The News & Observer, a paper based in Raleigh, North Carolina, has an article on Dr. Gregory Henderson, whose email dispatch from New Orleans was mentioned in my post last week. (Snopes.com has also concluded that the original email message was authentic.)

Henderson sent out an update on Saturday to his original email:

I am replying to all of your letters of prayers and support in this way in the interests of time.

1. thanks for all your letters of support and prayers and offers to help.

2. i am safe, and now based at the Sheraton hotel where we have a new makeshift clinic established.

3. the situation at the convention center is urgent and disastrous = 10-20 thousand people in dire need of health care from minor to severe. A small MASH unit was established there last night. I will be joining them today – I desparately need the help of as many medically trained individuals as possible to triage these patients, treat if necessary, and evacuate – only the most serious will be seen at the MASH

4. i need to figure out how to set up a morgue. there are several dead at the convention center

5. some supplies are ariving today courtesy of Fred Eschelman and PPD Inc of north carolina – I will get these supplies to the convention center as soon as they arrive.

6. i need mobile dialysis units – thousands haven’t been dialysed in over a week.

7. i can be reached pretty well on my cell phone at [number deleted]. now is the time to act – i need help – i haven’t found any other physicians in the field yet and i can only do so much

9. Ochsner is the only fully functional facility in the city – they are effectively taking care of all of their patients and offering extrordinary help, an lots of supplies – i am proud to be part of this organization.

Greg Henderson

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Sunday’s New York Times has an interesting piece by Louis Uchitelle on American companies that continue to do much of their production in America. “Made in America” is more common than you’d think. In spite of two decades of intensified globalization, the United States remains the world’s top manufacturer, accounting for 23.8 percent of manufacturing output worldwide in 2004, compared to 24.6 percent in 1982. (This is measured by “value added,” which takes into account the dollar value created at each stage of production through the addition of materials and labor.)

Uchitelle profiles three companies — Harley-Davidson, Haas Automation, and Hiwasse Manufacturing — to see what drives their decisions to either keep their production and supply lines in America or look overseas for cheaper options. For those companies that managed to stay rooted in America, two factors stand out: the benefits gained from tariffs and other forms of protectionism, which stymied aggressive foreign competitors and sustained companies during their most vulnerable years, and the efficiencies brought about by automation, which slashed labor costs and helped American firms compete with competitors abroad who pay much lower wages (for example, Chinese firms).

But given the particular advantages they enjoy, the companies in Uchitelle’s article may be the exceptions that prove the rule. Today, with the World Trade Organization and other free trade agreements in place, it’s harder for the U.S. government to protect industries — a fact that may be good for poor people in China, India, and other developing countries, but does not bode well for Americans toiling in the manufacturing sector. Furthermore, the automation that helps American firms compete is quickly spreading throughout the world. These companies may not be able to rely on their technological edge for much longer. (Indeed, as Thomas Friedman points out in his new book, America is falling behind other countries in churning out the engineers and scientists who can fuel its future innovation.)

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

The National Guard is finally out in force on the streets of New Orleans, but for some it is already too late. Survivors recount stories of infants and elderly victims who died of dehydration and exposure after days without help. Journalists describe the situation as a war zone, with corpses decomposing in open air and rapes taking place even in supposed safe havens. Criticism in Washington mounts as refugees ask why the government relief took so long in coming. “We are throw-away people,” a refugee tells Reuters.

We won’t know for some time the full extent of Hurricane Katrina’s toll, but it will likely reveal many of the dead to be African American and poor. In New Orleans, the city devastated by a one-two punch of hurricane and levee collapse, 68 percent of the population is African American, according to 2004 statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau. One in five individuals and one in seven families in New Orleans live under the poverty line, which in 2004 was $18,850 for a family of four. “If Sept. 11 showed the power of a nation united in response to a devastating attack, Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault lines of a region and a nation, rent by profound social divisions,” wrote Mark Naison, a professor of African American studies at Fordham University, in a piece quoted by The New York Times. (Kanye West was a bit less diplomatic in his choice of words.)

Has New Orleans been ignored by the nation’s leaders? Mayor Ray Nagin thinks so. Democrats (and some Republicans) have harshly criticized the federal government for its handling of the disaster. Some have complained that the Bush administration diverted funds that could have gone to levee building and reinforcement to the war in Iraq and tax cuts for the wealthy. Matthew Barge of FactCheck.org provides an even-handed assessment of this charge, concluding that, yes, the president drastically underfunded an Army Corps of Engineers project to enhance the levee system protecting New Orleans: Bush’s budget allocated $3 million of the $11 million the Corps requested for the project in fiscal year 2004, and $3.9 million of the $22.5 million requested in 2005 (Congress subsequently raised the funding to $5.5 million in both years). That said, it’s unclear whether the money cut would have made a difference. “The Army Corps of Engineers — which is under the President’s command and has its own reputation to defend — insists that Katrina was just too strong,” Barge writes, “and that even if the levee project had been completed it was only designed to withstand a category 3 hurricane.”

What is clear is that local officials had been complaining as early as four years ago that not enough funds were being devoted to hurricane protection. Federal officials knew of the danger, but little was done. The last paragraph of the FactCheck.org analysis is especially chilling:

Whether or not a breach” was “anticipated,” the fact is that many individuals have been warning for decades about the threat of flooding that a hurricane could pose to a set below sea level and sandwiched between major waterways. A Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) report from before September 11, 2001 detailed the three most likely catastrophic disasters that could happen in the United States: a terrorist attack in New York, a strong earthquake in San Francisco, and a hurricane strike in New Orleans. In 2002, New Orleans officials held the simulation of what would happen in a category 5 storm. Walter Maestri, the emergency coordinator of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans, recounted the outcome to PBS’ NOW With Bill Moyers:

Maestri, September 2002: Well, when the exercise was completed it was evidence that we were going to lose a lot of people. We changed the name of the [simulated] storm from Delaney to K-Y-A-G-B… kiss your ass goodbye… because anybody who was here as that category five storm came across… was gone.

A terrorist strike in New York, a hurricane in New Orleans, and an earthquake in San Francisco — is our government trying to win the Triple Crown of disasters? This time, an entire American city was turned into a war zone. An entire urban population was thrown onto the trash heap. Do we have to wait for a third catastrophe for the people in charge to get the message?

UPDATE, 9/8/05, 12:20 a.m. EST: The Guardian points out that earlier allegations of rape have not yet been substantiated by authorities.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

If you want to help the relief efforts in Louisiana and elsewhere, please consider making a donation to the American Red Cross. The local and national websites are jammed with visitors, so you might want to try the Red Cross donations site set up on Yahoo.

Below is an excerpt of an August 31 message by Dr. Greg Henderson, a pathologist in New Orleans. The email, which has been circulating on the Web, gives a first-hand account of the devastation in that part of the country. (The text has been edited slightly for typos.)

UPDATE, 9:34 p.m. EST: If you live in the Southeast and can offer hurricane victims a place to stay, the grassroots organization MoveOn.org is organizing an emergency national housing drive. Also, a reader asked if the authenticity of the email below can be verified. It was sent to me by a friend who said her family knows this doctor, so I have no reason to doubt its authenticity. If you know otherwise, of course, please let me know.

UPDATE, 9/4/05, 7:37 p.m. EST: Some errors corrected and the email header changed in the text below, based on the original version of the email posted on the Web (I was using a forwarded version before). The rumor-quashing site Snopes.com is looking into the veracity of this email, so you might want to check this page later for their determination.

UPDATE, 9/6/05, 1:52 p.m. EST: See this post for more details.

From: Gregory S. Henderson MD, PhD
Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2005 20:21:55 -0500
Subject: Re: thoughts and prayers

Thanks to all of you who have sent your notes of concern and your prayers. I am writing this note on Tuesday at 2 p.m. I wanted to update all of you as to the situation here. I don’t know how much information you are getting but I am certain it is more than we are getting. Be advised that almost everything I am telling you is from direct observation or rumor from reasonable sources. They are allowing limited internet access, so I hope to send this dispatch today.

Personally, my family and I are fine. My family is safe in Jackson, Miss., and I am now a temporary resident of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New Orleans. I figured if it was my time to go, I wanted to go in a place with a good wine list. In addition, this hotel is in a very old building on Canal Street that could and did sustain little damage. Many of the other hotels sustained significant loss of windows, and we expect that many of the guests may be evacuated here.

Things were obviously bad yesterday, but they are much worse today. Overnight the water arrived. Now Canal Street (true to its origins) is indeed a canal. The first floor of all downtown buildings is underwater. I have heard that Charity Hospital and Tulane are limited in their ability to care for patients because of water. Ochsner is the only hospital that remains fully functional. However, I spoke with them today and they too are on generator and losing food and water fast. The city now has no clean water, no sewerage system, no electricity, and no real communications. Bodies are still being recovered floating in the floods. We are worried about a cholera epidemic. Even the police are without effective communications. We have a group of armed police here with us at the hotel that is admirably trying to exert some local law enforcement. This is tough because looting is now rampant. Most of it is not malicious looting. These are poor and desperate people with no housing and no medical care and no food or water trying to take care of themselves and their families. Unfortunately, the people are armed and dangerous. We hear gunshots frequently. Most of Canal Street is occupied by armed looters who have a low threshold for discharging their weapons. We hear gunshots frequently. The looters are using makeshift boats made of pieces of styrofoam to access. We are still waiting for a significant national guard presence.

The health care situation here has dramatically worsened overnight. Many people in the hotel are elderly and small children. Many other guests have unusual diseases…. There are [Infectious Disease] physicians in at this hotel attending an HIV [conference]. We have commandeered the world famous French Quarter Bar to turn into a makeshift clinic. There is a team of about seven doctors and PAs and pharmacists. We anticipate that this will be the major medical facility in the central business district and French Quarter.

Our biggest adventure today was raiding the Walgreens on Canal under police escort. The pharmacy was dark and full of water. We basically scooped the entire drug sets into garbage bags and removed them. All under police escort. The looters had to be held back at gunpoint. After a dose of prophylactic Cipro I hope to be fine. In all we are faring well. We have set up a hospital in the French Quarter bar in the hotel, and will start admitting patients today. Many will be from the hotel, but many will not. We are anticipating dealing with multiple medical problems, medications and acute injuries. Infection and perhaps even cholera are anticipated major problems. Food and water shortages are imminent.

The biggest question to all of us is where is the National Guard. We hear jet fighters and helicopters, but no real armed presence, and hence the rampant looting. There is no Red Cross and no Salvation Army. In a sort of cliché way, this is an edifying experience. One is rapidly focused away from the transient and material to the bare necessities of life. It has been challenging to me to learn how to be a primary care physician. We are under martial law so return to our homes is impossible. I don’t know how long it will be and this is my greatest fear. Despite it all, this is a soul-edifying experience. The greatest pain is to think about the loss. And how long the rebuild will take. And the horror of so many dead people.

PLEASE SEND THIS DISPATCH TO ALL YOU THINK MAY BE INTERESTED IN A DISPATCH from the front. I will send more according to your interest. Hopefully their collective prayers will be answered. By the way, suture packs, sterile gloves and stethoscopes will be needed as the Ritz turns into a MASH.

Greg Henderson

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

An anonymous reader took the time to write a detailed response to my post last week about Cindy Sheehan and her efforts to meet with President Bush. Here it is:

Why would you meet with a woman who said the following at a S.F. rally in A[p]ril 05:

“We are not waging a war on terror in this country. We’re waging a war of terror. The biggest terrorist in the world is George W. Bush!”

So declared Cindy Sheehan earlier this year during a rally at San Francisco State University.

Sheehan, who is demanding a second meeting with Bush, stated: “We are waging a nuclear war in Iraq right now. That country is contaminated. It will be contaminated for practically eternity now.”

Sheehan unleashed a foul-mouth tirade on April 27, 2005:

“They’re a bunch of fucking hypocrites! And we need to, we just need to rise up…” Sheehan said of the Bush administration.

“If George Bush believes his rhetoric and his bullshit, that this is a war for freedom and democracy, that he is spreading freedom and democracy, does he think every person he kills makes Iraq more free?”

“The whole world is damaged. Our humanity is damaged. If he thinks that it’s so important for Iraq to have a U.S.-imposed sense of freedom and democracy, then he needs to sign up his two little party-animal girls. They need to go to this war.”

“We want our country back and, if we have to impeach everybody from George Bush down to the person who picks up dog shit in Washington, we will impeach all those people.”

—But I wouldn’t expect someone who can only look at one side of an issue to see why the President wouldn’t want to meet with her. Common sense people. Stop thinking with your lust to hate Bush and use common sense.

It’s certainly true that Cindy Sheehan is not the most subtle or diplomatic public speaker. Personally, I wouldn’t phrase some of those comments the way she did. But then again, I didn’t lose a child in Iraq. If anyone has the right to be angry, it would be Sheehan. Most of us Americans have the luxury of living our lives as if the United States was not in a state of war. Sheehan no longer has that privilege. If she’s not the most moderate voice in the chorus, there may be a reason.

The reader justifiably complains about the hateful rhetoric that afflicts this country. The first step we can take to stop the hatred is to start a dialogue. If Bush would meet with Sheehan, he could begin such a dialogue. Meeting with her doesn’t necessarily mean that Bush would have to compromise his views, or Sheehan hers. But it’s a necessary step to begin some healing. It’s the only way that both supporters and opponents of the president will ever learn to look beyond their side of the issue and consider seriously what the people across the aisle have to say.

Instead of constructively engaging his critics, the president seems to believe he can wish them away. Thankfully, however, there are Republican leaders who want to see a dialogue take place. Some have had the courage to speak out publicly, comparing Iraq to Vietnam and asking tough questions about when the troops will come home. A few have even come out in support of Sheehan’s request to speak with her elected representative. Senator George Allen, Republican from Virginia, said that it would be good for Bush to invite Sheehan in “just as a matter of courtesy and decency.” Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican from Nebraska, said that “the wise course of action … would have been to immediately invite her into the ranch.” The fact that Bush is not doing the “courteous and decent” thing is inflaming hostilities and showing the world that Bush would rather stick his head in the ground than face the reality knocking on his doorstep.

Cindy Sheehan is one woman with a tragic story. Fervent supporters of the president have spent a good deal of time dragging her name into the mud. What’s more important than what this suburban mother said or didn’t say, though, is what she represents: a conversation waiting to happen. A conversation on this war and on its future end. A conversation that this country needs and the president needs to begin.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Forget elephants or donkeys, hawks or doves. What does the Bush administration most resemble? An ostrich. With the mother of a fallen Iraq War soldier camped outside his ranch for nearly two weeks, a vacationing George W. Bush refuses to stick his head out the door and say hello. Meanwhile, the American effort in Iraq is, well, in its “last throes” — by which I mean it will probably go on for another five, six, eight, 10, maybe 12 years. Arianna Huffington sums up the current state of the Iraqi union:

How bad is the situation there? Barham Salih, Iraq’s minister of planning and development, tried to look at the bright side of things by saying, “We are failing to reach compromises. But we are not killing each other.” You know things are in trouble when the good news is that the Founding Fathers of the New Iraq are not blowing each other to bits.

Personally, I don’t mind if the president takes a vacation — running the country, after all, is “hard work” — but I’m puzzled why he won’t meet Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey died in Iraq last year. For one thing, it’s just good manners. Bush points out that he already met with her once last year, along with other relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq. Fair enough, but if a woman who lost her son in a war you started decides to come all the way to Crawford, Texas, for another chat, you might as well take 10 minutes out of your fishing trip and give her a good listen.

Avoiding Sheehan is just a dumb political move, too. I’m not sure who’s advising him these days — is Karl Rove too busy fending off special prosecutors? — but someone knowledgeable should have taken Bush aside and told him that if he didn’t talk to Sheehan soon, he’d just be enticing an army of reporters to come out to Crawford and turn his ranch into another Elián González/Terri Schiavo hatefest.

Well, the hatin’ has already begun: On Monday night a local resident drove his truck out to the protesters’ roadside encampment and ran over about half of the 500 wooden crosses they had hammered into the ground — crosses that bore the names of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq.

Where was our valiant “war president?” Out on the range, with his head stuck in the ground.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Check out this piece by academic Michael Schwartz in Asia Times Online for a so-ironic-it-hurts analysis of the ways that America’s recent adventures in Iraq have benefited its old enemy, Iran. Schwartz gives us a succinct rundown of the various political factions in post-war Iraq and explains how many of the key players are fans of — or avidly working with — Tehran’s authoritarian government. (It’s a point that Middle East scholar Juan Cole has also made repeatedly: The real victor of the Iraq War? Iran.)

Back when the Bush administration was trying to sell its invasion of Iraq, the war cry among the more rabid hawks was “first Iraq, then Iran.” (As one administration official put it: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.”) Then the insurgency rapidly sapped the strength of the military and the will of the public for more war. Things have gone swimmingly for Iran ever since, Schwartz says. Iranian-backed candidates have won office in the new republic, Iraqi businessmen have built up a bustling cross-border trade, and the grateful Iraqis have, in return, promised not to allow their country to be used as a staging ground for (U.S.) attacks on Iran.

Schwartz also sorts out some of the curious connections between Iraq, Iran, and — of all American bugbears — China. Ousting Saddam, he argues, inadvertently brought oil-hungry China (a former customer of Saddam’s) into the arms of the ayatollah. Since then, China has shown itself ready to block any American moves against Iran’s nuclear ambitions in the United Nations. It has also helped Iran establish ties with other countries in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization — an alliance of central Asian nations, Russia among them, which have increasingly spoken out against U.S. military intervention in the Middle East (as seen most dramatically last month when one of those allies, Uzbekistan, gave the U.S. military six months to leave the Karshi-Khanabad air base, which has been used for staging operations in Afghanistan).

Now that Iran seems intent on building a nuclear power plant (and maybe a bomb or two), the hard-liners in power should thank the Bush administration for giving them all the political cover they could have asked for. With enemies like the United States, who needs friends?

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Cathy Young, a contributing editor at Reason magazine, has a piece in The Boston Globe blasting the idea — peddled by President Bush last week — that “intelligent design” should be taught alongside evolution in America’s classrooms. Not all political conservatives, she notes, are willing to “make science classrooms a platform for pseudoscience whose sole intent is to counter ‘godless’ natural selection.” Take, for example, columnist Charles Krauthammer or blogger Glenn Reynolds — or even the White House’s own science czar, John H. Marburger III (director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy), who stated earlier this year that “intelligent design is not a scientific theory.”

It’s puzzling why certain religious groups find the theory of evolution so threatening. Yes, it doesn’t bode too well for the sanctity of your convictions if you believe every word in an ancient book to be literally true. But even if you recognize the validity of evolution, there is still plenty of space for thinking what you want about the existence, or non-existence, of God. As Alan Leshner, the chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, points out, the idea behind “intelligent design” — that a higher power had a hand in the development of species on earth — is “not even a scientifically answerable question.”

The theory of evolution doesn’t deny the existence of God. In fact, we expect too much of science if we insist that it can disprove, or prove, the presence of the sacred. So why bother at all with teaching pseudoscience? Let’s teach what we actually know — and let kids decide for themselves if they see God in evolution, or just the ordinary magic of the cosmos.

On this point, it seems, many conservatives and liberals would agree.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

“… For the moment at least, your guilt is taken as proven.”

“But I’m not guilty,” said K. “It’s a mistake. How can a person be guilty at all? Surely we are all human beings here, one like the other.”

“That is right,” said the priest, “but that is the way the guilty are wont to talk.”

—Franz Kafka, The Trial

You may have already heard that two senior prosecutors in the Guantánamo war crimes trials requested transfers after they complained that the process was “rigged” and pursuing convictions of low-level defendants. Now it turns out that a third military prosecutor shared their concerns and also asked to be redeployed. Captain Carrie Wolf left the Office of Military Commissions last year because of similar concerns about the unfairness of the trials, according to a report by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation yesterday. (David Hicks, an Australian captured in Afghanistan, is one of the four men at Guantánamo being tried for war crimes, and the Australian media is following the case closely.)

Emails from Major Robert Preston, a highly decorated judge advocate, and Captain John Carr, now a major working on the legal staff of General John Abizaid, show that the two did not consider the proceedings against the Guantánamo four to be fair or worthy of the extraordinary measures being taken. “I lie awake worrying about this every night … After all, writing a motion saying that the process will be full and fair when you don’t really believe it is kind of hard, particularly when you call yourself an officer and lawyer,” Preston wrote in an email to a senior officer in the prosecutor’s office. Pressing ahead with such “marginal” cases would amount to “a fraud on the American people,” he said. (For more excerpts from the emails, click here.)

In the second email, Carr reminded Colonel Frederick L. Borch that the chief prosecutor himself had guaranteed convictions. “You have repeatedly said to the office that the military panel will be handpicked and will not acquit these detainees and that we only need to worry about building a record for the review panel,” he wrote. Carr also complained of withheld and missing evidence that could be of use to the defense.

Borsch responded to the discontented prosecutors in an email that affirmed his great respect and admiration for them — then called their charges “monstrous lies.” (Well, as they say when grading papers, always start out with a positive.) A two-month military investigation found no evidence of criminal misconduct, ethical violations, or “tampered with, falsified or hidden” evidence.

It may just be me, but I find it a little worrisome when the prosecution starts complaining about having it too easy. I’m also skeptical any time that a branch of government decides to investigate itself — and, shockingly, finds no wrongdoing. (Anyone heard of Watergate?) Our friends overseas aren’t so easily persuaded of the U.S. government’s good intentions, either. “What farce,” says Michael Costello of The Australian. “As if [the Defense Department’s inspector general] could come to any other conclusion. If this is the standard we are to apply, we should ask Hicks to investigate the allegations against himself. He will no doubt say they were all the result of a misunderstanding and declare himself innocent.”

It seems like a no-brainer: If the U.S. government wants to preserve its credibility overseas — much less uphold justice, the American Way, and all that jazz — shouldn’t it give full and fair trials to those it detains/imprisons/involuntarily vacations in sunny Guantánamo? If the cases against these men are so ironclad, why the fear of fairness? As things are going now, the government seems like it’s headed straight for the secretive, bureaucratic lunacy of The Trial, Franz Kafka’s novel of a legal system run amok. There, too, you have prosecutors with no serious counterweight, evidence out of the reach of defendants, and panels of judges convinced of the defendant’s guilt before the proceedings have even begun. Not to mention defendants waiting in uncertainty for months or years, not knowing when they will be tried or even what crimes they are charged with — on that score, the Guantánamo four are to be envied.

In the bubble of these secretive, one-sided military tribunals, I worry that the well-intentioned men and women pursuing justice will find themselves digging a grave for it. This passage from The Trial is worth pondering:

At this point the disadvantage of a judiciary system which, from the very beginning, sanctioned secrecy made itself felt. The officials were out of touch with the public, they were well enough equipped to deal with the ordinary run-of-the-mill type of case, for this kind of case would proceed almost under its own momentum and only needed an occasional push. But when faced with quite simple cases or especially difficult ones, they were often at a total loss, because they were continuously, day and night, hamstrung by their legal system and lacked a proper feeling for human relations. And in such cases that feeling was all but indispensable.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

If you happen to be one of those doe-eyed, trusting readers who thought there was no need for alternative media (but why would you be, if you’re reading such a cutting-edge, avant-garde magazine like ITF?) you ought to pay attention to the juicy details coming out of New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s investigation into the “pay-for-play” shenanigans that are rife in Radioland. According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, emails unearthed from the inboxes of Sony BMG Music Entertainment execs reveal that the record company shelled out airplane tickets, vacation packages, TV sets, DVD players, laptop computers, cash — even, God fordbid, blackjack games with Celine Dion — to radio station managers who spun the “right” songs.

Willing to play J-Lo’s “This Is Me … Then” until your listeners’ eardrums bleed? Help yourself to a 32-inch plasma TV. Wouldn’t mind spinning Celine Dion’s “I Drove All Night” a couple thousand times a day? Enjoy the travel package to Vegas. (But first, sign right here with your fictitious name and fictitious Social Security number for our fictitious listener contest.)

One station manager boiled it down in an email: “I’m a whore this week. What can I say?”

The folks at a mammoth record company like Sony BMG were not averse to begging and whining like a bunch of teenage groupies to get their songs on the radio. “What do I have to do to get Audioslave on WKSS this week?!!?” wrote one employee who was trying to hawk Audioslave “Like a Stone” to a Clear Channel station in 2003. “Whatever you can dream up, I can make it happen!!!” (Which makes you wonder: How many exclamation points do you need to sell a Britney Spears song?)

But the most bizarre email has to be the one sent by an Epic promotions employee to the person in charge of the record label’s call-in campaign. What, you may ask, is a “call-in campaign”? It seems that Epic would make its interns bombard radio stations with calls, posing as listeners and requesting their favorite songs — which happened to be the ones that the label was trying to promote. “You need to rotate your people,” the promoter complained to the intern wrangler. “My guys on the inside say that it’s the same couple of girls calling in every week and that they are not inspired enough to be put on the air. They’ve got to be excited. They need to be going out, or getting drunk, or going in the hot [tub], or going clubbing … You get the idea.”

It takes two to play, of course. If the record companies were giving out bribes, it seems that some radio stations were more than happy to take — and then some. In some of the emails released this week, senior staff members at Sony BMG’s Columbia Records expressed their fears that Clear Channel, the country’s largest radio station conglomerate, would boycott their label’s songs unless they ponied up more cash and gifts.

With the secret now out, will the music industry clean up its act? Judging from the amount of damage they’re taking so far, I wouldn’t hold my breath. (In response to the allegations, Sony BMG has sacked an executive at one of its labels and paid a $10 million settlement, an amount roughly equivalent to Gwen Stefani’s weekly dry cleaning bill.) That said, Spitzer’s office is now sniffing into the inboxes of the country’s other mega-sized radio and record companies, and perhaps more heads will roll. In the meantime, I think I’ll stick to free streaming audio. Try WFUV.org or Novaplanet.com — the former is listener-supported public radio, the latter is French but plays mostly American tunes (added benefit: you won’t understand the ads).

Now I’ll go enjoy the plasma TV I got for telling you that.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

This week’s Ann Coulter Award for Humane Foreign Policy goes to Congressman Tom Tancredo, Republican from Colorado, who, when asked on a radio show what the United States should do if terrorists got their hands on nuclear weapons, answered:

“Well, what if you said something like — if this happens in the United States, and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, um, you know, you could take out their holy sites …”

Did the esteemed member of Congress mean that the United States should send out a few B-2 bombers to flatten Mecca, the city considered by one-fifth the world’s population to be the holiest place on earth?

“Yeah. What if you said — what if you said that we recognize that this is the ultimate threat to the United States — therefore this is the ultimate threat, this is the ultimate response.”

The fourth-term congressman added, helpfully, that he was just “throwing out there some ideas.” (Al Qaeda’s Middle Eastern recruitment office immediately issued a statement saying they were glad for the help, Tom, and keep those ideas coming.)

Tancredo later issued a statement to clarify his earlier remarks, emphasizing that he did not “advocate” the destruction of Muslim holy sites, but that folks might as well give it some thought. “Among the many things we might do to prevent such an attack on America would be to lay out there as a possibility the destruction of these sites,” he said. On a related note, Tancredo reportedly has his sights set on the White House in ’08 (campaigning for it, not bombing it).

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

“To be in an 8-by-8 cell in beautiful, sunny Guantanamo, Cuba, is not inhumane treatment.”

—U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld

Guantánamo Bay is in the news again. First, F.B.I. agents claimed that they had seen military interrogators using “torture techniques,” including one prisoner being shackled to the floor for hours on end until he soiled himself and pulled out his hair. Then, a military investigation into the complaints, released yesterday, said that the treatment was “abusive and degrading” but did not amount to torture. Investigators could not corroborate the bathroom deprivation incident, but they did acknowledge that jailers used dogs to intimidate prisoners — just like at Abu Ghraib. The report also confirmed that one V.I.P. guest at Hotel Guantánamo was leashed and forced to perform dog tricks, dressed in a woman’s bra and ridiculed as a homosexual, and interrogated for up to 20 hours a day for about two months. These techniques were approved by the Pentagon, the report said. (I bet the convicted Abu Ghraib jailers wish they had thought of that one.)

I have to admit that I’m less than impressed by this report. According to Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt, who led the military investigation, 10 former interrogators were not interviewed because they were no longer in the military and would not answer questions. Nor did investigators interview an F.B.I. agent who claimed that prisoners were deprived of food and water in order to break them down during interrogations. The reason? The agent was apparently “difficult to find.” (If the U.S. military can’t find an F.B.I. agent, how do they expect to find a certain bearded terrorist on the Afghan-Pakistani border?)

Meanwhile, the game of semantics continues. First, it was “detainees” rather than “prisoners” — which makes them sound like they are being held at the border for misplacing their passports. Now it’s “abuse” rather than “torture.” Whatever you call it, it’s not going to make the rest of the world swallow it with a smile. You thought the “Don’t Dump My Holy Book in a Toilet” riots were bad? Wait till the folks back east hear about this one.

Another point: Why bother with torture now that many of these prisoners have been in Guantánamo for three years? It’s not like they have their fingers on the pulse of global terrorism anymore. What good is any information they could tell their interrogators at this date? Just think of it: When they were put behind bars, Bennifer were still one. ’Nuff said.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen