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Today’s torture news
From an MSNBC report:Vice President Dick Cheney made an unusual personal appeal to Republican senators this week to allow CIA exemptions to a proposed ban on the torture of terror suspects in U.S. custody, according to participants in a closed-door session. Sullivan’s on the money: “[Cheney’s] still furiously lobbying Senators to protect his right to torture. A man who avoided
Music tidbits
I’ve been lax in posting about music, so here are a few recent highlights: —Watching Christopher Taylor play Ligeti’s complete Piano Etudes at the Miller Theater. Verging on superhuman. —Hearing Peter Apfelbaum’s great Hieroglyphics band at Symphony Space tonight (or last night, I should say). —Listening to Yes’s Tales From Topographic Oceans for the first time in probably 15 years,
Intelligent Design
Laurie Goodstein had a great piece in yesterday’s Times about the “intelligent design” trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, and how the Thomas More Law Center scoured the country for years looking for a school board willing to provoke a lawsuit over this pseudo-science. So the trial itself was intelligently designed, by reactionary political operators. (The law center is chaired, bizarrely enough,
Journalistic integrity
I have argued, and will continue until blue in the face, that the Iraqi insurgency is preying on Iraqis and is not the legit anti-imperialist force some on the left (Galloway, Arundhati Roy, etc.) take it for. Today, courtesy of David T at Harry’s Place, we have three news items: The BBC — About 26,000 Iraqis have been either killed
“World Can’t Wait”
A brief word on tomorrow’s Union Square demonstration, organized by The World Can’t Wait. Cornel West, Eve Ensler, Tom Duane and other well-known figures have signed on to the group’s campaign. I’ve written about WCW before, when the group held a New Orleans-style jazz funeral march in the wake of Katrina. Anti-Bush street demonstrations are justified and necessary. But why
Balkan revisionism postscript
Via Bill Weinberg, and following up on my previous Chomsky post, here is an in-depth piece by Marko Attila Hoare on the fallacies of “left revisionism” on the Balkans. Hoare’s conclusion: The bitterness of the left-revisionist campaign to deny the genocide in the former Yugoslavia carried out by Milosevic and the Serb nationalists reflects a neo-Stalinist determination to champion Europe’s
Anti-racism against antisemitism
David Hirsh makes the progressive case in the right-leaning Jerusalem Post. And he doesn’t shy away from uncomfortable truths. Responding to an earlier JPost op-ed by Isi Leibler, Hirsh writes: [T]he Israeli government has, since the collapse of the peace process, been acting in an indefensible way in its relations with Palestinians.…Demonizing Arabs or Palestinians or Muslims is not the
Chomsky’s standards
One more bit of fallout from Chomsky’s victory in the recent Prospect magazine poll. Oliver Kamm muses here on Emma Brockes’s laudably tough-minded interview with Chomsky in today’s Guardian. It’s not news that Chomsky, like some others on the far left, is a Bosnia revisionist, supporting dubious claims that the 1995 Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated. But in this particular interview,