Category: Current Affairs

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Dead in Iraq

I didn’t pay much attention to the news last weekend about the death in an insurgent attack of Marla Ruzicka in Iraq. Ruzicka came from Lakeport, one of the towns on Clear Lake, about 75 miles northeast of San Francisco. She had dedicated herself over the last couple of years to a campaign that aims to make the United States account for civilian casualties in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She would have turned 29 this year.

What finally made me pay attention to her story was a column this morning by Bob Herbert in The New York Times. He talks about Ruzicka’s organization, The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict and its aims.

“Tim Rieser, [an aide to Senator Patrick Leahy], said: ‘She came here as a very sort of naïve antiwar protestor, really, and became someone who was extraordinarily effective at putting politics aside – not trying to cast blame, but rather working with everyone from U.S. military officers to the Congress and others on how to actually help people. She was out there doing something that all of us knew was really needed, but that was too dangerous for most people to want to do, or be willing to do.’

What she was doing was stunningly simple and modest, in a way. She died trying to lift the veil that’s been drawn — that we’ve allowed to be drawn — across the reality of the war we’re fighting. The human price among our own troops is largely hidden — photographing the caskets of the slain is prohibited, and the awful injuries suffered in battle are largely invisible to us. There’s virtually no discussion of the ongoing toll among the people of Iraq. On one hand, Ruzicka was trying to get the government to acknowledge information she knew existed: statistics on civilian casualties; and on the other, she was trying to get help for victims and survivors.

On the accountability side, Ruzicka was making some headway. In an op-ed piece on the USA Today site, written just before she died, Ruzicka said:

“Recently, I obtained statistics on civilian casualties from a high-ranking U.S. military official. The numbers were for Baghdad only, for a short period, during a relatively quiet time. Other hot spots, such as the Ramadi and Mosul areas, could prove worse. The statistics showed that 29 civilians were killed by small-arms fire during firefights between U.S. troops and insurgents between Feb. 28 and April 5 — four times the number of Iraqi police killed in the same period. It is not clear whether the bullets that killed these civilians were fired by U.S. troops or insurgents. …

“… These statistics demonstrate that the U.S. military can and does track civilian casualties. Troops on the ground keep these records because they recognize they have a responsibility to review each action taken and that it is in their interest to minimize mistakes, especially since winning the hearts and minds of Iraqis is a key component of their strategy. The military should also want to release this information for the purposes of comparison with reports such as the Lancet study published late last year. It suggested that since the U.S.-led invasion there had been 100,000 deaths in Iraq.

“A further step should be taken. In my dealings with U.S. military officials here, they have shown regret and remorse for the deaths and injuries of civilians. Systematically recording and publicly releasing civilian casualty numbers would assist in helping the victims who survive to piece their lives back together.

A number is important not only to quantify the cost of war, but as a reminder of those whose dreams will never be realized in a free and democratic Iraq.

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Jubel in Petersplassen

“Jubel for ny pave”

“Taktfaste rop på ‘Benedetto!’ runget over Petersplassen i går kveld da den nye paven steg frem for hundretusener på balkongen og ga sin første velsignelse som den katolske kirkens overhode.”

You have to hand it to the gang at Oslo’s Aftenbladet — reading their coverage of Pope Ratzo’s election celebration, you almost feel like you’re there in the crowd in Petersplassen. Of course, leave it to the Dagbladet crew to get in a dig at the new pontiff. They’re calling him the “Panzer-pave.” The paper’s story on the new pope includes a picture of Ratzinger in his Hitlerjugend days. Say three “Our Fathers” and three “Hail Marys,” you guys.

Thus concludes our exclusive coverage of Norwegian press reaction to the election of the new pope. In other news, here’s the pope’s name as rendered in various European capitals:

Paris: Pape Benoit

Rome: Papa Benedetto

Berlin: Papst Benedikt

Oslo: Pave Benedikt

Warsaw: Papiez Benedykt

Athens: Πάπας Βενέδικτος ο 16ος

Good night.

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Pope Ratzo the Temporary

I haven’t been following the ins and outs, but suddenly Joseph Ratzinger, the ultra-orthodox-sounding German cardinal who under JP2 was officially in charge of putting the fear of (G)god into the faithful, is suddenly looking like a serious pope candidate. In fact, he’s moved up to the No. 2 position on the PaddyPower betting site, listed at 9-2 to become next pope after Nigeria’s Francis Arinze, the persistent favorite at 3-1. That’s great news for church onlookers because no matter what name Ratzinger might take as pope, he’ll be known as Pope Ratzo the First (or maybe it should be “Ratso,” to conform with the name of the Dustin Hoffman character in “Midnight Cowboy”; that’s a matter for higher religious authorities than myself).

What I like about Ratzinger is his return to an old way of Roman Catholic thinking: If you want to be drinking Slurpees and playing videogames and driving Boxsters in the afterlife — or doing anything besides wading eternally in a lake of molten lead, for that matter — The Church is your only choice. It reminds me of the nun who told me in second grade that it would be a sin for me, as a Catholic, to attend services at a Lutheran church — the church in which my dad was raised and in which my grandfather was a minister. That’s one way to keep your customer base: Tell your customers they’ll go to hell if they switch brands and warn them they’re at risk if they even look at the label.

Ratzinger gave the homily at this morning’s pre-conclave Mass at St. Peter’s. Here’s how The New York Times summarizes it:

“In his writings and public statements, he has often sought to uphold the primacy of Catholicism, saying no other religion offered a path to salvation. ‘Relativism,’ he has said, implies that other faiths are equally – and wrongly – valid. The idea was strongly expressed in a document the congregation issued in 2000, Dominus Iesus, which provoked angry responses from other religious leaders.

In his homily, Cardinal Ratzinger said that Christians were tossed on the waves of Marxism, liberalism and even ‘libertinism;’ of radical individualism, atheism and vague mysticism. He also decried the creation of ‘sects’ and how people are seduced into them, using a term church leaders often employ to refer to Protestant evangelical movements.

” ‘Having a clear faith, according to the Credo of the Church, is often labeled as fundamentalism,’ he said. ‘Yet relativism, that is, letting oneself being carried “here and there by any wind of doctrine,” appears as the sole attitude good enough for modern times.’

“Many of the cardinals, draped in bright-red vestments and wearing white mitres, watched intently as Cardinal Ratzinger spoke on a platform underneath Bernini’s bronze baldacchino. Several others among them – two thirds of the cardinals voting for pope are septuagenarians – appeared to doze.”

The Times notes one other aspect of the performance that might suggest Ratzinger is not the shoo-in some think:

“Cardinal Ratzinger spoke Italian in heavily accented German, his voice creaky at times and interrupted by coughs. Several church officials said he has been suffering from a cold.”

The Catholic world just got done watching a pope go through a long, painful decline. Are the cardinals really going to elect somebody who sounds like he’s hacking up a lung at his coming-out party? (The bettors are asking this question, too: Ratzinger’s post-homily odds have dropped to 5-1).

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Double Zero, Double Ought

The topic was ear gauging. The Resident Teen was telling me he intends to gauge his ears. What that means, in brief, is stretching out an ear piercing so that you can fit a piece of jewelry into the enlarged hole; one piece of jewelry inserted into a gauged ear is a colored plug. It’s a modest piece of body modification, really, and one that the Teen’s mom and dad can live with a little more easily at this point than a tattoo, say, or rings or spikes of various descriptions inserted into various vicariously painful body locales.

In talking about the size of earlobe hole that he desired to produce through gauging, the Teen described the largest diameter typically done as “double zero” and held up his fingers to indicate about a quarter-inch. Hearing “double zero,” I immediately thought of “double ought,” one of the largest sizes of buck shot (it turns out there is a larger size — “triple ought”). I wondered if the double-zero gauge for ear piercing was the same diameter as double-ought shot.

Not to keep anyone in suspense, I still don’t know. But I started looking for information on the size of double-ought shot. The non-precise answers I came up with suggested a range equivalent to .30-caliber to .38-caliber bullets — that is, .3 to .38 inches.

I didn’t hunt long, because one of the first references I consulted, with a page title of “Firearms Tutorial,” was a discourse on wound ballistics — the study of damage caused to human tissue by different types of gunshots. I was slow to realize the subject, because I was focusing on finding the diameter of buckshot. The Google entry for the page suggested I’d find the information there. When I hit the link, I searched forward to “double-ought,” and found the statement, “A 00 or ‘double ought’ pellet is essentially equivalent to a low velocity .38 handgun projectile.”

Then I considered the context. In the next paragraph, I encountered this:

“At close range, the pellets essentially act as one mass, and a typical shell would give the mass of pellets a muzzle velocity of 1300 fps (feet per second) and KE (kinetic energy) of 2100 ft/lb. At close range (less than 4 feet) an entrance wound would be about 1 inch diameter, and the wound cavity would contain wadding. At intermediate range (4 to 12 feet) the entrance wound is up to 2 inches diameter, but the borders may show individual pellet markings. Wadding may be found near the surface of the wound. Beyond 12 feet, choke, barrel length, and pellet size determine the wounding.”

