Herald Sun: Torture bunker busted [17nov05]

Herald Sun: Torture bunker busted [17nov05]: "IRAQ'S new security forces have been accused of routinely abusing and torturing detainees the same way Saddam Hussein's brutal regime did.

A gruesome discovery in Iraq... more than 170 tortured and starving prisoners in a locked Interior Ministry bunker beneath Baghdad. US troops stumbled on it while searching for a missing boy. A spokesman for the division of the multinational force in Iraq responsible for training the Iraqi police reportedly said, "This sort of behavior completely undermines everything the Iraqi Government stands for and everything the coalition came here for, It is unacceptable in any form." He might want to check higher up with say, Vice President Cheney.

This is the culture that Bush / Cheney / Rumsfield are exporting to the world. This is the very example that they are setting and it is against this backdrop that both the new regime in Baghdad and the United States will be judged by the world. Even all but 9 members of the Senate recognized recently.

Now comes more disturbing news... Is the United States using chemical weapons in Iraq? Is White phosphorus a conventional weapon?

torture Human Bush Iraq White Cheney McCain

It's Snowing

How appropriate my last post with the Dickinson verse "A little this side of the snow" because it was indeed a wee-little this side of it. The white stuff is falling here today! The are big husky flakes that look like they could be on steroids. Fortunately for the time being it is not sticking.

I am listening to Schubert - Symphony No. 5 - finale on xm satellite radio - presently and have taken a pause from my work to have diet drink and post this morning's blog.

A tango in mid-air
Reruns hammering the keys
Like no tomorrow
We'll do it again
But it will be different

Autumn Poets Singing

The air has chilled a bit - was nice earlier. My daughter Meg and I did the leaf thing in the front yard. I say the leaf thing because we didn't really rake as much as we sucked them up into bags all nicely mulched. It beats the hell out of raking when you have a lot.

Saturday and today I have created two new poem drafts which I am most happy with - they will require a bit of tweeking but not likely too much. It is a nice feeling when you have more then one come together nicely in a span of two partial days of work.

I read the New Yorker article from the November 7th issue by Larissa MacFarquhar on John Ashbery. What an astounding profile. I enjoyed every bit of it.

Speaking of Ashbery - I was reading a few of his poems and I especially like Paradoxes and Oxymorons from his book Shadow Train.

I will close out this evening post with a fitting autumn quote....

Besides the autumn poets sing,
A few prosaic days
A little this side of the snow
And that side of the haze.~Emily Dickinson

On Civil Disobedience

"Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it." ~Albert Einstein

Cicada Song

The treadmill cicada whine
Blends with the television.
I feel her presence
As if she is gently tapping my back

Periodically. The way she might have
Come up behind me at my locker
Thirty-three years ago. It’s substantial,
Solid, like a good hard mahogany table.

If we had not married, would I feel the same
About the cicada sound?

She’s stopped walking now, and gone upstairs
And I miss the cicada sound.

Black Sites

A black eye smacked across the face
Lies- caught with sooty residue
Staining their empowered hands

Their sordid secrets
Scattered about the globe
Now open for all to see
Like the belly of a gutted fish

In futile denial of the screaming truth
Their sick- torture twisted lies
Stare back at the world
In dumb void

Hope

The two Maples from our backyard that a promised a week to ten days ago. Isn't this time of year really all about color? The brilliance on one hand counterbalanced with the browning and graying. At least that is where I find the beauty of the fall season. I have to look for the good in it... I miss baseball. I do enjoy the cooler days - but not the shortened daylight.

But ah! Spring will come again! That is the greatest thing about spring - that eternal hope it represents.

When I think about hope and poetry together, I immediately think of Sam Hamill. I was delighted to hear that Sam was honored yesterday with the PEN USA Freedom to Write First Amendment Award. The First Amendment Award is presented to an individual who has demonstrated exceptional courage in defending freedom of expression in the United States. In my humble view, Sam's contributions to the literary community, the causes of justice and peace, and bringing the two together in one powerful voice is a tremendously unselfish act that poets, writers, essayists and indeed people of all walks of life would do well to aspire to.
You can find out more about PEN USA here.

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