THE CALAMITY HOWLER $166 Resent-Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2007 00:30:16 -0500 (CDT) THE CALAMITY HOWLER July 31, 2007 Issue #166 Sometimes an intended epithet can be turned to good advantage in the sole surviving issue of the Decatur, Texas Times one finds the way Populists not only accepted the label `calamity howler but insisted that they had ample reason to howl and would continue to howl until their objectives had been attained. --- THE POPULIST MIND, edited by Norman Pollack EDITOR\PUBLISHER: A.V Krebs E-MAIL: avkrebs@comcast.net TO RECEIVE: Send name and address to avkrebs@comcast.net OVERVIEW: * SUNNIS, SHIITES AND KURDS UNITE TO HAIL CUP-WINNING HEROES By Bushra Juhi abd Chris Brummitt * ANSWERING TO NO ONE By Walter F. Mondale * WHO REALLY TOOK OVER DURING THAT COLONOSCOPY ??? By Frank Rich * NOAM CHOMSKY PREDICTS THERE WILL BE COLD WAR BETWEEN IRAN AND U.S. By Noam Chomsky * NEW BILL KEEPS PORT CHICAGO'S STORY ALIVE By Kantele Franko * MEDICAL CHECKUPS STIR GRIM A-BOMB MEMORIES By Taya Flores * BY NUMBERS ALONE, CHARACTER COUNTS By Thomas Boswell SUNNIS, SHIITES AND KURDS UNITE TO HAIL CUP-WINNING HEROES By Bushra Juhi abd Chris brummitt The Scotsman July 30, 2007 "This is not just about football, this is more important than that. This has brought great happiness to a whole country. This is not about a team, this is about human beings." So said Jorvan Vieira, Iraq's national football team coach, yesterday after his side achieved one of sport's great fairytale moments, beating the favourites Saudi Arabia 1-0 in the Asian Cup final in Jakarta to provide a rare moment for celebration in their war-torn homeland. In the 71st minute of the match, Iraqi captain Younis Mahmoud, a Sunni, climbed to head a perfectly-weighted corner from Hawar Mulla Mohammed, a Kurd, into the net. "Those heroes have shown the real Iraq. They have done something useful for the people as opposed to the politicians and lawmakers who are stealing or killing each other," said Sabah Shaiyal, 43, a policeman in Baghdad's Shiite district of Sadr City. "Once again, our national team has shown that there is only one, united Iraq." But after the game, Mahmoud, who was named player of the tournament, said one of the tragedies of the war was that the team would not even be able to return to Iraq with the trophy. "I don't want the Iraqi people to be angry with me," he said. "[But] if I go back with the team, anybody could kill me or try to hurt me." The Iraqi captain, who like the rest of the team wore black armbands to remember the dozens killed by car-bombers following the side's semi-final victory over South Korea on Wednesday, said the United States presence in his homeland was a "problem". "I want America to go out," he said. "Today, tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, but out. I wish the American people didn't invade Iraq and hopefully it will be over soon." Yesterday, the Iraqi government enforced a vehicle ban to try to prevent a repeat of the two car bombs that tore into people celebrating Iraq's semi-final win. Mahmoud said one of the victims had been a small child. "His mother said when her child was killed in front of her, she didn't cry. She said, 'I present my son as a sacrifice for the national team'. Then we had to win," he said. An Iraqi military official said police had foiled a suicide car bomb attack in Baghdad yesterday, but the celebrations brought death for some. Shots fired into the air killed at least four people and wounded 17 when they returned to earth. But for the most part, Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds and other Iraqis joined together in peaceful celebration of their similarly mixed football team. "This winning has united the Iraqis and nobody has been this excited since a long time," said Yassir Mohammed, a Sunni from Baghdad. Traffic jams clogged the streets in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah. Amir Mohammed, a Shiite, joined a Kurdish friend to celebrate. "The soccer team has shown that we are united from the south to the north," he said. The Iraqi team, known as the "Lions of the Two Rivers" were making their first appearance in the final against three-time champions Saudi Arabia. In the post-match news conference, Vieira, a Brazilian, and Mahmoud sat wearing black armbands. "It's very clear, from our arms, our respect to the people who died when we put Korea out of the competition," Vieira said. "This victory we offer to the families of those people." He also paid tribute to the team physio, Anwar, who died in a bombing as he was collecting tickets to attend the pre-tournament training camp in Jordan. Vieira confirmed he was now quitting and said: "I have worked my best to give happiness to the Iraqi people, to bring a warm smile to their lips, and my mission is accomplished." ANSWERING TO NO ONE By Walter F. Mondale Washington Post July 29, 2007 The Post's recent series on Dick Cheney's vice presidency certainly got my attention. Having held that office myself over a quarter-century ago, I have more than a passing interest in its evolution from the backwater of American politics to the second most powerful position in our government. Almost all of that evolution, under presidents and vice presidents of both parties, has been positive --- until now. Under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, it has gone seriously off track. The Founders created the vice presidency as a constitutional afterthought, solely to provide a president-in-reserve should the need arise. The only duty they specified was that the vice president should preside over the Senate. The office languished in obscurity and irrelevance for more than 150 years until Richard Nixon saw it as a platform from which to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 1960. That worked, and the office has been an effective launching pad for aspiring candidates since. But it wasn't until Jimmy Carter assumed the presidency that the vice presidency took on a substantive role. Carter saw the office as an underused asset and set out to make the most of it. He gave me an office in the West Wing, unimpeded access to him and to the flow of information, and specific assignments at home and abroad. He asked me, as the only other nationally elected official, to be his adviser and partner on a range of issues. Our relationship depended on trust, mutual respect and an acknowledgement that there was only one agenda to be served --- the president's. Every Monday the two of us met privately for lunch; we could, and did, talk candidly about virtually anything. By the end of four years we had completed the "executivization" of the vice presidency, ending two centuries of confusion, derision and irrelevance surrounding the office. Subsequent administrations followed this pattern. George H.W. Bush, Dan Quayle and Al Gore built their vice presidencies after this model, allowing for their different interests, experiences and capabilities as well as the needs of the presidents they served. This all changed in 2001, and especially after September 11, when Cheney set out to create a largely independent power center in the office of the vice president. His was an unprecedented attempt not only to shape administration policy but, alarmingly, to limit the policy options sent to the president. It is essential that a president know all the relevant facts and viable options before making decisions, yet Cheney has discarded the "honest broker" role he played as President Gerald Ford's chief of staff. Through his vast government experience, through the friends he had been able to place in key positions and through his considerable political skills, he has been increasingly able to determine the answers to questions put to the president --- because he has been able to determine the questions. It was Cheney who persuaded President Bush to sign an order that denied access to any court by foreign terrorism suspects and Cheney who determined that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to enemy combatants captured in Afghanistan and Iraq. Rather than subject his views to an established (and rational) vetting process, his practice has been to trust only his immediate staff before taking ideas directly to the president. Many of the ideas that Bush has subsequently bought into have proved offensive to the values of the Constitution and have been embarrassingly overturned by the courts. The corollary to Cheney's zealous embrace of secrecy is his near total aversion to the notion of accountability. I've never seen a former member of the House of Representatives demonstrate such contempt for Congress --- even when it was controlled by his own party. His insistence on invoking executive privilege to block virtually every congressional request for information has been stupefying --- it's almost as if he denies the legitimacy of an equal branch of government. Nor does he exhibit much respect for public opinion, which amounts to indifference toward being held accountable by the people who elected him. Whatever authority a vice president has is derived from the president under whom he serves. There are no powers inherent in the office; they must be delegated by the president. Somehow, not only has Cheney been given vast authority by President Bush --- including, apparently, the entire intelligence portfolio -- but he also pursues his own agenda. The real question is why the president allows this to happen. Three decades ago we lived through another painful example of a White House exceeding its authority, lying to the American people, breaking the law and shrouding everything it did in secrecy. Watergate wrenched the country, and our constitutional system, like nothing before. We spent years trying to identify and absorb the lessons of this great excess. But here we are again. Since the Carter administration left office, we have been criticized for many things. Yet I remain enormously proud of what we did in those four years, especially that we told the truth, obeyed the law and kept the peace. WALTER MONDATE was vice president of the United States from 1977 to 1981. WHO REALLY TOOK OVER DURING THAT COLONOSCOPY ??? By Fran Rich New York Times July 29, 2007 There was, of course, gallows humor galore when Dick Cheney briefly grabbed the wheel of our listing ship of state during the presidential colonoscopy last weekend. Enjoy it while it lasts. A once-durable staple of 21st-century American humor is in its last throes. We have a new surrogate president now. Sic transit Cheney. Long live David Petraeus! It was The Washington Post that first quantified General Petraeuss remarkable ascension. President Bush, who mentioned his new Iraq commanders name only six times as the surge rolled out in January, has cited him more than 150 times in public utterances since, including 53 in May alone. As always with this White Houses propaganda offensives, the message in Mr. Bushs relentless repetitions never varies. General Petraeus is the main man. He is the man who gives candid advice. Come September, he will be the man who will give the president and the country their orders about the war. And so another constitutional principle can be added to the long list of those junked by this administration: the quaint notion that our uniformed officers are supposed to report to civilian leadership. In a de facto military coup, the commander in chief is now reporting to the commander in Iraq. We must wait to see what David has to say, Mr. Bush says. Actually, we dont have to wait. We already know what David will say. He gave it away to The Times of London last month, when he said that September is a deadline for a report, not a deadline for a change in policy. In other words: Damn the report (and that irrelevant Congress that will read it) --- full speed ahead. There will be no change in policy. As Michael Gordon reported in The New York Times last week, General Petraeus has collaborated on a classified strategy document that will keep American troops in Iraq well into 2009 as we wait for the miracles that will somehow bring that country security and a functioning government. Though General Petraeus wrote his 1987 Princeton doctoral dissertation on The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam, he has an unshakable penchant for seeing light at the end of tunnels. It has been three Julys since he posed for the cover of Newsweek under the headline Can This Man Save Iraq? The magazine noted that the generals pacification of Mosul was a textbook case of doing counterinsurgency the right way. Four months later, the police chief installed by General Petraeus defected to the insurgents, along with most of the Sunni members of the police force. Mosul, population 1.7 million, is now an insurgent stronghold, according to the Pentagons own June report. By the time reality ambushed his textbook victory, the general had moved on to the mission of making Iraqi troops stand up so American troops could stand down. Training is on track and increasing in capacity, he wrote in The Washington Post in late September 2004, during the endgame of the American presidential election. He extolled the increased prowess of the Iraqi fighting forces and the rebuilding of their infrastructure. The rest is tragic history. Were the Iraqi forces on the trajectory that General Petraeus asserted in his election-year pep talk, no surge would have been needed more than two years later. We would not be learning at this late date, as we did only when Gen. Peter Pace was pressed in a Pentagon briefing this month, that the number of Iraqi battalions operating independently is in fact falling --- now standing at a mere six, down from 10 in March. But even more revealing is what was happening at the time that General Petraeus disseminated his sunny 2004 prognosis. The best account is to be found in The Occupation of Iraq, the authoritative chronicle by Ali Allawi published this year by Yale University Press. Mr. Allawi is not some anti-American crank. He was the first civilian defense minister of postwar Iraq and has been an adviser to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki; his book was praised by none other than the Iraq war cheerleader Fouad Ajami as magnificent. Mr. Allawi writes that the embezzlement of the Iraqi Armys $1.2 billion arms procurement budget was happening under the very noses of the Security Transition Command run by General Petraeus: The saga of the grand theft of the Ministry of Defense perfectly illustrated the huge gap between the harsh realities on the ground and the Panglossian spin that permeated official pronouncements. Mr. Allawi contrasts the lyrical Petraeus pronouncements in The Post with the harsh realities of the Iraqi forces inoperable helicopters, flimsy bulletproof vests and toy helmets. The huge sums that might have helped the Iraqis stand up were instead handed over to unscrupulous adventurers and former pizza parlor operators. Well, anyone can make a mistake. And when General Petraeus cited soccer games as an example of the astonishing signs of normalcy in Baghdad last month, he could not have anticipated that car bombs would kill at least 50 Iraqis after the Iraqi teams poignant victory in the Asian Cup semifinals last week. This general may well be, as many say, the brightest and bravest we have. But that doesnt account for why he has been invested by the White House and its last-ditch apologists with such singular power over the war. On Meet the Press, Lindsey Graham, one of the Senates last gung-ho war defenders in either party, mentioned General Petraeus ten times in one segment, saying he would not vote for anything unless General Petraeus passes on it. Desperate hawks on the nations op-ed pages not only idolize the commander daily but denounce any critics of his strategy as deserters, defeatists and enemies of the troops. Thats because the Petraeus phenomenon is not about protecting the troops or American interests but about protecting the president. For all Mr. Bushs claims of seeking candid advice, he wants nothing of the kind. He sent that message before the war, with the shunting aside of Eric Shinseki, the general who dared tell Congress the simple truth that hundreds of thousands of American troops would be needed to secure Iraq. The message was sent again when John Abizaid and George Casey were supplanted after they disagreed with the surge. Two weeks ago, in his continuing quest for candid views, Mr. Bush invited a claque consisting exclusively of conservative pundits to the White House and inadvertently revealed the real motive for the Petraeus surrogate presidency. The most credible person in the fight at this moment is Gen. David Petraeus, he said, in National Reviews account. To be the most credible person in this war team means about as much as being the most sober tabloid starlet in the Paris-Lindsay cohort. But never mind. What Mr. Bush meant is that General Petraeus is famous for minding his press coverage, even to the point of congratulating the ABC News anchor Charles Gibson for kicking some butt in the Nielsen ratings when Mr. Gibson interviewed him last month. The president, whose 65 percent disapproval rating is now just one point shy of Richard Nixons pre-resignation nadir, is counting on General Petraeus to be the un-Shinseki and bestow whatever credibility he has upon White House policies and pronouncements. He is delivering, heaven knows. Like Mr. Bush, he has taken to comparing the utter stalemate in the Iraqi Parliament to our own debates at the birth of our nation, as if the Hamilton-Jefferson disputes were akin to the Shiite-Sunni bloodletting. He is also starting to echo the administration line that Al Qaeda is the principal villain in Iraq, a departure from the more nuanced and realistic picture of the civil-war-torn battlefront he presented to Senate questioners in his confirmation hearings in January. Mr. Bush has become so reckless in his own denials of reality that he seems to think he can get away with saying anything as long as he has his main man to front for him. The president now hammers in the false litany of a merger between Osama bin Ladens Al Qaeda and what he calls Al Qaeda in Iraq as if he were following the Madison Avenue script declaring that Cingular is now the new AT&T. He doesnt seem to know that nearly 40 other groups besides Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia have adopted Al Qaedas name or pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden worldwide since 2003, by the count of the former C.I.A. counterterrorism official Michael Scheuer. They may follow us here well before any insurgents in Iraq do. On Tuesday a week after the National Intelligence Estimate warned of the resurgence of bin Ladens Qaeda in Pakistan Mr. Bush gave a speech in which he continued to claim that Al Qaeda in Iraq makes Iraq the central front in the war on terror. He mentioned Al Qaeda 95 times but Pakistan and Pervez Musharraf not once. Two days later, his own top intelligence officials refused to endorse his premise when appearing before Congress. They are all too familiar with the threats that are building to a shrill pitch this summer. Should those threats become a reality while America continues to be bogged down in Iraq, this much is certain: It will all be the fault of President Petraeus. NOAM CHOMSKY PREDICTS THERE WILL BE COLD WAR BETWEEN IRAN AND U.S. By Noam Chomsky City Lights July 30, 2007 In the energy-rich Middle East, only two countries have failed to subordinate themselves to Washington's basic demands: Iran and Syria. Accordingly both are enemies, Iran by far the more important. As was the norm during the Cold War, resort to violence is regularly justified as a reaction to the malign influence of the main enemy, often on the flimsiest of pretexts. Unsurprisingly, as Bush send s more troops to Iraq, tales surface of Iranian interference in the internal affairs of Iraq --- a country otherwise free from any foreign interference, on the tacit assumption that Washington rules the world. In the Cold War-like mentality that prevails in Washington, Tehran is portrayed as the pinnacle in the so-called Shiite Crescent that stretches from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon, through Shiite southern Iraq and Syria. And again unsurprisingly, the "surge" in Iraq and escalation of threats and accusations against Iran is accompanied by grudging willingness to attend a conference of regional powers, with the agenda limited to Iraq-more narrowly, to attaining U.S. goals in Iraq. Presumably this minimal gesture toward diplomacy is intended to allay the growing fears and anger elicited by Washington's heightened aggressiveness, with forces deployed in position to attack Iran and regular provocations and threats. For the United States, the primary issue in the Middle East has been and remains effective control of its unparalleled energy resources. Access is a secondary matter. Once the oil is on the seas it goes anywhere. Control is understood to be an instrument of global dominance. Iranian influence in the "crescent" challenges U.S. control. By an accident of geography, the world's major oil resources are in largely Shiite areas of the Middle East: southern Iraq, adjacent regions of Saudi Arabia and Iran, with some of the major reserves of natural gas as well. Washington's worst nightmare would be a loose Shiite alliance controlling most of the world's oil and independent of the United States. Such a bloc, if it emerges, might even join the Asian Energy Security Grid and Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), based in China. Iran, which already had observer status, is to be admitted as a member of the SCO. The Hong Kong South China Morning Post reported in June 2006 that "Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole the limelight at the annual meeting of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO) by calling on the group to unite against other countries as his nation faces criticism over its nuclear programme." The non-aligned movement meanwhile affirmed Iran's "inalienable right" to pursue these programs, and the SCO (which includes the states of Central Asia) "called on the United States to set a deadline for the withdrawal of military installations from all member states. If the Bush planners bring that about, they will have seriously undermined the U.S. position of power in the world. To Washington, Tehran's principal offense has been its defiance, going back to the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 and the hostage crisis at the U.S. embassy. The grim U.S. role in Iran in earlier years is excised from history. In retribution for Iranian defiance, Washington quickly turned to support for Saddam Hussein's aggression against Iran, which left hundreds of thousands dead and the country in ruins. Then came murderous sanctions, and under Bush, rejection of Iranian diplomatic efforts in favor of increasing threats of direct attack. Last July (2006), Israel invaded Lebanon, the fifth invasion since 1978. As before, U.S. support for the aggression was a critical factor, the pretexts quickly collapse on inspection, and the consequences for the people of Lebanon are severe. Among the reasons for the U.S.-Israel invasion is that Hezbollah's rockets could be a deterrent to a potential U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran. Despite the saber-rattling, it is, I suspect, unlikely that the Bush administration will attack Iran. The world is strongly opposed. Seventy-five percent of Americans favor diplomacy over military threats against Iran, and as noted earlier, Americans and Iranians largely agree on nuclear issues. Polls by Terror Free Tomorrow reveal that "Despite a deep historical enmity between Iran's Persian Shiite population and the predominantly Sunni population of its ethnically diverse Arab, Turkish and Pakistani neighbors, the largest percentage of people in these countries favor accepting a nuclear-armed Iran over any American military action." It appears that the U.S. military and intelligence community is also opposed to an attack. Iran cannot defend itself against U.S. attack, but it can respond in other ways, among them by inciting even more havoc in Iraq. Some issue warnings that are far more grave, among them by the respected British military historian Corelli Barnett, who writes that "an attack on Iran would effectively launch World War III." The Bush administration has left disasters almost everywhere it has turned, from post-Katrina New Orleans to Iraq. In desperation to salvage something, the administration might undertake the risk of even greater disasters. Meanwhile Washington may be seeking to destabilize Iran from within. The ethnic mix in Iran is complex; much of the population isn't Persian. There are secessionist tendencies and it is likely that Washington is trying to stir them up-in Khuzestan on the Gulf, for example, where Iran's oil is concentrated, a region that is largely Arab, not Persian. Threat escalation also serves to pressure others to join U.S. efforts to strangle Iran economically, with predictable success in Europe. Another predictable consequence, presumably intended, is to induce the Iranian leadership to be as harsh and repressive as possible, fomenting disorder and perhaps resistance while undermining efforts of courageous Iranian reformers, who are bitterly protesting Washington's tactics. It is also necessary to demonize the leadership. In the West, any wild statement of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, immediately gets circulated in headlines, dubiously translated. But as is well known, Ahmadinejad has no control over foreign policy, which is in the hands of his superior, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The U.S. media tend to ignore Khamenei's statements, especially if they are conciliatory. For example, it's widely reported when Ahmadinejad says that Israel shouldn't exist-but there is silence when Khamenei says that Iran "shares a common view with Arab countries on the most important Islamic-Arabic issue, namely the issue of Palestine," which would appear to mean that Iran accepts the Arab League position: full normalization of relations with Israel in terms of the international consensus on a two-state settlement that the U.S. and Israel continue to resist, almost alone. The U.S. invasion of Iraq virtually instructed Iran to develop a nuclear deterrent. Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld writes that after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, "had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy." The message of the invasion, loud and clear, was that the U.S. will attack at will, as long as the target is defenseless. Now Iran is ringed by U.S. military forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey and the Persian Gulf and close by are nuclear-armed Pakistan and particularly Israel, the regional superpower, thanks to U.S. support. As already discussed, Iranian efforts to negotiate outstanding issues were rebuffed by Washington, and an EU-Iranian agreement was apparently undermined by Washington's refusal to withdraw threats of attack. A genuine interest in preventing the development of nuclear weapons in Iran --- and the escalating warlike tension in the region --- would lead Washington to implement the EU bargain, agree to meaningful negotiations and join with others to move toward integrating Iran into the international economic system, in accord with public opinion in the United States, Iran, neighboring states, and