There was a mural in Berkeley at the corner of Telegraph and Haste, in 1976.
"A People's History of Telegraph Avenue."
It was/is strong, vital, about People's Park, the FSM, the Black Panthers, and the gassing, and killing, of anti-war protestors under the governorship/regime of Ronald Reagan, which itself was under the Presidential regime of Richard Nixon.
One of the problems with history now is, save for rare exceptions, the people who were empowered by those regimes are writing it, are in charge of it, and the people who were disempowered have no voice for the most part, or they're very busy trying to stay alive and/or heal and recover from the wounds of those times.
Or they sold out and were consequently empowered along with the rest of the collaborationists.
Somebody wrote a phrase on the street wall of the apartments across the street from the mural.
It was there for a while.
This story reminds me of that, that time, those feelings:
Human Rights Watch complained to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that civilians in Iraq remained in custody month after month with no charges brought against them. Abu Ghraib had become, in effect, another Guant�namo.
As the photographs from Abu Ghraib make clear, these detentions have had enormous consequences: for the imprisoned civilian Iraqis, many of whom had nothing to do with the growing insurgency; for the integrity of the Army; and for the United States� reputation in the world.
Seymour Hersh
New Yorker 30.Apr.04
Probably because of the dogs, though at the same time the soldiers themselves, aren't they like dogs in a rich man's yard? Doing what they're trained to do. And isn't the argument, about how high up the chain of command culpability goes, like arguing about how responsibile the Dobermans are for the shredded legs of the beggar in the yard? Not so much who let them out but who put them there in the first place.
Why were they there? Why are those soldiers in Iraq to begin with? The investigation should start at the top and work down. Otherwise it's more criminal enterprise and collaboration. The problem, again, is that the people most culpable are in charge of the legal, and more importantly the moral, systems in which they themselves would be tried.
It must sound almost silly to the unprepared, but I'm more convinced daily it's time to jettison reason and logic, and moral architecture entirely. The enemy owns sense, and law, and the basic components of articulating right and wrong. Which can make the naive bewildered.
Bodies against the wheel.
