credit markets.
U.S. corporations sold $1.25 billion in bonds last week, marking the sharpest drop in sales volume since 1999, according to Bloomberg. Short-term commercial borrowing fell to $1.6 trillion, down 9 percent in the past two weeks, almost entirely because of a massive decline in borrowing by financial companies that cannot find lenders at any price.
September saw the worst monthly losses in the history of the hedge fund industry. Investor withdrawals could lead to the collapse of major funds, triggering further sell-offs and exacerbating the financial crisis.
Investors are also increasingly concerned that more U.S. banks will fail before the Treasury can launch the rescue program. Shares of National City, a regional bank based in Cleveland, fell 27 percent yesterday.
Bank of America said its third-quarter profit fell 68 percent, largely because of losses on mortgage loans and credit cards. The company reduced the dividend on its widely held shares by half, and said it would try to raise another $10 billion from investors. Its shares were down about 7 percent to $32.22.
"These are the most difficult times for financial institutions that I have experienced in my 39 years in banking," chief executive Ken Lewis said in a conference call.
© 2008 The Washington Post Company
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27058577/
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© 2008 MSNBC.com
Will the $700 billion bailout be enough to stem a worldwide financial crisis?
By David Cho and Binyamin Appelbaum
The Washington Post
updated 12:07 a.m. ET, Tues., Oct. 7, 2008
What went wrong?
Last week, the nation's political leaders said the financial system would collapse unless they passed a $700 billion rescue package for Wall Street. On Monday, the first day of trading after the plan passed, the financial system continued to melt down anyway.
Here's why: The plan developed by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. to buy troubled U.S. mortgage assets might not start for another month. And, despite its huge price tag, it already seems paltry compared with the scale of the rapidly evolving global crisis.
"People are realizing that the Paulson plan is not going to be nearly enough. It's not because the plan is ill-conceived. It looks like it's the right thing to do, but the problem is just growing astronomically," said Martin Evans, a professor of finance and economics at Georgetown University.
The bailout plan is focused on buttressing U.S. financial institutions. But it was global markets that plunged yesterday, as investors sold off commodities in Brazil, currency in Mexico, bank stocks in Russia and the short-term debt of the state of California.
Robert B. Zoellick, president of the World Bank, said the global financial system may have reached a "tipping point" -- the moment when a crisis cascades into a full-blown meltdown and becomes extremely difficult for governments to contain.
The mushrooming problems "will trigger business failures and possibly banking emergencies. Some countries will slip toward balance of payment crises," he said yesterday, speaking at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
The crisis threatens to reverse years of prosperity that financed the economic growth in developed and emerging countries through a global financial system that made credit widely available. Banks and governments were able to borrow money on an unprecedented scale by selling debt in new kinds of packages, allowing even the least credit-worthy consumers to borrow and spend.
China exported goods and then loaned the money back to the United States by buying those new debt packages. The story was similar for Russia, which exported massive amounts of energy to Europe, and for Brazil, which exported commodities including orange juice and sugar. All used the massive inflows of borrowed money from the developed world to fuel economic expansions and stock market bubbles.
Yesterday, trading on the major stock exchanges in Russia and Brazil was halted after prices crashed. China's major indexes fell about 5 percent. The bubbles appear to be bursting in rapid succession.
Faced with these developments, the markets have not been in a mood to cheer the passage of the Paulson rescue package. At one point yesterday, the Dow Jones industrial average had fallen nearly 800 points, more than 7 percent. It ended the day off 3.6 percent, below 10,000 for the first time since 2004.
"Quite frankly, what the market is looking for is some kind of coordinated action from central banks around the world." said Kathy Lien, director of currency research at GFT Forex. The Paulson plan, she added, is like a "Band-Aid for a problem that stretches way beyond the banking system now."
Treasury officials say that ramping up the rescue package will take time, and that they are working as fast as possible.
Yesterday, the department released the contracting rules for the asset managers they expect to hire to oversee its rescue program, requiring interested parties to apply by tomorrow. The Treasury also named Neel Kashkari as the interim assistant secretary of the Treasury for financial stability to oversee the rescue program until January when the next administration takes office.
Despite the mammoth bailout, Zoellick and other leaders are now urging central banks from the leading economies around the world to devise a coordinated response.
They don't have a lot of time.
It's been nearly three weeks since Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke warned lawmakers that the nation was at risk of a full-blown meltdown.
Since then, the same problems have afflicted Europe. Governments have bailed out five large financial firms, including two this weekend, triggering fears of additional bank collapses in Europe.
Hypo Real Estate, a German real estate lender, is collapsing under the weight of its own bad loans, forcing the German government and leading banks to announce Sunday that they would lend the company up to $68 billion.
The rescue follows the nationalization of one of England's largest real estate lenders, Bradford & Bingley. Iceland also has been forced to rescue one of its largest banks, Glitnir. And several European countries were forced to invest billions of dollars in Fortis, one of the largest banks on the Continent, in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to stave off its collapse. Fortis, too, has now been nationalized.
With confidence in banks basically shattered, governments increasingly have been forced to issue explicit guarantees that bank deposits will remain safe.
Ireland last week guaranteed all deposits and liabilities, totaling about $540 billion, at six domestic banks. The pledge included branches of the six banks outside of Ireland, and excluded branches of other banks in Ireland, raising concerns that deposits would now flow from rivals into the coffers of the six government-protected banks as investors fled to safety.
Germany promised Sunday to guarantee all private savings accounts, which hold at least $800 billion. Denmark yesterday announced that it would guarantee all deposits as well.
The economies of Ireland and Denmark have officially fallen into recession. Investors meanwhile are worried that Pakistan and Argentina might default on their debts. In India, the average interest on loans between banks jumped above 11 percent, reflecting a breakdown of trust.
The bailout has not even thawed critical segments of the U.S. credit markets.
U.S. corporations sold $1.25 billion in bonds last week, marking the sharpest drop in sales volume since 1999, according to Bloomberg. Short-term commercial borrowing fell to $1.6 trillion, down 9 percent in the past two weeks, almost entirely because of a massive decline in borrowing by financial companies that cannot find lenders at any price.
September saw the worst monthly losses in the history of the hedge fund industry. Investor withdrawals could lead to the collapse of major funds, triggering further sell-offs and exacerbating the financial crisis.
Investors are also increasingly concerned that more U.S. banks will fail before the Treasury can launch the rescue program. Shares of National City, a regional bank based in Cleveland, fell 27 percent yesterday.
Bank of America said its third-quarter profit fell 68 percent, largely because of losses on mortgage loans and credit cards. The company reduced the dividend on its widely held shares by half, and said it would try to raise another $10 billion from investors. Its shares were down about 7 percent to $32.22.
"These are the most difficult times for financial institutions that I have experienced in my 39 years in banking," chief executive Ken Lewis said in a conference call.
© 2008 The Washington Post Company
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27058577/
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