Month: October 2006

The Nobel Lit prize

I’m not a great fan of the Nobel literature (or peace) prize — I think some of their choices have been rather doubtful over the years — but some wonder if this year will see a Middle Eastern writer win. There’s certainly no shortage of possible candidates, as Moorishgirl writes:

Once again this year, there is mention of Mahmoud Darwish and Adunis, but I don’t think it will go to them. (Why the academy has never selected an Arab poet is beyond me.) Michael thinks that Orhan Pamuk is too young, at 54, to get the prize. But Gabriel García Márquez was 54 when he got his. Plus, Pamuk has had a great year and with Turkey in the news over its ridiculous censorship law, that might just tilt the judges’ votes in his favor.

I don’t think Pamuk should get it either. I’m not a great fan of poetry generally (my loss, it’s just I don’t quite appreciate it, especially since my Arabic is not good enough to appreciate poetic constructions in the original) but Darwish or Adonis certainly have the right stature, even if I wish my favorite Arab poet, the Iraqi Abdul Wahab Al Bayati, were alive to claim one. There are Arab novelists who would be worthy, too, although some of the most worthy (e.g. Abdel Rahman Mounif) are now dead. On another note altogether, I don’t think they should reward Middle Easterners only because it’s the topic of the moment. How about a science fiction writer? Or a detective novel writer? Surely if they were alive Georges Simenon, Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells or Isaac Asimov would be worthy of inclusion.

Still, a Lebanese or Palestinian recipient would certainly be nice if only that it would draw attention to those countries’ plight.

Media culpa

Just got this dispatch from a journo friend in Baghdad about the recent dismissal of the (latest) judge in the Saddam Hussein trial:

It was our fault. We brought him down. He seemed to be a perfectly good judge and by all counts was doing a better job than some of his predecessors.

He just made a little slip and we pounced on him.

This trial was supposed to be different. The first trial of Saddam Hussein was a circus. Saddam Hussein and three cronies and four total unknown minor officials were on trial for the brutal crackdown on the Shiite village of Dujail following an assassination attempt on Saddam in 1982.

It was an odd choice to start with, of all of Saddam’s crimes, this was the one to kick off with? Who’s ever heard of Dujail? Only 148 people died in this one, compared to hundreds of thousands in the other cases.

But so it went and soon each session became about Saddam’s half brother, Barzan. A crude showman who still quite hadn’t figured out that it was all over.

He would bluster, roar, then cringing before the judge, who at first just let him talk. Saddam would occasionally sound off too – and of course for us in the press, two words from Saddam would leave pages and pages of notes on Barzan’s rantings discarded on the floor.

The silver haired judge, a Kurd by the name of Rizkar, had a fair bit of patience… but the government didn’t and their’s ran out first. Rizkar abruptly resigned, for “personal reasons”. To this day he has never said the true reason – the one we all know – that the government told him to crack the whip, and he told them to shove it.

So a new judge came in, another Kurd, bald, wizened, sharp-beaked, he was like a tough old bird of prey with a short temper. Within his first session Barzan was thrown out, Saddam walked out, the defense lawyers mounted a boycott.

High entertainment, at least for the journalists watching this trial day in and day out, but not necessarily in line with anyone’s ideas of what due process should be all about.

But anyway, it finally ended, with a fair bit of relief for everyone – it ended with a whimper, the final statements weren’t from Saddam, but rather from a minor defendant, and one day we just looked at each other in the press gallery and realized that was it. Just a matter of waiting for the verdict on October 16.

Next up, though, was the Anfal trial, the genocide campaign against the Kurds in 1988, that saw over 100,000 Kurds killed, many with poison gas, thousands more imprisoned, whole villages wiped off the map.

This would be a serious trial, there was to mass graves, forensic evidence, diagrams, the whole bit. Dujail – whatever – that was a dress rehearsal. Now this would be a proper court case.

The new judge, Abdallah al-Ameri, a Shiite, presided over a very different court. With Barzan gone, everyone was a bit quieter. The new defendants didn’t mouth off as much and Saddam – mostly – kept a low profile. Everyone was polite.

Among the journalists it was a welcome change, though it meant we had to pay more attention to the witnesses for our story and less to the antics of the defendants.

