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Police Infilitrate Protests, Videotapes Show – New York Times

December 22, 2005

By JIM DWYER

Undercover New York City police officers have conducted covert surveillance in the last 16 months of people protesting the Iraq war, bicycle riders taking part in mass rallies and even mourners at a street vigil for a cyclist killed in an accident, a series of videotapes show.

In glimpses and in glaring detail, the videotape images reveal the robust presence of disguised officers or others working with them at seven public gatherings since August 2004.

The officers hoist protest signs. They hold flowers with mourners. They ride in bicycle events. At the vigil for the cyclist, an officer in biking gear wore a button that said, “I am a shameless agitator.” She also carried a camera and videotaped the roughly 15 people present.

Beyond collecting information, some of the undercover officers or their associates are seen on the tape having influence on events. At a demonstration last year during the Republican National Convention, the sham arrest of a man secretly working with the police led to a bruising confrontation between officers in riot gear and bystanders.

Until Sept. 11, the secret monitoring of events where people expressed their opinions was among the most tightly limited of police powers.

Provided with images from the tape, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, did not dispute that they showed officers at work but said that disguised officers had always attended such gatherings – not to investigate political activities but to keep order and protect free speech. Activists, however, say that police officers masquerading as protesters and bicycle riders distort their messages and provoke trouble.

The pictures of the undercover officers were culled from an unofficial archive of civilian and police videotapes by Eileen Clancy, a forensic video analyst who is critical of the tactics. She gave the tapes to The New York Times. Based on what the individuals said, the equipment they carried and their almost immediate release after they had been arrested amid protesters or bicycle riders, The Times concluded that at least 10 officers were incognito at the events.

After the 2001 terrorist attacks, officials at all levels of government considered major changes in various police powers. President Bush acknowledged last Saturday that he has secretly permitted the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without a warrant on international telephone calls and e-mail messages in terror investigations.

In New York, the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg persuaded a federal judge in 2003 to enlarge the Police Department’s authority to conduct investigations of political, social and religious groups. “We live in a more dangerous, constantly changing world,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said.

Before then, very few political organizations or activities were secretly investigated by the Police Department, the result of a 1971 class-action lawsuit that charged the city with abuses in surveillance during the 1960’s. Now the standard for opening inquiries into political activity has been relaxed, full authority to begin surveillance has been restored to the police and federal courts no longer require a special panel to oversee the tactics.

Mr. Browne, the police spokesman, said the department did not increase its surveillance of political groups when the restrictions were eased. The powers obtained after Sept. 11 have been used exclusively “to investigate and thwart terrorists,” Mr. Browne said. He would not answer specific questions about the disguised officers or describe any limits the department placed on surveillance at public events.

Jethro M. Eisenstein, one of the lawyers who brought the lawsuit 34 years ago, said: “This is a level-headed Police Department, led by a level-headed police commissioner. What in the world are they doing?”

For nearly four decades, civil liberty advocates and police officials have fought over the kinds of procedures needed to avoid excessive intrusion on people expressing their views, to provide accountability in secret police operations and to assure public safety for a city that has been the leading American target of terrorists.

To date, officials say no one has complained of personal damage from the information collected over recent months, but participants in the protests, rallies and other gatherings say the police have been a disruptive presence.

Ryan Kuonen, 32, who took part in a “ride of silence” in memory of a dead cyclist, said that two undercover officers – one with a camera – subverted the event. “They were just in your face,” she said. “It made what was a really solemn event into something that seemed wrong. It made you feel like you were a criminal. It was grotesque.”

Ms. Clancy, a founder of I-Witness Video, a project that collected hundreds of videotapes during the Republican National Convention that were used in the successful defense of people arrested that week, has assembled videotape of other public events made by legal observers, activists, bystanders and police officers.

She presented examples in October at a conference of defense lawyers. “What has to go on is an informed discussion of policing tactics at public demonstrations, and these images offer a window into the issues and allow the public to make up their own mind,” Ms. Clancy said. “How is it possible for police to be accountable when they infiltrate events and dress in the garb of protesters?”

The videotapes that most clearly disclosed the presence of the disguised officers began in August 2004. What happened before that is unclear.

Among the events that have drawn surveillance is a monthly bicycle ride called Critical Mass. The Critical Mass rides, which have no acknowledged leadership, take place in many cities around the world on the last Friday of the month, with bicycle riders rolling through the streets to promote bicycle transportation. Relations between the riders and the police soured last year after thousands of cyclists flooded the streets on the Friday before the Republican National Convention. Officials say the rides cause havoc because the participants refuse to obtain a permit. The riders say they can use public streets without permission from the government.

In a tape made at the April 29 Critical Mass ride, a man in a football jersey is seen riding along West 19th Street with a group of bicycle riders to a police blockade at 10th Avenue. As the police begin to handcuff the bicyclists, the man in the jersey drops to one knee. He tells a uniformed officer, “I’m on the job.” The officer in uniform calls to a colleague, “Louie – he’s under.” A second officer arrives and leads the man in the jersey – hands clasped behind his back – one block away, where the man gets back on his bicycle and rides off.

That videotape was made by a police officer and was recently turned over by prosecutors to Gideon Oliver, a lawyer representing bicycle riders arrested that night.

Another arrest that appeared to be a sham changed the dynamics of a demonstration. On Aug. 30, 2004, during the Republican National Convention, a man with vivid blond hair was filmed as he stood on 23rd Street, holding a sign at a march of homeless and poor people. A police lieutenant suddenly moved to arrest him. Onlookers protested, shouting, “Let him go.” In response, police officers in helmets and with batons pushed against the crowd, and at least two other people were arrested.

The videotape shows the blond-haired man speaking calmly with the lieutenant. When the lieutenant unzipped the man’s backpack, a two-way radio could be seen. Then the man was briskly escorted away, unlike others who were put on the ground, plastic restraints around their wrists. And while the blond-haired man kept his hands clasped behind his back, the tape shows that he was not handcuffed or restrained.

The same man was videotaped a day earlier, observing the actress Rosario Dawson as she and others were arrested on 35th Street and Eighth Avenue as they filmed “This Revolution,” a movie that used actual street demonstrations as a backdrop. At one point, the blond-haired man seemed to try to rile bystanders.

After Ms. Dawson and another actress were placed into a police van, the blond-haired man can be seen peering in the window. According to Charles Maol, who was working on the film, the blond-haired man is the source of a voice that is heard calling: “Hey, that’s my brother in there. What do you got my brother in there for?”

After Mr. Browne was sent photographs of the people involved in the convention incidents and the bicycle arrests, he said, “I am not commenting on descriptions of purported or imagined officers.”

The federal courts have long held that undercover officers can monitor political activities for a “legitimate law enforcement purpose.” While the police routinely conduct undercover operations in plainly criminal circumstances – the illegal sale of weapons, for example – surveillance at political events is laden with ambiguity. To retain cover in those settings, officers might take part in public dialogue, debate and demonstration, at the risk of influencing others to alter opinions or behavior.

The authority of the police to conduct surveillance of First Amendment activities has been shaped over the years not only by the law but also by the politics of the moment and the perception of public safety needs.

In the 1971 class-action lawsuit, the city acknowledged that the Police Department had used infiltrators, undercover agents and fake news reporters to spy on yippies, civil rights advocates, antiwar activists, labor organizers and black power groups.

A former police chief said the department’s intelligence files contained a million names of groups and individuals – more in just the New York files than were collected for the entire country in a now-discontinued program of domestic spying by the United States Army around the same time. In its legal filings, the city said any excesses were aberrational acts.

The case, known as Handschu for the lead plaintiff, was settled in 1985 when the city agreed to extraordinary new limits in the investigation of political organizations, among them the creation of an oversight panel that included a civilian appointed by the mayor. The police were required to have “specific information” that a crime was in the works before investigating such groups.

The Handschu settlement also limited the number of police officers who could take part in such investigations and restricted sharing information with other agencies.

Over the years, police officials made no secret of their belief that the city had surrendered too much power. Some community affairs officers were told they could not collect newspaper articles about political gatherings in their precincts, said John F. Timoney, a former first deputy commissioner who is now the chief of police in Miami.

The lawyers who brought the Handschu lawsuit say that such concerns were exaggerated to make limits on police behavior seem unreasonable. The city’s concessions in the Handschu settlement, while similar to those enacted during that era in other states and by the federal government, surpassed the ordinary limits on police actions.

“It was to remedy what was a very egregious violation of people’s First Amendment rights to free speech and assemble,” said Jeremy Travis, the deputy police commissioner for legal affairs from 1990 to 1994.

At both the local and federal level, many of these reforms effectively discouraged many worthy investigations, Chief Timoney said. “The police departments screw up and we go to extremes to fix it,” Chief Timoney said. “In going to extremes, we leave ourselves vulnerable.”

Mr. Travis, who was on the Handschu oversight panel, said that intelligence officers understood they could collect information, provided they had good reason.

“A number of courts decided there should be some mechanism set up to make sure the police didn’t overstep the boundary,” said Mr. Travis, who is now the president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “It was complicated finding that boundary.” The authority to determine the boundary would be handed back to the Police Department after the Sept. 11 attacks.

On Sept. 12, 2002, the deputy police commissioner for intelligence, David Cohen, wrote in an affidavit that the police should not be required to have a “specific indication” of a crime before investigating. “In the case of terrorism, to wait for an indication of crime before investigating is to wait far too long,” he wrote.

Mr. Cohen also took strong exception to limits on police surveillance of public events.

In granting the city’s request, Charles S. Haight, a federal judge in Manhattan, ruled that the dangers of terrorism were “perils sufficient to outweigh any First Amendment cost.”

New guidelines say undercover agents may be used to investigate “information indicating the possibility of unlawful activity”- but also say that commanders should consider whether the tactics are “warranted in light of the seriousness of the crime.”

Ms. Clancy said those guidelines offered no clear limits on intrusiveness at political or social events. Could police officers take part in pot-luck suppers of antiwar groups, buy drinks for activists? Could they offer political opinions for broadcast or publication while on duty but disguised as civilians?

Mr. Browne, the police spokesman, declined to answer those questions. Nor would he say how often – if ever – covert surveillance at public events has been approved by the deputy commissioner for intelligence, as the new guidelines require.

[From Jay Babcock: The book pictured above, published by the New York Public Library in 1998 in conjunction with an exhibition there, is the direct inspiration for the new line of Bastet “Mimeo” publications (see Arthur news for details). Here’s the NYUPL’s description of the “A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980” exhibition…]

From their apartments, garages, and basements, poets like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Spicer, Ted Berrigan, and Anne Waldman created their own publications as an alternative to the academic literary mainstream of the mid-twentieth century. More than 400 such publications are included in A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980, an exhibition on view from January 24 to July 25, 1998 in the Berg Exhibition Room of The New York Public Library’s Center for the Humanities at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.

