Category: Current Affairs

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Blogsex! Sexblog!

Tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine is publishing a feature on blogging. The focus is on personal blogs — very personal blogs, with lots of sex and gossip and carrying on. The most interesting aspect is how blogging opens people’s lives to public inspection in a new way. Especially in relationship to their sex lives. And another thing: You wouldn’t believe all the sex and gossip and carrying on you find on all these blogs. Lots of sex. S-E-X. Sex, sex, sex. And gossip. And carrying on.

Actually, it’s a fairly entertaining piece, but a little in the vein of, hey, I just went on that Internet thing and look what I found!

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The Verdict

Sure, you’ve got the victim’s family and the family of the defendant. You’ve got jurors who handed over six months of their lives to hear testimony and see evidence and make a tough call. You’ve got the prosecutors and defense lawyers. But in the end, the people I really feel for in the Scott Peterson case are the spectators. No more titillation. No more rage on behalf of someone they didn’t know and would never have cared about save for her dreadful fate. No more hatred for a suspect they likewise didn’t know. No more poring over testimony and gossip. No more jockeying for what one news outlet called “the 27 coveted public seats inside the courtroom,” where they could see the monster himself, or the grieving mothers, or the juror with the orange hair. No more booing and cursing the suspect’s family. No more cameras to show off for or reporters to impress.

But it’s not the end of the world. There’s always the execution to look forward to.

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Portraits of Crazyworld

The New York Times has a fine story on an artist, Steve Mumford, who’s gotten himself embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq as a combat artist. He’s been working for Artnet, which has posted a 15-part Baghdad Journal featuring Mumford’s drawings, paintings and dispatches. I’ve only looked at a couple of the more recent installments. I think they’re frank and human in a way you don’t often see in the mainstream press. In the Times story, he says his view of the war has changed. When he first went to Iraq, he thought the whole operation was a “huge blunder.” But he says he’s been won over to the view that the U.S. mission could succeed, partly by talking to Iraqis, partly by seeing firsthand what U.S. troops have been doing to fix things in Baghdad (which one Army officer he quotes calls “crazyworld”).

Despite his expressed optimism, his picture of Iraq — the violence, the apparent distrust of anything American, at this point — looks anything but hopeful. His most recent dispatch ends:

“When I get back to my hotel the following week Baghdad’s streets feel more dangerous than ever. A rocket has hit the nearby Sheraton; reporters are largely confined to their hotel rooms amid a rash of kidnappings. Only five other people are staying at the Al Fanar: an American contractor, his Iraqi wife and a British colleague, a rather mysterious Japanese woman who tells me she runs a massage parlor in the Green Zone, and a reporter, a young French woman who I occasionally spot in a headscarf, in the lobby.

“Drivers and hotel staff, with little work to do, hang out there, watching TV, while a lone macaque monkey in a small cage stares quietly out the lobby window at the street. In an effort to salvage something from this depressing scene I’d tried to arrange for this monkey to be transferred to Baghdad’s zoo, but the hotel owner refused to sell.

“For several days I stay within the confines of the security zone around the hotels, while my friends Esam and Ahmed come to visit. I’m quite sure my movements are being watched, and when I’m finally ready to leave Iraq I tell the hotel staff I’m going to visit a friend for a day before leaving town.

“However, the hotel driver, Farouk, looks not in the least surprised when I ask him to take me directly to the airport. We drive past the blighted landscape of palm tree stumps next to the highway, cut down and bulldozed to lessen the danger of ambushes. After 30 minutes we pass the first military checkpoint at the airport’s outskirts, and I breathe a sigh of relief.”

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Gary Webb

Something I missed over the weekend: Gary Webb, the San Jose Mercury News reporter who wrote a series of articles linking the CIA, Nicaragua’s anti-government contra rebels, cocaine traffickers, and the crack epidemic in Los Angeles, was found dead in suburban Sacramento on Friday, December 10. The cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head, and the sheriff’s and coroner’s offices up there are quoted as saying Webb appears to have committed suicide. (Un-shockingly, some in the parallel conspiracy-driven universe have revealed his death was a “suicide,” in quotation marks, meaning that he was rubbed out as someone who knew too much about the “Bush Crime Family.”)

Right here I’ll say I would need to go back and read what he wrote, how other media responded, and the substance of government investigations to offer an informed opinion about Webb’s stories. What’s clear was that as an investigative reporter, Webb was the real thing, sharing a Pulitzer Prize at one point and getting lots of other recognition for his work before the contra cocaine story.

In saying he had evidence that the CIA was in bed with people who had helped trigger a disaster of epic proportions in the second-biggest U.S. city and beyond, he was suggesting something that most people would reject as fantastic, too evil to be true, to byzantine to really hold together. That was my own reaction. And like most messengers bearing such tidings, he paid a price: others in the journalistic establishment worked to discredit his work, his own paper wound up repudiating the stories, he was transferred to a bureau office 100 miles from where he lived. Sixteen months after the series ran, he quit the Merc. And continued to pursue the story, eventually expanding his investigation into a book, from outside a big-city paper.

Conclusion: I don’t have any. The guy was 49. He believed passionately, and apparently sincerely and without cynicism, in the integrity of his journalism. He had three kids and had been pushed outside the professional realm he loved (his former wife is quoted as saying, “All he ever wanted to do was write”). And he apparently shot himself. It’s a tragedy, that’s all.

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Caring for the Wounded

The New England Journal of Medicine is running a photo essay in this week’s edition entitled “Caring for the Wounded in Iraq.” Like the photojournalistic work I mentioned a few days ago, “Purple Hearts: Back from Iraq,” it’s a glimpse at the reality that hides behind statistics like the number of U.S. troops wounded in action (nearly 10,000).

You can find the photo essay here (or go here for a PDF version). The photographs are mostly unsparing clinical images of soldiers who have suffered severe trauma. “High-energy gunshot wound passing through knee” is one of the typically dispassionate captions. To me, the pictures testify to two things: the extraordinary destructive power of modern weapons, even the improvised ones wielded by the Iraqi guerrillas; and the near-miraculous capacities of medical technology. The doctors and nurses you see in the pictures are using every means at their disposal to save bodies torn apart by explosives and shrapnel. In many cases, they’re succeeding. (As “Purple Hearts” testifies, though, it’s not as easy to put the people back together.)

Once again, I’m reminded of one of Walt Whitman’s Civil War poems, “The Wound-Dresser.” The hospital scene and means of treatment he depicts are primitive by our standards. But the sense of heartbreaking destruction of lives is the same:

“The crush’d head I dress (poor crazed hand tear not the bandage away),

The neck of the cavalry-man with the bullet through and through I examine,

Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet life struggles hard

(Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death!

In mercy come quickly).

“From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand,

I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood,

Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curv’d neck and side-falling head,

His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the bloody stump,

And has not yet look’d on it.

“I dress a wound in the side, deep, deep,

But a day or two more, for see the frame all wasted and sinking,

And the yellow-blue countenance see.

I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-wound,

Cleanse the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening, so offensive,

While the attendant stands behind aside me holding the tray and pail.

“I am faithful, I do not give out,

The fractur’d thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen,

These and more I dress with impassive hand (yet deep in my breast a fire, a burning flame).”

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1941

Because the “Spigot is the ‘Spigot, let’s note before the calendar changes that today is December 7, the anniversary (on this side of the International Date Line) of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the event that finally dragged the United States into the global conflict that had already cost millions of lives in Europe and Asia. The same week of the attack on the U.S. fleet in Hawaii, the Soviets stopped the German advance on Moscow — German units made it into outlying areas of the capital –and threw the invaders into a retreat that nearly became a rout.

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The Wounded

Purplehearts_cover_1

Found this listed on Kottke.org: The Purple Hearts Gallery. Portraits of American troops seriously wounded in Iraq, with brief accounts from each about what happened, how they feel about it, and what their lives are like now. Another aspect of the war that most of us know exists but never see.

"But like here in California, nobody really knows what the soldiers are going through, what’s happening to them. They see on TV, oh yeah, two soldiers got wounded today and they think, yeah, he’ll be alright. But that soldier is scarred for life both physically and mentally, but like they don’t understand. They see one soldier wounded and they’ll forget about it like as soon as they change the channel, you know." (Army Specialist Robert Acosta, Santa Ana, California)

(Note: The gallery contains selections from "Purple Hearts: Back from Iraq," a book of pictures and essays on Iraq.)

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Beleaguered, Deceased, DUSTWUN

Noodling around with some research on how our military reports casualties — ultimately, I’m interested in just how they’ve accounted for Iraqi casualties since the war started — I happened across a trove of public but obscure documents outlining rules for handling casualty reports and the casualties themselves. It’s strangely absorbing reading: They cover everything from how to identify mutilated bodies to how NOK (next of kin, in militaryspeak) notification should be handled. And the juxtaposition between the messy, imprecise methods of war and the meticulousness of planning for its inevitable outcome is almost weird. (Actually, the meticulousness is probably a good thing; I found a story online that noted that during the Vietnam War, the military authorized taxi drivers to deliver casualty notifications to next of kin).

From Army Regulation 600-8-1, “Army Casualty Operations/ Assistance/ Insurance” (224 pp., PDF):

Item Name/Description: Casualty Status (11x)

Instructions: Enter one of the following casualty status codes.

Codes:

BESIEGED—Besieged by a hostile force. The type casualty code must be hostile.

BELEAGUERED—Beleaguered by a hostile force. The type casualty code must be hostile.

CAPTURED—Captured by a hostile force. The type casualty code must be hostile.

DETAINED—Individual is detained in a foreign country. The type casualty code can be either hostile or nonhostile.

DECEASED—Individual casualty is dead. The type casualty code can be either hostile or nonhostile.

DUSTWUN—Individual whereabouts unknown. The type casualty code can be either hostile or nonhostile.

INTERNED—Individual is interned in a foreign country. The type casualty code must be nonhostile.

MIA—Individual whose whereabouts and status are unknown but are attributable to hostile activity. The type casualty code must be hostile.

MISSING—Individual whose whereabouts and status are unknown, provided the absence appears to be involuntary. The type casualty code can be either hostile or nonhostile.

NSI—Not seriously injured or ill. Treated at a medical facility and released. The type casualty code can be either hostile or nonhostile.

RMC—Returned to military control. The type casualty code can be either hostile or nonhostile.

SI—Seriously injured, wounded, or ill. The type casualty code can be either hostile or nonhostile.

SPECAT—Special category patient, usually an amputee. The type casualty code can be either hostile or nonhostile.

SPEINT—Special interest. Not seriously injured or ill. Incident could be news worthy. The type casualty code must be nonhostile.

VSI—Very seriously injured, wounded, or ill. The type casualty code can be either hostile or nonhostile.

Format Example:

03. DECEASED

03. VSI

From Army Regulation 638-2, “Procedures for the Care and Disposition of Remains and Disposition of Personal Effects” (141 pp., PDF):

Visual recognition of remains must be done with extreme deliberation and care. The unit commander may identify remains by visual recognition only when the remains facial features are not disfigured. The commander’s identification must be based upon a close and direct examination of the remains by a person or persons who knew the decedent well (roommate, squad leader, close friend). The visual recognition is recorded on DD Form 565 (Statement of Recognition of Deceased). A sample DD Form 565 is located at figure 3–1. DD Form 565 is an enclosure to DA Form 2773 (Statement of Identification).

And from Department of Defense Instruction 1300.18, “Military Personnel Casualty Matters, Policies,

and Procedures”:

In those circumstances where the reason for a member’s absence is uncertain and it is possible that the member is a casualty whose absence is involuntary, but there is not sufficient evidence to determine immediately that the member is missing or deceased, the member should be designated DUSTWUN [Duty Status Whereabouts Unknown]. This procedure is particularly useful when hostilities prevent the immediate determination of a member’s actual status, or when search and rescue efforts are ongoing.

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A Death in Iraq

The Department of Defense says that one of the soldiers killed over the weekend (and one of the 16 who have died so far in December) was Army Staff Sergeant Cari Anne Gasiewicz, 28 (according to the Army Times, she’d been promoted from specialist just this fall). She was in a convoy hit by two IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, or roadside bombs. The Buffalo News reports she was from Cheektowaga, New York, spoke fluent Arabic, and was serving in a military intelligence battalion.

A soldier who was riding in Gasiewicz’s truck and who was wounded herself in the attack has blogged an account of the incident. (Later: And here, another soldier blogger describes his acquaintance with Sgt. Gasiewicz in Iraq before she was killed.)

In May, the Buffalo News interviewed Gasiewicz as part of a story on the challenges facing military women stationed in Iraq. From that story:

“Cari Gasiewicz, a Depew native who holds the rank of specialist in the Army’s Military Intelligence Battalion based out of Fort Gordon in Augusta, Ga., speaks Arabic fluently. She has been working as an linguist in Iraq since earlier this year.

“Her job is to talk to the Iraqis about their feelings on the American presence there, the war effort and similar subjects.

“Children, especially, seem very open to the women soldiers, she said.

” ‘The children love talking to American soldiers. They are amazed that American females know how to speak Arabic,’ said Gasiewicz, who attended Canisius College for three years before joining the Army.

“Gasiewicz said she hopes to be home early next year.

“One day, while on duty, she said, she made friends with a group of Iraqi children — and was amazed by their reaction to her.

” ‘They were talking to me like crazy,’ she wrote in an e-mail from her station in Iraq, just west of Baghdad. ‘Right before I left, one of the kids tapped me on my arm and gave me one of his marbles as a gift.’ ”

” … Women soldiers face much the same challenges as male ones. Of course, there are a few dilemmas that are unique.

“Marriage proposals, for example.

“Gasiewicz, 27,received three proposals from Iraqi men in the past few months.

” ‘They were all very young,’ Gasiewicz wrote in an e-mail. ‘I think one was 15 — the time they get married here — one was 22, and the other was 35 and had three wives already. So I had to let them down nicely.’

She’s the 28th Army woman to die in Iraq, including one from the Army Reserve, four from the Army National Guard, and a civilian Army employee.

Updated 12/9/04

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The War in Pictures

Checking around for recent blog entries on Kevin Sites the other night, I came across a reference to a month-old blog called “Fallujah in Pictures” (the title’s since been changed to “Iraq in Pictures”). It’s a roughly executed collection of news-service war pictures. I could do without some of the repetitive images and the heavy-handed attempts at anti-war irony (the power of the images is what they say themselves to each viewer, not the spin you try to put on them). The caveat for anyone who goes to the site is that much of what’s shown is quite graphic; not what we’re used to seeing on the news or in the paper. But that’s the main point and what makes the site valuable: To the extent we, the people care what’s happening over there, we’re getting a cleaned-up version of events. Occasionally, we’ve gotten some fine front-line reporting on our troops’ experience. Beyond that, we get precise casualty counts for our guys. We get a rough though probably unreliable accounting of the number of enemy fighters we’re killing. The press gives casualty tolls for the intensifying insurgent attacks across Iraq. We get foggy, inconclusive numbers for civilians killed in the continuing festivities. We get senior officials and military officers downplaying the extent and severity of the insurgency and pretty much refusing to talk about the impact on Iraqis unless it serves our purpose. The pictures have a way of cutting through that, and the site has a way of cutting through our news media’s reluctance to show the public the whole face of the war we’re engaged in.

The link: “Iraq in Pictures.”