How Rumsfeld's Pentagon Used God

He needed some way to get through to Bush.

From Salon:

[A] new article in GQ by Robert Draper is doing more damage to [Former Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld's already-tarnished reputation. Veterans of the Bush administration, who'd apparently been waiting for the opportunity to unload on an old foe, dished plenty of dirt on the former defense secretary, and delivered some truly amazing images to go along with it.

On its Web site, GQ has published a slide show of cover sheets that accompanied intelligence updates produced by Rumsfeld's DOD for Bush. They all feature images of American soldiers in the field, and biblical quotes. It was, apparently, at least partially an attempt to appeal to Bush's religious belief, but it also made other administration officials quite unhappy, in part because if they ever leaked, the images would bolster the perception, which the administration had been working to counter, that America was fighting a holy war against Islam.

From Gentleman's Quarterly:

And He Shall Be Judged by Robert Draper:

On the morning of Thursday, April 10, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon prepared a top-secret briefing for George W. Bush. This document, known as the Worldwide Intelligence Update, was a daily digest of critical military intelligence so classified that it circulated among only a handful of Pentagon leaders and the president; Rumsfeld himself often delivered it, by hand, to the White House. The briefing’s cover sheet generally featured triumphant, color images from the previous days’ war efforts: On this particular morning, it showed the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down in Firdos Square, a grateful Iraqi child kissing an American soldier, and jubilant crowds thronging the streets of newly liberated Baghdad. And above these images, and just below the headline secretary of defense, was a quote that may have raised some eyebrows. It came from the Bible, from the book of Psalms: “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him…To deliver their soul from death.”

Holme

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From Holme

Neil Rolnick

Alan Kossin
NYTimes Review:

Neil Rolnick has been a prolific and inventive composer of electronic music for the last quarter-century, but lately he has been revisiting the joys of acoustic instruments. He has not abandoned technology entirely: in the title work, scored for Western string quartet and four Chinese string instruments, comparatively light electronic processing of the eight string lines adds a ninth strand, used sparingly.

“The Economic Engine” (2008) is an idiosyncratic four-movement dialogue between antiquity and modernity, and its charm is in the blend, clash and interplay of Asian and Western timbres, gestures and textures. The Chinese instruments usually sing in their native accents (without using traditional themes) but stretch toward Western styles too, and at times the two sound worlds are juxtaposed: a keening erhu line is supported by a vibrato-rich violin.

From the director of Helvetica

http://www.objectifiedfilm.com/about/

Neil Tennant

Photo: Lee Jenkins

On President Obama:

We’re crazy about Obama in Europe. We’re all Obama crazy. Everyone thinks he’s sexy. Lovely teeth, as my mother would say. He actually would have made a very good cardinal, that sort of gliding across St. Peter’s Square thing he does. He’s got that kind of bearing. He’s just brought back dignity, which is an amazing thing to put back on the cultural agenda. There’s a slightly corny song on our album called “More Than a Dream,” which was written when Obama was slugging it out with Hillary in the primaries, and you could feel the potential for the world to change away from the sort of paranoia -- justified as it may be -- to something different.

From the interview with Sullivan at Out.com here.

New York City

Photo: Frank Franklin/Associated Press

Christie's auction: David Hockney’s “Beverly Hills Housewife” brought in $7.9 million.

Story here.

NPH

Photo: Jonathan Alcorn for The New York Times
Neil Patrick Harris, seen here at the Magic Castle in 2008, will be the host of the 2009 Tony Awards.

Silhouette

Photo: David Roemer for The New York Times
Antonio Azzuolo cotton sport coat, $2,600 at Kesner; striped cotton shirt, $460 at Marc Jacobs; cotton denim jeans, $74 at American Apparel; Florsheim by Duckie Brown saddle oxfords, $295 at Barneys New York.

We Reconsider

Okay, I get it. I will always give President Obama the benefit of the doubt. As Sullivan says today:

My immediate shock that Obama would be willing to suppress evidence of prisoner abuse, torture and even murder - stunningly widespread in the Bush-led military - somewhat distracted me from the politics of this. That is often a mistake with Obama who both takes his own responsibilities as commander-in-chief seriously and always appears to be playing a longer game than his opponents.

But this is a blog, written in real time, so allow me some secondary thoughts after a night to sleep on it. In the cold light of morning, it doesn't seem quite so offensive. In fact, the rope-a-dope this time might be on us.

...

The point of the photos is not to demonstrate more gore; it is to have a fresh opening to explain to Americans just how widespread this was, and also to remind them that this led to the deaths of scores. But against this important public interest, the president has another duty - to his soldiers in the line of fire. These soldiers deserve a chance to do their astonishingly difficult job without inflaming those who might be inspired to kill and attack them. I see no reason to suspect that Obama is not genuine about this question, and it's a fair factor to consider. More importantly, he has not said that suppressing the photos at this time means suppressing them for ever, and has not indicated that he will prevent justice being done. In fact, his statement said the opposite.