At the end of the every session, though, the judge would usually give Saddam or one of the other defendants a chance to talk – and Saddam would make some pronouncement like if he was still in charge the country, it wouldn’t be such a mess.

So then the grumblings started, from the prosecutors of all people, one even burst out in court that the judge was being too sympathetic to the defendant.

Bit shocking really, I mean not telling someone to shut up and sit down all the time isn’t being sympathetic. Besides, maybe being allowed to mouth off every now and then kept the defendants a little more passive.

They’re going to hang them anyway.

So the next session, the angry prosecutor was relegated to a back seat and that was that.

Except for one little off hand comment that very few people heard.

One of the witnesses described how he sent to a petition to Saddam to find out what had happened to his family. When it came to his turn to question the witness (defendants get to question the witness, it’s bizarre), Saddam said, if I was such a dictator, why were you allowed to appeal to me?

It was a pointless question, and enraged the witness, so the judge decided to calm things down, and said (dismissively) to Saddam “no, you weren’t a dictator, sometimes it’s just the people around one that make one seem to be a dictator.” Perhaps sarcastic? Whatever it was, it was offhand.

Everyone had it in their notes, but only AP passed it on to their desker and then that became the top of the story.

Just to back up a bit, the way the wires cover the trial – since we have to be filing information throughout – is that we take notes and then periodically send them from the press room to our editors (via Yahoo Messenger, as it turns out). Back at the office, there is a desker who receives the quotes and the description and then writes the actual story.

I’ve done both ends and the simple formula is, find the quote, and the fact or two that will make an attractive interesting story. Basically you need two or three quotes from the unhappy witness (my family was gassed, I saw the dead bodies, and then they beat us some more, whatever) and the Saddam quote. There is always one good quote from him every trial and it usually leads the story, unless there is a something particularly awful described in court like a rape or a child dying.

Those who don’t follow this callous (was that a whiff of evil?) formula, will find the next day that the newspapers have chosen the competition’s articles get chosen.

So the word came down the line, “AP’s leading with a dictator quote, do you have it?” So the other wires, went back through their notes (and perhaps maybe, in exasperation, asked the AP guy) and dutifully delivered up the requisite quote.

And where the wires go, the rest of the media will follow. It doesn’t matter what the other TV, newspaper reporters saw or heard, their editors will be sitting there looking at the wire copy that came out during the trial, saying “do you have the dictator quote?”

And of course the Iraqi media, follows the wires as well.

So that was the story the next day, not about the Kurds who suffered, or how well run the trial was, but that the judge thought Saddam wasn’t really a dictator.

For two days the government went out of their way to say the judiciary was independent and they would respect that.

And then on the third day they fired him.

The funniest part was the American advisors to the court, a rather righteous bunch of characters, who’s main role, as far as we can tell, is to convince the media that the trial isn’t really a travesty of justice. It’s an Iraqi process.

So the night the judge is fired we called them up and they swore up and down that the old judge would be there the next day. And the next day he wasn’t and they were spinning it along explaining how it was all within Iraqi laws.

“To say that removing a single judge out of a panel of five besmirches the whole process is a bit premature,” said an advisor to us angrily. Right. When the lead judge gets fired by the government for the second trial in a row, that’s nothing to worry about.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t like Saddam, or the toads and psychopaths he surrounded himself with. But there are principles here somewhere. There is an ideal of due process.

When you watch these badly managed stage shows that are just clearly unfair, you start thinking – he was only reacting to an assassination attempt, I mean wouldn’t that annoy anyone? And after all, the Kurds were rebelling and he was just using the same counter insurgency techniques of strategic hamlets and free-fire zones
the Americans used in Vietnam – albeit to rather extreme degree…

Anyway, what do I care, all that matters is the quote.

So the new judge came in, and on his first day he ejected Saddam, the defense lawyers walked out and at one point, the judge even threw out all of the defendants and then went on to hear the rest of the witnesses in an front of an empty dock.

The Quran as a supermarket

I’ve barely had time to follow the developments in the Hassan Hanafi controversy, which has just emerged in the English-language press (note to Daily Star Egypt: among many other things, you need to be much quicker in following Egyptian news than you currently are) but was quite the thing in the Arabic press over two weeks ago. So I’ll just provide the link to Egyptian academic wades into troubled waters in the DS (via AFP), about Hanafi’s seemingly offhand remark that the Quran is like a supermarket, you can find anything you want in there:

Sheikh Mustafa al-Shaka, from Al-Azhar’s Center on Islamic Research, accused Hanafi of being a “Marxist” for “uttering such nonsense totally divorced from Islam.

“If apostasy is proven, he who becomes an ex-Muslim should be executed,” Shaka said. In Hanafi’s case, however, “he deserves medical treatment, because he has a psychiatric problem.”

Hanafi, who received his doctorate from the Sorbonne and has taught in Europe and the United States, was close to the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood in his youth. After passing through a phase of leftist leanings, he became one of the leading thinkers in the contemporary movement that posits a revolutionary political activism rooted in study of the Muslim scriptures.

Rarely do other thinkers publicly side with him, but one of them is Gamal al-Banna, a Muslim reformist and, ironically, younger brother of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna.

“I have to say it wasn’t very intelligent comparing the Koran with a supermarket but, in the end he’s not wrong,” said Banna, asserting that “one finds different opinions in the Koran.”

Some of the holy book’s verses are “very dense and confusing expressions” that require interpretation, he said, calling for a “return to the Koran,” interpreting it where necessary in the light of the whole corpus of Islamic theological writing.

Banna himself has been at the receiving end of criticism by traditional Muslim scholars.

His book “The Responsibility for the Failure of the Islamic State in the Modern Age,” in which he suggests ways for Muslim communities in non-Islamic societies to merge better with their environment, was banned in Egypt. In his book, he said that if a woman feels uncomfortable wearing a traditional veil in Europe, then a hat would be permissible.

He recently came under fire for suggesting that smoking during the holy month of Ramadan is permissible.

Even if Hanafi’s argument could have been phrased in a more diplomatic way, I hope other Muslim thinkers will quickly rise to defend him. The concept of ijtihad is hardly something new in Islamic theology, as is the idea that there are different interpretations of the Holy Book (after all there are four official schools of Sunni theology) and it was basically the point Hanafi was making. It is also one that some ideologically radical Islamist groups, such as al-Adl wal Ihsan in Morocco, are making.

Media Culpa (18)

October 3, 2006

It was our fault. We brought him down. He seemed to be a perfectly good judge and by all counts was doing a better job than some of his predecessors.

He just made a little slip and we pounced on him.

This trial was supposed to be different. The first trial of Saddam Hussein was a circus. Saddam Hussein and three cronies and four total unknown minor officials were on trial for the brutal crackdown on the Shiite village of Dujail following an assassination attempt on Saddam in 1982.

It was an odd choice to start with, of all of Saddam’s crimes, this was the one to kick off with? Who’s ever heard of Dujail? Only 148 people died in this one, compared to hundreds of thousands in the other cases.

But so it went and soon each session became about Saddam’s half brother, Barzan. A crude showman who still quite hadn’t figured out that it was all over.

He would bluster, roar, then cringing before the judge, who at first just let him talk. Saddam would occasionally sound off too – and of course for us in the press, two words from Saddam would leave pages and pages of notes on Barzan’s rantings discarded on the floor.

The silver haired judge, a Kurd by the name of Rizkar, had a fair bit of patience… but the government didn’t and their’s ran out first. Rizkar abruptly resigned, for “personal reasons”. To this day he has never said the true reason – the one we all know – that the government told him to crack the whip, and he told them to shove it.

So a new judge came in, another Kurd, bald, wizened, sharp-beaked, he was like a tough, old bird of prey with a short temper. Within his first session Barzan was thrown out, Saddam walked out, the defense lawyers mounted a boycott.

High entertainment, at least for the journalists watching this trial day in and day out, but not necessarily in line with anyone’s ideas of what due process should be all about.

But anyway, it finally ended, with a fair bit of relief for everyone – it ended with a whimper, the final statements weren’t from Saddam, but rather from a minor defendant, and one day we just looked at each other in the press gallery and realized that was it. Just a matter of waiting for the verdict on October 16.

Next up, though, was the Anfal trial, the genocide campaign against the Kurds in 1988, that saw over 100,000 Kurds killed, many with poison gas, thousands more imprisoned, whole villages wiped off the map.

This would be a serious trial, there was to mass graves, forensic evidence, diagrams, the whole bit. Dujail – whatever – that was a dress rehearsal. Now this would be a proper court case.

The new judge, Abdallah al-Ameri, a Shiite, presided over a very different court. With Barzan gone, everyone was a bit quieter. The new defendants didn’t mouth off as much and Saddam – mostly – kept a low profile. Everyone was polite.

Among the journalists it was a welcome change, though it meant we had to pay more attention to the witnesses for our story and less to the antics of the defendants.

At the end of the every session, though, the judge would usually give Saddam or one of the other defendants a chance to talk – and Saddam would make some pronouncement like if he was still in charge the country, it wouldn’t be such a mess.

So then the grumblings started, from the prosecutors of all people, one even burst out in court that the judge was being too sympathetic to the defendant.

Bit shocking really, I mean not telling someone to shut up and sit down all the time isn’t being sympathetic. Besides, maybe being allowed to mouth off every now and then kept the defendants a little more passive.

They’re going to hang them anyway.

So the next session, the angry prosecutor was relegated to a back seat and that was that.

Except for one little off hand comment that very few people heard.

One of the witnesses described how he sent a petition to Saddam to find out what had happened to his family. When it came to his turn to question the witness (defendants get to question the witness, it’s bizarre), Saddam said, if I was such a dictator, why were you allowed to appeal to me?

It was a pointless question, and enraged the witness, so the judge decided to calm things down, and said (dismissively) to Saddam “no, you weren’t a dictator, sometimes it’s just the people around one that make one seem to be a dictator.” Perhaps sarcastic? Whatever it was, it was offhand.

Everyone had it in their notes, but only AP passed it on to their desker and then that became the top of the story.

Just to back up a bit, the way the wires cover the trial – since we have to be filing information throughout – is that we take notes and then periodically send them from the press room to our editors (via Yahoo Messenger, as it turns out). Back at the office, there is a desker who receives the quotes and the description and then writes the actual story.

I’ve done both ends and the simple formula is, find the quote, and the fact or two that will make an attractive interesting story. Basically you need two or three quotes from the unhappy witness (my family was gassed, I saw the dead bodies, and then they beat us some more, whatever) and the Saddam quote. There is always one good quote from him every trial and it usually leads the story, unless there is a something particularly awful described in court like a rape or a child dying.

Those who don’t follow this callous (was that a whiff of evil?) formula, will find the next day that the newspapers have chosen the competition’s articles.

So the word came down the line, “AP’s leading with a dictator quote, do you have it?” So the other wires, went back through their notes (and perhaps maybe, in exasperation, asked the AP guy) and dutifully delivered up the requisite quote.

And where the wires go, the rest of the media will follow. It doesn’t matter what the other TV, newspaper reporters saw or heard, their editors will be sitting there looking at the wire copy that came out during the trial, saying “do you have the dictator quote?”

And of course the Iraqi media, follow the wires as well.

So that was the story the next day, not about the Kurds who suffered, or how well run the trial was, but that the judge thought Saddam wasn’t really a dictator.

For two days the government went out of their way to say the judiciary was independent and they would respect that.

And then on the third day they fired him.

The funniest part was the American advisors to the court, a rather righteous bunch of characters, whose main role, as far as we can tell, is to convince the media that the trial isn’t really a travesty of justice. It’s an Iraqi process.

So the night the judge is fired we called them up and they swore up and down that the old judge would be there the next day. And the next day he wasn’t and they were spinning it along explaining how it was all within Iraqi laws.

“To say that removing a single judge out of a panel of five besmirches the whole process is a bit premature,” said an advisor to us angrily. Right. When the lead judge gets fired by the government for the second trial in a row, that’s nothing to worry about.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t like Saddam, or the toads and psychopaths he surrounded himself with. But there are principles here somewhere. There is an ideal of due process.

When you watch these badly managed stage shows that are just clearly unfair, you start thinking – he was only reacting to an assassination attempt, I mean wouldn’t that annoy anyone? And after all, the Kurds were rebelling and he was just using the same counter insurgency techniques of strategic hamlets and free-fire zones the Americans used in Vietnam – albeit to rather extreme degree…

Anyway, what do I care, all that matters is the quote.

So the new judge came in, and on his first day he ejected Saddam, the defense lawyers walked out and at one point, the judge even threw out all of the defendants and then went on to hear the rest of the witnesses in an front of an empty dock.

Woodward on Ghorbanifar, Ledeen and Cheney

Since we recently mentioned both Bob Woodward’s new book and Middle Eastern arms dealers, take a look at this Tapped post quoting Woodward on how Manucher Ghorbanifar got in touch with Dick Cheney via Michael Ledeen about Iraq’s WMDs. Ghorbanifar being a legendary Iranian arms dealer, of course.

I am constantly amazed that Michael Ledeen is still an influential personality in the Beltway. Or that the American Enterprise Institute is taken seriously at all. There should be a campaign to ban any contacts between elected officials and representatives of think tanks or lobbyists (they are one and the same, mind you.) What’s wrong with university professors if they need experts?

Updated: Have corrected typo in title.

More revolt among generals

It’s been a slowly growing movement for over three years now, but more and more recently retired military officers are speaking out in protest against US policy — and more specifically, about Iraq:

The dissenters include two generals who led combat troops in Iraq: Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack Jr., who commanded the 82nd Airborne Division, and Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who led the First Infantry Division (the “Big Red One”). These men recently sacrificed their careers by retiring and joining the public protest.

In late September Batiste, along with two other retired senior officers, spoke out about these failures at a Washington Democratic policy hearing, with Batiste saying Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was “not a competent wartime leader” who made “dismal strategic decisions” that “resulted in the unnecessary deaths of American servicemen and women, our allies and the good people of Iraq.” Rumsfeld, he said, “dismissed honest dissent” and “did not tell the American people the truth for fear of losing support for the war.”

This kind of protest among senior military retirees during wartime is unprecedented in American history–and it is also deeply worrisome. The retired officers opposing the war and demanding Rumsfeld’s ouster represent a new political force, and therefore a potentially powerful factor in the future of our democracy. The former generals’ growing lobby could acquire a unique veto power in the future by publicly opposing reckless civilian warmaking in advance.

I keep hearing this kind of stuff more and more from people close to US military and foreign policy circles — but I’m afraid that the Nation hypes up exactly how much influence these people can have in a media news cycle much better handled by the White House than it was, say, in Nixon’s time.

Iranian wargames

A new Iranian game simulates an attack on a US warship:

TEHRAN (Reuters) – A new Iranian computer game sets players the task of blowing up a U.S. tanker in the Gulf to block the sea route for much of the world’s oil supplies, a newspaper reported on Saturday.

The game, “Counter Strike”, invites players to plant two bombs on the oil tanker to sink it and make the strait of Hormuz impassable, the Jomhouri-ye Eslami daily reported. About two-fifths of globally traded oil passes through the channel.

The game illustrates a warning by Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who said in June that oil exports in the Gulf region could be seriously endangered if the United States made a wrong move on Iran.

Considering that there are zillions of computer games that simulate US attacks on Iran and other countries, it’s hardly worth making a big deal out of it.

“Victim of airport confusion”

Here’s the implausible story of what happened to those 17 Egyptian students who went AWOL in the USA:

Lawyers for some of the students say they were misunderstood and that the U.S. government has been too hard on them. Some students say they fear persecution if sent back to Egypt.

“They are considered pariahs,” said Amy Peck, an Omaha, Neb., lawyer who represents three of the students. “This case has been headlined in Cairo.”

The students disappeared right around the time authorities announced a foiled plot to attack U.S.-bound airliners with liquid explosives.

One of the students, Eslam Ibrahim El-Dessouki, says he fell victim to airport confusion. Extra security checks caused him to miss his connecting flight, and he couldn’t find the other students, he said in a court statement.

He called an uncle who lived in Minnesota, who suggested he go there so relatives could help, he said. El-Dessouki jumped on a bus and headed to the Midwest.

Mohamed Ibrahim El Sayed El Moghazy, 20, Ahmed Refaat Saad El Moghazi El Laket, 19, and Moustafa Wagdy Moustafa El Gafary, 18, also scattered after arriving in New York. They told Peck, their lawyer, that once they landed at the airport, three other students turned to the rest, bid farewell and took off.

That panicked the remaining members of the group, the three said, because all had been told that if any one of them didn’t show up at Montana State University, the rest would lose their passports and immediately get sent back to Egypt.

It sounded all along like these guys wanted to have fun rather than go to some boring seminar about American civics. Stupid of them, but I can certainly understand where they came from.