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• Tsunami in a Teapot
• And they were all amazed!
• SOA Protest Photographs
• Our Torture Advocates
• What Would Ellacuria Say?
• Qu'ils mangent de la brioche!
• No Aid Needed
• All Safe
• 300,000 Vanish, Goats Patrol Falluja
• Falluja Liberated
• We Doomed!
• Will we be forgiven for this crime?

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Wednesday, November 24, 2004

SOA Protest Photographs

Visit the SOA Protest Photo Gallery to see pictures of the November 20-21 protest at the gates of Fort Benning, GA.

Friday, November 19, 2004

Our Torture Advocates

"I like him,” Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the leading Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said today after a closed meeting with Alberto Gonzales, whom he has known as White House counsel.

“I said jokingly that the president, with the majority he has in the Senate, could have sent up Attila the Hun and got him confirmed,” Mr. Leahy said. “But Judge Gonzales is no Attila the Hun; he’s far from that, and he’s a more uniting figure."

Patrick Leahy’s vow earlier this spring that he would demand a full disclosure regarding Abu Ghraib has now melted.  Does John Kerry even remember that he once demanded that Donald Rumsfeld resign because of Abu Ghraib?

The New York Times helpfully reminds readers:

As White House counsel, Mr. Gonzales wrote a memo suggesting that the detainees need not be given the full protections of the Geneva Convention.

Oh, is that what that memo was all about!

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

What Would Ellacuria Say?

Thousands will gather this weekend at the gates of Fort Benning to demand the closure of the U. S. Army’s School of the Americas (recently renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation). The protest calls attention to the school’s role in the training of military personnel from throughout Latin America since the mid-1940s, many of whom have been implicated over the years in crimes of torture and assassination, like the slaying of six Jesuits, their housekeeper, and her daughter, at the Jesuit’s University of Central America in San Salvador in 1989.  On Jesuit campuses across the country this week, faculty and students have marked the fifteenth anniversary of that grim event. Two teachers, Mark Chmiel and Andrew Wimmer, offered these reflections to their students at Saint Louis University.

What Would Ellacuria Say?
Mark Chmiel & Andrew Wimmer
November 17, 2004

A few years before his death at the hands of Salvadoran death squads, Ignacio Ellacuria, one of the six slain Jesuits we commemorate on campus this week, delivered the commencement address at Santa Clara University. He told his listeners that the Jesuit’s University of Central America in San Salvador had been bombed ten times. “We have been blocked and raided by military groups and threatened with the termination of all aid. Dozens of students and teachers have had to flee the country in exile; one of our students was shot to death by police who entered the campus.”

What were the faculty and students at the UCA doing to incur the wrath of the Salvadoran elite?  And how had they become so threatening that they had to be eliminated by the state terrorists who ruled that blood-soaked land?

“Precisely because a university is inescapably a social force,” Ellacuria argued, “it must transform and enlighten the society in which it lives.” But he cautioned that “there is no abstract and consistent answer” about how to do that.  “We must constantly look at our own peculiar historical reality.” In El Salvador, for them, it meant putting the prestige and resources of the UCA at the service of the poorest strata of that society and publicly working to dismantle a political and economic system that delivered the country’s land and wealth into the hands of just a dozen families.  Shortly before his death, Ellacuria lamented that we in the West “have organized our lives around inhuman values… The system rests on a few using the majority of the resources, while the majority can’t even cover their basic necessities. It is crucial to define a system of values and a norm of living that takes into account every human being.”

It will be a tragedy if we reduce our remembrance of the slain Salvadoran Jesuits to a pious tendency to put them on pedestals. Catholic radical Dorothy Day was never pleased when people referred to her as a saint, as she figured it was a way for people to get themselves off the hook, sidestepping their own responsibility for critical thinking and decisive action.

So, if Ellacuria were alive today and teaching here, what irritating questions might he be asking us about the “peculiar historical reality” of Saint Louis and our own University?  We imagine that the inhuman value of “destroying cities in order to save them”—part of our legacy from Vietnam, now being lived out again in Iraq—would be weighing heavy on his heart.  For this week’s criminal and inhuman siege of Falluja has been made possible in no small part by the work in St. Louis at Boeing’s Integrated Defense Systems division.

A Boeing press release on Thursday boasted that its ScanEagle, a “long-endurance fully autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle,” had just surpassed 1,000 flight hours during operations in Iraq.  “Since late summer when ScanEagle was first deployed in theater with the First Marine Expeditionary Force it has provided critical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance information to tactical commanders. Feedback regarding ScanEagle’s operational effectiveness and clear, detailed imagery has been extremely positive from all echelons of The Marine Corps.”

But to understand what that means in human terms, turn to an interview that appeared Sunday with Billal Hussein, an AP photographer and native of Falluja.  “Destruction was everywhere. I saw people lying dead in the streets, wounded were bleeding and there was no one to come and help them. There was no medicine, water, no electricity nor food for days.  U.S. soldiers began to open fire on the houses, so I decided that it was very dangerous to stay in my house,” he said.  Panicking, he seized on a plan to escape across the Euphrates River. “I wasn’t really thinking,” he said. “Suddenly, I just had to get out. I didn’t think there was any other choice. I decided to swim … but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river.” He watched horrified as a family of five was shot dead in front of him.  “I kept walking along the river for two hours and I could still see some U.S. snipers ready to shoot anyone who might swim.”

Dare we make a Saint Louis University connection? We as teachers must help our students understand the system in which they are being summoned to serve as professionals and technicians, often with handsome salaries and considerable prestige. A system that, as George Kennan observed decades ago, is structured to “maintain the disparity” in favor of the few Americans who have much of the wealth, “while the majority can’t even cover their basic necessities.” A system that future history books may deem the supreme inhuman value.

If Ellacuria were alive, we suspect he’d be helping his own students (and any others willing and open to learn) by engaging the curriculum of the real world of domination and nurturing the pedagogy of the imagination that refuses to be made complicit.  Such a course of study would be where knowledge disrupts lives:  the lives of ease and comfort, the lives of averting our eyes and of consuming thoughtlessly, the lives of only valuing American life and ignoring our many dead victims abroad.

Back in 1982 Ellacuria concluded his Santa Clara address with a sober admonition:  “If the University had not suffered, we would not have performed our duty. In a world where injustice reigns, a university that fights for justice must necessarily be persecuted.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark J. Chmiel and Andrew Wimmer teach in
the Department of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University.

Monday, November 15, 2004

Qu'ils mangent de la brioche!

Rasoul Ibrahim, a father of three, fled Falluja on Thursday morning and arrived with his wife and children in Habbaniya, about 12 miles to the west of Falluja, on Thursday night.

He said families left in the city were in desperate need.

“There’s no water. People are drinking dirty water. Children are dying. People are eating flour because there’s no proper food,” he told aid workers in Habbaniya, which has become a refugee camp, with around 2,000 families sheltering there.

Ubadi from the Iraqi Red Crescent Society said many families taking refuge in Habbaniya and other villages nearby were suffering from diarrhoea and malnutrition and needed medicine as well as basic necessities such as lentils, sugar, bread, tea and candles.

Reuters Story

No Aid Needed

Iraq’s Red Crescent group sent seven truckloads of food and medicine to the city, but U.S. forces blocked the aid convoy at Falluja’s main hospital and said it could not enter. The convoy turned back on Monday after three days of frustration.

“It’s our third day here at the hospital and all we have done is receive promises from the Americans,” Hassan Rawi, a member of the International Federation of the Red Cross, said.

Reuters Story

All Safe

Iraqi interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has said he does not believe any civilians were killed in the offensive, which has left 38 U.S. soldiers, 6 Iraqi troops and more than 1,200 insurgents dead. But witness accounts appeared to contradict him.  Washington Post Story

300,000 Vanish, Goats Patrol Falluja

“Innocent civilians in that city have all the guidance they need as to how they can avoid getting into trouble. There aren’t going to be large numbers of civilians killed and certainly not by US forces,” he said. 

Donald Rumsfeld

“Destruction was everywhere. I saw people lying dead in the streets, wounded were bleeding and there was no one to come and help them. Even the civilians who stayed in Fallujah were too afraid to go out,” he said.  “There was no medicine, water, no electricity nor food for days.  U.S. soldiers began to open fire on the houses, so I decided that it was very dangerous to stay in my house,” he said.

Hussein said he panicked, seizing on a plan to escape across the Euphrates River. “I wasn’t really thinking,” he said. “Suddenly, I just had to get out. I didn’t think there was any other choice.”

“I decided to swim … but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river.” He watched horrified as a family of five was shot dead as they tried to cross. Then, he “helped bury a man by the river bank, with my own hands.”

“I kept walking along the river for two hours and I could still see some U.S. snipers ready to shoot anyone who might swim. I quit the idea of crossing the river and walked for about five hours through orchards.”

AP Photographer, Bilal Hussein, native of Falluja

Full Story

Sunday, November 14, 2004

Falluja Liberated

Falluja, Sunday: “The city has been seized,” General John Abizaid, of US central command, said. “We have liberated the city of Falluja.”

Lieutenant General John Sattler, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said: “The perception of Falluja being a safe haven for terrorists, that perception and the reality of it will be completely wiped off before the conclusion of this operation.”

US military chiefs said that they saw no need for the Iraqi Red Crescent to deliver aid inside Falluja because they did not think any Iraqi civilians were trapped there.

“There is no need to bring [Red Crescent] supplies in because we have supplies of our own for the people,” said Colonel Mike Shupp of the Marines.

We Doomed!

Elegy Written in a Prison Courtyard
{to Allen Ginsberg: a voice in perilous times}

Whom torture?
We torture them!
Whom torture?
We torture them!
Whom torture?
We torture them!
Whom torture?
We torture them!

Whom torture?
You torture you!
Whom torture?
You torture you!
Whom torture?
You torture you!
Whom torture?
You torture you!

What do we do?
Who do we torture?
What do we do?
Who do we torture?
What do we do?
Who do we torture?
What do we do?
Who do we torture?

What do we do?
You torture! You torture them!
What do we do?
You torture! You torture them!
What do we do?
We torture! We torture them!
What do we do?
We torture! We torture them!

Whom torture?
We torture you!
Whom torture?
We torture you!
Whom torture?
You torture you!
Whom torture?
You torture you!

We doomed!

--------
Ginsberg’s Original Poem

And in related news: Flights of Torture

Will we be forgiven for this crime?

Reuters, Falluja, Sunday: Some locals say the stench of decomposing bodies fills the air. Others tell of children dying because it was too dangerous to get them to help. One family buried their 9-year-old boy in the garden after he bled to death over several hours from a stomach wound. Thousands of refugees are living in makeshift accommodation at camps outside the city, or with relatives.

“It was terrible. We had no water or electricity. I even saw dead bodies lying in the street and a tank rolled over them,” said Mohammed Ali Shalal, a 65-year-old truck driver who fled on Friday and is sheltering with a nephew in nearby Amriya, where 20 people were crammed into a two-bedroom apartment.

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