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Posted by John Grant

Why you can’t call a spade a spade in this country

An op-ed in the New York Times deals with one of the most vitally important issues Americans could get their minds around — the difference between an Empire and a Republic and just who are we as a people as we deal with two foreign wars and a job-devouring recession caused by financial delusion and chicanery. Unfortunately the topic is not treated totally seriously, and the notion of an American Empire is ridiculed. I’ve encountered this attitude in a running dialogue on the topic I had with Philadelphia Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky. Stu sneers at the notion we’re an “empire.” He’s a decent guy, and I reduce his argument with me to: “OK, if we’re supposed to be this empire, where’s the emperor in a toga?” I may be obsessive, but I think it’s a good topic for serious discussion. It’s way too easy in the dumbed-down climate of debate in this nation to ridicule the notion of Empire and, thus, of course, avoid dealing with all the real historical and political decisions that lead to the real dynamics of our current reality that suck so much of the oxygen out of our capacity to solve neglected problems. The list is long; for starters there’s a loss of jobs, a lessening of competitiveness due to shortcomings in our education system, crumbling infrastructure and an over-dependency on oil versus developing alternative, green energies — all things we should have been investing more in for the past 40 years. Now, as we are funding two on-going wars, a Global War On Terror and a dismally failed Drug War, these neglected investments at home are coming home to roost. and unless we change, it will only get worse in the future.

Posted by John Grant

I was just reading an 1898 essay by Leo Tolstoy on the Spanish American War in which he satirizes the United States for defeating the “decrepit and doting old man”  that was the Spanish Empire and, as “a young man in full possession of his strengths,” taking over Spain’s imperial role in Cuba and, especially, in the Philippines. The US beats this “decrepit old man” (known for his cruelty) and “knocks out his teeth, breaks his ribs, and then ecstatically tells his exploits to a vast public of just such young men as he is, and this public rejoices and praises the hero who has maimed an old man.” This from a writer who saw real bloody combat in several places and wrote War And Peace. This is late Tolstoy, when, in the eyes of many, he had gone off the deep end to preach Christian pacifism. War to him at this stage is organized “murder.” He is disgusted with governments who tell their citizens their wars are undertaken to protect them. “What you (governments) say of the threatening danger and of your concern about protecting us against it is a deception.” Sounds familiar, given the past nine years, when our leaders launched two major wars, one of which we are escalating in spite of opposing popular opinion — a war our military commanders have begun assuring the occupied Afghans is about “protecting the Afghan people.”

Now we must absorb the idea of assassination orders for US citizens. Our leaders now openly declare the right to murder American citizens deemed “enemy combatants” — or some such label worked out by PR-savvy lawyers aware of the post-9/11 fear and the lynch mob state of mind in parts of America. First we were worried about warrant-less wiretapping of citizens. Then, it was the three-year “slow torture” of a US citizen in a brig in South Carolina. Now we have graduated to warrant-less assassinations. The President says it’s OK, so sit back on the couch and watch the rest of Hitman4. And the current Supreme Court is probably fine with assassination hits of anybody as long as they are in the pursuit of American Power & Wealth. 

The target dejure is the US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemini Muslim cleric who had conversations with both the Fort Hood shooter and the underpants bomber. US intelligence has him pegged as Satan’s child, but, let’s be honest, US intelligence is not the most reliable arbiter of truth and they have been good at providing popular fodder for demonization campaigns. Al-Awlaki has told reliable Arab journalists he did not encourage either of the above to commit the acts they did, though, after the fact, he said what they did was honorable. Al-Awlaki is currently in hiding for his life, but he seems to argue he was a sympathetic ear to these disturbed men, not their instigator. Like the many people involved in some fashion with the loosely confederated global insurgency we are currently engaged with, al-Awlaki is clearly angry at our invasions and on-going occupations of Muslim lands, our support of Israel for its occupation of Palestine and a perceived general war against Islam. The argument for assassinating people like al-Awlaki is the exact same reasoning used in the Phoenix Program to assassinate nationalist Vietnamese leaders opposed to the US occupation of Viet Nam. The difference is the current war is being played out in a globalized context and our assassinations are done by the CIA or by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the hunter-killer teams commanded so well by General Stanley McChrystal and now operating in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. They currently favor the use of drones directed by some operator in Arizona with a Diet Pepsi on the console next to him to assassinate people by taking out entire buildings. Of course, no one gets a trial; guilt is established in secret by … well, no one is sure. 

It’s becoming easier to understand why Tolstoy ended up where he did relinquishing literary and commercial success to take on the war powers of his day. Think back to the 1980s and the outrage in the nation over “war off the books” by Oliver North and his patriotic warriors during the Reagan years. One’s head spins at the moral distance we have traveled since those innocent days. Thanks to rapid technological advances and stagnant human morality, the notion of war off the books is now beyond steroids as a metaphor and approaching some kind of secret robot dystopia in which the soma of the age is a popular culture where The Killer reigns supreme as an iconic figure of comedy and romance.

It’s been 112 years since Tolstoy wrote about how the US employed a campaign of “murder” to supplant the Spanish and create its own fledgling empire out of the spoils. That empire is now in full plumage and its leaders are ordering the assassination of people around the world based on their motivational influence. That our imperial wars are the prime motivational element in these speaker’s arguments is rarely mentioned. Given the distance we have come in the past 20 years, it’s interesting to imagine where things might go in the next 20 years.

John Grant

Posted by John Grant

Those of us who participated in the September 12th march on the Army Experience Center at the Franklin Mills Mall recall the arrest of Cheryl Biren, along with six others. I remember Biren there taking photos, it turns out, for OpEdNews.Com, a news and opinion blog site. Biren was doing her job covering the event when she was arrested by Philadelphia police.
The AEC is a tax-funded, $13 million experimental store selling the US Army as a brand to kids as young as thirteen. It employs violent computer games (“war porn”) and shooting simulators with human targets to entice mall-crawling kids into joining the military — at a time the economy is staggering from a lack of jobs. The Center is controversial and raises serious questions about how we educate our youth in today’s world and how well we equip them to analyze information in a critical fashion. 

Many of us “free-lance” or “independent” or, let’s go all the way, “radical” journalists regularly encounter the kind of difficulty Biren ran into covering the AEC march, since police departments are more and more taking it upon themselves to decide who is a legitimate journalist and who isn’t. 
When cops decide who and what constitutes a real journalist they end up permitting only those working for the mainstream, corporate media, people with corporate ID cards, pre-arranged police permits, backup staff at the office, expensive equipment, van drivers and someone to get them coffee. Anyone on a tight budget and sympathetic to the ideas expressed by demonstrators at marches like the one at the AEC are seen as loose cannons and, naturally, suspect in the eyes of the police. And since no one in the mainstream, corporate media has much interest in covering such demonstrations — well, you can see the problem.

In my case, I was there and I took some photos. I, then, chose not to challenge the cops and I left as they began pushing people out the doors. My timidity, of course, is precisely what the police approach is meant to encourage. Any reporter who stayed behind to assert their first amendment right to witness and report the arrests was subject to arrest. This is what Biren did.
We see this sort of thing a lot these days; it’s a variant on the Facts On The Ground strategy. Act first — deal with the repercussions later. The police make an arrest to eliminate a journalist, no matter how illegal the action might be, then they drop the charges and employ public relations later. During the 2000 Republican convention in Philadelphia, the city paid out millions in lawsuit settlements for illegal arrests. On January 13, the Philadelphia DA followed this pattern and dropped all charges against Biren – four months after her arrest and an uncertain amount of grief and legal expenses later.

The 1st Amendment outlaws “abridging” the “freedom of the press.” It does not say “freedom of the well-paid, corporate press with police permits.” When the 1st Amendment was written there were no press badges; all the bureaucratic hurdles and mazes came later. 
A.J. Leibling added this famous nugget to the mix: “If you really want freedom of the press you have to own one.” Leibling could not have foreseen the age we live in, but, now, with the advent of the internet and the capacity for virtually anyone to fashion a news blog and get out there and cover news, Leibling’s observation may be more than just a witty remark.
Maybe it’s time for those of us on the left to take a hint from James Bopp Jr., the right-wing conservative lawyer from Terre Haute, Indiana, behind the recent Supreme Court case that opened the flood gates to corporate money in campaign ads. He calculated the whole thing and designed the case to obtain the decision recently dropped on American democracy like a bomb. He is now about to launch a similar case aimed to eliminate any and all restrictions on corporate funding of political campaigns.

Maybe it’s time we tip our hats to the Bopps of this culture and do some original legal thinking of our own — pull off our own “Bopp coup” in the courts — to establish that the police cannot use prejudice or whim as a basis to decide who shall report on and document their actions and who shall not. As long as a reporter is cooperative, not violent or not actively participating in whatever the cops are focusing on, it should be made clear in law that sympathy for a cause or action being covered by a reporter is not a valid reason to lump that reporter in with those being arrested. 
It’s an important Constitutional question. Can a government police force quash, silence or prevent a reporter from doing his or her job by making a phony arrest? It happens so much these days it has become part of the fabric of our times, and it contributes to the distancing of citizens more and more from the decisions and actions of their government.

As the recent corporate funding case suggests, the current Supreme Court tends to come down on the side of money and power. But the Constitution clearly does not require a reporter be equipped with money or power, or more to the point, to be connected to a corporation. Current police practice in cases like Biren’s amounts to the harassment and silencing of reporters for failing to have the proper political “juice” behind them.
If the democratic vistas of the internet we hear so much about are real, then all a reporter needs to legitimately assert 1st Amendment rights is a pen & pad, a camera and a blogsite. 
To borrow the famous film line from The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges.”

Photos Copyright John Grant 

Posted By John Grant

…….I was there in 1987 visiting a doctor friend who worked in a clinic in the middle of the island and made two-hour treks to tiny villages up in the mountains three days a week. One thing I will never forget is watching a man who worked in the clinic use a pair of common pliers to extract a tooth from the jaw of a 30-year-old peasant woman. He was having a hard time wriggling the thing out, and she was suffering immensely. But she did not let out even a peep! It gives me the chills just recalling the scene.

The 23-year-old memory of that woman’s stoicism actually inspired me six months ago to extract a painful, loose tooth of my own. In my case, it was considerably easier, and I saved a $100 dental bill. As comfortable Americans, we should purge ourselves of any sense of superiority vis-a-vis Haiti and learn to respect and honor Haitians for the suffering they have endured — and are enduring at this moment.  In that spirit, we should extend our hand.

If nothing else, the earthquake disaster should wake Americans up to what an amazing place Haiti really is — absolutely unique in the Western Hemisphere, an island liberated by Africans brought to this hemisphere in chains as slaves. While poverty and horror are the usual images that pop into Americans’ minds when they hear the word “Haiti,” the real story is much more complicated and full to the brim with stoicism, art and music. And, folks, if we get all superior and see voodoo as third-rate theatrics and nonsense, it’s no different than all religions — it’s people trying to make sense out of darkness and death. The fact is, we could learn a lot from Haiti.  

……John and I go back a long ways. He was the first journalist to write about my erotic photographs when he reviewed a solo exhibition at Pentimenti Gallery in Philadelphia, 1994. Pentimenti was the first gallery to take notice of the sea change to occur in the direction of my photographic career in the early nineties. We didn’t actually meet until years later, when we were introduced socially by a mutual friend, the great documentary photographer Harvey Finkle.

John and I became regulars at Harvey’s Monday Night football parties, where the food, wine and conversation flows on a variety of topics the least of which is football. We got to know each other a little more over the years as a consequence. Recently he has become a regular contributor to this blog. I asked his close friend Harvey to write a little something about the pictures that accompany the post, in an effort to introduce you to a man filled with many passions, including our over zealous agressions in Iraq and Afghanistan. I am so honored to have John part of the Tony Ward Studio team. All photos courtesy of www.harveyfinkle.com.

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John Grant

Renaissance man. A superb photographer, videographer, novelist, journalist and craftsman. John is also a leader, having been at the helm of the local Vets for Peace for about a decade. His facility with words is such that he constantly appears on the pages of our local newspapers in letters or guest op-eds. I first met John through our political activities. Both of us having traveled to Central America during the 1980’s, every once in a while I would grab a photo of John in a variety of actions. And, you can bet that any issue or subject that John touches, his knowledge is totally comprehensive. As well as a tremendous source of knowledge, he is my good friend. Harvey Finkle

Posted By John Grant

It was sad watching Barack Obama cave in to the militarists on the war in Afghanistan. One, he didn’t have to give his speech on the war at West Point, which was 100% Bush; he could have given it at some location symbolic of the dire need to invest in America’s many domestic problems. Where exactly did Obama go wrong? From a progressive vantage point, he seems to have made a classic pact with the devil in order to reinforce his political capital. A writer I knew wrote a book called The Liberal Dilemma in which he outlined the problem everyone on the left faces in this country. How adamantly does one stick to one’s progressive ideals (and remaining marginalized without power) versus how much does one compromise those ideals in order to obtain power (in order to actually accomplish much-needed reforms.) Last night, Obama went too far on the compromise end of this continuum and may have fallen off the continuum entirely. 

Garry Wills, below, expresses the betrayal well. The item, at bottom, about Dan Senor’s support of the speech shows just how far he went. I met Dan Senor in the Green Zone in Baghdad in December 2003, where he was a high-powered Bush flak supporting the Iraq War who sat in with several other Green Zone warriors on a meeting our veteran and military family group had with Paul Bremer’s assistant. Senor was interested in us, he said, because a visit by the parents of soldiers in a hot war zone was “unprecedented,” something reminiscent of Russian mothers taking buses to visit their sons in places like Chechnya. Senor is now co-author of a book in stores reveling in Israel as a modern free-enterprise miracle, an “exceptionalist” argument that totally dismisses Palestinian rights. That someone like Dan Senor is supportive of Obama’s decision to escalate in Afghanistan only underlines that the decision was a bad one.

It will now take time to tell how really bad the decision is to send 30,000 more young American targets into a doomed war. John McCain said, “the worst thing we can do in Afghanistan is pursue half-measures.” To me, that means either heed the hard historic realities of counter-insurgency warfare and go all-out and send in 500,000 plus troops equipped with our most super-lethal weaponry and unburdened with moral concerns for killing civilians — or use our intelligence and diplomatic powers to remove our military forces and take a different tact. Trying to have it both ways like Obama has done is only doing exactly what we did in Vietnam — escalating the violence to avoid the really hard decisions and advance the crisis to a later date. As Stanley Karnow wrote about the war in Vietnam, our escalation decisions were about the “prestige of the American government” and not about “winning,” since McNamara and others knew early on that was impossible. That Obama chose West Point to give his speech only emphasizes how much “the prestige of the American government” — and especially the prestige of our post-Vietnam brotherhood of generals — played in his decision. He seems to have employed his well-known intellectual and analytic powers to bolster his political position in a war culture rather than using those powers and his bully pulpit to extricate the nation from the disastrous legacy of the Bush/Cheney period. He took the easy road. Tragically, it could have been different, and he could have given an altogether different speech outlining why, for our own good as a nation, we cannot afford this war any longer — and how we are going to honorably extricate our military without abandoning the Afghan people. He would have had to concede a hit on our “prestige,” but in the end it would have gone down in history as a “profile in courage” just like Kennedy’s when he stood up to Curtis LeMay in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

We in the peace movement now have our work cut out for us to continue to speak truth about this doomed war and to hold the Obama’s feet to the fire on his declared July 2011 withdrawal.

…..I first met Bob Shell at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York city while attending a Photography Expo at the Jacob Javits Center back in 1995. At the time, Bob was the editor in chief of Shutterbug, one of the largest photography publications in America. We were introduced at the convention by a mutual friend, Reiko Ikeda a representative of MegaPress, a photography syndication group based in Tokyo. I was represented by Miss Ikeda as was Bob, so the three of us decided to meet back at Bob’s hotel after various convention activities to meet for drinks and dinner. I also asked Bob to review a portfolio of photographs that I brought along with hopes that Bob would review the pictures for an editorial he would later publish in Shutterbug magazine.

After that initial meeting in New York, Bob and I became friends. He lived and worked in Radford, Virginia, so we spent most of our time, over many years communicating by phone about photography and related matters. A regular part of our conversation centered around the use of various cameras and lighting techniques each of us employed when working with models.

There was a particular model that Bob mentioned quite often, her name was Marion Franklin. They developed a friendship and eventually became lovers. Ms. Franklin enjoyed being photographed by Bob and enjoyed modeling for him on numerous occasions. She apparently was a big fan of my book Obsessions, a result of Bob’s earlier recommendation to find a book publisher. We talked often about making a trip down to Radford to photograph Marion, as well as other models that Bob frequently worked with in the Radford area.

That trip was never meant to be. On June 3, 2003, Marion died during a photo shoot at Bob’s studio. He was later prosecuted, and convicted in September of 2007. He is presently serving a 32 year sentence for involuntary manslaughter and other charges.

Bob and I communicated numerous times after Marion’s death. He explained the tragic events of that fateful day and implored his innocence of the charges levied by his claims of an overzealous prosecutor who won conviction by jury trial on September 3, 2007.

After Bob’s conviction, I lost track of him for a while. I scoured the internet trying to figure out where he was sent to serve his sentence. A year passed and then a couple of things happened in the fall of 2008. I received an email from a friend of Bob’s, who also believes that he was wrongfully convicted. I was contacted because Bob had been asking about me and sought my help. I responded in kind, still believing in his innocence, I conferred with several of my attorney friends for advise and a course of action to have Bob’s case reopened.

At around the same time, I became friends with a renowned private investigator who has since offered support in having a closer look at Bob’s case. We have already uncovered various problems with the prosecutions case, especially in the area of mitigation and will keep readers informed of our course of action over the coming months. The habeas corpus clock is ticking for Bob. He has already exercised most of his standard appeals. Short of clemency from the governor of Virginia or a new trial, Bob is imprisoned for life unless someone that believes in his innocence takes action. To learn more about Bob’s case log on to www.bobshelltruth.com. TW

….The studio was recently invited to attend a charity event to raise awareness of the international scourge of sex trafficking of children, to be held in Philadelphia at the Salt Art Gallery, on November 14th, 2009. Ms. Kristin Huggins, a former student of Temple University is part of a group of young women who volunteer their time and energy to raise funds to thwart this growing international problem. Kristin took some time out of her busy schedule to answer a few questions about the cause for our readership.

TW: How did you become involved in History Starts Now?

KH: The movie Traffic brought this issue to the center of my conscience, and when I heard about the charity, History Starts Now. They put out a casting call for models to walk in their Fashion Gives Back yearly event.  They ended up needing me for more volunteering, and I signed up to help organize their events. History Starts Now’s focus is twofold: spreading awareness of the enormity and horror of this crime, and raising money to fight this problem legally. We feel that the most effective way to stop sexual slavery is through the legal system. Very few buyers are successfully prosecuted. Less than ten percent of all arrests related to this crime are the clients, and over 61 percent of cases pursued are thrown out of court. Until the demand for underage prostitutes is curtailed, our nation’s children are at risk. One organization we work with on these issues is Redlight Children’s Campaign, which is headed by attorney, NYU professor, and Priority Films founder, Guy Jacobson. While people often hear of these crimes occurring in Southeast Asia, Columbia, and Eastern Europe, the media often overlooks how many American kids are victimized each year. History Starts Now’s primary focus is American children.

TW: I hear about it all the time in the news these days, which likely make’s the issue more like a pandemic, it’s spreading across many borders.

KH: According to Unicef, over 2 million children and young women are implicated worldwide in sex trafficking. Interpol considers this to be the third largest international criminal activity, but other groups feel it is second only to drug trafficking. Estimates on the revenue generated vary widely, as so much goes untracked. Anywhere from 9 to 20 billion is generated each year from sex trafficking.

TW: What is the age range of the victims of this type of crime? 

KH: In America, the average age of entry is 12 to 14 years old. Victims under 10 are less common but definitely exist within our own country’s borders. According to a study by Shared Hope International,  the average age of entry correlates to the average age of runaways. The most common form of underage prostitution is survival sex; the victim feels compelled to perform sexual acts for food, shelter, or some other “necessity.”  One Nevada treatment center discovered that roughly 30% of the victims they encountered were originally pimped by a family member. A 2006 Shared Hope International report financed by the U.S. Department of Justice proclaimed that incest was a training ground for underage prostitutes; some agencies claimed over 70% of all child prostitutes they encountered were sexually abused. Over 90% were supposedly physically abused.

TW: Which criminal element or organized crime group is at the head of the trafficking or are there a number of groups in the US and abroad?

KH: There is no singular crime entity at the root of this industry. There are many. In America, gangs often connect with female runaways, systematically hooking young women on drugs, while offering them “protection.”  When they feel their victims are dependent on them, they force these young women to prostitute themselves in exchange for drugs and “protection.” 
The pimp model is common. Their handlers often have a dozen adolescents that they manage, relying on a network of fellow pimps and facilitators to make their operations feasible and profitable.  Sex traffickers communicate to each other, letting each other know where they can sell without police interference. Facilitators include taxi drivers that direct customers to the location of victims, government and law enforcement officials that create, sustain, and enlarge loopholes, making these crimes profitable, and online websites that encourage pedophilia fantasies, harvesting the next generation of customers, often directing them to in-person stimuli.
Another significant trend  in this dark industry is moving the “merchandise” off the streets, making use of the Internets cloak of anonymity.Children are circulated through circuits, usually specific truck stops, hotels, and motels that have been scoped out. Facilitators help to connect potential customers to the pimps, thus preventing crackdowns by local law enforcement. Minors in group homes and foster care are targeted, often being lured in by an older boyfriend/friend promising love and affection.

TW: Does the crime impact primarily females or males as well?

KH: American boys are also victimized in this industry.  In the book, For Money or Love: Boy Prostitution in America, Robert Lloyd estimated that 300,000 boys are being trafficked right now in America. Referred to as chickens, they have similar profiles as their female counterparts, including a history of incest, mental, and physical abuse. While they are usually in “gay” capitals. it isn’t unheard of in small towns.

Sexual abuse plays a huge role in creating boy prostitutes. On average, their first sexual experience, typically with an older male partner, is at 9.6 years old. Most enter the business after running away, feeling conflicted over their supposed sexual identity, and unable to turn to their parents for guidance. Sadly, about half of these boys are thrown out for their “sexual identity”, when in fact, they were usually coerced into their initial encounters by sexual predators.

…when I created this picture I thought of Brassai and all those evening’s he spent with the ladies of the night……