Greg Mitchell's Blog, page 110

Remembering Jonathan Schell

[image error] UPDATE:  NYT obit now up.

Earlier:  The great writer/activist Jonathan Schell has died at age 70.  See tribute just up at The Nation, where he had done most of his writing in recent years after a long tenure at The New Yorker.   He was, as everyone says, a swell guy.  I knew him some, going back to my years at Nuclear Times in the 1980s.  Jonathan was in some ways the "godfather" of the massive antinuclear movement of those years, thanks to his immensely influential classic The Fate of the Earth.   I met him then and he helped inspire my Hiroshima focus.  Most importantly, he was not afraid to propose abolishing, not just "controlling," nuclear weapons.  In fact, his sequel to The Fate of the Earth was titled The Abolition.

Later we had many talks and spent some time together at the annual Wellfleet gatherings at my co-author Robert Jay Lifton's place. And then we'd meet from time to time in NYC, although in recent years he seemed to be ill or recuperating.  While many will remember his nuclear writings above all,  he was equally persuasive on 1) Vietnam  2)  9/11  3) Iraq and 4)  other peace and disarmament issues.  And a sweet, gentle, humble human being.

Warning: You Won't Be Able to Unsee This

Dinesh D'Souza spoofs President Obama's appearance on "Between Two Ferns" to flack his new flick...

Beethoven Will Never Really R.I.P.

On this day in 1827, Beethoven passed away quietly in his bed in Vienna, at the age of 56 -- ill for many years and totally deaf.  There's probably nothing to the claim that thunder struck, he raised his fist to shake it at the sky, and then died.

However, there's this:  When Beethoven, late in his life, and fully deaf, survived a serious illness, he wrote a slow movement for one of his fabled final string quartets, calling it a  "convalescent's holy song of Thanksgiving,"  now known as the Heiliger Dankgesang.  I am not alone in considering it one of  the greatest and most profound  pieces of music ever written.   Plus latest on our film and book about Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

Atomic Film Cover-up

I've  written a three-part series for the Who, What, Why site on one of my long-running probes, the suppression of key film footage from Hiroshima and Nagasaki for decades.  Part one appears today.  My book on the subject (and beyond).

State Kills Man With Drug from Secret Pharmacy

Another month, another execution in Missouri.  That's five in five months.   Man raped and killed girl, then seemed to find God and do good deeds in prison. Not a new story.  But the desperate drive to execute there is revealed in how they've gotten around a problem that has slowed state killings elsewhere--the difficulty in obtaining the drugs for the lethal injection cocktail, as some companies and outlets express qualms (at last) about this.  But in the "Show Me State," they've done this:

Missouri switched to a one-drug execution method late last year. The state obtains the drug, pentobarbital, from a compounding pharmacy that it refuses to name.
Ferguson's attorney, Jennifer Herndon, had argued that the state's secretive process prohibited the public from knowing exactly how the drug was made and whether it could cause pain and suffering for the inmate.

The same drug was used in the state's four previous lethal injections this year. Like Ferguson, those inmates also showed no outward signs of distress during the execution process.

Missouri executed just two men between 2005 and November. But after the state switched from a three-drug execution method to a single-drug protocol last year, executions resumed.  Although critics have raised concerns about the drug and the secretive ways Missouri obtains and uses it to kill inmates, more executions are likely.

For my ebook on the history of the death penalty in the USA, up to the current day, go here. 

After 'McConnelling'

Jon Stewart, after the wild success of his #McConnelling contest, introduced three new challenges tonight, including one where you take that same Mitch McConnell campaign video and dub it with Matthew McConaughey, and call it #McConnellhey."  I've already done mine.  All right...all right?

When Helen Keller 'Listened' to Beethoven's Ninth

This new to me and quite remarkable: A letter that Helen Keller, who could not see or hear, one day in the 1920s wrote to the New York Symphony Orchetra after "listening" with her fingers, pressed against a radio speaker, to Beethoven's Ninth.  Incredible experience.  Read it all, but one excerpt: "What was my amazement to discover that I could feel, not only the vibration, but also the impassioned rhythm, the throb and the urge of the music! The intertwined and intermingling vibrations from different instruments enchanted me. I could actually distinguish the cornets, the roil of the drums, deep-toned violas and violins singing in exquisite unison. How the lovely speech of the violins flowed and plowed over the deepest tones of the other instruments! When the human voices leaped up thrilling from the surge of harmony, I recognized them instantly as voices more ecstatic, upcurving swift and flame-like, until my heart almost stood still."

Our acclaimed new film (and book) on the Ninth.

FBI Agent Cleared in Death of Man Linked to Boston Bomber

UPDATE #2  Now Boston magazine has photo that provides confession of the man killed (after he wrote it). 


UPDATE  Florida prosecutor finally releases its report and (no shocker) it clears the FBI agents.   Justice Dept. and local officials go along with that.  They claim the suspect was killed because he was such a fearless fighter.

February 27, 2014:  I covered long ago this mysterious death in Florida, at the hands of the FBI, as well as its link to the dead Boston Marathon bomber--and the link between both and an unsolved  triple murder in Waltham, Ma.  Now Boston Magazine has a major feature in its next issue by Susan Zalkind (collaborating with "This American Life").   It has just been posted online and here's an excerpt:

It would take 18 months and two homemade bombs before FBI investigators exhumed the case—and once they did, they were able to move with uncanny speed. It took them mere hours to link Tamerlan to the Waltham triple homicide. The day after Tamerlan was killed in a shootout with Watertown police, plainclothes FBI agents detained his friend, Ibragim Todashev, at gunpoint. Although the FBI seems to have initially been looking for evidence of a wider terrorist cell in connection with the marathon bombings, within weeks its agents were questioning Ibragim about the Waltham murders. According to the FBI, agents were able to bring Ibragim to the brink of a written confession by pressuring him with circumstantial evidence.

If you believe the FBI’s account, then you must also believe this: If Waltham police had figured out who hacked three men to death on September 11, 2011, there’s a good chance we would not be talking about the Boston Marathon bombings. Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Ibragim Todashev might be alive and in jail. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev might be just another mop-headed, no-name stoner at UMass Dartmouth. There would be no One Fund. Krystle Campbell, Lu Lingzi, and Martin Richard would still be alive. Sean Collier would have graduated from the MIT police department to the Somerville Police Department by now. And for the friends and family of the three men who died in Waltham, perhaps their grief would not still be paired with such haunting questions....

Anonymous FBI sources gave numerous accounts of Ibragim’s death to the press, managing to be both vague and contradictory. The agency claimed that, just before being shot, Ibragim had been sitting at a table, about to write a statement that would implicate both himself and Tamerlan in the Waltham murders. In some reports, he lunged at an FBI agent with a knife, while others said he used a pole or a broomstick. It was an agonizing development: The FBI claimed he had been killed at precisely the moment he was about to give the answers so many of us had been waiting for.

Whatever occurred in Ibragim’s apartment the night he was shot dead, his death put the FBI on the defensive. The agency quashed the coroner’s report, leading media outlets and the American Civil Liberties Union to call for an independent investigation. On its editorial page, the Globe declared that “the agency’s credibility is on the line” due to its lack of accountability in Ibragim’s death. Ibragim’s father accused the agency of “premeditated murder” and released photos of his son’s bullet-ridden corpse, showing that he’d been shot in the top of the head—even though the FBI contended that one of its agents had fired in self-defense. Instead of providing answers, the FBI’s investigation of Ibragim had turned into a sudden dead end.

Tribute Album to Dylan's Only (Largely) Sucky Decade

Just got this from the folks at Bobdylan.com;

Bob Dylan In The 80s: Volume One (ATO Records) is a tribute album to Bob's 1980s catalog, covering the period that starts with 1980's Saved and ends with 1990's Under The Red Sky. The brainchild of producers Jesse Lauter (Elvis Perkins, The Low Anthem) and Sean O'Brien (Dawes, PAPA), the mission of Bob Dylan In The 80s: Volume One is to shed new light on a large cache of Bob Dylan songs that are often overshadowed by his 60s & 70s output and songs from his later career renaissance. Several songs on this album have never been covered for commercial release.

In the liner notes to this collection, New York Times best-selling author Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn, Fortress of Solitude) writes, "In the famously difficult art of going up against Dylan's performance of his own material, a number of these reach the highest threshold. I hope Bob Dylan listens to this record, and plays it for his current touring band."

Album contributors include Built To Spill, Aaron Freeman (Ween) & Slash, Glen Hansard, members of My Morning Jacket, Reggie Watts, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Lucius, Langhorne Slim, Craig Finn (The Hold Steady), Deer Tick, Dawn Landes, Blitzen Trapper, Elvis Perkins and more.

Full track list.  Yes, Oh Mercy was swell.  "Every Grain of Sand" was tremendous.  Ditto "Blind Willie McTell"--which he cut from an album.  Another one of the few great Bob songs of the decade (which he also cut from an album), which got the Lanois treatment: 

Triangle Tragedy

Today marks 103 years since the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York that killed dozens of women--and provoked reforms of worker safety laws.   Many jumped to their deaths, as on 9/11. CBS report: