A response by Loring Abeyta to Dien Bien Phu

My friend Loring Abeyta responded to the poem: Dien Bien Phu here. The stereotype of the Vietnamese as feminine is, of course, part of Orientalism as Edward Said suggests - their resistance to foreign oppression is as long and determined and resourceful as the Chinese - and applies to the Iraqis and Afghanis as well.

"Hi, Alan.

Thank you for this very moving poem, Alan. I am particularly taken by it
because I just finished Paul Hendrickson's The Living and the Dead:Robert
McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War and am working on H. R. McMaster's Dereliction of Duty. I picked up these books because I recently showed Fog of War in my national security class, and have always wanted to dig deeper behind the March 2, 1964 conversation between LBJ and McNamara that Errol Morris incorporates into the film. In that conversation, LBJ orders McNamara to write him a memo of "four letter words and short sentences" to explain the complexity of Southeast Asia, and McNamara replies that "we don't know what is going on out there." It seems our entire U.S. foreign policy is constructed on the flimsy, laughable, and utterly destructive scaffolding of "four letter words and short sentences," and then we march into places that we don't know -- deeply know -- but we have the all-purpose fix-it for what ails the world. And it usually seems to involve air power, ground troops, and these days, unmanned drones. Yep, four letter words and short sentences. That should cover it. Your poem reminds us that there is so much more to the story -- or, as Hendrickson quotes from Tran Tu Thanh (in achapter titled, "In the Shattering"), McNamara was "so ignorant of the customs and aspirations of the Vietnamese people" (p. 341).

Loring"

No one in the State Department spoke Vietnamese at the time of the Geneva Accords which the US sabotaged or even in 1965 when Johnson sent half a million troops. Eisenhower's casual remark: We cannot allow elections to unify Vietnam because a majority would vote for Ho Chi Minh was pretty much the substance of American policy. Anti-democratic depravity for (neo-)colonialist purposes is never a good place to start...

As Daniel Ellsburg discovered in reading and then heroically releasing the Pentagon Papers, lots of nonsense was written in the State Department and the Pentagon currying the approval of higher-ups but without a serious justification for (or even a thought about) why the US was in Vietnam. As in Iraq and Afghanistan, an enormous number of human beings, including Americans, has paid the price for the hubris of American policy makers (often, the only "excuse" for American war crimes is that they are all such criminals or the enablers of them).

What Loring says is the truth about Vietnam; the Iraq War, led by Cheney and Dr. Rice, as Condi likes to be called, was also a bunch of lies. In the sphere of power, all puffed up and talking only to themselves in the Oval Office or in the crannies of the self-important, the language and ideas are often fantastic, trivial, ignorant and scatalogical as well as murderous...

This extends to obviously bright people like David Petraeus as well as those uninterested in policy (not to mention, decency) like Bush.

As a senior at Harvard, I debated McGeorge Bundy about the war (see the poem: Sanders Theater at 3:AM magazine here and the answer to the first question here). Bundy said he knew things that we (the some 800 people at Sanders Theater, most with doubts about the war) did not. He did not.

Will Altman points out that the poem might also have included the Japanese...

Poem: Dien bien phu

Vietnam is

she

takenbytheChinese

theghastlyFrench

Americansbearingnapalm


chasingthem all


intothesea

Letter from Henry Kroll on the importance of Boulder Book Store and my reading tomorrow night

In my post on my talk/reading/signing on Black Patriots and Loyalists at Boulder Book Store, tomorrow (May 31) at 7:30 here, I emphasized the threat that independent book stores and libraries are under. The money-hungry culture of the 1% does not value education and independence of mind for the 99% or scholarship.

Henry Kroll wrote me a fine letter about the role of people who work in and run bookstores: his wife worked at Stacey's in San Franciso which has now, sadly, closed and comments on how helpful people are at the Boulder Book Store in working around the new admission fee for talks. He also makes the shrewd point that were J.K. Rowling to come, the store could collect whatever admission fee they liked, but for lesser known authors and for sometimes unusually good books, the fee probably diminishes the audience. It thus does exactly what a serious bookstore aims not to do (again, the terrible competition which such bookstores now face pushes them to seek additional sources of revenue, sometimes unwisely).

