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Our hopeless war debate
Accompanying George Packer’s extraordinary piece in the print edition of last week’s New Yorker is a photo of an Iraqi man lying dead on a heap of trash, his hands tied behind his back with black cord. From the camera angle it isn’t clear whether the corpse still has a head. This chilling image encapsulates just about everything there is
Happy Newroz
The Kurds (and others) are celebrating Newroz, the new year. The LA Times has a nice photo essay here. I was in Iraqi Kurdistan exactly a year ago, during the holiday. Read here and here.
Gassing Muslims
From Kirk Semple’s March 18 report on al-Qaeda suicide bombings in Ramadi and Amiriya — not the first incidents in which the bombs were spiked with chlorine gas: Insurgents began combining explosives with chlorine gas and other chemicals in January in an effort to sow more fear and havoc among civilians, military officials say. Some local officials blamed militants linked
Remember Ward Connerly?
He made big headlines in the ’90s with his efforts to ban affirmative action, garnering high praise from Newt Gingrich and other rightists. Connerly is still at it — he was behind the deceptively named Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, a ballot proposal that passed in November 2006 but is now facing legal challenges. I’m late in noticing this, but it
The shooting
Excellent piece of reporting by Serge Kovaleski and Sarah Kershaw in this morning’s NYT, about David Garvin, the lunatic who went on a shooting rampage in the West Village last Wednesday night. I know the area around Houston and MacDougal very well, from my earliest days in New York in the late ’80s. I still find myself down there sometimes,
Quote for the day
“We are not afraid of being named terrorists … But I want to ask, is someone who detonates one kilogram a terrorist while someone who detonates tons in Arab and Islamic cities not a terrorist?”— Shakir al-Abssi, leader of the Lebanese-based Fatah al Islam, an al-Qaeda offshoot This is a standard trope not only of the Islamist far-right but also
On Pat Martino
I have a short feature on guitarist Pat Martino in the current edition of the Philadelphia Weekly.
Cheney at AIPAC
Dick Cheney has the unmitigated gall to accuse war opponents of “undermining” the troops, with the Walter Reed revelations still in the news. And after all Cheney and Bush have put these troops through. Even more ridiculous when you consider what Peter Pace has just said, not only about the gay men and women under his command, but also about