October 10, 2007
Gallery Vandals Destroy Photos
A grainy video of four masked vandals running through an art gallery in Sweden, smashing sexually explicit photographs with crowbars and axes to the strain of thundering death-metal music, was posted on YouTube Friday night.
This was no joke or acting stunt. It was what actually happened on a quiet Friday afternoon in Lund, a small university town in southern Sweden where “The History of Sex,” an exhibition of photographs by the New York artist Andres Serrano, had opened two weeks earlier.
Around 3:30, half an hour before closing, four vandals wearing black masks stormed into a space known as the Kulturen Gallery while shouting in Swedish, “We don’t support this,” plus an expletive. They pushed visitors aside, entered a darkened room where some of the photographs were displayed and began smashing the glass protecting the photographs and then hacking away at the prints.
The bumpy video, evidently shot with a hand-held camera by someone who ran into the gallery with the attackers, intersperses images of the Serrano photographs with lettered commentary in Swedish like “This is art?” before showing the vandals at work.
No guards were on duty in the gallery, said Viveca Ohlsson, the show’s curator, although security videos captured much of the incident.
“There was one woman who works at the gallery who tried to stop them until she saw the axes and crowbars,” Ms. Ohlsson said. “These men are dangerous.”
By the time the masked men had finished, half the show — seven 50-by-60-inch photographs, worth some $200,000 over all — had been destroyed. The men left behind leaflets reading, “Against decadence and for a healthier culture.” The fliers listed no name or organization.
“I was shocked and horrified,” Mr. Serrano said in a telephone interview yesterday from New York. “I never expected something like this, especially in this magical town, which is so sweet I joked about it being like something out of Harry Potter.”
Mr. Serrano said he had flown to Sweden for the opening and was met with great enthusiasm by gallery visitors. “The reaction was so positive,” he said. “I could never imagine anything like this happening.”
Officials at the local police station said yesterday that the vandals had not been caught but that they were believed to be part of a neo-Nazi group.
Ms. Ohlsson said the attack was clearly well planned. “We think that they had been at the gallery a few days before,” she said. “They knew where to go.”
The show consists of photographs, made in 1995 and 1996, of various sex acts, including a depiction of a naked woman fondling a stallion. It was divided into two rooms. One had white walls, the other black. The vandals went to the black room, where Ms. Ohlsson said the photographs were a bit racier.
This is not the first time Mr. Serrano’s work has been attacked, physically or in words. In 1989 the National Endowment for the Arts came under fire from conservative politicians and religious groups for helping to finance a $15,000 grant to Mr. Serrano related to past work that included a photograph of a crucifix immersed in urine. A print of that work was attacked and destroyed in 1997 when it was on view at the National Gallery of Art in Melbourne, Australia.
It is not the first time the Kulturen Gallery has seen violence, either. About 10 years ago vandals raced into the gallery and put paint on images by a Swedish photographer.
“The History of Sex” remains on view, but with bolstered security, Ms. Ohlsson said, explaining that the group had threatened on the Internet to attack the show again.
Paula Cooper, Mr. Serrano’s New York dealer, whose gallery in Chelsea exhibited his “History of Sex” photographs in 1997, said she was horrified by the attack in Sweden. “Art inflames people,” she said.
Ms. Cooper said that her gallery was working to replace the destroyed photographs as soon as possible so they could go back on view in Lund. (Mr. Serrano produced each in editions of three.)
After “The History of Sex” closes in Lund in December, it is to travel to the Alingsas Art Museum in Alingsas, Sweden.
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Torture Endorsed, Torture Denied
The April 2004 publication of grotesque photographs of naked Iraqis piled on top of each other, forced to masturbate, and led around on leashes like dogs, sent shock waves around the world. George W. Bush declared, “I shared a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated.” Yet less than a year later, his Justice Department issued a secret opinion endorsing the harshest interrogation techniques the CIA has ever used, according to an October 4, 2007 report in the New York Times. These include head slapping, frigid temperatures, and water boarding, in which the subject is made to feel he is drowning. Water boarding is widely considered a torture technique. Once again, Bush is compelled to issue a denial. He insists, “This government does not torture people.”
This was not the first time the Bush administration had officially endorsed torture, however. John Yoo, writing for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, penned an August 2002 memorandum that rewrote the legal definition of torture to require the equivalent of organ failure. This memo violated the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, a treaty the United States ratified, and therefore part of U.S. law under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.
In December 2002, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved interrogation methods that included the use of dogs, hooding, stress positions, isolation for up to 30 days, 20-hour interrogations, deprivation of light and sound, and water boarding. U.S. Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora told William Haynes, the Pentagon’s general counsel, that Rumsfeld’s “authorized interrogation techniques could rise to the level of torture.” As a result, Rumsfeld rescinded some methods but reserved the right to approve others, including water boarding, on a case-by-case basis.
When Bush maintained earlier this week that his government doesn’t torture prisoners, he stressed the need for interrogation to “protect the American people.” Notwithstanding the myth perpetuated by shows like “24,” however, torture doesn’t work. Experts agree that people who are tortured will say anything to make the torture stop.
One of the first victims of the Bush administration’s 2002 torture policy was Abu Zubaydah, whom they called “chief of operations” for al Qaeda and bin Laden’s “number three man.” He was repeatedly tortured at the secret CIA “black sites.” They water boarded him, withheld his medication, threatened him with impending death, and bombarded him with continuous deafening noise and harsh lights.
But Zubaydah wasn’t a top al Qaeda leader. Dan Coleman, one of the FBI’s leading experts on al Qaeda, said of Zubaydah, “He knew very little about real operations, or strategy … He was expendable, you know, the greeter . . . Joe Louis in the lobby of Caeser’s Palace, shaking hands.” Moreover, Zubaydah was schizophrenic; according to Coleman, “This guy is insane, certifiable split personality.” Coleman’s views were echoed at the top levels of the CIA and were communicated to Bush and Cheney. But Bush scolded CIA director George Tenet, saying, “I said [Zubaydah] was important. You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” Zubaydah’s minor role in al Qaeda and his apparent insanity were kept secret.
In response to the torture, Zubaydah told his interrogators about myriad terrorist targets al Qaeda had in its sights: the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statute of Liberty, shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, and apartment buildings. Al Qaeda was close to building a crude nuclear bomb, Zubaydah reported. None of this was corroborated but the Bush gang reacted to each report zealously.
Likewise, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, considered the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, was tortured so severely – including by water boarding – that the information he provided is virtually worthless. A potentially rich source of intelligence was lost as a result of the torture.
Bush’s insistence that his administration doesn’t torture rings hollow. He lied about weapons of mass destruction and a Saddam-al Qaeda connection in Iraq. He lied when he assured us his officials would not wiretap without warrants. As evidence of secret memos detailing harsh interrogation policies continues to emerge, we can’t believe Bush’s denials about torture.
Democrats in Congress have demanded they be allowed to see the memos, but Bush said the interrogation methods have been “fully disclosed to appropriate members of Congress.” Senator John D. Rockefeller IV was unmoved. “I’m tired of these games,” he said. “They can’t say that Congress has been fully briefed while refusing to turn over key documents used to justify the legality of the program.”
It is incumbent upon the Senate Judiciary Committee to vigorously interrogate Michael Mukasey during his attorney general confirmation hearing. As AG, Mukasey would oversee the department that writes interrogation policy. Mukasey should know the Convention Against Torture prohibits torture in all circumstances, even in times of war.
Torture is a war crime. Those who commit or order torture can be convicted under the U.S. War Crimes Statute. Techniques that don’t rise to the level of torture but constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment also violate U.S. law. Congress should provide for the appointment of a special independent counsel to fully investigate and prosecute all who are complicit in the torture and mistreatment of prisoners in U.S. custody.
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Cocaine galore! Villagers live it up on profits from ‘white lobster’
Washed-up bales of drugs bring millions of dollars to poor fishing communities
Centuries of troubles have bobbed on the waves off the Mosquito Coast: Christopher Columbus, the Spanish conquest, pirates, slave ships. For the fishing villages scattered across these remote central American shores there was seldom reason to welcome visits from the outside world.
But that was before the “white lobster”, and before everything changed. Now the villagers rise at first light to scan the horizon in hope of seeing a very different type of intruder.
What they are looking for, and what they have coyly euphemised, are big, bulging bags of Colombian cocaine. A combination of law enforcement, geography and ocean currents has washed tonnes of the drug, and millions of dollars, into what was one of the Caribbean’s most desolate and isolated regions. Villages that once eked an existence on shrimp and red-tinged lobster have been transformed. In place of thatched wooden huts there are brick houses, mansions and satellite dishes.
“They consider it a blessing from God. You see people all day just walking up and down the beaches keeping a lookout to sea,” said Louis Perez, the police chief in Bluefields, the main port on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast.
Colombian speedboats hug the coastline so closely that this narco-route to the US is known as the “country road”. With 800-horsepower outboard motors, the so-called “go fasts” can usually outrun US and Nicaraguan patrols. But on occasion they are intercepted, not least when US snipers hit their engines. “Then they throw the coke overboard to get rid of the evidence,” said a European drug enforcement official based in the region. “Other times it’s because they run out of fuel or have an accident.”
Currents carry the bales towards the shore. A decade ago many of the indigenous Miskito people had not even heard of cocaine. Some 15 people in the village of Karpwala are said to have died after mistaking the contents of a bale for baking powder.
That innocence is long gone. Colombian traffickers and Nicaraguan middlemen trawl villages offering finders $4,000 (£1,960) a kilo, said Major Perez – seven times less than the US street value but a fortune to a fisherman.
Tasbapauni, a sleepy hamlet a three-hour motorboat ride from Bluefields, is a cocaine version of Whisky Galore!, the 1940s tale of a Hebridean island which salvages a shipwrecked cargo of booze and plays cat-and-mouse with the authorities to keep it.
Posh hotels
Some locals who used to be in rags live it up at posh hotels in Bluefields and Managua, others stock up on wide-screen TVs and expensive beer. With its creole English and African slave descendants, the community feels more Jamaican than Nicaraguan. Its high-rolling reputation has earned Tasbapauni the nickname Little Miami. That’s an exaggeration. There is still plenty of poverty and barefoot children and there are no roads or vehicles and little to break the silence except lapping surf, clucking chickens and the occasional thud of a falling coconut. But things are different. “Today the toiling is easier. Life is plenty better than before,” said Percival Hebbert, 84, a Moravian Church pastor and village leader. “The community is like this: you find drugs, this one find drugs, the next one find drugs – that money is stirring right here in the community, going round and round.”
The white lobster was a blessing, he said, as long as the bonanza was spent wisely. “Almost all you see with a good home, a good cement home, those are the ones who find them things.”
The church had just installed a shiny white floor thanks to a donation from a fisherman, Ted Hayman, who reputedly hauled in 220kg (485lb). Mr Hayman chose the colours and tiles himself. “He’s a kind man,” said Mr Hebbert.
He was grateful but lamented the church’s cut was not greater. “God says that 10% of whatever you earn is his. But no one do that here.” Villages further north oblige finders to give a tenth of the proceeds to the church and at least another tenth to neighbours.
Mr Hayman, 37, Tasbapauni’s most “blessed” fisherman, has converted his shack into a three-storey mansion with iron gates, a satellite dish and architecture best described as narc-deco. A sign identifies the residence as Hayman Hi.
Garrison
Mr Hayman’s sister, Maria, 40, said cocaine was the source of the wealth – and philanthropy. “Him always try to help the people. Him help the sick, the widows, the church, anybody.”
A short stroll from Hayman Hi is a 30-strong army garrison tasked with combating drug trafficking. It is as laid back as the rest of Tasbapauni. You could not prosecute someone for becoming rich, said the commander, Edwin Salmeron. “If we don’t capture them with the drugs there’s nothing we can do.”
Given the poverty and decades of government neglect it was “understandable but not justified” that the cocaine was sold on, said Moises Arana, a former Bluefields mayor. “There is no shame. It’s almost an innocence – they don’t understand the consequences.”
Increasingly, however, a dark side is emerging. Not all the cocaine is shipped north. Some is turned into crack and sold locally, producing the skinny, ragged youths who haunt Bluefields’ slums. The town jail is crammed with alleged addicts and pushers awaiting trial.
“With crack you lose your pride, you lose your money, everything,” said Randolph Carter, 50, a former addict. In 2004 traffickers shot off his arm while looking for another addict who had reneged on a promise to fuel their boat. “Cocaine is not a blessing. It can destroy you,” said Mr Carter.
Corruption allows traffickers to buy their way out of trouble. In 2004 a gang took over Bluefields’ police station and cut the throats of four officers. No one has been charged for what is assumed to be a drug-related atrocity.
To many, however, cocaine promises deliverance from poverty. Marvin Hoxton, 37, a lobster diver, once discovered a 72kg bale. Thieves forced him to hand over 70kg at gunpoint but he sold the remainder for $5,000. It lasted two months. “Drinking, dancing, women, the dollars fly,” he rued.
Now broke and back living with his mother, Mr Hoxton had a plan: to fill his wooden skiff with supplies and camp out on a remote beach for six months. He will string a hammock between two coconut trees, listen to his transistor radio and keep his eyes on the ocean.
“You can’t know when you might get it,” he said, staring at his beer, as if mini-bales were floating inside the bottle. “You have to wait. Wait for it to come.”
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October 9, 2007
Five Heroes of the Paris Monet attack
A gang of intruders broke into Paris’ Musee D’Orsay overnight on Sunday and punched a hole in the Impressionist painting Le Pont d’Argenteuil.
France’s Culture Minister called the vandalism an attack on French heritage.
It is the latest incident that has highlighted security problems at French cultural institutes.
Le Pont d’Argenteuil, painted in 1874, depicts moored sailing boats and a bridge on the Seine. It is part of a major collection of Impressionist works housed in the Musee d’Orsay gallery.
Security cameras caught footage of four or five people breaking into the Musee d’Orsay via a back door early on Sunday.
An alarm sounded but the apparently drunken group fled after punching a 10cm (four inch) hole in the famous work of art.
Four men and a young woman were questioned early on Tuesday and taken into custody, said AFP, citing a source close to the investigation.
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Viruses ‘hit 1m China computers’
Almost one million Chinese computers were hit by viruses during last week’s national holidays, state media has reported.
Three different types of viruses attacked computers during the holiday week, Xinhua news agency said.
It is not the first time China’s web users have faced problems recently.
A Pacific earthquake damaged undersea cables earlier this year, slowing down internet lines and forcing many people to start using their old fax machines.
China has more than 130 million internet users – and last week should have been a perfect time for them to catch up with their web surfing.
There was an entire week of national holidays – known as the Golden Week – so most people were off work with plenty of time to spend at home online.
But for some internet users, there were real problems. Nearly one million computers crashed as a result of the viruses.
But in other ways, experts suggest that parts of China’s computer system are working extremely well.
Recently, there have been repeated allegations that the Chinese army has hacked its way into sensitive government systems in the US and Europe.
It is a charge that China has denied.
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