The pro-torture right will say this call is obvious. It isn't. It's very hard. When you have inherited a policy of war crimes, and you are still fighting a war, balancing accountability with responsibility is tough. I think, having made our point, we should cut the man some slack on this. What matters is holding those who destroyed America's moral standing responsible. That is a struggle for patriots to engage, a Truth Commission to study, and the attorney-general to pursue, while allowing the president to do his job as commander-in-chief.

I will note this too about the politics. If Obama wants to get the truth out, and does not want to be slimed as a partisan avenger (the propaganda line from the Rovians), it helps him to have symbolic spats with those of us who believe we have no choice but to confront the war crimes of the last administration. This has long been his mojo: give symbolic gifts to your opponents while retaining the core issue. These gestures - Rick Warren, dinner with Bill Kristol, summits with Cantor - help insulate him from being drawn into the kind of partisan fight the Rove right likes to fight. In this rope, in other words, the anti-torture movement is the current dope.

Fine. Rope-A-Dope us. But let us not let the responsible parties get away with torture, abuse and murder. And let us play a smart and relentless long game as well.

Chicago

Photo: Michelle Litvin for The New York Times

Renzo Piano's Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago
Nicholas Ourousoff:

It is this obsessive refinement that raises Mr. Piano's best architecture to the level of art. In an age with few idealists, he exudes a touching faith in the value of slow, incremental progress. He has never fully abandoned the belief that machines can elevate as well as destroy. The beauty of his designs stems from his stubborn insistence that the placement of a column or a window, when done with enough patience and care, brings us a step closer to a more enlightened society.

Slideshow here.

On Blocking the Torture Photos Release

A.C.L.U. Executive Director Anthony D. Romero:

The Obama administration’s adoption of the stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration flies in the face of the president’s stated desire to restore the rule of law, to revive our moral standing in the world and to lead a transparent government. This decision is particularly disturbing given the Justice Department’s failure to initiate a criminal investigation of torture crimes under the Bush administration.

It is true that these photos would be disturbing; the day we are no longer disturbed by such repugnant acts would be a sad one. In America, every fact and document gets known – whether now or years from now. And when these photos do see the light of day, the outrage will focus not only on the commission of torture by the Bush administration but on the Obama administration’s complicity in covering them up. Any outrage related to these photos should be due not to their release but to the very crimes depicted in them. Only by looking squarely in the mirror, acknowledging the crimes of the past and achieving accountability can we move forward and ensure that these atrocities are not repeated.

Andrew Sullivan:

Without photos, we would never have heard of the mass abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib. Bush and Cheney would be denying today that any of it happened at all. When the photos were uncovered, revealing clearly what the anodyne words "stress position", "mock execution", "forced nudity" etc actually meant, we finally were able to hold the government accountable for the abuse it authorized.

Of course, they lied to us and to the Congress about this, declaring that these techniques, meticulously crafted in Washington, had been improvised by a few "bad apples" on the night shift whom the Weekly Standard believed should be jailed or executed (that was before they discovered that their friends were deeply implicated).

We now know that these Abu Ghraib techniques were imported from Gitmo and were used in every theater of war as Cheney constructed a secret war machine that used the capture, torture and abuse of prisoners as its central intelligence-gathering tool. But we only have the photos from Abu Ghraib and so people can continue to pull a Noonan and pretend that this didn't happen no a much wider scale. From my understanding, the photos would prove very similar techniques spread across the globe. And so it would be clear that any Muslim anywhere, upon seeing US troops, could be Abu Ghraibed. The photos would reveal more powerfully than the impressive documentation in countless reports that Bush and Cheney's torture and abuse machine was everywhere, in every theater. How do you run an effective counter-insurgency when all Afghans know that Americans bring torture along with "democracy"?

Obama inherits this legacy. He has two options: pull the lid right off it, and fuel more anger and anti-Americanism; or hunker down, acquiesce to the military and become an active accomplice to the cover-up. He's trying to straddle the divide but now realizes he cannot prosecute Bush's wars with Bush's military while exposing Bush's war crimes. Hence the cover-up.

Illustrator/Author: Peter Brown

Sherie Posesorski:

As all good, enduring stories are, “The Curious Garden” is a rich palimpsest. Echoing the themes of “The Secret Garden,” it is an ecological fable, a whimsical tale celebrating perseverance and creativity, and a rousing paean, encouraging every small person and every big person that they too can nurture their patch of earth into their very own vision of Eden.

The Torment of St. Anthony

Photo: Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth

NYTimes: The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth has acquired what some scholars now say is the first painting made by Michelangelo. And if he created it, he did so when he was only 12 or 13.

Story here.

Kristo

Self-portrait: Brussels

Atlantis

Matt Stroshane/Getty Images
NYTimes: The space shuttle Atlantis blasted off from Florida on Monday afternoon carrying a seven-member crew to revamp and refresh the Hubble Space Telescope.