"The lost are borne on seas of shipwreck"

Incredible music by the Tord Gustavsen Ensemble, with singer Kristin Asbjørnsen, set to words by W.H. Auden... what could be better in this world tonight?

"Restored, Returned"

Restored! Returned! The lost are borne
On seas of shipwreck home at last:
See! In the fire of praising burns
       The dry dumb past, and we
The life-day long shall part no more.

- From Ten Songs, 1939, W.H. Auden

"I'm your great big butter and egg man from way down south"

Louis Armstrong Hot Five & May Alix, "Big Butter and Egg Man from the West," 1926 jazz song by Percy Venable.

Armstrong is, as he tells May Alix, "different," as he's "a big butter and egg man from way down in the South", with a coronet on his lip....

Amériques

From a time when "America" meant "discoveries - new worlds on earth, in the sky, or in the minds of men."


Composer Edgar Varèse composed Amériques, a monumental though relatively brief symphonic work, between 1918 and 1921, revising it (according to the piece's Wikipedia page) in 1927.

Listen for the sirens! Think of "Rite of Spring" in Manhattan.

Direct YouTube link

Homer Quincy Smith: "I want Jesus to walk with me"

The mysterious, unknown Homer Quincy Smith walked out of the black American South and recorded two unforgettable performances, then drifted back into the anonymous depths. "I want Jesus to walk with me," an African-American spiritual was one of them. (The title of the song says "talk with me," but the lyrics, and Smith sings accordingly, says "walk with me".)



As commenter Chris Alvarez states:

Why don’t they have music like this in church anymore? This negro spiritual confronts the same post-modern landscape as No Church in the Wild. Along with the strains of a haunted house organ, Homer Quincy Smith pleads for Jesus to walk with him:

I want Jesus to walk with me
I want Jesus to walk with me
All along my pilgrim journey
I want Jesus to walk with me

As night is falling, Lord, walk with me
As night is falling, Lord, walk with me
When the shades of evening fall o’er me
Lord, I want Jesus to walk with me

What the evangelicals with their guitars and drums and the Baptists with their frenetic gospel and the Presbyterians with their acoustical majesty and the Episcopalians with their choral Bach seem to have totally forgotten is that to ask Jesus to walk with you is an act of insane desperation, because the pilgrim journey is really fucking hard, and there’s no guarantee you’re going to get what you want.

Keep on marching my sisters and brothers.

If this music touched you, check out Smith's other haunting masterpiece, "Go Down Moses."

"Everything You Can Think of Is True"

Tom Waits, from his 2002 album, Alice

Davis and Evans a long time ago...

Was there ever a greater pairing than Miles Davis and Bill Evans on "Blue in Green"? The piece was written by Evans (though Davis was initially credited with it). The video by Christopher Coltrane is evocative. Sit back and enjoy, smoke a virtual cigar and drink that tumbler of Islay.

When I listen to this, I can almost believe there is such a thing as hope or truth. Certainly there is love.

"Don't tell anyone what happened here"

"Japan's Dirty Secret"
Documentary, May 2003

Produced by ABC Australia
Distributed by Journeyman Pictures
Uploaded to YouTube, March 10, 2008

Memories of Japanese war crimes continue to poison Japan's relations with its neighbours. Many Chinese are still suffering the effects of a vicious campaign of germ warfare.

"Our unit did things no human being should ever do," confesses Unit 731 member Yoshio Shinozuka. His unit developed the deadly pathogens which were used to infect 250,000 Chinese. Japan's refusal to apologise for its actions, or to acknowledge Unit 731's existence, has further upset its victims.

The story of how the United States gave amnesty to the war criminals who ran the Japanese Emperor's biological and chemical warfare program in the 1930s and 1940s has been told a number of times now, but after over 40 years of U.S. denials and censorship, it's not surprising the story is still barely known by the average American.

Few books in print still examine the issue, but they are good ones. See Sheldon Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45 and the American Cover-Up; also Hal Gold, Unit 731 Testimonies; and Daniel Barenblatt, A Plague upon Humanity: The Hidden History of Japan's Biological Warfare Program.

The entire history of modern Asia is mostly unknown by U.S. citizens, and that's especially true when it comes to the post-War period in Japan, China and Korea. And yet, bizarrely, the U.S. itself has fought two major wars in Asia (Korea and Vietnam), and lost many tens of thousands of its own citizens, with very little idea of what U.S. policy even was or is in that part of the world.

One's education can begin with the biggest cover-up of a war crime in U.S. history: the U.S. amnesty of the germ warfare researchers in Japan, their brutal murder, sometimes via vivisection, of thousands of human "guinea pigs", including, it seems likely, U.S. POWs. When the Soviet Union tried some of these military researchers as war criminals in the late 1940s, the US derided it as fake propaganda.

Such was the evil of the time that the US lied about this. The lies were not formally withdrawn for 50 years, and even then with a minimum of fanfare.

The ABC documentary is short but powerful. I offer it here with the hope that greater education of these issues will make people more politically aware and better able to intervene in the political process.

For further viewing, see this History International five part video on Unit 731, and also my reposting of Japanese professor Shingo Shibata's essay, "The Atomic Victims as Human Guinea Pigs."

"Give me Christ -- or give me Hiroshima!"

Leonard Cohen's apocalyptic vision of "The Future" looks all too much like our awful present.

From his 2009 Live in London concert (catch the DVD).

"The Prisoner"

Art Pepper's version of "The Prisoner," otherwise known as the theme from The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978). Pepper's version reminds me of the Vangelis soundtrack to Blade Runner four years later: cool, sad, bluesy.

"Sola, perduta, abbandonata"

Eva Marton sings "Sola, perduta, abbandonata" from the last act of Puccini's Manon Lescaut, Budapest Congress Center, 1988

Sola, perduta, abbandonata
in landa desolata!
Orror! Intorno a me s'oscura il ciel.
Ahime, son sola!
E nel profondo deserto io cado,
strazio crudel, ah, sola, abbandonata,
io la deserta donna!
Ah, non voglio morir!
Tutto e dunque finito.
Terra di pace mi sembrava questa
Ah, mia belta funesta
ire novelle accende
strappar da lui mi si volea; or tutto
il mio passato orribile risorge,
e vivo innanzi al guardo mio si posa.
Ah, di sangue s'e macchiato!
Ah, tutto e finito;
asil di pace ora la tomba invoco
No, non voglio morir. Amore, aita!
(from 6lyrics.com)

English translation, from ClassicalPlus:

Alone, lost, abandoned.
in this desolate plain!
Ah, the horror of it!
Around me
the day darkens. Alas I am alone!
And in the depth of this desert I fall -
what cruel torment!
Ah! alone, abandoned,
a woman deserted!
Ah! I do not want to die,
no, I do not want to die.
So all is over.
I thought this would be a land of peace.
Alas! my fatal beauty
arouses fresh troubles,
they wanted to snatch me from him.
Now all my past
rises up starkly
and stands vividly before my gaze.
Ah! It is stained with blood
Ah! All is over!
As a haven of peace
I now invoke the tomb.
No, I do not want to die,
I do not want to die,
No, no, I do not want to die: love, help me.

RT TV Discusses IG Report Cover--up of Drugging of Detainees

RT TV had a segment on 9/26 that followed from my Truthout article earlier this month, New Revelations Suggest DoD Cover-Up Over Detainee Drugging Charges. They initially asked me to be interviewed, but I couldn't be available in time, and they instead turned to journalist and human rights attorney Scott Horton, who was quoted in the article.

The following is from RT's YouTube blurb for the video:

According to a recent report on Truth-out.org by Jeffrey Kaye (http://truth-out.org/news/item/11640-new-revelations-suggest-dod-cover-up-ove...), detainees at Gitmo were drugged by the Pentagon staff. The prison which has been open for nearly a decade, has many questioning the validity and legality of site and the torture techniques implemented there. Now it seems the US Department of Defense is attempting to cover up allegations of drugging prisoners at Gitmo. So why does Gitmo remain in open and what really goes on there? Scott Horton, a contributing editor for Harper's Magazine, joins us with his take on the legality of Gitmo and how it could be hurting the US in the long run.

Refice's Cecilia

Licinio Refice is well-known in Italy, or so I understand. But in the U.S., he is practically unknown. A verismo Italian composer, following in the tradition of Puccini and Mascagni, with a dash of plainsong from church music (he was a composer for the Vatican, after all), Refice produced one sublime opera that definitely deserves production by some major U.S. opera company: Cecilia.

The great 1950s soprano Renata Tebaldi sung Refice, and here are two examples, both from the opera Cecilia. -- It doesn't more beautiful and soulful than this.

Per amor di Gesu



Grazie Sorelle

"The other night, they cast my child into the sea..."

I found online, at a blog by "scheherezhade" this this YouTube video of soprano Renata Tebaldi singing the aria "L'altra notte in fondo al mare." It was always one of my favorite arias on an old CD collection of Tebaldi's performances, but I'd never seen it on YouTube. There are other versions by other sopranos probably just as good (yes, Maria Callas fans), but this is the way I heard this magnificent piece first, and it still sends chills down my spine.

L'altra notte in fondo al mare
Il mio bimbo hanno gittato,
Or per farmi delirare dicon ch'io
L'abbia affogato.
L'aura a fredda,
Il carcer fosco,
E la mesta anima mia
Come il passero del bosco
Vola, vola, vola via.
Ah! Pieta di me!

In letargico sopore
E' mia madre addormentata,
E per colmo dell'orrore dicon ch'io
L'abbia attoscata.
L'aura a fredda,
Il carcer fosco,
E la mesta anima mia
Come il passero del bosco
Vola, vola, vola via.
Ah! Pieta di me!

Scheherezhade gives as translation: "the other night into the sea they cast my child and now to send me mad they say I drowned her. The air is cold, the prison is gloomy and my spirit like a bird in the wood flies, flies away. Ah, have pity on me. Into a lethargic slumber my mother fell sleeping and now the supreme horror they say I poisoned her. The air is cold, etc."

Of course, this famous aria is from the great opera Mefistofele by Arrigo Boito.

"Ombra di Nube"

A devotee of Claudio Muzio (1889-1936 ) posted this video of Muzio singing the rarely recorded but hauntingly beautiful "Ombra di Nube" by the Italian verismo composer (and priest) Licinio Refice (1885-1954).

Help Bring Anti-Torture Documentary "Doctors of the Dark Side" to DVD!

Psychologist and documentary film maker Martha Davis is making a new push to get her important film, "Doctors of the Dark Side," which is about the collaboration of doctors and psychologists with the US torture program, out on DVD. This is an important step towards getting wider distribution as a whole.

Davis, along with actress Mercedes Ruehl (who narrates the film) and Physicians for Human Rights' Anti-torture Program Director Kristine Huskey, have filmed a video appeal for funds. Watch the appeal and then make a tax-deductible donation:



From the film's website, where you can also watch a film trailer:

Doctors of the Dark Side exposes the scandal behind the torture scandal — how psychologists and physicians implemented and covered up the torture of detainees in US controlled military prisons. The stories of four detainees and the doctors involved in their abuse show how essential doctors have been to the torture program. Director Martha Davis (Interrogation Psychologists) spent four years investigating the controversy and produced the documentary with an award-winning team that includes Oscar-winners Mark Jonathan Harris (Writer) and Mercedes Ruehl (Narrator), and Emmy-winner Lisa Rinzler (Director of Photography). Editor M. Trevino (Hidden Battles) led the post-production team of the feature length documentary. The Executive Producers are Thea Kerman and Sergio Rothstein.

(Full disclosure: I was interviewed and appear briefly twice in the movie, as my reporting on some of these issues has contributed to exposures about the depth and breadth of psychologist and physician collaboration with the CIA and Department of Defense torture programs. -- Even so, I heartily recommend this film because I believe it to be an important contribution to the campaign to fully expose the torture scandal, and to also be an important work of documentary cinema.)

Alyona Show Interviews Jason Leopold on DoD Drugging of Detainees

Alyona Mikovski at RT TV interviewed Jason Leopold, co-author of our July 11 Truthout article, DoD Report Reveals Some Detainees Interrogated While Drugged, Others "Chemically Restrained.

The Truthout article was noted by numerous news outlets, including Associated Press, the UK Daily Mail, and Wired Magazine. Kevin Gosztola also interviewed me about what the Inspector General report, "Investigation of Allegations of the Use of Mind-Altering Drugs to Facilitate Interrogations of Detainees" (PDF), was really all about.



If you're not done wanting to know more about the IG report and the whole issue of drugging the "war on terror" detainees, you might also want to listen to Scott Horton at The Scott Horton Show interview Jason on the latest revelations.

For more penetrating, original commentary on the IG report and the drugging issue in general, see Andy Worthington and Marcy Wheeler's recent blog postings.

Come See California Premier of "Doctors of the Dark Side"

American Friends Service Committee, Physicians for Human Rights, Psychologists for Social Responsibility, and Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility are co-sponsoring the California premier of “Doctors of the Dark Side.” Martha Davis’s critically acclaimed documentary will be followed by a panel discussion, which will include yours truly, along with anti-torture activist Ruth Fallenbaum, Ph.D., solitary confinement expert and UC Santa Cruz professor Craig Haney, MD, and Bob Flax, Ph.D. of Saybrook University.

[Update, 6/26: Event organizers have informed me Dr. Haney will not be able to attend, and he will be replaced with another panel participant.]

"Doctors of the Dark Side" describes the complicity of doctors and psychologists in the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. The website for the film project is www.doctorsofthedarkside.com. To see a preview clip of the film, made by Martha Davis, Ph.D. and an award-winning crew, including Oscar-winners Mark Jonathan Harris (Writer), Mercedes Ruehl (Narrator), and Emmy-winner Lisa Rinzler (Director of Photography), click here.

The event will held Saturday, June 30, 7:00-9:30 PM (doors open at 6:30), at Delancy Theater, 600 Embarcadero St., San Francisco. The event is free, and it is wheelchair accessible. Donations will be welcomed.

Interested readers can also view a new video, "How to Help Doctors Prevent Torture." This is a nine-minute introduction to the crucial role of physicians and psychologists in the detainee torture program and how new state legislation could stop this post-9/11 misuse of health care professionals and secure them as a force for torture prevention. It is made with excerpts and additional footage from the documentary "Doctors of the Dark Side."

Shutting the Door on Habeas at Guantanamo

Andy Worthington was on RT TV yesterday (June 11) talking about the recent Supreme Court decision not to review seven lower court rulings denying habeas release to Guantanamo prisoners. (The Court also declined review of a lawsuit by US prisoner, and Jose Padilla, who was tortured in a US Navy brig as an "enemy combatant" and later sentenced to prison for "material support" to terrorism.)

Back in June 2008, then-Presidential candidate told election crowds, "That's why we're going to close down Guantanamo and restore habeas corpus." But as Lyle Denniston, at SCOTUSblog noted in an article yesterday -- "Court bypasses all new detainee cases (FINAL UPDATE)" -- that's not what actually happened.

The [2008] Boumediene case was the last major terrorism case that went against the government. There, while establishing a constitutional right for Guantanamo prisoners to file habeas challenges to their detention, the Crt left it to lower courts to sort out just how that judicial process would work, case by case. More than a dozen District Court judges in Washington then took on the initial review task and, for a time, found in a majority of cases that the government had not justified further detention of the individual involved. But, when the government appealed release orders, the D.C. Circuit ruled against the detainee, or else ordered the District judge to reconsider.

In a string of decisions, not one of which the Supreme Court has been willing to review, the D.C. Circuit fashioned its own legal rules for Guantanamo cases, including at least two review methods that strongly favored the government’s evidence. Along the way, three judges on the D.C. Circuit — Senior Judges A. Raymond Randolph and Laurence H. Silberman, and Circuit Judge Janice Rogers Brown — have publicly and sharply criticized the Boumediene decision. The Supreme Court, turning its judicial cheek, has never responded to any of those criticisms, other than to leave the D.C. Circuit with virtually sole control of continuing litigation by Guantanamo prisoners and their volunteer lawyers.

Denniston made the point, as well, that Obama appointee Elena Kagan was probably involved in the decision not to review. Even more to the point, though, the Obama administration argued against SCOTUS review of the detainees' appeals.

The implicit instigators of this decision are the liberals who have sold out any semblance of belief in civil rights and civil liberties, unless such pertains to their own favorite group. Instead, for the sake of electoral "lesser-evil" politics, human beings held in solitary confinement, in indefinite detention, many if not most innocent of any crimes, and subjected to brutal medical treatments like forced feedings, or violent cell extractions, and God knows what else, are reduced to merely chips in the poker game of US election politics. This attitude goes hand-in-hand with the bizarre cheerleading for Obama's drone killings, and his policies of military intervention from Afghanistan to Libya to Mexico, and (barely) covert warfare against Iran.

As Andy Worthington said at his blog, introducing the RT video, "On the fourth anniversary of Boumediene v. Bush, this is a truly depressing state of affairs, and one made all the more depressing because of the general indifference of the US media and the American people, and I hope my contribution, and RT’s interest in the story, will help people to understand how depressing it is that the men in Guantánamo have been so shamefully failed by all three branches of the US government."



Other important discussions of the recent SCOTUS decision are taking place at Emptywheel and Lawfare. Adam Serwer at Mother Jones also wrote a good story. The best review of all the coverage on this was by Jason Leopold at Truthout, who also talked to some of the Guantanamo attorneys affected by the decision:

Brent Mickum, an attorney who has spent nearly a decade working on the habeas cases of several Guantanamo detainees and currently represents the high-value prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, said, "For those of us who have been working in the trenches for years and years this is a really sad and disappointing day."

"All of our work has essentially been for naught," Mickum said. "This leaves open a glaring question, what is the next step? All of the habeas attorneys will be getting together for a major meeting to discuss that."

In an interview, Mark Denbeaux, the director of the Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research who has represented several Guantanamo detainees and is also a member of Zubaydah's legal team, said the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Boumediene is now as "legally effective as a law review article."

Out of Hitchcock: The Story of Hesham Abu Zubaydah

Jason Leopold was interviewed on RT's The Alyona Show on May 30, talking about his big Truthout investigation published the other day. The story is pure Americana, circa 21st century, as the courts, immigration, the FBI, Army CID, and even a problematic ex-wife all descend upon a man who just happened to be the brother of one of the three or four most famous "terrorists" known, Abu Zubaydah. An innocent man persistently hounded by police agents is something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie, but here it really happened.

The word "terrorists" above is in quotes, because one, no charges have ever been filed against Zayn Al-Abidin Muhammed Husein, who sits rotting in solitary confinement in Guantanamo these past six years. (His lawyers have demanded the government charge him.) And two, it is not clear that whatever actions Abu Zubaydah took, they were not merely the actions of a person involved in a civil war, undeserving of the nebulous label of "terrorism," which is more of a political label than it is anything else.

And why at this point can anyone be so uncertain about who this man actually is? (And it is a piquant irony in Jason's article that Zubaydah's own brother cannot say exactly who the man is the government holds called Abu Zubaydah, that he really doesn't recognized him.) Well, for one thing, the government has reneged on its accusations that he was a high Al Qaeda figure, and offered zero explanation for why they thought that, or why they changed their minds. Then, there is the little matter of the horrendous torture of Zubaydah and many, many others, throwing real doubt on the veracity of whatever supposed revelations came from such criminal abuse.

Zubaydah was the first of the CIA torture victims to be waterboarded, and not once, but 83 times. He was the "high-value detainee" for which John Yoo and Jay Bybee wrote a legal memo to the CIA redefining torture and the legal understanding of "pain" so the CIA could put, for instance, Abu Zubaydah in a confinement box, or deprive him of sleep, or repeatedly slap him, or waterboard him, etc.

Jason Leopold's article is not about the Abu Zubayah we "know." It is about his brother, Hesham. Watch the two videos below, both the Alyona interview and one of Jason Leopold interviewing Abu Zubaydah's brother himself (originally posted with the Truthout article). Besides the inherent human interest of such a story, there is much to ponder from what is revealed: about how informants are recruited by the FBI via pressure, false promises or blackmail; how the full story about what the government saying and what it was really doing in the "war on terror"; on the lies and secrets still withheld from the American people about 9/11, and much more.

(An important related side story about how the FBI tried to get Hesham Abu Zubaydah to drop his permission to let Jason Leopold have access through FOIA to his FBI files is something Jason wrote up separately, and is a disturbing story in and off itself.)




From the beginning of Jason's Truthout story, "From Hopeful Immigrant to FBI Informant - the Inside Story of the Other Abu Zubaidah"

Hesham opened the envelope at the bar, expecting a green card. Instead it was a subpoena from a federal prosecutor, which would force him to testify--against his brother.

He thought about fleeing to Norway or Poland with his wife and daughter. But it would be much easier to cross the border into Canada in his Cadillac Escalade and avoid the hassle of airport security and the possibility that his name would pop up on the no-fly list.

Hesham Abu Zubaidah speaking to Truthout in November 2011 at his home in Florida. (Photo: Lance Page / Truthout)
In Canada, he could start over again. Raise farm animals or something. Change his name. Never look back. Hesham had played this fantasy out in his head dozens of times since he had quit working as an informant for the FBI.

"This is what you wanted from me all along, isn't it?" Hesham asked the FBI agent who handed him the envelope. "You guys used me."

When he'd been living in Portland, Oregon, Hesham had agreed to infiltrate mosques and spy on other Muslims because his FBI handler led him to believe she could help him obtain a green card. She didn't, and he cut off contact with the agency when he moved to a small town in Florida. But they had found him again.

[Click here to read the rest]

Dvořák on a blustery early Spring day

Antonín Dvořák - String Quartet No.12, the "American" in F (Op. 96)
Second movement: Lento - Alban Berg Quartet

CD or MP3: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00000DNP0/ref=dm_dp_cdp?ie=UTF8&s=music...

The photo montage presents "Christina's World" and "Wind from the Sea" by Andrew Wyeth(1917-2009).