Do we want a Vice President who endorses illegal detention and torture of Palestinians? Anthony Cordesman, a national security type frequently deployed as a television pundit, recently posted a paper on the website for the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies recommending that Yasir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority engage in just these practices to repress the latest intifada.
“Halt civil violence,” Cordesman counsels, “even if it means using excessive force by the standards of Western police forces.” But this is only a warm-up. “Halt terrorist and paramilitary action by Hamas and Islamic Jihad,” Cordesman continues, “even if this means interrogations, detentions, and trials that are too rapid and lack due process.” Still not clear enough. “Effective counter-terrorism relies on interrogation methods that border on psychological and/or physical torture, arrests and detention that violate the normal rights of privacy, [with] levels of violence in making arrests that are unacceptable in civil cases, and measures that involve the innocent (or at least the not provably directly guilty) in arrests and penalties.”
In other words, protected only by the weasel phrase “border on,” Cordesman urges that Israel’s security forces return to the torture techniques that were finally abandoned under High Court order a year ago. Joe Lieberman is one of the senators belonging to the CSIS Middle East Task Force. Thus far, despite explicit requests for comment, he has not disavowed Cordesman’s prescriptions, which have been condemned by Amnesty International USA.
For two months now Israel has laid barbarous siege to Palestinians throughout the occupied territories. The Israeli Army is busily cordoning Palestinian areas behind trenches and barbed wire, making Gaza and the West Bank one vast prison–or rather, many separate prisons, all barred from communicating with one another.
The policy of “closure,” initiated after the Gulf War, continued unabated during the so-called Oslo peace process, in violation of Israeli government obligations. The strategy of apartheid and imprisonment is now accelerating, accompanied by bombardment of heavily populated areas, as well as incessant attacks from settlers (all courtesy of the US government, as always, with vast new military subventions rolling in after the Al-Aksa intifada began).
Even the relatively better-informed mainstream accounts fail to convey the brutality of this policy. There are a number of excellent news outlets for those who want unjaundiced reporting. The website for Middle East Research and Information Project is trustworthy (www.merip.org), as is the Electronic Intifada (electronicintifada.net/new.html). For the latter, the intro essay by Nigel Parry gives a useful overview of media coverage. Electronic Intifada also has links to other sites, as does ZNet’s Mideast Watch (www.zmag.org/meastwatch/meastwat.htm). Particularly comprehensive is Birzeit University’s (www.birzeit.edu/links).
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Fair Game
Five fine specimens of Meleagris gallopavo–wild turkey to you–wandered onto my property here in Humboldt County, Northern California, a few days ago. I assume they forgot to check the calendar. Under California fish and game regs, you can shoot them legally for two weeks around Thanksgiving. Out came my 12-gauge, and I loosed off a shot that at some 100 feet did no discernible damage, and after a brief bout of what-the-hell-was-that the turkeys continued to forage. A fusillade of two more shots finally brought down a fourteen-pounder. I hung him for four days, plucked him and by Thanksgiving’s end he was history. This was all easier than sporting manuals suggest, where hunters take enormous trouble to decoy the turkeys with fake gobbles.
Wild turkeys haven’t been seen in California since earlier in the Cenozoic era, but in recent years two ranchers in my valley imported a few and now they’ve begun to appear in our neighborhood in Humboldt County in substantial numbers. I’ve heard reports of flocks of up to a hundred wild turkeys fifteen miles up the Mattole River around Honeydew, an impressive quantity though still far short of the thousand birds counted in one day by two hunters in New England in the 1630s.
The speed with which New World foods spread across Europe and Asia is astounding. Cortez brought turkeys back to Europe from Mexico, and by the 1530s they were well-known in Germany and England. The Puritans had domestic turkeys with them in New England, gazing out at their wild relatives, offered by the Indians who regarded them as somewhat second-rate as food.
Of course, wild turkeys have many enemies aside from the Beast called Man. There are swaths of Humboldt and Mendocino counties where coyotes and mountain lions now hold near-exclusive sway. Ranchers running sheep used to hold off the coyotes with M-80 poison-gas canisters that exploded at muzzle touch, but these are now illegal, and the alternatives are either trapping, which is a difficult and time-consuming job, or getting Great Pyrenees dogs to guard the flock. But the coyotes are crafty and wait till the sheep have scattered, then prey on the unguarded half.
Gabbing on the phone to my friend Ford Roosevelt, who lives in Los Angeles, I mentioned my turkey kill, and he reacted with revulsion, not so much to the fate of Meleagris gallopavo but to the fact that I have a shotgun at all. I told Ford that it was this sort of city-slicker foolishness that cost Gore states like West Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Ohio. Ford, a grandson of FDR, then disclosed that the Democratic National Committee had asked him to campaign in various states, including West Virginia. “Well Ford, didn’t you find that the gun issue was on people’s minds?” “Yes, as a matter of fact. I was talking to some miners and they brought it up. I told them that as far as I was concerned, guns should be banned altogether. They weren’t pleased.” “So it was you, Ford, who lost West Virginia.” He didn’t seem contrite.
