Thanks to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, the chemical and biological weapons watchdog group, the Sunshine Project, has uncovered an American military project that never came to fruition: the gay bomb.

According to the BBC, the military “envisaged an aphrodisiac chemical that would provoke widespread homosexual behaviour among troops, causing what the military called a ‘distasteful but completely non-lethal’ blow to morale.”

The catalog of other bizarre weapons listed in the 1994 proposal that the military ultimately did not create include a chemical that would encourage wasps or agitated rats to attack enemy troops, a weapon that would render human skin intolerably sensitive to sunlight, a chemical that would induce “severe and lasting halitosis,” and a weapon that, in the BBC’s polite language, would “simulate flatulence in enemy ranks.”

The BBC tartly quoted one of the official and ethnocentric reasons the flatulence bomb was scrapped: “people in many areas of the world do not find faecal odour offensive, since they smell it on a regular basis.”  
  
The bigoted heteronormativity of the gay bomb and the curiously offensive nature of the proposals do provide an odd comic relief against the grim backdrop of the American military’s most recent incidents in Abu Ghraib, other prisoner detention centers in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and in Guantanamo Bay. The military might, however, devote less time pondering the tactical validity of flatulence and more time creating strategies of reconstruction for the nations that America has further destabilized.    

Mimi Hanaoka

At the Kalmunai Base hospital in Columbo, Sri Lanka, “Baby 81” is the center of a heated conflict between nine women, who each claim that he is their child.  

Since the tsunami on December 26th when “Baby 81” (whose real name is unknown) was admitted as the 81st patient to the hospital, the women have threatened doctors and each other in hopes of securing the infant.  

“Most of the parents who came and claimed that this is their baby are really believing that this is their baby,” Dr. K. Muhunthan, an obstetrician, told Sky TV. “Maybe they are not lying, because they have lost a baby of the same age and all the babies they look at look like their own child,” he said.  

Needless to say that in Sri Lanka, where 40 percent of the tsunami deaths involved children, the emotional impact of the disaster on parents has been tremendous. Here, losing a child, particularly a boy, could mean losing one’s prospects of relative economic security in the future.  

Nurses, in the meantime, are attending to the child, and hospital authorities have requested access to DNA tests from local officials. “Baby 81” will remain at the hospital in the interim.

Toyin

“The Americans came to free the Iraqi people from Saddam — I didn’t expect this was going to happen. When they first came, it appeared that they were good, but this incident changed the entire picture of what Americans look like.”

—Hussein Mutar, an Iraqi imprisoned at Abu Ghraib, testifying in the trial of Specialist Charles A. Graner, Jr.

Yesterday, a military jury found Special Graner guilty on charges of assault, conspiracy, maltreatment of detainees, committing indecent acts, and dereliction of duty during his tenure as a prison official in Abu Ghraib. His sentencing is scheduled for today.

While the Bush administration continues to portray the Abu Ghraib scandal as the actions of a few, masochistic soldiers, it remains difficult to view the incident as an isolated one in light of the investigations of torture and human rights violations that now extend to Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, as well as Iraq.  The Bush administration continues to distance itself from previous legal speculation that torture techniques were permissible, but for Iraqis like Mr. Mutar, the damage has already been done.

llouison

Susan Estrich offers one more perspective on the proposed amendment to the Constitution which would permit foreign-born American citizens the opportunity to be President of the United States. In her piece, “Immigrant President? Why Not?,” she notes that valid reasons to support such a change do exist.

“Who could oppose a constitutional amendment that allows every American child to grow up dreaming of becoming president? Why should that dream be limited to those who happened to be born in this country, excluding the growing number of Americans who were born in other countries and are Americans by choice? Are they less loyal because of the place of their birth? Of course not.”

Meanwhile, she cites “only two” reasons to oppose such a change. One of the reasons she argues against the amendment “commutes between Brentwood and Sacramento.”

There is a strong possibility that Arnold Schwarzenegger will succeed in altering the Constitution. Estrich is not the only person to think so. Nor is she the only person who would prefer the Constitution remain unaltered.

Estrich brings up one loophole which might act in favor of a Constitutional amendment: Democratic principles.

“The problem, as my friend blogger Mickey Kaus puts it, is that most Democrats are just too principled to act in such a strategic but unprincipled way when it comes to the Constitution. And unless they do, the amendment wins.”

It’s an interesting dilemma. How might Democrats oppose an amendment which would, at least in theory, remove one more obstacle from the path which leads toward cultural equality?

Democrats who find they cannot oppose such an amendment would do well to remember another European with money and pull: George Soros.

Whenever the subject comes up, I obnoxiously like to say that I don’t believe in dieting. After reading an article published this week, I will need to revise my pronouncement to something like this: I don’t believe in diets. I believe in eating well.

A friend of mine writes in The New York Sun about a new book by Mireille Guiliano, French Women Don’t Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasure.

I haven’t yet read the book, but the story about it was a sort of a that’s-what-I-meant experience. An excerpt:

“Ms. Guiliano offers a wealth of gastronomic wisdom not only to defeat nos petits demons but to reawaken an individual, multi-sensory relationship to food as pleasure …

Ms. Guiliano is confident that through slowly ‘recasting’ and making minor adjustments American women can learn to think about what is good to eat instead of what we ‘can’t’ have …

French Women is not a book for anyone looking for a radical transformation, or a January 1 starting gun. The book’s true strength is to remind the dieting public that there are no quick fixes and that eating truly should be a source of real pleasure.”

Vinnee Tong

Homosexuality is prohibited in Islam and is illegal in Iran, but a Muslim cleric in Iran has ruled that a sex change operation is a human right; he is so convinced of this human right that he’s advocating on the behalf of transsexuals, and he’s so fascinated by the individuals he studies that he dreams about them at night.  

Hojatulislam Kariminia, a Muslim cleric who addressed the consequences of sex change operations — which were condoned by Ayatollah Khomeini 41 years ago — in his doctoral thesis, declared: “I want to suggest that the right of transsexuals to change their gender is a human right.”  

Mahyar is one such individual in Iran who claims that she is a woman encased in a man’s body, and she’s willing to hawk off a kidney to pay for the sex change operation; Mahyar has already had her testicles removed, and she is waiting for the next surgical step, in which surgeons will create female sex organs out of parts of Mahyar’s intestines.

If we are to believe Dr. Mirjalali, the most prominent sex change surgeon in Iran, Mahyar is far from being the only Iranian who wants a sex change; Dr. Mirjalali has performed 320 such operations in the past 12 years, while he states that his European counterparts only perform about 40 operations in 10 years.  

One of Hojatulislam Karimini’s stated aims is to “introduce transsexuals to the people through my work and in fact remove the stigma or the insults that sometimes attach to these people.” Indeed, while the religious establishment has decreed sexual reassignment permissible, it still rubs against the grain of mainstream Iranian society. Iranian law, however, is also supportive of postoperative transsexuals; they may legally change the gender on their birth certificates and passports, something that will not be possible until April of 2005, with the Gender Recognition Act 2004,  in the much more socially lenient United Kingdom.  

While a more inclusive sexual revolution is postponed for the indefinite future, the transsexual revolution in Iran has already quietly begun.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Could a 79-year-old Baptist preacher have brutally murdered three boys as part of a KKK murdering binge?  

Edgar Ray Killen, a Baptist preacher, was charged with three counts of murder in Philadelphia, Mississippi, on Friday; he was charged with murdering three voter registration workers — Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney — in 1964.  

While Killen was tried in 1967, along with 17 others, for civil rights violations relating to the murder of the three young men, he is the only one of those who stood trial who has never been incarcerated. During his trial in 1967, 11 members of his jury believed he was guilty, but one member dissented and the jury was hung; the 12th member of the jury later explained that she refused to convict a preacher.

Curiously, Killen is the only person associated with the crime who has been charged with murder, and he pled not guilty on Friday to all three counts. In a move fit for low-brow and highly engrossing daytime TV, Killen’s 63-year-old brother, JD, assaulted a cameraman as the family left the courthouse.

The trial may become something of a curiosity — after all, a septuagenarian preacher is being prosecuted, largely on the basis of evidence from a 1967 trial, for a murder that occurred over 40 years ago. It does, however, demonstrate that the battle for civil rights is still dutifully being fought in the 21st century.

Mimi Hanaoka

The outpouring of financial support for the victims of the tsunami that befell Southeast Asia on December 26 often seems very inspiring. In a world full of differences and economic disparities, people are coming together to donate to one cause.

But the goodwill is hardly universal, particularly among those who are experiencing the disaster firsthand.

In India, where the caste system persists, lower caste survivors are being forced out of relief camps and are being denied aid supplies.

Why? Well, higher caste survivors think that their economic superiority gives them a greater right to have access to those camps and supplies, so they’re moving in and forcing the so-called untouchables out.

Would this kind of class politics happen elsewhere were other countries to be struck by a horrific natural disaster? Perhaps. Almost certainly.

What’s scary about that realization is not simply the fact that it puts a serious damper on a rare unified mood of goodwill in the world. It also begs the question of who is receiving the aid in regions where economic hierarchies reign. Is the aid going primarily to those who wield the most privilege?

Sadly, the predicament in India also brings to light a horrid side of human nature. The side where no disaster, no degree of loss can ever erase the lines between the haves and have-nots and the exclusion, loss, and devastation those lines produce.

Laura Nathan-Garner

For anyone who may have wondered, last week’s tsunami proves beyond a doubt that humanity has yet to conquer the natural world. In fact, in his piece, “How Nature Changes History,” Donald G. McNeil, Jr. recalls several instances in which natural catastrophes have changed the course of history.

“Death and devastation have deflected the course of nations,” he reports. “If the past is any guide, the response to the shock of Dec. 26 will loom larger in history than the wave itself.”

Is this catastrophe the result of global warming? How much of global warming is due to human negligence? Although the immediate repercussions of this worldwide disaster have pushed these questions into the background, eventually they will be addressed.

Dr. Brian M. Fagan, an archaeologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, alludes to the potential implications of this disaster by recalling three instances in history in which civilization changed after similar watery catastrophes.

Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future, contends that the potential for religious repercussions is as serious an issue as that of a looming environmental threat. He expects the present devastation will act as “a wacko magnet of enormous proportions with new cults founded” in the rural areas which were hit hardest. He recalls the 1883 eruption of the island of Krakatoa, which has been immortalized in the children’s book, The Twenty-One Balloons. “There was a sense that the old gods had failed [believers],” Mr. Saffo is cited as saying.

Saffo anticipates that a fundamentalist response to such a loss in faith might be severe. “The Indonesian government’s response ‘has to be swift, effective and free of corruption or it will be a gift to the fundamentalists,’ [Saffo] said. The American war on terror … might fare better by outspending Islamic charities in Indonesia than by ‘pouring money into the sand’ in Iraq.”

However nations worldwide choose to respond to the disaster, the interdependence of humanity and nature cannot be negated. Both thought as well as a diversity of response, reflected by the diversity of the nations who are responding in record numbers, may prove to be the most effective solution.