New Quaker Notebook

Nothing but dirt under every soldier's boot. My father and I have had a difficult relationship, and I suppose I'm guilty of making my relationship with my two sons similarly difficult. I'm working on that, but I am more concerned now that the Iraq war is going to change my number two son in the same way the Korean conflict changed my father.

My father, who was a young Marine during WWII and served also in Korea, never would talk to me about the wars, either war—what he did, how bad it was, what he thought about it. For me, and maybe for him, too, it was just something that he went through, like puberty, high school, or his fraternity days at Stetson University, or his father's suicide. I don't know: he's not saying. My mother told me that he used to be a happy, friendly man, and that was what helped to cement her first love for him. During the Korean conflict, she said, he and his platoon were attacked and his buddies were all killed, blown apart. When he came home, she said, he was totally changed; her marriage was difficult from that point on. They stayed married and are still married. But I know from first hand what Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) can do to a man, because it did that to my father. And I don't want that for my son—or any man's son or daughter, for that matter. I saw what it did to men returning from Vietnam, another war created by an administration's lies and protracted in the American mind by the napalm of propaganda.

I shake my head every day in dramatic disbelief over the Bushevik rise to power and how it is that we the people can watch as a great nation's values are shredded like so many classified documents, and its economic future dismantled, sold off for cheap imports. And I feel the little hairs on the back of my neck as I read these two contemporary stories about PTSD in today's Truthout.org.

May we all awaken tomorrow to find that the American people have had their common sense restored.

Sticks and stones ... but news hurts more. This press release issued by Witness Against Torture speaks to a new outrage, but also to the Bush administration's stranglehold on moral reasoning:

US Initiates Legal Processes Against Christian Group that Marched
to Guantánamo

NEW YORK (February 7) - Seven individuals from Witness Against Torture, a group protesting the denial of rights to prisoners at the US Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were served papers by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) last week. The group of twenty-four US Christians marched over 60 miles to the Naval Base in an attempt to practice the Christian act of prisoner visitation. The group camped and fasted for four days at the gate of the militarized zone while awaiting access to the base.

Five hundred prisoners are currently detained by the US government in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Human rights organizations and released detainees have documented torture and extreme prisoner abuse at the base, but the Bush administration asserts that Guantánamo is beyond the jurisdiction of US and international courts of law.

[ READ MORE » ]

France to Take Back Louisiana

NEW ORLEANS - The US government's failure to respond to disaster recovery after hurricane Katrina will force the return of all Louisiana territories to France, said legal experts in New Orleans today.

In a surprising development in efforts to secure federal relief funds for hurricane-battered Louisiana, historians and legal scholars familiar with the original Louisiana Purchase declared that a clause in the original purchase agreement stipulates not only ongoing federal support for levees, but also swift disaster recovery in the event of a "large hurricane" such as Katrina, the class-5 hurricane that flooded 80 percent of the New Orleans area. "This means that FEMA incompetence allowed the purchase contract to be breached," said a spokesperson for the legal team working on the treaty. "Because of that, the United States now has to give back the entire Louisiana territory to France."

Because federal assistance has been insufficient in restoring New Orleans and Louisiana infrastructures, both Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin are discussing recovery efforts with other nations while state attorneys plan for the return of Louisiana territories to France. "It's time to play hardball," Gov Blanco said Monday evening, "as I believe that's the only game Washington understands."

Meanwhile, in New Orleans leading a French delegation to a city that was founded by France in 1718, French Transport Minister Dominique Perben said: "This catastrophe has deeply upset the French people and the French government." France, Perben said through a translator, "wants to be a long-term partner for Louisiana and New Orleans." He gave assurances that Jacques Chirac's administration would move quickly to assume France's oversight of the entire Louisiana territory.

The Louisiana Purchase Treaty was negotiated in the 19th century between the Jefferson administration and the French government of Napoleon Bonaparte. Signed and ratified by Congress in 1803, the $15 million purchase agreement sold the United States not just New Orleans and Louisiana, but also Arkansas, Colorado east of the Rocky Mountains, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota west of the Mississippi River, Missouri, portions of Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, northern Texas, and Wyoming. Affected states have not yet issued formal statements regarding the pending change of jurisdiction.

President Bush issued assurances today that the Louisiana Purchase agreement can be renegotiated and all issues resolved. "My White House legal team will do a heck of a job at getting that great state back from France," he told embedded reporters from his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

NSA jam. The NSA's illegal domestic surveillance operation might be suffering from a surfeit of information, but I can help. According to a news report in today's Washington Post, of the nearly 5,000 US citizens who have had their conversations listened to or emails read by intelligence analysts over the past 4 years, only about 10 Americans were found to be of enough security interest to have their domestic calls intercepted. That sure is a lot of illegal work for a small result.

Occasionally, as he's able, my son will telephone me from his base in Iraq. I'm not able to call him in Mosul and our cell phones can't handle the distance, so he uses a calling card. I suspect that some of our conversations have been caught up in the Bush administration's illegal, warrantless domestic spying operation. So as someone who might be a person of record in this "terrorist surveillance" dragnet, I feel it's important that I suggest to the NSA what they really ought to be looking for.

When I lived in Louisiana, I had a friend who would (to avoid the appearance of political incorrectness) refer to Blacks as "Germans." In that way, he could always carry on a conversation in the open without risking offending any person of color. Now it would seem to me that if a terrorist, plotting some heinous event, is going to be discussing that operation by telephone or email or fax, he (or she) wouldn't actually use such words as "bomb," "attack," "blow 'em up," "Osama," "al-Qaeda," "nine-eleven," or any other keywords likely to trigger further interest from a US intelligence agent listening or watching. No, they would use code words, like my friend—wouldn't you think? During the Cold War, and even before that, we had staff cryptographers who could decipher coded messages. Now the NSA just listens to everything? Surely no one wants this to happen to them.

And, yes, I am very concerned about the slow response of federal officials from FEMA and the SBA in bringing aid to New Orleans and the region, as this will only impede the return of Germans to the Gulf Coast.