Henry rightly worries that the Boulder Book Store will be forced to cut back (ironically, Tattered Cover, though it has three stores, is less stocked with good books than the old Cherry Creek store - TC was the main reason I and my family went to Cherry Creek - and is also today gradually "trimming"). He makes the point that we all can work to support independent book stores. No community which is not a spiritual desert can do without a good bookstore.


"Hi Alan,

Like you I am very concerned with survival of ind. bookstores in communities all over (Boulder, Golden, Denver, San Francisco et al).

My wife ran for 6 years a one woman business - employment bookstore in San Francisco and worked then at Stacey's ... one of SF's oldest, best and well regarded store on Market Street which also hosted readings and programs some VERY progressive! With key window displays on one of the West's major boulevards. Stacey's (owned by Brodart Industries which makes and markets furniture and supplies for libraries and schools over over USA) closed about 2 or 3 years ago.

Likewise, I was aghast at the BBS $5 charge for admission for the book talks.

Clearly they CAN be counter productive.

However living in Boulder and attending many programs sometimes with out of town authors who I know from San Francisco
and others...I discern that the problem is NOT the fee itself. For noted authors who are well known to wider community and "famous" to some degree...the fee does not seem to keep a full house from forming at the store for the author's talk.

It is those who are "unknown" OR whose material is deemed "esoteric" by many that results in low turnout. Of course, the FEE may be an added obstacle.

However, the folks at the store on the night of the event .... have been very liberal in allowing those browsing the store or otherwise showing up to access the talk many times WITHOUT charging the fee. A simple curiousity and request to observe seems to get "last minute" folks in without the charge. Many on the staff agreed with us that the charge is counter productive. And it should be noted Tattered Cover DOES NOT charge for a program and in many cases, the same authors are covering BOTH Boulder Books and The Cover on a Colorado book tour.

With all that said, perhaps you can encourage your e mail readers to attend the program tomorrow [Hope I have...].

Even those paying the $5 charge can use the coupon towards a purchase that evening of ANY book in the store ... (or other items too such as DVD, Cards, et al - I believe).

Hopefully, Boulder residents and others nearby will NOT be discouraged and work with Boulder Books to help secure their survival and ask them to review their policy now that it has been in place nearly 2 years.

From one of the executives - I had learned that sales in February were down significantly. And while, it is unlikely a store such as Boulder Books in this university town with so many college grads working professionally ... will close down completely ... reduction of staff, floor space and diversity of titles might be coming unless the people keep supporting their local independent bookstores.

All the best,

Henry Kroll
Unitarian Universalist Church of Boulder (UUCB)
member and Chair, Forum Planning Committee
Social Justice Council - UUCB
and National Board member, Action Coalition for Media Education"

In addition, Freedy Cole Shebaka, a singer/activist from Sierra Leone, wrote to me:

"Hi Professor Gilbert,

My name is Freddy Cole Shabaka and I'm a singer/songwriter from Sierra Leone based in the U.S. I just came across your name with regard to your work on the Black Loyalists and I just wanted to make contact with you. I recently released a song and video called "The Black Loyalists" after researching my own history. I am a Creole and we are descended from the Black Loyalists who are called Nova Scotians in Freetown, The Maroons from Jamaica, and other Africans collectively known as the "Recaptives" who were taken into slavery and released in Freetown by the British Navy patrols as they were enforcing the abolition of the slave trade. As I was researching my own ancestors I was able to make a connection to the Black Loyalists and found out that a very good friend of mine is a descendant of Thomas Peters and another friend of mine is descended from David George. I gave a little help to Maya Jasanoff in her book "Liberty's Exiles" as she planned her visit to Freetown to research the Black Loyalists.

It is very important that the story of the Black Loyalists be told as many people are unfamiliar with their story. We recently held a Black Loyalist event at a small cafe in Washington DC to help tell their story. We had Kevin Lowther who recently wrote a book on the Black Loyalist John Kizell, and we also had Nemata Blyden a history professor at George Washington University. I plan on doing more events to help tell this story to a wider audience. I wish you well in your work and I'm sure our paths will cross at some point.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAB5nKP3mbM Black Loyalist Video

http://www.thesierraleonetelegraph.com/?p=1212#more-1212 Article on Black Loyalist event

http://www.switsalone.com/14932_miss-sierra-leone-shines-at-bus-boys-and-poets-video/ -video of event

Take Care
Freddy"

I wrote back:

"You will like Black Patriots and Loyalists. Unlike previous accounts, I emphasize the fight for democracy from below led by Peters and Isaac Anderson, around Granville Sharp's ideas, and against the autocracy and exploitativeness of the abolitionist Sierra Leone Company. The literature had portrayed the rebellion not as the first great fight for democracy in Africa (and hence a precursor of the Paris Commune in France), but as an early nationalism. But that view runs into the difficulty that of course David George and the Baptists supported Clarkson and paid quit-rents to the later governors; it was the Methodists, taking up Sharp's ideas, who rebelled in favor of serious local organization and democracy. This puts the democratic experiment in Sierra Leone in a context of radical democratic movements which is of broad, international historical interest (would that Toussaint had had some of these ideas in leading the revolt in Saint-Domingue!)."

I am also going to be in Washington from the evening of June 23rd till the morning of the 29th giving a talk at the Treasury Executive Initiative and appearing on the Marc Steiner show in Baltimore and hope to see Freddy and others in the Washington/Baltimore area.

Talk on Black Patriots and Loyalists, Boulder Book Store, this Thursday, May 31 at 7:30

I will talk about and sign Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence at Boulder Book Store this Thursday, May 31 at 7:30.

As a result of recent conversations about the book, I am increasingly connecting the failure of gradual emancipation in the South - a contingent or political failure, I argue in the book - with the reactionary character of the Constitution and how it shapes reaction, for instance, the Senate's fostering of the 1%, even now.

I have also been interested in what it means to find the right question: why I pursued the issue of a revolution for abolition internationally which surged into the American revolution and Haiti and beyond, while others have not (even in the case of Robin Blackburn's The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, memorable on the interplay of Saint Domingue/Haiti and the French Revolution, he dismissed this great story in the light of the economic restoration after the Revolution and the subsequent growth of bondage in the South*). For some of these discussions, see here, here and here.

The Boulder Book Store has been very helpful, but has the counter-productive, if increasingly common policy of charging a $5 admission which can be used toward the price of a book (several people have written to me about it). Like most independent book stores, Boulder Book Store is under threat from vacant - soulless - competition from Barnes and Noble and Amazon.

The beauty of book stores where you can go in and look through books, be intrigued by something you didn't expect, begin reading to see if you like a book, sit down and get lost in it for a while, and then buy it and take it home, of owners who are interested in books and some of the subject matter and connecting with readers, of people working there who love to read and find, despite the difficulties, some joy in working in a bookstore - all this is being gradually lost, collections thinned out, the internet and virtual reality substituting for the physical pleasures of searching and reading, of living among books...

Unfortunately, the store's new policy will probably limit, to some extent, those who will come. Yet anyone who sets foot in the Boulder Book Store is likely to buy something, and any book beats the admission fee several times without stirring annoyance (since I feel it, I expect others do, too). The change in policy reveals the slow dying of an older epoch about reading (the moving of campus libraries largely off campus, the diminution of the stacks is part of this; going down in libraries to search for relevant and unexpected books has been a great experience since Cordoba and Alexandria and flourished until very recently...).

Driving people away who would come otherwise is, in any case, counterproductive.

Yet this is a fine book store, which plays an important role in the community in Boulder. I hope you will come, anyway. For those outside the area, I hope to get a videotape or audiotape up on the web shortly.

*In Blackburn's case, this is a problem of studying a number of revolutions, not probing the United States in depth, not doing a comparison with gradual emancipation in other independence movements in the hemisphere, and allowing economic determinist predispositions to cloud his judgments about North America. At the end of his second volume, written 10 years later, however, he mentions the tens of thousands of blacks who escaped and fought for the British as one of three great instances of slave revolt. That late glimmer might have led him to recast his earlier account, but so far, he has not.

What remains of American law?

The rule of law is what people fought for in the Revolution (though the Constitution enshrined slavery), in the Civil War which finally did in slavery, and in World War II against Nazism. It is the mark of freedom.

A free regime is one in which every human is recognized as free (no slaveries or sexisms or heterosexisms). It is one in which habeas corpus is upheld, in which each prisoner gets a day in court and is not subjected to torture. World War II vets have expressed pride that the US did not, as the Japanese and German fascists did, torture prisoners (or slaughter them).

But often, American patriotism seems connected with the opposite. In the Bush period, the little metal flags sported by officials accompanied the open propagation of torture, the rule of a police state. And what happened to Arabs, like the red crescent worker Lakhdar Boumedienne, was linked to the prison system in the United States (Charles Graner, a former prison guard locked up for Abu Ghraib as the scapegoat for Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Gonzalez and Bush, had learned his techniques of sexual abuse by practicing them on black men in Florida). The massiveness of the American system of imprisonment is revealed in the New Orleans Times-Picayune’s 8 part series on the biggest prison system in the world, the one in Louisiana. This is a for profit system in which the rule of law has been deep-sixed – see here and Charles Blow’s startling column on "Plantations, Prisons, and Profits" Saturday in the New York Times here. It is revealed in Michelle Alexander’s account of the New Jim Crow – 2.3 million prisoners in the US (25% of the world’s prison population) and 5.1 million more on probation. It is revealed in the massive unemployment and foreclosure statistics of the current economic crisis, in debt-slavery for education to the banks (so much for democratic education), and in the revelations of the 99%.

Just as freedom at home and its propagation are linked (to fight for freedom against the Nazis in World War II and mobilize black soldiers among the recruits helped lead to Brown v. Board of Education and the civil rights movement – freedom is “chain connected” in John Rawls’s phrase), so, conversely, are oppressions at home and abroad. The treatment of prisoners – in American history in the 13th amendment’s permitting the enslavement of convicted prisoners and the leasing of convict labor through the late 19th and into the 20 the century; see Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name and here – and the practice of lynching under segregation was linked to the impoverishment of poor whites in the South (and throughout the country). And the abuse of prisoners of war today (in the so-called war on terror) is tied to the prison-probation complex and the impoverishment of the many.

For 7 years Lakhdar Boumediene was terrorism "suspect" 10005 and tortured by American authorities at Guantanamo (an Algerian who helped orphans in Sarajevo):

“An aid worker handling orphans in Sarajevo, Mr. Boumediene (pronounced boom-eh-DIEN) found himself swept up in the panic that followed Sept. 11, 2001. He likens himself to a caged cat, toyed with and tormented by fate and circumstance.

‘I learned patience,’ Mr. Boumediene, 46, said. He is a private man, trim and square-jawed and meticulously kempt, his eyes set in deep gray hollows. ‘There is no other choice but patience.’

The United States government has never acknowledged any error [let alone crime!} in detaining Mr. Boumediene, though a federal judge ordered his release, for lack of evidence, in 2008.”

Lakhdar fought his torturers through a law suit which bears his name now. And he went on hunger strike for the last 28 months of his imprisonment and was force-fed (how Gandhi would have been treated by the Bush administration/CIA if they had had him and not the British). What he did was civil disobedience to uphold the rule of law. And the American force-feeding, too, was torture…

Today Boumedienne is trying to put together a life, being an innocent but having been "judged" and tortured by the CIA at Bush's command far from any field of battle. He cannot now get a job. In the black hole of Guantanamo, his resume, helping orphans until 2001, is a black hole afterwards.

Most of those at Guantanamo were innocent. A few were guilty of actual or plotted crimes against American citizens, but torture was not a legal or moral or practical (it elicits what the torturer wants to hear, not useful information) way to deal with them. See "What the torturer knew" here.

No torture was involved in Obama taking out the mass murderer Osama Bin Laden.

The war criminals at Guantanamo were mainly the cowards in the White House, and, sadly, today the Democrats who, by protecting them, become accomplices.

I am for Truth and Reconciliation hearings for anyone who would tell the truth about these crimes, though the offenses committed, including the murder of over 100 prisoners in American custody according to the Pentagon, are, under American law, possible death sentence cases (it would be good to become a more civilized culture, one which barred capital punishment, a long way up from here…). The reason Obama doesn’t permit independent bipartisan hearings, let alone an independent prosecutor, however, is that the case in the public record against each of the principals is unfortunately a “slam-dunk,” legally speaking (with the likely exception of Colin Powell who seems to have opposed it in White House meetings – though there is yet no public record released beyond Cheney okaying the torture and Rice urging Geoge Tenet to go "do it," i.e. torture supposedly to get “information”).

Boumediene is a courageous and honorable man trying to put his life together on this memorial day, living in what the article calls quiet anger. He is symbolically the man in the iron mask – and everyone who hears his and all the stories must come to terms with the “America” which was (until Obama’s election) the most hated nation in the world. In a 2003 Pew Poll Bush was deemed the most dangerous tyrant in the world by 84%. Saddam Hussein 7%, Kim Jong-il 6%, other 1%. Obama now approaches these figures in the middle east.

One must pray that Boumedienne can cope. He has seen the enemies of freedom.

It is what soldiers sometimes do (though he is not a soldier). It is a courage that this day might also honor in a more courageous and freedom-loving country. I heard Tom Brokaw on AMC barking for pay about the well-beloved war movies that the History channel and AMC are showing all day. We will honor our warriors, he said.

We should honor and work to heal our soldiers. But too many crimes have been committed by the occupying armies in Iraq and Afghanistan (and the US - in the person of Romney and most of the Republicans but fortunately Obama still stands in the way - and Isreal now threaten Iran) to feel that Brokaw is anything other than a propagandist. Jonathan Shays’ books, Achilles in Vietnam, Odysseus in America, are now read even in the military to get a grip on the terrible consequences, for the soldiers, of war. Ptsd is now part of our vocabulary, the tip of an iceberg…

The soldiers here who hurled their medals at the NATO leaders this week are the genuine patriots of today.

But it would be a country that learned the lesson of Boumediene that could celebrate today with grace. That lesson is not only that he deserved habeas corpus – the best Supreme Court decision in recent times (one which Chief Justice Roberts naturally voted against) and one that looks increasingly like an outlier in that this Court consistently abridges the decency that underpins democracy – but that torturing disgraces the cause of freedom and what the soldiers fight for. See here.

It is honesty about Boumedienne and the resolve never again to do it which would mark such a day. It is honesty about the Iraq and Afghanistan occupation – why are only 27% of the American people today in favor of the war in/occupation of Afghanistan?* – which would mark such a day.

It is, sadly, not this celebration.


THE SATURDAY PROFILE
After Guantánamo, Starting Anew, in Quiet Anger
By SCOTT SAYARE
New York Times
Published: May 25, 2012

Nice, France

Lakhdar Boumediene was kept at Guantánamo from January 2002 until May 15, 2009 as terrorism suspect No. 10005, when he was released and put aboard a plane to France.


IT was James, a thickset American interrogator nicknamed “the Elephant,” who first told Lakhdar Boumediene that investigators were certain of his innocence, that two years of questioning had shown he was no terrorist, but that it did not matter, Mr. Boumediene says.

The interrogations would continue through what ended up being seven years, three months, three weeks and four days at the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

An aid worker handling orphans in Sarajevo, Mr. Boumediene (pronounced boom-eh-DIEN) found himself swept up in the panic that followed Sept. 11, 2001. He likens himself to a caged cat, toyed with and tormented by fate and circumstance.

“I learned patience,” Mr. Boumediene, 46, said. He is a private man, trim and square-jawed and meticulously kempt, his eyes set in deep gray hollows. “There is no other choice but patience.”

The United States government has never acknowledged any error in detaining Mr. Boumediene, though a federal judge ordered his release, for lack of evidence, in 2008.

The government did not appeal, a Defense Department spokesman noted, though he declined to answer further questions about Mr. Boumediene’s case. A State Department representative declined to discuss the case as well, except to point to a Justice Department statement announcing Mr. Boumediene’s transfer to France, in 2009.

More than a decade has passed since his arrest in Bosnia, since American operatives shackled his feet and hands, dropped a black bag over his head and flew him to Guantánamo. Since his release three years ago, Mr. Boumediene, an Algerian by birth, has lived anonymously in the south of France, quietly enraged but determined to start anew and to resist the pull of that anger.

He calls Guantánamo a “black hole.” Islam carried him through, he says. In truth, though, he still cannot escape it, and is still racked by questions. “I think back over everything in my life, all the stages, who my friends were, who I did this or that with, who I had a simple coffee with,” Mr. Boumediene said. “I do not know, even now, why I was at Guantánamo.”

There were early accusations of a plot to bomb the American Embassy in Sarajevo; he lived in that city with his family, working for the Red Crescent, the Muslim branch of the Red Cross. President George W. Bush hailed his arrest in a State of the Union address on Jan. 29, 2002.

In time, those accusations disappeared, Mr. Boumediene says, replaced by questions about his work with Muslim aid groups and suggestions that those groups financed Islamic terrorism. According to a classified detainee assessment from April 2008, published by WikiLeaks, investigators believed that he was a member of Al Qaeda and the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria. Those charges, too, later vanished.

In a landmark case that bears Mr. Boumediene’s name, the Supreme Court in 2008 affirmed the right of Guantánamo detainees to challenge their imprisonment in court. Mr. Boumediene petitioned for his release.

In court, the government’s sole claim was that Mr. Boumediene had intended to travel to Afghanistan to take up arms against the United States. A federal judge rejected that charge as unsubstantiated, noting that it had come from a single unnamed informer. Mr. Boumediene arrived in France on May 15, 2009, the first of two non-French former detainees to settle here.

Mr. Boumediene retreated into himself at Guantánamo, he says. He speaks little of his past now; with few exceptions, his neighbors know him only as a husband and a father. He lives with the wife and two daughters from whom he was once taken, and a son born here two years ago. More than vengeance, or even justice, he wants a return to normalcy.

He lives at the whim of the French state, though. France has permitted Mr. Boumediene to settle in public housing in Nice, where his wife has family, but he is not a French citizen, nor has he been granted asylum or permanent residence. His Algerian and Bosnian passports, misplaced by the American authorities, have not been reissued, leaving him effectively stateless.

Money comes in a monthly transfer to his French bank account. He does not know who, exactly, pays it. (The terms of his release have not been made public or revealed even to him.) He has been seeking work for years.

RECRUITERS typically scan his résumé with an air of approval, he said, until noting that it ends in 2001. He tells them that his is a “particular case,” that he spent time in prison. He avoids the word “Guantánamo,” he said, as it often stirs more fear than sympathy.

Mr. Boumediene arrived at Guantánamo on Jan. 20, 2002, nine days after the camp began operations. He was beaten on arrival, he said. Refusing food for the final 28 months of his detention, he was force-fed through a tube inserted up a nostril and down his throat, he said. There was a hole in the seat of the chair to which he was chained, sometimes clothed, sometimes not; as the liquid streamed into his stomach, his bowels often released.

He emerged gaunt, with wrists scarred from seven years of handcuffs, almost unable to walk without the shackles to which he had grown accustomed, he said. Crowds terrified him, as did rooms with closed doors, said Nathalie Berger, a doctor who worked with Mr. Boumediene shortly after his release.

Dr. Berger was moved, she said, by his equanimity and his “strength to live.”
“He has no hate for the American people,” she said, though Mr. Bush is another matter. Mr. Boumediene has been disappointed too by President Obama, who pledged to close Guantánamo but has not done so.

Born in the hills of northwestern Algeria, Mr. Boumediene served for two years in the Algerian military before following a friend to Pakistan in 1990, to aid refugees of the Afghan civil war.

He found work as a proctor at an orphanage and school operated by a Kuwaiti aid organization, a post that investigators later seized on as evidence of ties to terrorism.

A man identified as a director of the group, Zahid al-Shaikh, is the brother of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of the Sept. 11 attacks, who has been held at Guantánamo since 2006 and is now to be tried before a military court. Mr. Shaikh’s signature appeared on Mr. Boumediene’s contract, but the two had little interaction, Mr. Boumediene said.

He moved to Yemen, studying at the French cultural center in Sana; fighting there drove him to Albania, where he worked for the Red Crescent Society of the United Arab Emirates. Deadly riots erupted in 1997, and he received a transfer to Bosnia.
Violence seemed to trail him, his interrogators noted. He has come to understand their suspicions, he said.

In Nice, Mr. Boumediene has grown friendly with a neighbor, Babette. She brings him coffee, he said, and gifts for his young son. They share meals at Christmas and on Muslim holy days.

He feared she might no longer come if she knew his past. In January, though, it was the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, and there was media coverage. Babette asked if it was true.

“I told her, ‘It’s fate, and it’s life,’ ” Mr. Boumediene said. She still comes to call, he said, and still calls him “my brother.”

“Little by little, now, there are people who know who I am,” he said. Some offer cautious words of encouragement, others their apologies.

“I do not know what the right reaction is,” he said, but he does like a reaction, just the same.


*See Anne Gearon, of the Associated Press, "Support for Afghan war at new low," The Denver Post, May 10, 2012, p. 15A.

KGNU can be heard in real time anywhere on the worldwide web

Duncan Campbell just sent the following note, relevant to our dialogue tomorrow at 12:30 - see here:

All programs on KGNU are simulcast on the worldwide web, so can be listened to in real time from anywhere at www.kgnu.org at the correlative time where the listener is located - e.g., 12:30-1pm in Colorado, 11:30-noon in Pacific time zone, 2:30-3pm in Eastern time zone, etc. around the world. This May 27 Living Dialogues Part 2 program will be archive accessible after the broadcast/simulcast at: www.kgnu.org/livingdialogues/5/27/2012, and Part 1 is accessible at www,kgnu.org/livingdialogues/4/22/2012

I will be on Living Dialogues with Duncan Campbell, Sunday, 12:30 pm on KGNU, AM 1390, FM 88.5

I will be on Living Dialogues with Duncan Campbell, Sunday, 12:30 pm on KGNU AM 1390, FM 88.5. This is the second part of a conversation about the success of the revolution for emancipation, described in Black Patriots and Loyalists, in the North - analogous to the independence movement which achieved gradual emancipation under Bolivar in Venezuela - but its failure, determined largely for political reasons, in the South. The conversation begins from the surprising centrality of black soldiers on both sides in the decisive battle at Yorktown as reported by Georg Daniel Flohr, a German private fighting for the Royal Deux-ponts on the Patriot side, who walked around the field and surveyed the corposes: a majority, he wrote, were "Mohren" (Moors, blacks).

Duncan raises an important consequence of the defeat of emancipation in the South: the Constitution enshrined slaveowners (Presidents for 52 of the first 72 years of the Republic, and the only ones elected to two terms). See here for part 1 of the conversation, here and here. The 3/5th rule (article 1, section 2 paragraph 3) - counting fractions of slaves to create pseudo-votes on behalf of their masters - caused the election of Jefferson and increased the representation of slave-owners in Congress by roughly a third with many evil consequences, including the genocide toward the Cherokee in Georgia.

Article 1 section 9 forbidding citizens to aid escaped slaves was a) a reaction to mass escape to and fighting with the Crown against the colonists during the Revolution (the infamy of the colonists' cause: "how come we hear the greatest yelps for liberty from the drivers of slaves?" asked Samuel Johnson, of Tom Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, bitingly), Along with a force of 50,000 troops, the section underpinned the seizure and deportation of Anthony Burns against a great crowd of abolitionists in Boston in 1854 - there is a powerful sermon of James Freeman Clark denouncing this - and the infamous Dred Scott decision (Justice Roberts has not quite achieved the distinction of Roger Taney but on Guantanamo and other matters, he is working hard at it).

The discussion in this second part will explore the consequences of the anti-democratic character of the Constitution for current developments, including the new debt-slavery of students. For those not in the Colorado area, the audio will also be available on KGNU's website - KGNU.org - shortly after the show.

This Thursday, May 31, I will be talking about/signing Black Patriots and Loyalists at Boulder Book Store at 7:30.