Harry Potter and the Al Qaeda Network; More on Torture; Missed You at the March, Hitch; Oooh, Eurosluts!

"We're passing from appalling human loss and suffering, live in the front yard of the media capital of the world, to the traditional parameters of imperial retribution. I can't imagine it will be long before the Taliban are chased out..." That was me, right here in the Oct. 10-16 issue, in a column that drew genteel ridicule from Ross Douthat in the National Review. Douthat took odd exception to my references to Dante's circles of hell and made sneering reference to the "ever-so-literate Cockburn," as though I were citing something complicated from Theodor Adorno.

It won't be long, surely, before Osama's body is on display and an end written to his chapter in the unfinished saga of Empire vs. Terror. How appropriate then that this last weekend millions of children here were thrilling at Harry Potter's final battle with Quirrell and the archvillain Voldemort, the traductive and etymological roots of whose name, "flight of death" or alternately "death wish," have appropriately bin-Ladenian echoes.

One of the big scenes in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is the chess battle with the darker forces, where, as a knight, Ron sacrifices himself to the white queen, in a scene crisply described by J.K. Rowling: "She struck Ron hard around the head with her stone arm, and he crashed to the floor..." Ron's sacrifice allows Harry and Hermione to cross the board safely.

And in fact chess comes out of Islam, originally invented in India somewhere in the sixth or seventh century. Early Muslim writers often contrasted chess, a game symbolizing the exercise of free will and rationality, with backgammon, emblem of the caprices of the dice and of fate. In the bluff, lottery-loving West, chess is iconically regarded as the province of brainy villains. In this style bin Laden is Terror's grand master, with the world as his chess board.

"We play poker, they play chess" used to be a favored phrase of President Kennedy, the notion being that the communist enemy in all his Oriental cunning had a strategy thoroughly conceived and inherently rational: move would be countered by move, with uncertainty and chance eliminated. "We," on the other hand, play poker. "We" gamble and bluff.

"Living chess" has always fascinated people, the notion of absolute power in the disposition of men and women; also the idea that a wrong move can cause death. During the Spanish Inquisition a Dominican inquisitor called Pedro Arbues ordered unfortunate victims of persecution to stand in as figures in a game of living chess played by two blind monks. Each time they captured a piece they condemned someone to death. Chess is mostly used in films to indicate thought, problems, villainy or Nemesis.

Back from Harry's victory over Voldemort to Afghanistan: The millions spent on bombs and missiles have now helped engineer the victory of the Northern Alliance, whose leaders visited on its long-suffering people some of the worst horrors back in the middle 1990s, and whose leader Rabbani has as nasty a view of the desired condition of women as does Mullah Omar. No happy ending there, alas. Life for ordinary Afghans will continue to be awful.

Footnote: My friend Steve Perry did unearth this gem, from the letters page on the website of the New Statesman, a British weekly of tepid semi-leftist proclivities:

"Les Dawson Monday 12th November 2001.

"Re: Crazy Osama.

"I don't think Osama Bin Laden is psychotic, he just has some abandonment issues and possibly a really poor body image. I think sometimes we are all guilty of terrorism, and by that I mean inner-terrorism. I myself was an inner terrorist, with crumbling towers of self-esteem and the plummeting fusilage of emotional frigidity."

Cole on Torture

I'm glad to have a letter from Prof. David Cole of Georgetown University Law Center assuring me that "I do not condone the use of torture under any conditions." A couple of columns ago, at the start of the torture boom, I expressed dismay at the ambiguous use of a quotation from Cole, whose views I mostly esteem. The quote was in the Walter Pincus article in The Washington Post that kicked off the whole torture debate, which displayed many liberals voicing their enthusiasm for thumbscrews or "truth drugs" or delegating interrogation to foreign subcontractors.

Cole writes to me that "while as a hypothetical matter reasonable people might differ about whether it would be justified to torture a person if you knew that he (and he alone) knew where a ticking time bomb is, and obtaining the information will save the lives of 1,000 people, that hypothetical never arises in the real world. We can never know with certainty whether the person being interrogated in fact knows anything, nor whether the threat is imminent, nor whether the use of force will result in accurate information. What we can know with certainty is that if law enforcement agents are given this authority, they will abuse it. Accordingly, I support an absolute ban on the use of force in interrogations. More importantly, so does the Supreme Court and international law, which treats the ban on torture as one of the few legal principles that brooks no derogation under any circumstances."

Torture here in the U.S. in the good old days was robust. John Parry and Welsh White, a brace of law professors at the University of Pittsburgh, had a useful column in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette on Nov. 18 pointing out that "some police interrogators routinely employed torture to obtain information from criminal suspects. They subjected suspects to physical brutality with the aid of various instruments, including boxing gloves, rubber hoses, placing a rope around the suspect's neck or using the 'water cure,' which involved slowly pouring water into the nostrils of a suspect who was held down on his back. In addition, they employed other abusive practices, including stripping the suspect of clothing, placing him in an airless, overcrowded or unsanitary room, and subjecting him to protracted questioning without sleep."

When limp-wristed, chardonnay-sipping, brie-munching pinko liberals criticized such practices the cops said that without torture they wouldn't be able to solve crimes. In the end the Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement, prepared by the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement's Wickersham Commission set up by President Herbert Hoover, doomed torture as a legal weapon of the police. The commission found that the "third degree"?the infliction of physical or mental pain to extract confessions or statements?was "widespread throughout the country" and was "thoroughly at home in Chicago." The report further found that the practice of police torture in the United States was "shocking in its character and extent, violative of American traditions and institutions and not to be tolerated."

So the third degree gave way to the jailhouse snitch and other resources developed by the police to clinch their cases. President Bush has now simplified matters by setting up military courts for Al Qaeda members and symps, thus dispensing with the inconveniences of due process and other protections for the accused. William Safire wrote an admirably fierce column denouncing Bush as a would-be Caesar. Safire's denunciation at last prompted some other columnists and editorial writers to take note, far too late, that the Terrorism Bill threw the Bill of Rights in the garbage can. Where were they when it counted?

Hitchens in Bizarre New Claim

"As a charter supporter of CND I can remember a time when the peace movement was not an auxiliary to dictators and aggressors in trouble. Looking at some of the mind-rotting tripe that comes my way from much of today's left, I get the impression that they go to bed saying: what have I done for Saddam Hussein or good old Slobodan or the Taliban today?"

Thus Christopher Hitchens in The London Guardian on Nov. 14. To my ears the phrase "charter supporter" implies that Hitchens is claiming to have been in at the birth of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Britain. Now, I was on the first Aldermaston march, organized by CND, in 1958, a three-day trek from what I seem to remember was a British nuclear base to London. I marched alongside my friend Kayo Hallinan, now district attorney of San Francisco. We were both about 17, and didn't notice self-described charter-member Hitchens, who though doubtless upstanding in moral vision would have been about nine years old at that time, and thus the peace-loving tot would have been below our field of physical vision.

Anyway, I'm surprised that Hitchens is boasting about his support for CND, many of whose founders were either members of or close to the Communist Party and thus ripe for his derision as "Stalinists." Maybe the term "charter supporter" means something different to Hitchens. I recall how in the earliest days of CounterPunch, the newsletter I co-edit with Jeffrey St. Clair, he used to boast that he was a "charter-subscriber," a claim never buttressed by the cold cash necessary to ratify this titular dignity.

Encouraging News

Recall Julia Butterfly, who spent two years sitting in a big redwood tree she called Luna. She became famous and was visited by many distinguished persons, including Bonnie Raitt and Joan Baez, who were hoisted up onto Luna's lower branches by brawny steel workers, in a scene worthy of depiction by Poussin or David. A Butterfly cult flourished, and there are still worshipful adherents. However, I am now in receipt of a communication from the Butterfly group, which is in the process of relocating to the Bay Area.

Among other items it confides that "Yes, we are painfully aware that the site www.lunatree.org has been taken over by a porn site. Unfortunately, the former manager/owner of lunatree.org allowed control of the site to lapse and thus the current owner took over. We've inquired about buying the site back, but the owner is asking an outrageous amount of money to sell it, which just isn't feasible. So please remove any links you have to that site."

Of course I made haste to link rapidly to lunatree.org and found myself invited to cavort visually with "Euroteensluts." The Butterfly people should make the best of a bad job and call it "coalition building."