Oscars 2005
Edgy Chris Rock Brings New Tone to Oscars
Sun Feb 27,11:17 PM ET
By Steve Gorman
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - "Sit your asses down!"
With those four words, comedian Chris Rock brought a new tone to the Oscars (news - web sites) that network executives and sponsors of the Academy Awards (news - web sites) hope will lure back a bigger, younger TV audience to Hollywood's biggest night.
Giving the Oscar producers what they paid for, the first-time host introduced an edgy, provocative mood to the show, with a monologue that was politically charged and racially aware while seeming, at times, to veer close to profane.
Rock, who drew controversy weeks before taking the Oscar stage by suggesting that he and most other African Americans had little reason to watch the awards, opened Sunday's show by acknowledging the record number of black performers vying for acting honors this year.
"We have, like, four black nominees. It's kinda like the Def Oscar Jam tonight," he enthused, in a reference to the HBO comedy series "Def Comedy Jam," a springboard for many black performers.
While flirting with network censors in his choice of words as he urged the star-studded studio audience to take their seats, the opening minutes of the broadcast bore no signs that ABC was forced to bleep put any of his remarks.
The sharp-tongued comic drew some of his biggest laughs with jabs aimed at President Bush (news - web sites), the involuntary star of Michael Moore's scathing documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11."
Rock noted that Moore's film, though shut out of the Oscar competition, was breaking box office records at the time Bush was running for re-election.
"Can you imagine applying for a job, and while you're applying for that job there's a movie in every theater in the country that shows how much you suck in that job?" Rock said. "It would be hard to get hired, wouldn't it?"
Citing "another movie nobody wanted to make this year," Rock turned to Mel Gibson (news)'s blood-soaked homage to the final hours in the life of Jesus, "The Passion of the Christ."
"I saw 'Passion of the Christ. Not that funny, really," he joked. "Nobody wanted to make 'Passion of the Christ,' man. Come on. They made six 'Police Academies' and can't make one 'Passion of the Christ."'
Turning again to race for laughs, Rock complained that Hollywood makes movies "for white people to enjoy -- real movies, with plots, with actors, not rappers, with real names, like, 'Catch Me If You Can,' like 'Saving Private Ryan.'
"Black movies don't have real names," Rock continued. "They get names like 'Barbershop.' That's not a name. That's just a location. 'Barbershop,' 'Cookout,' 'Carwash,' ... you know 'Laundromat's' coming soon, and after that, 'Check-Cashing Place."'
Rock closed his monologue by sending "love out to our troops fighting all over the world."
Off-camera friction with ABC over what performers could say during the broadcast bubbled to the surface when Robin Williams took the stage to present the award for best animated feature, and ripped a piece of tape from his mouth.
The gesture was an reference to the network's reported refusal to allow Williams to perform a song lampooning a conservative group that had criticized cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants for appearing in a video the group branded "pro-homosexual."
But Williams got in his licks anyway.
"SquarePants is not gay," he said. "Tight pants, maybe. SpongeBob Hot Pants, you go girl. What about Donald Duck? Little sailor top, no pants. Hello?" ... "Bugs Bunny? In more dresses than J. Edgar Hoover at Mardi Gras. Hello?"
- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 4:53 PM

 
Report Cards For Doctors
March 1, 2005ESSAY
Report Cards for Doctors? Grades Are Likely to Be A, B, C . . . and IBy ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D.
he was an internist by training, but privately I always called her the eye doctor.
Ask her about any of her patients, and the answer would come back starting with "I." How was Mr. Jones? "I got him to start taking his insulin, and I'm working on his cholesterol."
Mr. Smith? "Wonderful. I fixed up that anemia, and I got him to Weight Watchers."
Mrs. Brown? "I finally got her mammogram done."
All medical information was subtly refracted, worded to reflect the doctor's role as prime mover and chief puppeteer. Health and illness might be considered random evolutionary events elsewhere; her practice was clearly ruled by intelligent design.
When her patients did well, she beamed with pride. When they did badly, she was full of excuses. They had ignored her advice or somehow misled her. She had to make sure you understood it wasn't her fault.
I think of her often now that we are apparently heading straight into an era when doctors will receive report cards for their work. Are we are all now destined to become something like her?
Past efforts to grade doctors have been clumsy at best. The names on all the "Best Doctor" lists tend to reflect old boys' networks rather than actual merit. Internet sites posting doctors' credentials let consumers weed out true miscreants, but not evaluate the remaining multitudes.
But far more precise rankings lie just over the horizon, with doctors publicly graded and paid by the good results they achieve.
Medicare announced the first such program this winter: a pilot "pay for performance initiative" will reward large group practices with bonuses for keeping their elderly patients vaccinated, their cardiac patients properly medicated and their diabetics well controlled. It is only a matter of time before individual doctors are similarly ranked and paid.
Any attempt to improve the quality of medical practice deserves a shot, and this idea seems as reasonable as any. Still, it is bound to jar the doctor-patient relationship slightly, altering it just as subtly as the eye doctor's peculiar syntax altered the truth.
All doctors suffer from that "I" disease to some extent: the success of the enterprise depends on it. Most, though, retain some necessary emotional distance as well - not only distance from tragedy and suffering, but also from the innumerable humdrum snafus, habits and idiosyncrasies that invariably stand between people and their health. When we start getting scores in health maintenance, that distance will be hard to maintain.
The prospect of a report card in my future always reminds me of a diabetic woman from my past. She spent the year after her divorce sitting on her couch eating ice cream straight from the carton. Her medications went untouched. She still came in to see us quite a bit, but she refused to be weighed, refused to have her blood pressure measured, refused antidepressants, refused to see a psychiatrist. Her blood sugar ran so high the lab invariably called us in a panic. We tried everything; nothing worked.
I felt terrible for her, but had anyone been grading me on my management of diabetes that year, I would have felt even worse for myself because I would have flunked. She would have brought me right down with her. With my reputation (or a cash bonus) at stake, would I have done better at taking care of her? Or would I instead have begun to hate her for bringing down my "diabetes" grade and lowering my income? Would I eventually have told her just to stay home until she could behave, so at least my failure to make her better was not so visible in the record? Would we have lost her trust then for good?
Eventually the patient pulled herself together and got her sugar back under control. She thanked us for all we had done for her in the interim. We thought we hadn't done much, and certainly the quality mavens would have agreed. But sometimes quality of care transcends the usual markers.
Rewarding doctors for good outcomes may well work out fine. Still, I can't quite forget the edge in the eye doctor's voice when she spoke about patients who weren't doing quite as well as she would have liked. A real dislike hid behind all her cheery disclaimers. Her failures, as she saw them, badly interfered with her self-image. She wanted nothing to do with them.
Of course, when she and all the rest of us are prodded to pursue good outcomes with grades and merit bonuses, we will all still have our failures. Will we have the strength to stand by them, or will we just tell them all to stay home?
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS Help Back to Top
- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 4:51 PM

 
Las Vegas Tourism
Tourism: 37.4 Million Magical for Las Vegas
by Chris Jones
Las Vegas Gaming Wire
LAS VEGAS -- Those who visit the Grand Canyon typically go there expecting to see a humongous hole in the ground.
But once they've arrived, that hole's vast size and scale still make for a memorable sight to behold.
The same holds true when studying Las Vegas' 2004 tourism numbers: Though most everyone predicted big gains, even high expectations couldn't overshadow what was a remarkable year for the local travel industry.
Slightly more than two years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks widely thrashed the global travel sector, Las Vegas recovered in 2004 to post its strongest year ever with 37.4 million visitors. And more such growth is expected this year and beyond, a local tourism official said Tuesday.
"2004 was a great year," Kevin Bagger, research director for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, said Tuesday during a presentation to his organization's board of directors.
Last year's visitor total was 5.2 percent better than 2003's 35.5 million, and more than 4 percent better than 2000, the city's previous best year with nearly 35.9 million visitors.
Experts have repeatedly credited Las Vegas' recent success to its strong convention industry; low-cost and abundant air service; recovering economic conditions; and a popular advertising campaign, among other factors.
Of equal importance to local businesses, visitors here also opened their wallets, purses and pocketbooks with increased fervor in 2004, Bagger said, noting double-digit increases from 2003's average expenditures on food and beverages, local transportation, shopping and entertainment.
Lodging expenses jumped to $90 per night, up from $83 in 2003, while visitors' average gaming budgets climbed from $491 to $545.
"If you ask how much they spent, how much they won or lost, they won't be very candid," Bagger said of the measure. "So what we ask is, `How much did you budget?' "
The citywide room occupancy rate was 88.6 percent, up from 85 percent in 2003, despite having added 1,000 rooms. Weekend occupancy was 95 percent, a record figure, Bagger said.
Las Vegas occupancy totals also blew away the national average, and those of most key competitors. New York reported 81.1 percent occupancy last year, while Oahu, Hawaii, enjoyed a 79.7 percent success rate. However, those areas have far fewer rooms than Las Vegas.
The nationwide hotel and motel occupancy rate was 61.3 percent last year, up 2.2 percentage points, Bagger said, citing data from Hendersonville, Tenn.-based Smith Travel Research. Local convention attendance last year was 5.7 million, up 1.2 percent from 2003.
Thanks to this year's scheduled April opening of Wynn Las Vegas, the yearlong Las Vegas centennial celebration and the expected continued release of pent-up travel demand, Bagger said he expects Las Vegas to host 38.2 million visitors this year, up 2.1 percent from 2004's record level.
"Anytime a major resort opens on the Strip, it generates a tremendous amount of positive demand for the destination," Bagger said.
Wynn Las Vegas will be Las Vegas' first new megaresort since Aladdin opened in August 2000.
Numbers were mixed in two outlying resort destinations. Laughlin hosted nearly 4.05 million visitors last year, down 3.5 percent. Still, visitors' gaming expenditures there were up nearly 7.7 percent through November.
Fueled by an increase in single-day visitors, Mesquite's visitor count grew 2.7 percent to 1.74 million. Gaming revenue there was up 9.2 percent through November, Bagger added. December's statewide gaming revenue report will be released later this week.
GAMING BEHAVIOR AND VISITOR SPENDING 2003 2004
.Percent that gambled 87% 87%
.Hours spent gambling per day 3.6 3.3
.Average trip gaming budget $491 $545
.Food and beverage $209 $238
.Local transportation $49 $65
.Shopping $97 $124
.Shows $42 $47
.Lodging per night $83 $90
SOURCE: Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority


- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 3:32 PM

 
Las Vegas Football et cetera
Columnist Ron Kantowski: Recruiting Las Vegas not as new as you think
Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at ron@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4088.
•••
It wasn't that long ago that recently retired UNLV football coach John Robinson could do no wrong in this town. Now it seems he did no right.
The theme of UNLV's national signing day press conference for high school recruits was how new coach Mike Sanford had "reclaimed city recruiting" and "taken back the city of Las Vegas."
Indeed, it was nice to learn that five of the 29 members comprising Sanford's first Rebels recruiting class could have walked their letters-of-intent over to the football office. Just as it was last year, when four of the 23 members comprising Robinson's last Rebels recruiting class could have done the same thing.
Above and beyond that, do the names Jamaal Brimmer, Adam Seward and Dyante Perkins ring a bell? Brimmer and Seward were the defensive stars of Robinson's final team and played their high school football at Durango and Bonanza High, respectively. Perkins, a two-year starter in the offensive backfield, prepped at Bishop Gorman. Starting defensive end Leon Moore (Rancho) is another local product.
A UNLV spokesman said the remarks about Sanford's aggressive recruiting at home were not meant to discredit Robinson, or to suggest he didn't recruit locally, but that the Rebels reportedly beat Oregon State and other Pac-10 schools in signing Palo Verde quarterback Jarrell Harrison, Las Vegas High lineman A.J. Rodriguez and Cheyenne running back Torrie Coleman.
It was just a couple of years ago that it seemed like every local high school football player with a letterman's jacket wound up in Corvallis, Ore., for some reason that, having covered a game on a rainy night there once, still is beyond my limited comprehension.
At least Sanford gave credit to former Las Vegas High coach Kris Cinkovich, one of two holdovers he retained from Robinson's staff, for helping to facilitate the local recruiting effort.
In Friday's column on this year's UNLV Athletic Hall of Fame class I noted that Warren Schutte was the first Rebel to win an NCAA individual championship when he beat Phil Mickelson for the 1991 golf title. But as Sun readers Dave Dreibelbis and Paul Seifer pointed out, he was only the first male athlete to wear a crown.
The late Sheila Tarr was UNLV's first NCAA champ, as she won the track and field heptathlon in 1984.
"You obviously never saw Sheila Tarr in shorts," Seifer wrote in an e-mail, "or you would never forget that those amazing legs belonged to UNLV's first NCAA champion."
For the record, UNLV's second NCAA champion also was a track star, as Treina Hull won the 100 meters title in 1987 while running for longtime women's track and field coach Al McDaniel.
To nobody's great surprise, former UNLV baseball coach Fred Dallimore stole the show at the Hall of Fame gala with a 25-minute acceptance speech/ monologue in which he thanked everybody but the home plate umpire who squeezed the strike zone on the Rebels during a 1987 game against Pacific.
One of the neat things about the evening is that all three head coaches of the former Rebels who were inducted were on hand to share the evening with their stars. UNLV golf coach Dwaine Knight led the cheers for Warren Schutte while retired basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian and Wayne Nunnely did the same for Freddie Banks and Keenan McCardell.
Nunnely, who also recruited McCardell, just completed his eighth year as the San Diego Chargers defensive line coach, where he has been reunited with his former pass-catching whiz. McCardell ended a contract holdout with Tampa Bay to sign with the Chargers in mid-season.
This past weekend's PGA tour stop in Scottsdale drew an astounding 165,268 beer drinkers and other spectators on Saturday and 517,000 for its four-day weekend (although attendance dropped off to 75,947 on Super Bowl Sunday). That is probably more paying customers than our pro golf event, now known as the Michelin Championship at Las Vegas, has attracted since its inception.
The crowds are so thick in Scottsdale that a few years back when Tiger Woods' ball landed behind a giant boulder that looked like it had been imported from the Bedrock Quarry, the juiced-up gallery simply decided to get behind it and roll it out of the way. Yabba-dabba-do!
Here, the crowds have gotten so sparse in recent years that the gallery would have trouble moving those bark chips used for landscaping from the path of somebody's ball.
In defense of the local golfing community, perhaps if our tournament was played in early February, and Woods or somebody like him decided to enter, there would be a little more traffic on the fairways out in Summerlin.
Emmitt Smith, who announced his retirement on Super Bowl weekend, was a fantastic running back and a pretty good student, too, said one of his former classmates at the University of Florida.
Mark Wallington of the UNLV sports information department said he and Smith were in the same 7 a.m. class after the Cowboys' star decided to return to school and finish work on his degree.
Wallington said despite the rude hour and Smith's status as an NFL star, he never missed a class.
Well, almost never missed a class.
On the day a class project was due, Smith was a no-show, and when the professor asked if anybody knew the reason for his absence, somebody blurted out that it was "Hammer Time."
Turns out rapper M.C. Hammer was in town for a concert the night before and invited Smith to join him on tour.
As far as not doing your homework, at least it was a more original excuse than the dog ate it.
Smith eventually made up the work and went on to receive his degree. I'm not sure the same can be said for Hammer.
UNLV could have put on a heck of a game of H-O-R-S-E at halftime of Monday's game against Utah based on the number of former pro basketball greats disguised as NBA scouts and executives that were on hand to watch the Utes' Andrew Bogut. Among those I spotted were Grizzlies president of basketball operations Jerry West and Chris Mullin, now a special assistant with the Warriors.
West was seated at courtside, which might explain the curious performance of UNLV's Louis Amundson. After getting behind Bogut for a dunk and a put-back early in the game, Amundson started pretending he was West. He wound up chucking some 13 shots -- way too many for a guy who has the range of an air rifle -- including a couple of brutal-looking midrange jump shots while facing the basket.
To say Amundson's jumpers were taken out of context of the offense would be an understatement. These were shots that made one of Billy Kilmer's forward passes look pretty. Had they come close enough to invade the air space around the basket, they probably would have been shot down by anti-aircraft guns.
Amundson deserves credit for tying Bogut's kangaroo down on one of the big Aussie's rare off nights. But just the same, he probably needs to get back under the basket as soon as possible.
Absence, it has been said, makes the heart grow fonder. In the case of the Utah basketball team, it also may wind up being responsible for an NCAA tournament berth.
Were it not for the difficult-to-play-for Rick Majerus' decision to resign as Utes coach last year, chances are point guard Marc Jackson would still be working on a construction crew, which he was doing at this time last year. And future NBA lottery pick Andrew Bogut might be sitting on the end of the Clippers' bench or maybe even on a park bench back home in Melbourne, throwing the boomerang around.
Neither got along famously or otherwise with Majerus but seem to be comfortable with their go-to-guy roles under new coach Ray Giacoletti. Both Jackson and Bogut played the entire 40 minutes in a 57-53 victory against UNLV on Monday night.
Maybe Monday's game wasn't one of Bogut's best. But when was the last time you saw a 7-footer with three guys banging on him like a bass drum go from flag-to-flag without a pit stop?
Among the many things I don't understand about arena football is why it supposedly is impossible to run the football. Sure, the field is smaller, making it more difficult to stretch the defense, but then there are only eight players to block instead of 11. Shouldn't it be relative, then, to real football?
At least it is to the Grand Rapids Airbags, or whatever the unemployed auto workers call the team up there. Michael Bishop, the Grand Rapids QB and former K-State star, became the first player in arena football history to rush for 100 yards in a game when he stepped off exactly that many on just six carries in a 72-56 loss against Colorado on Sunday.
"I think he could run for a lot more if they gave him more attempts," said Mike Dailey, the Colorado coach.
That's just what I've been saying.
Major Harris, the former West Virginia quarterback, had set the previous AFL rushing record with a 95-yard effort for the Columbus Thunderbolts in 1991. Until Sunday, nobody had rushed for more than 75 yards in an arena game since 1996.
I guess it's OK for Paul McCartney to sing about Jojo leaving his home in Tucson, Ariz., for some California grass during halftime of the Super Bowl. After all, California grass -- and for that matter, every other kind -- isn't a first offense that will get you tossed out of the NFL.
But I thought somebody under the age of 50 at NFL headquarters should have been a little more sensitive to the message of U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday" before using it as a backdrop for the first-half highlights.
The song commemorates the lives of 13 unarmed civilian demonstrators who were slain by the British Army's 1st Parachute Regiment in Derry, Northern Ireland, on Jan. 30, 1972.
Basically, Bloody Sunday is Ireland's Kent State, and I don't think Bono had the Patriots and Eagles in mind when he sat down to write the lyrics.
Of course, there are those in the Reagan administration who still believe Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" is a patriotic tribute to America.


- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 2:39 PM

 

Barbarians (Well, Mostly Art Lovers) at 'The Gates'
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER



In 1991 David Yust clocked 22 hours staring at a forest of yellow umbrellas in a valley north of Los Angeles. He spent 13 days in Berlin in 1995 marveling at the aluminum-surfaced fabric that draped the Reichstag, once rising at 2 a.m. for a reverential photo session of the sun rising over the enfolded neo-Renaissance landmark. And next week he plans to photograph a saffron-cloaked Central Park at dawn.
Mr. Yust, 65, is part of a far-flung group of followers of the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whose latest public art project, "The Gates," is scheduled to open along 23 miles of the park's pedestrian walkways on Saturday. These loyal fans plot distant vacations, organize group trips and sometimes abandon jobs to bear witness to the artists' installations.
They are like the fans that long traipsed after the Grateful Dead, but with far fewer tour dates. They share the passion of people who collect milk glass, Manolo Blahniks or rare teapots, although their holdings are limited to books, pieces of fabric or, in the case of Caryl Unger, a shovel that was used to install "Surrounded Islands" in Biscayne Bay, off Miami.
Groupies? Gate-heads? They resist monikers. But their ardor for the Christo and Jeanne-Claude happenings is passionate.
Mr. Yust, an art professor at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, said he was first bitten by the Christo bug in 1983, when he signed on to work on "Surrounded Islands," in which 11 Florida islands were encircled by pink floating fabric, after hearing the artists speak at the university. Since then he has tried to see as many of the installations as he can.
"I thought about that project every day for the next two years," said Mr. Yust, who, like many of those who travel the country or world to see the team's work, is an artist himself. "I thought he was a big nut at that time. And I still think he is a big nut. But I am totally supportive of what he and Jeanne-Claude do. I feel they are among the last of the true idealists on the planet."
From art collectors to museum groups, tourists to paid Christo volunteers, the city expects 200,000 to flock to the city for the installation, which will remain through Feb. 27. Such figures, of course, are mere guesses for now. But there does seem to be universal agreement that in a traditionally slow tourism period, New York will draw record numbers of visitors, thanks to "The Gates."
Hotels that are usually half full or worse this time of year are reporting strong bookings, especially at establishments that line the park's perimeter. For the coming weekend, the Carlyle Hotel is 75 percent booked, a 30 percent increase over last year, said James McBride, the hotel's managing director. The hotel is offering a "Gates" package, which includes a park-view suite with catering for two hours for 25 people, at $6,000. "We booked one of them already," Mr. McBride said.
The Mark is sold out this weekend; last February, only half of the 176 rooms were booked, managers there said.
The artists estimate that thousands of people around the globe make a point of traveling to see their work, often signing on to help install the pieces. Smaller Christo communities hammer beams, tread water, twist fabric, answer phones or perform myriad other tasks to help bring a work together. There is even a blog on which visitors can record their reactions: nycgates.blogspot.com .
Those fans, as well as thousands of other visitors who are landing in New York over the next several days to behold the ornamented park, are expected to lift the city's tourism economy, usually lackluster this time of year.
"You don't go running up to New York in the middle of February from Miami," said Mrs. Unger, who is flying in on Thursday from Miami to see the installation. "But when I heard it was going to be in New York, I said to my husband, 'Please, let's go.' "
New York merchants, of course, hope the experience will be as remunerative as it is enriching. The Mandarin Oriental will offer a package including binoculars in each of its Central Park View rooms, as well as breakfast at Asiate and a Metropolitan Museum of Art book on the project, starting at $1,050 a night. La Prima Donna Restaurant will serve sautéed Prince Edward Island mussels, in a saffron cream sauce. You get the idea.
For the record, the artists do not earn income from the detritus left behind once a project is over. "The Gates" will be industrially recycled, and proceeds from the sale of "Gates" sweatshirts and other souvenirs will be donated to Nurture New York's Nature and the Central Park Conservancy. The project, which will cost more than $20 million to install, will be paid for by the artists.
Organized groups are coming from Japan, Germany and many American cities to see the work, a great many of them made up of artists or art collectors.
Ruth Halperin, chairwoman of Contemporary Collectors Circle of the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, will fly in with 25 museum members on her fourth Christo trip.
"We went to Fresno to see the umbrellas," said Ms. Halperin, who is 77. "We went to Paris, and we saw "Running Fence," she said, referring to the draping of the Pont-Neuf in Champagne-colored cloth in 1985 and a 24-mile nylon curtain that stretched through Sonoma and Marin Counties in California in 1976. " 'Running Fence' - to me that was the most beautiful one," she said. "The hills were beautiful and soft, and the light as the wind blew was magic. I will never forget that for the rest of my life."
About 100 hard-core fans live out their commitment by helping to assemble the projects. Iris Sandkuhler, an artist from San Francisco, has worked on seven Christo installations to date. "I did my first one as a teenager, and now I am in my 40's," Ms. Sandkuhler said. "In 1978, an art instructor in North Carolina piled us into a van and said you have to do this," she said, describing her initiation, a modest Christo project involving the wrapping of some streets in Kansas City.
The commitment is not without its physical challenges. "Working in water in the Biscayne Bay," she said, "we had to lace the panels together, and there was nothing to stand on, so we were in the water floundering around."
"But the hardest one for me," Ms. Sandkuhler mused, "was when I worked for them in Paris, and I was sleeping on a couch in the office right next to the bathroom."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS Help Back to Top

- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 1:42 PM

 

Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Actors and extras re-enacted the rape of the Sabine women in 60's dress at the Prospect Park tennis courts for the video director Eve Sussman. Eve Sussman is the director of the video opera "Raptus," which may or may not end up including a version of the battle scene she supervised in Brooklyn, loosely inspired by a Jacques-Louis David painting. "Intervention of the Sabine Women," by Jacques-Louis David Into the Mosh Pit With the Old Masters By PHOEBE HOBAN

THE Prospect Park tennis courts in Brooklyn are an unlikely setting for an ancient Roman tragedy. But that did not deter the artist Eve Sussman, who had brought her actors' collective to this tennis bubble on a miserably wet day in January to rehearse a battle scene loosely inspired by David's "Intervention of the Sabine Women." A small, dark, wild-haired woman, Ms. Sussman darted around like a hummingbird, checking in with her composer, her choreographer and her cameraman. Before long, a motley crew of about two dozen Greek and American actors dressed in vintage 60's clothing - the men in suits, the women in mod dresses - had gathered in the middle of the tent. A cacophonous four-piece band was warming up. Ms. Sussman grabbed a video camera, and the rehearsal began. "Just walk around," her choreographer, Claudia de Serpa Soares, told the actors. "O.K., now find somebody in the group and lock eyes with them, like they are a magnet pulling you together. Now lean your body against theirs." A group of extras, including children, joined in. A smoke machine began blowing mist. Over the course of the next hour, the motion accelerated into a full battle scene: men toppling onto one another, suits ripped off, children hoisted aloft, women crying and weaving through the carnage. The music escalated. "Mosh pit!" a child shouted. This extraordinary scene may ultimately serve as the climax of "Raptus," Ms. Sussman's video opera based on the myth of the Sabine women. Or perhaps it will be scrapped. It is part of an elaborate improvisational process developed by Ms. Sussman, 43, whose last piece, "89 Seconds at Alcázar," was a huge hit at last year's Whitney Biennial. The large-scale projection, a numinous exploration of Velázquez's "Meninas," wowed viewers and critics alike with its ravishing colors, ornate costumes, oddly balletic gestures and ambient soundtrack. (Beautiful, yet with the subversive sensibility of a David Lynch film, "89 Seconds" could be the avant-garde answer to "Girl With a Pearl Earring.") That piece was sold in a limited edition of 10, for as much as $65,000 each. In addition to putting Ms. Sussman seriously on the map, "89 Seconds," now on view at the Museum of Modern Art, gave birth to the Rufus Corporation, a band of actors, artists, dancers and musicians that now includes 22 members. Its core group - Ms. Sussman; the composer Jonathan Bepler (who worked with Matthew Barney on the "Cremaster" series); Ms. de Serpa Soares, the choreographer; the costume designer Karen Young; and the actors Jeff Wood, Helen Pickett, Walter Sipser, Annette Previti, Nesbitt Blaisdell and Sofie Zamchick - all worked on "89 Seconds." During the production, they developed a collaborative technique using improvised choreographical and vocal exercises to create a visually impressionistic nonverbal piece. It worked so well that Ms. Sussman decided to form Rufus and apply the same method to other projects, including "Raptus." Using high-definition video to capture this innovative performance process, Ms. Sussman has created the perfect vehicle for her continuing interest in light, space and what she calls "gesture implying narrative." "I've never been a studio artist - I was always working out in a space somewhere out in the world, or going into a space and trying to change it," said Ms. Sussman, who was brought up in a landmark house in Lexington, Mass., renovated by her mother, an interior designer specializing in historic restoration. She also lived in India, Turkey and Israel because her father, a professor at Tufts, took sabbaticals abroad. Ms. Sussman studied photography and printmaking at Bennington College in Vermont. A nine-week residency at Skowhegan in Maine got her started on sculpture and installation art. Over the last decade, she has turned a shaftway at Long Island University into a canal; installed a giant cantilevered mirrored periscope on Roosevelt Island that reflected a view of the East River into a building; built a ledge and tower for "Ornithology" (1997), a live-action aviary for pigeons; and, for the Istanbul Biennial that same year, placed 12 surveillance cameras in the Sirkeci Train Station to create random stories by combining images with four concurrent scripts. What links all her work is that Ms. Sussman, like Chauncey Gardiner in "Being There," likes to watch, whether it's wind and water or people. "I've always played with surveillance cameras, watching people and body language," she said. "Human gestures are sort of ubiquitous, and you can use them in any way to imply a narrative. What's nice about closed-circuit cameras is that you are kind of innocuous and can just wander around and film these beautiful, delicate, intimate things," she continued. "You can be sort of an anthropological spy. But after a while, just taking stuff from live feed wasn't quite enough anymore. I wanted to work with real actors." And "89 Seconds" provided an epiphany: she wanted to direct people, not just observe them. She may be an anthropological spy coming in from the cold, but Ms. Sussman differentiates her work from that of a film director. "The bar is lower for video pieces than it is for movies," she said. "I am trying to make video art that is as emotionally involved as a feature film or novel - as psychologically rich and stunningly beautiful - but might only be 15 minutes or half an hour long. I have no shame or embarrassment about trying to make beautiful things. But I also want to make things that are edgy and a little bit emotionally twisted and convey a strange sort of energy." Unlike the familiar postmodern appropriation of the 80's, in which artists like David Salle used canonical references to deconstruct art history itself, Ms. Sussman uses cutting-edge technology to revel in the very painterliness of her subjects. And unlike such early video artists as Bill Viola and Gary Hills, who used video to create metaphorical landscapes, Ms. Sussman has used video to explore the pictorial evolution of a masterpiece. In "89 Seconds at Alcázar," she recreated the moments just before and after the image of the royal family in "Las Meninas" coalesces. "You look at that painting and you think, 'This is the first cinéma vérité moment,' " Ms. Sussman said. "It has the feeling of a snapshot, of a Tina Barney photograph, as if the Enfanta could walk out and come back again. And you think, if this is a film still, then there is a still that came before, and one that came after. It was that simple. There's no big conceptual sort of rumination other than that." Michael Lynne, co-chairman of New Line Cinema, bought the video work as well as one still for his art collection. "She took one of the great works of art and allowed you to look into the cinematic fantasy of almost living it, as if it were happening in front of your very eyes," he said. Chrissie Isles, a video curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, noted that while "Las Meninas" has inspired many artists, Ms. Sussman was the first to reinterpret it as a projection. "She succeeded in actually transforming a very potent cipher of art history into an artwork that's very much her own," Ms. Isles said. "She's captured what Roland Barthes would call the 'punctum' of that painting, that climax of the moment when it finally arrives." "Raptus," which retells the myth of the Sabine women in a 60's setting, is Ms. Sussman's most ambitious project yet. Last September, the Rufus Corporation spent six weeks in Greece auditioning actors (the 10 Greek actors were chosen from among 200), scouting locations and improvising. The opera, which may run around 30 minutes, will be shot in Athens, Hydra and Berlin. While her previous video work began with a budget of $40,000 (it ultimately cost more than $100,000) "Raptus," sponsored in part by the Hauptstadtkulturfond-Berlin, is starting off with a budget of $250,000. Like "89 Seconds," which was also spun off into a limited edition of photographic stills as well as a "Making 89 Seconds" video, it will be sold in a limited edition of 10. Ms. Sussman's rambling, gritty studio in South Williamsburg, with its wraparound view of three bridges spanning the East River, is Raptus central. (She and her husband, the artist Simon Lee, have two spaces in the building.) A long desk holds various reference books - "The Sixties: A Decade in Vogue," "Graffiti in the Anthenian Agora," a copy of Life magazine from May 1967. Stills from the shoot in Greece line the wall, and there is a rack full of vintage 60's clothing. It is here that the cast and crew (many of whom are also living in the loft during the one-week rehearsal) rehearse, relax and meet for frequent group-therapy-like postmortems. Sitting in mismatched chairs and on a huge blue fur dais, eyes fixed alternately on Ms. Sussman and on the monitor, the Rufus collective is watching a run-through of video shot in Greece - a marketplace, a fight in a village square, a feast in a hunters' lodge and an improvised choir in a chapel at an extraordinary 60's-era villa in Hydra. The town-hall-style meeting illustrates Ms. Sussman's modus operandi: auteurism by committee. Virtually everyone volunteers ideas. (Should there be a battle of the bands? A bouzouki concert? A fight on a football field? Are the Greeks modern-day C.I.A. operatives, and the Sabines the wives of the local butchers?) "This way of working is very attractive," said Katarina Oikonomopoulou, an opera singer. "Everybody can say what they want. It's like a democracy." Mr. Sipser, the actor, said: "I've never met anyone more open to collaboration than Eve. She's someone who thrives on creating a world around her, whether working at home or in Greece, and she has an uncanny ability to get people that work well together." While "89 Seconds" embellished on an existing work of art, the Rufus Corporation is making "Raptus" up as they go along. "We are trying to do our own version of a myth," Ms. Sussman said. "We are not working with a traditional script, just a loose outline of a story, and how we interpret it can be as abstract or linear as we want it. We know we want a fight involving the Sabine women, and other than that we don't have a clue. We are inventing the whole narrative as a group, with the actors being who they are as people." The music is equally improvisational. "It won't be explicitly operatic," Mr. Bepler said. "I like the idea of an ensemble, and possibly a concert scene. There could be a kind of number constructed at an outdoor meat market in which the work gestures, the rhythm of the knives and the vocal calls take on a musical choreography." But that doesn't mean Ms. Sussman doesn't have a very specific idea in mind. "I'm really interested in the love triangle aspect, where the love triangle becomes a cancer that has sort of epidemic proportions," she said. "One group of foreign men, operatives, come into the meat market in Athens and steal the daughters of the butchers, and then the men within the group start to steal from each other. So the final choreography will evolve from that." It remains to be seen whether the "89 Seconds" treatment, in which visual atmosphere, physical gesture and ambient sound design are the major motifs, can be successfully sustained in a piece that lasts 30 minutes or even longer. But Ms. Sussman says she hopes to achieve with "Raptus" what she aimed for in "89 Seconds." "I think that I am trying to find that cogent, ineffable moment where the banal meets the sublime," she said. "I want to take people's breath away and make them cry, and I think every artist wants to do that. You want to stop people in their tracks the same way 'Las Meninas' stops people in their tracks when you walk into the Prado. Or the same way 'Apocalypse Now' is able to stop you in your tracks. If you can do that with a measly little 10-minute video, you are pretty lucky." Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS Help Back to Top

- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 1:03 PM

 

Tuesday, February 08, 2005
"Imagenes de Dali" being performed by Cuban dancers at the International Festival of Ballet in Havana. Alicia Alonso, above, and her husband, Fernando, were the founders of Ballet Nacional de Cuba Dance students, survivors of a rigorous selection process, hope to become company members. The Imperious Vision of Cuba's Other Ruler-for-Life By ERIKA KINETZ

S the curtain closed on the final gala of the International Festival of Ballet in Havana in November, Alicia Alonso, the aged matriarch of Cuban ballet, stood unsteadily at center stage, her arms outstretched toward the raucous adulation of the crowd. Silent and still, a gracious smile chiseled on her face, she seemed less a woman than a monument. She has presided over the biennial festival since 1960, and her power is such that she - and perhaps she alone - is able to draw the globe's best artists to her slight, impoverished nation to dance. Ms. Alonso, who is 83, has ruled the Ballet Nacional de Cuba - has been the Ballet Nacional de Cuba - for nearly six decades. Before, ballet in Cuba was a marginalized extravagance. Now, men in one of the world's most macho countries clamor to put on dancing tights. She has trained some of the era's greatest dancers and created a world-class ballet company renowned for its precise classicism and exuberant virtuosity. She has accomplished all this despite her nation's poverty. Despite its isolation from the world's great ballet companies. And one other thing: despite the fact that she is, depending on whom you ask, either largely or completely blind. "I see through here," Ms. Alonso said in her Havana office, pressing a neatly manicured hand to her pale, broad forehead. Like most dancers, Ms. Alonso has aged with some desperation. She performed into her 60's, but today she is undeniably brittle, with a grandeur so willful it can be frightening. For public appearances, she paints her face with a thick layer of foundation, pencils in high, arching eyebrows and transforms her lips into a broad slash of red. She keeps her hair hidden under an ever-changing series of colorful scarves, bound tightly around her forehead. But despite Ms. Alonso's efforts to keep up appearances, her empire shows signs of crumbling beneath her. The company's repertory is so static - a lovely but unchanging iteration of "Giselle," "Swan Lake," "Don Quixote" and "Coppélia" - that one of her top dancers says he has resorted to making up steps to keep himself entertained. The Cuban choreographers who once worked with the company have, for the most part, left or retired, and the company says it can't afford the work of innovative international choreographers like Jiri Kylian and William Forsythe. Ms. Alonso's own choreography, in its worst moments, is a bit of a bad joke. In addition, her dancers have been leaving at an alarming rate - more than 20 in the last few years. Former Ballet Nacional dancers now grace American Ballet Theater, the Boston Ballet, the San Francisco Ballet, the Washington Ballet, the Cincinnati Ballet and the Royal Ballet, among others. But she prefers not to acknowledge this diaspora. Cocooned in historical glory, she will neither cede control of her company nor plan for its future after her death. Like all great divas (and for that matter, dictators) she will not countenance talk of succession. "I am going to live to 200," she said, in charmingly accented English. "Maybe I live longer. I love life." Legend has it that Ms. Alonso danced herself blind. She arrived in New York from Havana in 1937 and eked out a living as a Broadway hoofer before joining the fledgling Ballet Theater. Four years later, at 19, she began to lose her sight, and after multiple operations for a detached retina, her doctors prescribed several months in bed. It was there that she first learned the role of Giselle, as her husband, Fernando, helped her mark the steps with her fingers. Doctors warned her that her frail eyes would not withstand the rigors of her whipped turns, but Ms. Alonso went right on dancing. She got her big break in 1943, when Alicia Markova got sick and Ms. Alonso performed Giselle in her stead. (It became her signature role, and she was still dancing it in the early 1970's, when Kevin McKenzie, now the artistic director of American Ballet Theater, saw her perform. He was, he said, "riveted" by "an unfaltering technique coupled with this ethereal quality.") Ms. Alonso was a part of the rich ferment that gave birth to both American Ballet Theater and the New York City Ballet, and she worked with the greats, including Agnes de Mille, Antony Tudor and Jerome Robbins. The demanding role George Balanchine created for her in "Theme and Variations" in 1947 terrified later generations of ballerinas. Then, goes the hagiography, she and Fernando gave it all up to take ballet back to their beloved Cuba. In 1948, they founded Ballet Alicia Alonso, which became known as the Ballet Nacional de Cuba after the revolution. "Everybody thought it was crazy that people dance," recalled Fernando Alonso, 90, who helped found the Ballet Nacional and ran it from 1959 to 1975. (As a teacher, he largely defined the Cuban ballet style.) "They thought you had to be a doctor or a lawyer or anything else," Mr. Alonso said. He used to knock on the doors of his mother's rich friends seeking donations, and the company sold performances to sponsors like Cerveza Polar and Bacardi Rum. "We had a stage with two big beers on it," he said. "What do we care? We get to make a performance." Soon after Fidel Castro took power, in 1959, he gave the ballet company $200,000, with the admonition that it had better excel. "The budding revolution wanted to get for the Cuban people all possible good, and not just material good but also spiritual good," said Miguel Cabrera, the historian of the Ballet Nacional. Mr. Castro decided that ballet would be part of that gift. The Alonsos dutifully carted their dancers to sugarcane fields, army bases and factories. Today in Cuba, ballet is a great career. Dancers can earn more than doctors. And it's cool. Audiences, which are packed with the young and miniskirted, give the dancers the kind of love Boston gives the Red Sox. Alejandro Sene, a member of the corps de ballet, is one of many dancers who was pushed into his profession by well-meaning relatives. "I remember the first time I saw ballet on TV," he recalled. "I was 4 or 5. I said, 'I'll be anything but that.' " His uncle and his grandfather lured him into ballet class with promises that he would get to dress up in neat costumes. Young Alejandro found few costumes and a lot of hard physical work, an injustice he grew to accept once he realized he was marooned in a sea of girls. "I think I've liked girls since I was one month old," he said. Cuba has an enviable network of schools that provide students throughout the country with methodical, full-time training from the ages of 9 to 18. Students must pass a battery of physical, musical and psychological tests. Last year 611 students auditioned for 60 spots at the Alejo Carpentier School in Havana, where José Manuel Carreño and Carlos Acosta, among many others, first studied ballet. But ballet in Cuba is part of a fading world, fueled by a mix of need, desire and boredom. For the time being, the government's control of mass media and the American embargo continue to insulate Cubans to some extent from the speed and sophistication of American visual culture. Life is slower here than it is on "Gilmore Girls." And in this context, ballet is thrilling entertainment, filled with superhuman feats and romance. Last November, the Ballet Nacional set up a stage in the Plaza Vieja in Havana and performed "Shakespeare y Sus Máscaras" ("Shakespeare and His Masks"), a takeoff on "Romeo and Juliet" choreographed by Ms. Alonso. There was not much else to do on the neighborhood's dusky streets. Boys played dominos in disintegrating alleyways. Men sat in their hot living rooms, watching state-run television. The stage was the brightest thing for miles. But lately a sort of torpor has fallen over the Ballet Nacional. Although Ms. Alonso remains the director, the latest generations of dancers - including high-wattage performers like Joel Carreño, Viengsay Valdés, Alihaydée Carreño and Rolando Sarabia - only rarely work directly with her. Carlos Acosta, who now dances with the Royal Ballet, actually performed with her once, in 1993. "I was very nervous," Mr. Acosta said from London. "It was a big responsibility. I was only 20 years old, dancing with this living legend. What if you drop her?" Her poor eyesight made it difficult for her to give corrections. "She gives you general corrections," he said, "and you try to find whether you can use them, because she cannot be direct with you." Current dancers at the Ballet Nacional say Ms. Alonso's choreographic process is similarly vague: she explains her vision to one of her minions, who then builds the work on the company. Like bees around their queen, a cloud of advisers hovers around Ms. Alonso, seeing for her, judging for her, describing for her the daily reality of the Ballet Nacional. Her successor, company insiders say, will probably be pulled from these courtly ranks, which include Loipa Araújo, Aurora Bosch and Josefina Méndez, all ballet masters in their 60's, as well as younger teachers like María Elena Llorente, Carmen Hechavarría and Svetlana Ballester. The woman most often pointed to as a potential successor is Ms. Araújo. She speaks five languages and says she teaches regularly at the Royal, La Scala, the Royal Danish and the Paris Opera ballets. She has phone numbers in Cuba, London and Spain and has long worked to freshen the repertory. "My opinion is that it should be Loipa," said Joel Carreño, half-brother of José Manuel Carreño of American Ballet Theater and one of the biggest stars of the Ballet Nacional. "And not when Alicia is gone. It should be her already." When confronted with that possibility, Ms. Araújo gave a wry, tired laugh and looked away. "Loipa, Josefina," she said. "Who knows? If Alicia is 200 years old, we'll be 100. I don't think anybody is raising that question. What's important to us is to work every day." Even if Ms. Alonso does live to be 200, Mr. Castro might not, and that could spell big trouble for the Cuban ballet. The status of the Ballet Nacional - the breadth of its audiences and the quality of its school - derives in no small part from the state's commitment. In fact, despite Cuba's growing economic distress, Mr. Castro has in recent years boosted cultural expenditures. In 2001, the National Ballet School, which trains 15-to-18-year-olds, moved into a grand mansion right on Paseo del Prado in old Havana, and the Alejo Carpentier school is undergoing extensive renovations. In 2002, the national school, under a directive from Mr. Castro, auditioned 42,000 students around the country and selected 4,500 for a new vocational program. The objective is not to build dancers but to build audiences and, as Ramona de Saá, the school's director, said, "to make a correct use of students' free time." It's hard to imagine such activities taking place anywhere else in the world today. Large ballet companies in Russia, Europe and China have recently had to wean themselves from state subsidies, and the results - sometimes frantic touring and shameless corporate sponsorship - have not always been pretty. In the very long run, Ms. Alonso's miracle may face an even more pernicious threat than poverty: wealth. Jane Hermann, the ICM executive who oversees the Ballet Nacional's American tours, points out that while life as a dancer is a step up in a poor country like Cuba, it can be a step down in a middle-class country like the United States. Ms. Alonso scoffs at the notion that history may someday undo her legacy. "Are you kidding," she said. "Have you seen the amount of talents we've got? Have you seen the amount of teachers? We have the biggest school that exists today. Do you think that will die like that? No. This is a healthy tree." Determined to show that her body, despite the weight of its accumulated years, still holds the clarity, passion and light that distinguish the Cuban school of movement - and to prove, by extension, her fitness to lead - Ms. Alonso rose from behind her desk and began to dance. Her face rapt with some remembered glory, she lifted her unseeing eyes toward a far balcony, gripped the desk with one hand and sent the other wafting gaily into the air. With perfect, flirtatious grace, she pranced like a muse in Balanchine's "Apollo." Then her press secretary walked swiftly over and helped her back into her chair. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top
 

- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 12:33 PM

 





OUTSOURCING TORTURE
by JANE MAYER
The secret history of America?s ?extraordinary rendition? program.
Issue of 2005-02-14
Posted 2005-02-07
On January 27th, President Bush, in an interview with the Times, assured the world that ?torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture.? Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer who was born in Syria, was surprised to learn of Bush?s statement. Two and a half years ago, American officials, suspecting Arar of being a terrorist, apprehended him in New York and sent him back to Syria, where he endured months of brutal interrogation, including torture. When Arar described his experience in a phone interview recently, he invoked an Arabic expression. The pain was so unbearable, he said, that ?you forget the milk that you have been fed from the breast of your mother.?
Arar, a thirty-four-year-old graduate of McGill University whose family emigrated to Canada when he was a teen-ager, was arrested on September 26, 2002, at John F. Kennedy Airport. He was changing planes; he had been on vacation with his family in Tunisia, and was returning to Canada. Arar was detained because his name had been placed on the United States Watch List of terrorist suspects. He was held for the next thirteen days, as American officials questioned him about possible links to another suspected terrorist. Arar said that he barely knew the suspect, although he had worked with the man?s brother. Arar, who was not formally charged, was placed in handcuffs and leg irons by plainclothes officials and transferred to an executive jet. The plane flew to Washington, continued to Portland, Maine, stopped in Rome, Italy, then landed in Amman, Jordan.
During the flight, Arar said, he heard the pilots and crew identify themselves in radio communications as members of ?the Special Removal Unit.? The Americans, he learned, planned to take him next to Syria. Having been told by his parents about the barbaric practices of the police in Syria, Arar begged crew members not to send him there, arguing that he would surely be tortured. His captors did not respond to his request; instead, they invited him to watch a spy thriller that was aired on board.
Ten hours after landing in Jordan, Arar said, he was driven to Syria, where interrogators, after a day of threats, ?just began beating on me.? They whipped his hands repeatedly with two-inch-thick electrical cables, and kept him in a windowless underground cell that he likened to a grave. ?Not even animals could withstand it,? he said. Although he initially tried to assert his innocence, he eventually confessed to anything his tormentors wanted him to say. ?You just give up,? he said. ?You become like an animal.?
A year later, in October, 2003, Arar was released without charges, after the Canadian government took up his cause. Imad Moustapha, the Syrian Ambassador in Washington, announced that his country had found no links between Arar and terrorism. Arar, it turned out, had been sent to Syria on orders from the U.S. government, under a secretive program known as ?extraordinary rendition.? This program had been devised as a means of extraditing terrorism suspects from one foreign state to another for interrogation and prosecution. Critics contend that the unstated purpose of such renditions is to subject the suspects to aggressive methods of persuasion that are illegal in America?including torture.
Arar is suing the U.S. government for his mistreatment. ?They are outsourcing torture because they know it?s illegal,? he said. ?Why, if they have suspicions, don?t they question people within the boundary of the law??
Rendition was originally carried out on a limited basis, but after September 11th, when President Bush declared a global war on terrorism, the program expanded beyond recognition?becoming, according to a former C.I.A. official, ?an abomination.? What began as a program aimed at a small, discrete set of suspects?people against whom there were outstanding foreign arrest warrants?came to include a wide and ill-defined population that the Administration terms ?illegal enemy combatants.? Many of them have never been publicly charged with any crime. Scott Horton, an expert on international law who helped prepare a report on renditions issued by N.Y.U. Law School and the New York City Bar Association, estimates that a hundred and fifty people have been rendered since 2001. Representative Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts and a member of the Select Committee on Homeland Security, said that a more precise number was impossible to obtain. ?I?ve asked people at the C.I.A. for numbers,? he said. ?They refuse to answer. All they will say is that they?re in compliance with the law.?
Although the full scope of the extraordinary-rendition program isn?t known, several recent cases have come to light that may well violate U.S. law. In 1998, Congress passed legislation declaring that it is ?the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States.?
The Bush Administration, however, has argued that the threat posed by stateless terrorists who draw no distinction between military and civilian targets is so dire that it requires tough new rules of engagement. This shift in perspective, labelled the New Paradigm in a memo written by Alberto Gonzales, then the White House counsel, ?places a high premium on . . . the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians,? giving less weight to the rights of suspects. It also questions many international laws of war. Five days after Al Qaeda?s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Vice-President Dick Cheney, reflecting the new outlook, argued, on ?Meet the Press,? that the government needed to ?work through, sort of, the dark side.? Cheney went on, ?A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we?re going to be successful. That?s the world these folks operate in. And so it?s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.?
The extraordinary-rendition program bears little relation to the system of due process afforded suspects in crimes in America. Terrorism suspects in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East have often been abducted by hooded or masked American agents, then forced onto a Gulfstream V jet, like the one described by Arar. This jet, which has been registered to a series of dummy American corporations, such as Bayard Foreign Marketing, of Portland, Oregon, has clearance to land at U.S. military bases. Upon arriving in foreign countries, rendered suspects often vanish. Detainees are not provided with lawyers, and many families are not informed of their whereabouts.
The most common destinations for rendered suspects are Egypt, Morocco, Syria, and Jordan, all of which have been cited for human-rights violations by the State Department, and are known to torture suspects. To justify sending detainees to these countries, the Administration appears to be relying on a very fine reading of an imprecise clause in the United Nations Convention Against Torture (which the U.S. ratified in 1994), requiring ?substantial grounds for believing? that a detainee will be tortured abroad. Martin Lederman, a lawyer who left the Justice Department?s Office of Legal Counsel in 2002, after eight years, says, ?The Convention only applies when you know a suspect is more likely than not to be tortured, but what if you kind of know? That?s not enough. So there are ways to get around it.?
Administration officials declined to discuss the rendition program. But Rohan Gunaratna, a Sri Lankan expert on terrorist interrogations who has consulted with several intelligence agencies, argued that rough tactics ?can save hundreds of lives.? He said, ?When you capture a terrorist, he may know when the next operation will be staged, so it may be necessary to put a detainee under physical or psychological pressure. I disagree with physical torture, but sometimes the threat of it must be used.?
Rendition is just one element of the Administration?s New Paradigm. The C.I.A. itself is holding dozens of ?high value? terrorist suspects outside of the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S., in addition to the estimated five hundred and fifty detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The Administration confirmed the identities of at least ten of these suspects to the 9/11 Commission?including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a top Al Qaeda operative, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a chief planner of the September 11th attacks?but refused to allow commission members to interview the men, and would not say where they were being held. Reports have suggested that C.I.A. prisons are being operated in Thailand, Qatar, and Afghanistan, among other countries. At the request of the C.I.A., Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld personally ordered that a prisoner in Iraq be hidden from Red Cross officials for several months, and Army General Paul Kern told Congress that the C.I.A. may have hidden up to a hundred detainees. The Geneva Conventions of 1949, which established norms on the treatment of soldiers and civilians captured in war, require the prompt registration of detainees, so that their treatment can be monitored, but the Administration argues that Al Qaeda members and supporters, who are not part of a state-sponsored military, are not covered by the Conventions.
The Bush Administration?s departure from international norms has been justified in intellectual terms by élite lawyers like Gonzales, who is a graduate of Harvard Law School. Gonzales, the new Attorney General, argued during his confirmation proceedings that the U.N. Convention Against Torture?s ban on ?cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment? of terrorist suspects does not apply to American interrogations of foreigners overseas. Perhaps surprisingly, the fiercest internal resistance to this thinking has come from people who have been directly involved in interrogation, including veteran F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents. Their concerns are as much practical as ideological. Years of experience in interrogation have led them to doubt the effectiveness of physical coercion as a means of extracting reliable information. They also warn that the Bush Administration, having taken so many prisoners outside the realm of the law, may not be able to bring them back in. By holding detainees indefinitely, without counsel, without charges of wrongdoing, and under circumstances that could, in legal parlance, ?shock the conscience? of a court, the Administration has jeopardized its chances of convicting hundreds of suspected terrorists, or even of using them as witnesses in almost any court in the world.
?It?s a big problem,? Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general and a member of the 9/11 Commission, says. ?In criminal justice, you either prosecute the suspects or let them go. But if you?ve treated them in ways that won?t allow you to prosecute them you?re in this no man?s land. What do you do with these people??


The criminal prosecution of terrorist suspects has not been a priority for the Bush Administration, which has focussed, rather, on preventing additional attacks. But some people who have been fighting terrorism for many years are concerned about unintended consequences of the Administration?s radical legal measures. Among these critics is Michael Scheuer, a former C.I.A. counter-terrorism expert who helped establish the practice of rendition. Scheuer left the agency in 2004, and has written two acerbic critiques of the government?s fight against Islamic terrorism under the pseudonym Anonymous, the most recent of which, ?Imperial Hubris,? was a best-seller.
Not long ago, Scheuer, who lives in northern Virginia, spoke openly for the first time about how he and several other top C.I.A. officials set up the program, in the mid-nineties. ?It was begun in desperation, ? he told me. At the time, he was the head of the C.I.A.?s Islamic-militant unit, whose job was to ?detect, disrupt, and dismantle? terrorist operations. His unit spent much of 1996 studying how Al Qaeda operated; by the next year, Scheuer said, its mission was to try to capture bin Laden and his associates. He recalled, ?We went to the White House??which was then occupied by the Clinton Administration??and they said, ?Do it.?? He added that Richard Clarke, who was in charge of counter-terrorism for the National Security Council, offered no advice. ?He told me, ?Figure it out by yourselves,?? Scheuer said. (Clarke did not respond to a request for comment.)
Scheuer sought the counsel of Mary Jo White, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who, along with a small group of F.B.I. agents, was pursuing the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case. In 1998, White?s team obtained an indictment against bin Laden, authorizing U.S. agents to bring him and his associates to the United States to stand trial. From the start, though, the C.I.A. was wary of granting terrorism suspects the due process afforded by American law. The agency did not want to divulge secrets about its intelligence sources and methods, and American courts demand transparency. Even establishing the chain of custody of key evidence?such as a laptop computer?could easily pose a significant problem: foreign governments might refuse to testify in U.S. courts about how they had obtained the evidence, for fear of having their secret coöperation exposed. (Foreign governments often worried about retaliation from their own Muslim populations.) The C.I.A. also felt that other agencies sometimes stood in its way. In 1996, for example, the State Department stymied a joint effort by the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. to question one of bin Laden?s cousins in America, because he had a diplomatic passport, which protects the holder from U.S. law enforcement. Describing the C.I.A.?s frustration, Scheuer said, ?We were turning into voyeurs. We knew where these people were, but we couldn?t capture them because we had nowhere to take them.? The agency realized that ?we had to come up with a third party.?
The obvious choice, Scheuer said, was Egypt. The largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid after Israel, Egypt was a key strategic ally, and its secret police force, the Mukhabarat, had a reputation for brutality. Egypt had been frequently cited by the State Department for torture of prisoners. According to a 2002 report, detainees were ?stripped and blindfolded; suspended from a ceiling or doorframe with feet just touching the floor; beaten with fists, whips, metal rods, or other objects; subjected to electrical shocks; and doused with cold water [and] sexually assaulted.? Hosni Mubarak, Egypt?s leader, who came to office in 1981, after President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Islamist extremists, was determined to crack down on terrorism. His prime political enemies were radical Islamists, hundreds of whom had fled the country and joined Al Qaeda. Among these was Ayman al-Zawahiri, a physician from Cairo, who went to Afghanistan and eventually became bin Laden?s deputy.
In 1995, Scheuer said, American agents proposed the rendition program to Egypt, making clear that it had the resources to track, capture, and transport terrorist suspects globally?including access to a small fleet of aircraft. Egypt embraced the idea. ?What was clever was that some of the senior people in Al Qaeda were Egyptian,? Scheuer said. ?It served American purposes to get these people arrested, and Egyptian purposes to get these people back, where they could be interrogated.? Technically, U.S. law requires the C.I.A. to seek ?assurances? from foreign governments that rendered suspects won?t be tortured. Scheuer told me that this was done, but he was ?not sure? if any documents confirming the arrangement were signed.
A series of spectacular covert operations followed from this secret pact. On September 13, 1995, U.S. agents helped kidnap Talaat Fouad Qassem, one of Egypt?s most wanted terrorists, in Croatia. Qassem had fled to Europe after being linked by Egypt to the assassination of Sadat; he had been sentenced to death in absentia. Croatian police seized Qassem in Zagreb and handed him over to U.S. agents, who interrogated him aboard a ship cruising the Adriatic Sea and then took him back to Egypt. Once there, Qassem disappeared. There is no record that he was put on trial. Hossam el-Hamalawy, an Egyptian journalist who covers human-rights issues, said, ?We believe he was executed.?
A more elaborate operation was staged in Tirana, Albania, in the summer of 1998. According to the Wall Street Journal, the C.I.A. provided the Albanian intelligence service with equipment to wiretap the phones of suspected Muslim militants. Tapes of the conversations were translated into English, and U.S. agents discovered that they contained lengthy discussions with Zawahiri, bin Laden?s deputy. The U.S. pressured Egypt for assistance; in June, Egypt issued an arrest warrant for Shawki Salama Attiya, one of the militants. Over the next few months, according to the Journal, Albanian security forces, working with U.S. agents, killed one suspect and captured Attiya and four others. These men were bound, blindfolded, and taken to an abandoned airbase, then flown by jet to Cairo for interrogation. Attiya later alleged that he suffered electrical shocks to his genitals, was hung from his limbs, and was kept in a cell in filthy water up to his knees. Two other suspects, who had been sentenced to death in absentia, were hanged.
On August 5, 1998, an Arab-language newspaper in London published a letter from the International Islamic Front for Jihad, in which it threatened retaliation against the U.S. for the Albanian operation?in a ?language they will understand.? Two days later, the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were blown up, killing two hundred and twenty-four people.
The U.S. began rendering terror suspects to other countries, but the most common destination remained Egypt. The partnership between the American and the Egyptian intelligence services was extraordinarily close: the Americans could give the Egyptian interrogators questions they wanted put to the detainees in the morning, Scheuer said, and get answers by the evening. The Americans asked to question suspects directly themselves, but, Scheuer said, the Egyptians refused. ?We were never in the same room at the same time.?
Scheuer claimed that ?there was a legal process? undergirding these early renditions. Every suspect who was apprehended, he said, had been convicted in absentia. Before a suspect was captured, a dossier was prepared containing the equivalent of a rap sheet. The C.I.A.?s legal counsel signed off on every proposed operation. Scheuer said that this system prevented innocent people from being subjected to rendition. ?Langley would never let us proceed unless there was substance,? he said. Moreover, Scheuer emphasized, renditions were pursued out of expedience??not out of thinking it was the best policy.?
Since September 11th, as the number of renditions has grown, and hundreds of terrorist suspects have been deposited indefinitely in places like Guantánamo Bay, the shortcomings of this approach have become manifest. ?Are we going to hold these people forever?? Scheuer asked. ?The policymakers hadn?t thought what to do with them, and what would happen when it was found out that we were turning them over to governments that the human-rights world reviled.? Once a detainee?s rights have been violated, he says, ?you absolutely can?t? reinstate him into the court system. ?You can?t kill him, either,? he added. ?All we?ve done is create a nightmare.?


On a bleak winter day in Trenton, New Jersey, Dan Coleman, an ex-F.B.I. agent who retired last July, because of asthma, scoffed at the idea that a C.I.A. agent was now having compunctions about renditions. The C.I.A., Coleman said, liked rendition from the start. ?They loved that these guys would just disappear off the books, and never be heard of again,? he said. ?They were proud of it.?
For ten years, Coleman worked closely with the C.I.A. on counter-terrorism cases, including the Embassy attacks in Kenya and Tanzania. His methodical style of detective work, in which interrogations were aimed at forging relationships with detainees, became unfashionable after September 11th, in part because the government was intent on extracting information as quickly as possible, in order to prevent future attacks. Yet the more patient approach used by Coleman and other agents had yielded major successes. In the Embassy-bombings case, they helped convict four Al Qaeda operatives on three hundred and two criminal counts; all four men pleaded guilty to serious terrorism charges. The confessions the F.B.I. agents elicited, and the trial itself, which ended in May, 2001, created an invaluable public record about Al Qaeda, including details about its funding mechanisms, its internal structure, and its intention to obtain weapons of mass destruction. (The political leadership in Washington, unfortunately, did not pay sufficient attention.)
Coleman is a political nonpartisan with a law-and-order mentality. His eldest son is a former Army Ranger who served in Afghanistan. Yet Coleman was troubled by the Bush Administration?s New Paradigm. Torture, he said, ?has become bureaucratized.? Bad as the policy of rendition was before September 11th, Coleman said, ?afterward, it really went out of control.? He explained, ?Now, instead of just sending people to third countries, we?re holding them ourselves. We?re taking people, and keeping them in our own custody in third countries. That?s an enormous problem.? Egypt, he pointed out, at least had an established legal system, however harsh. ?There was a process there,? Coleman said. ?But what?s our process? We have no method over there other than our laws?and we?ve decided to ignore them. What are we now, the Huns? If you don?t talk to us, we?ll kill you??
From the beginning of the rendition program, Coleman said, there was no doubt that Egypt engaged in torture. He recalled the case of a suspect in the first World Trade Center bombing who fled to Egypt. The U.S. requested his return, and the Egyptians handed him over?wrapped head to toe in duct tape, like a mummy. (In another incident, an Egyptian with links to Al Qaeda who had coöperated with the U.S. government in a terrorism trial was picked up in Cairo and imprisoned by Egyptian authorities until U.S. diplomats secured his release. For days, he had been chained to a toilet, where guards had urinated on him.)
Under such circumstances, it might seem difficult for the U.S. government to legally justify dispatching suspects to Egypt. But Coleman said that since September 11th the C.I.A. ?has seemed to think it?s operating under different rules, that it has extralegal abilities outside the U.S.? Agents, he said, have ?told me that they have their own enormous office of general counsel that rarely tells them no. Whatever they do is all right. It all takes place overseas.?
Coleman was angry that lawyers in Washington were redefining the parameters of counter-terrorism interrogations. ?Have any of these guys ever tried to talk to someone who?s been deprived of his clothes?? he asked. ?He?s going to be ashamed, and humiliated, and cold. He?ll tell you anything you want to hear to get his clothes back. There?s no value in it.? Coleman said that he had learned to treat even the most despicable suspects as if there were ?a personal relationship, even if you can?t stand them.? He said that many of the suspects he had interrogated expected to be tortured, and were stunned to learn that they had rights under the American system. Due process made detainees more compliant, not less, Coleman said. He had also found that a defendant?s right to legal counsel was beneficial not only to suspects but also to law-enforcement officers. Defense lawyers frequently persuaded detainees to coöperate with prosecutors, in exchange for plea agreements. ?The lawyers show these guys there?s a way out,? Coleman said. ?It?s human nature. People don?t coöperate with you unless they have some reason to.? He added, ?Brutalization doesn?t work. We know that. Besides, you lose your soul.?


The Bush Administration?s redefinition of the standards of interrogation took place almost entirely out of public view. One of the first officials to offer hints of the shift in approach was Cofer Black, who was then in charge of counter-terrorism at the C.I.A. On September 26, 2002, he addressed the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, and stated that the arrest and detention of terrorists was ?a very highly classified area.? He added, ?All you need to know is that there was a ?before 9/11? and there was an ?after 9/11.? After 9/11, the gloves came off.?
Laying the foundation for this shift was a now famous set of internal legal memos?some were leaked, others were made public by groups such as the N.Y.U. Center for Law and National Security. Most of these documents were generated by a small, hawkish group of politically appointed lawyers in the Justice Department?s Office of Legal Counsel and in the office of Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel. Chief among the authors was John C. Yoo, the deputy assistant attorney general at the time. (A Yale Law School graduate and a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, Yoo now teaches law at Berkeley.) Taken together, the memos advised the President that he had almost unfettered latitude in his prosecution of the war on terror. For many years, Yoo was a member of the Federalist Society, a fellowship of conservative intellectuals who view international law with skepticism, and September 11th offered an opportunity for him and others in the Administration to put their political ideas into practice. A former lawyer in the State Department recalled the mood of the Administration: ?The Twin Towers were still smoldering. The atmosphere was intense. The tone at the top was aggressive?and understandably so. The Commander-in-Chief had used the words ?dead or alive? and vowed to bring the terrorists to justice or bring justice to them. There was a fury.?
Soon after September 11th, Yoo and other Administration lawyers began advising President Bush that he did not have to comply with the Geneva Conventions in handling detainees in the war on terror. The lawyers classified these detainees not as civilians or prisoners of war?two categories of individuals protected by the Conventions?but as ?illegal enemy combatants.? The rubric included not only Al Qaeda members and supporters but the entire Taliban, because, Yoo and other lawyers argued, the country was a ?failed state.? Eric Lewis, an expert in international law who represents several Guantánamo detainees, said, ?The Administration?s lawyers created a third category and cast them outside the law.?
The State Department, determined to uphold the Geneva Conventions, fought against Bush?s lawyers and lost. In a forty-page memo to Yoo, dated January 11, 2002 (which has not been publicly released), William Taft IV, the State Department legal adviser, argued that Yoo?s analysis was ?seriously flawed.? Taft told Yoo that his contention that the President could disregard the Geneva Conventions was ?untenable,? ?incorrect,? and ?confused.? Taft disputed Yoo?s argument that Afghanistan, as a ?failed state,? was not covered by the Conventions. ?The official United States position before, during, and after the emergence of the Taliban was that Afghanistan constituted a state,? he wrote. Taft also warned Yoo that if the U.S. took the war on terrorism outside the Geneva Conventions, not only could U.S. soldiers be denied the protections of the Conventions?and therefore be prosecuted for crimes, including murder?but President Bush could be accused of a ?grave breach? by other countries, and be prosecuted for war crimes. Taft sent a copy of his memo to Gonzales, hoping that his dissent would reach the President. Within days, Yoo sent Taft a lengthy rebuttal.
Others in the Administration worried that the President?s lawyers were wayward. ?Lawyers have to be the voice of reason and sometimes have to put the brakes on, no matter how much the client wants to hear something else,? the former State Department lawyer said. ?Our job is to keep the train on the tracks. It?s not to tell the President, ?Here are the ways to avoid the law.?? He went on, ?There is no such thing as a non-covered person under the Geneva Conventions. It?s nonsense. The protocols cover fighters in everything from world wars to local rebellions.? The lawyer said that Taft urged Yoo and Gonzales to warn President Bush that he would ?be seen as a war criminal by the rest of the world,? but Taft was ignored. This may be because President Bush had already made up his mind. According to top State Department officials, Bush decided to suspend the Geneva Conventions on January 8, 2002?three days before Taft sent his memo to Yoo.
The legal pronouncements from Washington about the status of detainees were painstakingly constructed to include numerous loopholes. For example, in February, 2002, President Bush issued a written directive stating that, even though he had determined that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the war on terror, all detainees should be treated ?humanely.? A close reading of the directive, however, revealed that it referred only to military interrogators?not to C.I.A. officials. This exemption allowed the C.I.A. to continue using interrogation methods, including rendition, that stopped just short of torture. Further, an August, 2002, memo written largely by Yoo but signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee argued that torture required the intent to inflict suffering ?equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.? According to the Times, a secret memo issued by Administration lawyers authorized the C.I.A. to use novel interrogation methods?including ?water-boarding,? in which a suspect is bound and immersed in water until he nearly drowns. Dr. Allen Keller, the director of the Bellevue/N.Y.U. Program for Survivors of Torture, told me that he had treated a number of people who had been subjected to such forms of near-asphyxiation, and he argued that it was indeed torture. Some victims were still traumatized years later, he said. One patient couldn?t take showers, and panicked when it rained. ?The fear of being killed is a terrifying experience,? he said.
The Administration?s justification of the rough treatment of detainees appears to have passed down the chain of command. In late 2003, at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq, photographs were taken that documented prisoners being subjected to grotesque abuse by U.S. soldiers. After the scandal became public, the Justice Department revised the narrow definition of torture outlined in the Bybee memo, using language that more strongly prohibited physical abuse during interrogations. But the Administration has fought hard against legislative efforts to rein in the C.I.A. In the past few months, Republican leaders, at the White House?s urging, have blocked two attempts in the Senate to ban the C.I.A. from using cruel and inhuman interrogation methods. An attempt in the House to outlaw extraordinary rendition, led by Representative Markey, also failed.
In a recent phone interview, Yoo was soft-spoken and resolute. ?Why is it so hard for people to understand that there is a category of behavior not covered by the legal system?? he said. ?What were pirates? They weren?t fighting on behalf of any nation. What were slave traders? Historically, there were people so bad that they were not given protection of the laws. There were no specific provisions for their trial, or imprisonment. If you were an illegal combatant, you didn?t deserve the protection of the laws of war.? Yoo cited precedents for his position. ?The Lincoln assassins were treated this way, too,? he said. ?They were tried in a military court, and executed.? The point, he said, was that the Geneva Conventions??simple binary classification of civilian or soldier isn?t accurate.?
Yoo also argued that the Constitution granted the President plenary powers to override the U.N. Convention Against Torture when he is acting in the nation?s defense?a position that has drawn dissent from many scholars. As Yoo saw it, Congress doesn?t have the power to ?tie the President?s hands in regard to torture as an interrogation technique.? He continued, ?It?s the core of the Commander-in-Chief function. They can?t prevent the President from ordering torture.? If the President were to abuse his powers as Commander-in-Chief, Yoo said, the constitutional remedy was impeachment. He went on to suggest that President Bush?s victory in the 2004 election, along with the relatively mild challenge to Gonzales mounted by the Democrats in Congress, was ?proof that the debate is over.? He said, ?The issue is dying out. The public has had its referendum.?


A few months after September 11th, the U.S. gained custody of its first high-ranking Al Qaeda figure, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi. He had run bin Laden?s terrorist training camp in Khalden, Afghanistan, and was detained in Pakistan. Zacarias Moussaoui, who was already in U.S. custody, and Richard Reid, the Shoe Bomber, had both spent time at the Khalden camp. At the F.B.I.?s field office in New York, Jack Cloonan, an officer who had worked for the agency since 1972, struggled to maintain control of the legal process in Afghanistan. C.I.A. and F.B.I. agents were vying to take possession of Libi. Cloonan, who worked with Dan Coleman on anti-terrorism cases for many years, said he felt that ?neither the Moussaoui case nor the Reid case was a slam dunk.? He became intent on securing Libi?s testimony as a witness against them. He advised his F.B.I. colleagues in Afghanistan to question Libi respectfully, ?and handle this like it was being done right here, in my office in New York.? He recalled, ?I remember talking on a secure line to them. I told them, ?Do yourself a favor, read the guy his rights. It may be old-fashioned, but this will come out if we don?t. It may take ten years, but it will hurt you, and the bureau?s reputation, if you don?t. Have it stand as a shining example of what we feel is right.??
Cloonan?s F.B.I. colleagues advised Libi of his rights and took turns with C.I.A. agents in questioning him. After a few days, F.B.I. officials felt that they were developing a good rapport with him. The C.I.A. agents, however, felt that he was lying to them, and needed tougher interrogation.
To Cloonan?s dismay, the C.I.A. reportedly rendered Libi to Egypt. He was seen boarding a plane in Afghanistan, restrained by handcuffs and ankle cuffs, his mouth covered by duct tape. Cloonan, who retired from the F.B.I. in 2002, said, ?At least we got information in ways that wouldn?t shock the conscience of the court. And no one will have to seek revenge for what I did.? He added, ?We need to show the world that we can lead, and not just by military might.?
After Libi was taken to Egypt, the F.B.I. lost track of him. Yet he evidently played a crucial background role in Secretary of State Colin Powell?s momentous address to the United Nations Security Council in February, 2003, which argued the case for a preëmptive war against Iraq. In his speech, Powell did not refer to Libi by name, but he announced to the world that ?a senior terrorist operative? who ?was responsible for one of Al Qaeda?s training camps in Afghanistan? had told U.S. authorities that Saddam Hussein had offered to train two Al Qaeda operatives in the use of ?chemical or biological weapons.?
Last summer, Newsweek reported that Libi, who was eventually transferred from Egypt to Guantánamo Bay, was the source of the incendiary charge cited by Powell, and that he had recanted. By then, the first anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq had passed and the 9/11 Commission had declared that there was no known evidence of a working relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Dan Coleman was disgusted when he heard about Libi?s false confession. ?It was ridiculous for interrogators to think Libi would have known anything about Iraq,? he said. ?I could have told them that. He ran a training camp. He wouldn?t have had anything to do with Iraq. Administration officials were always pushing us to come up with links, but there weren?t any. The reason they got bad information is that they beat it out of him. You never get good information from someone that way.?
Most authorities on interrogation, in and out of government, agree that torture and lesser forms of physical coercion succeed in producing confessions. The problem is that these confessions aren?t necessarily true. Three of the Guantánamo detainees released by the U.S. to Great Britain last year, for example, had confessed that they had appeared in a blurry video, obtained by American investigators, that documented a group of acolytes meeting with bin Laden in Afghanistan. As reported in the London Observer, British intelligence officials arrived at Guantánamo with evidence that the accused men had been living in England at the time the video was made. The detainees told British authorities that they had been coerced into making false confessions.
Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, told me that ?the U.S. accepts quite a lot of intelligence from the Uzbeks? that has been extracted from suspects who have been tortured. This information was, he said, ?largely rubbish.? He said he knew of ?at least three? instances where the U.S. had rendered suspected militants from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan. Although Murray does not know the fate of the three men, he said, ?They almost certainly would have been tortured.? In Uzbekistan, he said, ?partial boiling of a hand or an arm is quite common.? He also knew of two cases in which prisoners had been boiled to death.
In 2002, Murray, concerned that America was complicit with such a regime, asked his deputy to discuss the problem with the C.I.A.?s station chief in Tashkent. He said that the station chief did not dispute that intelligence was being obtained under torture. But the C.I.A. did not consider this a problem. ?There was no reason to think they were perturbed,? Murray told me.
Scientific research on the efficacy of torture and rough interrogation is limited, because of the moral and legal impediments to experimentation. Tom Parker, a former officer for M.I.5, the British intelligence agency, who teaches at Yale, argued that, whether or not forceful interrogations yield accurate information from terrorist suspects, a larger problem is that many detainees ?have nothing to tell.? For many years, he said, British authorities subjected members of the Irish Republican Army to forceful interrogations, but, in the end, the government concluded that ?detainees aren?t valuable.? A more effective strategy, Parker said, was ?being creative? about human intelligence gathering, such as infiltration and eavesdropping. ?The U.S. is doing what the British did in the nineteen-seventies, detaining people and violating their civil liberties,? he said. ?It did nothing but exacerbate the situation. Most of those interned went back to terrorism. You?ll end up radicalizing the entire population.?


Although the Administration has tried to keep the details of extraordinary renditions secret, several accounts have surfaced that reveal how the program operates. On December 18, 2001, at Stockholm?s Bromma Airport, a half-dozen hooded security officials ushered two Egyptian asylum seekers, Muhammad Zery and Ahmed Agiza, into an empty office. They cut off the Egyptians? clothes with scissors, forcibly administered sedatives by suppository, swaddled them in diapers, and dressed them in orange jumpsuits. As was reported by ?Kalla Fakta,? a Swedish television news program, the suspects were blindfolded, placed in handcuffs and leg irons; according to a declassified Swedish government report, the men were then flown to Cairo on a U.S.-registered Gulfstream V jet. Swedish officials have claimed that they received assurances from the Egyptians that Zery and Agiza would be treated humanely. But both suspects have said, through lawyers and family members, that they were tortured with electrical charges to their genitals. (Zery said that he was also forced to lie on an electrified bed frame.) After spending two years in an Egyptian prison, Zery was released. Agiza, a physician who had once been an ally of Zawahiri but later renounced him and terrorism, was convicted on terrorism charges by Egypt?s Supreme Military Court. He was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.
Another case suggests that the Bush Administration is authorizing the rendition of suspects for whom it has little evidence of guilt. Mamdouh Habib, an Egyptian-born citizen of Australia, was apprehended in Pakistan in October, 2001. According to his wife, Habib, a radical Muslim with four children, was visiting the country to tour religious schools and determine if his family should move to Pakistan. A spokesman at the Pentagon has claimed that Habib?who has expressed support for Islamist causes?spent most of his trip in Afghanistan, and was ?either supporting hostile forces or on the battlefield fighting illegally against the U.S.? Last month, after a three-year ordeal, Habib was released without charges.
Habib is one of a handful of people subjected to rendition who are being represented pro bono by human-rights lawyers. According to a recently unsealed document prepared by Joseph Margulies, a lawyer affiliated with the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Chicago Law School, Habib said that he was first interrogated in Pakistan for three weeks, in part at a facility in Islamabad, where he said he was brutalized. Some of his interrogators, he claimed, spoke English with American accents. (Having lived in Australia for years, Habib is comfortable in English.) He was then placed in the custody of Americans, two of whom wore black short-sleeved shirts and had distinctive tattoos: one depicted an American flag attached to a flagpole shaped like a finger, the other a large cross. The Americans took him to an airfield, cut his clothes off with scissors, dressed him in a jumpsuit, covered his eyes with opaque goggles, and placed him aboard a private plane. He was flown to Egypt.
According to Margulies, Habib was held and interrogated for six months. ?Never, to my knowledge, did he make an appearance in any court,? Margulies told me. Margulies was also unaware of any evidence suggesting that the U.S. sought a promise from Egypt that Habib would not be tortured. For his part, Habib claimed to have been subjected to horrific conditions. He said that he was beaten frequently with blunt instruments, including an object that he likened to an electric ?cattle prod.? And he was told that if he didn?t confess to belonging to Al Qaeda he would be anally raped by specially trained dogs. (Hossam el-Hamalawy said that Egyptian security forces train German shepherds for police work, and that other prisoners have also been threatened with rape by trained dogs, although he knows of no one who has been assaulted in this way.) Habib said that he was shackled and forced to stand in three torture chambers: one room was filled with water up to his chin, requiring him to stand on tiptoe for hours; another chamber, filled with water up to his knees, had a ceiling so low that he was forced into a prolonged, painful stoop; in the third, he stood in water up to his ankles, and within sight of an electric switch and a generator, which his jailers said would be used to electrocute him if he didn?t confess. Habib?s lawyer said that he submitted to his interrogators? demands and made multiple confessions, all of them false. (Egyptian authorities have described such allegations of torture as ?mythology.?)
After his imprisonment in Egypt, Habib said that he was returned to U.S. custody and was flown to Bagram Air Force Base, in Afghanistan, and then on to Guantánamo Bay, where he was detained until last month. On January 11th, a few days after the Washington Post published an article on Habib?s case, the Pentagon, offering virtually no explanation, agreed to release him into the custody of the Australian government. ?Habib was released because he was hopelessly embarrassing,? Eric Freedman, a professor at Hofstra Law School, who has been involved in the detainees? legal defense, says. ?It?s a large crack in the wall in a house of cards that is midway through tumbling down.? In a prepared statement, a Pentagon spokesman, Lieutenant Commander Flex Plexico, said there was ?no evidence? that Habib ?was tortured or abused? while he was in U.S. custody. He also said that Habib had received ?Al Qaeda training,? which included instruction in making false abuse allegations. Habib?s claims, he suggested, ?fit the standard operating procedure.?
The U.S. government has not responded directly to Habib?s charge that he was rendered to Egypt. However, several other men who were recently released from Guantánamo reported that Habib told them about it. Jamal al-Harith, a British detainee who was sent home to Manchester, England, last March, told me in a phone interview that at one point he had been placed in a cage across from Habib. ?He said that he had been in Egypt for about six months, and they had injected him with drugs, and hung him from the ceiling, and beaten him very, very badly,? Harith recalled. ?He seemed to be in pain. He was haggard-looking. I never saw him walk. He always had to be held up.?
Another piece of evidence that may support Habib?s story is a set of flight logs documenting the travels of a white Gulfstream V jet?the plane that seems to have been used for renditions by the U.S. government. These logs show that on April 9, 2002, the jet left Dulles Airport, in Washington, and landed in Cairo. According to Habib?s attorney, this was around the same time that Habib said he was released by the Egyptians in Cairo, and returned to U.S. custody. The flight logs were obtained by Stephen Grey, a British journalist who has written a number of stories on renditions for British publications, including the London Sunday Times. Grey?s logs are incomplete, but they chronicle some three hundred flights over three years by the fourteen-seat jet, which was marked on its tail with the code N379P. (It was recently changed, to N8068V.) All the flights originated from Dulles Airport, and many of them landed at restricted U.S. military bases.

Even if Habib is a terrorist aligned with Al Qaeda, as Pentagon officials have claimed, it seems unlikely that prosecutors would ever be able to build a strong case against him, given the treatment that he allegedly received in Egypt. John Radsan, a law professor at William Mitchell College of Law, in St. Paul, Minnesota, who worked in the general counsel?s office of the C.I.A. until last year, said, ?I don?t think anyone?s thought through what we do with these people.?
Similar problems complicate the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was captured in Pakistan in March, 2003. Mohammed has reportedly been ?water-boarded? during interrogations. If so, Radsan said, ?it would be almost impossible to take him into a criminal trial. Any evidence derived from his interrogation could be seen as fruit from the poisonous tree. I think the government is considering some sort of military tribunal somewhere down the line. But, even there, there are still constitutional requirements that you can?t bring in involuntary confessions.?
The trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, in Alexandria, Virginia?the only U.S. criminal trial of a suspect linked to the September 11th attacks?is stalled. It?s been more than three years since Attorney General John Ashcroft called Moussaoui?s indictment ?a chronicle of evil.? The case has been held up by Moussaoui?s demand?and the Bush Administration?s refusal?to let him call as witnesses Al Qaeda members held in government custody, including Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. (Bin al-Shibh is thought to have been tortured.) Government attorneys have argued that producing the witnesses would disrupt the interrogation process.
Similarly, German officials fear that they may be unable to convict any members of the Hamburg cell that is believed to have helped plan the September 11th attacks, on charges connected to the plot, in part because the U.S. government refuses to produce bin al-Shibh and Mohammed as witnesses. Last year, one of the Hamburg defendants, Mounir Motassadeq, became the first person to be convicted in the planning of the attacks, but his guilty verdict was overturned by an appeals court, which found the evidence against him too weak.
Motassadeq is on trial again, but, in accordance with German law, he is no longer being imprisoned. Although he is alleged to have overseen the payment of funds into the accounts of the September 11th hijackers?and to have been friendly with Mohamed Atta, who flew one of the planes that hit the Twin Towers?he walks freely to and from the courthouse each day. The U.S. has supplied the German court with edited summaries of testimony from Mohammed and bin al-Shibh. But Gerhard Strate, Motassadeq?s defense lawyer, told me, ?We are not satisfied with the summaries. If you want to find the truth, we need to know who has been interrogating them, and under what circumstances. We don?t have any answers to this.? The refusal by the U.S. to produce the witnesses in person, Strate said, ?puts the court in a ridiculous position.? He added, ?I don?t know why they won?t produce the witnesses. The first thing you think is that the U.S. government has something to hide.?
In fact, the Justice Department recently admitted that it had something to hide in relation to Maher Arar, the Canadian engineer. The government invoked the rarely used ?state secrets privilege? in a motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by Arar?s lawyers against the U.S. government. To go forward in an open court, the government said, would jeopardize the ?intelligence, foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.? Barbara Olshansky, the assistant legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing Arar, said that government lawyers ?are saying this case can?t be tried, and the classified information on which they?re basing this argument can?t even be shared with the opposing lawyers. It?s the height of arrogance?they think they can do anything they want in the name of the global war on terrorism.?


Nadja Dizdarevic is a thirty-year-old mother of four who lives in Sarajevo. On October 21, 2001, her husband, Hadj Boudella, a Muslim of Algerian descent, and five other Algerians living in Bosnia were arrested after U.S. authorities tipped off the Bosnian government to an alleged plot by the group to blow up the American and British Embassies in Sarajevo. One of the suspects reportedly placed some seventy phone calls to the Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah in the days after September 11th. Boudella and his wife, however, maintain that neither he nor several of the other defendants knew the man who had allegedly contacted Zubaydah. And an investigation by the Bosnian government turned up no confirmation that the calls to Zubaydah were made at all, according to the men?s American lawyers, Rob Kirsch and Stephen Oleskey.
At the request of the U.S., the Bosnian government held all six men for three months, but was unable to substantiate any criminal charges against them. On January 17, 2002, the Bosnian Supreme Court ruled that they should be released. Instead, as the men left prison, they were handcuffed, forced to put on surgical masks with nose clips, covered in hoods, and herded into waiting unmarked cars by masked figures, some of whom appeared to be members of the Bosnian special forces. Boudella?s wife had come to the prison to meet her husband, and she recalled that she recognized him, despite the hood, because he was wearing a new suit that she had brought him the day before. ?I will never forget that night,? she said. ?It was snowing. I was screaming for someone to help.? A crowd gathered, and tried to block the convoy, but it sped off. The suspects were taken to a military airbase and kept in a freezing hangar for hours; one member of the group later claimed that he saw one of the abductors remove his Bosnian uniform, revealing that he was in fact American. The U.S. government has neither confirmed nor denied its role in the operation.
Six days after the abduction, Boudella?s wife received word that her husband and the other men had been sent to Guantánamo. One man in the group has alleged that two of his fingers were broken by U.S. soldiers. Little is publicly known about the welfare of the others.
Boudella?s wife said that she was astounded that her husband could be seized without charge or trial, at home during peacetime and after his own government had exonerated him. The term ?enemy combatant? perplexed her. ?He is an enemy of whom?? she asked. ?In combat where?? She said that her view of America had changed. ?I have not changed my opinion about its people, but unfortunately I have changed my opinion about its respect for human rights,? she said. ?It is no longer the leader in the world. It has become the leader in the violation of human rights.?
In October, Boudella attempted to plead his innocence before the Pentagon?s Combatant Status Review Tribunal. The C.S.R.T. is the Pentagon?s answer to the Supreme Court?s ruling last year, over the Bush Administration?s objections, that detainees in Guantánamo had a right to challenge their imprisonment. Boudella was not allowed to bring a lawyer to the proceeding. And the tribunal said that it was ?unable to locate? a copy of the Bosnian Supreme Court?s verdict freeing him, which he had requested that it read. Transcripts show that Boudella stated, ?I am against any terrorist acts,? and asked, ?How could I be part of an organization that I strongly believe has harmed my people?? The tribunal rejected his plea, as it has rejected three hundred and eighty-seven of the three hundred and ninety-three pleas it has heard. Upon learning this, Boudella?s wife sent the following letter to her husband?s American lawyers:
Dear Friends, I am so shocked by this information that it seems as if my blood froze in my veins, I can?t breathe and I wish I was dead. I can?t believe these things can happen, that they can come and take your husband away, overnight and without reason, destroy your family, ruin your dreams after three years of fight. . . . Please, tell me, what can I still do for him? . . . Is this decision final, what are the legal remedies? Help me to understand because, as far as I know the law, this is insane, contrary to all possible laws and human rights. Please help me, I don?t want to lose him.
John Radsan, the former C.I.A. lawyer, offered a reply of sorts. ?As a society, we haven?t figured out what the rough rules are yet,? he said. ?There are hardly any rules for illegal enemy combatants. It?s the law of the jungle. And right now we happen to be the strongest animal.?


 
- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 12:15 PM