John Isaacs

I can't help the way I feel
2003
wax, resin, polystyrene, steel
86 1/2 x 59 x 70 inches
Wellcome Collection
http://www.ktfgallery.com/artists/john_isaacs/?project_id=30

Penguin Press

Michael Clayton

Warner Brothers Pictures
George Clooney.

Arclight this weekend.

Saint Yrieix

A reliquary bust of Saint Yrieix.
Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art

“Eternal Ancestors: The Art of the Central African Reliquary,” the Metropolitan Museum of Art, through March 2; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.

Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec

Fascist

Direct from Andrew Sullivan:

War Criminal

After reading the full investigative piece in the NYT today on how this administration decided on breaking America's historic ban on torture and then pursued a long, corrupting policy of ensuring that the interpretation of the law was politicized to keep torture alive, it is hard to disagree with Marty Lederman:

Between this and Jane Mayer's explosive article in August about the CIA black sites, I am increasingly confident that when the history of the Bush Administration is written, this systematic violation of statutory and treaty-based law concerning fundamental war crimes and other horrific offenses will be seen as the blackest mark in our nation's recent history -- not only because of what was done, but because the programs were routinely sanctioned, on an ongoing basis, by numerous esteemed professionals -- lawyers, doctors, psychologists and government officers -- without whose approval such a systematized torture regime could not be sustained.

The way in which conservative lawyers, and conservative intellectuals, and conservative journalists aided and abetted these war crimes; the way in which the president of the United States revealed so much contempt for the law that he put a candidate to run the Office of Legal Counsel on probation before he appointed him in order to keep the torture regime in place, the way in which Republicans and Democrats in the Congress pathetically refused to stand up to these violations of American honor and decency in any serious way (and, I'm sorry, Senator McCain, but in the end, you caved, as you always do lately): these will go down in history as some of the most shameful decisions these people ever made. Perhaps a sudden, panicked decision by the president to use torture after 9/11 is understandable if unforgivable. But the relentless, sustained attempt to make torture permanent part of the war-powers of the president, even to the point of abusing the law beyond recognition, removes any benefit of the doubt from these people. And they did it all in secret - and lied about it when Abu Ghraib emerged. They upended two centuries of American humane detention and interrogation practices without even letting us know. And the decision to allow one man - the decider - to pre-empt and knowingly distort the rule of law in order to detain and torture anyone he wants - is a function not of conservatism, but of fascism.

James Comey - one of the principled conservatives, like Jack Goldsmith, who actually supported the rule of law and American decency - put it succinctly enough:

"We are likely to hear the words: 'If we don’t do this, people will die,'" Mr. Comey said. But he argued that government lawyers must uphold the principles of their great institutions.

"It takes far more than a sharp legal mind to say ‘no’ when it matters most," he said. "It takes moral character. It takes an understanding that in the long run, intelligence under law is the only sustainable intelligence in this country."

A couple of things need to be stressed, because I've learned the hard way that intelligent people simply refuse to absorb what is staring them in the face, when what is staring them in the face is so staggering:

Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics.

There is no doubt - no doubt at all - that these tactics are torture and subject to prosecution as war crimes. We know this because the law is very clear when you don't have war criminals like AEI's John Yoo rewriting it to give one man unchecked power. We know this because the very same techniques - hypothermia, long-time standing, beating - and even the very same term "enhanced interrogation techniques" - "verschaerfte Vernehmung" in the original German - were once prosecuted by American forces as war crimes. The perpetrators were the Gestapo. The penalty was death. You can verify the history here.

We have war criminals in the White House. What are we going to do about it?

September

Flood Building

Market Street, San Francisco, California

Courtesy of California Historical Society, North Baker Research Library, 678 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94105-4014

http://www.californiahistoricalsociety.org/collections/northbaker_research.html

Dominique A

Herbert Muschamp 1947-2007

Photo:

Robert Maxwell for The New York Times

Herbert Muschamp in October 2006 in New York.

via NYTimes:

Herbert Muschamp, a writer for The New York Times whose wildly ranging, often deeply personal reviews made him one of the most influential architecture critics of his generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 59 and lived in Manhattan.

As the architecture critic for The Times from 1992 to 2004, Mr. Muschamp seized on a moment when the repetitive battles between Modernists and Post-Modernists had given way to a surge of exuberance that put architecture back in the public spotlight. His openness to new talent was reflected in the architects he singled out, from Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid and Jean Nouvel, now major figures on the world stage, to younger architects like Greg Lynn, Lindy Roy and Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto.

Mr. Muschamp often reflected on the central role that gay men played in New York’s cultural history, specifically the world that he entered as a young gay man escaping the homogeneity of suburban Philadelphia.

Reminiscing lovingly about Edward Durell Stone’s so-called lollipop building on Columbus Circle — now undergoing an extensive redesign — in a 2006 article in the paper’s Arts & Leisure section, he described his generation’s experience this way:

“We were the children of white flight, the first generation to grow up in postwar American suburbs. By the time the ’60s rolled around, many of us, the gay ones especially, were eager to make a U-turn and fly back the other way. Whether or not the city was obsolete, we couldn’t imagine our personal futures in any other form. The street and the skyline signified to us what the lawn and the highway signified to our parents: a place to breathe free.”

San Francisco

Antonio Roman-Alcala

Double Portrait: San Francisco: 2007
iPhone camera

Blackwater

Photo: Chris Curry/The Virginian-Pilot/ZUMA Press

Blackwater USA Academy recruit Gregory Collier screams to team members during a drill at the Blackwater compound in Moyock, N.C., on Aug. 2, 2006.

via Salon: The dark truth about Blackwater

Outsourcing the war to private military contractors such as Blackwater has shattered the United States' moral authority and its ability to win wars like that in Iraq.

By P.W. Singer

On Sept. 16, 2007, a convoy of Blackwater contractors guarding State Department employees entered a crowded square near the Mansour district in Baghdad, Iraq. But versions of what caused the ensuing bloodshed diverge. Employees from the firm claim they were attacked by gunmen and responded within the rules of engagement, fighting their way out of the square after one of their vehicles was disabled. Iraqi police and witnesses instead report that the contractors opened fire first, shooting at a small car driven by a couple with their child that did not get out of the convoy's way as traffic slowed. At some point in the 20-minute gunfight, Iraqi police and army forces stationed in watchtowers above the square also began firing. Other Iraqi security forces and Blackwater quick-reaction forces soon reportedly joined the battle. There are also reports that one Blackwater employee may even have pointed his weapon at his fellow contractors, in an effort to get them to cease firing.

Since then, the Iraqi and U.S. governments have launched separate investigations, likely ensuring that the differing versions of the story will never meet. The only thing agreed upon is the consequences: After a reported 20 Iraqi civilians were killed, including the couple and their child, who was subsequently burned to the mother's body after the car caught fire, the Iraqi government and populace exploded with anger.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called the killings a crime, announcing that his government was pulling Blackwater's license to operate in Iraq and would prosecute any foreign contractors found to have been involved in the killings. But there were two problems: Despite its mission of guarding U.S. officials in Iraq, Blackwater had no license with the Iraqi government. Secondly, the murky legal status of the contractors meant they might be considered exempt from Iraqi law because of a mandate left over from the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. governing authority in Iraq that was dissolved more than two years prior.

The Blackwater mess has roiled Capitol Hill and shined light on the many questions surrounding the legal status, management, oversight and accountability of the private military force in Iraq, which numbers more than 160,000 -- at least as many as the total number of uniformed American forces there. The debate will heat up again Tuesday with hearings by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee led by Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California. The problem is, some of the most critical questions may yet go unasked.

I've done a decade's worth of research and writing on the military's use of private contractors... and when I evaluate the facts, the use of private military contractors appears to have harmed, rather than helped, the counterinsurgency efforts of the U.S. mission in Iraq, going against our best doctrine and undermining critical efforts of our troops. Even worse, the government can no longer carry out one of its most basic core missions: to fight and win the nation's wars. Instead, the massive outsourcing of military operations has created a dependency on private firms like Blackwater that has given rise to dangerous vulnerabilities.

On Tuesday, among those testifying on Capitol Hill will be Erik Prince, the chairman and owner of Blackwater, as well as a series of State Department officials who were supposed to have overseen the firm's activities. We can expect that Prince will wrap himself in the flag, discussing all the vital missions that Blackwater conducts in Iraq, while downplaying the recent killings. State Department officials are likely to say that they had no other option but to use the firm, given their lack of Diplomatic Security forces -- conveniently ignoring that the department has chosen to hollow out its Diplomatic Security corps and instead hand over the task to a consortium of private firms led by Blackwater under a multibillion-dollar contract.

Waxman's committee, which has already been focused on politically connected companies and contracting corruption in Iraq, has disclosed a series of documents in recent days that reveal some dark patterns with Blackwater. The documents appear to show that the firm cut corners that may have contributed to employee deaths, it may have tried to have documents classified in order to cover up corporate failures, and the State Department's own inspector general may have tried to impede investigations into Blackwater, including threatening to fire any of his inspectors who cooperated with Congress.

Prince will take his shots, and State officials will point to new investigations they are now launching to try to mollify congressional anger. But regardless of whether the Blackwater contractors were justified in the shooting, whether there was proper jurisdiction to ensure accountability, or even whether using firms like Blackwater saves money (the data shows it does not), there is an underlying problem that everyone is ignoring.

Our dependency on military contractors shows all the signs of the last downward spirals of an addiction. If we judge by what has happened in Iraq, when it comes to counterinsurgency and the use of private military contractors, the U.S. has locked its national security into a vicious cycle. It can't win with them, but can't go to war without them.

More: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/10/02/blackwater/print.html

Confisserie et Patisserie

http://www.miettecakes.com/

San Francisco Bay

Saturday 29 September 2007