COURTESY ERIC BLUHM!

“What is Henderson’s Relish?

“Though similar in appearance to a Worcestershire sauce, Hendersonís Relish is unique in its aroma and flavour. It can be used both as a sauce on meat dishes, pies, fish, chips and as a cooking ingredient in casseroles, pasta dishes, soups and marinades.†

“Unlike other comparable sauces, the relish is also suitable for vegetarians.

“The special mix of spices are blended together with our secret recipe and a special sauce is made. The way in which the sauce is blended is still a closely guarded secret and at least once a year a rumour sweeps Sheffield that the owner is retiring and taking the secret recipe with him. Upon hearing this supermarket shelves are cleared as people stock up on their favourite sauce. Fortunately all these rumours are unfounded and Hendersons is going as strong as ever.”

Scientists worried by riot control ray gun
Wed Jul 20, 2:03 PM ET

LONDON (Reuters) – Scientists are questioning the safety of a Star Wars-style riot control ray gun due to be deployed in Iraq next year.

The Active Denial System weapon, classified as “less lethal” by the Pentagon, fires a 95-gigahertz microwave beam at rioters to cause heating and intolerable pain in less than five seconds.

The idea is people caught in the beam will rapidly try to move out of it and therefore break up the crowd.

But New Scientist magazine reported on Wednesday that during tests carried out at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, participants playing the part of rioters were told to remove glasses and contact lenses to protect their eyes.

In another test they were also told to remove metal objects like coins from their clothing to avoid local hot spots developing on their skin.

“What happens if someone in a crowd is unable for whatever reason to move away from the beam,” asked Neil Davison, coordinator of the non-lethal weapons research project at Britain’s Bradford University.

“How do you ensure that the dose doesn’t cross the threshold for permanent damage? Does the weapon cut out to prevent overexposure?,” he added.

The magazine said a vehicle-mounted version of the weapon named Sheriff was scheduled for service in Iraq in 2006 and that U.S. Marines and police were both working on portable versions.

The Guardian, July 20

In Machete Season, 10 Hutu men recall how they enjoyed slaughtering their neighbours with machetes and clubs – and, six years after the Rwanda genocide, feel no guilt

Suzy Hansen
Wednesday July 20, 2005

The 1994 Rwandan genocide was ignored by most of the world as it raged on. But in years since, the horrific event that claimed 800,000 deaths has garnered worldwide attention, thanks to numerous books and documentaries, and even a Hollywood film. Philip Gourevitch’s masterly We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, based on his dispatches from Rwanda for the New Yorker, became an award-winning bestseller. Romeo Dallaire, the United Nations commander stationed in Rwanda at the time, recently participated in a documentary based on his own memoir, Shake Hands With the Devil. And last year, the tragedy of the slaughter was brought to the big screen in the surprisingly good Hotel Rwanda, a film starring Don Cheadle that managed to grab three Oscar nominations.

These renderings of the genocide include many unfathomable images of men furiously hacking at other men, of whole communities decimated while seeking refuge in church, of bloated, days-old bodies choking the country’s rivers. As by now most people know, in Rwanda, the vast majority of the Hutu population participated in the mass killing of their fellow Tutsi countrymen (as well as Hutu moderates) in only 100 days, a little more than three months. The killing was done without the efficient aid of gas chambers or bombs or machine guns; instead, most of the murders were of the one-on-one sort – a very personal, laborious killing in which many, many people willingly, almost enthusiastically, took part.

Although western writers and artists have attempted, and will continue attempting, to translate the reality of a mass extermination, it’s a nearly impossible task. They succeed in many ways, but what they can’t quite get across is technical: what is it like for one entire population to kill another, day after day, for an entire season of the year? Did the men go to work too? Did they make love at night, and wake up and kill in the morning? Did they read books, get drunk, tell bedtime stories – all after a day’s kill? Did they cry?

Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, the second book on Rwanda by French journalist Jean Hatzfeld, attempts to answer some of these questions, and gives this madness a shocking sort of order. Hatzfeld interviewed 10 Hutus six years after the genocide, while the men served time in jail. These Hutus were from the rural Nyamata district (population 119,000), which includes a small town and 14 surrounding hills (Rwanda is lush and mountainous) split almost half between Hutus and Tutsis. Beginning in April 1994, within six weeks, five out of every six Tutsis in Nyamata were killed.

The 10 men, ranging from 20 to 62 years of age, hailed from these hills, where most of them were farmers. “None of them has ever quarrelled with his Tutsi neighbors over land, crops, damage, and women,” Hatzfeld writes. In fact, they lived next door to Tutsis, played soccer with them, went to church with them. “But these 10 banded together,” Hatzfeld explains, “because of the proximity of their fields, their patronage of a cabaret, and their natural affinities and shared concerns”. Hatzfeld gives the reader a basic sense of who the men are – the little detail already provided in this review – but he wisely lets the men talk first before proffering their proper biographies. “That bunch was famous on the hill for carousing and tomfoolery,” said Clementine, a local Hutu who is married to a Tutsi. “Those fellows did not seem so bad.”

The Rwandan genocide officially began after the death of President JuvÈnal Habyarimana, a Hutu, whose plane was mysteriously shot down on April 6 1994. The death of the president was the excuse the Hutu extremists needed to begin the killing that they had long planned. (Obviously, Rwandan history is ever more complicated: Hutu extremists had long been paranoid about Tutsi power; at various times Tutsis had suffered, and been slaughtered, at the hands of Hutus; a group of exiled Tutsis organised the Rwandan Patriotic Front, with whom Habyarimana had signed peace accords in 1993. Later, the RPF would enter Rwanda and stop the genocide.)

Hatzfeld’s band of ordinary Hutus, incited by extremists broadcasting on the radio, gathered together, singing songs and screwing around, and then headed down to the marshes where they believed the Tutsis were hiding. The new killers indeed bonded immediately: “We gathered into teams on the soccer field and went out hunting as kindred spirits,” said Ignace. “We had to work fast, and we got no time off, especially not Sundays – we had to finish up,” said Elie. “We cancelled all ceremonies. Everyone was hired at the same level for a single job – to crush all the cockroaches.”

The most difficult part of all of this is to comprehend the moment when men become killers. The Hutus claimed not to have been forced to kill, though they did fear the consequences of not joining in at the beginning. By the time of the interviews, killing strikes them as quite normal. It’s not as though their first kill is particularly memorable. Still, they attempt to recall it:

Fulgence: “First I cracked an old mama’s head with a club.”
Alphonse: “I was quite surprised by the speed of death, and also by the softness of the blow.”

Adalbert didn’t remember the “precise details” of his first kill: “Therefore the true first time worth telling from a lasting memory, for me, is when I killed two children, April 17.”

They meditate on murder like this throughout the book.

Elie: “The club is more crushing, but the machete is more natural. The Rwandan is accustomed to the machete from childhood. Grab a machete – that is what we do every morning.”
Alphonse: “Saving the babies, that was not practical. They were whacked against walls and trees or they were cut right away.”

Indeed, especially for farmers, slicing at things was routine. The men use the word “cut” to describe their murders, as if what they did was akin to dragging a paper edge across a thumb. Obviously it’s a callous way of distancing themselves from their deeds, but it also signals the parallel they saw between hacking Tutsis and working in the fields.

Yet, there were differences. “Killing was a demanding but more gratifying activity,” said Pio. “The proof: none ever asked permission to go clear brush on his field, not even for a half-day.” Soon it became addictive, and there were rewards: “We could no longer stop ourselves from wielding the machete, it brought us so much profit.” The looting that accompanied the killing was dazzling for the poor farmers, and it offered a way for the women to pitch in (though some women and children did kill). They stole everything – some even grabbed the bloodstained clothing of the dead. “If you went home empty-handed, you might even be scolded by your wife or your children,” one man said. And despite knowing that their husbands were out raping women and then killing them, most wives still made love to their husbands at night.

Many men insisted that this life – the one where they woke up and killed people all day – was a better one. “Man can get used to killing, if he kills on and on,” said Alphonse. Fulgence went one step further: “The more we saw people die, the less we thought about their lives, the less we talked about their deaths. And the more we got used to enjoying it.”

As the killing went on, the men became intoxicated by the idea of “finishing the job”. The idea appears to have been that when it was all over, the Tutsis would be gone, and there would be no reminder of them. So the drive to kill every last Tutsi became more ferocious. In Nyamata not one bond of friendship spared a life, writes Hatzfeld; unlike in Nazi Germany, for example, Tutsis found “not a single escape network”.

But there was another key component to the genocide’s ferocity: no one was watching. There is nothing so damning in Machete Season as when the men speak of the “whites”. One man suggests that the idea of genocide germinated in 1959, when Hutus massacred many Tutsis “without being punished”. And, in 1994, Hutu extremists gradually realised that the world was averting its eyes from the present atrocities as well. “All the important people turned their backs on our killings,” said Elie. “The blue helmets, the Belgians, the white directors, the black presidents, the humanitarian people and the international cameramen, the priests and the bishops and finally even God … We were all abandoned by all words of rebuke.” Pancrace agreed: “Killing is very discouraging if you yourself must decide to do it … but if you must obey the orders of the authorities … if you see that the killing will be total and without disastrous consequences for yourself, you feel soothed and reassured.”

These were ordinary men, for sure. And ordinary men would have feared the punishment of others; as soon as the west pulled out of Rwanda they knew they were free to kill. It’s clear that if some force had been monitoring them, at least some of the motivation to kill would have withered away. Fittingly, one of the chapters in the book is titled A Sealed Chamber.

Perhaps not surprisingly, because of this long absence of condemnation, the men have no regrets. “I want to make clear that from the first gentleman I killed to the last, I was not sorry about a single one,” said Leopord. Hatzfeld notes in amazement that the killers speak in monotone and “never allow themselves to be overwhelmed by anything”. During the men’s seven years in prison, they knew of not one Hutu suicide. If they were depressed, it was only because they were locked up. “Aside from the anguish of my years in prison,” said Pancrace, “I do not see my life as harmed by all these regrettable events.” The unfortunately candid Elie takes a stab at remorse: “In prison and on the hills, everyone is obviously sorry. But most of the killers are sorry they didn’t finish the job.”

Machete Season is realistic and, above all else, terrifying; Hatzfeld brilliantly organises his subjects’ stories for maximum effect. His method captures the rhythm of a genocide – the cold, workmanlike, fierce nature of its repetition. The book goes on and on, the killers are still alive, they persist, they won’t stop talking. Just when you think they won’t mention their machete again, it’s back.

When the men return home from jail, it’s to a country in trauma. “The silence on the Rwandan hills is indescribable and cannot be compared with the usual mutism in the aftermath of war,” writes Hatzfeld. What Hatzfeld suggests is the possibility of an Africa in turmoil because of many of its people’s learned fatalism. Perhaps the most terrible line in Machete Season is spoken by Pio, who noted with astonishment the silence with which the Tutsis confronted their deaths, even as he came near to where they hid in the marsh, machete in hand. They did not fight back. They did not cry out. “They felt so abandoned they did not even open their mouths.”

Follow the Uranium – New York Times
July 17, 2005
By FRANK RICH

“I am saying that if anyone was involved in that type of activity which I referred to, they would not be working here.” – Ron Ziegler, press secretary to Richard Nixon, defending the presidential aide Dwight Chapin on Oct. 18, 1972. Chapin was convicted in April 1974 of perjury in connection with his relationship to the political saboteur Donald Segretti.

“Any individual who works here at the White House has the confidence of the president. They wouldn’t be working here at the White House if they didn’t have the president’s confidence.”
– Scott McClellan, press secretary to George W. Bush, defending Karl Rove on Tuesday.

WELL, of course, Karl Rove did it. He may not have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, with its high threshold of criminality for outing a covert agent, but there’s no doubt he trashed Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame. We know this not only because of Matt Cooper’s e-mail, but also because of Mr. Rove’s own history. Trashing is in his nature, and bad things happen, usually through under-the-radar whispers, to decent people (and their wives) who get in his way. In the 2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain’s wife, Cindy, was rumored to be a drug addict (and Senator McCain was rumored to be mentally unstable). In the 1994 Texas governor’s race, Ann Richards found herself rumored to be a lesbian. The implication that Mr. Wilson was a John Kerry-ish girlie man beholden to his wife for his meal ticket is of a thematic piece with previous mud splattered on Rove political adversaries. The difference is that this time Mr. Rove got caught.

Even so, we shouldn’t get hung up on him – or on most of the other supposed leading figures in this scandal thus far. Not Matt Cooper or Judy Miller or the Wilsons or the bad guy everyone loves to hate, the former CNN star Robert Novak. This scandal is not about them in the end, any more than Watergate was about Dwight Chapin and Donald Segretti or Woodward and Bernstein. It is about the president of the United States. It is about a plot that was hatched at the top of the administration and in which everyone else, Mr. Rove included, are at most secondary players.

To see the main plot, you must sweep away the subplots, starting with the Cooper e-mail. It has been brandished as a smoking gun by Bush bashers and as exculpatory evidence by Bush backers (Mr. Rove, you see, was just trying to ensure that Time had its facts straight). But no one knows what this e-mail means unless it’s set against the avalanche of other evidence, most of it secret, including what Mr. Rove said in three appearances before the grand jury. Therein lies the rub, or at least whatever case might be made for perjury.

Another bogus subplot, long popular on the left, has it that Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, gave Mr. Novak a free pass out of ideological comradeship. But Mr. Fitzgerald, both young (44) and ambitious, has no record of Starr- or Ashcroft-style partisanship (his contempt for the press notwithstanding) or known proclivity for committing career suicide. What’s most likely is that Mr. Novak, more of a common coward than the prince of darkness he fashions himself to be, found a way to spill some beans and avoid Judy Miller’s fate. That the investigation has dragged on so long anyway is another indication of the expanded reach of the prosecutorial web.

Apparently this is finally beginning to dawn on Mr. Bush’s fiercest defenders and on Mr. Bush himself. Hence, last week’s erection of the stonewall manned by the almost poignantly clownish Mr. McClellan, who abruptly rendered inoperative his previous statements that any suspicions about Mr. Rove are “totally ridiculous.” The morning after Mr. McClellan went mano a mano with his tormentors in the White House press room – “We’ve secretly replaced the White House press corps with actual reporters,” observed Jon Stewart – the ardently pro-Bush New York Post ran only five paragraphs of a wire-service story on Page 12. That conspicuous burial of what was front-page news beyond Murdochland speaks loudly about the rising anxiety on the right. Since then, White House surrogates have been desperately babbling talking points attacking Joseph Wilson as a partisan and a liar.

These attacks, too, are red herrings. Let me reiterate: This case is not about Joseph Wilson. He is, in Alfred Hitchcock’s parlance, a MacGuffin, which, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, is “a particular event, object, factor, etc., initially presented as being of great significance to the story, but often having little actual importance for the plot as it develops.” Mr. Wilson, his mission to Niger to check out Saddam’s supposed attempts to secure uranium that might be used in nuclear weapons and even his wife’s outing have as much to do with the real story here as Janet Leigh’s theft of office cash has to do with the mayhem that ensues at the Bates Motel in “Psycho.”

This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit – the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes – is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That’s why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.

So put aside Mr. Wilson’s February 2002 trip to Africa. The plot that matters starts a month later, in March, and its omniscient author is Dick Cheney. It was Mr. Cheney (on CNN) who planted the idea that Saddam was “actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time.” The vice president went on to repeat this charge in May on “Meet the Press,” in three speeches in August and on “Meet the Press” yet again in September. Along the way the frightening word “uranium” was thrown into the mix.

By September the president was bandying about the u-word too at the United Nations and elsewhere, speaking of how Saddam needed only a softball-size helping of uranium to wreak Armageddon on America. But hardly had Mr. Bush done so than, offstage, out of view of us civilian spectators, the whole premise of this propaganda campaign was being challenged by forces with more official weight than Joseph Wilson. In October, the National Intelligence Estimate, distributed to Congress as it deliberated authorizing war, included the State Department’s caveat that “claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa,” made public in a British dossier, were “highly dubious.” A C.I.A. assessment, sent to the White House that month, determined that “the evidence is weak” and “the Africa story is overblown.”

AS if this weren’t enough, a State Department intelligence analyst questioned the legitimacy of some mysterious documents that had surfaced in Italy that fall and were supposed proof of the Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. In fact, they were blatant forgeries. When Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said as much publicly in the days just before “shock and awe,” his announcement made none of the three evening newscasts. The administration’s apocalyptic uranium rhetoric, sprinkled with mushroom clouds, had been hammered incessantly for more than five months by then – not merely in the State of the Union address – and could not be dislodged. As scenarios go, this one was about as subtle as “Independence Day” and just as unstoppable a crowd-pleaser.

Once we were locked into the war, and no W.M.D.’s could be found, the original plot line was dropped with an alacrity that recalled the “Never mind!” with which Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella used to end her misinformed Weekend Update commentaries on “Saturday Night Live.” The administration began its dog-ate-my-homework cover-up, asserting that the various warning signs about the uranium claims were lost “in the bowels” of the bureaucracy or that it was all the C.I.A.’s fault or that it didn’t matter anyway, because there were new, retroactive rationales to justify the war. But the administration knows how guilty it is. That’s why it has so quickly trashed any insider who contradicts its story line about how we got to Iraq, starting with the former Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill and the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke.

Next to White House courtiers of their rank, Mr. Wilson is at most a Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. The brief against the administration’s drumbeat for war would be just as damning if he’d never gone to Africa. But by overreacting in panic to his single Op-Ed piece of two years ago, the White House has opened a Pandora’s box it can’t slam shut. Seasoned audiences of presidential scandal know that there’s only one certainty ahead: the timing of a Karl Rove resignation. As always in this genre, the knight takes the fall at exactly that moment when it’s essential to protect the king.