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Bollettino The Washington Post reports on the Ashcroft version of ethnic cleansing – arresting anybody named Mohammed – that was allowed after 9/11 . Many of the detainees were held in a Brooklyn jail and were routinely bounced off walls – meaning rammed into walls, kicked, held in restraints for up to seven hours, and had their conferences with their lawyers illegally taped and eavesdropped upon. These were charges denied by the officials of the prison – a Federal prison – until a stash of videos were found recording it all. The videos, according to the director of the prison, had been ‘recycled.” During the investigation, prison officials blankly denied the charges. Are these prison officials going to be fired? That’s a good question. The second and third grafs: “An investigation by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine also found that officials at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, N.Y., which is run by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, improperly taped meetings

Bollettino My previous posts are now up, but they are full of these -- things. I don't know. I'm giving up. Sorry about that. I'm going to write an entirely different post. If you want to know what I wrote before, send me an email at rogerwgathman@yahoo.com, and I'll send it to you.

Bollettino (These two posts are to be read together) My friend, H., sent me an article about Leo Strauss and urged me to write a post about it for LI. Unfortunately, I know very little about Leo Strauss, and H. knows so much more that I feel a little ridiculous taking the pontifical chair. For what it is worth: whenever his adherents quote Mr. Strauss, the words always seem disturbingly shallow – either platitudinous encomiums of Plato and Aristotle, one of the habits of German philosophers that the analytics had the good taste to do away with, or else exhortations that are the starting points for arguments that aren’t, in the event, ever made. I am simply giving you my impression of Strauss – but I admit, I’ve never really seriously read him. However, I – and everybody else – has read a lot about Straussians. And I do think that there is one strain among the Straussians that exerts an improbable influence on American foreign policy today. Strauss had a great reverence

West begins by asking a good question: “What were the original principles of the American Constitution? Are those principles true?” Then we have the inevitable gathering of the tics: “Many historians and political scientists write about the first question. Scholars are never shy about telling us what happened in the dead-and-gone eighteenth century. But few of them think it is even worth discussing whether the Founders' principles are true. For example, in a review of my book Vindicating the Founders, historian Joseph Ellis accuses me of having committed "sins of presentism." My error, as he cleverly puts it, is believing "that ideas are like migratory birds that can take off in the eighteenth century and land intact in our time." Ellis does not even try to refute the Founders' principles or their arguments, summarized in my book, regarding property rights, women's rights, and welfare policy. For him, it is enough simply to dismiss my endorse

Bollettino My friend, H., sent me an article about Leo Strauss and urged me to write a post about it for LI. Unfortunately, I know very little about Leo Strauss, and H. knows so much more that I feel a little ridiculous taking the pontifical chair. For what it is worth: whenever his adherents quote Mr. Strauss, the words always seem disturbingly shallow – either platitudinous encomiums of Plato and Aristotle, one of the habits of German philosophers that the analytics had the good taste to do away with, or else exhortations that are the starting points for arguments that aren’t, in the event, ever made. I am simply giving you my impression of Strauss – but I admit, I’ve never really seriously read him. However, I – and everybody else – has read a lot about Straussians. And I do think that there is one strain among the Straussians that exerts an improbable influence on American foreign policy today. Strauss had a great reverence for the American Constitution. He was a man,

Bollettino My friend, H., sent me an article about Leo Strauss and urged me to write a post about it for LI. Unfortunately, I know very little about Leo Strauss, and H. knows so much more that I feel a little ridiculous taking the pontifical chair. For what it is worth: whenever his adherents quote Mr. Strauss, the words always seem disturbingly shallow – either platitudinous encomiums of Plato and Aristotle, one of the habits of German philosophers that the analytics had the good taste to do away with, or else exhortations that are the starting points for arguments that aren’t, in the event, ever made. I am simply giving you my impression of Strauss – but I admit, I’ve never really seriously read him. However, I – and everybody else – has read a lot about Straussians. And I do think that there is one strain among the Straussians that exerts an improbable influence on American foreign policy today. Strauss had a great reverence for the American Constitution. He was a man,

Bollettino The Sock Army Patrick Cockburn, who wrote the best book about the Post Gulf War survival of Saddam H, pens the best horrorscope of his regime for the Mirror today . You know Cockburn is going for the gusto from his first sentence: �WHEN one of Saddam's most notorious prisons was captured by rebels after the Gulf War they found a human ear nailed to the wall.� This is one of the classic stories � like the story of Caligula, or of Nero. Saddam the H. was not a tyrant in the Stalin or Hitler vein. The Ba�ath party never played the role of the Communist or Nazi parties, but were window dressing for legitimating a peculiarly virulent family. Cockburn�s summary of how Saddam won the Intifada in 91 is concise and to the point: �And it was in the aftermath of this war that Saddam faced his greatest challenge from the Iraqi people. A tank gunner retreating to the southern Iraqi port of Basra, infuriated by the defeat, fired a shell into a portrait of Saddam.

Bollettino The Saddam H. capture is being touted as the next step in the re-election of George Bush. We don�t think so. We do think the capture is great news. It is a definitely a moment � one of those political moments Montesquieu discussed in �Considerations sur la cause de la grandeurs des Romains:� an event that suddenly signals the loosening of the grip of fate. LI thought, after the fall of Baghdad, that Saddam must surely be dead. In the last couple months, however, that theory was clearly wrong, dependent as it was on an exaggerated sense of what the American military can do with their laser directed bombs. But that Saddam the Meat Hustler still existed in the flesh (and, pixilated, on video) has burdened the resistance much more than the occupiers. In spite of the American media�s insistence that the fear of Hussein in the souks was the final impediment to the flowers and candy that the American occupiers naturally deserved, we thought, on the contrary, that the ina