Approximately half-way through the King hearings today, I am struck by how nebulous the purpose of the hearings are. I am unclear as to why Rep. King has called them, and what goals they will serve
Related Posts
Command the Good – Gaza
Haroon posted about a fundraiser at NYU a few days ago. Unfortunately, I was on the road. Give if you can. He says: We can look all over the world and find a lot of misery, a lot of suffering, a lot of deprivation; some of that is done in our name; some of that is done and defended in a language we really use to argue for the exact opposite. The most important thing is to focus on what can be done, pray very hard, work very hard; we should not be discouraged by the scale of the challenge…
Reasonable Torture Doesn’t Exist
by Zoe Pollock Scott Horton interviewed father and son Charles and Gregory Fried about their book, Because It Is Wrong—Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror. Horton asked why they paired torture with privacy and surveillance: [After 9/11] the general public, and even the informed public, reacted as if both transgressions were equally serious and equally deserving of condemnation. Indeed, there may have been a markedly greater tolerance of torture than of surveillance—maybe because few of us expect to undergo torture, but all feel our phones or Internet may be tapped into. This gets things exactly wrong.…
Excerpt from “Butterfly Mosque” by @g_willow
Very excited that G. Willow Wilson has made the Prologue of her excellent book, Butterfly Mosque, available. I think, once you read it, you get a flavor of the character in the story. [I am of the opinion that even in memoir, the protagonist is the creation of the writer. The question is that creation recognizable as the writer.] —- PROLOGUE In the upper reaches of the Zagros Mountains, the air changed. The high altitude opened it, cleared it of the dust of the valleys, and made it sing a little in the lungs; low atmospheric pressure. It was a…