1992 U.S. Army Interrogation Field Manual 34-52 states: “Experience indicates that the use of prohibited techniques is not necessary to gain the cooperation of interrogation sources. Use of torture and other illegal methods is a poor technique that yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.”

In the words of the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984), “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for torture.” The United States ratified this convention in 1994.

If anything useful came out these interrogations in Iraq, we would have heard about it. – Alfred McCoy, historian and author of “A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror

History shows — and I know a little about this — that mistreatment of prisoners and torture is not productive. It’s not productive. You don’t get information that’s usable from people under torture, because they just tell you what you want to hear. – Senator John McCain (R-AZ)

Torture anywhere is an affront to human dignity everywhere. We are committed to building a world where human rights are respected and protected by the rule of law. . . . Yet torture continues to be practiced around the world by rogue regimes whose cruel methods match their determination to crush the human spirit. . . . These despicable crimes cannot be tolerated by a world committed to justice. . . . I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment. – President George W. Bush, Statement on United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, 6/26/2003

The debate over how terrorist suspects should be held and questioned began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the Bush administration adopted secret detention and coercive interrogation, both practices the United States had previously denounced when used by other countries. It adopted the new measures without public debate or Congressional vote, choosing to rely instead on the confidential legal advice of a handful of appointees….The administration had always asserted that the C.I.A.’s pressure tactics did not amount to torture, which is banned by federal law and international treaty. But officials had privately decided the agency did not have to comply with another provision in the Convention Against Torture — the prohibition on “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment.

First, torture is not necessary. If someone has information, they are just as likely, if not more so, to disclose the information after non-abusive interrogation tactics. Second, many who are interrogated do not have information to give. Third, whether or not a person has information, he or she will likely confess to anything to stop torture; thus the information obtained is never reliable. – statement from the Center for Constitutional Rights

Terrorism requires us to think carefully about who we are as free peoples and what we need to do in order to remain so. When we are confronted with terrorist violence, we cannot allow the claims of national security to trump the claims of liberty, since what we are trying to defend is our continued existence as a free people. Freedom must set a limit to the measures we employ to maintain it. – Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror, 2004

All men have rights, including the right to a trial–a regular trial! The abuse of prisoners indicates that we don’t think detainees are human. – Lieut. Cmdr. Charles Swift

We were pretty much told that they [prisoners in Afghanistan] were nobodies, that they were just enemy combatants. I think that giving them the distinction of soldier would have changed our attitudes toward them. A lot of it was based on racism, really. We called them hajis, and that psychology was really important. – A member of the 377th Military Police Company, quoted by Douglas Jehl and Andrea Elliott, “Cuba Base Sent Its Interrogators To Iraqi Prison,” NY Times, 5/29/2004

Torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment harms individuals, sends a message of fear and intimidation to prisoners and members of minority political, ethnic, religious and belief groups, and undermines state legitimacy. – U.S. Mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), 11/17/1999

How could ordinary American soldiers and civilian contractors inflict such degradation on other human beings? . . . Torture and humiliation is a landscape without boundaries, a terrible slope that even the most practiced interrogators can slide down once they allow themselves to apply the slightest physical or psychological pressure. – James Glanz, “Torture Is Often a Temptation And Almost Never Works,” NY Times, 5/9/2004

According to experts, the preconditions that can lead someone to become a torturer include a fervently held ideology that attributes great evil to some other group and defines the believer as a guardian of the social good, an attitude of unquestioning obedience to authority, and the open or tacit support of the torturer by his peers. – Daniel Goleman, “The Torturer’s Mind: Complex View Emerges,” NY Times, 5/14/1985

The United States helps the advance toward a world free of torture by a number of means, including a $5 million contribution to the UN Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture. In addition we support torture victims’ treatment centers in the U.S. and abroad. . . . We continue to be appalled by the actions of governments that use torture or turn a blind eye to its occurrence. They may try to escape international scrutiny and accountability for their actions, but as long as torturers around the world spread fear and suffering, the United States will not waver in its commitment to eliminate torture. – U.S. Department of State, 6/26/2003

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it “bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East. How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. – Harold Pinter’s Nobel lecture, which the ailing playwright delivered by video from London December 7 2005 to the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.

The right to be free from torture . . . is one of the few absolute standards of international law, a right that exists regardless of the economic or social organization of a society. – Irving R. Kaufman, “A Legal Remedy for International Torture?” NY Times Magazine, 11/9/1980

As early as the 16th century the French thinker Montaigne had registered his distaste for what he regarded as nothing less than state-sponsored sadism. . . His protest was increasingly taken up in the century that followed, and by the 18th century writers such as Voltaire were speaking out scathingly against the barbarity of torture. – Michael Kerrigan, The Instruments of Torture, 2001

American interrogators working in Iraq have obtained as much as 50 percent more high-value intelligence since a series of coercive practices . . . were banned [in May]. . . . Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the American commander in charge of detentions and interrogations, said that . . . “a rapport-based interrogation that recognizes respect and dignity, and having very well-trained interrogators, is the basis by which you develop intelligence rapidly and increase the validity of that intelligence.” – Dexter Filkins, “General Says Less Coercion of Captives Yields Better Data,” NY Times, 9/7/2004

CIA veteran Bob Baer says torture was forbidden when he worked for the agency. “Now contractors are sent out to torture people to death and then hide it.” And now the Americans — at least in the minds of Iraqis and many others in the Middle East — are no better than Saddam? That’s right. The U.S. was going to go in and win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, and instead we take over Abu Ghraib when we should have torn it down. It’s just enormously symbolic. It’s sort of like going into Baghdad and tearing down the central mosque and building a synagogue in its place. I don’t think [U.S. policymakers] really get the full picture of this. – “The Place is Broken“

How are the torturers justified? It is sometimes said that it is right to torture a man if his confession can save a hundred lives. This is nice hypocrisy. . . . Arrests are made at random. Every Arab can be “questioned” at will. The majority of the tortured say nothing because they have nothing to say unless, to avoid torture, they agree to bear false witness or confess to a crime they have not committed. – Jean-Paul Sartre, Introduction to Henri Alleg, The Question, 1958

States which practice torture also resort to legal fictions and conveniences, the by now customary “emergency” statutes, which suspend constitutional rights, including the writ of habeas corpus, and facilitate arrest, detention, and interrogation. – Kate Millett, The Politics of Cruelty, 1994

A nationalist is someone who not only overlooks atrocities committed by his own side. He has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. – George Orwell

We discovered a prison for children – all aimed at — for Saddam Hussein to intimidate the people of Iraq. – President George W. Bush, July 10, 2003

An Iraqi TV reporter Suhaib Badr-Addin al-Baz saw the Abu Ghraib children’s wing when he was arrested by Americans. He related how he himself was arrested arbitrarily by the Americans while shooting film and spent 74 days in Abu Ghraib. “I saw a camp for children there,” he said. “Boys, under the age of puberty. There were certainly hundreds of children in this camp.” Al-Baz said he heard a 12-year-old girl crying. Her brother was also held in the jail. One night guards came into her cell. “She was beaten,” said al-Baz. “I heard her call out, ‘They have undressed me. They have poured water over me.’” He says he heard her cries and whimpering daily – this, in turn, caused other prisoners to cry as they listened to her. Al-Baz also told of an ill 15-year-old boy who was soaked repeatedly with hoses until he collapsed. Guards then brought in the child’s father with a hood over his head. The boy collapsed again. UNICEF has confirmed that Iraqi children have been imprisoned in Iraq.

Torture has a way of undermining the forces using it, as it did with the French Army in Algeria. . . . By using torture, we Americans transform ourselves into the very caricature our enemies have sought to make of us. . . . [It] is self-defeating; for a strong country it is in the end a strategy of weakness. . . . the road back — to justice, order and propriety — will be very long. Torture will belong to us all. – Mark Danner, “We Are All Torturers Now,” NY Times Op Ed, 1/6/2005

Any government that commits, condones, promotes or fosters torture is a malignant force in the world. And those who refuse to raise their voices against something as clearly evil as torture are enablers, if not collaborators. . . . Jettisoning the rule of law to permit . . . torture is not a defensible policy for a civilized nation. It’s wrong. And nothing good can come from it. – Bob Herbert, “Torture, American Style,” NY Times Op Ed, 2/11/2005

They continued asking me questions, constantly the same ones: accomplices, addresses, meeting places. . . . . What they wanted to hear from me in Breendonk, I simply did not know myself. If instead of the aliases I had been able to name the real names . . . probably . . . I would be standing here now as the weakling I most likely am, and as the traitor I potentially already was. Yet . . . I talked. I accused myself of invented absurd political crimes, and even now I don’t know at all how they could have occurred to me. – Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, 1966

Once you open the door to torture, once you start legitimizing it in any way, you have broken the absolute taboo. President Bush had it right in his State of the Union address when he was describing various forms of torture by Saddam Hussein and he said, “If this isn’t evil, then evil has no meaning.” – Ken Roth, Executive Director, Human Rights Watch, CNN broadcast with Wolf Blitzer and Alan Dershowitz, 3/4/2003

In 1951, as a young paramilitary officer trainee in the C.I.A., I heard my instructors say that to win the cold war, “fighting fire with fire” would be required. I remember asking, how, if we did that, we could maintain any distinction between what we stood for, and what our communist opponents represented. I was told to sit down and shut up. – Donald P. Gregg, “Fight Fire With Compassion,” NY Times Op Ed, 6/10/2004

Torture destroys the soul of the torturer even as it destroys the body of his victim. The boundary between humane treatment of prisoners and torture is perhaps the clearest boundary in existence between civilization and barbarism. – Jonathan Schell, “What Is Wrong With Torture,” The Nation, 2/7/2005

Societies that do not recognize the dignity of the human person, or profess to recognize it and fail to do so in practice, or recognize it only in highly selective circumstances, become, not simply societies with torture, but societies in which the presence of torture transforms human dignity itself, and therefore all individual and social life. – Edward Peters, Torture, 1985

Meeting for the first time since the 1940s, World War II veterans who had been charged with top-secret interrogations of Nazi prisoners of war lamented “the chasm between the way they conducted interrogation during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism suspects.” … Another World War II veteran–one of the few who interrogated the early 4000 prisoners of war, most of them German scientists and submariners, who were brought in to Fort Hunt, Virginia for questioning for days and weeks–spoke of how “during the many interrogations, I never laid hands on anyone. We extracted information in a battle of the wits.” He added that he was proud that he “never compromised my humanity.” Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist, told the Post, “We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or ping pong than they do today, with their torture.” Several of the veterans used the occasion, upon receiving honors from the Army’s Freedom Team Salute, to state their opposition to the war in Iraq and methods used at Guantanamo Bay…. But what the Veterans’ revealed so strikingly was the disgust these former interrogators– in a war that posed a greater threat to America’s survival than the so-called “war on terror”–have for the cruel, inhuman, degrading and illegal techniques called for –and condoned– by the Bush Administration.

“The indisputable evidence disclosed today that the US government, with the assistance of psychologists, was engaged in psychological torture tactics for the CIA is as morally reprehensible as Tuskegee and the MK-Ultra program of the 1950’s and 60’s.” – Leonard S. Rubenstein, Executive Director of Physicians for Human Rights

Torture is a sign that a government either does not enjoy the trust of the people it governs or cannot recruit informers for a surveillance system. In both cases, torture to obtain information is a sign of institutional decay and desperation, and torture accelerates this process, destroying the bonds of loyalty, respect and trust that keep information flowing. As any remaining sources of intelligence dry up, governments have to torture even more. Torture also gives a fake sensation of power to the executioner a fact that has a positive feedback that further fuels more violence. Psychological torture has persisted not because it necessarily works, but because of an institutional history of the practice. The interrogators themselves tend to believe in its efficacy, and no matter what you do, you can’t stop them once they start. – Darius Rejali

Frank Anderson, former chief of the CIA’s Near East and South East Asia division, talked about reform but reminded the audience that “reformers are no smarter than the people who need to be reformed.” He believed that there is a natural tendency for organizations to resist change. Discussing the use of torture as an intelligence strategy, Anderson said, “[the] problem with torture is what it does to us… I will rebel against anyone who wants my son to torture — those are wounds that never heal.” He voiced support for Senator John McCain’s proposal that would ban the use of inhumane treatment against anyone in US government custody. With such reassurance, Anderson believed America can regain some of its lost global legitimacy and the intelligence community can concentrate on more effective means of obtaining information.

Documents Tell of Brutal Improvisation by GIs

“You would be surprised at how far a can of orange soda would go,” said Lt. Col. Mark Costello, who oversees interrogations at Abu Ghraib. – Norimitsu Onishi, “Transforming a Prison, With U.S. Image in Mind,” NY Times, 9/16/2004

Resources:

• CIA Veterans Condemn Torture
• Veterans for Common Sense
• Iraq Veterans Against the War
• Veterans for Peace
• Center for Constitutional Rights
• Physicians for Human Rights
• 911 Truth
• Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

Nechvatal’s art and theoretical writing attempt to bring certain kinds of awareness and understanding into the open public sphere (or even into the clearing, as Heidegger might say). It would be the limited person indeed who could meditate long upon one of his paintings without having new patterns of recognition, new kinds of thoughts.

I am always more than happy to brag about the work of my viral friend. In the vernacular of my youth, Nechvatal is “wicked cool.” Keep it going, Joseph!

the america jesus tOrture series

Nechvatal counters the too-ephemeral cultural recognitions of torture with his embedded images of Abu Graib. The inevitable, evocation of the crucification in this collection is cause for ethical reflection in many directions. These works function as a “wake-up slap to the face” for Americans in general, but especially so for the so-called Christians who have condoned and supported torture policies from the top down.

inside Bohemian Grove

As a 100% real Bohemian, Nechvatal objects both to the name appropriation and to the realities of the “Bohemian Grove,” the 130-year old California retreat for the political, corporate, banking, and military ruling elite. He has created “a series of faux-romantic digital paintings” that call attention to to the private power club, using source photographs obscured with viral codes and layered imaginaries. The paintings evoke the darker side of the multiple layerings and mutations of religion and power.

Note: The secondary (and more well-known) definition of a Bohemia as a place where creative people can live and work cheaply – and behave unconventionally – in community also seems a bit alien to global power players. This is something beyond simple gentrification…

ideologues in fairyland

“Fairy portraits” render prominent neo-conservatives as insectile, bulbous, fractalized, twisted, and written-over, in a series that calls attention to current governmental manipulation and corruption, while at the same time performatively undermining neo-con claims to dominance or authority. Multiply-resonant for would-be interpreters. Have fun.

Finally, be sure to read Nechvatal’s essay on Yves Klein, whose works are being shown at the CORPS, COULEUR, IMMATÉRIEL (Body, Color, Immaterial) show, The Centre Pompidou / Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, through February 5th, 2007.

In bringing together 120 paintings and sculptures, some 40 drawings and manuscripts and a great number of contemporary films and photographs, this exhibition offered me a new reading of Klein’s work, this time in the context of virtuality. Adhering as faithfully as possible to the artist’s own intentions as revealed in his recently published writings, the design of the exhibition brought out the importance that Klein accorded to the diverse aspects of his artistic practice: not only painting and sculpture, but also immaterial performances, sound works, interventions in public spaces, architectural projects and, most essentially, immaterial art theory. This diverse oeuvre, all produced during a period of just seven years, is indeed impressive as much of it anticipated the trends of Happening and Performance Art, Land Art, Body Art, Conceptual Art and Digital Art. Thus it has had, ironically, a durable influence on art through its essential interest in and expressions of the immaterial.

Rolling in more troops for prison security, taking in more prisoners, building yet another prison camp.

As the insurgency continues, there are now nearly 11,000 prisoners in major US-run detention centres – twice as many as last September. US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last month he would like to give Iraq’s government full responsibility for detainees as soon as was feasible. But the US has offered no timetable for such a handover.

A Pentagon spokesman, Air Force Lt-Col John Skinner, said detention operations in Iraq were expanding. The battalion, from the division’s 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, will be deployed to Iraq over the next two months, Pentagon officials said on Wednesday. It has already served once in Iraq, from September 2003 to April 2004, and before that in Afghanistan. The troops are being prepared to perform duties such as providing security around prison compounds and for transportation of prisoners.

PRISON CAPACITY

Abu Ghraib – expanded to house 4,000
Camp Bucca – 6,000, to take an extra 1,400
Camp Cropper – 100, to take 2,000 more
Fort Suse – to take 2,000

A fourth facility at Fort Suse in the Kurdish city of Suleimaniya, 330km (205 miles) north of Baghdad, is expected to be completed next month. The three older prisons are being expanded.

The $50m (£28m) construction programme, announced in June, will eventually allow the US to hold 16,000 prisoners.

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 Architect-1,Professor-0

Once again, facts and precision defeat slander and pamphlet-speak. “Heidi”, a Humanities Proffessor, stumbled on EPR, and decided to initiate a pointed debate in the comments section. I thought: ‘uh-oh…big shiny PhD…I’m in for it.” After one of her posts being deleted for profane content, she cried ‘censorship’. Yet the contents of her thinking became evident when she proclaimed with outright indignation, little gems like “we trained Bin Laden, we installed Saddam Hussein.”….later followed with “Guantanamo is a Gulag“.

Oh I forgot, this person’s profile starts off with ‘Feminist Intellectual”
Well, an intellectual, feminist or otherwise would know that we did not train Bin Laden, we did not install Saddam Hussein, nor is a government run prison in Cuba holding 520+ people anything remotely akin to the Soviet-era Gulag of the 1920′2 to 1950’s whereby arguably 13,000,000 people died. Not a single soul has perished at Gitmo. But they do recieve Qorans, prayer mats, a Muslim diet, and medical attention. These and many, many other widely known facts continue to evade Heidi all the way up to the university level. The ‘Prager Principle’ is proving truer by the minute. This sad fact that this ‘Ph.D’ is teaching impressionable youth simply adds further impetus to the already exploding home-schooling effort in the nation. When grown adults spout such nonsense, who will run this place in twenty years?

I did not, in fact, initiate anything, and there’s a little misquoting there too.

We trained Bin Laden: By 1984, Bin Laden was running a front organization known as Maktab al-Khidamar – the MAK – which funneled money, arms and fighters from the outside world into the Afghan war. MAK was nurtured by Pakistan’s state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA’s primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow’s occupation. Those involved in the decision to give the Afghan rebels access to a fortune in covert funding and top-level combat weaponry continue to defend that move in the context of the Cold War. Sen. Orrin Hatch, a senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee making those decisions, told Robert Windrem that he would make the same call again today even knowing what bin Laden would do subsequently. “It was worth it,” he said. A decision was made to provide America’s potential enemies with the arms, money – and most importantly – the knowledge of how to run a war of attrition violent and well-organized enough to humble a superpower.

We put Hussein in power – ever seen the photo of Cheney sorry – Rumsfeld shaking his hand? Ok “put in power” is possibly an exaggeration, but we did support him and helped to put him and keep him in power. US intelligence helped Saddam’s Ba`ath Party seize power for the first time in 1963. Saddam was on the CIA payroll as early as 1959, when he participated in a failed assassination attempt against Iraqi strongman Abd al-Karim Qassem. In the 1980s, the US and Britain backed Saddam in the war against Iran, giving Iraq arms, money, satellite intelligence, and even chemical & bio-weapon precursors. As many as 90 US military advisors supported Iraqi forces and helped pick targets for Iraqi air and missile attacks despite his use of chemical weapons. The Reagan administration did not deviate from its determination that Iraq was to serve as the instrument to prevent an Iranian victory. Chemical warfare was viewed as a potentially embarrassing public relations problem that complicated efforts to provide assistance. The Iraqi government’s repressive internal policies, though well known to the U.S. government at the time, did not figure at all in the presidential directives that established U.S. policy toward the Iran-Iraq war. The U.S. was concerned with its ability to project military force in the Middle East, and to keep the oil flowing. Later, we even abandoned the internal forces that were willing to fight to overthrow his regime.

Guantánamo as part of our new gulag-like system: The reason the administration located that prison in Cuba in the first place was to avoid judicial review. Although the Supreme Court ruled a year ago that Bush must give prisoners there access to US courts, none has yet had his day in court. Hardly any have even been charged with a crime. The US government has refused to allow UN human rights monitors, including the special rapporteur on torture, to visit the Guantánamo prisoners. In addition to Gitmo, there are the other prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan (not to mention the astoundingly high imprisonment percentages right here in the USA). See the documents related to torture obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and the Defense Department’s latest effort to block the release of materials requested by the under the Freedom of Information Act – in particular, the rest of the Abu Graib photos – by the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans for Peace. The New York Civil Liberties Union is co-counsel in the case.

As Amnesty International points out: Neither the US administration nor the US Congress has called for a full and independent investigation of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Afghanistan. The US government has gone to great lengths to restrict the application of the Geneva Convention and to “re-define” torture. It has sought to justify the use of coercive interrogation techniques. It has sought to justify the practice of holding “ghost detainees” (people in unacknowledged incommunicado detention). It has sought to justify the “rendering” or handing over of prisoners to third countries that practise torture. Guantanamo Bay has entrenched the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law. Trials by military commissions have made a mockery of justice and due process.

May 02, 2003
Guantanamo Gulag
Writes law prof. Jonathan Turley in the Los Angeles Times, “Although certainly tiny compared with Chinese or Soviet models, the facility operated by the U.S. can no longer be defined as a prison or even a military camp. It is an American gulag, holding hundreds of prisoners without trial or access to the courts. In fairness to the Soviets, it must be noted that at least their prisoners got sham trials. This makes Camp Delta an even more extreme variation on the gulag theme.”

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In any case, I followed comments here under two different names “marc” and “Atkinson” back to his own blog. His comments here were not backed by a whole lot of evidence or factual content – just angry versions of the regular propaganda. He seemed to want to bully somebody, and I guess I can be a target for such ones. I put up with it for a while – a couple of the things he brought up could have led to an interesting debate. However, his posts got more derisive and he seemed to escalate. He bragged that he been kicked off the forum at Smirking Chimp – for similiar harassment, I’m guessing.

If you want a taste of what I was reading, I did leave several of his comments up in the last several posts. He seemed to think I should be using my blog in very specific ways and was distinctly displeased when I didn’t do what he projected that I should do.

I did use the “s” word in a colloquial way in the comments on his post – shocking, I know (especially to a guy whose avatar is taken from the movie Dr. Strangelove? Should have taken that as a warning in itself, perhaps). I sincerely hope that he doesn’t actually let his kids read the blog – let them have a few illusions. If he doesn’t delete more of the posts, here is the exchange at his blog. I finally had to tell him that while he might have some valid criticisms here and there, his intent was so clearly hostile that I don’t really feel it was worthwhile to continue to engage.

My inbox was promptly filled with attempted spam comments to the blog – one of which simply repeated the same question over and over again – typical stalker behavior – and it validated my decision to ban him from the blog. Tonight I got even more… including allcaps fun like “YOU DELETED MY COMMENTS OUT OF FEAR, BUT YOU KNOW WHAT I SAID IS TRUE. ALL—ALL—LIBERALS ACT LIKE COWARDS, BECAUSE THEIR POSITIONS ARE INDEFENSIBLE.” This guy claims that he is an ex-liberal.

Fascinating – in a certain sort of clinical, creepy way – were his fixations on my calling myself an intellectual, a feminist, someone with a Phd – all of which are true. More of us are intellectuals than we realize – it’s a word that’s used a lot more in other countries which seem to admire thinking more than we do. No need to fear thinking – thinking is very liberating and wisdom-making and there are all kinds of thinking. I like playful rumination and disciplined interpretation best, I think, and in an alternating current. And yes, I am a liberal – it’s what our country is all about.

However, I am not a “Professor,” as “marc” or “Atkinson” assumes.

Here’s how it works. You start with the PhD – that’s only the beginning. If you are very talented and somewhat lucky you get a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professsor (or if not, a Lecturer or Adjunct or 1-year appointment), then you publish 2-3 books and a bunch of articles and give tons of conference papers, and then you might get promoted to the rank of Associate Professor and even tenure if you get through the rigorous peer review process. Eventually, with good reviews and teaching evaluations and service to the community and another extremely rigorous peer review, you might be promoted to the rank of Full Professor.

I earned my PhD one year ago. There weren’t any jobs in my field last year. The job listings are published in the fall, and it is a one-year hiring period. Assuming that there is a job offered in my field anywhere in the country this year, I would compete with other applicants for the position – sometimes hundreds of other applicants. My starting salary at such a job won’t be much to write home about and I would probably have a heavy teaching load, multiple committees to work on, and the never-ending “publish or perish” pressure. That’s the best-case scenario. No one would get a PhD in the humanities except for the love of the subject they study and a love of teaching. It requires great sacrifices (and in my case at least, will continue to do so) – and at this point I just don’t need the harassment.

I have already taught at four universities: three of them while I was in graduate school, the fourth as an adjunct paid (not much) for the whole course. I have taught courses which involved world literature, religion and society, judeo-christian traditions and various other literature/religion/philosophy/culture courses. While my expertise is interdisciplinary, no PhD is an “expert” in much outside their field. So no, I don’t know everything, and neither does any other PhD. I still disagree with a goodly percentage of what he is trying to claim – and you don’t have to have a PhD to figure out why.

As for the “impressionable youth” – I don’t teach elementary, middle school or high school, so I’m not sure how I would have anything to do with “home schooling” which just seems to be a way for parents to overly-insulate their children. I am a university teacher. Teaching (mostly young 18-21 year olds) adults methods of critical reading and interpretation may get some students out of their comfort zone, especially if they are unprepared for college-level work, but I think it’s worth the effort so that they can really be capable of forming their own judgments based on something other than appeal to authority.

Kinda feel sorry for those home-schooled kids, but I’m sure they will recover. Kids are very resilient.

Then, it’s a matter of money. Advertisers, network owners, and so on.

But you know, last night an old girlfriend was in town. As the three of us munched down our dinner in the kitchen, my hubby John started telling us about his last trip to Paris and all the stories that were reported there… and reported very differently. Ok, some of you out there have decided to hate France – why, I’m not sure. We wouldn’t even have a democracy here without them.

He said that when he was there, the Abu Graib story was hitting the world news. He picked up LeMonde one day (the more conservative of the two major French newspapers) and it was full of testimony from prisoners that had been there.

Do you recall reading a whole lot of testimony from the people who were actually there? I don’t – maybe I just missed it.

Just one example, but there were others. It is worth checking websites and alternative news sources. Out media just isn’t what it used to (at least aim to) be.