link courtesy Gabe Soria!

link courtesy Jesse Locks!

Sunday May 25 8pm

with:
Alan Bishop
Richard Bishop

Opening 40 minute film of the late Charles Gocher’s video experiments followed by two sets of music by Alan Bishop and Richard Bishop, performing Sun City Girls songs as an acoustic guitar duet. This tour will most likely be the only time this show will be presented as such and is a tribute both to Charles Gocher and selected music from the 27 year legacy of Sun City Girls.

$12 advance, $14 day of show / All Ages

Thursday, May 15 at 8pm

SERIES: FOLK AMERICANA

The Old, Weird America: Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music

Imagine a world without rock and roll, or without that obsessive breed of cultural anthropology that favors the margins over the center. That’s the world you’d get without Harry Smith. No one better anticipated the sea change of the ’60s and its post-revolutionary landscape than this son of Theosophists, experimental filmmaker, Native American ethnographer, alchemical evangelist, speed freak, town crier and collector extraordinaire. His three-volume Anthology of American Folk Music, with its archive of “blues singers, hillbilly musicians and gospel chanters,” in the words of Greil Marcus (whose Old Weird America lends its title), launched Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead and the folk revival of the early ’60s, just for starters. This loving portrait by Rani Singh, Smith’s one-time assistant and co-curator of his archives, blends biography with concert footage of Beck, Elvis Costello, Lou Reed, Nick Cave and other musical archaeologists performing songs from the Anthology, to capture the life of one of America’s secular saints.

Dir. Rani Singh, 2006, DigiBeta, 90 min.

Tickets $10

Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theatre
611 N Fairfax Avenue
Los Angeles, 90036
323-655-2510

More info and tix…

The New York Times -May 11, 2008

Change We Can Stomach
By DAN BARBER

TARRYTOWN, N.Y.

COOKING, like farming, for all its down-home community spirit, is essentially a solitary craft. But lately it’s feeling more like a lonely burden. Finding guilt-free food for our menus — food that’s clean, green and humane — is about as easy as securing a housing loan. And we’re suddenly paying more — 75 percent more in the last six years — to stock our pantries. Around the world, from Cairo to Port-au-Prince, increases in food prices have governments facing riots born of shortages and hunger. It’s enough to make you want to toss in the toque.

But here’s the good news: if you’re a chef, or an eater who cares about where your food comes from (and there are a lot of you out there), we can have a hand in making food for the future downright delicious.

Farming has the potential to go through the greatest upheaval since the Green Revolution, bringing harvests that are more healthful, sustainable and, yes, even more flavorful. The change is being pushed along by market forces that influence how our farmers farm.

Until now, food production has been controlled by Big Agriculture, with its macho fixation on “average tonnage” and “record harvests.” But there’s a cost to its breadbasket-to-the-world bragging rights. Like those big Industrial Age factories that once billowed black smoke, American agriculture is mired in a mind-set that relies on capital, chemistry and machines. Food production is dependent on oil, in the form of fertilizers and pesticides, in the distances produce travels from farm to plate and in the energy it takes to process it.

For decades, environmentalists and small farmers have claimed that this is several kinds of madness. But industrial agriculture has simply responded that if we’re feeding more people more cheaply using less land, how terrible can our food system be?

Now that argument no longer holds true. With the price of oil at more than $120 a barrel (up from less than $30 for most of the last 50 years), small and midsize nonpolluting farms, the ones growing the healthiest and best-tasting food, are gaining a competitive advantage. They aren’t as reliant on oil, because they use fewer large machines and less pesticide and fertilizer.

In fact, small farms are the most productive on earth. A four-acre farm in the United States nets, on average, $1,400 per acre; a 1,364-acre farm nets $39 an acre. Big farms have long compensated for the disequilibrium with sheer quantity. But their economies of scale come from mass distribution, and with diesel fuel costing more than $4 per gallon in many locations, it’s no longer efficient to transport food 1,500 miles from where it’s grown.

The high cost of oil alone will not be enough to reform American agriculture, however. As long as agricultural companies exploit the poor and extract labor from them at slave wages, and as long as they aren’t required to pay the price for the pollution they so brazenly produce, their system will stay afloat. If financially pinched Americans opt for the cheapest (and the least healthful) foods rather than cook their own, the food industry will continue to reach for the lowest common denominator.

But it is possible to nudge the revolution along — for instance, by changing how we measure the value of food. If we stop calculating the cost per quantity and begin considering the cost per nutrient value, the demand for higher-quality food would rise.

Organic fruits and vegetables contain 40 percent more nutrients than their chemical-fed counterparts. And animals raised on pasture provide us with meat and dairy products containing more beta carotene and at least three times as much C.L.A. (conjugated linoleic acid, shown in animal studies to reduce the risk of cancer) than those raised on grain.

