Biological Weapons

Rats by Robert Sullivan is a fascinating study of rats and their cohabitation with humans. One particularly interesting section was on rats and plague, which, as you may know, is spread to humans by the rat flea. Apparently the Japanese were the first to experiment with the use of plague as a biological weapon during WWII under the direction of General Shiro Ishii. He discovered that the best was to infect a city with plague was to fill clay bombs with infected fleas. An attack was successfully conducted against the Chinese city of Changde. A clue that the outbreak was caused by humans rather than rats was that the rats began dying of plague weeks after the humans, a reverse of the normal situation.

General Ishii also practiced vivisection on live humans. He was never tried for war crimes, apparently having made a deal with the Americans who got copies of his notes and papers which formed the basis for the early American attempts at creating biological weapons. He retired a respected medical man.

The United States began experimenting with biological weapons in the early fifties and tested their weapon distribution methods on unsuspecting Americans. In one case, Navy planes sprayed the eastern Virginia coat with microbes similar to Anthrax but "thought to be harmless," and as late as 1966, soldiers dressed in civilian clothes dropped light bulbs filled with the microbes on the tracks in New York subways in order to measure how the microbes dispersed -- all without the knowledge of the public or Congress.

Stats, the Bible and the Christian Right

Some data to consider. These numbers were compiled by a Catholic priest.

1. There are more than 31,000 verses in the Bible.
2. Not one verse relates to gay marriage.
3. Only two verses could even remotely have anything to do with abortion.
4. Over 5,000 discuss alleviating poverty.
5. The number 1 item of the published Christian Coalition's agenda was preserving the Bush tax cuts.

Maybe the Christian right needs to reorient its priorities.

Slavery, Property, and Miscegenation

In 1662, the Virginia legislature passed a law that read, "Children got by an Englishman upon a Negro woman shall be bond or free according to the condition of the mother." Seems otherwise innocuous, but this statute reversed English common law under which the status of the child frollowed that of the father.

The implications were huge. It meant that slave owners could impregnate as many slave women as they wanted secure in the knowledge that the children that resulted would become their property, increasing their wealth and slave population. This provided a huge incentive for white men to sleep with their slave women.

This intertwined sex and race and led to the powerful taboo of black men marrying or even looking at a white woman. The long-term result of this taboo was the epidemic of the lynching of black men.

Blood Done Sign My Name by Timothy Tyson

KISS

"There's no doubt in my mind as a soldier that part of the responsibility for Abu Ghraib and for Afghanistan belongs with the secretary of defense and the president of the United States. There's an old aphorism: Keep it simple, stupid. KISS is the acronym. You always have personalities in uniform--I had them in Vietnam--who will take advantage of any ambiguity, any lack of clarification in the rules of engagement, and kill people, or whatever his particular psyche is liable to do. You don't have rules for your good people. You have rules for that five or six percent of your combat unit that are going to be weird. You need those people, because sometimes they're your best killers. But you need the rules. And when you make any kind of changes in them, any relaxation or even a hint of it, you're opening Pandora's box. And I fault Gonzalez, the president, the vice-president, the secretary of defense, the chain of command, Myers, Abizaid, Sanchez, the whole bunch of the them."

An administration official who had served in Vietnam explaining Abu Ghraib. Quoted by George Packer in The Assassin's Gate.

Hiatus

Well, after a substantial hiatus caused by the addition of major new responsibilities at work, it’s time to get back in the saddle, to use a Bushism. I have been reading as much as possible regarding the debacle in Iraq, and there are several really interesting and enlightening books that have been published in the last few months. I’m well into several.

The best from the perspective of what went wrong in Baghdad as far as the civil authorities is George Packer’s Assassin’s Gate. Packer, a staff writer at the New Yorker — along with the Atlantic must reading, writes well. Clearly the Bush administration was less interested in making sure things went well than in regarding loyalists. Bush et al just assumed everything would turn out well and if left alone, much like the Katrina disaster, would sort of fix itself. I mean, how hard can government be? There are numerous examples of bureaucrats with expert knowledge in civil affairs being replaced by someone with no experience, but who thought “right” on abortion or stem cell research, or who was a contributor. Even the Iraqis placed in power, were those who had been in exile for many years and had little first-hand knowledge of conditions in the country. They also lacked the respect of their compatriots. In the meantime they hunkered down in the Green Zone, slurping down martinis, eating pork (the Americans at least) and isolating themselves from the horror just outside the concrete barriers. It’s not a pretty picture.

Cobra II:The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq by Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor tells the story from the military perspective. Again, a case of wishful thinking from the Bush Cabinet. [ Speaking of his Cabinet, I happened to hear Elaine Chao, current Secretary of Labor, speak at a recent EEO conference, and she is living on another planet — something probably true of all of them. ]

I must say that while reading Robert McNamara’s In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, I continue to be struck by the terminology and similarities in the way our government massages the language. In 1967 and 1968 Johson and McNamara (he even looks like Rumsfeld) were discussing the problems caused by the “insurgency” and the “political instability” of the country. Not to mention that we now measure success by the number of bodies we count.