Week of December 14, 2009

Walter Pincus of the Washington Post reports that the US-hired contractors already in Afghanistan have been paying protection money to Taliban and tribes to allow their convoys to transit without trouble. I.e. we have met the enemy and he is being paid by us.

William Astore

Prolonging a stalemated war will, in fact, only mean more hurt for both Afghans and Americans.  The hurt to Afghans will undoubtedly be worse, for their homes are the battlefield, but our own hurt shouldn’t be underestimated.  More broken bodies and shattered minds.  More echoes of the horrifying violence that accompanies war.

To paraphrase William Faulkner on history’s relationship to the past: Even when war is officially declared over, it’s not dead.  It’s not even past.  The horrors of war endure in the hearts and minds of the people who experience them, and they dwell, to some degree, in the collective consciousness of us all.

NYT News Story

Yitzhak Ganon avoided doctors for 65 years. But when he became sick recently, his wife insisted that he visit one. Stents were implanted to help his heart in a procedure made more risky because he was missing a kidney. What happened to his other kidney explained his aversion to doctors, according to an account he gave Spiegel Online. While held at the Auschwitz concentration camp, the 85-year-old Mr. Gannon told his doctors, he was the subject of an experiment by Joseph Mengele, the Nazi physician known as “the Angel of Death.” Mr. Ganon was tied down on a table, and, without anesthesia, cut open by Mengele, who then removed his kidney. “I saw the kidney pulsing in his hand and cried like a crazy man,” Mr. Ganon said.