Where good nutrition goes, flavor tends to follow. Chefs are the first to admit that an impossibly sweet, flavor-filled carrot has nothing to do with our work. It has to do with growing the right seed in healthy, nutrient-rich soil.

Increasingly we can see the wisdom of diversified farming operations, where there are built-in relationships among plants and animals. A dairy farm can provide manure for a neighboring potato farm, for example, which can in turn offer potato scraps as extra feed for the herd. When crops and livestock are judiciously mixed, agriculture wisely mimics nature.

To encourage small, diversified farms is not to make a nostalgic bid to revert to the agrarian ways of our ancestors. It is to look toward the future, leapfrogging past the age of heavy machinery and pollution, to farms that take advantage of the sun’s free energy and use the waste of one species as food for another.

Chefs can help move our food system into the future by continuing to demand the most flavorful food. Our support of the local food movement is an important example of this approach, but it’s not enough. As demand for fresh, local food rises, we cannot continue to rely entirely on farmers’ markets. Asking every farmer to plant, harvest, drive his pickup truck to a market and sell his goods there is like asking me to cook, take reservations, serve and wash the dishes.

We now need to support a system of well-coordinated regional farm networks, each suited to the food it can best grow. Farmers organized into marketing networks that can promote their common brands (like the Organic Valley Family of Farms in the Midwest) can ease the economic and ecological burden of food production and transportation. They can also distribute their products to new markets, including poor communities that have relied mainly on food from convenience stores.

Similar networks could also operate in the countries that are now experiencing food shortages. For years, the United States has flooded the world with food exports, displacing small farmers and disrupting domestic markets. As escalating food prices threaten an additional 100 million people with hunger, a new concept of humanitarian aid is required. Local farming efforts focused on conserving natural resources and biodiversity are essential to improving food security in developing countries, as a report just published by the International Assessment of Agriculture Science and Technology for Development has concluded. We must build on these tenets, providing financial and technical assistance to small farmers across the world.

But regional systems will work only if there is enough small-scale farming going on to make them viable. With a less energy-intensive food system in place, we will need more muscle power devoted to food production, and more people on the farm. (The need is especially urgent when you consider that the average age of today’s American farmer is over 55.) In order to move gracefully into a post-industrial agriculture economy, we also need to rethink how we educate the people who will grow our food. Land-grant universities and agricultural schools, dependent on financing from agribusiness, focus on maximum extraction from the land — take more, sell more, waste more.

Leave our agricultural future to chefs and anyone who takes food and cooking seriously. We never bought into the “bigger is better” mantra, not because it left us too dependent on oil, but because it never produced anything really good to eat. Truly great cooking — not faddish 1.5-pound rib-eye steaks with butter sauce, but food that has evolved from the world’s thriving peasant cuisines — is based on the correspondence of good farming to a healthy environment and good nutrition. It’s never been any other way, and we should be grateful. The future belongs to the gourmet.

Dan Barber is the chef and co-owner of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns.

May 11 at 8pm
THE MAN WHO LAUGHS
with live accompaniment by Plastic Crimewave, Ariel Pink and Jimi Hey
Co-Presented by Arthur Magazine

Arthur proudly presents live scores to both the classic 1928 German expressionist film The Man Who Laughs and Georges Méliès’ classic turn-of-the-century silent short A Trip To The Moon.

Based on the Victor Hugo novel, The Man Who Laughs is a moody masterpiece by director Paul Leni, a tragic melodrama starring Conrad Veidt (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) as an abandoned 17th-century British aristocrat disfigured at a young age by gypsies to have a freakish eternal grin.

Performing the soundtrack will be an ensemble of Chicago’s own Plastic Crimewave aka Steve Krakow (who also writes and draws the GALACTIC ZOO DOSSIER magazine, as well as contributing to Arthur), and locals Jimi Hey and Ariel Pink.

Also DJing before and after the films will be Frankie Delmane of the Teenage Frames.

The Man Who Laughs Dir. Paul Leni, 1928, DVD, 110 min.
Tickets - $12/ $8 for Cinefamily members

More info here…

LABEL PROMO TEXT:

“Clone Therapy”

“The latest and greatest from Greenfield’s own Weirding Module. You go out and have fun while your clone stays home and heals. S/he’ll tell you all about it! Two secret tracks from another decade on side 2. Fifty minutes of just what your clone needs. Edition of 50.”

Panel Subpoenas Close Cheney Aide

By SCOTT SHANE

May 6, 2008 New York Times

WASHINGTON — A House subcommittee investigating the Bush administration’s approval for harsh interrogation methods voted on Tuesday to issue a subpoena to David S. Addington, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney and a major proponent of the methods, which some legal experts have condemned as illegal torture.

Two former administration officials, John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, and John C. Yoo, who wrote controversial legal opinions justifying harsh techniques, have agreed to give public testimony to a House Judiciary subcommittee, staff members said.

Their testimony and that of several other administration officials invited to speak at a future hearing might provide the fullest public account to date of the internal discussions that led the administration to break with American tradition in 2002 and authorize waterboarding and other physical pressure against terrorist suspects.

The panel, the House Judiciary subcommittee on the constitution, civil rights and civil liberties, took the action at a hearing on Tuesday. During the session, law professors called for a full investigation by Congress or by an independent commission of the adoption of the harsh techniques.

Philippe Sands, a British law professor and author of a new book on the approval of coercive interrogation by high-level American military officials, “Torture Team,” said that if no such inquiry took place in the United States, foreign prosecutors might seek to charge American officials with authorizing torture. He said two foreign prosecutors, whom he did not name, had asked him for the materials on which his book is based.

“If the U.S. doesn’t address this, other countries will,” Mr. Sands said.

Witnesses at the hearing clashed over whether coercive interrogation methods can be effective or whether they produce unreliable answers from prisoners who want the pain to stop. Under pressure from Congress and the courts, the administration has dropped the harshest methods, including waterboarding, in which water is poured over a prisoner’s mouth and nose to produce a feeling of suffocation.

Mr. Ashcroft’s testimony might shed new light on discussions of interrogation methods at the highest level of the administration. ABC News reported last month that the so-called “enhanced” interrogation techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency were approved after they were discussed at the White House by Mr. Ashcroft and other top officials.

Mr. Yoo was the principal author of several key legal opinions on the issue, including two dated August 1, 2002, and March 14, 2003, that argued that the president could legally approve the harshest methods as part of his powers as commander in chief. Both were subsequently withdrawn by Justice Department officials.

Mr. Yoo’s attorney, John C. Millian, said in a letter to the committee that the Justice Department has directed him to protect the confidentiality of executive branch deliberations. But he said Mr. Yoo would be willing to answer questions that did not violate that confidentiality.

A spokeswoman for the vice president’s office, Megan Mitchell, said she could not predict whether Mr. Addington would appear if subpoenaed. “If we receive a subpoena we’ll review it and respond accordingly,” she said.

The committee is still negotiating possible testimony with other former officials, including George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director; Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy; and Daniel Levin, former assistant attorney general.

The New York Times - May 7, 2008

Urban Farmers’ Crops Go From Vacant Lot to Market
By TRACIE McMILLAN

In the shadows of the elevated tracks toward the end of the No. 3 line in East New York, Brooklyn, with an April chill still in the air, Denniston and Marlene Wilks gently pulled clusters of slender green shoots from the earth, revealing a blush of tiny red shallots at the base.

“Dennis used to keep them big, and people didn’t buy them,” Mrs. Wilks said. “They love to buy scallions.”

Growing up in rural Jamaica, the Wilkses helped their families raise crops like sugar cane, coffee and yams, and take them to market. Now, in Brooklyn, they are farmers once again, catering to their neighbors’ tastes: for scallions, for bitter melons like those from the West Indies and East Asia and for cilantro for Latin-American dinner tables.

“We never dreamed of it,” said Mr. Wilks, nor did his relatives in Jamaica. “They are totally astonished when you tell them that you farm and go to the market.”

For years, New Yorkers have grown basil, tomatoes and greens in window boxes, backyard plots and community gardens. But more and more New Yorkers like the Wilkses are raising fruits and vegetables, and not just to feed their families but to sell to people on their block.

This urban agriculture movement has grown even more vigorously elsewhere. Hundreds of farmers are at work in Detroit, Milwaukee, Oakland and other areas that, like East New York, have low-income residents, high rates of obesity and diabetes, limited sources of fresh produce and available, undeveloped land.

Local officials and nonprofit groups have been providing land, training and financial encouragement. But the impetus, in almost every case, has come from the farmers, who often till when their day jobs are done, overcoming peculiarly urban obstacles.

The Wilkses’ return to farming began in 1990 when their daughter planted a watermelon in their backyard. Before long, Mrs. Wilks, an administrator in the city’s Department of Education, was digging in the yard after work. Once their ambition outgrew their yard, she and Mr. Wilks, a city surveyor, along with other gardening neighbors, received permission to use a vacant lot across from a garment factory at the end of their block.

They cleared it of trash and tested its soil with help from GreenThumb, a Parks Department gardening program. They found traces of lead, so to ensure their food’s safety, they built raised beds of compost. (Heavy metals are common contaminants in city soil because of vehicle exhaust and remnants of old construction. Some studies have found that such ground can be cultivated as long as the pH is kept neutral.)

They wanted their crops to be organic, a commitment they shared with many other farmers in this grimy landscape. They planted some marigolds to deter squirrels; they have not had rat problems, which can plague urban gardens; and they abandoned crops, like corn, that could attract rodents. They put up fences to thwart other pests — thieves and vandals — and posted signs to let people know that this was a garden and no longer a dump.

There were also benefits to farming in the city. The Wilkses took advantage of city composting programs, trucking home decomposed leaves from the Starrett City development in Brooklyn and ZooDoo from the Bronx Zoo’s manure composting program. They got free seedlings from GreenThumb and took courses on growing and selling food from the City Farms project at the local nonprofit Just Food.

“The city really has been good to us,” Mrs. Wilks said. “All of the property we work on, it’s city property.”

The Wilkses now cultivate plots at four sites in East New York, paying as little as $2 a bed (usually 4 feet by 8 feet) in addition to modest membership fees. Last year the couple sold $3,116 in produce at a market run by the community group East New York Farms, more than any of their neighbors.

Florence Russell is looking forward to this year’s offerings. On a recent Saturday she watched from the end of Alabama Avenue as gardeners worked compost into beds at Hands and Hearts Garden, one of the sites where the Wilkses keep beds, along with 24 other growers. Fresh greens, she said, would be a welcome alternative to tough collards from the local grocery.

“This is something good happening here,” Ms. Russell said.

The city’s cultivators are a varied lot. The high school students at the Added Value community farm in Red Hook, Brooklyn, last year supplied Italian arugula, Asian greens and heirloom tomatoes to three restaurants, a community-supported agriculture buying club and two farmers’ markets.

In the South Bronx a group of gardens called La Familia Verde started a farmers’ market in 2003 to sell surpluses of herbs like papalo and the Caribbean green callaloo.

At a less established operation, the Brooklyn Rescue Mission’s Bed-Stuy Farm, mission staff members began growing produce in the vacant lot behind their food pantry in 2004, and ended up with a surplus last year. So they enlisted their teenage volunteers to run a sidewalk farm stand selling collards, tomatoes and figs; this year they plan to open a full farmers’ market.

The city’s success with urban farming will receive international attention on Saturday when, during an 11-day conference in New York, 60 delegates from the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development are scheduled to visit Hands and Hearts, the Bed-Stuy Farm and two traditional community gardens in Brooklyn.

There was not always so much enthusiasm for city farming, though.

John Ameroso, a Cornell Cooperative Extension agent who has worked with local farmers and gardeners for 32 years, said that when he first suggested urban farm stands in the early 1990s, city environmental officials dismissed the idea. “ ‘Oh, you could never grow enough stuff with the urban markets,’ ” he said he was told. ‘ “That can’t be done. You have to have farmers.’ ”

But local officials have come around.

Holly Leicht, an associate assistant commissioner at the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, helped provide two half-acre parcels of city land last year. One became Hands and Hearts and the other is in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Brooklyn.

The Red Hook farm began in 2003 when the Parks Department gave the youth group Added Value permission to use an abandoned three-acre asphalt ball field. The group started with two raised beds, built a hoop house where it could start seeds, then laid down an acre of compost two feet deep on top of the asphalt. Last year the young farmers sold more than $25,000 in goods.

Urban agriculture has been an even larger undertaking in other cities, particularly those with weaker real estate markets and a declining population.

In Detroit, where locals refer to stretches of the city as urban prairie, food gardens are scattered through backyards, schoolyards and even more unlikely spots, including the floor of an abandoned roofless furniture factory and a vacant lot owned by a local order of Catholic friars. The number of gardens has grown to nearly 450 since the Garden Resource Program Collaborative began coordinating them in 2003.

The gardeners grow much of the food for themselves, but they have also organized a co-op, Grown in Detroit, to sell their surplus peas, onions, yams and greens. From farm stands in health center parking lots and at a prime booth in Eastern Market, the city’s chaotic maze of wholesalers and local farmers, gardeners lure customers to take their first bite of a garlic scape, or compare their young spinach with that in a Del Monte box down the aisle. Next year two and a half acres that were waist high with weeds last summer will be set aside for market-bound produce.

City Slicker Farms in West Oakland, Calif., started in 2001 with a quarter-acre garden and a farm stand selling neighborhood favorites like collards and mustard greens. It has since persuaded local elementary students to volunteer and gotten owners of five additional vacant lots to let it grow food on their land.

Some operations have figured out how to make real money.

On a fringe of Philadelphia, a nonprofit demonstration project used densely planted rows in a half-acre plot and generated $67,000 from high-value crops like lettuces, carrots and radishes.

In Milwaukee, the nonprofit Growing Power operates a one-acre farm crammed with plastic greenhouses, compost piles, do-it-yourself contraptions, tilapia tanks and pens full of hens, ducks and goats — and grossed over $220,000 last year from the sale of lettuces, winter greens, sprouts and fish to local restaurants and consumers.

One key to financial success is having customers with the wherewithal to buy your goods. In New York, Bob Lewis, the head of the city office for the state Department of Agriculture and Markets, helped make this happen by getting 21 farmers at 16 sites approved to accept checks from the Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program, a supplement to the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) and senior nutrition programs.

Sarita Daftary, the program director for East New York Farms, estimates that about 60 percent of the market’s gross revenue came from the farmers’ market checks. And by the end of this year, changes to WIC will give city residents another $14 million specifically for fresh fruits and vegetables.

But land and demand are not all that successful farmers need. They have to know how to run a business or a farm.

So Growing Power, the Milwaukee group, offers several training sessions each year, and Just Food’s City Farms project holds an annual series of workshops on running farm stands.

For more formal training there is the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Founded in 1967, the center runs a six-month course for 39 students each year on its two farms.

Patricia Allen, the center’s executive director, said roughly three-fourths of her students today were interested in urban growing.

“We’re not looking at a back-to-the-land movement in any sense,” she said.

Just ask Karen Washington. She began growing food in 1985, after a city program offering a house with a yard lured her, then a single mother of two, to the South Bronx from Harlem.

Though she works as a physical therapist, Ms. Washington always knew she had another calling. “When I was a little kid I used to watch the farm report,” she said. “I always wanted to grow and be a farmer.”

Wary of chemicals and their effect on her health, Ms. Washington was determined to farm organically. She learned how to deter pests with mild soapy sprays and marigolds, encourage natural pest killers like ladybugs, and turn food scraps into fertile compost. As her skills grew, so did her ambitions. First she helped turn a vacant lot on her block into the Garden of Happiness. Then she helped defend local gardens from developers, and later persuaded the resulting coalition, La Familia Verde, to run a farm stand and test the waters for a farmers’ market.

“It’s not about making money,” Ms. Washington said. “We’re selling so that people in our neighborhood have good quality. There’s no Whole Foods in my neighborhood.”

Like many markets that sell neighborhood produce, La Familia Verde’s has attracted upstate farmers who did not venture into these areas until the locals showed them there was a market. The professionals do not compete with the amateurs though; they sell crops like corn and apples.

All this has not quenched Ms. Washington’s agricultural ambitions. In April she took a six-month leave from her job and headed to the Center for Agroecology with two other city growers. She said she hoped to take notes and start an urban farm school in New York.

With that in place, Ms. Washington said, the possibilities could be endless.

“So that the next time we ask a kid where a tomato comes from,” she said, “he won’t have to say a supermarket. He can say, Here’s an urban farm, and here is where I’m growing that tomato that you’re talking about. How great is that?”

Why are the presidential candidates—and so many counterterrorism experts—afraid to say that the Al Qaeda threat is overrated?

Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
Updated: 9:32 AM ET May 6, 2008

Michael Sheehan is on a one-man mission to put terrorist threats into perspective, which is a place they’ve rarely or ever been before. Already you can see it’s going to be a hard slog. Fighting the inflated menace of Osama bin Laden has become big business, generating hundreds of billions of dollars for government agencies and contractors in what one friend of mine in the Washington policy-making stratosphere calls “the counterterrorist-industrial complex.”

But Sheehan’s got the kind of credentials that ought to make us stop and listen. He was a U.S. Army Green Beret fighting guerrillas in Central America in the 1980s, he served on the National Security Council staff under both President George H.W. Bush and President Bill Clinton, and he held the post of ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism from 1998 to 2000.

In those days Sheehan was among that persistent, relentless and finally shrill chorus of voices trying to warn the Clinton administration that Osama bin Laden and his boys represented a horrific danger to the United States and its interests. Days after the October 2000 suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen that killed 17 American sailors, experienced analysts like Sheehan at the State Department and Richard A. Clarke at the White House were certain Al Qaeda was behind it, but there was no support for retaliation among the Clintonistas or, even less, the Pentagon.

Clarke later wrote vividly about Sheehan’s reaction after the military brass begged off. “Who the s— do they think attacked the Cole, f—in’ Martians?” Sheehan asked Clarke. “Does Al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?”

We all know the answer to that question, of course. But what’s interesting is not that Sheehan was so right, for all the good it did, or that President Bill Clinton and then President George W. Bush were so wrong not to pay attention. What’s interesting is Sheehan’s argument now that Al Qaeda just isn’t the existential-twilight-struggle threat it’s often cracked up to be. Hence the subtitle of his new book, “Crush the Cell: How to Defeat Terrorism Without Terrorizing Ourselves” (Crown, 2008).

The ideas Sheehan puts forth in a text as easy to read as a Power Point should be central to every security debate in the current presidential campaign. But given the personality politics that have dominated the race so far, that seems unlikely. Once again it’s up to the public to figure these things out for itself.

“I want people to understand what the real threat is and what’s a bunch of bull,” Sheehan told me when I tracked him down a few days ago in one of those Middle Eastern hotel lobbies where you sip orange juice and lemonade at cocktail time. (He asked me not to say where, precisely, since the government he’s now advising on policing and terrorism puts a high premium on discretion.)

Before September 11, said Sheehan, the United States was “asleep at the switch” while Al Qaeda was barreling down the track. “If you don’t pay attention to these guys,” said Sheehan, “they will kill you in big numbers.” So bin Laden’s minions hit U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, they hit the Cole in 2000, and they hit New York and Washington in 2001—three major attacks on American targets in the space of 37 months. Since then, not one. And not for want of trying on their part.

What changed? The difference is purely and simply that intelligence agencies, law enforcement and the military have focused their attention on the threat, crushed the operational cells they could find—which were in fact the key ones plotting and executing major attacks—and put enormous pressure on all the rest.

“I reject the notion that Al Qaeda is waiting for ‘the big one’ or holding back an attack,” Sheehan writes. “A terrorist cell capable of attacking doesn’t sit and wait for some more opportune moment. It’s not their style, nor is it in the best interest of their operational security. Delaying an attack gives law enforcement more time to detect a plot or penetrate the organization.”

Terrorism is not about standing armies, mass movements, riots in the streets or even palace coups. It’s about tiny groups that want to make a big bang. So you keep tracking cells and potential cells, and when you find them you destroy them. After Spanish police cornered leading members of the group that attacked trains in Madrid in 2004, they blew themselves up. The threat in Spain declined dramatically.

Indonesia is another case Sheehan and I talked about. Several high-profile associates of bin Laden were nailed there in the two years after 9/11, then sent off to secret CIA prisons for interrogation. The suspects are now at Guantánamo. But suicide bombings continued until police using forensic evidence—pieces of car bombs and pieces of the suicide bombers—tracked down Dr. Azahari bin Husin, “the Demolition Man,” and the little group around him. In a November 2005 shootout the cops killed Dr. Azahari and crushed his cell. After that such attacks in Indonesia stopped.

The drive to obliterate the remaining hives of Al Qaeda training activity along the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier and those that developed in some corners of Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003 needs to continue, says Sheehan. It’s especially important to keep wanna-be jihadists in the West from joining with more experienced fighters who can give them hands-on weapons and explosives training. When left to their own devices, as it were, most homegrown terrorists can’t cut it. For example, on July 7, 2005, four bombers blew themselves up on public transport in London, killing 56 people. Two of those bombers had trained in Pakistan. Another cell tried to do the same thing two weeks later, but its members had less foreign training, or none. All the bombs were duds.

Sheehan’s perspective is clearly influenced by the three years he spent, from 2003 to 2006, as deputy commissioner for counterterrorism at the New York City Police Department. There, working with Commissioner Ray Kelly and David Cohen, the former CIA operations chief who heads the NYPD’s intelligence division, Sheehan helped build what’s regarded as one of the most effective terrorist-fighting organizations in the United States. Radicals and crazies of many different stripes have targeted the city repeatedly over the last century, from alleged Reds to Black Blocs, from Puerto Rican nationalists and a “mad bomber” to Al Qaeda’s aspiring martyrs. But the police have limited resources, so they’ve learned the art of terrorist triage, focusing on what’s real and wasting little time and money on what’s merely imagined.

“Even in 2003, less than two years after 9/11, I told Kelly and Cohen that I thought Al Qaeda was simply not very good,” Sheehan writes in his book. Bin Laden’s acolytes “were a small and determined group of killers, but under the withering heat of the post-9/11 environment, they were simply not getting it done … I said what nobody else was saying: we underestimated Al Qaeda’s capabilities before 9/11 and overestimated them after. This seemed to catch both Kelly and Cohen a bit by surprise, and I agreed not to discuss my feelings in public. The likelihood for misinterpretation was much too high.”

It still is. At the Global Leadership Forum co-sponsored by NEWSWEEK at the Royal United Services Institute in London last week, the experts and dignitaries didn’t want to risk dissing Al Qaeda, even when their learned presentations came to much the same conclusions as Sheehan.

The British Tories’ shadow security minister, Pauline Neville-Jones, dismissed overblown American rhetoric: “We don’t use the language of the Global War on Terror,” said the baroness. “We actively eschew it.” The American security expert Ashton Carter agreed. “It’s not a war,” said the former assistant secretary of defense, who is now an important Hillary Clinton supporter. “It’s a matter of law enforcement and intelligence, of Homeland Security hardening the target.” The military focus, he suggested, should be on special ops.

Sir David Omand, who used to head Britain’s version of the National Security Agency and oversaw its entire intelligence establishment from the Cabinet Office earlier this decade, described terrorism as “one corner” of the global security threat posed by weapons proliferation and political instability. That in turn is only one of three major dangers facing the world over the next few years. The others are the deteriorating environment and a meltdown of the global economy. Putting terrorism in perspective, said Sir David, “leads naturally to a risk management approach, which is very different from what we’ve heard from Washington these last few years, which is to ‘eliminate the threat’.”

Yet when I asked the panelists at the forum if Al Qaeda has been overrated, suggesting as Sheehan does that most of its recruits are bunglers, all shook their heads. Nobody wants to say such a thing on the record, in case there’s another attack tomorrow and their remarks get quoted back to them.

That’s part of what makes Sheehan so refreshing. He knows there’s a big risk that he’ll be misinterpreted; he’ll be called soft on terror by ass-covering bureaucrats, breathless reporters and fear-peddling politicians. And yet he charges ahead. He expects another attack sometime, somewhere. He hopes it won’t be made to seem more apocalyptic than it is. “Don’t overhype it, because that’s what Al Qaeda wants you to do. Terrorism is about psychology.” In the meantime, said Sheehan, finishing his fruit juice, “the relentless 24/7 job for people like me is to find and crush those guys.”

As I headed into the parking lot, watching a storm blow in off the desert, it occurred to me that one day in the not too distant future the inability of these terrorist groups to act effectively will discredit them and the movement they claim to represent. If they did succeed with a new attack and the public and media brushed it off after a couple of news cycles, that would discredit them still more. The psychological victory would be ours for a change, and not only in our own societies but very likely in theirs. Or, to paraphrase an old Army dictum, if you crush the cells, the hearts and minds will follow.

In a similar vein (and way back in 2004): The Power of Nightmares.

from Arthur Magazine No. 29/May 2008

CULLING TIME by Dave Reeves

“A joke is an epitaph on the death of a feeling.”—Nietzsche

If we are in Iraq looking for the guys that did the Nineleven caper we’re stupid because, according to the FAA, the pilots are usually among the first people to arrive at a crash site.

The only other 9/11 joke I’ve heard is:

Knock, knock
Who’s there?
Nine eleven
Nine eleven who?
You said you would never forget me.

Yeah, it’s not funny. Not just because the feeling isn’t dead. It plays on the fact that 9/11 is an old heartbreak whore of ours, the one who unfettered our basest desires, which we’ll be paying for for the rest of our children’s lives. Har de har.

Your kids are going to be pissed when they see the pictures which Colin Powell pointed at when he talked us into World War Three.

“Daddy is it true that you guys started World War Three over a picture of a meth lab out in the desert?”

“Well honey see we didn’t have no education back then and so we didn’t know that nuclear fission takes whole buildings full of advanced ceramics, Germans and yellow cake uranium to manufacture…”

It’s good that we can’t tell a meth lab from a nuclear bomb-making facility because it means that our elders saw fit to give us the gift of bliss, which more judgemental people would call ignorance. With this bliss we are free to see the world without any preconceived notions based on science or pre-known facts.

Back when people got educations they were indoctrinated so thoroughly that they believed crazy shit like the Civil War was fought to free black slaves. Anybody stupid enough to think that white people went to war and killed other white people for the rights of black people will be stupid enough to believe that we are looking for Osama Bin Laden in Iraqian Permian basin.

That’s right: Though you’ve been taught that the American Civil War was some kind of freedom ride gone horribly awry, it was, in fact, an economic war. The propaganda that the War Between the States was about freeing slaves was made up for a speech called the Gettysburg Address, much as the “Axis of Evil” was made up by a speechwriter. All the proof you need is to witness the war being fought in the streets of America to jail black people today. Putting one out of six black men behind bars is a pretty good start at re-slaving America, chains and all.

How did we get so stupid? Practice, man, practice. Our acquiescence was bought behind the persistent machinations of faux-Fox News, whose confusions enabled Diebold machines to send Americans to do just that. Five years later, 4,000 soldiers have boldy died behind a mission yet to be defined. On top of that we didn’t even get the damn oil. Greed was good, back when it was smart.

Considering that the war industry is America’s biggest export, you may wonder how we got in a war and a recession at the same time. Plus, if we were to leave Iraq right now, some Pol Pots would jump up in the vaccum to turn our Fallujahs into Sinaloas.

Fallujaloas. I can already hear the heroin getting stronger.

With this is in mind we must be sure that Bush must not be allowed to kill himself. It is our job as responsible Americans to make an example of this man. I propose that the Decider, Laura and the twins be waterboarded to death at the Lincoln Memorial. If something of this sort is not done, World War Five will be blamed on you and me for the rest of our miserable lives.

It is a matter of style. The reason why Italians don’t get the proper blame for the Euro-fascism of Hitler and the boys is because the Italian populace punished the figurehead properly. They strung Mussolini and his bitch wife up by their heels and beat them naked and dead, in the middle of Rome. This act allowed the world to forgive Italy for sparking the pitiless hell which burned Europe and Japan to cinders. If the Italians hadn’t beat Il Duce like that then the world might have known the Pope was a gay Hitler way back then.

The responsible populace needs to do something to exonerate ourselves from being duped by ol’ George. It would be apropos to cut George’s head off with a butter knife on youTube while screaming some religious babble. Let’s flip the script on these Semites, like an Arab killing a stranger. We could leave the Bush women and children alive to be sold as curiosities in brothels, then chased from village to village in a hail of stones, allowed to live as a reminder of what happens to smug, stupid assholes who steal elections.

This nutty buddy of mine called the Constitution of the United States of America suggests an armed bunch of guys and gals are supposed to organize into a militia to do this. It’s like our forefathers were Nostradamuses to see a crooked politico clusterfuck like this coming.

I suggest some kind of hipster army. Why not? Jodie Foster had an army. It was only one crazy guy, but he shot Reagan. I notice George Bush is still unshot. I heard they let Hinckley out. John if you are reading this: “Try, try again.” You should be even more ashamed to let Jodie Foster live in a world with George Bush as president.

We must crusade for the good and get the mySpace poseurs to put the skateboards down long enough to get hurt for something more than a hobby. It’s springtime in the revolution, time to get down to the nut cutting. Real cowboys call it the “culling time.” Every head of the herd is to be saved or chopped off.

The price to join the militia is the procurement of some sort of protection system more realistic than calling the cops. Those that can take care of themselves look forward to whatever form the apocalypse takes. If you are not ready to save yourself, then what good would it do for a militia to save you? That’s two soldiers down for somebody that didn’t have the sense to survive in the first place.

Get some boots. Armies are made of leather and rubber. Procure a flashlight, shotgun, water, motorcycle, siphon hose, iodine, sleeping, bag, knife, lighter and set of cojones. If you have these things, you are a militiaman or militiawoman.

Say you don’t watch enough news to be mad enough to shoot anybody? Let me have your shotgun and you’ll be drafted to be a goddamn Politician for The Cause. In a world where Bush has a DUI, Obama admits to messing with cocaine, and Clinton had cigar sex with a girl in a Gap dress you have been thrust into the arena of the politically viable. Your peccadillo body modifications, aderal addictions, litanies of filthy text messages and binges of internet porn perversions have not freed you from being an American. Indeed, modern America is why you’re a modern American, and vice versa. When a major presidential contender has been cuckolded by a tobacco product you have to really limbo to be beneath being a viable candidate anymore.

America took a page from the playbook used at the great Cradle of Wars of Dien Bien Phu, Little Big Horn and Israel: build a fort somewhere surrounded on all sides by hostiles, preferably at the bottom of a hill or a heights. Supply the Indians with rudimentary weapons and then make them mad as hell. Make sure to give the enemy plenty of chances with exposed supply lines to inflict damage so that the following wrath and retribution seems warranted. Occupy enemy territory using whatever means necessary. Repeat this process until the world is a Mall. Yee haw.

Our generation apes the criminal with the tattooes, the pimp cup wiggerdom and self-medication. Turns out that these are good impulses, because, like Hakim (if that is his real name) Bey says “there is always the element of the criminal in the Nietzschean overman.” So listen to your tattooes, you big overman, and be criminal enough to take the country back.

I’m here to tell you that America is good real estate, as long as you didn’t actually buy any of it on a subprime loan. See, the real America can’t be bought, you got to take it like our forefathers did. The time to flank these assholes is now, while their national guard troops are off on the fourth tour of duty.

Until then, ain’t nothing changed. America is up in an Indian war dressed like Custer again. There is talk of retreating out the back door of Iraq, also known as Iran. A bold move for sure, soon to be glorified in the cave drawings left by the survivors of the near future. I got a 9/11 joke: “Fission Accomplished.” The reason that one isn’t funny is because it’s not a joke.

David Crosby Reeves is working on a militia project and riding around on a motorcycle trying to eat everywhere that Jonathon Gold eats. Also sometimes he writes.