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“Just Following Orders”

Often enough, commentators talk about the prospect that some foreign prosecutors will open criminal cases against Americans involved in some of the Bush Administration’s criminal enterprises, such as the operation of the torture black sites. But such cases are not speculative. They are already pending, and the most advanced of them is now coming close to the conclusion of the trial phase. In Milan, Italian prosecutors are pursuing kidnapping and assault charges against 26 American officials—CIA officers, diplomats, and a military attaché—in connection with the seizure and torture of a radical Islamic cleric known as Abu Omar. According to some observers, the case will conclude by the end of the summer.

Now Robert Seldon Lady, the former Milan station chief of the CIA and a key defendant in the case, has surfaced with an extended interview in Il Giornale, an Italian newspaper.

According to a translation by the Associated Press, Lady has set up a defense that sounds remarkably familiar: he was just following orders.

”I am not guilty. I am only responsible for following an order I received from my superiors,” Lady was quoted as saying by Il Giornale. “It was not a criminal act. It was a state affair. I find consolation in reminding myself that I was a soldier, that I was at war with terrorism, and that I could not discuss the orders I received,” he was quoted as saying. “I have worked in intelligence for 25 years, and almost none of my activities in these 25 years were legal in the country in which I was carrying them out.”

From a number of reports, Lady was intensely critical within CIA circles of the proposed effort to snatch Abu Omar. As it turns out, Italian prosecutors were on the verge of arresting and prosecuting Abu Omar before the CIA interceded. Chief Italian prosecutor Armando Spataro stated that the criminal case against Abu Omar was demolished by the CIA action. But Lady opposed the action, noting that it would be understood by the Italians as a crime and would badly damage the relationship with a NATO ally which was supporting the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. It turns out that Lady assessed the situation with perfect accuracy. It’s a shame that his bosses in Langley didn’t listen to him. However, “only following orders” is also known as the Nuremberg defense, and the problem is that it is no defense at all.

Judges Above the Law

The chief judge of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals acted preemptively in an apparent effort to head off challenges to his colleague, torture lawyer turned judge Jay Bybee. On Friday, public interests groups in California filed a judicial misconduct complaint against Bybee based on his focal role in creating legal memoranda designed to protect torturers against criminal prosecution. Judge Alex Kozinski handed down a decision stating that judges of the court of appeals could not be held accountable for any crimes they may have committed before they came on the bench—at least not through the court’s own internal disciplinary mechanisms. Bybee had prepared the torture memoranda for the Department of Justice while his nomination to the federal bench was in the process of being cleared, and some critics have seen evidence of a quid pro quo arrangement under which he prepared the memoranda in order to get the appointment as a federal judge. Bybee is now the subject of a criminal investigation in the Spanish Audiencia Nacional—making him the first American federal appeals court judge to continue on the bench after becoming the subject of a criminal proceeding. John Roemer of the Daily Journal reports:(subscription required)

As pressure grows to discipline 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jay S. Bybee for drafting memos authorizing controversial interrogation practices, the circuit’s Chief Judge, Alex Kozinski, published an unusual misconduct order Wednesday that appeared to rule out any action against Bybee for activities he took before being appointed to the federal bench. The order, which doesn’t mention Bybee by name, cited a 1986 order by former Chief Judge James R. Browning considering whether federal judges can be disciplined by the federal courts for acts committed prior to their appointments to the judiciary. The short answer was no.

“The judicial branch has no constitutional role in considering the fitness of an individual to assume judicial office,” Browning wrote. “Congress noted the differing roles of the coordinate branches in relation to judicial fitness, and recognized that ‘because of the separation of powers principle established by the Constitution, these roles must remain separate.’”

The position advanced by Kozinski provides a parallel to arguments advanced by the Bush and Obama Administrations under which their operatives have complete immunity for criminal misconduct relating to the torture issue. Apparently, judges have immunity for their misconduct as well. As America’s legal system is evolving, those who exercise positions of privilege and power are not held to account for even the most serious violations of the criminal law. Accountability, it seems, is reserved strictly for the small fry.

García Lorca — For the Love of Green

Paul Cézanne, Le Mont Sainte-Victoire vu des Lauves (1902)

Verde que te quiero verde.

Verde viento. Verdes ramas.

El barco sobre la mar

y el caballo en la montaña.

Con la sombra en la cintura

ella sueña en su baranda,

verde carne, pelo verde,

con ojos de fría plata.

Verde que te quiero verde.

Bajo la luna gitana,

las cosas le están mirando

y ella no puede mirarlas.

Verde que te quiero verde.

Grandes estrellas de escarcha,

vienen con el pez de sombra

que abre el camino del alba.

La higuera frota su viento

con la lija de sus ramas,

y el monte, gato garduño,

eriza sus pitas agrias.

¿Pero quién vendrá? ¿Y por dónde…?

Ella sigue en su baranda,

verde carne, pelo verde,

soñando en la mar amarga.

Finish reading the poem here

Green, how I desire you, green.

Green wind. Green branches.

The ship upon the sea

and the horse in the mountains.

With the shade wrapped about her waist

she dreams on her balcony,

green flesh, a green coat,

with eyes of cold silver.

Green, how I desire you, green.

Beneath the gypsy’s moon,

all things follow her

yet she sees them not.

Green, how I desire you, green.

Big stars of frosted vapors

come with the fish of the shadows

that opens the path of daybreak.

The fig tree fondles its wind

with the sandpaper of its branches,

and the forest, cunning cat,

bristles its acrid thorns.

But who will come? And from where?

She remains on her veranda

green flesh, a green coat,

dreaming in the bitter sea.

Read the translation of William Logan here

–Federico García Lorca, Romance sonámbulo first published in Romancero Gitano (1928)(S.H. transl.)

Listen to a reading of the poem here:

Listen to Andrés Segovia perform the fandanguillo from Frederico Moreno Torroba’s Suite castellana:

Copernicus—Vita brevis

Johannes Vermeer, The Astronomer (1668)

Vita brevis, sensus ebes, negligentiæ torpor et inutiles occupationes nos pancula scire permittent. Et aliquotients scita excutit ab animo per temporum frandatrix scientiæ et inimica memoriam præceps oblivio.

The brevity of life, the failing of the senses, the numbness of indifference and unprofitable occupations allow us to know very little. And again and again swift oblivion, the thief of knowledge and the enemy of memory, makes a void of the mind, in the course of time, even what we learn we lose.

–Nicholas Copernicus, fragmentary scrap found among his papers (ca. 1540)

Did a Bush Justice Figure Obstruct the Renzi Investigation?

Why was Paul K. Charlton, the man appointed by George W. Bush in 2001 as U.S. attorney in Arizona, fired from his job in the immediate wake of the 2006 election? Charlton was pursuing a corruption investigation into G.O.P. Congressman Rick Renzi. Karl Rove and his acolytes in the White House were deeply concerned that information about the investigation could cost the G.O.P. a vital seat in the House. That fact seems clearly to have played a major role in the decision to fire Charlton. But it seems that political meddling with the Renzi case was not limited to Charlton’s firing.

Significant new information concerning the political shenanigans surrounding Charlton and the Renzi case has just surfaced. In October 2006, weeks before the election, Charlton got the go-ahead from Attorney General Gonzales to seek a wiretap of Renzi. The case against Renzi is now in the trial phase, and observers say that the wiretap does not appear to have yielded much to support the government’s case. Now it appears that there’s a reason for that. Murray Waas reports in The Hill:

In the fall of 2006, one day after the Justice Department granted permission to a U.S. attorney to place a wiretap on a Republican congressman suspected of corruption, existence of the investigation was leaked to the press — not only compromising the sensitive criminal probe but tipping the lawmaker off to the wiretap. Career federal law enforcement officials who worked directly on a probe of former Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.) said they believe that word of the investigation was leaked by senior Bush Administration political appointees in the Justice Department in an improper and perhaps illegal effort to affect the outcome of an election.

The leak went out at roughly the same time to a number of major newspapers covering the matter. Here’s how one of them—the Phoenix-based Arizona Republic reported it, quoting an unnamed senior Justice Department official. The Renzi case, he said,

“is not a well-developed investigation, by any means. A tip comes into the department. The department is obligated to follow up … and we do that. People are assuming there is evidence of some crime,” even though that is not necessarily true. The official added, “Be careful. I can confirm to you a very early investigation. But I want to caution you not to chop this guy’s (Renzi’s) head off.”

The newspaper noted that “the federal official would not discuss whether the Justice Department was being manipulated for political purposes. However, the official said it is unusual for the department to publicly acknowledge concerns about the accuracy of media reports.” The unnamed Justice official seems to have been a very busy beaver. The Arizona Republic story notes that he had contacted two other newspapers to persuade them that their stories about Renzi were wrong.

Except that the newspapers had accurately reported what was going on. It’s the unnamed Justice official whose account was wrong. He had claimed that the investigation had barely begun and did not rest on anything substantial. In fact the investigation had been going on for more than a year and had compiled a sufficient quantum of evidence to warrant seeking the attorney general’s okay for a wiretap. It’s obvious that the Justice official in question was spreading false accounts in order to save Renzi’s scalp in a closely-fought election campaign. It worked. Newspapers on the scent of the probe that led to Renzi’s indictment dropped it, suggesting the whole matter was simply “campaign trickery.” Renzi was reelected in 2006.

But there’s another aspect to these politically motivated leaks of fake information: they also clued the target to the existence of the criminal investigation. Here’s how Charlton put it in an interview with Waas: “Any time you have a wiretap up and the subject or the target becomes aware that there is an investigation, the value of the information you glean from that wiretap will almost certainly be greatly diminished.”

This means that the “Justice official” who leaked to the newspapers in question did not simply breach Department protocols, he may very well have committed a crime: obstruction of justice.

That leaves a big question: who is the leaker who disseminated disinformation to the papers to help out Renzi? The circumstances suggest that he was someone well versed on dealing with the press, who actually had information about the Renzi case and had partisan political motives. Waas notes that sources involved in the Justice Department’s internal probe of the U.S. attorneys firings, conducted jointly by the Office of Professional Responsibility and the Inspector General, concluded that the person must have been a political appointee. Their report casts suspicion directly on one individual: Brian Roehrkasse. The report notes that Roehrkasse approached then-head of the Criminal Division Alice Fisher and secured her authorization to be briefed about the probe. Roehrkasse was a highly partisan figure who later disseminated false information in a botched cover-up of the U.S. attorney scandal. (A flavor for Roehrkasse’s political guttersniping can be gleaned from this collection of emails exchanged with his friends Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling; I summarize issues with his conduct in “Fire Brian Roehrkasse.”) However, Attorney General Mukasey was so delighted with Roehrkasse’s facility with dissembling that he promoted him to Director of Public Affairs in 2007. Maybe it’s time for Mr. Roehrkasse to answer some further questions. Was he the “Justice official” who called the Arizona Republic, the New York Times, the Associated Press, and the Washington Post in a successful effort to get them to backtrack on their accurate reports about the Renzi case?

Political Prosecutions in the Bush Era: A Forum

While the collapse of the Justice Department’s prosecution of former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens and the criminal probe targeting the Department’s senior prosecutors responsible for political cases have gained some recent attention, the story of prosecutorial misconduct in high-profile political cases over the last eight years remains largely unexplored. On Friday, June 26, a forum in Washington will focus attention on these cases and will revive the call for Congressional probes and an internal accounting within the Justice Department.

Keynote Speaker: Rep. John Conyers, Chair, House Judiciary Committee

Presentations from:

Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), Chair, House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Courts

Hon. U.W. Clemon, former Chief U.S. District Court Judge (N.D. Ala.)

Hon. Don E. Siegelman, former Governor of Alabama

Hon. Oliver Diaz, former Justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court

Scott Horton, Contributing Editor, Harper’s Magazine

Hon. Eduardo Bhatia, Minority Whip, Senate of Puerto Rico

Nan Aron, President, Alliance for Justice

Gail Sistrunk, Executive Director, Project Save Justice

Andrew Kreig, attorney and investigative reporter

Friday, June 26, 2009, 8—11 a.m.

The National Press Club, Washington, D.C.

Lawyers’ Opinions and Crime

Remember when former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey insisted—in response to Congressional calls for accountability for the torture lawyers–that the notion that attorneys could be criminalized for writing a legal opinion was “absurd”? Of course, those who seriously tracked the issue recognized that Mukasey’s remarks were not serious. The Justice Department in fact regularly prosecuted lawyers for writing opinions, when it reckoned that the opinions were part of a larger conspiracy to commit a crime. Why would that same reasoning not apply to the case of the torture lawyers? In fact it would, and in fact, Congress expressly created a crime—conspiracy to torture—which covers it. The New York Times has reported on another recent case in which a group of tax lawyers and accountants and a foreign bank conspired to introduce a tax shelter product that they offered to their clients. The lawyers participated by issuing legal opinions, as the Justice Department stresses in its own press release covering the matter. So why is this not a perfect precedent justifying the criminal prosecution of the torture team? Major distinctions between the cases—torture is a vastly more serious crime than games with tax shelters, and the tax shelter case turns on issues of tax law as to which reasonable minds might differ, unlike the torture case—cut in favor of a prosecution of the torture lawyers. The decisive difference may simply be that the United States Department of Justice holds its own attorneys to a far lower standard of accountability than it holds ordinary attorneys. Ask the lawyers who head the Department’s own Public Integrity Section. They’re now the targets of a special prosecutor investigating their criminal misconduct. It’s revealing that the criminal probe into the misconduct of federal prosecutors in political cases occurred by special action of a federal court, not as a result of any internal action of the Justice Department itself. When complaints were brought to the attention of the Justice Department it consistently reacted the same way, sweeping them under the carpet. Often enough, we have to ask on which side of the law enforcement divide the Justice Department stands. The answer often disappoints.

Emerson’s Saadi

Saadi in His Rose Garden, from an early 17th century manuscript

Yet Saadi loved the race of men,—

No churl, immured in cave or den;

In bower and hall

He wants them all,

Nor can dispense

With Persia for his audience;

They must give ear,

Grow red with joy and white with fear;

But he has no companion;

Come ten, or come a million,

Good Saadi dwells alone.

Be thou ware where Saadi dwells;

Wisdom of the gods is he,—

Entertain it reverently.

Gladly round that golden lamp

Sylvan deities encamp,

And simple maids and noble youth

Are welcome to the man of truth.

Most welcome they who need him most,

They feed the spring which they exhaust;

For greater need

Draws better deed:

But, critic, spare thy vanity,

Nor show thy pompous parts,

To vex with odious subtlety

The cheerer of men’s hearts.

…

Whispered the Muse in Saadi’s cot:

‘O gentle Saadi, listen not,

Tempted by thy praise of wit,

Or by thirst and appetite

For the talents not thine own,

To sons of contradiction.

Never, son of eastern morning,

Follow falsehood, follow scorning.

Denounce who will, who will deny,

And pile the hills to scale the sky;

Let theist, atheist, pantheist,

Define and wrangle how they list,

Fierce conserver, fierce destroyer,—

But thou, joy-giver and enjoyer,

Unknowing war, unknowing crime,

Gentle Saadi, mind thy rhyme;

Heed not what the brawlers say,

Heed thou only Saadi’s lay.

‘Let the great world bustle on

With war and trade, with camp and town;

A thousand men shall dig and eat;

At forge and furnace thousands sweat;

And thousands sail the purple sea,

And give or take the stroke of war,

Or crowd the market and bazaar;

Oft shall war end, and peace return,

And cities rise where cities burn,

Ere one man my hill shall climb,

Who can turn the golden rhyme.

Let them manage how they may,

Heed thou only Saadi’s lay.

Seek the living among the dead,—

Man in man is imprisonèd;

Barefooted Dervish is not poor,

If fate unlock his bosom’s door,

So that what his eye hath seen

His tongue can paint as bright, as keen;

And what his tender heart hath felt

With equal fire thy heart shalt melt.

For, whom the Muses smile upon,

And touch with soft persuasion,

His words like a storm-wind can bring

Terror and beauty on their wing;

In his every syllable

Lurketh Nature veritable;

And though he speak in midnight dark,—

In heaven no star, on earth no spark,—

Yet before the listener’s eye

Swims the world in ecstasy,

The forest waves, the morning breaks,

The pastures sleep, ripple the lakes,

Leaves twinkle, flowers like persons be,

And life pulsates in rock or tree.

Saadi, so far thy words shall reach:

Suns rise and set in Saadi’s speech!’

And thus to Saadi said the Muse:

‘Eat thou the bread which men refuse;

Flee from the goods which from thee flee;

Seek nothing,—Fortune seeketh thee.

Nor mount, nor dive; all good things keep

The midway of the eternal deep.

Wish not to fill the isles with eyes

To fetch thee birds of paradise:

On thine orchard’s edge belong

All the brags of plume and song;

Wise Ali’s sunbright sayings pass

For proverbs in the market-place:

Through mountains bored by regal art,

Toil whistles as he drives his cart.

Nor scour the seas, nor sift mankind,

A poet or a friend to find:

Behold, he watches at the door!

Behold his shadow on the floor!

Open innumerable doors

The heaven where unveiled Allah pours

The flood of truth, the flood of good,

The Seraph’s and the Cherub’s food.

Those doors are men: the Pariah hind

Admits thee to the perfect Mind.

Seek not beyond thy cottage wall

Redeemers that can yield thee all:

While thou sittest at thy door

On the desert’s yellow floor,

Listening to the gray-haired crones,

Foolish gossips, ancient drones,

Saadi, see! they rise in stature

To the height of mighty Nature,

And the secret stands revealed

Fraudulent Time in vain concealed,—

That blessed gods in servile masks

Plied for thee thy household tasks.’

–Ralph Waldo Emerson, excerpts from Saadi first published in The Dial, Oct., 1842 in: Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 9, pp. 136-41 (Riverside ed. 1911).

How distant and strange the developments appear today in Saadi’s country and with his people. How alien to Americans. But there was a time when America’s intelligentsia was enraptured by the ancient legacy of Persian letters, and found much guidance in it. Emerson’s poem Saadi bears witness to that era. It is a fascinating portrait of one of the great poets and thinkers of the Persian world who was being “discovered” in the early nineteenth century in Europe and America, but it may not really be so much about Saadi, the historical personage. It’s also one of Emerson’s most important poems. Emerson has selected Saadi as the embodiment of the ideal poetic spirit, the disposition that he strives to uphold. And remarkably, he sees nothing tragic in Saadi’s life and writings. Instead he sees a man with a Zen-like mastery of the world about him. He lives a contemplative life (“Unknowing war, unknowing crime”) yet is not altogether a hermit. To the contrary, he is a man who engages the world about him, offering teachings and lessons, building friendships, experiencing love (”Yet Saadi loved the race of men,—/ No churl, immured in cave or den.”) But he keeps the dark side of life perpetually at bay. (“For Saadi sat in the sun,/And thanks was his contrition.”) In this poem, more even than in his essays on Representative Men, Emerson’s objective is to “draw characters, not write lives.” So the historical Saadi is not necessarily his objective. And indeed, we have to ask ultimately: is Emerson looking back to the historical Saadi for his portrait, or is he not in fact holding a mirror before himself, painting the Emerson he wishes to be? In a journal entry of 1843, he seems to admit as much—was this poem really about Saadi, or was it about me, he asks.

But to be sure, Emerson is deeply engaged with Saadi and his writings. And what he sees in them looks an awful lot like New England transcendentalism. In the third book of Saadi’s Gulistan (or Rose Garden), Emerson reads the tale of the young laborer who prefers to eat the fruits of his own work and disdains the bread offered him by the gregarious Hatim Tai. For him, this is a parable of self-reliance. Similarly the repeated admonitions to his readers to be satisfied with what they have and not warped by desire for needful things. (In Gulistan we see this for instance in the passage in which a young man obsesses about his want of shoes, only to go to the mosque for prayer and meet there a man with no feet.) Likewise at the outset of the fifth book, we read the story of the young maid who is found beautiful by the sultan, but homely by all others. Each of these passages of Gulistan finds an echo in the poem Saadi.

In the closing months of the American Civil War, Emerson, who had been taken for much of the prior twenty years with the study of the Persian, and particularly Sufi poets, was asked to write an introduction for a new translation of the Gulistan. It was a time of trouble, bringing steady news of friends and loved-ones who had fallen in the war. But it was also a time of hope in the promise of the future. In his journal, as Emerson notes the commission, he writes: “Saadi is the poet of friendship, of love, of heroism, self-devotion, joy, bounty, serenity, and of the Divine Providence.” But as the short essay progresses, Emerson decides to stress the upbeat and affirming aspect of Saadi as a writer and thinker: “The word Saadi means fortunate. In him the trait is no result of levity, much less of convivial habit, but first of a happy nature, to which victory is habitual, easily shedding mishaps, with sensibility to pleasure, and with resources against pain. But it also results from the habitual perception of beneficent laws that control the world, he inspires in the reader a good hope.” Like Martin Luther King Jr., the philosopher-poet of Shiraz believes that the “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” May the arc be hastened in its course.

Rumi’s Green-Winged Longing

The Ottoman Sultan Selim II receives the Persian ambassador in the palace at Edirne in 1567

This world of two gardens, and both so beautiful.

This world, a street where a funeral is passing.

Let us rise together and leave “this world,”

as water goes bowing down itself to the ocean.

From gardens to the gardener, from grieving

to wedding feast. We tremble like leaves

about to let go. There’s no avoiding pain,

or feeling exiled, or the taste of dust.

But also we have a green-winged longing

for the sweetness of the Friend.

These forms are evidence of what

cannot be shown. Here’s how it is

to go into that: rain that’s been leaking

into the house decides to use the downspout.

Finish reading Ghazal 1713 and examine a number of variant translations here

–Mawlānā Jalāl-ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (Rumi) (مولانا جلال الدین محمد رومی), Dīwān-e Shams-e Tabrīzī (یوان شمس تبریزی), vol. 4, Ghazal 1713 (ca. 1250 CE) (this text is based on a translation by John Moyne further developed by Coleman Barks)(میکشم میکشم آنکه برادرم کشت).

Obama Justice Department Loves Secrecy

More evidence of the Obama team’s repudiation of its commitment to transparency, this time as it tries to keep Dick Cheney’s darkest secrets. Today’s Washington Post reports (on page A17, which is where the paper generally buries the truly important news):

A federal judge yesterday sharply questioned an assertion by the Obama administration that former Vice President Richard B. Cheney’s statements to a special prosecutor about the Valerie Plame case must be kept secret, partly so they do not become fodder for Cheney’s political enemies or late-night commentary on “The Daily Show.” U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan expressed surprise during a hearing here that the Justice Department, in asserting that Cheney’s voluntary statements to U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald were exempt from disclosure, relied on legal claims put forward last October by a Bush Administration political appointee, Stephen Bradbury. The department asserted then that the disclosure would make presidents and vice presidents reluctant to cooperate voluntarily with future criminal investigations.

But career civil division lawyer Jeffrey M. Smith, responding to Sullivan’s questions, said Bradbury’s arguments against the disclosure were supported by the department’s current leadership. He told the judge that if Cheney’s remarks were published, then a future vice president asked to provide candid information during a criminal probe might refuse to do so out of concern “that it’s going to get on ‘The Daily Show’” or somehow be used as a political weapon.

Let’s focus a bit on this. The subject is Cheney’s FBI interview on the subject of the outing of a covert CIA agent. As it happens, that’s a felony, even if it’s done by a vice president. This is a matter of intense public interest and concern, particularly given a federal prosecutor’s decision to treat Cheney as an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal prosecution that secured the conviction of his chief-of-staff. It is a fair inference from Patrick Fitzgerald’s comments that he believed that Cheney was guilty of criminal conduct but believed that he had technical problems in building a case–or that political considerations weighed in opposition to it. Disclosure of the interview notes would give the public a strong sense of Cheney’s culpability. At a time in which Cheney has reasserted himself into the public sector, emerging as the principal spokesman of a disintegrating G.O.P., public interest in his possible involvement in a criminal conspiracy is hardly a matter of historical interest.

A career Justice Department spokesman is saying that Cheney’s secrets should stay secret because a vice president in the future might refuse to cooperate with a criminal investigation if he knew his remarks might make him the subject of public ridicule. Am I understanding that correctly? An elected public official fully understands that his or her conduct and statements in a criminal investigation may be exposed and—particularly if they prove to be false or misleading, or if they disclose criminal dealings—may subject him or her to public ridicule. That’s what we call democratic process.

The Bush Justice Department never saw things that way. It made historically unprecedented use of prosecutorial power as a political tool to influence elections and to implement its partisan political agenda. On the other hand, it viewed the White House as a site of executive prerogative, and it disdained entirely the notion of accountability. No surprise there. And no surprise that Steven G. Bradbury would be allergic to disclosure. This is the same Steven G. Bradbury who authored a series of torture memoranda, and in displays of characteristic cowardice kept them secret and then revoked the earlier torture memoranda just as he was packing his desk to leave. It’s easy to understand why Mr. Bradbury craves secrecy. Indeed, he apparently is having a very difficult time finding a job, and a full vetting of his conduct in office would make things even tougher for him.

But Jeffrey M. Smith, a career Justice Department attorney, claims that his new bosses adhere to the same reasoning and viewpoints as their predecessors. On this point we need to know more. Who are these nameless Obama Justice functionaries who bend before the idol of secret government? They really should have an opportunity to explain themselves before a Congressional committee. And it would have been better had they explained themselves before their confirmation. Obama came to Washington promising an era of transparency in government; Eric Holder promised to uphold this commitment in the Department of Justice. So far, their decisions reflect straight-line continuity with the abuses of the Bush regime. The litigation may be about Cheney’s dark secrets, but they’re obviously focused on their own dark secrets to come.

The solution for this problem is for Judge Sullivan to make his own assessment. If he upholds their conclusions, I’d be satisfied. I’d also be shocked. The arguments they have made in defense of secrecy are more evidence of the arrogance and intoxication of power.

WaPo Loses Its Top Web Columnist

For years, the best thing going at the Washington Post’s website has been Dan Froomkin’s “White House Watch” (originally called “White House Briefing.”) In fact, aside from the need to link to pieces from their print edition, there has been no other consistent reason to visit the website. Froomkin bored into the Bush Administration’s selling of the war with Iraq, its introduction of warrantless surveillance, and its treatment of prisoners, particularly the policies that encouraged torture and official cruelty. On each of these points, he was a strong counterpoint to the official editorial page voice of WaPo, which was an essential vehicle for selling the Iraq War and for soliciting support for Bush-era policies, even while it occasionally feigned criticism of them. With the arrival of the Obama team, Froomkin hasn’t let up for a second, a clear demonstration that he doesn’t play the partisan political games of old-media hacks like David Broder who clog the WaPo roster. Froomkin’s handling of the torture issue, among other things, consistently brought far deeper insights to the issues raised than the Post’s increasingly fact-challenged editorial page. Froomkin was particularly strong in discussing legal matters, a fact I link to his brother Michael, a prominent law professor. Froomkin’s work was heavily read and circulated. Indeed, as Glenn Greenwald notes, Froomkin was the author of three of the ten most closely followed columns published at WaPo. His work was consistently well regarded. So why would WaPo say good-bye to its premier web writer?

The answer to that question certainly lies with Fred Hiatt and his plans to push the WaPo editorial page to the Neocon right. Anyone in doubt about that should just have a glance at the line-up in today’s paper: Charles Krauthammer, Paul Wolfowitz, David Ignatius, all in a coordinated attack on Obama for not intervening in Iran, plus Michael Hayden, telling us that we will all die in our sleep if torture-mongers are held accountable for their crimes. Alone among the voices at WaPo, Froomkin has had the temerity to remind the Neocons of their mistakes and call them on their falsehoods. Charles Krauthammer, for instance, recently threw a fit when Froomkin dissected his use of the intellectually dishonest ticking-bomb scenario. Froomkin noted that the ticking-bomb scenario was a fiction from the world of Hollywood. Which is true: the scenario has never occurred in the totality of human experience. Krauthammer recently made plain what he was up to when he praised Fox News for engineering an “alternate reality.” Unable to refute Froomkin, Krauthammer used the approach of a bully. He called Froomkin “stupid,” and from that point it seems Froomkin’s days at WaPo were numbered. Froomkin’s departure accentuates a clear trend: WaPo’s opinion pages are emerging as a Neocon remainder bin. William Kristol found harbor there after his New York Times op-ed column went unrenewed, and unknown Neocon chatterboxes regularly find a hearty welcome in its pages. The dismissal of Froomkin seems doubly curious given the WaPo editorial page’s notorious problem with factually inaccurate columns over the last eight years. The best-known problems have been on the right side of the ledger, with Neocons selling a war with Iraq and my favorite Tory, George Will, embarrassing himself with bogus claims on global warming. Froomkin has had no issues with his accuracy–indeed, his accuracy seems to drive the Neocons nuts.

WaPo’s makeover continued this week as the paper lent a helping hand to their favorite floundering lunatic dictator, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. On Monday, Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty published an op-ed in which they wade into the Iranian election controversy. “The election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people,” they argue. They make this remarkable claim on the basis of a poll they supervised, taken before the launch of the Iranian election campaign, showing that Ahmadinejad had 33.8% of the total vote—a fact that hardly supports their thesis and which they chose to spike in their account, without being called on the deception by the WaPo editors. In the meantime, returns showing a greater than 100% voter turnout in thirty Iranian towns, and statistical analysis of released partial returns, confirms “moderately strong evidence of electoral fraud,” as Walter Mebane has written. (Not that you’ll read much about that in WaPo, of course. Its news coverage of developments in Iran has been pathetic.)

There’s no doubt that Froomkin’s pieces, which frequently raked the Neocons over the coals and challenged some of their counter-factual op-eds, were a thorn in the side of the forces that shape opinion at the paper. And that without a doubt cost him his job. But it cost WaPo its best web columnist.

The Jump Artist: Six Questions for Austin Ratner

Austin Ratner has just made his debut as a novelist with a remarkable work based on the tragedy-filled life of Philippe Halsman, the iconic American photographer of the post-war years. The work documents a triumph of human spirit over tremendous adversity. I put six questions to Austin Ratner about his book.

1. Your novel focuses on Philippe Halsman, a New York photographer whose work gained international repute in the forties and fifties, but you write that your work is not so much a biography as a tribute to Halsman, just as Rodin’s sculpture of Balzac is a tribute rather than an example of verisimilitude. But your novel is filled with a vast collection of meticulous historical details. How did you settle on Halsman as a subject, and how do you distinguish historical detail from fiction in your approach to him?

Austin Ratner

I had Halsman’s famous photograph of Einstein hanging in my bedroom as a kid. (I was a nerd.) It’s the photo Halsman took at Princeton in 1947 during their conversation about the atom bomb, where Einstein told Halsman, rather ominously, “As long as there is man, there will be war.” But I didn’t know it was Halsman who took the photo until 2002, when I stumbled across a reference to the “Austrian Dreyfus Affair.” I learned then about Halsman’s photography and that Halsman suffered something very tragic early in his life before he went on to make these photographs for Life magazine that typified the outlook of postwar America—happy, funny, sexy, full of joie de vivre. And he made all these exuberant pictures of famous people jumping in the air too. Here was an individual who seemed to embody the ravages of the history of the twentieth century and also the miraculous healing and progress that that century saw. And his story was more or less unknown. I was fascinated.

I was careful to try to honor the facts as much as I could in the telling of it, because the full Halsman story has never been told at length in English, and because lies, rumors, and misunderstandings are what got Halsman into trouble in the first place. I worked with grad students to translate archival newspaper articles and a book of Halsman’s letters from 1930. I was interested first and foremost in his subjective experience, his inner life, and that is where the imagining comes in most of all. Even letters can’t get at the totality of inner life and subjective experience in the same way a novel can.

2. The core of your story is a recounting of Halsman’s trial on charges of patricide in Innsbruck in 1928-29—showing how Halsman is effectively denied justice, notwithstanding the international outcries against the wrongs that were done to him. You deal with the trial in great detail, focusing particularly on the role of the psychiatric opinion. Why so much focus on legal process and the role played by health care professionals?

A trial naturally dramatizes revelation and memory. Past events come out in the war between prosecution and defense rather than in meandering flashbacks. And that war in court for me was also a symbolic apparatus to represent the civil war of the psyche, as in the Kafka novel The Trial. We all have judges, prosecutors, and defenders in our minds. Even though Halsman was innocent of murder, I’ve supposed he suffered inner conflict, that he had some variety of “survivor guilt,” for instance, so that even as he was falsely accused in a court of law he maybe was also falsely accusing himself of having been unkind to his father or an inadequate steward of his father’s well-being. In many ways, it’s really a father-and-son story more than anything.

I was also interested in the idea of law as a rational order of thinking and in the way emotions distort that rationality, the way that distorted thinking can derail an individual person’s life or the life of a whole continent as it did in Europe under Nazism. The Halsman trial was a breakdown of the rational legal process under the pressure of fear and xenophobia. It’s a phenomenon highly relevant to certain things going on today.

I didn’t purposely focus on doctors in the novel. It so happened that historically Karl Meixner, a forensic pathologist who later acquired a reputation as a “radical Nazi,” was a key witness for the prosecution. It’s a grisly historical fact that he removed Philippe’s father’s head and displayed the head in court. It ended up in a jar at the University of Innsbruck and remained there for sixty years.

3. You completed an M.D. at Johns Hopkins before writing your novel. Do you intend to practice as a physician as well as write? How does your medical experience affect your writing?

A friend from med school recently wrote to me to say he started reading the book and that the prison scenes reminded him of his days at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Don’t laugh until you’ve had a lecture on transcriptional activation of zinc-finger proteins in the basement of the Pre-Clinical Teaching Building.

I co-wrote a physiology textbook for medical students that was published in 2005, but I don’t practice and don’t plan to. But medicine has definitely informed my outlook on human beings as a writer of fiction. A physician is comfortable with the idea of human nature in a way that an English major steeped in the works of Derrida is not. I like to write about human nature even though devotees to the postmodern creed might find that notion old-fashioned. I’m also interested in themes of illness and death and how people respond. Doctors are on the front lines of the ancient conflict between humanity and the second law of thermodynamics. Writers are engaged in a rear guard action in the same conflict, or they ought to be.

4. You call your work The Jump Artist and that clearly refers to Halsman. How do you come by this title, and what do you mean by it?

On one hand the title refers to Halsman’s photographs of people jumping in the air. Halsman noticed that when he photographed comedians—like Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis—they would almost automatically jump in the air. (I guess in the 1950s that was funny.) Then he started asking everyone, Marilyn Monroe and comedians, but also the most staid people in the world, to jump for him, people like Mrs. Edsel Ford, Richard Nixon, Judge Learned Hand, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. He felt that jumping removed inhibitions. As it happens the real historical Halsman was himself a great leaper who could turn a somersault in the air.

Metaphorically, the title refers to, I guess you could say, Halsman’s capacity for reinventing himself. He had to start over again and again. After the trauma of the affair in Austria, which had driven him to attempt suicide, he moved to Paris, learned the language and became a huge success as a photographer. Then the Nazis came after him again, and he fled to New York with basically the clothes on his back and had to start over from scratch. In the end he was fluent in six languages, a trained electrical engineer, a photographer, an author, and a damn good self-publicist. He was a person who seemed to lift himself up by his own bootstraps, like Baron Munchausen. He never gave up, even when the world was crashing down around him.

5. Clearly Halsman is able to overcome adversity repeatedly and despite all odds to make a success of himself (though he questions that), but much of his challenge involves the way he reconciles himself to his past. Plainly the experience of his father’s death was painful, and it haunts him to the last lines of the novel. How does Halsman manage to cope with these memories without being overwhelmed by them?

I know from researching his life that Halsman suffered and felt depressed even many years after the tragic events in the Alps, but he had a brilliant wit and a love of life too. I think that for a suffering person to elevate himself above his suffering and be joyous is an art. I suppose you can’t erase painful memories, maybe you can’t even erase the distorted patterns of thought that pain inspires. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube—that’s that second law of thermodynamics. (My older son, who is four, has tried. To put the toothpaste back in.) In that case I think you have to try to navigate the dangers of negative emotion, like Odysseus navigating past Scylla and Charybdis, and the only way you can do that is to try to know the danger and the emotion and its geography and architecture. I also find Jameson Irish Whiskey to be useful. But Halsman never touched alcohol. All the more reason to honor him with the name “jump artist.”

6. Halsman’s artistry as a photographer seems to turn in part on a mastery of technical things, but also on having an eye for the right moment and the right image that ultimately made his photographs—like the cover shot of Marilyn Monroe—iconic. This skill of capturing the moment seems both an art and a curse. Is that a fair summary of the “persistence of memory” theme that dominates your last chapter?

Halsman describes how he got the Marilyn shot in an article in Popular Photography in 1953. It seems he had a good sense for how to make her feel what she needed to feel in order to look like that. He and his assistant and a Life reporter were all flattering her and competing for her attention. Marilyn needed to be loved, and Halsman understood that about her. I think he understood other people’s vulnerabilities because he knew what it was to be vulnerable. In that sense, yes, his skill with his subjects may have come at a cost. I have certainly supposed this to be the case in my fictional re-creation of him. Marilyn told him about her own tragic past at her photo shoot that day in L.A., and she appears in that last chapter of my book as an emblem of psychological damage. Memory can persist in a painful and destructive way. But “The Persistence of Memory” is also the title of a Salvador Dalí painting. Dalí and Halsman collaborated together on a photograph called “Dalí Atomicus,” which shows Dalí jumping in the air with a bunch of flying cats, and Halsman shared Dalí’s ability to turn the horror of life, self, and time into art and comedy. Whereas Einstein seemed to gaze into the abyss when he looked into Halsman’s camera and thought about the atomic age, Dalí’s idea of the atomic age caused him to leap into the air with a bunch of flying cats. So I like to think that the somewhat gloomy title of the last chapter also holds the key to transcendence.

Operation Pinwale

Candidates Obama and Biden were quick to castigate the Bush Administration’s love for warrantless surveillance of American citizens in the alleged interests of national security. In fact, they were quick to use the label that actually applies to this conduct: “illegal.” But in office, their attitudes seem curiously transformed. Eric Holder, at an appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, turned semantic summersaults to avoid calling the intrusive practices unlawful. And his Justice Department seems to have adopted a curiously lax attitude towards enforcement of the law limiting government surveillance. In fact, their conduct seems remarkably similar to that of the Bush team.

These facts were highlighted yesterday in a strong article by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times.

Since April, when it was disclosed that intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency’s ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation….

He said he and other analysts were trained to use a secret database, code-named Pinwale, in 2005 that archived foreign and domestic e-mail messages. He said Pinwale allowed N.S.A. analysts to read large volumes of e-mail messages to and from Americans as long as they fell within certain limits — no more than 30 percent of any database search, he recalled being told — and Americans were not explicitly singled out in the searches. The former analyst added that his instructors had warned against committing any abuses, telling his class that another analyst had been investigated because he had improperly accessed the personal e-mail of former President Bill Clinton. Other intelligence officials confirmed the existence of the Pinwale e-mail database, but declined to provide further details.

The NSA insists that this is all innocent error. That excuse is getting very tired and increasingly unbelievable. At this point the abuses are so wide sweeping and so systematic that it’s hard not to conclude that they have official approval if not encouragement. We wouldn’t have these problems if we had effective Congressional oversight. For eight years that has been lacking. On the Senate side, Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has promised that her committee will start taking its mandate seriously. But when confronted with the Risen-Lichtblau story yesterday, Feinstein insisted that as far as she knew, the NSA was not violating the rules on e-mail surveillance. Feinstein’s idea of oversight appears to rest on accepting the claims of senior NSA functionaries. But that is the same negligent-to-complicit approach to oversight taken by her predecessor, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kans.).

This points to another problem. If the NSA is engaged in the sort of conduct that Risen and Lichtblau describe, and it’s doing this in conformity with law, then something’s terribly wrong with the law. Every time it was caught engaged in illegalities, the NSA demanded that the law be changed to legalize its invasions of the privacy of American citizens. It consistently got 90% of what it asked for, and continued to act as if it had gotten everything. The Times editorializes on this problem as well:

The 2008 expansion of FISA is a deeply flawed law. Congress needs to repeal it and re-examine, carefully this time, what powers the government really needs to eavesdrop on Americans and what limits and safeguards need to be placed on those powers.

The 2008 FISA bill went too far, and it’s now high time to start restoring civil liberties. It’s also time to insist that Congress begin at long last to provide meaningful oversight.

A Crisis in Theocracy

Several readers have asked what I meant in saying that “The myth of the Islamic Republic has been shaken by its roots.” Let me unpack this a bit. At the core of the state created following the 1979 revolution was an attempt to update the political theology of Shi’a Islam. A theocratic model in which a religious figure was to be installed as Supreme Leader with ultimate political authority was balanced in two ways. First, the Expediency CouncilCouncil of Experts was created as a body of religious experts to select the Supreme Leader and potentially also remove him or check his exercise of power. Second, an elected presidency and parliament were also created. The president exercises the executive powers not given to the Supreme Leader, and the parliament is the legislative body. The whole concept of the system involves a democratic model which is subject to theocratic limits, with the balance being struck consistently in favor of the theocracy. The myth of the Islamic Republic—and I am using the term myth in the sense of political philosophy, not necessarily as a disparaging term–is that this is an updating of the medieval models, serving to imbue the government with the legitimacy of popular consent. But current events point to the system’s inherent fault line: what happens when the democratic mandate cannot be reconciled with the theocratic leadership? Moreover, what happens when the theocratic leaders attempt a coup d’état to remove the democratic component of the government and install their own puppet? We’re witnessing a severe stressing of this system now, and it reveals a real allocation of power which is at odds with the theoretical one. The radical clerical party appears to hold all the cards, and the constitutional checks on their power so far appear ineffective.

Reza Aslan is reporting now that maneuvers are underway within the Expediency CouncilCouncil of Experts—that its chair, Rafsanjani, has convened a meeting in the city of Qom. This could be a momentous event, and in any event, it is threatening to Ali Khamenei, the current Supreme Leader. But together with the strong and rather underappreciated statement against the elections issued by the most senior of the ayatollahs, Montazeri, it also shows that the fissure lines are not simply between the reformers and the clerical party, but even within the clerical party. Reza Aslan discusses these developments with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow here:

Also note that the Ahmadinejad government has been caught photoshopping again. It took photographs of yesterday’s pro-Ahmadinejad rally and manipulated them to make the crowds look as big as those which swelled Tehran at the anti-government rally. It’s now clear that notwithstanding all the blandishments his government could offer, Ahmadinejad is not as strong a draw as his opponents. And this fact is extremely telling in terms of the legitimacy of the claimed voting results.

Partisan Politics and the Accountability Commission

Notwithstanding commanding support in Congress and with the American public, the creation of an Accountability Commission is now being held up by the Obama White House. Critics of the concept have consistently argued that it would be “just politics,” a vehicle for Democrats to pursue political retribution against the Bush Republicans. But as I learned in an interview with the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, published earlier this week at The Daily Beast, the truth is just the opposite: pure partisan politics is the biggest obstacle to creation of a commission. Mayer told me that CIA chief Leon Panetta had argued strongly for creating a commission but was blocked by the President’s two senior political advisors, David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, who both believed that the Commission would drive the Party of No to create a massive stink. Obama’s affirmative agenda—in particular, his proposed health insurance reform–would suffer as a result. Panetta says he abandoned the effort in the face of their resolute tactical opposition.

The issue led to cognitive dissonance in Obama’s latest high-profile speech. At the National Archives, he insisted that “our existing democratic institutions are strong enough to deliver accountability.” Yet only seconds later, he was expressing concern that Congress would get bogged down in its study of the question. He can’t have it both ways. Obama is the consummate politician of reason, but on this point his explanations don’t add up. In fact, the Accountability Commission alternative is necessary precisely for the reasons he cites: it would allow the issue to be fully explored while it is removed from the to-and-fro of daily politics. It would insure that the issue would not complicate the handling of his own legislative agenda. Obama’s real reasons for opposing the initiative are pure partisan political tactics, and that can’t be sold so smoothly in a public address.

Across the Atlantic, in Britain, Prime Minister Gordon Brown reacted to pressure from Conservative lawmakers on Monday by agreeing to a formal inquiry much along the lines proposed. The New York Times reports:

After years of delay, the British government said Monday that it would go forward with a wide-ranging inquiry into the country’s role in the Iraq war, an issue that has caused deep political divisions and protest since American and British troops overran the country in 2003.

One of the major aims of the British inquiry is to assess the extent to which Britain was misled by the Bush Administration and how U.S. policies, including the torture and abuse of prisoners, spread to British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Given the sensitivities of the Special Relationship, Gordon Brown insists that the inquiry proceed confidentially—a demand that has infuriated many parliamentarians who had been pushing for the probe. Nevertheless, the British move shows a far more responsible reaction to the issues than have come so far from the Obama White House.

The concept of an Accountability Commission isn’t about to fade. In fact, developments this summer will put the spotlight on the question. On Friday, the Administration is required to release the CIA Inspector General’s report on the CIA’s implementation of the Bush Program. That report will show that the CIA was administering torture techniques in a fashion inconsistent with the guidance given by the Bush torture lawyers at the Justice Department—and that the latter kept changing their advice to approve what the CIA had in fact done. If fully released, the CIA IG report may contradict Vice President Cheney’s claims about “actionable intelligence” having been gained through the use of torture, and it may express the view that the torture techniques are unlawful, providing more evidence that the Bush figures who ran the program were warned in real time of the possible criminal law consequences of their conduct.

Later in the summer, the Justice Department’s own internal ethics probe will be released. It will detail that Vice President Dick Cheney was the man who drove the entire torture program, pressuring Justice Department lawyers to issue a stream of “get-out-of-jail” free cards to those who ran the program for him when they expressed concern about the prospect of prosecution. It will also show senior figures in the Justice Department behaving just like a bunch of mafia consigliere, fully cognizant of the fact that if their dealings are exposed, they may go to jail for them. They rest their hopes on pure politics to save themselves.

So far, Obama’s Justice Department is doing little to dispel the concerns raised by the Bush team about politically directed decisions. The most striking example of the Holder Justice Department’s ongoing politicization comes in precisely the area of torture accountability. Obama and his political advisors, applying a blatantly partisan political calculus, have now repeatedly expressed their view that there should be no criminal investigation of this issue. They say that Holder will decide these matters according to the law, but Holder seems fully prepared to take his political cues from the White House. That means, as John Dean has just pointed out in a typically insightful column, that a decision not to investigate has been taken by default.

Dean gives us a series of strong new arguments for accountability, taken from the late Samuel P. Huntington’s study of Latin America’s struggle to overcome its legacy of authoritarianism, The Third Wave. Here is Dean’s distillation of the Huntington thesis:

(1) “Truth and justice require it.” The Obama Administration “has the moral duty to punish vicious crimes against humanity.”

(2) “Prosecution is a moral obligation owed to the victims and their families.”

(3) “Democracy is based on law, and the point must be made that neither high officials nor [the] military … are above the law.” Citing a judge who was critical of a government amnesty proposal, Huntington added: “Democracy isn’t just freedom of opinion, the right to hold elections, and so forth. It’s the rule of law. Without equal application of the law, democracy is dead. The government is acting like a husband whose wife is cheating on him. He knows it, everybody knows it, but he goes on insisting that everything is fine and praying every day that he isn’t going to be forced to confront the truth, because then he’d have to do something about it.”

(4) “Prosecution is necessary to deter further violations of human rights by [future] officials.”

(5) “Prosecution is essential to establish the viability of the democratic system.” If the Republicans and Bush/Cheney apologists can prevent prosecution though political influence, democracy does not really exist.

(6) Even if the worst crimes are not prosecuted, “at a very minimum it is necessary to bring into the open the extent of the crimes and the identity of those responsible and thus establish a full and unchallengeable public record. The principle of accountability is essential to democracy, and accountability requires ‘exposing the truth’ and insisting ‘that people not be scarified for the greater good…’.”

There is no doubt that Axelrod and Emanuel are dispensing smart partisan political advice to Obama when they tell him to can the idea of an Accountability Commission and to block any criminal investigation. But their advice is also lethal to the nation’s democratic traditions and to our Rule of Law tradition. Obama’s presidency has so far been marked by a series of compromises in the interest of partisan political expediency. That is very far from what he promised his voters and the country.

The Fruits of Torture

Late yesterday further transcripts from Guantánamo emerged in the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act litigation. The Obama Administration reviewed and released a few new details from a group of hearings before the highly controversial Combat Status Review Tribunal (CSRT). This entity was set up in response to the Supreme Court’s conclusion that the Bush Administration violated Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions when it failed to conduct proceedings to determine the status of the individuals it was holding in Guantánamo. Some of the military lawyers who participate in it describe the CSRT as a farce designed to give an aura of legality to a kangaroo court. One of the most vehement critics was indeed a military judge who was forced to preside over one of these sessions. Justice Department lawyers have routinely refused to have anything to do with CSRT, viewing it as a legal toxic waste dump. One source of controversy has been the testimony of prisoners about how they were tortured. At several of the CSRT hearings, when prisoners were confronted with alleged confessions of criminal conduct, they stated that they had been tortured to get these confessions.

Torture-induced testimony is considered to be inherently unreliable. Beyond this, torture is a crime, and these statements would tend to inculpate the interrogators involved in criminal acts. But the Tribunal quite properly would not rely on the prisoner’s conclusions, and it insisted on questioning them about what was done to them that they called “torture.” When the Bush Administration first released these transcripts, all this information was censored on claimed grounds of national security.

The newly released transcripts offer us more information about the prisoners’ claims. But more importantly, they give us another chance to test the Bush Administration’s claims of secrecy. Just what exactly about the testimony of these prisoners could possibly jeopardize the security of the United States? We should start by noting the converse: keeping this testimony secret does damage the security of the United States, because it makes the entire process by which prisoners are held at Guantánamo appear to be arbitrary and unjust and undermines their credibility in the eyes of the world.

Here’s an example of one of the new unredacted passages from the testimony of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (“KSM”). The Tribunal president asks him if he made any statements because of torture. Here’s how he answers:

I ah cannot remember now [CENSORED] I be under questioning so many statements which have been some of them I make up stories just location UBL. Where is he? I don’t know. Then he tortured me. Then I said, yes, he is in this area or this is al Qaida which I don’t him. I said no, they torture me. Does he know you? I say don’t him but how come he know you? I told him I’m senior man. Many people they know me which I don’t them. I ask him even if he knew George Bush. He said, yes I do. He don’t know you, that not means its false. [CENSORED] I said yes or not. This I said.

So KSM is saying that he lied about the questions they asked to get them to stop torturing him. Is there anything surprising about that? It’s a standard response, for which thousands of examples can be found in human experience.

The real question is, why was this censored? First, it got in the way of the Bush Administration’s lies to the American public. The Bush mantra, most recently taken up by Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz, is that torture saves lives. They argue that real life is just like the Fox show “24.” Let Jack Bauer attach some electrodes to a terrorist, and he’ll get the information he needs to save Los Angeles. It undermines this fiction to learn that torture produces false answers. Second, the actual descriptions of the torture techniques used could wind up as exhibits to a criminal indictment of Bush Administration officials who authorized the torture. This is hardly idle speculation. In fact, criminal proceedings are underway in Spain, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Poland, each of which could quite plausibly result in an indictment of a Bush official or two. Someday even the U.S. Justice Department might decide that its mission includes enforcement of the criminal law even when its own staffers are the criminals.

We still don’t have the full picture, because much information has still been withheld due to an—almost certainly bad-faith—invocation of national security. But at this point, “national security” might mean this: we committed a crime, and if we divulge the details we may very well wind up being prosecuted.

The Ghosts of Gitmo

One hundred and forty days into his administration, Barack Obama remains haunted by the ghost of Gitmo. Not only is the camp still open and operating, but Obama’s claims to have ended the abuses for which the facility has gained notoriety around the world are increasingly disbelieved. And indeed, there is good reason not to believe them.

Consider the case of Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh Al Hanashi, who was pronounced dead on June 1—the fifth Guantanamo prisoner to die in captivity. The prisoner’s death was described as an “apparent suicide” by the camp commander. But U.S. authorities have maintained mysterious silence about the death, and those who have looked into it come away filled with skepticism and more questions. Here’s how the Associated Press characterized it:

A Guantanamo Bay detainee who left his cell to meet with military commanders as prisoner representative never returned, and was instead sent to a psychiatric ward where he died five months later, a former detainee recalled… The U.S. military has refused to say how Saleh allegedly killed himself in the closely watched ward. But the former detainee, Binyam Mohamed, said it wasn’t like him to commit suicide. “He was patient and encouraged others to be the same,” Mohamed said. “He never viewed suicide as a means to end his despair.” Even if it was suicide, Mohamed still classifies the death as “murder, or unlawful killing, whichever way you look at it,” saying that the U.S. had caused Saleh to lose hope by locking him up indefinitely without charges.

But there’s another detail to Saleh’s death that U.S. officials are particularly anxious to avoid discussing: it appears to be tied to practices that the Pentagon defends as “force-feeding” but other officials decry as “torture,” and that, no matter how you cut it, do not comport with accepted medical standards. Saleh is apparently one of seven inmates held in the psychiatric ward for the purpose of being exposed to what the Pentagon calls “force-feeding.”

In the current issue of Harper’s–which should be arriving in your mailbox soon—Luke Mitchell takes a close look at the issues surrounding the “force-feeding” program. Pentagon officials seem extremely eager not to be associated with it or to be quoted defending it, particularly if they are health care professionals. There’s a good reason for that. The techniques do not comply with the international standards for actual force-feeding, established in the World Medical Association’s Malta Declaration of 1991. Instead they have a darker and more distressing progeny. From the use of restraint chairs down to the specific brand of commercial diet supplement used by the doctors, the force-feeding techniques now in use at Guantanamo replicate the methods used by the CIA at black sites under Bush. At the black sites, those methods were not part of any medical regime. Instead, they were a part of a carefully designed torture regime, the very same regime that Obama claims to have abolished in his first executive order.

Pentagon spokespersons righteously defend the “force-feeding” program at Guantanamo as medically necessary to save lives. That’s a farce. In fact, this program is the last residue of the Bush-era torture system. Did it just claim another life on June 1? That’s a question that some apparently don’t want to have to answer. And two weeks later, the public continues to await a serious explanation of this death. The passage of time will not make the ultimate explanations more credible.

John Yoo’s Reckoning With Justice Draws Closer

On Friday, a federal judge in California handed down an important decision in a suit brought by law students at John Yoo’s alma mater, Yale University, against their most controversial alumnus. Sweeping aside Yoo’s objections, the court decided that the matter could proceed to trial. Read the court’s decision here.

Representing Jose Padilla and his mother, the Yale students brought a civil action for damages that Padilla suffered. Padilla was, they argued, tortured and mistreated as a result of legal memoranda that John Yoo wrote when he served as an official in the Bush Justice Department. Arguing for Yoo, the Obama Justice Department sought dismissal of the lawsuit, arguing the same legal propositions advanced by the Bush Administration. Their view is that officials of the Justice Department have immunity for official acts. That notion is widely accepted, but the issue here is whether the same notion of immunity applies when a government official engages in lawless and indeed criminal conduct of a particularly outrageous form that violates the rights of a citizen. Since the early days of the Republic, it was recognized that immunity did not go that far. In the view of the Bush team, however, now embraced by their successors, Justice Department officials have immunity that shields them against civil claims that arise from their criminal conduct, such as torture, kidnapping, renditions to torture, and warrantless surveillance. This might better be called the doctrine of official irresponsibility: it argues that government officials are entitled to disobey their oath to uphold the laws and Constitution, and in fact are entitled to break the criminal law with total impunity. The doctrine of official irresponsibility is not law, but rather just the opposite: it is an attempt to place personal prerogative above the law.

In seeking dismissal, Yoo argued that the case asked the courts to look at the president’s exercise of his war-making powers, and that the courts should butt out. But his principal argument was utterly predictable: state secrets. “Yoo contends that the Court should abstain from reviewing the alleged constitutional violations presented in this matter because the claims necessarily would uncover government secrets, thereby threatening national security.” The “secrets” here, of course, are of two sorts: first, the torture techniques used to turn Padilla into the human equivalent of an eggplant and second, the legal voodoo employed by Yoo in his efforts to justify Padilla’s torture and thus promise the torturers legal protection from criminal prosecution. But neither of these “secrets” are actually secret. Padilla was subjected to 21 months of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation that left him in a state of “post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation.” Detailed descriptions of the regime applied are actually in the public record. Similarly, over Yoo’s vehement objections, his memoranda were already released—and indeed, we learn they had even been repudiated by Yoo’s Bush Administration colleagues, in further secret memoranda filed just as they were packing to leave.

So just what sort of “government secrets threatening to national security” are implicated in the Yoo suit? Why, that would be the sort of “secrets” that reflect criminal conduct on the part of those involved in them and which would prove embarrassing and damaging to the reputation of their authors. In other words, they are not “secrets” at all, and the government’s claim has certainly been put forward–as usual–in bad faith.

The court properly saw through this fog bank. It also drew the correct initial assessment of Yoo’s attempted invocation of the doctrine of official irresponsibility.

Like any other government official, government lawyers are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their conduct…. Here, Padilla alleges that in Yoo’s highly-influential position, he participated directly in developing policy on the war on terror. The complaint specifies that in Yoo’s role as an advisor in the President’s War Council, he drafted legal opinions which lay out the legal groundwork for assessing the designation of individual enemy combatants and legitimized the unconstitutional treatment of those individuals once detained… Yoo also advised executive officials that military detention of an American citizen seized on American soil was lawful because, he claimed, the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations in this context.

The court relied on a number of precedents in which government lawyers were held accountable for rendering bad legal advice. However, it misses the substantial precedent relating specifically to the potential criminal liability of government attorneys for misstating the law relating to armed conflict, which was confirmed in United States v. Altstoetter. Still, the key principle is the one the judge flagged: “government lawyers are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their conduct.” It was a clearly foreseeable consequence of John Yoo’s malicious memo writing that individuals in government custody would be tortured, subjected to cruel, inhuman, and degrading conduct, and that some of them would die or suffer lifelong impairment as a result. If John Yoo suffers no more than a civil suit as a result, he’s gotten off very lightly indeed. Lawyers in the same position before him were sent to prison for doing just what he did.

Keller’s Iranian Insights

The developments in Iran since Friday expose the country’s fracture lines. They have demonstrated graphically what some have contended for years, namely that there is a growing divide between its government (headed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, backed by the nation’s radical clerical leadership) and the educated and commercial classes. The latter had supported two anti-Ahmadinejad candidates at the polls. We may never know exactly how the Iranian people voted in that election, but we know there was a record turnout, that concern about the outcome was feverish, and that the governing elites felt acutely threatened by the vote. It will take some time to assess what all of this means for the United States and its foreign policy initiatives, but one thing is extremely clear: large parts of the Iranian nation—the urban elites which in a functioning democracy would be expected to carry the government—have a much more positive view of the United States than Ahmadinejad and his clerical backers. That’s an essential fact for American policy makers in the months going forward.

But sorting through the coverage of the developments in Tehran—which in the mainstream U.S. broadcast media was astonishingly weak—I was puzzled by a featured piece of analysis by Bill Keller and Michael Slackman in the New York Times. Keller and Slackman see the outcome as the confirmation of Ahmadinejad, who now climbs closer to paramount power in Iran as the face of the clerical interests:

Asked about speculation that in his second term he would take a more moderate line, he smirked, “It’s not true. I’m going to be more and more solid.” He can afford to be. With the backing of the supreme leader and the military establishment, he has marginalized all of the major figures who represented a challenge to the vision of Iran as a permanently revolutionary Islamic state.

Really? It’s true that the Supreme Leader heralded Ahmadinejad’s victory as a “divine assessment” on Friday. Today, however, under strong pressure from surging crowds in the streets and critics high in the clerical establishment, he appears suddenly to acknowledge that the assessment might well have had a different source. In any event, I suspect that images of Ahmadinejad’s triumphant press conference—in which he proclaimed peace, order, and the rule of law as his thugs beat students and middle-class businessmen senseless in the streets of Tehran—will come back to haunt him as long as he still clings to power. Keller’s coronation anthem to Ahmadinejad may be premature.

A more prudent assessment would, I think, make the following points. The recent developments exposed the fault lines both within Iran’s governing elites and the population in general. They reveal that Ahmadinejad’s provocative foreign policy and his pursuit of nuclear power (and warheads) are not popular with powerful elements within society. They reveal a strong taste for personal freedom and reforms among many groups—students, women, and what the Iranians call the “bazaar,” namely middle-class businessmen. The rigging of the election was certainly supported by the highest clerical levels and was designed to silence these political opponents and heighten the prestige and authority of Ahmadinejad. But the fraud may have been too crudely carried out to allow this objective to be achieved. In any event, however, it is unlikely that this election will be unwound, because that would severely threaten the power and authority of the clerical leaders. It will be key to see what happens in the next few weeks with Mir Hossein Mousavi—will Ahmadinejad keep him in prison? Will be continue his defiance? Will he be forced into exile? Similarly, what happens with critics like Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the chair of the Expediency Council, is also important. Harsh action against the reform camp will, however, signal weakness or perceived vulnerability and not strength in the government in Tehran.

Reza Aslan says that what we’re watching is a slow-moving military coup d’état, in which the Revolutionary Guard are consolidating control over the apparatus of government. That may well be so, but I think it would be prudent to see what their physical control over real estate really means. Are they flexing political muscle? Are they willing to operate against the will of the Supreme Leader or president?

The Iranian economy also presents a severe test for any new government. The global economy is in trouble, but Iran stands to be one of the most adversely affected nations. There will be inflation, soaring unemployment, and shortages of goods. The constituencies to which Ahmadinejad and the clerical party play—the urban poor and rural Iranians—are likely to be the hardest hit, and this is likely to loosen the government’s hold on its last redoubt. The clerical leadership has touted the nation’s political freedom, though serious analysts have consistently noted that this is more appearance than substance. But expect the space previously allocated for free political expression to shrink dramatically—the developments of the weekend already send a strong signal to that effect.

In any event, speaking of a “triumph” of Ahmadinejad is naïve. He came to power as the candidate of the clerical extremists who actually run the country. Mousavi would have presented a threat to the power of the radical clerical party, and it’s now apparent to all observers that they stepped beyond the bounds of Iran’s curious theocratic constitution to stamp that out. So the upshot of the election is not really the ascendency of Ahmadinejad, but rather that Supreme Leader Khamenei is jealous of his power and senses his vulnerability. Over the last four days, the curtain has been drawn back to show how far he will go to continue his unchecked exercise of that power. Changes in Iranian nuclear policy and foreign policy are unlikely. More likely is that Tehran will attempt to build the popular perception of foreign threats as a means of coping with rising domestic unease caused by the faltering economy.

The global economic meltdown was always certain to produce flashspots, and Iran clearly will be one of them. What happened this weekend is likely to flare again until change comes to Iran. The myth of the Islamic Republic has been shaken by its roots.

Dryden/Handel—The Warrior’s Revenge

Paolo Veronese, Alexander at Persepolis (detail)(1571)

“War,” he sung, “is toil and trouble;

Honour, but an empty bubble;

Never ending, still beginning,

Fighting still, and still destroying:

If the world be worth thy winning,

Think, O think it worth enjoying;

Lovely Thais sits beside thee,

Take the good the gods provide thee” —

The many rend the skies with loud applause;

So Love was crowned, but Music won the cause. The prince, unable to conceal his pain,

Gazed on the fair,

Who caused his care,

And sighed and looked, sighed and looked,

Sighed and looked, and sighed again;

At length, with love and wine at once oppressed,

The vanquished victor sunk upon her breast.

…

Now strike the golden lyre again;

A louder yet, and yet a louder strain.

Break his bands of sleep asunder,

And rouse him, like a rattling peal of thunder

Hark, hark! the horrid sound

Has raised up his head;

As awaked from the dead,

And amazed, he stares around.

Revenge, revenge! Timotheus cries,

See the furies arise;

See the snakes, that they rear,

How they hiss in their hair,

And the sparkles that flash from their eyes!

Behold a ghastly band,

Each a torch in his hand!

Those are Grecian ghosts, that in battle were slain,

And, unburied, remain

Inglorious on the plain:

Give the vengeance due

To the valiant crew.

Behold how they toss their torches on high,

How they point to the Persian abodes,

And glittering temples of their hostile gods. —

The princes applaud, with a furious joy,

And the king seized a flambeau with zeal to destroy;

Thais led the way,

To light him to his prey,

And, like another Helen, fired another Troy.

–John Dryden, Alexander’s Feast; Or, the Power of Music: An Ode in Honour of St Cecilia’s Day pts v, vi (1697)

John Dryden composed two odes to mark St Cecilia’s Day, and each has a special role among his poems and within the literature of Restoration England. The works are sublime, masterpieces of the poet’s art, and also packed with meanings–some which sit right on the surface and some which require extensive mining operations to open up. I took a crack at the first of the St Cecilia’s Day odes here–it provides strong evidence, I think, of Dryden’s Pythagorean attitudes about mathematics, science and religion. The second, usually called Alexander’s Feast is more challenging–in fact, it’s full of contradictions. It’s easy to appreciate this work, and I’m sure most of his contemporary readers would have appreciated it, as an exhibition of Dryden’s genius as a classicist. He’s working a fairly obscure account from the life of Alexander the Great. The story is a simple one. After his defeat of the Persian king, in 330 BCE, Alexander seizes the capital of Persepolis. A lavish banquet is given for Alexander, his concubine Thais and his generals, at which the soldier-musician Timotheus sings. Alexander is drunk, as most of the generals, and Timotheus’s singing exercises great power over them. At a critical moment, Timotheus calls for revenge against the vanquished Persians on behalf of those Greeks who fell in the battles that led to the capture of Persepolis. Alexander, worked into a lather, orders the destruction of the city. (Most of this can be found in section 17 of Diodorus of Sicily’s Library of World History (ca. 50 BCE), which is plausibly Dryden’s source).

Almost from the moment of its appearance, this ode was recognized as a masterwork. His contemporaries talk about it and it makes appearances in other works (in an essay by Alexander Pope, for instance, and in Richardson’s novel Clarissa). All of them praise Dryden and his poetic abilities. Pope calls Dryden the Timotheus of the age, the man whose sense of drama and control of the emotive in literature can command the sensibilities of society. But there’s something very strange about this, and indeed about the subject matter. This is an ode in honor of St Cecilia, after all, the patron saint of music, whose legendary invention of the organ is referenced in the final lines (”the Vocal Frame”). How does it pay tribute to a saint to tell the story of a group of soldiers who get drunk at an orgy and then burn down a city they have captured as an act of vengeance against a foe they have vanquished and promised protection? There is not an iota of grace or dignity in the story. And even the classical accounts reflect Alexander paying a later visit to Persepolis and lamenting the stupidity of his actions in laying waste to Xerxes’s palace. Moreover, would Dryden really want to be compared with Timotheus, who uses his gifts in such a morally irresponsible way? So we come to the conundrum of Alexander’s Feast. Just what was John Dryden thinking?

I think there are two explanations for this. One is Dryden the classicist. His writing is not designed to glorify, but to demonstrate the foibles of the human condition–and indeed, to show that even the greatest of humans (Alexander) can be vain and foolish. But he is also demonstrating the power of the bacchanal, a rite associated with excessive drink, sex and a certain kind of music, whose hallmark was excess–and crime. Characteristically, we see the entrance of the Furies (”See the furies arise;/See the snakes, that they rear,/How they hiss in their hair,”) which marks the suspension of reason and the rule of violent emotion. I review Dryden’s use of these same images and his understanding of them, especially of the emotive power of certain kinds of music, in a discussion of his reworking of Sophocles’s Oedipus here.

The other explanation is more political and ironic. Dryden is the master of the use of classical images as a double-edged sword. His audience may well understand the images as laudatory of the great and noble in antiquity, and as enhancing the power and authority of the monarchy. But just under the surface is a subtly seditious Dryden, showing us that the king, alas, is just a man, and as capable of being as vain, stupid and misled as any man. And Alexander’s Feast is an exposition of the human frailties of great men, in the end, it shows us a great man at one of his monumentally low points. Imagine a performance filled with Baroque pomp and glamor. And imagine Dryden snickering through the performance, just off stage.

Dryden’s initial composition was given to Jeremiah Clark to compose, but no trace of the besotted Clark’s working of the piece has survived. Forty years later, however, it came to the attention of a very worthy composer, George Frederick Handel, whose treatment of these texts gave them a sort of immortality. Handel misses the ironic element, perhaps, but he is focused on the dramatic possibilities of the lines. I pull out two passages here which are the finest examples of his high Baroque coloration, especially the pivotal aria, “Revenge.”

Listen to Soprano Nancy Argenta sing the aria “War, he sung, is toil and trouble” and then Stephen Varcoe sing the aria “Revenge, revenge, Timotheus cries” from George Frederick Handel’s setting of John Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast:

Proust—Memory and the Foods of Childhood

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Thé et Brioche (1763)

Mais, quand d’un passé ancien rien ne subsiste, après la mort des êtres, après la destruction des choses, seules, plus frêles mais plus vivaces, plus immatérielles, plus persistantes, plus fidèles, l’odeur et la saveur restent encore longtemps, comme des âmes, à se rappeler, à attendre, à espérer, sur la ruine de tout le reste, à porter sans fléchir, sur leur gouttelette presque impalpable, l’édifice immense du souvenir.

Et dès que j’eus reconnu le goût du morceau de madeleine trempé dans le tilleul que me donnait ma tante (quoique je ne susse pas encore et dusse remettre à bien plus tard de découvrir pourquoi ce souvenir me rendait si heureux), aussitôt la vieille maison grise sur la rue, où était sa chambre, vint comme un décor de théâtre…

When from the distant past nothing remains, after the beings have died, after the things are destroyed and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, yet more vital, more insubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of everything else; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the immense architecture of memory.

Yet again I had recalled the taste of a bit of madeleine dunked in a linden-flower tea which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long await the discovery of why this memory made me so happy), immediately the old gray house on the street where her room was found, arose like a theatrical tableau…

–Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann (1913) in: À la recherche du temps perdu vol. 1, p. 47 (Pléiade ed. 1954)(S.H. transl.)

When Lin Yutang (林語堂) writes “what is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?,” it’s easy to see that as a flip comment. Actually, it’s a very serious remark about the way our memory works–just like this celebrated passage from Proust. The image of Proust’s madeleine, a spongy almond-flavored cookie baked in a press to look like a scallop shell, a delight with an afternoon cup of tea or coffee, has become an icon for this reclusive writer. But what is Proust telling us in this passage? All memories are not created equal, he suggests, some are imprinted more strongly than others. One can have a very sharp recollection of a specific experience from one’s childhood, and still have forgotten entirely what one had for breakfast in the morning. Moreover, the long-past recollection need not even be associated with some objectively significant event, something traumatic, or happy, or historical. Second, he is pointing to the role that smell and taste play in memory, which may in fact be very intense but is not generally closely associated with memory. Third, he is noting that memory and its clarity and detail depend a lot on the mood of the individual, both at the time of the initial experience and at the time of occurrence. One can struggle to recollection without success, and then the memory can come back suddenly, flooding the imagination of the rememberer, triggered by the strangest coincidence–the cup of linden-flower tea and the cookie, for instance. In our age, memory is facilitated greatly by artificial intelligence, by the Internet and computerized search programs. But the purely human memory has a very curious search program. The way we order and collect thoughts and memories is not entirely logical, and it links to all the senses–those of vision, touch, taste and sound. Our mind seems to act like a great sewing machine, stitching things together for reasons that may not immediately be present but which generally relate to the synchronization of the senses. Proust may not be a neuroscientist, as Jonah Lehrer suggests in his recent book, but he certainly appears to anticipate discoveries made long afterwards by scientists studying the functioning of the human brain.

Let’s pass from vision, smell and taste to sound. In other passages, Proust keys his recollection to sounds, like the last Beethoven string quartets and the chamber music of César Franck and Camille Saint-Saëns. My friend Larry Bensky has done a terrific job combining readings from Proust with musical selections at Bard College’s Radio Proust project, which provides a wonderful introduction to Proust and the world of music. But there is one chamber piece I closely associate with Proust and the reading of his novel. I listened to it for the first time on a cold winter day when I was home sick, drinking tea and lemon in an effort to stay hydrated. Ever since that time, listening to it brings back recollections of fever and coughs, lemon and tea, and reading Proust. It’s Maurice Ravel’s piano trio in A minor, composed about the same time that the first volume of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu was appearing, in 1914. This is one of my favorite pieces of chamber music, unmistakably modern and still clearly an echo of earlier works, like the Saint-Saëns trio. The somber notes in a minor key, the brilliant adaptation of simple Basque tunes into beautifully elaborated movements, the wonderful notes struck by the cello at the outset of the third movement, and at last, the process of recollection as themes enter, depart and are revived, all strikes me as consummately Proustian, just as it reflects the great genius of Ravel. By the way, there is a curious thread that ties together the lives of Maurice Ravel and Marcel Proust: it’s the amazing figure of Céleste Albaret, who was housekeeper to Proust in his last years, and then moved to the little village of Montfort-l’Amaury west of Paris to keep Ravel’s home.

Listen to an inspired performance of Maurice Ravel’s piano trio in A minor by the Beaux Arts trio, recorded at Indiana University back in the late seventies: