A certain bombshell historian put this together for this year's Samhain festivities. Totally kicks the crap out of all these silly Obama-lanterns. Color me speechless.
Apparently, a number of this year's nominees for the National Book Award's non-fiction category are related to the "global war on terror" -- namely Jane Mayer's The Dark Side, which chronicles the role of torture and enhanced interrogation techniques in the war's administration. Two things sort of get drawn into relief by much of the more rigorous journalism that's been done on the subject:
1] That the techniques used by the Bush administration are de facto war crimes, under the Geneva Convention. How so? Well, most of them were developed by reverse-engineering the training given to Special Forces under the SERE program; a program specifically designed to produce actors who, were they to be captured by enemies, could successfully resist and survive forms of torture carried out by States that considered themselves outside of international law on war crimes (the Soviet Union, etc). In other words, the pool from which US interrogation techniques were culled was one comrprised of tactics adopted by States operating outside of the Geneva Conventions. In fact, one could argue that the designation of war crime itself was a pre-condition for inclusion in the interrogation program carried out under the Bush administration.
2] The tactics included in the SERE program were based on forms of torture carried out against US prisoners in the Korean War; tactics that ultimately produced false confessions, largely for propaganda effect. Much of the contemporary discourse around this fact seems to seize upon the oddity of the US using such tactics for intelligence gathering, given that the historical record indicates a consistently flawed set of results. What's striking about this framework is that it forgoes entirely the possibility that there's a domestic propaganda dimension to what the US has been doing with interrogations since Sept. 11th; as though false confessions from those captured as "enemy combatants" (a category with no basis or meaning in international law; not impossibly deployed for domestic propaganda effect itself) does not serve to legitimize the forms of power exercised by the State since Sept. 11th, in the exact same ways it did during the Korean War. Wondering why we're eviscerating civil liberties domestically? Look no further than the horrific plots to which GITMO detainees are confessing! Etcetera. How serious journalists or historians overlook this is staggering, really. Almost intellectually dishonest, in fact. The historical precedents are certainly myriad, and well-documented. Read more...
A handful of the two of you who read this have been instant-messaging me on the odd days, insisting that I post something here. With good reason. What's stopped me? Eh, bit of writer's block, a lot of work, and well... I'll write about it later. But what's worth noting is the very real fact that, after a couple years of constantly feeling in the shadow of this or that uncompleted task (there's a way that I prevent myself from beginning things, out of guilt for the things I haven't finished), I've begun to feel a peculiar ability to just stop. I'm taking the time to enjoy coffee, read, run, work out (no, really), sleep, talk with friends on the front steps, appreciate the sweet spot of properly-tensioned chainline, sit on the waterfront and watch planes take off from National, or just be. And soon enough, that'll mean writing, and other such things.
And the miles don't really matter. Because there's nowhere far enough away. - Sarge
I don't know what accounts for it, exactly, but I'm rather quick to forget that I grew up on islands. In fact, the entirety of my adolescence unfolded across two years in Bermuda, and another five on the eastern coast of Sicily. There's a comfort that comes with what my senses seem to classify as "coastal" conditions. The cool balminess in the District this morning, the damp/breezy autumn I spent in Seattle a few years back. What it stirs in me is less a nostalgic familiarity than it is a rather subtle and deep-seated feeling of arrival. And what I mean to evoke in that term is not a newness or culmination; it's got nothing to do with motion, actually. Rather, it's the feeling that there is nowhere to go, nowhere to be but precisely where I am. And that's a really rare sensation for me. I suppose if I wanted to be really reductionist about it, I could say that growing up with the very material frontiers of the Atlantic or Mediterranean in all directions would intuitively inspire a certain resignation to one's present place. One is sort of bound to strike some sort of peace with that constrained mobility. But in hindsight, there was a real gift in that. In my daily negotiations with the coast, I ceded a certain set of potentialities; a fantasy or two of escape, from time to time, to be sure. And in return, I was allowed to exhale and put one foot in front of the other, without having to account for a particular destination. Anywhere I could possibly need to be was within reach, anyway. It's productive of a particular mode of being, one in which there's (for me, anyway) less of an inclination to manage every little event or expectation that happens to crop up. And in the present, these sensations are productive of a certain spaciousness, in which I tend to quiet and ease into a better version of myself -- often enough, quite in spite of what happens to be swirling about in my general vicinity.
Apparently, a number of this year's nominees for the National Book Award's non-fiction category are related to the "global war on terror" -- namely Jane Mayer's 
A handful of the two of you who read this have been instant-messaging me on the odd days, insisting that I post something here. With good reason. What's stopped me? Eh, bit of writer's block, a lot of work, and well... I'll write about it later. But what's worth noting is the very real fact that, after a couple years of constantly feeling in the shadow of this or that uncompleted task (there's a way that I prevent myself from beginning things, out of guilt for the things I haven't finished), I've begun to feel a peculiar ability to just stop. I'm taking the time to 
And the miles don't really matter.
