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Harvard and Katrina

September 2, 2005 Dear Students, Faculty, and Staff: The devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina have stunned us all. The loss of life, destruction of property, and unimaginably severe conditions that remain in parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama are profoundly saddening. Our thoughts, prayers, and sympathies are with all those who have suffered from the storm and its aftermath. How can we as a university help? Let me outline several ways. First, we are contacting our undergraduate and graduate students who live in the region to offer any assistance we can in helping them arrive safely for the fall term.…

Did we miss something else?

So I’m reading Jeff Jacoby’s op-ed in the Boston Globe today and he’s talking about anti-American sentiment in the Arab world, (I’m ignoring the fact for a second that the idea of an Arab world, like Arab street, is Orientalist, and that using Egypt as an example for over two dozen countries is just bad writing.) when I run across this paragraph: It was Al-Akhbar, another regime-sponsored daily, that declared in August: “The Statue of Liberty . . . must be destroyed because of the idiotic American policy that goes from disgrace to disgrace in the swamp of bias and…

More on our #torture policies

If you haven’t already seen it, read this article in Harper’s entitled “We Still Torture.” Then go listen to “Blackout Beach” by the Kominas. Now we have entered what we may wish to call the post-torture era, except that it is not. Indeed, we cannot even revert to the easy hypocrisy of the Cold War. We have returned to our traditional practice of torturing and pretending not to, but the old routine is no longer convincing. We know too much. We know that we are still imprisoning men who very likely are completely innocent. We know that we still beat…