Why Not Just Call It LYING?

Steve Benen, writing for Salon's "War Room," points out that President Bush has praised the expansion of the GI bill after he had publicly opposed it. He had to sign the bill because it passed by a veto-proof margin. Now he's praising it as if he had never opposed it. In addition to that, Benen points out, Bush praised Republican leaders who opposed the bill and even voted against it--in such a way that an unwary public (a group in which many Americans hold membership) would draw the conclusion that these leaders approved the bill. Bush also praised John McCain for his "hard work" on the bill--when John McCain also had publicly opposed the bill.

Bush had no words of praise for one of the actual Republican sponsors of the bill: Chuck Hagel.

Down is Up and Up is Down in this administration. Yes is No and No is Yes, too, I guess. (And torture is just enhanced interrogation procedures). I just think it's lying. But that's what this administration seems to do best.

In other news, the media are jumping on Wesley Clark for some comments he made about John McCain. Evidently, Clark said that flying a plane does not make one qualified to be president--but critics have taken Clark's comments out of context and are accusing Clark of attacking McCain's military career. I've read two good responses to these criticisms in the last few minutes. Here is Billings Outpost editor David Crisp on the brou-ha-ha, at his Billings Blog. And here is Steve Benen's response on Salon: "Media Mischaracterizes Clark Comments, Obama Backs Away."

Update:
Via Kevin Drum, I am reminded of earlier, truly nasty attacks on John McCain during the 2000 presidential primaries, attacks that are being echoed again among some lefties and some far-right conservatives. I remember receiving a forwarded e-mail from an uncle, in which John McCain's patriotism was questioned and in which McCain was described as a scary "Manchurian Candidate." I reacted negatively to those nasty innuendos and lies then, as I do to the resurrection of them today. Clark's comments, however, do not fall in that category.

Grim Reading

My favorite bookstore in Austin, Texas, is BookPeople. When I'm in Austin visiting my son, I usually take time to drop by BookPeople and pore over the store's sales tables and shelves. By doing this, I've discovered some winners, including Caroline Elkins' book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (2005), an examination of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the fifties and the British response to that uprising. This book won a Pulitzer for General Non-fiction in 2006. It's very grim reading.

The book interested me because I know so little about colonialism in Africa outside of what I learned in general history classes, what I've read over the years in book reviews and the passing article or two, and what I've caught in news stories on current events in Africa. And Africa is much in the news today, with genocide in Darfur, Sudan, the disputed elections and violence in Kenya and in Zimbabwe, and post-election violence in Nigeria.

Elkins' book is an eye-opener, and a must-read for anyone who wants to understand more fully the consequences of imperial powers' exporting their world view, their sense of superiority, and their military might. The Mau Mau conflict in Kenya arose out of years of native subjugation to British rule. The most advantageous land was wrested from tribes and given to white British settlers. The Kikuyu were relegated to reserves, as were other tribes, to land that was less fertile and to areas that were too small to provide for their growing populations. According to Caroline Elkins, the Kikuyu "was the ethnic group most affected by the colonial government's policies of land alienation, or expropriation, and European settlement" (12). Agriculturalists, the Kikuyu "lost over sixty thousand acres to the settlers, mostly in southern Kiambu, a highly fertile region just outside of Nairobi that would become some of the most productive European farmland in the colony."

Over the years, tribes brought their grievances to the British government, but the government favored white settlers and British needs over that of the natives. And, of course, racism was rampant. The British ruling class lived leisured lives supported by native servants. In the fifties, thousands of Kikuyu--and some from other tribes--took oaths of allegiance to fighting British colonialism and to evicting Europeans from Kenya. Thus began a bloody guerrilla war. The colonial government's response was to create "transit" camps in which tens of thousands of Kikuyus (and some other tribal members) were incarcerated--and creating a detainee population of over 52,000, scattered in various camps and militarily-confined villages.

As I read the descriptions of these camps and of the treatment of men, women, and children in these camps, I could not help comparing what happened here, at the hands of the British, to what happened in Nazi concentration camps. The numbers might have been smaller, the eventual dead less numerous, but the torture as horrendous. And this was governmentally-approved torture, official torture.

The goal of the British colonial government was to get Kikuyus to confess their Mau-Mau affiliations and to provide intelligence of any Mau Mau movements and plans. In addition to using British settlers and soldiers, the colonial government used loyalist Kikuyus and members of other tribes to subjugate those resisting--thus ensuring hatred between these groups for generations to come.

In Operation Anvil, the Kikuyu living in Nairobi were rounded up, Gestapo-like, by British soldiers. Many of these detainees were strip-searched, relieved of their valuables, packed in enclosed rail cars for the trip to one of the camps, forced through a cattle dip of disinfectant, forced to strip and were provided with little clothing in exchange (for men--a pair of shorts and a couple of blankets). And they were given identity bracelets with a number on them. These people were "screened" to get them to confess their Mau Mau sympathies, screenings which included being whipped, beaten, sodomized, burned, and forced to eat feces and drink urine. Life in the camps was horrific, where diseases such as typhoid spread. Women were raped. Men were castrated. Others were summarily executed. Thousands of children died. Truly brutal people were put in charge of many of the camps.

One Labour MP, Barbara Castle, became a public critic of British policies in Kenya, but Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd maintained these camps by outright lying to the British people--all in the name of national security. High-level British officials knew that they were violating international human rights treaties but used "national security" (as well as lying) to side-step those legal issues. Detainees were held without the right to a fair trial or legal help. The government often fabricated charges, but the detainees could not even find out what those charges were in order to address them. Charges were unspecified for "security reasons." Detainees who smuggled out letters describing their horrific circumstances were punished if caught. Sometimes the entire camp was punished. And, of course, people who had only slightly supported the land and freedom movement became radicalized by their treatment in the camps.

Many British records of this time have disappeared, been purged. But people who suffered in these camps still live. As I read this book, I couldn't help draw parallels with the atrocities associated with the war in Iraq, with the mind-set of people who think they are above international and even national law.

For more information:
"British Brutality in Mau Mau Conflict", by John McGhie, in The Guardian
"10 Downing Street's Gulag", in Harvard Magazine
"What's Tearing Kenya Apart? History, for One Thing," by Caroline Elkins, in The Washington Post
"Who are the Kikuyu?" by Michela Wrong, in Slate
a book review by R. W. Johnson, in the Times Online
another book review, by Richard Dowden, in The Guardian

Techie Fun: Wordle

My son sent me and other family members a link to Wordle, a program created by Jonathan Feinberg, that turns text into "word clouds." I took the text for my postings in June and created a Wordle. Here is the link: A Wordle of June's postings

Update:
And here is the link to Benton's Wordle of Samuel Butler's translation of The Iliad of Homer.

Today's Quotation

from John LeCarre's The Constant Gardner:

She would never, as she thought of it now, have put herself in the firing line where she was determined to remain, fighting for the things she was determined to be loyal to--even if, boiled down, they made pretty simplistic reading: truth, tolerance, justice, a sense of life's beauty and a near-violent rejection of their opposites--but, above all, an inherited belief. . . that the system itself must be forced to reflect these virtues, or it had no business to exist. . . And the fact that she was working for the system did not oblige her to accept the system's lies. . . On the contrary, it obliged her to reject them, and put the system back where it belonged, which was on the side of truth.

Promote Torture? Don't Travel!

Scott Horton has two pieces online this morning ["Travel Advisory" and "Torture from the Top Down"] that address the subject of war crimes, of whether or not our leaders will be held accountable for condoning and even actively promoting torture of prisoners in pursuit of information after the attacks of 9/11. Not only did our leaders discuss and direct particular torture techniques, but they also attempted to ensure that those directives would not be traced to them but would seem to appear to be instituted because of requests from Guantanamo.

In his article for The New Republic, Horton refers to a recently-released report by Physicians for Human Rights which details the abuse. That report is led by a quote from Major General Antonio M. Taguba, who was assigned to investigate the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and who authored the consequent report on that investigation, known as the Taguba Report: "

After years of disclosures by government investigators, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held into account.

Horton writes that only in very unusual circumstances will a country prosecute its own leaders for war crimes; to do so requires a political will that Americans just don't have. [We're distracted now by high gas prices, the increasing costs of food, flooding in the Midwest, and drought in the Southeast. Will the presidential campaign just add to the distraction or focus our attention on the previous administration's disastrous leadership?] But foreign countries have no such restrictions. Investigating magistrates for at least two European countries ("pro-Iraq war NATO allies," according to Horton) are assembling a case for war crimes, focusing on American policymakers. Horton suggests that certain of these policymakers should be mighty careful about traveling outside the United States.

Gardening and Conservation

The drought continues in Atlanta, where the watershed doesn't meet the needs of a metropolis that continues to grow with little restrictions. Sally Bethea, executive director of Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, claims that "Georgians use more water and more energy per person than the national average" and that "you can never 'drought-proof a metro area that grows by a million people every decade while repeatedly failing to plan for sustainable growth and invest in measures to use water more efficiently."

Yet, despite the continuing drought, water restrictions have been eased in some counties in metro Atlanta. Here in Dekalb County, we are under a level four drought declaration which allows citizens to irrigate personal food gardens and to water plants with a hand-held hose for 25 minutes on designated days. In fact, I just read the updated restrictions and realized how conservative I have been with my water use the past few months.

I have gardened all my life, beginning with the vegetable garden in which I was required to hoe weeds when I was a kid. I love gardening. My favorite memories of both of my grandmothers are connected with gardens: my short and fat grandmother Ruby Benton, flat on her back like a June bug, having fallen over when trying to straddle a row of crowder peas, holding up her hands and laughing as I reach to pull her up from the ground; my grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat hiring me as a teenager one summer to help her re-shape all her flower beds and all the years thereafter sharing seeds and plants with me as I moved around the country, far from Tarkington Prairie and Old River, where Coles and Dugats first settled in Texas.

Here in metro Atlanta, in our little urban yard, my husband and I have ripped out traditional plants such as boxwoods and have planted blueberry bushes, strawberries, herbs and vegetables (lemon grass from a friend in Louisiana, a chilipiquin--also known as chiltecpin, chiltepin, bird eye pepper--from my father, basil, dill, cilantro, rosemary, lemon balm, serranos, Sungold tomatoes, etc.), flowers and native plants from Georgia Perimeter College Botanical Garden.

To care for these plants, we've connected a rain barrel to a downspout behind our house, we've mulched the plants, and we have become more careful conservators of the water we use in our house.

I first started paying attention to the length of my showers, limiting shower time to 3-5 minutes, and I never take real baths anymore. How I miss those long, hot soaks in water perfumed with bath salts. I don't let the water run while I brush my teeth or wash my hands. For a while, we kept a bucket in the shower to catch gray water. More recently, I've begun to conserve the cold water that usually runs down the drain while the shower water is warming. Unlike my daughter, who claims she immediately jumps into her shower, no matter how cold it is at the beginning, I have always let the water run until the water turns tepid. Now I keep an enamel bowl in the bathroom, in which I catch the cold water. I put the bowl of water aside when the water just begins to warm. After my shower, I pour the cold water into two-liter soda bottles that we now keep at-the-ready in the bathroom.

The first time I did this, I was shocked to discover that almost 2 liters of water go down the drain while my shower is warming up. That water now goes on my garden, on whatever plants seem to need it the most at the moment.

I am trying to see how I can sustain my vegetables, herbs, and flowers with these measures: collecting rain water and conserving household water that would otherwise go down the drain. By the time I give in to the more liberal level-four restrictions, irrigating food gardens with no restrictions and watering other plants with a hand-held hose, even those watering techniques may be banned. By that time, then, my garden will be dead. As will all our gardens if we do not become better stewards of our diminishing resources.

Predators: An Essay, a Moral Story, a Poem

We live in a leafy neighborhood in a fairly enlightened city in the metro Atlanta area. By "enlightened" I mean that the city, with the support of most of its citizens, has instituted practices that indicate a care for the environment and a desire for a quality of life that promotes community: a recycling program that includes composting leaves, clippings and tree limbs for free distribution to anyone who wants to fill up her truck-bed with compost; and community activities such as art festivals, downtown music, Community Supported Agriculture, a community garden, etc.

And the city has a leash law that includes not only dogs, but cats, too. Any pet must be collared and restricted to one's own property or on a leash if off the property. This law caused us the most problems when we moved to our leafy neighborhood, for while our dog stayed behind in Texas, we brought with us three cats, cats that were used to going in and out of our house and over fences in more lawless Belton, Texas.

The two female cats seemed fairly content to stay in our fenced-in back yard here in metro Atlanta. But Pluto, the male cat, was not so sanguine about his diminished domain. First, he lost the collar we put on him when he had his shots updated. Then he started going right over the privacy fence.

Some of our neighbors are more militant than others about encountering wandering cats. One neighbor keeps a trap in her yard, a humane trap, but a trap that has caught other neighborhood cats that ended up in the pound until their owners showed up to pay the hefty fine. We know this because neighbors whose cats disappeared told us as soon as we moved in to beware the cat trap across the street. I know this because the first community forum I attended, the cat trap was the topic of discussion. A local policeman was brought in to remind us of the law: Pets must be restricted to one's property or leashed.

Now, I'm a woman of peace, so I did what I could to keep the cats contained. I failed. Spring came. Birds were singing and nesting. A couple of neighbors began worrying about the black cat eyeing their bird baths or casing the bushes in their yards in the early morning hours. E-mails were sent on the neighborhood listserv describing the nurturing antics of the parent birds and the criminal cats that threatened the lives of baby birds.

How was I to keep the peace and keep Pluto out of neighbors' yards? Tom and I finally came up with a workable plan for our own little cat Alcatraz. It was a simple plan, really: chicken wire. We stapled chicken wire all along the top of the privacy fence in our back yard, about two feet of chicken wire that flops over and prevents the cats climbing to the top of the fence. At a distance, the chicken wire is barely visible. Up close, well. . . . it works. Or rather, it worked after Tom plugged up all the other holes Pluto found to escape the back yard.

Now the neighborhood birds are safe from our cats (except for, of course, the birds that seem determined to nest in the trees in our back yard--but they seem a scrappy lot).

But this morning, as Tom, Mary-Margaret, and I sat in our back yard, I wondered if our neighbors realize that--with hardly a cat on the streets--their bushes and bird baths are still not predator-free. Ten to fifteen squirrels played chase in the sweet gums and water oaks above us. A rattled robin came fiercely down a limb of a sweet gum toward the squirrels. All around us this morning we could hear birds defending their nests. Oh, yes, squirrels eat birds. We've seen a video that proves it. An ornithologist Tom knows focused a camera on the nest of an endangered bird in Texas (a golden-cheeked warbler or black-capped vireo--we can't remember which one) and caught quite a murderous sequence on tape. The video of a squirrel eating the baby birds in their nest is really compelling; local school children who were shown the video in a nature workshop were very impressed.

Or what about the red-shouldered hawk that haunts these trees? Or the crows that also will eat baby birds of other species, given the chance? Do our neighbors think mockingbirds chase crows because the mockingbirds are ill-tempered?

Cats, I know, are hell on songbirds, but, really, feral cats in the countryside do the most damage. Removing one predator in an urban setting will not much impact the songbird population. Or so says Dr. Kevin J. McGowan, in defense of crows.

And now, our daughter's story:
One afternoon in late winter, our daughter was walking home from school. When she was less than a block from the house, she noticed a little striped ground squirrel being chased by a cat. The ground squirrel had obviously been trying to evade the cat for a while and was losing energy. It would be captured any moment. So our daughter scared off the cat with a loud "shushing" sound and some swift hand movements. The cat ran off. The little ground squirrel took a thankful breath. And then, from a limb in a large tree in one of our neighbors' front yards where this life-saving mission was taking place, a hawk swooped down and picked up the ground squirrel. Open-mouthed and speechless, daughter watched the hawk fly away with its prey in its claws.

And Anita's poem:

The Darkness that Haunts their Dreams

Flat on its back, beak bitter
and still, feathers lank and close,
a sparrow lies under the ironing board
like a drunk in a stupor--
But even a drunk has breath,
heavy, malodorous, humid
exchange of air for air.
Not this bird
placed with such poignant domesticity,
a gift from Pluto,
cat of the underbrush,
pre-dawn shadow among shadows,
connoisseur of bird baths and dodgy bird dives,
cartographer of neighborhoods.
Scofflaw, he stalks where city laws
forbid the unleashed.
Neighbors mourn the feathers they find,
curse the cat and plot revenge.
What do they know?
The darkness that haunts their dreams
has other forms.
It sits with watchful eyes,
it glides with silent wings.
It preens in the sycamore at the edge of their lawns,
perfectly at home,
perfectly at ease,
perfectly prepared for darkness or dawn.

Bolstering the Constitution

One of my sisters recently checked this blog and asked "what was up" with my not having any recent postings. There are a number of reasons: travel to Texas to help my son finish moving into an apartment and to visit with some friends and relatives there; general malaise due to some health issues; time spent doing other activities, such as gardening and reading; and such a disappointment in our country's leadership that I just don't have the heart to post!

However, I've been cheered by the Supreme Court's recent decision in Boumediene vs. Bush, rejecting the Bush administration's assertion that enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay do not have the right of habeas corpus. Of course, the reaction to this judgment seems to fall along political lines. Here are links to editorial responses on the Real Clear Politics (conservative-leaning) website: "Editorial Roundup".

I particularly recommend reading Scott Horton's clear and interesting discussion of the ruling on his [recently retired but occasionally updated] blog at Harper's Magazine: "A Setback for the State of Exception."

Update
I'm with Juan Cole on John McCain's response to the Supreme Court's decision on habeas corpus. And why can't those on the far right not see that people who have been abused by power can be radicalized by that abuse?