PROF. FRANCIS BOYLE : THE PENTAGON IS POISED TO RESUME OPEN AIR WEAPONS TESTING (OF BIOLOGICAL AND/OR CHEMICAL WEAPONS)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Boyle, Francis FBOYLE@law.uiuc.edu
Date: Dec 4, 2007 10:30 AM
Subject: FW: [biodefense] FW: Scoop Link: Pentagon Poised To Resume Open Air Weapons Testing
To: ben.merhav@gmail.com
Francis A. Boyle
Law Building504
E. Pennsylvania Ave.Champaign,
IL 61820 USA217-333-7954
(Voice)217-244-1478 (Fax)
(personal comments only)
EXCERPTS :
"...The Pentagon's annual report apparently calls for both the developmental and operational "field testing of (CBW) full systems," not just simulations.The Pentagon's report to Congress contains the following passage: "More than thirty years have passed since outdoor live-agent chemical tests were banned in the United States, and the last outdoor test with live chemical agent was performed, so much of the infra structure for the field testing of chemical detectors no longer exists or is seriously outdated. The currently budgeted improvements in the T&E infrastructurewill greatly enhance both the developmental and operational fieldtesting of full systems, with better simulated representation of threats and characterization of system response."
"T&E" is an acronym for testing and evaluation."Either the military has resumed open-air testing already or they are preparing to do so," said Francis Boyle, a University of Illinois Professor of International Law who authored the implementing legislation for the U.S. Biological Weapons Convention signed into law by President George Bush Sr. and who has tracked subsequent developments closely."
I am stunned by the nature of this development," Boyle said. "This is a major reversal of policy." The 1972 treaty against germ warfare, which the U.S. signed, forbids developing weapons that spread disease, such as anthrax, a pathogen that is regarded by the military as "ideal" for conducting germ warfare."The Pentagon is fully prepared to launch biological warfare by means of anthrax," Boyle charged. "All the equipment has been acquired and all the training conducted and most combat-ready members of U.S. armed forces have been given protective equipment and vaccines that allegedly would protect them from that agent."
Open-air testing takes research into deadly agents out of the laboratories in order to study their effectiveness, including their aerial dispersion patterns, and whether they actually infect and kill in field trials. Since the anthrax attacks on Congress in October, 2001,the Bush administration has funded a vast biological research expansion at hundreds of private and university laboratories in the U.S. and abroad involving anthrax and other deadly pathogens.The anthrax attacks killed five people, including two postal workers,injured 17 others and temporarily shut down the operations of the U.S.Congress, Supreme Court, and other Federal entities.
Although a Federal statute permits the president to authorize open-air testing of CBW agents, Boyle said this "does not solve the compliance problem that it might violate the international Chemical Weapons Convention and the Biological Weapons Convention as well as their related domestic implementing legislation making such violations crimes."Boyle charged the U.S. is already "in breach" of both conventions and also of U.S. domestic criminal law implementing them.
In February, 2003,for example, the U.S. granted itself a patent on an illegal, long-range biological-weapons grenade, evidently for offensive purposes.Boyle said the development of anthrax for possible offensive purposes is underscored by the government's efforts "to try to stockpile anthrax vaccines and antibiotics for 25-million plus Americans to protect the civilian population in the event there is any 'blowback' from the use of anthrax in biowarfare abroad by the Pentagon.""In theory," Boyle added, "you cannot wage biowarfare abroad unless you can protect your civilian population from either retaliation in kind, or blowback, or both." Under Project BioShield, Homeland Security is spending $5.6 billion to stockpile vaccines and drugs to fight anthrax,smallpox, and other bioterror agents. The project had been marked by delays and operational problems and on December 12th last year Congress passed legislation to pump another $1 billion into BioShield to fund three years of additional research by the private sector.
Boyle said evidence the U.S. has super-weapons-grade anthrax was demonstrated in the October, 2001, anthrax mail attacks on Senators Thomas Daschle(D-S.D.) and Patrick Leahy(D-Vt.) The strain of highly sophisticated anthrax employed has allegedly been traced back to the primary U.S. Army biological warfare campus at Ft. Detrick, Md. The attacks killed five persons and sickened 17 others. A current effort to expand Ft. Detrick has sparked widespread community opposition,according to a report in the Baltimore Sun."Obviously, someone working for the United States government has a stockpile of super-weapons grade anthrax that can be used again domestically for the purposes of political terrorism or abroad to wage offensive warfare," Boyle said.
The Associated Press has reported the U.S. Army is replacing its Military Institute of Infectious Diseases at Ft. Detrick "with a new laboratory that would be a component of a biodefense campus operated by several agencies." The Army told AP the laboratory is intended to continue research solely for defense against biological threats.Undercutting the argument U.S. research is for "defensive" purposes is the fact government scientists have been creating new strains of pathogens for which there is no known cure. Richard Novick, a professor of microbiology at New York University, has stated, "I cannot envision any imaginable justification for changing the antigenicity of anthrax as a defensive measure." Changing a pathogen's antigenicity means altering its basic structure so that existing vaccines will prove ineffective against it.Biological warfare involves the use of living organisms for military purposes. Such weapons can be viral, bacterial, and fungal, among other forms, and can be spread over a large geographic terrain by wind, water,insect, animal, or human transmission, according to Jeremy Rifkin,author of "The Biotech Century"(Penguin).
Boyle said the Federal government has been plowing money into upgrading Ft. Detrick, Md., and other CBW facilities where such pathogens are studied, developed, tested, and stored. By some estimates, the U.S.since 2002 has invested some $43 billion in hundreds of government,commercial, and university laboratories in the U.S. for the study of pathogens that might be used for biological warfare.According to Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright,more than 300 scientific institutions and 12,000 individuals have access to pathogens suitable for biowarfare and terrorism. Ebright found that the Number of National Institute of Health grants to research infectious diseases with biowarfare potential shot up from 33 in the 1995-2000period to 497 by 2006.Ebright has stated the government's ten fold expansion of Biosafety Level-4 laboratories, such as those at FortDetrick, raises the risk of accidents and the diversion of dangerous organisms. "If a worker in one of these facilities removes a single viral particle or a single cell, which cannot be detected or prevented,that single particle or cell can form the basis of an outbreak."During the Cold War era, notably in the Fifties and Sixties, various Government agencies engaged in open-air CBW testing on U.S. soil and on naval vessels at sea to study the effects of weaponized pathogens. U.S. cities, including New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, were among the targets and sickness and even a number of deaths were reported as a result.
According to an article titled "Lethal Breeze" by Lee Davidson in the Deseret News of Salt Lake City of June 5, 1994, "In decades of secret chemical arms tests, the Army released into Utah winds more than a half million pounds of deadly nerve agents." Among them, he said, was VX, a pinhead-sized drop of which can be lethal. The tests were conducted at Dugway Proving Ground but Davidson said the evidence suggests "some(agents) may have escaped with the wind."Pentagon documents obtained by the News listed 1,635 field trials or demonstrations with nerve agents VX, GA and GB between 1951 and 1969,"when the Army discontinued use of actual nerve agents in open-air tests after escaped nerve gas apparently killed 6,000 sheep in Skull Valley,"Davidson wrote. The Skull Valley strike also sickened a rancher and members of his family.Boyle has previously charged the Pentagon with "gearing up to fight and 'win' biological warfare" pursuant to two Bush national strategy directives adopted in 2002 "without public knowledge and review." He contends the Pentagon's Chemical and Biological Defense program was revised in 2003 to implement those directives, endorsing "first-use"strike of chemical and biological weapons in war.
The implementing legislation Boyle wrote that was enacted unanimously by Congress was known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989.Boyle has written extensively on the subject. Among his published works are "Biowarfare and Terrorism" and "Destroying World Order: U.S. Imperialism In the Middle East Before and After September 11th," both from Clarity Press."
(Emphasis added - B.M.)
Monday, December 3, 2007
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Francis Boyle: Our Nuremberg Moment
http://dennisloo.blogspot.com/2007/12/francis-boyle-our-nuremberg-moment.html
Law and Resistance:The Republic in Crisis and the People's Response
Speech by Professor Francis A. Boyle ,University of Illinois College of Law
Tuesday, November 20, 2007 - 6 p.m.
Northwestern University School of Law Lincoln Auditorium 357 E. Chicago Avenue
Sent by Francis Boyle - Nov 21, 2007 Chicago, Ill.
Sponsored by: National Lawyers Guild, Northwestern University Student Law School and Chicago Chapter of the NLG
Since the impeachable installation of George Bush Jr. as President by the U.S. Supreme Court's Gang of Five, the people of the world have witnessed a government in the United States that has demonstrated little if any respect for fundamental considerations of international law, human rights, or the United States Constitution.
Instead, the world has watched a comprehensive and malicious assault upon the integrity of the international and domestic legal orders by a group of men and women who are thoroughly Machiavellian and Straussian in their perception of international relations and in their conduct of both foreign affairs and American domestic policy.
Even more seriously, in many instances specific components of the Bush Jr. administration's foreign policy constitute ongoing criminal activity under well recognized principles of both international law and United States domestic law, and in particular the Nuremberg Charter, the Nuremberg Judgment, and the Nuremberg Principles, as well as the Pentagon's own U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 on The Law of Land Warfare, which applies to President Bush Jr. himself as Commander-in-Chief of United States Armed Forces under Article II, Section 2 of the United States Constitution.
Depending on the substantive issues involved, these international and domestic crimes typically include but are not limited to the Nuremberg offences of “crimes against peace”-- so far Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and perhaps their longstanding threatened war of aggression against Iran. Their criminal responsibility also concerns “crimes against humanity” and war crimes as well as grave breaches of the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the 1907 Hague Regulations on land warfare: torture at Guantanamo, Bhagram, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere; enforced disappearances, assassinations, murders, kidnappings, extraordinary renditions, “shock and awe,” depleted uranium, white phosphorous, cluster bombs, Fallujah, etc. Furthermore, various members of the Bush Jr. administration have committed numerous inchoate crimes incidental to these substantive offences that under the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles as well as U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 (1956) are international crimes in their own right: planning, and preparation, which they are currently doing today against Iran; solicitation, incitement, conspiracy, complicity, attempt, aiding and abetting.
Of course the terrible irony of today's situation is that six decades ago at Nuremberg the U.S. government participated in the prosecution, punishment and execution of Nazi government officials for committing some of the same types of heinous international crimes that the Neo-Conservative Straussian members of the Bush Jr. administration currently inflict upon people all over the world. To be sure, I personally oppose the imposition of capital punishment upon any human being for any reason no matter how monstrous their crimes, whether they be Bush Jr., Tony Blair, or Saddam Hussein.
According to basic principles of international criminal law set forth in paragraph 501 of U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10, all high level civilian officials and military officers in the U.S. government who either knew or should have known that soldiers or civilians under their control (such as the C.I.A. or mercenary contractors) committed or were about to commit international crimes and failed to take the measures necessary to stop them, or to punish them, or both, are likewise personally responsible for the commission of international crimes. This category of officialdom who actually knew or should have known of the commission of these international crimes under their jurisdiction and failed to do anything about them include at the very top of America's criminal chain-of-command President Bush Jr. and Vice-President Cheney; former U.S. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld; Secretary of State Rice; Director of National Intelligence Negroponte, who was previously in charge of the contra terror war against the people of Nicaragua that murdered 35, 000 civilians; National Security Advisor Hadley; his Deputy Elliot Abrams, who was also criminally responsible for murdering 35,000 people in Nicaragua; former U.S. Attorney General Gonzales, criminally responsible for the torture campaign launched by the Bush Jr. administration; and the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staffs along with the appropriate Regional Commanders-in-Chiefs, especially for Central Command CENTCOM).
These U.S. government officials and their immediate subordinates are responsible for the commission of crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and war crimes as specified by the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles as well as by U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 of 1956. Today in international legal terms, the Bush Jr. administration itself should now be viewed as constituting an ongoing criminal conspiracy under international criminal law in violation of the Nuremberg Charter, the Nuremberg Judgment, and the Nuremberg Principles, because of its formulation and undertaking of serial wars of aggression, crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and war crimes that are legally akin to those perpetrated by the former Nazi regime in Germany. As a consequence, American citizens possess the basic right under international law and the United States domestic law, including the U.S. Constitution, to engage in acts of civil resistance designed to prevent, impede, thwart, or terminate ongoing criminal activities perpetrated by Bush Jr. administration officials in their conduct of foreign affairs policies and military operations purported to relate to defense and counter-terrorism.
For that very reason, large numbers of American citizens have decided to act on their own cognizance by means of civil resistance in order to demand that the Bush Jr. administration adhere to basic principles of international law, of U.S. domestic law, and of our own Constitution in its conduct of foreign affairs and military operations. Mistakenly, however, such actions have been defined to constitute classic instances of "civil disobedience" as historically practiced in the United States. And the conventional status quo admonition by the U.S. power elite and its sycophantic news media for those who knowingly engage in “civil disobedience” has always been that they must meekly accept their punishment for having performed a prima facie breach of the positive laws as a demonstration of their good faith and moral commitment.
Nothing could be further from the truth!
Today's civil resisters are the sheriffs! The Bush Jr. administration officials are the outlaws!
Here I would like to suggest a different way of thinking about civil resistance activities that are specifically designed to thwart, prevent, or impede ongoing criminal activity by members of the Bush Jr. administration under well-recognized principles of international and U.S. domestic law. Such civil resistance activities represent the last constitutional avenue open to the American people to preserve their democratic form of government with its historical commitment to the rule of law and human rights.
Civil resistance is the last hope America has to prevent the Bush Jr. administration from moving even farther down the path of lawless violence in Southwest Asia, military interventionism in Latin America and Africa, and nuclear confrontation with Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China.
Such measures of "civil resistance" must not be confused with, and indeed must be carefully distinguished from, acts of "civil disobedience" as traditionally defined. In today's civil resistance cases, what we witness are U.S. citizens attempting to prevent the ongoing commission of international and domestic crimes under well-recognized principles of international law and U.S. domestic law. This is a phenomenon essentially different from the classic civil disobedience cases of the 1950s and 1960s where incredibly courageous African Americans and their supporters were conscientiously violating domestic laws for the express purpose of changing them.
By contrast, today's civil resisters are acting for the express purpose of upholding the rule of law, the U.S. Constitution, human rights, and international law.
Applying the term “civil disobedience” to such civil resistors mistakenly presumes their guilt and thus perversely exonerates the Bush Jr. administration criminals.Civil resistors disobeyed nothing, but to the contrary obeyed international law and the United States Constitution.
By contrast, Bush Jr. administration officials disobeyed fundamental principles of international law as well as U.S. criminal law and thus committed international crimes and U.S. domestic crimes as well as impeachable violations of the United States Constitution. The civil resistors are the sheriffs enforcing international law, U.S. criminal law and the U.S. Constitution against the criminals working for the Bush Jr. administration!
Today the American people must reaffirm our commitment to the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles by holding our government officials fully accountable under international law and U.S. domestic law for the commission of such grievous international and domestic crimes. We must not permit any aspect of our foreign affairs and defense policies to be conducted by acknowledged “war criminals” according to the U.S. government's own official definition of that term as set forth in U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 (1956), the U.S. War Crimes Act, and the Geneva Conventions.
The American people must insist upon the impeachment, dismissal, resignation, indictment, conviction, and long-term incarceration of all U.S. government officials guilty of such heinous international and domestic crimes. That is precisely what American civil resisters are doing today!
This same right of civil resistance extends pari passu to all citizens of the world community of states. Everyone around the world has both the right and the duty under international law to resist ongoing criminal activities perpetrated by the Bush Jr. administration and its nefarious foreign accomplices in allied governments such as in Britain, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Georgia, etc.
If not so restrained, the Bush Jr. administration could very well precipitate a Third World War. In this regard, during the course of an October 17, 2007 press conference, President Bush Jr. terrorized the entire world with the threat of World War III if he could not work his illegal will upon Iran. Then Russian President Vladimir Putin responded in kind by likewise terrorizing the entire world with the prospect of yet another Cuban Missile Crisis if he did not get his way on the needlessly provocative anti-ballistic missile systems that the Bush Jr. administration plans to locate in Poland and the Czech Republic.
The publicly threatened U.S./Israeli attack upon Iran could readily set off a chain of events that would culminate in World War III, and could easily go nuclear. It is my opinion that the Bush Jr. administration would welcome the outbreak of a Third World War, and in any event is fully prepared to use tactical nuclear weapons against Muslim and Arab states and peoples.
After September 11, 2001 the United States of America has vilified and demonized Muslims and Arabs almost to the same extent that America inflicted upon the Japanese and Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. As the Nazis had previously demonstrated with respect to the Jews, a government must first dehumanize and scapegoat a race of people before its citizens will tolerate if not approve their elimination: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In post-9/11 America we are directly confronted with the prospect of a nuclear war of extermination conducted by our White Racist Judeo-Christian Power Elite against People of Color in the Muslim and Arab worlds in order to steal their oil and gas. The Crusades all over again. But this time nuclear Armageddon stares all of humankind right in the face!
We American lawyers must be inspired by the stunning example set by those heroic Pakistani lawyers now leading the struggle against the brutal Bush-supported Musharraf military dictatorship. We American lawyers must now lead the fight against the Bush Jr. dictatorship! This is our Nuremberg Moment!Thank you. B) Copyright 2007 by Francis A. Boyle. All Rights reserved.***
[Francis Boyle is professor of law at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. A Harvard law graduate, for the last twenty years he has been involved as lawyer and/or witness in the major cases challenging U.S. defense policy, notably nuclear issues and, in recent years, preemptive wars. He speaks and writes regularly on civil resistance and anti-war issues. Most recently he helped to defend Camilo Mejia, the first military resister to the current Iraq War.]
(Emphasis added - B.M.)
http://dennisloo.blogspot.com/2007/12/francis-boyle-our-nuremberg-moment.html
Law and Resistance:The Republic in Crisis and the People's Response
Speech by Professor Francis A. Boyle ,University of Illinois College of Law
Tuesday, November 20, 2007 - 6 p.m.
Northwestern University School of Law Lincoln Auditorium 357 E. Chicago Avenue
Sent by Francis Boyle - Nov 21, 2007 Chicago, Ill.
Sponsored by: National Lawyers Guild, Northwestern University Student Law School and Chicago Chapter of the NLG
Since the impeachable installation of George Bush Jr. as President by the U.S. Supreme Court's Gang of Five, the people of the world have witnessed a government in the United States that has demonstrated little if any respect for fundamental considerations of international law, human rights, or the United States Constitution.
Instead, the world has watched a comprehensive and malicious assault upon the integrity of the international and domestic legal orders by a group of men and women who are thoroughly Machiavellian and Straussian in their perception of international relations and in their conduct of both foreign affairs and American domestic policy.
Even more seriously, in many instances specific components of the Bush Jr. administration's foreign policy constitute ongoing criminal activity under well recognized principles of both international law and United States domestic law, and in particular the Nuremberg Charter, the Nuremberg Judgment, and the Nuremberg Principles, as well as the Pentagon's own U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 on The Law of Land Warfare, which applies to President Bush Jr. himself as Commander-in-Chief of United States Armed Forces under Article II, Section 2 of the United States Constitution.
Depending on the substantive issues involved, these international and domestic crimes typically include but are not limited to the Nuremberg offences of “crimes against peace”-- so far Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and perhaps their longstanding threatened war of aggression against Iran. Their criminal responsibility also concerns “crimes against humanity” and war crimes as well as grave breaches of the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the 1907 Hague Regulations on land warfare: torture at Guantanamo, Bhagram, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere; enforced disappearances, assassinations, murders, kidnappings, extraordinary renditions, “shock and awe,” depleted uranium, white phosphorous, cluster bombs, Fallujah, etc. Furthermore, various members of the Bush Jr. administration have committed numerous inchoate crimes incidental to these substantive offences that under the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles as well as U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 (1956) are international crimes in their own right: planning, and preparation, which they are currently doing today against Iran; solicitation, incitement, conspiracy, complicity, attempt, aiding and abetting.
Of course the terrible irony of today's situation is that six decades ago at Nuremberg the U.S. government participated in the prosecution, punishment and execution of Nazi government officials for committing some of the same types of heinous international crimes that the Neo-Conservative Straussian members of the Bush Jr. administration currently inflict upon people all over the world. To be sure, I personally oppose the imposition of capital punishment upon any human being for any reason no matter how monstrous their crimes, whether they be Bush Jr., Tony Blair, or Saddam Hussein.
According to basic principles of international criminal law set forth in paragraph 501 of U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10, all high level civilian officials and military officers in the U.S. government who either knew or should have known that soldiers or civilians under their control (such as the C.I.A. or mercenary contractors) committed or were about to commit international crimes and failed to take the measures necessary to stop them, or to punish them, or both, are likewise personally responsible for the commission of international crimes. This category of officialdom who actually knew or should have known of the commission of these international crimes under their jurisdiction and failed to do anything about them include at the very top of America's criminal chain-of-command President Bush Jr. and Vice-President Cheney; former U.S. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld; Secretary of State Rice; Director of National Intelligence Negroponte, who was previously in charge of the contra terror war against the people of Nicaragua that murdered 35, 000 civilians; National Security Advisor Hadley; his Deputy Elliot Abrams, who was also criminally responsible for murdering 35,000 people in Nicaragua; former U.S. Attorney General Gonzales, criminally responsible for the torture campaign launched by the Bush Jr. administration; and the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staffs along with the appropriate Regional Commanders-in-Chiefs, especially for Central Command CENTCOM).
These U.S. government officials and their immediate subordinates are responsible for the commission of crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and war crimes as specified by the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles as well as by U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 of 1956. Today in international legal terms, the Bush Jr. administration itself should now be viewed as constituting an ongoing criminal conspiracy under international criminal law in violation of the Nuremberg Charter, the Nuremberg Judgment, and the Nuremberg Principles, because of its formulation and undertaking of serial wars of aggression, crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and war crimes that are legally akin to those perpetrated by the former Nazi regime in Germany. As a consequence, American citizens possess the basic right under international law and the United States domestic law, including the U.S. Constitution, to engage in acts of civil resistance designed to prevent, impede, thwart, or terminate ongoing criminal activities perpetrated by Bush Jr. administration officials in their conduct of foreign affairs policies and military operations purported to relate to defense and counter-terrorism.
For that very reason, large numbers of American citizens have decided to act on their own cognizance by means of civil resistance in order to demand that the Bush Jr. administration adhere to basic principles of international law, of U.S. domestic law, and of our own Constitution in its conduct of foreign affairs and military operations. Mistakenly, however, such actions have been defined to constitute classic instances of "civil disobedience" as historically practiced in the United States. And the conventional status quo admonition by the U.S. power elite and its sycophantic news media for those who knowingly engage in “civil disobedience” has always been that they must meekly accept their punishment for having performed a prima facie breach of the positive laws as a demonstration of their good faith and moral commitment.
Nothing could be further from the truth!
Today's civil resisters are the sheriffs! The Bush Jr. administration officials are the outlaws!
Here I would like to suggest a different way of thinking about civil resistance activities that are specifically designed to thwart, prevent, or impede ongoing criminal activity by members of the Bush Jr. administration under well-recognized principles of international and U.S. domestic law. Such civil resistance activities represent the last constitutional avenue open to the American people to preserve their democratic form of government with its historical commitment to the rule of law and human rights.
Civil resistance is the last hope America has to prevent the Bush Jr. administration from moving even farther down the path of lawless violence in Southwest Asia, military interventionism in Latin America and Africa, and nuclear confrontation with Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China.
Such measures of "civil resistance" must not be confused with, and indeed must be carefully distinguished from, acts of "civil disobedience" as traditionally defined. In today's civil resistance cases, what we witness are U.S. citizens attempting to prevent the ongoing commission of international and domestic crimes under well-recognized principles of international law and U.S. domestic law. This is a phenomenon essentially different from the classic civil disobedience cases of the 1950s and 1960s where incredibly courageous African Americans and their supporters were conscientiously violating domestic laws for the express purpose of changing them.
By contrast, today's civil resisters are acting for the express purpose of upholding the rule of law, the U.S. Constitution, human rights, and international law.
Applying the term “civil disobedience” to such civil resistors mistakenly presumes their guilt and thus perversely exonerates the Bush Jr. administration criminals.Civil resistors disobeyed nothing, but to the contrary obeyed international law and the United States Constitution.
By contrast, Bush Jr. administration officials disobeyed fundamental principles of international law as well as U.S. criminal law and thus committed international crimes and U.S. domestic crimes as well as impeachable violations of the United States Constitution. The civil resistors are the sheriffs enforcing international law, U.S. criminal law and the U.S. Constitution against the criminals working for the Bush Jr. administration!
Today the American people must reaffirm our commitment to the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles by holding our government officials fully accountable under international law and U.S. domestic law for the commission of such grievous international and domestic crimes. We must not permit any aspect of our foreign affairs and defense policies to be conducted by acknowledged “war criminals” according to the U.S. government's own official definition of that term as set forth in U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 (1956), the U.S. War Crimes Act, and the Geneva Conventions.
The American people must insist upon the impeachment, dismissal, resignation, indictment, conviction, and long-term incarceration of all U.S. government officials guilty of such heinous international and domestic crimes. That is precisely what American civil resisters are doing today!
This same right of civil resistance extends pari passu to all citizens of the world community of states. Everyone around the world has both the right and the duty under international law to resist ongoing criminal activities perpetrated by the Bush Jr. administration and its nefarious foreign accomplices in allied governments such as in Britain, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Georgia, etc.
If not so restrained, the Bush Jr. administration could very well precipitate a Third World War. In this regard, during the course of an October 17, 2007 press conference, President Bush Jr. terrorized the entire world with the threat of World War III if he could not work his illegal will upon Iran. Then Russian President Vladimir Putin responded in kind by likewise terrorizing the entire world with the prospect of yet another Cuban Missile Crisis if he did not get his way on the needlessly provocative anti-ballistic missile systems that the Bush Jr. administration plans to locate in Poland and the Czech Republic.
The publicly threatened U.S./Israeli attack upon Iran could readily set off a chain of events that would culminate in World War III, and could easily go nuclear. It is my opinion that the Bush Jr. administration would welcome the outbreak of a Third World War, and in any event is fully prepared to use tactical nuclear weapons against Muslim and Arab states and peoples.
After September 11, 2001 the United States of America has vilified and demonized Muslims and Arabs almost to the same extent that America inflicted upon the Japanese and Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. As the Nazis had previously demonstrated with respect to the Jews, a government must first dehumanize and scapegoat a race of people before its citizens will tolerate if not approve their elimination: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In post-9/11 America we are directly confronted with the prospect of a nuclear war of extermination conducted by our White Racist Judeo-Christian Power Elite against People of Color in the Muslim and Arab worlds in order to steal their oil and gas. The Crusades all over again. But this time nuclear Armageddon stares all of humankind right in the face!
We American lawyers must be inspired by the stunning example set by those heroic Pakistani lawyers now leading the struggle against the brutal Bush-supported Musharraf military dictatorship. We American lawyers must now lead the fight against the Bush Jr. dictatorship! This is our Nuremberg Moment!Thank you. B) Copyright 2007 by Francis A. Boyle. All Rights reserved.***
[Francis Boyle is professor of law at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. A Harvard law graduate, for the last twenty years he has been involved as lawyer and/or witness in the major cases challenging U.S. defense policy, notably nuclear issues and, in recent years, preemptive wars. He speaks and writes regularly on civil resistance and anti-war issues. Most recently he helped to defend Camilo Mejia, the first military resister to the current Iraq War.]
(Emphasis added - B.M.)
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
I've been burning to post these past couple of weeks, but the secretary who usually transcribes my words (from my state-of-the-art personal voice recording device to the computer) has been on strike, along with the rest of the support staff at the firm. It's been a frustrating situation, for sure. It's long been our practice at the firm to pay secretaries only for the time they spend performing certain tasks for us: answering the phone, making photocopies, sharpening our pencils, cutting our meat. As a matter of philosophy, we've felt it unnecessary to pay them for being idle, when they can be sitting at their desks doing other income-producing work if they like. (One secretary, for instance, earns almost $400 a year selling magazine subscriptions to recruiting candidates she pressures into buying while they wait for her boss to be ready for their interviews.) So, just like attorneys, they're required to clock every minute of their time, and we determine, at the end of every two-week period, how much time they've spent on productive work, and therefore how much they should get paid.
And now they've gotten greedy.
We've always maintained, as a matter of philosophy, that we can only pay for the kind of work that we're absolutely certain provides value, because otherwise there is room left for abuse. The secretaries are insisting that we pay them for the time they spend on the Internet. And since we're not yet able to distinguish productive Internet time from wasteful and unproductive Internet time, we've maintained that time spent on the computer counts as unproductive time and we will not pay for it. Three weeks ago, they decided they cared enough about this issue that they all banded together and struck. In response, we assigned our associates to do double duty, and have dug in our heels. We can afford a long strike more than they can, and, as a matter of philosophy, we refuse to cave in to their ridiculous demands.
After all, who hasn't passed by a secretary and seen her on MySpace? Or playing solitaire? Or online shopping? Why should we pay them for that? They can be using eBay to sell their possessions, or Craigslist to make extra money on the side for what the young people are calling "casual encounters." It's not our duty to double-pay them. Just like we can't double-bill our clients except in certain circumstances.
As more and more of them lose their homes, I feel confident they will come to their senses and return to work. In the meantime, although it's a strain on our associates, they're certainly paid well enough to handle it, and it's not like us partners aren't feeling the strain as well. Many of us have started working part of the day from home, putting our spouses to work as support staff. Of course, many of our spouses are less than entirely competent. So we're definitely feeling the brunt of this. When the Internet is proven to actually add value to the business process, perhaps we will consider paying the secretaries for their time spent using it, if we're feeling generous and can make up for it by trimming their health insurance benefits. But for now, we fight the good fight, and hope for a just and proper outcome.
And now they've gotten greedy.
We've always maintained, as a matter of philosophy, that we can only pay for the kind of work that we're absolutely certain provides value, because otherwise there is room left for abuse. The secretaries are insisting that we pay them for the time they spend on the Internet. And since we're not yet able to distinguish productive Internet time from wasteful and unproductive Internet time, we've maintained that time spent on the computer counts as unproductive time and we will not pay for it. Three weeks ago, they decided they cared enough about this issue that they all banded together and struck. In response, we assigned our associates to do double duty, and have dug in our heels. We can afford a long strike more than they can, and, as a matter of philosophy, we refuse to cave in to their ridiculous demands.
After all, who hasn't passed by a secretary and seen her on MySpace? Or playing solitaire? Or online shopping? Why should we pay them for that? They can be using eBay to sell their possessions, or Craigslist to make extra money on the side for what the young people are calling "casual encounters." It's not our duty to double-pay them. Just like we can't double-bill our clients except in certain circumstances.
As more and more of them lose their homes, I feel confident they will come to their senses and return to work. In the meantime, although it's a strain on our associates, they're certainly paid well enough to handle it, and it's not like us partners aren't feeling the strain as well. Many of us have started working part of the day from home, putting our spouses to work as support staff. Of course, many of our spouses are less than entirely competent. So we're definitely feeling the brunt of this. When the Internet is proven to actually add value to the business process, perhaps we will consider paying the secretaries for their time spent using it, if we're feeling generous and can make up for it by trimming their health insurance benefits. But for now, we fight the good fight, and hope for a just and proper outcome.
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Sunday, September 16, 2007
The Death of Deference
Thursday’s sentencing and fining of four independent newspaper editors is not particularly new or surprising. And neither is the impending trial of Ibrahim Eissa for allegedly spreading rumours about Mubarak’s health. First, the editors have all been hauled off to court before and have either been fined, sentenced, or had their cases settled out of court. Second, the two incidents do not herald an impending crackdown on the press, for the simple reason that Mubarak’s regime has been continuously cracking down on and intimidating independent journalists, from at least the early 1990s to the present. So I would caution against spinning these cases as unprecedented curbs on the freedom of the press. What’s more interesting to me about these recent events is what they reveal about the development of an adversarial press in Egypt. Last year, I argued that one domestic effect of Israel’s assault on Lebanon was the further emboldening of the independent press in its campaign of diminishing the president through rubbishing his foreign policy. The suit against the four editors which was filed last year was one response to the seemingly unstoppable irreverence and vitality of the independent press. Another was the activation of the government Supreme Press Council to issue critical reports of independent newspapers for allegedly violating the journalistic code of ethics with their trenchant criticism of the president. A third was behind-the-scenes lobbying and pressure to remove Abdel Halim Qandil from the editorship of al-Karama. When that failed, government officials succeeded in drying up ad funds to the newspaper, leading to staff cuts, reduced salaries, and a general sense of besiegement. This compelled Qandil to leave the newspaper this summer, to ensure its survival.
With Qandil finally robbed of a platform, the authorities have now turned their attention to that other dogged muckraker, Ibrahim Eissa, the one-man journalistic phenomenon who has been enlivening Egyptian journalism since 1995 with al-Dustour (and a brief stint on Dream TV before being chased out of that venue). And for good measure, the government is also going after the post-Qandil Karama and the new leftist daily al-Badeel, edited by Dr. Mohamed El-Sayed Said. Last week, the Supreme Press Council fingered al-Dustour, al-Karama, and al-Badeel for alleged violations of journalistic ethics in their coverage of the Mubarak health rumours, and has called on their editors to appear before an investigative committee.
The Changing Print Media Market
To put today’s developments in context, it makes sense to review the press scene in the Mubarak years. The Egyptian press does have a rich tradition of challenging and lampooning public officials, especially during the 1920s (I’m thinking of al-Kashkul), 1948-1954, and the final years of Sadat’s tenure. But in none of these eras was the press as systematically aggressive as it is today, nor as diverse. And if we look at just the Mubarak years, there’s a marked shift in the character of the independent print media at the beginning and at the end of Mubarak’s tenure. Compare the style and content of the leading opposition paper in the early years of Mubarak’s rule (al-Ahali under the editorship of Hussein Abdel Razeq) to today’s al-Dustour and al-Karama.
Today’s papers are not only stylistically bolder, using more explicit, even hostile prose and directly targeting the president and his family rather than his cronies and appointees, but the range of issues on which they castigate the president is far broader, encompassing domestic policies, foreign policies, and the open discussion of the regime’s own survival strategies, most especially succession. What caused this dramatic shift?A slew of factors are at work. First are the eclipse of opposition parties and the partisan press. The decline of opposition parties in the 1990s also meant the decline of their mouthpieces, as the dysfunctional internal workings of these parties inevitably infected their newspaper teams; who reads al-Ahali now or even al-Wafd beyond a core group of partisans? Two prominent exceptions are al-Araby and al-Sha’b, both outlets that managed to carve out a space between party dynamics and the management of the newspaper, until the government shut down al-Sha’b and the Labour party in 2000-01. The decline of opposition parties and their mouthpieces left the field open to a new brand of journalism.
A second cause is structural shifts in how newspapers are produced. The broader economic trend of privatisation has influenced the press, where enterprising independent businessmen and journalists sought to enter the print market, using foreign licenses while still being subject to the state censor (the Cyprus press). This is how journalists like Ibrahim Eissa made their mark with al-Dustour (est. 1995), but the private press also includes shadier characters who produce sensationalist rags such as al-Naba’ and al-Khamis, and assorted businessmen who publish vanity newspapers to promote their wares and undermine their rivals.
A third cause is generational and stylistic: the tone of Egyptian journalism is more biting today than at any time since the 1920s because a new generation of journalists is at the helm. There’s no uniformity among these journalists and they come from starkly different schools and backgrounds, but together they’re a different breed from both the tame fare offered up by the old opposition press and the agitprop of the government newspapers. The new boldness in style is maintained by the mimicry and competition among the new papers: competition for readers, competition for ads, and competition for the social prestige that comes with being a bold regime critic and a good wordsmith. The dense field of print media now includes a whole range of actors motivated by varying interests. There are high-end government outlets such as al-Qahira, ostensibly independent weeklies with informal ties to state agencies such as al-Usbu, liberal dailies such as Nahdet Masr, independent weeklies of indeterminate political ideology such as al-Fagr and Sawt al-Umma, partisan weeklies such as al-Karama, al-Ghad, and al-Araby, the independent non-partisan daily al-Masry al-Yawm (which deserves a separate study examining how it managed to supplant al-Ahram as the daily newspaper of record), and the most recent addition of al-Badeel, a leftist daily that aspires to buck the sensationalist trend by offering readers concrete policy alternatives and quality investigative reporting.
It’s important to remember that the current government has not “allowed” this press diversity so much as tried to alternately contain and control it. It has done this by making sure that administrative regulations to establish newspapers are as cumbersome as possible, that penal provisions jailing journalists and shutting down newspapers remain on the books, and by attempting to enter the lively print media market with newspapers of its own, such as the NDP’s new al-Watany al-Yawm and the Rose al-Yusuf newspaper (it’s interesting how this latter rag has appropriated the name of the doyen of contentious journalism in Egyptian history). When the tenor of criticisms against Mubarak reached a fever pitch last summer, the government activated the Supreme Press Council to assert its claim as the standard-setter for journalistic ethics and professionalism, accusing independent newspapers of violating professional codes with their criticism of the president. Last but not least, the government also resorts to threats and brute force with particularly intrepid journalists, as when Abdel Halim Qandil was kidnapped in November 2004, beaten and stripped naked, and warned to stop writing about his “masters.”
The Architects of the Adversarial Press
The two editors who more than any of their peers have created and promoted the contemporary adversarial model of Egyptian journalism are Abdel Halim Qandil and Ibrahim Eissa (though I must also recall the pioneering role of Magdi and Adil Hussein in the early 1990s). Both are consciously engaged in a systematic project of accusing, belittling, and criticising public officials, from the most hapless minister to the most powerful public official, the normally untouchable president. In light of the weakness of parliament and the fragmentation of citizen watchdog groups, both see journalism as a useful tool to extract a modicum of responsiveness from an unaccountable, unchecked imperial presidency. And both aspire to make a profound impact on the wider political culture, replacing existing norms of deference and decorum when addressing the powerful with a style marked by irreverence, profound scepticism, and a blunt, salty style. But though they’re fellow travellers in many ways, Eissa and Qandil come from very different backgrounds and are motivated by different impulses. Ibrahim Eissa is a consummate newspaperman raised on the plucky, lively style of the Rose al-Yusuf school. Read his articles in that magazine from the early 1990s and you’ll recognise the pungency of his prose, the trademark brash style, and an aimless critical thrust that would be harnessed to much better use years later. Apprenticed by Adel Hammouda, Eissa soon outshone his mentor: he is sharper, more daring, and more adept at successfully managing a newspaper team. Journalism is his passion and life’s work. In 1995, at the age of 30, he launched al-Dustour, an entirely new experiment that proved wildly popular and successful, achieving a circulation of 150,000 and creating a new genre of journalism that spawned many knockoffs and imitators. Shut down by the government in February 1998, the newspaper resumed publication in 2005 and then went daily earlier this year.
Eissa’s success is a potent combination of writerly skill, political commitment, and strategic vision. He may be the first editor to put in newsprint how ordinary people talk and gripe about politics. His own writing is warm, playful, and conversational, drawing in the reader and eliciting hearty chuckles. His personal political commitment to social democracy is supplemented by truly catholic tastes that have earned him the admiration and respect of every ideological camp in the country, and have opened the pages of al-Dustour to writers of every conceivable persuasion. And he’s driven by the long-term goal of transforming the press from a passive chronicler to an active participant in the political development of the country. Eissa’s methodical, unrelenting pursuit of the president in print has done nothing less than create a new genre in Egyptian journalism that is likely to outlive its creator. Abdel Halim Qandil is an old-timer (and hardliner) in Nasserist circles but a newcomer to the world of journalism. A physician by training, he became a household name when he and Abdallah al-Sennawi assumed joint editorship of the Nasserist party’s moribund al-Araby in the early 2000s. Their principled opposition to Mubarak energised the editorial team and transformed al-Araby from a pallid partisan rag to a must-read and sold-out item every Sunday. Unlike Eissa’s folksy writing style, Qandil’s prose is shorn and clinical, composed of short, dagger-like sentences that aim straight for the highest echelons of political power. And though it lacks the humour that leavens Eissa’s writing, Qandil’s prose more than makes up for it with a sense of purpose and precision that for me is a joy to read.
Qandil’s salty columns at al-Araby vilifying Mubarak, his policies, his family, and his foreign patrons (collated in the book Against the President and reviewed here) earned him the admiration of many readers and fellow activists and the undying hatred of the powers that be, hence the 2004 kidnapping and the pressure to eject him from al-Karama. But many were also put off by Qandil’s columns, calling them repetitive, shrill, insolent, and extreme. They turn up their noses in distaste at the violation of norms of decorum. I don’t share this view. I find Qandil’s targeted anger and relentless dressing down of the president (both the person of Mubarak and the office of the presidency) to be a refreshing, healthy alternative to the stultifying deference and enforced politesse of our political discourse, especially when it comes to public officials. In an authoritarian system like ours where public officials lord it over citizens, loot public resources, and muzzle those who dare protest, it is nothing short of indispensable to bring them down to size, embarrass them, perturb them, and compel them to justify their actions in the court of public opinion. If this is done in a shrill, repetitive manner, then so be it.
The Impact of the Adversarial Press
Eissa and Qandil set out to demystify and demythologize powerholders, and judging by the responses of the latter, they have succeeded marvellously. I find this photograph of Hosni Mubarak making a public appearance on 4 September quite revealing for his handlers’ attempt to assert presidential health and power in the face of an increasingly sceptical and irreverent public. See also Suzanne Mubarak’s recent interview in Egypt Today, where she elaborates on her hostility to what she calls “the media” and gushes about her pet projects. The interview is a stunning exemplar of stomach-churning deference; the interviewer shares with readers his opinion that Suzanne Mubarak is “the woman Princess Diana might have resembled in her autumnal years had God granted her the chance.” Quite. And last but not least, read Mufid Fawzi’s paean to the president in Saturday’s al-Ahram; in its desperate attempt to salvage the president’s “stature” and rubbish the new breed of adversarial journalists, it is the best indication of just how influential and effective this new genre has become.A final word about what the new adversarial journalism and its architects have not achieved. They have not made an appreciable contribution to raising the quality of newsgathering and transmission. They have not worked to create a tradition of solid and hard-hitting investigative reporting, an urgent task that still eludes virtually all Egyptian newspapers. And they have not devoted any space or time to sensitive human interest stories, stories that would illuminate some of the many untapped dimensions of the contemporary Egyptian condition. But I don’t see these as fatal failures. An antagonistic press that disturbs the sleep of venal public officials is a considerable achievement and a real public service. It’s a very risky, overtime job that people like Eissa and Qandil have turned into a calling. I hope it is an enduring achievement, and I’m happy to wait for the other genres to follow suit.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Remembrance of Readings Past
I was a bookish child, and spent endless hours immersed in fantastic stories, tales peopled with strange and wonderful characters getting themselves into all sorts of ill-advised but oh-so-exciting adventures. On my eighth birthday, Baba bought me a stack of stories from Dar al-Maa’ref’s venerable Awladna series, a collection that has shaped untold generations of young readers. Books in the series include translations of world classics such as Ivanhoe, Don Quixote, and Tom Sawyer; abridged Arabic classics; and generic stories of indeterminate origin such as ‘Am Ni’na’ (Uncle Mint), a charming homily about a beloved neighbourhood stationer-cum-wise man whose shop turns into an agora for the local children to mingle and learn the values of truth, honest hard work, and good citizenship. Now, riffling through my Awladna books after so many years, I’m struck by the unmistakable Platonic thrust of the series’ founding statement, issued in March 1947: “It is no secret that the life of the mind is the firmest pillar of happiness. Our love for our children compels us to pave for them the paths to this happiness by endearing them to the good book, so that they can seek it out as youngsters and become attached to it as adults, thus building the bonds of a firm friendship that sharpens their sentiments and emotions, refines their tastes, develops their talents, and endows them with a loftiness of soul.” The project of building young minds through stories was entrusted to none other than leading Egyptian pedagogue Muhammad Farid Abu Hadid (1893-1967), Dean of the Education Institute in Cairo and himself a prolific author of historical novels and translator of major works of world literature into Arabic.
I consumed the Awladna stories in quiet corners of my parents’ and grandparents’ apartments, while the rest of the family children played and ignored me. There was one particular story that riveted me entirely, that I read over and over again to revel in its menagerie of wondrous characters and the irrepressible insouciance of its lead protagonist. Pinocchio was like nothing I’d ever read before. It had movement, suspense, and more emotional drama than I could handle. I was enthralled by the story’s talking crickets, chicks, goats, and birds, by Pinocchio’s cap made of dough, and most of all by the kindly and trusting Geppetto. I teared up at all the pain he suffered on account of his errant, ungrateful little tyke. I couldn’t understand how Pinocchio could so blithely hurt his poor old father like that.I open the book now and the same sense of palpable foreboding washes over me, the constant sense of dread at Pinocchio’s errant ways, from the first minute when he detours from school to see the Marionette Theatre to his ignominious metamorphosis into a donkey to his being swallowed up by the asthmatic shark. But then I remember that the story has a sweet, happy ending. Pinocchio learns his lesson and changes his ways, landing gainful employment and succeeding in the studies he had neglected. As a reward, he turns into a real boy and Geppetto grows younger and returns to his craft of wood carving. And all is well with the world.
For a brief spell, school reading nourished my imagination. Like so many of my contemporaries, I grew up on the two didactic props of the Ministry of Education: the smug Omar and his silly little sister Amal. Amal struck me as pathetic and annoying, imitating everything that her older brother did.
Omar was an insufferable know-it-all who inexplicably wore a skirt to school. I didn’t like how he knew everything and she was the buffoonish tag-along; it offended my sensibility as a serious girl (quite). Still, I was fascinated by their world, and still remember quirky things from the book: their friend’s name “Nargis”, a girl’s name I’d never heard before; their class visit to the consumer cooperative, which I envied because I heard adults talking about buying this or that from al-gam’iyya, but I didn’t know what a gam’iyya was; and their trip to the village, where Omar’s equally smug friend Ashraf informs us that the white egret is “the fellah’s friend” because he eats up all the worms in the fields.Though the Awladna stories formed the core of my reading, I had catholic tastes. I read anything I could get my hands on to fill the hours of summer ennui, including snippets of newsprint and I consumed the frilly stories of al-Maktaba al-Khadra, but the fairy tales full of princesses and princes dressed up in fussy outfits eventually bored me. I read slim volumes of scriptural stories made for children that supplied the narrative details missing in the Qur’an’s elliptical exposition. I still remember the feeling of horror at the bloodshed in the story of Qabil and Habil; the evocative detail of the notable ladies of the city distractedly slicing their hands instead of the fruit as they sat transfixed by Yusuf’s breathtaking beauty (I kept trying to imagine what he looked like); and the story of Yunus being swallowed up by the whale, which terrified me. I kept wondering how he could breathe in there.
Kamel al-Kilani’s (1897-1959) stories were fun, especially the ones adapted from Alf Layla. I didn’t know anything about the author, except that my father grew up on his stories. I didn’t know that Kilani was a lifelong clerk in the Awqaf Ministry and an avid lover of literature, and that he is now considered the pioneer of Arabic children’s literature. I just liked the alliteration in his name, and the fact that all his books contained diacritical marks, so I could pronounce the words properly. I remember the whimsical, humorous tale of the hapless ‘Umara, a story that unfolds over seven days. ‘Umara is a lazy ne’er-do-well of unbelievable stupidity. He gets kicked out of school, and then his mother threatens to kick him out of the house if he doesn’t secure gainful employment. On his quest, ‘Umara quite accidentally brings laughter to a depressed sultan’s daughter; the sultan of course rewards him handsomely, and ‘Umara marries the princess and eventually assumes the throne, “and he ruled the land with justice.”
I gradually moved on to more contemporary fare, and distinctly remember one summer being entirely taken up with detective stories. My favourite were the five adventurers, a monthly series whose utterly ridiculous premise did not in the least faze me: five upper-class kids from Maadi helping to solve knotty and dangerous crime cases, with the enthusiastic cooperation of the local police station, no less. I obsessively collected their books, visiting the newspaper stand every month to get the latest. Those of a certain age will remember that the quintet consisted of Takhtakh, the portly but really smart ringleader who had superior deductive powers; the siblings Atef and Loza and the twins Noosa and Moheb, and the beloved dog Zangar. In an utterly self-flattering manner, I identified strongly with Loza, the youngest member of the crew and the smartest after Takhtakh. She was energetic, cute, and such an excellent sleuth. Plus, she was brave. When she was kidnapped by some ruthless criminals, she weathered the experience with grit and aplomb.
This was all very attractive and convincing to me, apparently, and I whiled away the hours consuming the fast-paced, thrilling adventures of the fabulous five. They spent their summer vacations pursuing dangerous criminals and sophisticated organised gangs (gasp!), while I spent summer vacations filled with crushing boredom. They put themselves in real danger, going undercover as street children and thugs to consort with the shadowy figures of the Maadi underworld. And they amassed valuable clues simply by engaging in systematic, logical thinking (the unsubtle moral of all the stories). In their downtime, the sleuths had a love-hate relationship with the grouchy Shaweesh Ali, who found them annoying (who wouldn’t?), but they enjoyed the enthusiastic support of Inspector Sami, an influential detective who always wore dark glasses and said things like “What I admire about you is that you are bold adventurers and diligent students at the same time.” Not only that, but Takhtakh had unmediated access to Inspector Sami, often phoning him on his direct line to offer clever advice and tips.I flip through the books of my childhood, and find that they still grip, delight, and stimulate me. They taught me the beauty of words, the magic of imagination, the virtues of concentration, and the love of all that is quirky, unlikely, astonishing.
Charles Rodriguez & His Psychedelic Organ
It took me months to find Charles Rodriguez but I eventually did. "Samy, I found the guy you are looking for..... what his name again?" On the other end of the line the legendary Melome Clement. "We all knew him, he use to hang at our concerts all the time, but i didn't know his name."About a year earlier I had bumped into a strange looking single. Strange because it was released with a Decca label Sticker but for another label named Alofty Music, which apparently was a shop in Lagos. I had never heard of that Label before and no one in Nigeria had ever heard of that shop...obscurity was total. The two sides of that single are quite similar, while most prefere Side.1 I had fallen in love with the flip Side, "L´amour ne s´achetes pas" (You can´t buy Love) and its amazing Organ Solo (Listen Below)
Melome and myself took a commuter to Ouidah on the very next morning and met the guy that I have been searching for so long. At the entrance a sign board saying "Bar Charlie". A very happy chap, warmly welcomed us:
"You Know Samy, This Bar use to be hot. I am from a highly regarded family so all the heavy guys who wanted a rest in Ouidah, came here for a drink or two. Politicians use to spend their nights sleeping here on the terrace, under the palm trees with their "maitresse". But then everything came to a halt when I had a very severe car accident. I was in a coma for 13 days and had to stay 8 months at Boni hospital. I had saved Three millions CFA, its all gone now. They even cut the light because I couldn't pay my bill."
Charles lived on a very nice parcel of land, on it, two beautiful old houses. He showed us around. We entered one large room painted in a light green, on the ground, carefully laid against the wall, picture frames. Photos of the deceased relatives of the Rodriguez family. In front of the central picture, old brandy bottles, fruits, candles and some other bizarre stuff. I suddenly realize I was in a shrine.
"This is the picture of my grand grand father, Joachin Jacintho Rodriguez, he is buried here. He was a Portuguese trader, he used to ship slaves to Portugal and other european regions. He also had huge lands in Porto Novo, that area is today the center of the town and still carries his name, Jasin. My father was a renown doctor in this region, Fernando Candido Fernandez. We used to be a highly influential family around here so I´m sure you can imagine the reaction when they found out I wanted to be a singer. You will become a dagga smoker, you will be a beggar etc, It was very discouraging. I still believe my family betrayed me. I´m sure that I would have reached something with music.
I started my musical career in ´58 or ´59. At that time Nel Oliver, a friend, was playing with the Daho Jazz Orchestra at the Cheklebo Bar In Cotonou, so I joined him as a vocalist. Few month later I joined a Zairian band, Los Cubano Fiesta which was a Rumba band. We traveled to Lomé in the early 60´s and from there further to Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, I later moved to Accra where I formed a band called Ufredas, I was the bass player. At that time Ignace de Souza and his legendary Black Santiagos were the resident band of the Ring-way Hotel in Accra, I teamed up with them and we moved to Abidjan. I stayed with Ignace till late into the 60s and then decided to come back home. All I found was angry family members telling me "you are the son of the Rodriguez, an Agouda (portuguese ancestry), no no no its not possible, you are spoiling our family's name", this and that."
"I had time to do few more recordings with El Rego before I eventually gave up under the parental pressure. El rego had a club, Le playboy. (when I tell him that he still has it but its now a horehouse - "Un Bordel" - and that El Rego goes there every Tuesday to collect his money, He burst into laughter) Oh really he still has it? I didn't know that. Anyway I did some "chansons Francaises" and he backed me with his band Les Commandos. I was performing with them at the club when I was approached by the owner of the Alofty label based in Lagos. He loved my voice and asked me if I would like to record something for him. I agreed. so we formed a band which were composed of some artist from here and some members of the EKs, a Nigerian band. We practiced for a month and in August ´73 we recorded four Afrobeat tracks which were recorded in a house with a reel to reel recorder. I sang and played the Organ on all four. The music was distributed by Decca"
"In the track "L´amour ne s´achete pas" I´m telling prostitutes to stop drinking and sleeping with men for 2000 or 3000-CFA per day, thats they are wasting their lives. Oh Man, when that song was released I got in all kinds of trouble with the hores of Cotonou, they gave me hard times, but i didn't care..........thats it, that was my last recording." (S)
Charles Rodriguez, Ouidah July 12th, 2006
1.L´AMOUR NE S´ACHETE PAS LISTEN HERE
Monday, August 6, 2007
House Passes 15% Renewable Energy by 2020
The United States House of Representatives has passed an Energy Bill requiring utility companies to produce 15 per cent of their electricity from renewable sources such as wind and solar power by 2020.
The Bill passed in the House on a 241-172 vote, despite strong opposition from electric utility companies and the White House, which has threatened to veto the measure. Twenty six Republicans voted in favor and nine Democrats opposed the bill.
A senior analyst for Lazard Capital Markets described the bill as "a significant positive step towards creating a cohesive energy policy."
The renewable electricity standard applies only to investor-owned utilities and exempts rural electric cooperatives, municipal utilities, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the state of Hawaii from the mandate.
The bill also calls for stronger energy efficiency standards for appliances and lighting and incentives for building more energy-efficient buildings. The bill bans the sale of 100-watt incandescent light bulbs by 2012 and requires that all bulbs be 300% more efficient than today’s ordinary bulbs by 2020. The bill also includes a range of loan guarantees, federal grants and tax breaks for alternative energy programs. These include building biomass factories, research into making ethanol from wood chips and switch grass and producing better batteries for hybrid cars.
The bill will repeal a tax break for oil companies from 2004, and another tax break relating to income from foreign oil production. Critics of the two tax breaks called them loopholes that the industry had taken advantage of.
The 786-page House energy bill does not include an increase in fuel-efficiency standards for cars and light trucks. That issue, as well as whether to force major increases in the use of E85 fuel as a substitute for gasoline, were left to be negotiated when the House bill is merged with energy legislation the Senate passed in June.
"There's a war going on against energy from fossil fuels" said Representative Ralph Hall, Republican-Texas. Representative Joe Barton predicted the bill "isn't going to go anywhere" because President Bush would veto it if it reaches his desk.
In a somewhat surprising comment from the White House, they accused the bill of making "no serious attempts to increase our energy security". This defies commonsense as by producing more electricity from domestic renewable sources rather than with imported natural gas by definition increases the United States' diversity and security of energy supply.
As with all legislation the details (such as a subsidy for installing gas pumps for expensive and inefficient E85 fuel) need to be checked carefully. Regardless a 15% renewable energy standard is good news.
House Passes 15% Renewable Energy by 2020
The United States House of Representatives has passed an Energy Bill requiring utility companies to produce 15 per cent of their electricity from renewable sources such as wind and solar power by 2020.
The Bill passed in the House on a 241-172 vote, despite strong opposition from electric utility companies and the White House, which has threatened to veto the measure. Twenty six Republicans voted in favor and nine Democrats opposed the bill.
A senior analyst for Lazard Capital Markets described the bill as "a significant positive step towards creating a cohesive energy policy."
The renewable electricity standard applies only to investor-owned utilities and exempts rural electric cooperatives, municipal utilities, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the state of Hawaii from the mandate.
The bill also calls for stronger energy efficiency standards for appliances and lighting and incentives for building more energy-efficient buildings. The bill bans the sale of 100-watt incandescent light bulbs by 2012 and requires that all bulbs be 300% more efficient than today’s ordinary bulbs by 2020. The bill also includes a range of loan guarantees, federal grants and tax breaks for alternative energy programs. These include building biomass factories, research into making ethanol from wood chips and switch grass and producing better batteries for hybrid cars.
The bill will repeal a tax break for oil companies from 2004, and another tax break relating to income from foreign oil production. Critics of the two tax breaks called them loopholes that the industry had taken advantage of.
The 786-page House energy bill does not include an increase in fuel-efficiency standards for cars and light trucks. That issue, as well as whether to force major increases in the use of E85 fuel as a substitute for gasoline, were left to be negotiated when the House bill is merged with energy legislation the Senate passed in June.
"There's a war going on against energy from fossil fuels" said Representative Ralph Hall, Republican-Texas. Representative Joe Barton predicted the bill "isn't going to go anywhere" because President Bush would veto it if it reaches his desk.
In a somewhat surprising comment from the White House, they accused the bill of making "no serious attempts to increase our energy security". This defies commonsense as by producing more electricity from domestic renewable sources rather than with imported natural gas by definition increases the United States' diversity and security of energy supply.
As with all legislation the details (such as a subsidy for installing gas pumps for expensive and inefficient E85 fuel) need to be checked carefully. Regardless a 15% renewable energy standard is good news.
Sunday, August 5, 2007
The Art of Ibrahim Aslan
Since he emerged on the literary scene in the mid-1960s with his elliptical, allusive, deceptively simple short stories that deeply impressed culture mavens Naguib Mahfouz, Latifa al-Zayyat, and Salah Abdel Sabbour, Ibrahim Aslan has been elaborating and perfecting a genre all his own. Mixing fiction with autobiography, short story conventions with novelistic forms, poetic economy with dramaturgical composition, Aslan’s art is a precious, wondrous creation. He has the poet’s ear for language, the painter’s feel for texture, the composer’s sense of movement, the layperson’s love of humour, and the photographer’s knack for finding the magic in the mundane.Aslan’s latest work, Shay’un Min Hadha al-Qabil (Something like That), is a collection of the author’s terse and evocative columns in al-Ahram and al-Karama written in the past two years. Reading them once a week among the grim fare of news and opinion was like a breath of fresh air, a momentary flash of mystery and beauty amidst mind-numbing ugliness. But reading them in succession in a single volume is a more intense, absorbing experience, inviting contemplation of just what it is that makes Aslan’s writing perennially fresh, profound, and pleasurable.
Aslan is by far my favourite writer among his contemporaries. While very readable, Sonallah Ibrahim’s work is highly cerebral and lacks beauty (with the exception of his latest oeuvre). Baha’ Taher has become too transparently didactic and self-conscious in his writing, Khairy Shalabi’s storytelling is exuberant but unrestrainedly verbose and showy, Gamal al-Ghitani’s prose is too opaque and impenetrable, and reading Edwar al-Kharrat is grim work, what with all of his avant-garde philosophising. Mohamed El-Bisatie’s writing comes closest to Aslan’s poetic power and economical style, but his fixation on village life over-relies on predictable themes and characters.
Like his contemporaries, Aslan conceives of writing as a medium to communicate with and prod the reader, but unlike many of them, his writing has a very light, ethereal touch while still making a profound impression. He does not moralise or philosophise, nor does he use writing simply to experiment with technique or engage in word play. He doesn’t write to shock or condemn or complain. He writes for the same reason a painter puts brush to canvas or a composer puts pencil to music paper: to give form to some inchoate thought or inspiration and to share it with others. From his first published collection of short stories Buhayrat al-Misa’ (Evening Lake, 1971) to his present collection of vignettes, Aslan’s sources of inspiration have been Melete and Mneme, the muses of meditation and memory.
As with his vignettes in Khulwat al-Ghalban (Poor Man’s Hermitage, 2003), the 34 meditations in Shay’un Min Hadha al-Qabil (the title comes from an obiter dictum on p. 63) draw on Aslan’s memories from childhood and his early working life, as well as his quotidian interactions with peers, acquaintances, and neighbours. There are sketches of cultural figures Yahya Haqqi, Naguib Mahfouz, Mohammad Auda, and George Bahgoury, visits to St. Petersburg and Dostoevsky’s house, and everyday encounters with neighbours, Aslan’s car mechanic, a loquacious taxi driver, an exhausted old man, a besotted young newspaper seller, the author’s third grade English teacher, and a rural migrant to the city who’s written a real letter to God that Aslan surreptitiously filched from the undeliverable mail bin back when he worked at the postal service. None of these scenes are more than 2-3 short pages long, and the first five in the book are particularly revelatory of Aslan’s graceful melding of memory and meditation.
Of course, Imbaba serves as a sort of hidden motif. As is well known, the neighbourhood where Aslan was born and has lived all his life has featured centrally in his two novels, Malek al-Hazin (The Heron, 1983) and Asafir al-Nil (Nile Sparrows, 1999), and his short story collection Hikayat min Fadlallah Uthman (Stories from Fadlallah Uthman, 2003). But here, evocations of his beloved natal quarter have a special poignancy. As the author mentions, he has moved from Imbaba to a new domicile in Moqattam, an experience whose logistical and psychological dimensions are most beautifully explored in these etudes.
In small, precise gestures, this collection reveals much about Aslan’s life and art. We learn that one of his inspirations for becoming a writer was reading Anton Chekhov’s “The Death of a Government Clerk.” We learn that he wrote his first novel “out of pure coincidence.” That it troubles him that he can never remember his dreams. That reading every day is a reflex and compulsion of quasi-religious significance. That melancholy and humour commingle in his writing as they do in life. We learn the art of noticing, of living as fully sentient beings, in perpetual contemplation.
Many of those following our efforts have been clamoring for some information over the past week or so as to the progress of our various efforts. I apologize for the wait but am finally in the position to give a status update on said progress. We are proud to announce the immediate availability of "Alky for Applications" version 1.0. Those who followed Project VAIO before its merger with Falling Leaf Systems will remember it by that name. It has been re-branded and contains many bug fixes as well as improved support for the Windows Sidebar.
Our excitement over the announcement of "Alky for Applications" is tempered by the fact that we regretfully also announce that support for Halo 2 and Shadowrun will not come until the middle or end of August. The main reason for the short delay stems from the difficulty of implementing Windows Live support in a truly transparent manner. It has proven more difficult than we first envisioned, but we are making great strides. While many will be disappointed or even a bit angry, we hope that the prevention of having your Live account banned will be worth the wait.
Lastly, we have nothing definitive to report in regards to our support for DirectX 10 based games. As announced in the very beginning, this is a monumental effort and will take a great deal of time to implement properly. We hope to have a fully functioning demo in two months or so.
We appreciate your continued support and look forward to bringing you great products in the future.
Until next time,
Brian Thomason
CEO
Falling Leaf Systems, LLC
Our excitement over the announcement of "Alky for Applications" is tempered by the fact that we regretfully also announce that support for Halo 2 and Shadowrun will not come until the middle or end of August. The main reason for the short delay stems from the difficulty of implementing Windows Live support in a truly transparent manner. It has proven more difficult than we first envisioned, but we are making great strides. While many will be disappointed or even a bit angry, we hope that the prevention of having your Live account banned will be worth the wait.
Lastly, we have nothing definitive to report in regards to our support for DirectX 10 based games. As announced in the very beginning, this is a monumental effort and will take a great deal of time to implement properly. We hope to have a fully functioning demo in two months or so.
We appreciate your continued support and look forward to bringing you great products in the future.
Until next time,
Brian Thomason
CEO
Falling Leaf Systems, LLC
Friday, August 3, 2007
Orchestre Poly-Rythmo - Unreleased Distortion
August 29th, 2005Its 9-am, I´m in front of the Studio Satel Buildings in Cotonou waiting for Wassi and Rafiou Adisa, sons of Seidou Adisa, founder of the Legendary Albarika Store music Label. I've just paid 120.000CFA, which is the fee for renting the studio for a whole day. I didn't really know what to expect but the guys told me not to worry...."you will be satisfied !!"
They finally arrived with an hour delay, each one carrying a huge bag (the ones that are used to transport rice) full of master tapes. We had few "Fizzy Pamplemouse" and then started transferring the reels onto DAT, with a backing on CD as well. We listened to about 100 to 120 Tracks on that day. Some songs were of no interest, so we quickly skipped those, others were amazing and were directly recorded - I ended up with about 20 songs, half of which will be released in the near future. Most of the tunes were by one of my favorite band, Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou. One song in particular, Se Ba Do, composed by Amoussou William (a traditional singer) and performed by Poly-Rythmo, did get everyone in the Studio Grooving. That track is pure Sato, a traditional rhythm from Benin and probably one of the heaviest beats in Africa.
One 1/4 inch reel tape from 1973 contained 4 tracks that were completely distorted and were eventually re-recorded few month later in Lagos by Albarika and released on 45´s as ASB 97 & ASB 98 - AS stands for Albarika Store, the B (second) was added as there was already a label named African Songs (Lagos) which had the prefix AS.
I´ve had those Songs for a while now and didn´t really know what to do with them, too badly recorded to be released and too good to be forgotten, so I am glad my friends "forced" me to start this blog.
Enjoy unreleased material and...........the Distortion. (S)
1. AHOULI VOU YELLI LISTEN HERE
2. GNON A GNON WA LISTEN HERE
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