It turns out the “Firearms Tutorial” is a resource for forensic pathologists, giving an introduction to the world of guns and everything they can do to the body, with special attention, it seems, on close-range effects. Living in a place where the number of people who die each year of gunshot wounds rivals the total of deaths during the entire Iraq war*, it’s good to have such a resource at the ready.

(*On the statistics: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control report, “Deaths: Final Data for 2002,” (PDF file) puts the total number of U.S. firearms deaths for the year — the most recent the CDC has covered — at 30,242. (I was surprised to see that more than half of those deaths — 17,108 — were suicides.) It’s hard to know the real toll in Iraq since our war began in March 2003, but the Iraq Body Count site, which bases its estimates on an analysis of press accounts, puts the number of Iraqi dead so far at a maximum of about 20,000. The Iraq Coalition Casualties site puts the number of U.S. and allied troops killed so far at 1,726, and notes that at least 210 foreign contract workers have died, too). The big unknown in the total Iraq numbers is how many Iraqi troops and insurgent fighters have died since the fighting started. Ten thousand? Twenty thousand?)

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Pope Hopefuls vs. Spread

We’re all stocking up on beer and chips and cases of altar wine for next week’s conclave and celebratory smoke signals. How to while away the hours till the college of cardinals gets together Monday to pick a new pope? Well, you can dip into the beer and chips early, or you can place online bets on the outcome of the papal election. Or both.

Paddypower, an Ireland-based wagering site, is taking bets on which cardinal will become the next pope. The current favorite (now at 7-2, down from earlier quotes of 11-4 and 3-1) is Francis Cardinal Arinze (to use the traditional R.C. title) of Nigeria (he’d be the first pope from Africa in 15 centuries). Interesting that of the top 10 on the Paddypower list, just three are from Italy (and five of the top 13 listed candidates are Italian). The non-Italian betting favorites are from Honduras (No. 2 on the list), Germany (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, a conservative Vatican insider), Brazil, Argentina, France, and Portugal. Personally, I think the next pope will be Italian; the Vatican has had its fling with flamboyant outsiders for awhile. If you’re looking for a long-shot to fund the kids’ education, try Jean-Baptiste Pham Minh Man of Vietnam, one of several cardinals listed with the longest odds of 125-1. Hey, that’s better odds than the lottery, at least in California.

Paddypower also has some side propositions if you’re really determined to lose some money: what name the next pope will take, how many days the election will take, and — best of all — will the next pope fulfill a medieval Irish prophecy foretelling the end of the papacy?

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John Paul Embalming Caper, Part IV

With Pope John Paul II’s funeral about to begin, here’s one last — I promise — return to the subject of how his body has been handled since he died last Saturday. The Los Angeles Times on Thursday sorted through the conflicting reports about how the papal remains were prepared for viewing and came up with a pretty convincing, if not intricate or exact, account of what’s happened.

Reporter Laura King recounts how a professor of forensic medicine was assigned to handle John Paul’s body. And from the few facts and informed speculation available — the professor says he is sworn to secrecy about the details — it sounds like the pope was semi-embalmed. Further, his body has been getting nightly cosmetic touch-ups.

“During the three days that the body has been on view, St. Peter’s has closed from 2 to 5 a.m. The Vatican has said the hiatus is for maintenance inside the basilica, but a prominent specialist said it was likely that a formaldehyde solution was re-injected during that time, and cosmetics applied to conceal what by now would be apparent signs of decay.

” ‘Even with treatment, after this length of time, there would be the beginning of blackening of the skin, and “weeping” of the eyes,’ said Vincenzo Pascali, director of forensic medicine at Rome’s Catholic University.”

Also worthy of note in the Papal Embalmment Watch is Slate’s “Explainer” column, which doesn’t purport to say how the pope’s process was handled but instead focuses on how nature has its way with us after we die.

Slate: Why Didn’t They Embalm the Pope?

Los Angeles Times: An Alternative to Embalming for the Pontiff

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Iraq by the Numbers

The Iraq Coalition Casualties Web site offers a glimpse at a dimension of the human toll often missing from U.S. reporting on the war. For last month, the site’s operators compiled all the stray day-in, day-out reports of violence around Iraq and tallied casualties among Iraqi civilians and members of the Iraqi security forces. As the site cautions, it’s not a complete list, just what folks could scrape together from a careful reading of daily news wires.

The toll reported for March was 440, including 240 civilians and 200 military. The compilation continues this month.

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Papal Embalmment, the Sequel

Do we want to know whether Pope John Paul II was embalmed? We do. The Infospigot Papal Interregnum Information Clearinghouse is under siege this morning today with dozens hundreds of visitors seeking the facts. So here, as precisely as they can be ascertained from a distance of 6,260 miles, they are:

The authoritative word from the Vatican is that Pope John Paul II has not been embalmed. Instead, according to a pretty good rundown from the BBC, the church is saying the body has been “prepared.” But there’s a mystery about the nature and extent of the preparation. The BBC story cites speculation that the bier upon which the pope lies is being cooled (get your ice-cold bier here) to slow the body’s decomposition. The Associated Press reports Massimi Signoracci, a Roman mortician whose family has handled past popes, as saying some type of embalmment would be necessary for a body on display as long as John Paul’s has been. Reuters’ story, which sheds no more light on what was or wasn’t done, picks up a good quote from Cardinal Francis George of Chicago:

“You see him, you see the body, and in Italy they don’t embalm in the same way we do, so you see the face of death more clearly,” Cardinal Francis George was quoted as saying in the Chicago Sun Times. “The person who is there looks like a dead person, and that’s good, that’s the reality of our future, but it’s not the last word.”

BBC: Preparing a Pontiff for the Grave

Reuters: Vatican Not Afraid to Show Pope’s Face of Death

San Francisco Chronicle (AP): Vatican: John Paul II Was Not Embalmed

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Embalming the Pope

In further search of the truth about papal embalming practices, I found what appears to be a nice feature story Reuters did in 2001, when Pope John XXIII was disinterred to be put on public display. The story says that the pope himself directed that he be embalmed, and the job fell to a young doctor named Gennaro Goglia:

“… Goglia, now 78, still vividly recalls how a Vatican car picked him up at home on the night of June 3, 1963, hours after Pope John died of stomach cancer. Goglia, then a specialist in anatomy at Rome’s Catholic University, did not even tell his family where he was going.

“Before John died he entrusted a custodian to see to his funeral. John recalled that the body of his predecessor Pius XII was preserved so badly in 1958 that the four men standing guard in the Vatican had to be changed every 15 minutes because they could not stand the stench. The custodian, also a doctor, got in touch with Goglia. After they arrived, Goglia and others were taken by private elevator to the papal apartments in the apostolic palace. They had to wait about an hour while Italian sculptor Giacomo Manzu made a bronze death mask.

” ‘Manzu walked out and we walked in,’ Goglia said.”

The best line in the story: “Yes, it was just a body,” (Goglia said). “It didn’t have to go to a beauty contest but it was the body of the pope.”

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Search of the Day

What with all of the pictures of the deceased pope being carried through St. Peter’s Square, a lot of people seem to want to know whether he was embalmed or not before being displayed publicly. I count nine people coming to the renowned Infospigot Papal Information Clearinghouse through Google searches looking for information on whether the pope was embalmed; before you scoff, that’s a hefty 16 percent of the site’s visits on a non-banner Monday.

The answer is: I don’t know for sure. I mean, I have not found a story anywhere that says definitively that John Paul II was embalmed. However, lots of stories refer to his embalmed body being borne through the square on Monday. So I’m guessing he was embalmed.

Interesting to note that the Universi Dominici Gregis — the rules of succession that John Paul promulgated in 1996 — don’t mention embalmment, but do set out some specific rules limiting the kinds of pictures that can be taken of the pope’s body after he’s died:

“No one is permitted to use any means whatsoever in order to photograph or film the Supreme Pontiff either on his sickbed or after death, or to record his words for subsequent reproduction. If after the Pope’s death anyone should wish to take photographs of him for documentary purposes, he must ask permission from the Cardinal Camerlengo of Holy Roman Church, who will not however permit the taking of photographs of the Supreme Pontiff except attired in pontifical vestments.”

The Vatican’s site is worth checking out, for its orthodox weirdness if not for the oddness of Medieval Europe brushing elbows with the postmodern world. (Most of the news on the site has yet to be translated from Italian. So the official announcement of the pope’s cause of death refers to the primary causes — “shock settico” and “collasso cardiocircolatorio irreversibile” (which I take to be septic shock and irreversible cardiocirculatory collapse) — and several secondary causes:

“–Morbo di Parkinson

–Pregressi episodi di insufficienza respiratoria acuta e conseguente tracheotomia

–Ipertrofia prostatica benigna complicata da urosepsi

–Cardiopatia ipertensiva ed ischemica.”