Dead Reporter Walking by Charles Bowden

We are sitting in the sun somewhere in the United States of America. Emilio is hiding now with the family of a man who has connections in northern Chihuahua. But if this fact were known, the man's relatives in Chihuahua would be kidnapped and possibly killed, his businesses seized.


As we soak up the sun at this fine moment, Ascension is in a state of siege. Four women have vanished and are probably murdered. The head of the bank there and his wife have been kidnapped. In Palomas, a border town in the same county as Ascension, two dead women have just been found in the dump – one of them pregnant. The Mexican army is everywhere and can be ill-tempered. Six months ago I was there with a friend who took a photograph of them downtown, a block from the port of entry, and they came racing at us with machine guns. In the streets, children beg, their skin a gray cast that suggests malnutrition. Work has fled – the people-smuggling business has moved because of U.S. pressure in the sector, and so the town is studded with half-built or abandoned cheap lodgings for migrants heading north. Also there is an array of narco-mansions whose occupants have moved to duck the current violence. Last year, the U.S. Port of entry as accidentally strafed during a shoot-out. There is more dust than life in the air of the town.

Back in Juarez it goes like this at the new death house. On the first day, they announce one body. On the second day, three bodies. On the third day, one more body. Now it is a week in, the digging continues, and the tally seems to be nine bodies. But since the heads are severed from the bodies, the exact count might take a while. Besides, there is one more patio to dig up. No one really knows what is going on.

The editor of one local daily estimated that his publication reports maybe 15% of the action. For example, fake cops have been setting up checkpoints in the city and seizing guns. In a forty-eight-hour period, a top cop is mowed down, four other residents are murdered, three banks are robbed, and, by a fluke, $1.8 million is seized by U.S. Customs because a driver from Kansas got turned back by Mexican customs and reentered the United States. Also, the Mexican army bagged 4.5 tons of marijuana. All this is the 15% that gets reported.

As I sit in the sun with Emilio he tells me of the current violence in the towns he once covered, and none of these incidents have been reported in the U.S. Press or the Mexican press. Nor will the be. He knows what is happening because he has retained his sources. And he knows that it will not be reported because to publish is to invite death.

There is a curious disconnect between the Mexican press and the U.S. Press, one where the U.S. Press pretends that reporting in Mexico is pretty much the way it is in the North, where the Mexican press considers American reporters to be fools. Sometimes Emilio deals with American reporters who are fluent in Spanish, but that is not enough because “they imagine things they don't know", and so the U.S. reporters are marginalized by the Mexican reporters because they figure they are hopeless.

Emilio Gutierrez is one of eight children raised in Nuevo Casas Grandes, a small Chihuahua town against Sierra Madre. His father was a master bricklayer, his mother was a housewife. His childhood was poverty. The army has a post in his town. One day, a very pretty classmate named Rosa Saenz shows up, her hair and skin coated with mud. Her breasts have been sliced with blades and she has been stabbed fifty times. She has been raped. Her body is found in an abandoned chicken farm on the edge of town. In the end, no one is charged with the crime. Everyone in town knows the girl was raped and murdered by the army but no one says anything about it. Emilio was thirteen years old.

He always wanted to be a writer and worked on the high school paper, a weekly printed on a mimeograph machine. Emilio emerges in high school with a first-rate mind where intelligence can be a fatal trait. He learns photography, and when he graduates, a new daily is starting in Ciudad Juarez, El Diario, and he gets hired to take pictures. Soon he is a reporter.

He learns corruption almost instantly. He is paid very little, and payday is every Friday. He explains the system in simple terms. Every Monday, a man comes who represents the police, the government, the political parties, and the drug leaders. He gives each reporter a sum that is three or four times his wage. This is called the sobre, the envelope.

”Ever since I as a little kid,” he continues, “ I listened to my parents criticize bad government. We knew it was corrupt.” Now he is part of a corrupt system.

“Corruption at the paper,” he explains,” was subtle. The politicians would win over my boss with dinners and bags of money. The reporter on the beat would get pressure sometimes from the boss not to report certain things like the bad habits of politicians, the houses they own, the girlfriends. The narcos also gave out money but I was always afraid of them. They owned businesses, buy ads, have parties and celebrities and horses and you cover that, they would pay you to cover that, but you never mentioned their real business.”

He sees Mexico as genetically corrupt. A corrupt Aztec ruling class fused with the trash of Spain - the conquistadors – and produced through this marriage a completely corrupt Mexico. This thesis helps him face the reality around him.

“In Mexico,” he says “we operate in disguise. There is one face and under that is another mask. Nothing is upfront. The publisher wishes to perpetuate the system. But if it is clear that you are taking bribes, you will be fired. You must take it under the table because if you talked about it openly, that would affect the image.”

He is entering a bar one night, when he sees the mayor of Juarez leaving with some narco-traficantes. The mayor pauses by the street, drops his pants and pisses into the gutter. Emilio writes up a little note and puts it in the paper. He is nineteen and doesn't understand.

The next day he is called to the mayor's office.

The man is at a big desk with a check register.

He says, “How much?”

He wants Emilio to publish a story saying his earlier story was a lie.

Gutierrez does not take the money. He realizes later that this is a serious error because he learns the mayor and the publisher are very close.

“I quit and take a job in radio before something bad can happen.”

Later, when things calm down, he returns to Diario a wiser man.

Here is what a wise man knows: that certain people – drug leaders, the corrupt police, the corrupt military – these things cannot be written about. That other people should be mentioned favorably unless they get caught in circumstances so extreme that the news cannot be suppressed. Then, they appear in the paper, but the blow is softened as much as possible. Nor are investigations favored. If someone is murdered, you call the proper authorities and you print exactly what they tell you. But you don't poke around in such matters.

Emilio loves politics and develops one-page stories dutifully interviewing politicians and the nakedly publishing their inane answers. Sometimes, when a leading drug figure is arrested, usually as a show to placate the U.S. Agencies, he interviews this person , also. He is hard-driving, at least until his son is born. After that, he becomes cautious because he must think of his son, and not give in to the dangers of ambition.

For a while, he works for a small radio station and he makes one report on how a mayor in a neighboring town has fired the local drug counselor for the schools. He wonders on the air if the officials themselves are clean.

He soon finds out because a mayor of another town is listening. This mayor has just gotten out of a treatment center in El Paso for cocaine addiction. He storms down to the radio station and offers the owner ten thousand pesos to fire Emilio, The owner obliges him.


He moves from paper to paper and eventually winds up in Ascension, the region of Chihuahua where is was raised. He has mastered, he thinks, the rules of the game. He writes down answers and publishes them. He avoids drug dealers. He is careful about offending politicians. He does not look into the lives of the rich, nor does he explore how they make their money. He is clean, he avoids taking bribes. He is not looking for trouble

This is the reality of Mexican reporting, where a person is inside but outside, where a person knows more than the public but can only say what is known in code and this code had better not be too clear. A world where submission is essential and independence is eventually fatal.


He is stressed because, even though he plays by the rules, he cannot know all the rules and he cannot be certain when the rules change. He can understand certain things. When a general comes to Chihauhua in April 2008 with an army and says if there any rapes and robberies, they are to be assigned to Mexican migrants, well, that is the way it will be reported.

He will obey his instructions for a very simple reason.


For three years, he has been afraid he will be murdered by the Mexican army. He has, to his horror, committed and error. And nothing he has done in the past three years has made up for this mistake. He has ceased reporting on the army completely. He has focused on safe things such as fighting the creation of a toxic waste facility in the town. He has apologized to various military officers and endured their tongue lashings. Still, this cloud hangs over him.

He can remember the day he blundered into this dangerous country.


Murder City; Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields by Charles Bowden; Nation Books, N.Y., 2010

The American Gas Chamber by Scott Christianson

Until now there has not been a book or even a single major article exploring this dreadful history. This book tells the story of the American gas chamber from its early imaginings to the nightmarish last gasp of Walter LeGrand in Arizona on March 3, 1999. The investigation goes into several different arenas of modern science, war, industry, medicine, law, politics, and human relations, marshaling evidence from many quarters. Studying this subject has been a painful and demanding experience- much remains to be learned for those willing to probe for it – but criminal punishments and crimes against humanity, I have long believed, can reveal many things about a civilization, and the tragic saga of the rise and fall of the lethal chamber is full of the stuff philosophers and tragedians dwell upon – and fools ignore at their own peril.

Altogether, between 1924 and 1999, 594 individuals were executed by lethal gas in the United States, a majority before the legal revolution under the Warren Court in the 1960s when, for the first time, illegally obtained evidence was ruled inadmissible, prisoners could no longer be subjected to the “third degree”, not informed of their legal rights, questioned without a lawyer or denied access to counsel or appeals because they were poor.

In no case did the U.S. Supreme Court ever rule by majority opinion that execution by lethal gas constituted “cruel and unusual punishment incompatible with the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society”, however contrary to the testimonies of witnesses to such executions and the affidavits presented to lower appeals courts such as that of Dr. Richard Traystman, director of the Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine Research Laboratories at Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1983:

“Very simply, cyanide gas blocks the utilization of the oxygen in the body's cells...the person exposed to this gas remains conscious for a period of time, in some cases for several minutes. During this time, the person is unquestionably experiencing pain and extreme anxiety. The pain begins immediately, and is felt in the arms, shoulders, back and chest. The sensation is similar to the pain felt by a person during a heart attack, where essentially, the heart is being deprived of oxygen... The agitation and anxiety a person experiences in the hypoxic state will stimulate the automatic nervous system, the person may begin to drool, urinate, defecate or vomit. There will be muscular contractions. These responses can occur both while the person is conscious or when he becomes unconscious.. the brain remains alive from two to five minutes. The heart will continue to beat for a period of time after that, perhaps five to seven minutes, or longer, though at a very low cardiac output. Death can occur ten to twelve minutes after the gas is released in the chamber.”

Dr Traystman further testified that the execution by lethal gas is sufficiently painful that it is disfavored in the scientific community as a method of putting animals to sleep.


Most readers will prefer not to read accounts of executions by lethal gas where all does not go as planned- they seldom did- such as the prolonged thrashings, clawings, screamings and convulsions of the victims and the unforgettable horrors visited upon the witnesses.

Though U.S. Supreme Court still could never bring itself to address the question the question whether such executions amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, the court of world opinion did - The International Court of Justice in the Hague in the Case Concerning the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, Germany vs United States of America, General List No 104 (March 3, 1999), a matter to which President Bill Clinton and Governor Hull of Arizona turned a blind eye.

To the rest of the world the gas chamber represented one of modernity's worst crimes; it was an instrument of torture that first had been disguised as a humane alternative to pain and suffering. What originally had seemed to be such a noble and practical idea, even by such luminaries as H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence and Bernard Shaw, turned out to be something else entirely.

Dreamers, scientists, soldiers, merchants, lawmakers, lawyers, physicians, governors, journalists, wardens, keepers – and, of course, the condemned prisoners – all made their unique contributions to the rise and fall of the gas chamber. But the creation of a “painless and humane” method of killing proved elusive. Despite all of their Utopian schemes, laboratory experiments and mathematical formulas, blind obedience, commercial arrangements, legislative clauses, legal briefs, stopwatches, execution protocols, and public relations pronouncements, America's use of lethal gas as a method of capital punishment- despite all that was witnessed during the Holocaust- only ended with the close of the twentieth century. But its awful legacy will continue for a long time to come.

[It tells us something about ourselves as Americans that cannot be erased by mere forgetting]

The Last Gasp; The Rise and Fall of The American Gas Chamber by Scott Christianson; University of California Press, Berkeley, 2010

(comments to follow)

Lone Man in the Amazon by Monte Reel

It began with a rumor, a scrap of information picked up by a health worker delivering antimalarial medicine in the scattered villages of southern Amazonia. In the middle of 1996, he stopped at a lumber-yard in Brazil's Guapore River Valley, near the Bolivian border. Loggers there spoke of a wild man who roamed the surrounding rain forest, which they occasionally ventured into in search of mahogany trees. The man was a naked savage, they said, probably an Indian. But he didn't seem to be part of any tribe. From what they could see, he lived alone in a tiny thatched hut, with no apparent ties to another human soul.

That's where the story dead-ended. The few who claimed to have caught a glimpse of the man said he was as quick and crafty as a jaguar – get near him, and he'd vanish into the forests' dappled shadows. Describing encounters with him apparently was like trying to remember an elusive dream: they were pretty sure it happened, but couldn't quite grasp the details.

It was a flimsy splinter of jungle lore, but it stuck with the health worker when he left the lumberyard and eventually made his way to the town of Vilhenas, where Brazil's federal agency in charge of Indian affairs maintained a regional outpost. He previously had met the man who ran the office, Marcelo dos Santos, while delivering medicines to one of the regions indigenous reserves.

If anyone could dismiss the rumor outright and label it a tall tale unworthy of a second thought, it was Marcelo. His job was to locate Indian tribes that remained isolated in the forest, completely cut off from the main current of Brazilian society. His small team of field agents was called the Guapore Contact Front, on of five regional teams within the Isolated Indians Division of Brazil's National Indian Foundation, known as FUNAI. The Isolated Indians Division was less than a decade old, created just before the country ratified a new constitution in 1988. The new national charter specified that if Indians lived on a patch of forest, that land was theirs - not a single tree could be touched by an a outsider.

But a fundamental shortcoming threatened to completely undermine the documents intentions: no one knew how many tribes actually lived in Brazil's massive portion of the Amazon, or how much land they could potentially could claim. So if a rancher had a natural incentive to chase the Indians off the property- by various means including murder- before the government could document their presence. The contact fronts were created to defuse the threat of clashes between settlers and tribes. They were often attacked by both sides!

When Marcelo received the rumor about the spectral wild man believed to be an Indian, he paid special attention....

In October 2006,with a collection of a decades worth of field notes and fresh evidenced amassed from the jungle- huts and pitfalls, tracks and planted cornstalks, collections of edible nuts and fruits, axe cuts into various trees for various gathering purposes- the renamed Guapore Ethno-Environmntal Protection Front went to FUNAI president Mercio Gomes with a formal proposal for the creation of a thirty-one-square mile Tanaru Indigenous territory, which the they named for the river that ran through it. They suggested that if the reserve was approved, the Guapore Protection Front would establish a camp of the border of the territory and conduct monthly surveys to make sure the Indian was alive and well. Under no circumstances would they attempt to directly interact with the Indian, they wrote, unless the Indian himself initiated contact. The reserve would be meaningless if they didn't establish conditions not only to protect his land but also to give him peace.

In Brasila, the government agencies leadership didn't have to debate their pitch too long. Marcelos dos Santos was by this time in charge of dealing with the request. His intimate knowledge of the situation- including long legal battles which had eventually forced him to flee Rondonia- equipped him to make a convincing argument that the man was endangered and in need of protection. The shooting of Tunio in one encounter with the lone Indian had also raised the case's profile ; the only question was whether the Indian represented a “tribe” that FUNAI could legally protect After reviewing the case, the agency's attorney general issued his opinion in the final weeks of 2006.


“A single individual can be considered a 'people' if he is the only remnant of his culture and ethnic group, and is distinct from the national collective in his customs and traditions”, declared Luiz Fernando Villares.



To quash the temptation for anyone to simply kill the Indian to open up the land for development, the agency's director of agrarian affairs prepared an explanation for local ranchers.


“The land is property of the Union (Brazil), and must remain so until the end of the Indian's life,” said Nadja Binda, “ in the case of his death, the property will continue to be the property of the Union.”


With Marcelo's prodding, the customary bureaucratic delay of a year or more for the declaration of new indigenous territories was avoided. In January 2007, less than a month after the request, the Brazilian government made it official. The borders of the Tanaru Indigenous Territory were demarcated. The territory would be up for reviewed in a few years, but Marcelo and Algaer Altair finally succeeded in establishing a zone of protection for a man they had never really met and whose language they could not have understood.

The suddenness of the resolution almost felt anti climatic, and perhaps it was appropriate. It was a victory , but what had the Indian won? Protection, certainly, but no matter how much land they reserved for him, there was no bringing back the rest f his tribe. All that they could do was respect the right that Marcelo had identified years before: the right to die alone.

As long as the Indian stayed within the thirty-one-square-mile zone, they believed he would be safe. For their part, they resolved to do nothing to chase him away.

In cities such as Seoul and Tokyo, more than one-million people live in the average thirty-one-square- mile plot of land. In Manhattan and its immediate surrounding, the same area houses 2.5 million people. If a thirty-one square-mile area were populated as the same levels as the most crowded parts of Kong Kong about 6.1 million people would live there.

The Tanaru Indigenous Territory has a population on 1 ; a triumph for the individual, culture and humanity itself, for those for feel no injustice however seeming insignificant ought to be tolerated, and of ever lasting glory to the government of Brazil. Viva Brazil!


“The Last of The Tribe; The Quest To Save A Lone Man in The Amazon by Monte Reel; Scribner, NY 2010

'Closure' by Hans-Georg Moeller

Typically, the following explanations are offered to explain why so many wrongful convictions come about in death penalty cases in the United States: racial prejudice, illegal acts by overzealous prosecutors, police or judges who misrepresent the facts in order to get a guilty verdict; inadequate counsel because of incompetent court-appointed attorneys or the defendant's inability to pay for an effective defense team. I have no doubt that all these factors have contributed to a good number of wrongful convictions ( 102 between 1973-2004 and who knows how many wrongful convictions remained undetected?). But I think the strong emphasis on morality that is typically part of U.S. Trials involving the death penalty, along with the resurgence of retributive ethics, probably plays an even more important role.

[ see also http://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2009/05/mystery-of-judicial-performance.html ]

In recent years A new pseudopsychological term was coined: “closure”. While the moral shift to victims' interests was obviously a shift towards a morality of retribution, vengeance, or both, these terms do not sound very nice. “Vengeance is an anachronism with a bad press. Something new, something personal, and something that sounded both civilized and refined would be the best candidate for an appealing label for personal involvement in executions. From this perspective, the evocative term 'closure' was a public relations godsend.” ( “The Symbolic Transformation of American Capital Punishment” by Franklin E. Zimring).


The term was not used at all in the context of the death penalty before 1989, but since then it has had a fantastic career. It is now quite rare to hear about a death penalty case in the mass media without it being mentioned. The term has no official function in legislation or legal proceedings – it is still not a legal concept. But it of great value for both prosecutors and the mass media in exploiting the moral potential of a murder trial. A poll from 2001 showed that 60 percent of Americans think that the death penalty is fair because it provides “closure”. What a remarkable rating for an argument that didn't even exist twelve years earlier!

The term “closure” is used in the American mass media as a good reason to kill evil people – and how could a relative of the victim interviewed on TV not use it? Relatives have learned from the media and prosecutors that they are not only entitled but also expected to yearn for closure if they are to be good victims. Closure has become a symbolic moral necessity. If the media did not speak of closure, the story would lose some of its moral drama.


There is no psychological evidence that closure happens through the execution of an offender, but this is, of course, irrelevant since the term is not used psychologically either in the mass media or by the prosecutors. Its function is to express the moral necessity for retribution. “It is not known whether there are psychological advantages in mourning the loss of a loved one when that loss leads to an execution, nor is there any indication that the adjustment to the loss of a loved one in a homicide is any different in death penalty states than in non-death penalty states.” ( Zimring) Some states even go so far as to let a victim's relatives witness the execution of an offender for the sake of closure.. I can hardly imagine how this could be psychologically beneficial. Closure is a psychological phantom, but an extremely efficient moral and rhetorical device in U.S. Death penalty practice and media coverage.

A last important observation about “the transformation of execution into a victim service gesture” made by Zimring is that “it links the symbolism of execution to a long American history of community control of punishment.” Zimring documents in great detail how the current U.S. practice of the death penalty is related to earlier forms of community control of punishment, namely lynching and vigilantism. The moral cult of the innocent victim and the evil offender historically connects current legal practice not with the legal system but with extra-legal (and now illegal) acts of public violence that were once seen as morally right. The moralization of trials that involve the death penalty makes them less a purely legal procedure than a new form of public – constituted by the mass media – lynching.

The death penalty advocate Walter Berns says “There is something in the souls of men that requires crimes to be revenged. “ I do not know if there is something like this in the souls of men, but there is certainly something in communication in the courtroom and the mass media that makes judges and jurors decide that revenge is a moral necessity – that the evil one must be killed – and that this communication often overrides facts 'beyond a reasonable doubt' and the misericordia that underwrites sound judicial practice.

The Moral Fool by Hans-Georg Moeller

Most situations in everyday life – having breakfast, driving to work, doing our jobs, watching TV- do not confront us with moral dilemmas. Most of the time we neither think nor speak in ethical terms at all, and even when we do , we are often not entirely sure what exactly is, and what is not, ethical. Within the family circle, for instance, ethics are usually of secondary importance to love. We may condemn what our spouses, our children or or parents do but since we love them, this condemnation or disapproval does not normally result in a moral judgment; we do not think of them as evil. In fact when love distinctions are replaced by ethical distinctions then the emotional harmony within a family is in danger, as well represented in John Steinbeck's novel East of Eden.

Another example of this hypothesis is traffic law the main function of which is not to sanction and get rid of evildoers but to provide a smooth playing field in a highly complex society. Parking tickets and other minor offenses are generally laughed about. Speeding regulations are often arbitrary and contingent and violated with impunity a certain times by just about everyone who drives a car. Drunk drivers who end up injuring or killing others are morally condemned though if they just end up killing themselves this tends to be regarded more as a tragic mistake than an indication of a bad moral character.

Sports is another activity which is not primarily of an ethical nature. If the ethical doctrine of fairness as devised by the moral philosopher John Rawls were applied to basketball, for instance, then the height of the basket would be determined by the average height of the players engaged in each game. Professional wrestling, a parody of sport, illustrates the point. Unlike in real sports competition, there are no explicit rules in place, the result is fixed; and the safety of the combatants is made a mockery of- and there is more often than not a moral storyline of narrative attached to the show. Professional wrestling is a comedy that demonstrates what would happen to sport if it were a moral activity.

The author suggests that , for an empirical point of view, in everyday life and even in most of our important decisions, ethics or morals do not provide useful guide. It is doubtful, for example, that becoming righteously angry with an obnoxious colleague, boss or family member is more beneficial than avoiding a moral a mindset altogether . Actually, when moral discourse prevails, disaster often appears. The demand for “moral smartness” ( as in the “smart diplomacy” advocated by the present U.S. Administration, or the debate over immigration) is a symptom of social crisis and a society verging on hopeless disorder and accumulating misery.

In identifying himself as a moral fool, the author is not advocating immorality or moral relativism. Nor does he claim to have achieved perfect amorality. In so far as moral mindsets go, however, the extreme form of labeling people good or bad, judgments which concern the person as a whole, are not helpful in the promotion of social harmony and happiness.

On the whole the book is not an academic treatise but he does quote Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan in support of his proposition: that such categories as fairness and justice are “ever used with relation to the person that useth them; one calleth wisdom, what another calleth fear; and one cruelty what another justice. . . . and therefore such names can never be true grounds of any ratiocination.”.

Hobbes' thinking can be viewed as relativistic and, at any rate, most philosophers don't like to use him because, in a modern context, his writings seem to support the central authority of the State however arbitrary its rule. But the author is simply trying to point out that trying to come to common agreement on moral matters is among the most difficult, trying, unsuccessful and unsatisfying of all human endeavors. This is probably the reason so many people find it necessary to rely on Divine Authority ( as they might interpret various passages in Holy [unassailable] Scripture). As far as secular ethics go the author completely demolishes Immanuel Kant's notion ( “Critique of Practical Reason”) that there are “a priori” moral principles- of epistomological or biological origin - that are universally valid , however much such an idea has become the foundation for arguments in favor of Just and Unjust wars.

The author's discussion of the theory of Just War is brilliant. The ascriptions “innocent” and “guilty are largely unwarranted and, in the end, most of the arguments in this theory boil down to an arbitrary division of the world into those who deserve to live and those who deserve to die. To summarize as briefly as possible, the author admires the position of the ancient Chinese Daoists who “did not care much for the moral smartness of war but were primarily interested in avoiding and preventing war which they regarded as a form of natural disaster like earthquakes, hailstorms and hurricanes. Like other natural facts, they did not regard war as good ( Hitler thought they were essential to the preservation of civilization) or bad ( as a religious passivist might) though they accepted that sometimes it is unavoidable. When war did occur their idea was to remain on the defensive, let the enemy wear himself down and to limit the expense and damage as much as possible.

In reality the theory of Just and Unjust Wars is nothing more than a weapon a war itself, and no better at controlling its wanton destruction or 'collateral damage' than modern, hyped up 'smart bombs' which simply multiply the occasion for the use of bombs anyway. In consideration of war it is always better to think outside the moral mindset, in terms of love ( e.g. do you want your sons and daughters slaughtered in this fashion?) and legal terms (e.g. should hypothetical 'risk factors' prompt preemptive actions that violate the standards or spirit of national or international law?).

In regards to war, as in so many other matters, the Media bears primary responsibility for maintaining moral discourse, as opposed to discourses predicated upon love and the law. . The media is, however, is highly carnivalistic in its character- inconsistent and highly ambiguous. It is often hard to take the 'moral outrages' in the media absolutely seriously because they presented with a sort of joy and ironic ethical detachment.


Everyone with an interest in such matters should read Chapter Twelve- “Ethics and the Mass Media” in this book. In recognition of the limitations of this blog and my own obvious incapacity I can't do much better than to quote the last paragraph directly, understanding how inadequately this captures the complete flavor of the author's narrative.

“ I do not want to be misunderstood here. I am not suggesting that the mass media democratize ethics or that they lead to some sort of ethical progress. The morality of the mass media is a virtual morality; it does not correlate with the moral convictions of individual people; it does not give people a voice. It is rather an effect of a peculiar form of communication of a specific social system, namely the mass media. While the mass media proliferate morality on a global scale, they also subvert it. The mass media have no moral convictions; they are naturally amoral and intertwined in the endless, meaningless and aimless spiral of superficial and contradictory moral communication [ which usually exist in the realm of fantasy as far as solving the problems of society go]. In this sense, the mass media function in a highly paradoxical and ambiguous way. While they flood society daily with moral discourse on a massive scale, they also constantly undermine the credibility of this very discourse. They maintain, spread, and accelerate moral communication but carnivalize and desubstantiate it at the same time. The mass media are, indeed, ethically rather foolish.”

Plight of the Nobodies in Pakistan By Imtiaz Gul

What is clear on the tribal frontiers in the Northwest Territories of Pakistan is that the Taliban has capitalized on the absence of good governance and of swift justice. Common people, already reeling under backbreaking food inflation and a tormenting energy crisis, feel that politicians, criminals, drug traffickers, and officials have ganged up against them to deprive them of an honorable living. The Taliban and like-minded religious militants have successfully exploited these feelings while sowing fear in the minds of all government servants. Providing justice on the spot, prosecuting criminals, and ensuring fair play to victims of injustice are effective tools that the Taliban use to make themselves look like a God-fearing, formidable force that is eager to come to the public's rescue.

Little attention, however, is paid to the consequences of Taliban advances. Many frustrated people – and not just conservatives – overlook the problems that arise out of the Taliban code of life. It was the suppression of individual liberties in the name of a questionable puritanical brand of Islam that the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban practiced, and are hoping to put into practice again. This obviously does not augur well for Pakistan's tribal area or the country as a whole.


A majority of the people [The Nobodies] are faced with demoralizing choices, wedged between the receiving end of an overbearing and inefficient bureaucracy - which is unhelpful, obstructive, corrupt - and radical, sometimes viciously sectarian Islamists. They are often caught in the crossfire between insurgents and the army which has increasingly bowed to the wishes of the occupation forces in Afghanistan and moved into the frontier territories with overwhelming force and stayed for increasingly longer periods of time, disrupting traditional economies, exacerbating tribal conflicts and creating large refugee populations.


At the bottom of the pecking order in Pakistan are mentally unstable teenagers in asylums, orphanages, schools, and refugee camps across Pakistan. Most of the suicide bombers used in the roughly eighty attacks inside Pakistan between January 2007 and July 2008 were Pakistanis and Afghans recruited from these populations.

The Iraq war helped popularize suicide bombings through-out the Muslim world and bears some responsibility for Pakistan's current predicament. The war had an enormous impact in Pakistan. Most Pakistanis thought it was an unjust war, imposed on Iraq under a flimsy pretext so the reaction to it was quite intense, especially among those who were wary or critical of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Almost every discussion of the Afghan war in Pakistani social and political circles ( 'the chattering classes') invariably brings in the U.S, invasion of Iraq and its consequences for Pakistan.

But it was the second drone strike on January 13, 2006, targeting Ayman al-Zawahiri in Damadola, a village in the Bajour territory, followed by another on October 29 that killed eighty-three students at a seminary in Chengai, that really triggered suicide bombings in Pakistan, along with the operation targeting Islamabad's Red Mosque in July 2007.[ http://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2010/02/red-mosque-by-nicholas-schmidle.html ]


Until 2007 suicide bombings mostly targeted restaurants and public places frequented by foreigners. This abruptly changed after the seizure of the Red Mosque when terrorists began targeting army, police, and intelligence facilities and army convoys in the Northwest Territories. No place in Pakistan is secure against such attacks and religious leaders who have spoken against suicide bombings as Un-Islamic have themselves been bombed or otherwise assassinated.

At the conclusion of his book the author asserts that this tactic has likely backfired on the militants. Previously the government and the ruling elite in the army had been willing to negotiate, bargain with or play-off militant groups one against the other. The suicide bombings have pretty much convinced them that this is no longer possible and that their best interests is to cooperate fully with the U.S. and NATO's global “war on terror” and attack all militant groups without discrimination.. The hope for honest government, however, with basic infrastructures- water, power, transport, public schools, hospitals, and some measure of economic justice- remains largely unfulfilled.

On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings by William James

Our judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on the feelings the things arouse in us. Where we judge a thing to be precious in consequence of the idea we frame of it, this is only because the idea is itself associated already with a feeling. If we were radically feelingless, and if ideas were only the things our minds could entertain, we should lose all our likes and dislikes at a stroke, and be unable to point to any one situation or experience in life more valuable or significant than any other.

Now the blindness in human beings, of which this discourse will treat, is the blindness with which we are all afflicted in regards to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.


We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties to perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth. But this feeling in each of us is a vital secret, for sympathy with which we look vainly to others. The others are too much absorbed in their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. Hence the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons' conditions or ideals.

Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more intimate than most ties in this world; and yet, outside that tie of friendly fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes life significant for the other! - we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and art. As you sit reading the most moving romance you ever fell upon, what sort of judge is your fox-terrier of your behavior? With all his good will toward you, the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his comprehension. To sit there like a senseless statue, when you might be taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to catch! What queer disease is this that comes over you every day, of holding things and staring at them like that for hours together, paralyzed of motion and vacant of all conscious life?

The African savages came nearer the truth; but they, too, missed it, when they gathered wonderlingly round one of our American travellers, who, in the interior, had just come into possession of a stray copy of the New York Commercial Advertiser, and was devouring it column by column. When he got through, they offered him a high price for the mysterious object; and, being asked for what they wanted it, they said: “For an eye medicine,” - that being the only reason they could conceive of for the protracted bath which he had given his eyes upon its surface. . .


Let me take a personal example of the kinds that befalls each one of us daily: -

Some years ago, while journeying in the mountains of North Carolina, I passed by a large number of 'coves,' as they call them there, or heads of small valleys between the hills, which had been newly cleared and planted. The impression on my mind was one of unmitigated squalor. The settler had in every case cut down the more manageable trees, and left their charred stumps standing. The larger trees he had girdled and killed, in order that their foliage should not cast a shade. He had then built a log cabin, plastering its chinks with clay, and had set up a tall zig-zag rail fence around the scene of havoc, to keep his pigs and cattle out. Finally, he had irregularly planted the intervals between the stumps and trees with Indian corn, which grew among the chips, and there he dwelt with his wife and babes – an axe, a gun, a few utensils, and some pigs and chickens feeding in the woods, being the sum total of his possessions.

The forest had been destroyed; and what had 'improved' it out of existence was hideous, a sort of ulcer, without a single element of artful grace to make up for the loss of Nature's beauty. Ugly, indeed, seemed the life of the squatter, scudding, as the sailors say, under bare poles, beginning again away back where our first ancestors started, and by hardly a single item the better off for all the achievements of the intervening generations.


Talk about going back to Nature! I said to myself, oppressed by the dreariness, as I drove by. Talk of country life for one's old age and for one's children! Never thus, with nothing but bare ground and one's bare hands to fight the battle! Never, without the best spoils of culture woven in! The beauties and commodities gained by the centuries are sacred. They are our heritage and birthright. No modern person ought to be willing to live a day in such a state of rudimentariness and denudation.


Then I said to the mountaineer who was driving me, “What sort of people are they who have to make these new clearings?” “All of us,” he replied. “Why, we ain't happy here, unless we get one of these coves under cultivation.” I instantly felt that I had been losing the whole inward significance of the situation. Because to me the clearings spoke naught but denudation, I thought that to those whose sturdy arms and obedient axes had made them they could tell no other story. But, when they looked on the hideous stumps, what they thought of was a personal victory. The chips, the girdled trees, and the vile split rails spoke of honest sweat, persistent toil and final reward. The cabin was warrant of safety for self and wife and babes. In short, the clearing, which to me was a mere ugly picture on the retina, was to them a symbol redolent with moral memories and sang a very paean of duty, struggle and success.


I had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of their condition as they certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had they had a peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at Cambridge...

And now what is the result of all these [lengthy] considerations and quotations? It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than oor own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may seem to us.

Hands off : neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and sick-rooms have their special revelations. It is enough to ask of each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field.