virtually the entire rest of the world. NOAM CHOMSKY is the author of Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (Metropolitan Books), just published in paperback, among many other works. His most recent book is Interventions. The preceding was an excerpt from Noam Chomsky's new book Interventions published by City Lights Books. The excerpt first appeared in Z Magazine NEW BILL KEEPS PORT CHICAGO'S STORY ALIVE By Kantele Franko San Francisco Chronicle July 30, 2007 An evening crew of bustling sailors had taken over loading munitions at Port Chicago Naval Magazine on July 17, 1944 --- a night like most others at the Suisun Bay pier during World War II. At a barracks half a mile away, 20-year-old Irvin Lowery was relaxing with friends just after 10 p.m. when reverberations from a massive explosion shattered his windows and sent him flying across his room. The blast, the largest stateside disaster during the war, killed 320 people --- 202 of them black --- and catalyzed military desegregation by drawing attention to race-based assignments. Lowery, a specialist A first class, spent the next two days collecting body parts of the bowlers and basketball players he worked with as a physical instructor on the recreation staff. Now 83, Lowery hopes a new bill could help to preserve the Port Chicago story by increasing the public's access to the site and making it easier to pursue funding for an information center there. Among the tales he wants told is the public outcry that followed the courts-martial of 50 black ammunition loaders, who were charged with mutiny for refusing to return to the same work conditions. In general, the loaders were black men who worked under the supervision of white officers and had little training in how to handle heavy munitions. "It's a very important piece of history that for many years was essentially invisible to the generations after World War II," said U.S. Rep. George Miller, Dem.-Martinez, who introduced the legislation. The bill, HR3111, is currently before the House Natural Resources Committee. The bill would eventually incorporate the Suisun Bay site into the national park system, with which it is now affiliated. That move would make the site eligible for more funding that could pay for a visitors' center, educational rangers and upkeep. Currently, visitors must sign up for a tour two weeks in advance and receive military clearance because the area is part of the Concord Naval Weapons Station, an active base. Port Chicago was designated as a national memorial in 1992 through legislation written by Miller, who also supported President Bill Clinton's pardon of Freddie Meeks, the only one of the court-martialed sailors to receive a pardon. By then, 48 of the sailors had died, and the other surviving participant did not seek a pardon. Between 200 and 300 people visit the site each year, and there is also an annual anniversary ceremony, said Martha Lee, who oversees Port Chicago as the general supervisor of four Bay Area national historic sites. "It's one of those stories ... where we can still shake the hand of someone who experienced this point in history," Lee said. Lowery traveled from his home in Columbus, Ohio, three years ago to mark the 60th anniversary of the blast, the exact cause of which is unknown. A lack of training and competition among loading teams might have contributed to the disaster, said Robert Allen, a professor of African American and ethnic studies at UC Berkeley and author of "The Port Chicago Mutiny." Contests to see which team could load most quickly were common and "encouraged something less than good caution in handling the ammunition," Lowery said. Facing those conditions in a segregated environment for a second time, more than 250 survivors refused orders to return to work. Some faced fines or were discharged, and 50 who were identified as leaders were charged with mutiny, convicted and sentenced to prison, Allen said. Their highly publicized trials stirred public pressure, and the Navy began to desegregate a year after the blast. The imprisoned men were released in early 1946 under general amnesty but never had their convictions overturned. President Harry Truman gave the order for general military desegregation in 1948. "Most people are surprised they didn't learn this story in their history classes going through school," Lee said. One of those people is Lowery's niece, Diana McDaniel of San Leandro, who as a child had heard her uncle speak in outrage about his military past. She didn't know the whole story until she visited Port Chicago with friends several years ago. After connecting the dots, McDaniel decided the event, especially its ramifications for black Americans and its role as a precursor to the civil rights movement, was too important to let fade into history. So she established the Friends of Port Chicago advocacy group to keep the story alive. Her group's vision of an expanded national memorial site and visitors' center includes maps, photos and memorabilia contributed by the families of those who survived the blast, along with a quiet reflection area. "I think it's important to establish a center because the story can never be told enough," McDaniel said. "It's too often we forget history, and then we repeat it." MEDICAL CHECKUPS STIR GRIM A-BOMB MEMORIES By Taya Flores Seattle Times July 30, 2007 8 a.m., August 6, 1945. It was already hot that morning in Hiroshima. So instead of helping stock warehouses with food as part of the Japanese war effort, 17-year-old Gene Fujita and his friends decided to cool off in a nearby sandbag bomb shelter. About 20 minutes later, Fujita saw a B-29 bomber fly overhead in a circle as if taking photos. Then a bright light flashed and heat radiated from the explosion. He was almost three miles away from the epicenter, so he didn't suffer burns from the radiation. He was immediately recruited to help the injured."You just felt bad," he said. "You're walking around, but you should be injured --- there wasn't much you could do to help them." Almost 62 years later, the 79-year-old Seattle resident remembers the bombing like it was yesterday. He sat in a waiting room at Pacific Medical Center in Seattle shooting the breeze with dozens of other atomic-bomb survivors. Over the weekend, Fujita and his fellow survivors received their biennial examinations from Japanese doctors, part of a study to analyze the long-term effects of exposure to atomic radiation. Fujita doesn't have any health problems besides a loss of hearing. A small man with a friendly demeanor, he wore glasses, blue pants and a colorful belt that seemed to match his personality. He recalled the carnage of that day with a combination of uncomfortable jokes and sad memories. More than 200,000 people died in the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the final days of World War II. About 340,000 of the survivors --- called "hibakusha" in Japanese --- are alive today. About 1,000 survivors live in America and Canada, with 60 in Washington and 20 in British Columbia. The health-exam program, started in 1977, tracks survivors of Japanese or Korean descent who live in the United States or Canada. Two teams of Japanese doctors from the Hiroshima Prefectural Medical Association examine patients who live in San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles and Honolulu. Dr. Ken-ichi Arita, the lead Japanese physician, said that his main concern was checking the survivors to see whether they have cancer. For Arita, the work is personal: His father was in Hiroshima when the bomb hit. In addition to the many scars on his back, he has colon, skin and gastric cancer. In 2005 Arita found that 30% of the North American survivors had a high level of carcinoembryonic antigen, or CEA, which is often a tumor marker for colon cancer. But Dr. Richard Ludwig, a physician with Pacific Medical Centers who previously oversaw the program, said that most of the illnesses seen are not unusual. "What we are seeing now are a lot of diseases you see in elderly people," he said, which isn't surprising, given that the average age of the North American survivor is 73. Another survivor, Sanaya Kawamura, 69, was in school 20 miles away from the epicenter when the bomb hit. She was seven years old and remembers the impact. "The mushroom came up and I could see it, and the impact broke the glass," she said. She appreciates the exams, even if she feels she doesn't need the extra medical attention. "Fortunately, I don't get sick," she said. "This is really keeping track, which is amazing." But even the healthy survivors still suffer from emotional hardship. After the bombing, as the young Fujita tried to make it home to a suburb ten to 15 miles away, what he saw gave him lifelong nightmares. "The dead were strewn all over the street; we had to jump over them," he said. "A lot of people were walking in a daze." Death surrounded him, and the stench of burning flesh was sickening, he said. The next day he went to the epicenter to look for his father. He saw the remains of people on street cars still standing, burnt in place, with glass embedded in their chests. He never found any sign of his father. Fujita has lived in Seattle since 1948; he made his living as an apartment owner. But no distance can separate him from his memories of that day. "Today, when I see that mushroom cloud, I get kind of choked up on it," he said. BY NUMBERS ALONE, CHARACTER COUNTS By Thomas Boswell Washington Post July 30, 2007 COOPERSTOWN, New York --- As the sun set over the Adirondacks on Saturday evening, you could get a clear radio signal for almost every major league game east of the Mississippi on I-88 to the Hall of Fame. In Baltimore, Nick Markakis slapped a single to left off Roger Clemens. In New York, the Nats began a rally to beat the Mets. The Phillies, Pirates and Red Sox whispered as you sped along the ridges. However, as the town where Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn were inducted into the Hall on Sunday came into view, one broadcast was absent. Nowhere on the dial could you find the Giants, or any mention of Barry Bonds. Here, baseball reaches out and embraces you, welcomes you back, restores your faith, not just in games but in the people who play or love them. You gaze into the game's history and realize, since human nature changes as slowly as mountain-range rock, that our future, no matter what we fear, will resemble nothing so much as our past. A "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, Pete Rose or Bonds may disappoint or gall us, make us plead, "Say it ain't so," but we still have our choice of models, even heroes --- Christy Mathewson, Lou Gehrig, Hank Aaron or, on this day, Gwynn and Ripken. Records are broken. Character remains. On Sunday as a bus full of Hall of Famers approached the vast fields and hillsides where the induction ceremony would be held, the greats began gasping like children. "They're saying: 'Oh, my goodness, look at all the people. I've never seen them way up on those hills,' " Gwynn said. "Cal and I thought they were messing with us, making us nervous before our speeches." But they weren't. The 53 Hall of Famers, the largest such group ever assembled, were simply marveling, like everyone else, at the sight of 75,000 fans, jammed, sprawled and congregated as far as the eye could see. And why had they come? Just to hear a couple of dignified, honest ballplayers give their modest remarks. To give a sense of the jaw-dropping scope of the scene, neither Ripken nor Gwynn, ever in his career, had played a game before so many fans, since no major league ballpark holds so many. For comparison, when Brooks Robinson was inducted here in '83, a crowd of 15,000 set what was then a record. On this Sunday, however, a throng worthy of any World Series had trekked, as a pilgrimage and testimony to their values, to one of America's more inaccessible villages. "Nine hours by car from Annandale with one rest stop," said John Falardeau, who came with wife, Margaret, and daughters Lydia and Emma, ages four and two. "We had dual DVD players in the back seat --- cost $140. By the time we finally got here, I'd have given Target another $300 just to thank them." This sea of fans, with signs such as "My Son is Named Cal Because of You," came from distances and in numbers never before seen. Few, if any, overlooked the confluence of this induction with Bonds's failed attempt to steal the sport's spotlight on such a symbolic day. The Giants outfielder could have rested Sunday --- standard practice for a 43-year-old in a day game after a night game. Instead, he eloquently chose to play and swing for No. 755. None of the men whose faces grace the plaques here missed the meaning. On Saturday, at a reception for Hall of Famers, word passed through the crowd, "0 for 1" or "0 for 3." Everyone knew the subject. Everyone said, "Good." In recent days, as this weekend became a closely watched juxtaposition of steroid scandal and Hall celebration, estimates of the eventual crowd continued to rise. On Saturday, reports arrived here that an additional 250 buses had been added to bring all the fans. Coincidence? After all, baseball is hot, setting a one-day attendance record on Saturday: 717,000. Or referendum? After their acceptance speeches, Ripken and Gwynn were asked, "Do you think so many people showed up because they wanted to make a statement about how they want the game to be played?" "I don't think there is any doubt of it," said Gwynn, not mentioning Bonds by name. "The fans felt they could trust us. They could trust how we played the game, especially in this era, that we did it the right way. "And I think the writers [who vote] felt that, too. There's no way I'm a 97.6 [percent] guy," said the eight-time batting champ, referring to his vote total, almost as high as Ripken's. On the same ballot, Mark McGwire got only 23.5 percent of the vote, perhaps the most resounding rejection in Hall history. This crowd, Gwynn said, was "about the type of people we were." Tony was right. But so was Ripken who, refusing to concede Bonds any part of the stage, said that this day, this huge revival on a hillside, was simply about the sport itself --- and its health, in spite of all that is inflicted on it. "This was about the fans love of baseball, from generation to generation. The game continues long after any of us put away our glove," Ripken said. "This demonstrates that baseball is alive, popular and good." That last word --- "good" --- may have slipped out courtesy of Dr. Freud. Few athletes have, grudgingly at first, then eventually with a whole heart, so completely embraced the job of understated hero as a career mission. Throughout his acceptance speech, Ripken addressed this task of combining personal behavior with athletic performance. "I didn't understand when I was younger," Ripken said. Once, he threw a helmet and teammate Ken Singleton showed him a tape of it and asked, "How does that look?" Another night, Ripken learned that a family had saved money to come to a game in which he had been ejected in the first inning "and their little boy cried the whole game." Eventually, he realized that he was a role model whether he liked it or not. "Kids see it all," he said. "Not just the big things. Everything." After that "baseball became a platform," he said. "Games were and are important," Ripken said, "but people and how you impact on them are most important. The chains of habit, it has been famously said, are too light to be felt until they are too strong to be broken. Perhaps that insight can be taken a step further. In many ways, our character is little more than a lifetime's collection of habits --- some consciously chosen, too many fallen into unawares. Some people, by the guidance of family or who knows what, make crucial choices that lead them to the habits, to the relationships with others --- to the inspiring character --- that we find in Ripken and Gwynn. On days like this, we not only praise them for their athletic records. A Bonds can do as much. By the tens of thousands, we trek to a rural village for a reason we can hardly express. In a game, we have discovered people who can help us decide which chains of habit will define us. These newletters are produced by the Calamity Howler. If you do not wish to receive this e-mail, simply click on the link to :(http://www.thecalamityhowler.com/?unsubscribeCode=595ca&unsubscribeEmail=rich%40math.missouri.edu)unsubscribe:(http://www.thecalamityhowler.com/?unsubscribeCode=595ca&unsubscribeEmail=rich%40math.missouri.edu).