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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: miraje who wrote (250841)	5/20/2008 1:09:39 PM
From: Sr K	Respond to of 793883

morris.blogs.nytimes.com [long essay with photographs] May 19, 2008, 10:56 pm The Most Curious Thing By Errol Morris The following essay shows how a photograph aided and abetted a terrible miscarriage of justice. I invite readers to offer their own interpretation of the considerable amount of material contained in the footnotes. “Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice; “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!” – Lewis Carroll, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” “How can you say she’s a good person?” I am sitting in an editing-room in Cambridge, Mass. arguing with one of my editors. I reply, “Well, exactly what is it that she did that is bad?” We are arguing about Sabrina Harman, one of the notorious “seven bad apples” convicted of abuse in the notorious Abu Ghraib scandal. My editor becomes increasingly irritable. (I have that effect on people.) He looks at me as you would a child. “What did she do that is bad? Are you joking?” And then he brings up the trump card, the photograph with the smile. “How do you get past that? The smile? Just look at it. Come on.” --- [excerpt] Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, told me about a meeting he had with Robert Kennedy in the mid-1960s. It concerned Vietnam, and the $64,000 question: What would John F. Kennedy have done in Vietnam had he lived? R.F.K.’s answer was: J.F.K. would have gotten us out of Vietnam. He would have waited until after the ‘64 elections, and then “fuzzed it up.” [25] Note 25 [25] Interview with Daniel Ellsberg, November 13, 2003: DANIEL ELLSBERG: In ’67 [Bobby Kennedy] told me the President was determined not to send ground combat troops. And he said, I don’t know what he would have done in the event, you know, a year or two away. But I know what he intended to do, and he was determined not to send ground combat units. And I knew that he had had those units recommended to him by McNamara and others, virtually everyone else, in ’61. And he rejected them. He sent only advisers, who are much less likely to suffer casualties. So they weren’t as much of a commitment. So I could believe that was his intention, not to send ground combat units. So I said to Bobby, rather impudently, “What made him so smart?” There was whap on the table and I jumped a little bit, and he hit the table again. And he said, “Because we were there! We were there in 1951,” I believe it was. “We were there and we saw what happened to the French.” And my brother was determined – “not to let that happen to us.” And I said, soberly then, “Would he have been prepared to lose Saigon? To see Saigon go Communist?” Because that’s the test. And Bobby said, “We would have fuzzed it up. We would have tried for a Laotion type of solution.” And I knew what that meant. And he went on, he said, “A coalition government, an international conference, so we’d have other people making this deal, making this arrangement — not just us. The comments [166 and counting] are as interesting as the article.