These publications overflow with the enthusiastic experiments and explorations of such writers as Paul Auster, Clark Coolidge, LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka), Kenneth Koch, Eileen Myles, and Aram Saroyan. Also included are designs and original art by artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Joe Brainard, and Alex Katz, who created covers and illustrations for many of the publications. A compelling photograph that helps introduce the exhibition is by Allen Ginsberg, taken from his back window. At the bottom, in black ink, he inscribed “Out my kitchen window, Ed Sanders’ Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts was Emimeo’d in a secret location in the lower East Side’ circa 1964 . . . . ”

The writers who created their own publications required cheap, accessible means of duplicating them. In many cases they turned to the then prevalent mimeograph machine. “Mimeograph allowed for immediate publication and distribution and was a primary tool of communion among many poets and other writers of the ’60s and ’70s in what became known as the mimeograph revolution,” said Rodney Phillips, curator of the Library’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. Mr. Phillips and Steven Clay, Publisher of Granary Books, are the curators of the exhibition.

A Secret Location showcases several early items which were precursors to the wave of artist-created publications that started appearing in the 1960s. On view are two 1951 issues of Origin: A Quarterly for the Creative, a journal published by poet Cid Corman. Origin featured the work of many important poets, including early poems by Charles Olson, who (with Robert Creeley) a few years later created the seminal Black Mountain Review, published from Black Mountain College where he was Rector.

One of the most fascinating early items on view is Allen Ginsberg’s publication of his poem Siesta in Xbalba, which he created in 1956 aboard a ship in the Alaskan Sea. Ginsberg managed to find a mimeograph machine on board and published approximately thirty copies of the work.

It was Donald Allen’s watershed 1960 anthology The New American Poetry that stimulated the flood of poetry that led to the mimeo movement. Allen defined a “New York School” of poets, which included such writers as John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara. The work of these writers is included in many of the publications in A Secret Location, and their own elegant magazines are also on view. These include Art and Literature, edited from Paris by Ashbery, and Locus Solus, issues of which were edited by Ashbery, Koch, and James Schuyler.

In the early 1960s, a second generation of younger “New York School” writers emerged. Centered in New York City’s East Village, many were affiliated with The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, which even today is considered the premier venue for new and experimental poetry. The loose band of second-generation writers included Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Larry Fagin, Dick Gallup, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, and Lewis Warsh.

The exhibition features many of their publications, including copies of Berrigan’s “C”: A Journal of Poetry, Fagin’s Adventures in Poetry, and Angel Hair, edited by Waldman and Warsh. Also included is the first issue of the Poetry Project Newsletter, edited by Ron Padgett in 1972, and issues of The World, the Project’s journal. Both are still being published and are important beacons of contemporary poetry.

In addition to providing a cross-sectional look at the poetry and art of the 1960s, A Secret Location allows a glimpse at the vivid social life of the era through a series of photographs and artifacts from the personal collections of some of the second-generation “New York School” poets. A series of thirty or so small, color snapshots capture a charming exuberance which seems to have characterized the group. There also are photographs of a long-running poker game in which many of the writers played and of the session in which a score of poets posed nude for a painting by George Schneeman. The huge, unfinished artwork is on display and dominates the walls of the exhibition room.

Journals were often devoted to works in a particular style or form. For example, 0 to 9, edited by Bernadette Mayer and Vito Hannibal Acconci, focused on “concrete” poetry; Carol Berg?©’s Center published “performance” poetry; and Trobar, published in only five issues from 1960 to 1964, was dedicated to “deep image poetry.” A Secret Location also showcases publications reflecting a third generation “New York School” poetry as represented by the work of Eileen Myles, Gregory Masters, Michael Scholnick, Gary Lenhart, and others.

Although much of the material in A Secret Location was created in New York, the mimeo revolution thrived in many locations throughout the country, but especially in the San Francisco Bay area. Among the most important precursors to the genre was City Lights, which in the mid-1950s began publishing from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s bookstore in the city’s North Beach neighborhood. City Lights became known for publishing works of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and many other important poets of the Beat generation. Jack Spicer’s J, published in 1959 and 1960, also came out of the North Beach area. It featured intricate mimeographed covers with designs formed from thick patches of letters typed in repetition.

The materials in A Secret Location are drawn largely from the Library’s Berg Collection. Other materials have been loaned by poets and collectors. The exhibition will also form the basis for a book to be published by the Library and Granary Press.

Not in our name

The War Game had no budget, no hero and was banned by the BBC. Yet it remains a landmark anti-war film. Alex Cox traces the career of its fearless director

Alex Cox
Saturday July 9, 2005
The Observer

I saw Peter Watkins’ documentary film Culloden when it was first broadcast on December 15 1964. It was on the new, third channel, BBC2. I watched it with my parents; they didn’t let on to being impressed by it, but it disturbed me. After a diet of second world war newsreels recycled into documentaries, and old war features like Reach for the Sky (Douglas Bader loses both legs yet still pilots a Spitfire!), it was the first thing I’d ever seen on television that could be called anti-war. Thanks to the documentary style, the parallels between what the Americans were doing in Vietnam and what the English had done to the Scots were very clear. The Scotswoman telling the camera how the English troops had killed her child stuck in my head and haunted me. I resolved to be a pacifist. It was my 10th birthday.

Culloden was such a brilliant film, such a great and tragic work of art, that it should have got its 28-year-old director immediately fired from the BBC. Somehow, this did not occur. Maybe the BBC didn’t know what directors were – Watkins was credited only as writer and producer. More likely he was fortunate, and the head of documentaries, Huw Weldon, stuck up for him. We’re lucky Weldon did, because in the space of 18 months Watkins shot a pair of films that changed the nature of what a documentary could be, and that profoundly affected filmed drama. The other film was The War Game

What makes these two films particularly great is the director’s perfect use of minimal resources. Culloden and The War Game were only possible, are only conceivable, in black and white – where blood and earth and mud are all the same colour, and the viewer isn’t always sure what they’ve just seen. But Watkins’ inventive resourcefulness went way beyond film stock. These were the days before CGI and dinosaur-documentary budgets; there was no possibility of a wide shot or a panorama in either film. So Watkins did the reverse of what one expected: he concentrated on the faces of the people in his story – the clansman, the English soldier, the civil defence official, the relocatee.

Doing this, and filling in the background with a few more extras in costumes, got around the budget issue. But it also did something democratic, even revolutionary: it made the clansmen and the English prison conscripts protagonists. In a traditional war film, heroic individuals (William Holden, Alec Guinness, Peter O’Toole) received the lion’s share of close-ups; in Culloden, a landless man had as large a closeup as Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Watkins wanted to draw parallels between Culloden and Vietnam, of course, and to warn of the consequences of nuclear war. But, going far beyond that, he also wanted to oppose the western-heroic-drama structure, with its sole, strong protagonist, and its obvious moral line. In neither film did he try to score points against an obvious antagonist, or to rely on the tedious weight of a conventional villain. As the narrator points out in Culloden, there are thousands of Scottish soldiers in the English ranks, and Prince Charlie is an idiot. As order breaks down in The War Game, the police end up hoarding the last rations of food: how could they keep order, otherwise?

The nearest thing to a villain in either film is the actor playing an Anglican bishop in The War Game, who says (quoting the bishop’s words): “I still believe in the war of the just.” Watkins cuts straight from this close-up to blurred images of a vehicle, ablaze. “In this car, a family is burning alive,” the narrator says. The juxtaposition isn’t about nuclear war, any more. It could be a cut straight out of Culloden – or from an anti-war documentary about Iraq.

But there won’t be any bold anti-war documentary coming from the BBC; for the same reason, The War Game was banned, and remained unscreenable, for many years. In the past decade, a debate has arisen as to whether this great, passionate, genial film was banned as an act of self-censorship, or on direct orders from Whitehall. Patrick Murphy, Watkins’ biographer, writes that the BBC organised “secret screenings … for senior government representatives” in September 1965, prior to the official ban. He also reports that formerly classified documents relating to the genesis of the ban have been destroyed, so we may never know whether the BBC was leaned on, or whether they leaned on themselves. But these debates don’t really matter. The miracle was that Culloden, with its graphic anti-war message (“This is grapeshot. This is what it does”) had slipped through the net, and with it, Watkins’ original and radical style.

Inevitably, The War Game is technically more proficient and more interesting than Culloden. In less than a year, the young film-maker had got better at his craft, and wanted to try new things. In addition to the extraordinary editing, and the brilliantly choreographed action (both films’ action coordinator was Derek Ware), Watkins tried a new technique: the long, hand-held take, in which he followed a motorcycle dispatch rider from his pillion, into a building and up a flight of stairs; or a doctor, in his car, then out of it, without a cut. In a medium endangered by repetitive editing and storytelling, Watkins was pushing down barriers more effectively than any other film-maker.

But, if the jig with the BBC was up, where was he to go from there? Conventionally, a film-maker is supposed to make a work-for-hire feature at this point, then go off to Hollywood. This is more or less what Watkins did. But, equally predictably, it didn’t turn out as planned.

Privilege was a rock’n’roll messiah story, originally written by Johnny Speight, which Watkins adapted into his preferred quasi-documentary style. Punishment Park was a more personal project, which Watkins developed for himself and shot in the US in 1970. Like Culloden and The War Game it posited societal breakdown followed by reprisals and police actions, with the war-torn US in the grip of mass arrests and show trials. Again, Watkins filmed his stressed-out characters addressing the camera directly.

In this way, as in the hand-held style of his action sequences, the director Watkins most resembles is Stanley Kubrick, whose war-related films Fear and Desire and Full Metal Jacket also lack a single protagonist, and feature characters speaking directly to the camera. Kubrick and Watkins were alike in other ways, perhaps: both famously resisted the trappings of Hollywood and film festivals; both have a reputation for reclusivity and intelligence. But Kubrick’s intelligence led him to daily conversations with studio heads and to a 10-picture deal with Warner Bros. Watkins, more radical, more humanistic, far less politic, now lives in Lithuania, and publishes manifestos via the internet.

Watkins has made 14 films in all, ranging from a 17-minute amateur short to an anti-nuclear documentary, Resan (The Journey), which runs for 14 and a half hours. Of these, only two are “mainstream” features, in the sense of English-language dramas intended to be shown in the cinema; his recent work has been diverse in the extreme, and has received little distribution.

Right now, the British film industry is in a right mess. I’m sure Watkins has been having a great time, making films about Munch and Strindberg with enthusiastic amateurs, and tweaking his website. But, damn it, there’s a war on! We need Watkins here. The peace movement needs him, because it’s one of the largest national movements in the world, and one of the most ignored. And the nation needs him. Even reactionaries can agree with this, because Britain needs great, fearless film-makers who can see both sides of the question, no matter whom it incenses, and who can make radical, revolutionary films for little money. There are still great film technicians here, dying to work on great films – and I suspect that never since making The War Game has Watkins had the same combination of autonomy and economy that he achieved during that one momentous year.

Maybe the BBC in 1964 was a bureaucratic nightmare, but it also hired bright young men, set them up as full-time, salaried directors, and gave them some of the best technical staff in the world to work with: cameramen like Dick Bush and Peter Bartlett, editors like Michael Bradsell, stunt coordinators like Derek Ware. Their successors sit behind computers now, not just in Soho, but in Bradford, Liverpool, Nottingham, dutifully assembling promos and corporates and stupid reality TV. They hate the formulaic trash that they are paid to deliver. And they would love to work on films like the ones Watkins, Ware, Bradsell and company made. Peter, come home.

? Punishment Park was re-released yeserday.

COURTESY JOHN COULTHART!

SFWEEKLY, Jan 26, 2005

ARMAGEDDON IT

Oakland noise nuts Axolotl school us in aliens, hash, and the end of the world as we know it

By Justin F. Farrar

“Let me see if I understand this. According to the ancient calendar of the Mayans, some massive event, irrevocably altering humanity, is scheduled to occur on October 28, 2011.”

“Yes. That’s basically it.”

“Well, then, what the fuck do you think is really going to happen, Karl — global nuclear holocaust?”

“Possibly, but a hopeful thing that could happen is a total transformation in human consciousness. Then again, some say it will be permanent global blackout. There are actually infinite possibilities.”

So here I am grilling — quite relentlessly, mind you — this experimental musician-dude named Karl Bauer about what exactly is going to occur when this date, Oct. 28, 2011, hits us all, discussion of which is all Bauer’s fault. We are — I mean, I am — supposed to be conducting a professional journalistic interview, because Bauer, along with William Sabiston, is Axolotl (pronounced “ax-oh-lot-el”), Oakland-based creators of deeply meditative psych-noise. But we are both having a little trouble focusing on this because just minutes after Bauer entered my Ocean Beach digs for said interview two objects furtively appeared on the carpet that were not there before: a tiny but effective nugget of hash and a copy of the book The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness. I simply take all this in stride, because rapping with Bauer about such unabashedly New Age hippie-trippy subjects as violent cosmic realignment makes absolute sense considering how mind-fucking stoned and “out there” Bauer and Sabiston’s music feels.

Axolotl, you see, is one of literally hundreds, possibly thousands, of super-obscure bands and collectives from all over mother Gaia. These groups have sprung forth just within the past five years, and they’ve spurned traditional song structures in favor of a brand-new electronic-based brand of mind-expanding tones and sounds inspired by ’60s minimalism, feedback-packed experimental noise from early-’90s Japan, traditional Indian ragas, the faux world-music jams of the Sun City Girls, post-techno ambient electronics, fiery free jazz, field recordings of African and Asian tribal musicians, and ridiculously rare acid freakout psych-rock from the late ’60s and early ’70s that very few ears have ever heard save those belonging to fanatical record collectors.

“I feel like music has gotten real interesting since about 2001,” Bauer explains just after presenting evidence for the existence of world-dominating extraterrestrials called “Archons.” “Many bands these days, Axolotl included, seem to be inspired by world music — music that is, to a large degree, spiritual music, sometimes even ritual music. It seems as though the thought of the Eastern Hemisphere is now permeating the Western Hemisphere.” As you can plainly read, Bauer and I are now floating far, far above San Francisco, rapping about ultra-rare psych records, aliens, and Taoism. But for the uninitiated, here is a mental image explaining what Axolotl’s droning psychedelic noise sounds like, or, more importantly, does.

First off, please relocate to the quietest place that you know of. Now listen to the beat of your heart, to the soft, persistent ring in your ears, to the hushed hum of your nervous system, to the air drifting through your nostrils, to the garbled contractions in your abdomen, to the saliva collecting in the back of your throat, and even to the silence encompassing your body. If you meditate hard enough (but not too hard), the clatter of individual metabolic processes slowly morphs into a single, organically nurtured movement of sound. This is precisely what Axolotl (and the new psychedelia) strives to create using jury-rigged electronics and just about any other object capable of producing noise. It’s all about orchestrated sound flowing as a living, breathing organism.

“We want to feel the sound in our guts. We want to make huge gorgeous drones,” Bauer enthusiastically says. “We do not want to hurt people, but we do want them to feel this expanse of sound. I want to create an incredible physical experience. We really like the idea of the visceral fused to really blessed-out sounds. We really like the way frequencies affect hearing, depth perception, and sense of space. We love powerful tones. We just love that feeling.”

Of course, the evocation of all this patchouli-soaked yogi mysticism is not to imply that Bauer and Sabiston, while at home in their Oakland warehouse, wrap themselves up like a couple of Auntie Anne’s hot pretzels and record the sound of their stomach acids dissolving pork chops and apple sauce (although someone does need to request that as an encore at the next Axolotl gig). On the contrary, the duo actually started as live-action improvisational performers when Bauer, a classically trained violinist, and Sabiston, a drummer, came together in 2002 not long after Bauer relocated to the Bay Area from New York.

“I used to take mushrooms with some of my musician friends in New York,” Bauer recalls, “and we just wanted to have a bunch of shit in the room to find out what happened. We would just bang on lots of pots and pans with contact mikes. We just wanted to document weird human outbursts. That was a huge influence on all of us. Then I moved out here and I wanted to continue what I was doing back east.”

Before too long, Bauer augmented his violin with an assortment of toy instruments, trumpets, and human voices and started feeding them through a complex network of pedals, wires, and blinking lights, which transformed these formerly acoustic instruments into cyclical waves of feedback and thick, undulating sheets of static and distortion. Sabiston followed suit, ditching his drum kit and acquiring a small collection of hand-held percussion elements and this large black box outfitted with all types of esoteric knobs, buttons, and levers, which generates growling low-end frequencies and cascades of crackling static.

Axolotl’s preliminary results from this new fusion of the acoustic and the digital can be heard on the 2003 compilation Space Is No Place: NYC Noise From the Underground and the duo’s 2004 self-titled debut, both released on the New York-based imprint Psych-o-Path Records. As I mentioned earlier, Axolotl is indeed from Oakland, but its particular style of droning psychedelic noise definitely has much in common aesthetically and spiritually with New York’s current tribe of hippie-stinking noise-shamans such as Double Leopards, Black Dice, Mouthus, Animal Collective, Gang Gang Dance, Excepter, and the No Neck Blues Band. These acts convey a loose collective mind-set that Bauer feels quite intimate with.

Overall, Axolotl’s first full-length CD is a pretty expansive and far-out affair even though its palette of tones and frequencies is relatively narrow and the production quality just a little too uniformly digital. But the group is evolving at an accelerated clip. A mystical incandescence that Bauer and Sabiston’s debut only hints at can now be thoroughly and profoundly experienced on their brand-new CD-R, Archons?/Archons!, released on the Jyrk imprint, a small but industrious underground label operated by Oakland-based noise guerrillas D Yellow Swans.

“The song titles on the new CD-R [such as ‘Emme Ya,’ ‘Enuma Elish,’ and ‘Baal’] are influenced by a lot of cosmic thought and conspiracy stuff,” Bauer elaborates in a choked voice as if he’s preventing something from escaping his lungs.

Archons?/Archons! consists of fragments of eight separate drones recorded over the past year that Axolotl has sequenced and edited into one 48-minute master-drone. This is the group’s most successfully psychedelic and trance-inducing release to date. (Time to pass that hash pipe again, Bauer.) It’s meticulously constructed and spontaneously performed. It’s dense but not muddy. It’s propulsive but not explicitly beat-driven. And sinking deeper into its expanse of textures and patterns, we discover faint digital tones that drunkenly chirp like naughty sparrows sipping cough syrup. Clusters of effervescent static tumble from the speaker cones like steel teeth patiently chewing on a mouthful of thin copper wire. Electronic babble nervously converses with hand rattles and bells. Deep, ghostly voices moan from within the ruined temples of Atlantis only to gradually melt and re-form into the well-measured whir of Bauer’s echo-stained violin. And vaporous feedback trails every sound.

At times these incredibly varied sonic textures feel like microscopic particles wandering the inner corridors of the mind heretofore locked shut, and other times they swell to monolithic proportions, dwarfing the listener and shaking the walls and furniture as if the N Judah were scuttling past your crib. But, regardless of volume and dissonance, what remains of ultimate importance is how deeply and succinctly Axolotl’s collective sound lives, breathes, talks, walks, cries, crawls, flexes, sighs, and coughs.

It’s that very last quality that seems particularly appropriate, because by this point our interview has devolved into violent fits of coughing and gasping amidst a thick, stagnant fog of hash exhaust, but, I must admit, the mind does feel slightly more expanded than ever before.

The BBC, Nov 28, 2005: Romantic love ‘lasts just a year’

Some couples may disagree, but romantic love lasts little more than a year, Italian scientists believe.

The University of Pavia found a brain chemical was likely to be responsible for the first flush of love.

Researchers said raised levels of a protein was linked to feelings of euphoria and dependence experienced at the start of a relationship.But after studying people in long and short relationships and single people, they found the levels receded in time.

The team analysed alterations in proteins known as neurotrophins in the bloodstreams of men and women aged 18 to 31, the Psychoneuroendocrinology journal reported.

They looked at 58 people who had recently started a relationship and compared the protein levels in the same number of people in long-term relationships and single people.

In those who had just started a relationship, levels of a protein called nerve growth factors, which causes tell-tale signs such as sweaty palms and the butterflies, were significantly higher.

Of the 39 people who were still in the same new relationship after a year, the levels of NGF had been reduced to normal levels.

Report co-author Piergluigi Politi said the findings did not mean people were no longer in love, just that it was not such an “acute love”.

“The love became more stable. Romantic love seemed to have ended.”

And he added the report suggested the change in love was down to NGF. “Our current knowledge of the neurobiology of romantic love remains scanty. But it seems from this study biochemical mechanisms could be involved in the mood changes that occur from the early stage of love to when the relationship becomes more established.”

However, he said further research was needed.

Dr Lance Workman, head of psychology at Bath Spa University, said: “Research has suggested that romantic love fades after a few years and becomes companionate love and it seems certain biological factors play a role.

“But while we are a pair-bonding species, there is some doubt over whether this is within monogamous relationships or not.

“Different societies have different practices and trends.”

Into harm’s way

By ‘rendering’ suspects to torturers America sinks to the moral level of Saddam

Henry Porter
Sunday December 11, 2005
The Observer

The word rendition was an odd one in the context. It seemed to imply long-standing procedures, an obscure diplomatic formality perhaps. It was some weeks later that I began to puzzle at the word used by my American contact over lunch in London and which, come to think of it, was accompanied by a series of nods and glances. I understood what it was to render something – although not perhaps someone – and I knew what a rendition was in the context of musical and dramatic performance, but what did it mean in the new war against terror? And what was ‘extraordinary rendition’?

This was in the dying weeks of 2001. Sometime early the following year I saw him again; this time he was on his way back from Afghanistan where he had been contracted to the US military in a quasi intelligence role. He was in exultant, kick-arse form. The war against the Taliban had been won; al-Qaeda was in flight and its members were being hunted down across the globe.

I asked him again about renditions. He revolved his eyes and looked away as though to say I was being dim, which maybe I was. But the problem with rendition, I explained, was that it was such an ambiguous term. A rendition can mean nothing more than a delivery, an exchange, or a return by agreement. Or it can refer to the process of extracting fat from meat by applying heat. Which did he mean? He shook his head. Rendition was delivery and it had nothing to do with fat and meat, and anyway he wanted to talk about something else. And extraordinary rendition? Well, buddy, use your imagination.

Sometime later I learned that rendition referred to the outsourcing of the interrogation of untried terrorist suspects, and that ‘extraordinary renditions’ could either refer to the capture and transport of suspects in the utmost secrecy, or to the performance of the suspect under extreme conditions – that is to say the information produced by torture. It wasn’t clear which, but I suspected it covered both.

As far as I was aware the phrase had not appeared in the media. But there was nothing hard for me to go on. I had no dates, places or names of individuals, and it seemed unlikely that I would get enough to write a piece of journalism. So I started drafting a novel called Empire State and that made things a lot easier because once you go from factual reporting to fiction people tend to talk more.

It was then that I heard a story about five Egyptian al-Qaeda suspects being arrested in Albania and flown to Egypt. The important part was that this had happened before 11 September 2001 – during the Clinton administration – proof that rendition was an established CIA practice.

So I flew to Tirana, stayed in the Rogner Hotel and waited for various contacts I had been given to return my calls. If you hang about in the Rogner sooner or later you meet everyone you need and with a help of a fixer – one of the few Albanian males I met who was not suffering some mild psychotic disorder – I got to the bottom of the story of how five men were trapped by the electronic surveillance of the local intelligence service and were transported to Cairo by the CIA. They were all tortured and two were hanged.

Since it had all happened in 1998 people didn’t mind talking about it. Only when I asked about current operations against al-Qaeda in the Balkans did the shutters come down. I left Tirana for Cairo and after many false trails found the facilities where these things were likely to have happened. I also learned that American intelligence officers were part of the process. They did not simply leave the rendered suspects, but remained on hand to receive information produced by the interrogation. That America was collaborating with torturers was shocking, but it was seeing these facilities that brought home to me the terror and despair of the men who were wrung dry before being executed.

Rendition is profoundly wrong and it happens to be against American law. In 1998 the US Congress passed legislation that confirmed the policy of the United States ‘not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States’.

Outsourcing torture is also against International law, but still the secret flights continue across the world and through European airspace – 400 over the United Kingdom alone. Countless suspects have disappeared into various facilities never to be heard of again.

We get hot under the collar about the CIA’s ‘black sites’ in Europe but nothing is done. Last Thursday the Law Lords ruled that the secret tribunals hearing cases related to terrorism suspects could not consider evidence that wouldn’t be acceptable in a criminal trial – in other words that which is produced by torture. This is an important ruling for Liberty and the other human rights organisations that fought the case, but it will have no effect on renditions, for as I learned during my trips in 2002, they occur in an entirely different dimension to the criminal justice system of civilised countries. Renditions service the ‘intelligence community’, not the law courts. They are about gaining information, not proof.

Last week on a trip to Europe, the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, clarified her country’s policy by saying that America would meet its treaty obligations in respect of torture. Two points need to be remembered from her statement. The first is that it was flagged by her aides as an important shift in policy, from which we may therefore conclude that the CIA had been directly involved in the mistreatment of suspects. The second is that at no stage did Rice deny or condemn the practice of outsourcing torture to countries such as Egypt.

Read her assurances carefully and you realise that she did not address the main issue about rendition. As though to underline this, senior al-Qaeda suspects being questioned in Europe were transferred to North Africa prior to her landing in Europe last week.

Are we Europeans content as long as the torture is not going on in our backyard? It would seem so, but in Britain we should remember that during the war, when we faced a greater threat than the one posed by al-Qaeda, we did not resort to torture. The late Colonel T. A. Robertson, a friend of my family’s, was known as TAR in MI5, where for much of the Second World War he directed the B1(a) section responsible for tracking down Abwehr agents. He would no more have contemplated torture than amputating his own right hand. No doubt this charming man was as hard as nails but he was also civilised and, like the rest of his generation, fought for civilisation.

We affirm and protect civilisation by behaving within its constraints, not by shipping blindfolded men into dungeons where they are plugged into the electricity supply. If only the Prime Minister had thought for a few moments before rising in the House of Commons last week to support renditions, he might have recalled that on that very day the court listening to the trial of Saddam Hussein heard evidence from women who claimed to have been tortured by the dictator’s secret police.

What is the moral difference between Saddam’s behaviour and the American renditions? There is none. For the dirty secret about torture is that it is not simply to gain unreliable information but that it is a weapon of punishment and extreme terror, which is deployed in exactly the same way by America as it was by Saddam. Knowing that, imagine yourself a Muslim and then see what you think about extraordinary renditions.

New York Times Sunday Magazine

Conservative Blogs are More Effective
By MICHAEL CROWLEY

Published: December 11, 2005

When the liberal activist Matt Stoller was running a blog for the Democrat Jon Corzine’s 2005 campaign for governor, he saw the power of the conservative blogosphere firsthand. Shortly before the election, a conservative Web site claimed that politically damaging information about Corzine was about to surface in the media. It didn’t. But New Jersey talk-radio shock jocks quoted the online speculation, inflicting public-relations damage on Corzine anyway. To Stoller, it was proof of how conservatives have mastered the art of using blogs as a deadly campaign weapon.

That might sound counterintuitive. After all, the Howard Dean campaign showed the power of the liberal blogosphere. And the liberal-activist Web site DailyKos counts hundreds of thousands of visitors each day. But Democrats say there’s a key difference between liberals and conservatives online. Liberals use the Web to air ideas and vent grievances with one another, often ripping into Democratic leaders. (Hillary Clinton, for instance, is routinely vilified on liberal Web sites for supporting the Iraq war.) Conservatives, by contrast, skillfully use the Web to provide maximum benefit for their issues and candidates. They are generally less interested in examining every side of every issue and more focused on eliciting strong emotional responses from their supporters.

But what really makes conservatives effective is their pre-existing media infrastructure, composed of local and national talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, the Fox News Channel and sensationalist say-anything outlets like the Drudge Report – all of which are quick to pass on the latest tidbit from the blogosphere. “One blogger on the Republican side can have a real impact on a race because he can just plug right into the right-wing infrastructure that the Republicans have built,” Stoller says.

Earlier this year, John Thune, the newly elected South Dakota senator, briefed his Republican colleagues on the role of blogs in his victory over Tom Daschle, the former Democratic minority leader. The message seems to be catching on. In Arkansas, the campaign manager for the gubernatorial candidate Asa Hutchinson sent a mass e-mail message to supporters in May promoting the establishment of blogs “to comment on Arkansas politics as a counter to liberal media.” With the 2006 elections coming, Democrats have begun trying to use blogs more strategically. But given their head start, Stoller says, conservatives “will certainly have an upper hand.” Again.

Harold Pinter delivering his Nobel lecture via video to the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. Photo: Janerik Henriksson/EPA

The Nobel lecture: Art, truth and politics

In his video-taped Nobel acceptance speech, Harold Pinter excoriated a ‘brutal, scornful and ruthless’ United States. This is the full text of his address

Thursday December 8, 2005
The Guardian

In 1958 I wrote the following:

‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.

Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.

The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is ‘What have you done with the scissors?’ The first line of Old Times is ‘Dark.’

In each case I had no further information.

In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn’t give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter.

‘Dark’ I took to be a description of someone’s hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light.

I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.

In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), ‘Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don’t you buy a dog? You’re a dog cook. Honest. You think you’re cooking for a lot of dogs.’ So since B calls A ‘Dad’ it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn’t know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.

‘Dark.’ A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with drinks. ‘Fat or thin?’ the man asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark.

It’s a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author’s position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can’t dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man’s buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.

So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.

But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.

Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.

In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally focussing on an act of subjugation.

Mountain Language pretends to no such range of operation. It remains brutal, short and ugly. But the soldiers in the play do get some fun out of it. One sometimes forgets that torturers become easily bored. They need a bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up. This has been confirmed of course by the events at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Mountain Language lasts only 20 minutes, but it could go on for hour after hour, on and on and on, the same pattern repeated over and over again, on and on, hour after hour.

Ashes to Ashes, on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place under water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the waves, dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there, either above or under the water, finding only shadows, reflections, floating; the woman a lost figure in a drowning landscape, a woman unable to escape the doom that seemed to belong only to others.

But as they died, she must die too.

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.

The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.

But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here.

Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States’ actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.

Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America’s favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as ‘low intensity conflict’. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued – or beaten to death – the same thing – and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.

The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America’s view of its role in the world, both then and now.

I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: ‘Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.’

Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.’ There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.

Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.

Finally somebody said: ‘But in this case “innocent people” were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?’

Seitz was imperturbable. ‘I don’t agree that the facts as presented support your assertions,’ he said.

As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply.

I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: ‘The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.’

The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.

The Sandinistas weren’t perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.

The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.

I spoke earlier about ‘a tapestry of lies’ which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a ‘totalitarian dungeon’. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.

Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.

The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. ‘Democracy’ had prevailed.

But this ‘policy’ was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, ‘the American people’, as in the sentence, ‘I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.’

It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn’t give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.

What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days – conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what’s called the ‘international community’. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be ‘the leader of the free world’. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally – a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man’s land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You’re either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.

The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading – as a last resort – all other justifications having failed to justify themselves – as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East’.

How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they’re interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.

Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don’t exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. ‘We don’t do body counts,’ said the American general Tommy Franks.

Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. ‘A grateful child,’ said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. ‘When do I get my arms back?’ he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn’t holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you’re making a sincere speech on television.

The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm’s way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.

Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, ‘I’m Explaining a Few Things’:

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children’s blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate.

Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives.

Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull’s eye of your hearts.

And you will ask: why doesn’t his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land.

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets! *

Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda’s poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians.

I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as ‘full spectrum dominance’. That is not my term, it is theirs. ‘Full spectrum dominance’ means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.

The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don’t quite know how they got there but they are there all right.

The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity – the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons – is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.

Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government’s actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force – yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.

I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man’s man.

‘God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden’s God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam’s God was bad, except he didn’t have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don’t chop people’s heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don’t you forget it.’

A writer’s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don’t have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection – unless you lie – in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.

I have referred to death quite a few times this evening. I shall now quote a poem of my own called ‘Death’.

Where was the dead body found?
Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the dead body found?

Who was the dead body?

Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?

Was the body dead when abandoned?
Was the body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?

Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?

What made you declare the dead body dead?
Did you declare the dead body dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the dead body was dead?

Did you wash the dead body
Did you close both its eyes
Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man.

* Extract from “I’m Explaining a Few Things” translated by Nathaniel Tarn, from Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems, published by Jonathan Cape, London 1970. Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited.