Iraq's Top Archivist to Kanan Makiya: Stop, Thief!

Some of you may remember reading last summer's Q & A with Kanan Makiya, when he described how, after the 2003 invasion, he pilfered a treasure-trove of interior Baath Party documents from the abandoned regional headquarters building in Baghdad. These documents form the bedrock of the Iraq Memory Foundation, a private nonprofit organization that is trying to build a memorial site in the style of the Holocaust Memorial Museum at the site of the Crossed Swords in Baghdad. At the time of the interview, it didn't strike me that these were stolen documents and belonged not to Makiya's organization, but to the people of Iraq.

Last week, the notoriously controversial Iraqi exile, best known for writing Republic of Fear under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil, gave everyone another reason to hate what he's doing. On Wednesday, journalist John Gravois wrote a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education about how Makiya's Memory Foundation recently handed off "seven million pages of records and other artifacts," all produced during Saddam's rule, to a conservative think tank based in California called the Hoover Institution.

"I still can't understand how and why Mr. Kanan Makiya took all those documents and in what position," wrote Donny George Youkhanna, the former director of the Iraq Museum, on IraqCrisis. "All those documents are Iraqi property and they should go back immediately to the Iraqi institution that is responsible for the National Documents, that is the National Library and Archives."

The Chronicle reports that Makiya received permission from the U.S. government in 2005 to ship the documents to the United States, so government contractors could scan all of the documents quickly. Makiya said that he has received permission from numerous Iraqi government officials to keep control of the archives. But this latest deal caused quite an uproar. For one, it raised the hackles of Dr. Sa'ad Eskander, the director general of the Iraq National Library and Archive, who maintains that Baath Party documents are public property that belong in the country's national archives.

In an interview with the Chronicle, Eskander cited Iraqi laws from 1963 and 1983 and chapters of the Hague and the Geneva Conventions to argue that the documents are Iraq's property and the Memory Foundation's possession of them is illegal. For instance, the deal violates the The Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, which demands that occupying powers respect and protect cultural property during national and international conflicts.

Makiya told the Chronicle that he would love to return the documents to Iraq. But he told the Chronicle, "Baghdad is just not ready for it." He worries about whether Iraq's members of parliament will use the records to smear the reputations of their opponents and critics. "It's not [Eskander's] good intentions that I'm worried about," he said. "It's his bosses'."

In 2005, Eskander wrote in a letter to Jeff Spurr, an Islamic and Middle East Specialist at Harvard, that that the Memory Foundation and the Hoover Institution have no right whatsoever to possess the archives. "These documents are highly sensitive from political and human rights perspective, as they contain the names of tens of thousands of people," he wrote. "They should not be held by any private group, which can use it for its own interests. If you read Iraqi newspapers, then you will understand how the stolen documents are misused for political and personal reasons. Yes, the IMF people are liberals, but they need to respect liberal rules and regulations."

On IraqCrisis two days ago, Spurr wrote that this situation generally sends a dire message: "It is a sure sign of that government's lack of commitment to its own laws, and susceptibility to outside pressure. That little is made--in Iraq or in the US--of the unseemly deal by which these documents were surreptitiously spirited out of Baghdad by the US military, similarly reflects on this lack of governmental integrity. How is the INLA to pursue its legal right to the tens of millions of documents seized by the US Army in 2003, if such behavior is supported in late 2005 and further countenanced in 2008?"

As for Dr. Eskander who won the 2007 Academic Freedom Award from the Middle East Studies Association for helping transform the decimated national library into a space with a staff of over 400 stocked with computers and a reading room for scholars and students. Spurr writes: "Dr. Eskander's every declaration, and his remarkable work to rebuild and rejuvenate the INLA make his institution the very--indeed the only--unequivocal expression of the values voiced and purportedly adhered to by Kanan Makiya himself to be found in Iraq at present. That it would be Makiya himself who most publicly undermines the INLA's position is shameful at best."

In the letter, Eskander wrote that he offered to work with members of the Memory Foundation in archiving the documents, but this went unanswered. "I asked our Deputy Minister, Maysoon Al-Damluji, to talk to the head of the IMF in Baghdad, Mr. Mustafa Al-Kadhimiy. He refused to talk to us or even to acknowledge the existence of any Iraqi legislation governing archival issues. By the way Al-Damluji is a friend of Kanan Makiya," he wrote. "I tried in vain to tell the IMF people that they were violating Iraqi laws, and that they should respect the rule of laws if they are true democrats."

Jeff Spurr had some harsh words to say about Gravois' work, writing that the article is inaccurate and patronizes Eskander. Gravois told Spurr that he is working on a longer piece about the issue. I eagerly await its publication...

Photo: Outside the Iraq National Library and Archive. Courtesy the Mind Matters blog.

Jonathan Veitch, Dean of Eugene Lang College, Will Step Down

For Jonathan Veitch, Dean of Lang, work can be rough.

His job, he said, is "75 percent" management. He runs a gauntlet of back-to-back meetings every weekday. He has to "block out scholarly time." He feels embarrassed that he has to tell his colleagues, "I write memos all day."

He usually does not leave the office until 9 or 10 p.m. His three kids complain that he does not spend enough time with them.

But at the end of June, after six months as Acting Dean and "four years of hard labor," Veitch will step down from his post. Neil Gordon, Chair of Lang's Writing Department, will take his place.

"I've accomplished what I've wanted to accomplish," Veitch said, during an interview in his office. "It's a different set of challenges now."

Thirteen faculty members, all full-time or tenured, were nominated as candidates for Dean, according to e-mails from faculty and staff about the search. Every nominee except Gordon declined the nomination. After meeting with faculty and reading Gordon’s mission statement, New School President Bob Kerrey and Provost Ben Lee decided to appoint him as Dean.

"Neil is a gifted intellectual, a superb teacher and a natural leader and manager," Kerrey said. "He also loves the college, has a great vision for its future, and has deep connections with New York City."

Gordon, a journalist and novelist who has taught at Lang for six years and has served as the Writing Department chair for four, is still working out the terms of his contract. He declined to be interviewed for this article, but he said that he will sign his contract on February 6. According to Kerrey, Gordon will begin serving as Dean on July 1.

Veitch entered his tenure as Acting Dean in Spring 2004, after the former Dean, Mary Rawlinson, suddenly quit—too overwhelmed, according to Kerrey, to continue. Kerrey said that he found Veitch to be an ideal candidate.

"[Veitch] pushes back when he thinks he's right and I'm wrong,” Kerrey said. “He's very smart and very talented, and cares deeply about the success of the college."

Veitch embarked on a mission to hire more staff and full-time faculty, connect with the city's "cultural institutions," start "civic engagement" programs and boost the college's international focus.

Since 2004, the college has hired 43 full-time faculty members, according to Assistant Dean Amos Himmelstein, and an adviser for every student class.

The school has created partnerships with major museums in the city. There are numerous study-abroad options. The college also started the I Have a Dream (IHAD) program, which holds acting workshops at an elementary school near a low-income housing project in Chelsea.

"Jonathan had the vision to reconnect Lang to what was always part of the school's original mission, and that was service and education," Cecilia Rubino, who teaches acting courses at Lang and helps run IHAD workshops, wrote over e-mail, referring to IHAD.

There is a new "civic engagement" director, Joseph Heathcott, who has $100,000 a year for the next five years, Veitch said, to develop programs that address prison reform, homelessness and immigration.

When the semester ends, Veitch will take a year-long sabbatical to work on his second book, about how once-pivotal American sites - like working-class Pittsburgh and the Nevada Test Site, where the U.S. government tested nuclear bombs - are memorialized, remembered and often forgotten. Then he will return to Lang and teach.

Veitch, a strikingly tall man of 48, with a calm voice and calculating manner, was born into a family of actors and grew up in Los Angeles. After he graduated from Stanford as an undergraduate, he said, he embarked on a quest to see America from the "inside-out." He worked on a dairy farm in Nebraska. He unloaded fish onto docks in Massachusetts. For two-month stints, he labored aboard a tugboat plying the Mississippi.

One day, a tugboat captain took away Veitch's copy of Mark Twain's Life On the Mississippi. "He said, 'If you've got enough time to read, you've got enough time to clean the bathroom,'" Veitch said. "He could tell that I had a college education, that I didn't need this job. So he kinda rode me most of the time. And when I got off, he handed me the book back. And this is a guy, I'm sure, who had never finished high school, had never heard of Mark Twain, if you can imagine that," he continued. "He said, 'You know, this guy Mark Twain really knows what he's talking about.' Wow, that's high praise—from a riverboat captain!"

After touring the United States for fifteen months, Veitch pursued a PhD in American Studies at Harvard. He moved on to teach in that field at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

During faculty meetings at Madison, Veitch got a taste of what university administrators were like: "They sounded kind of windy to me," he said. "Full of clichés."

After serving as Lang's Dean, he said, he can relate.

"You don't have time to think," he said. "You don't have a few hours a day—'Should I do this? Should I do that? Let me read about this before I…' None of that. So eventually there's no gas in the tank and you end up, sort of, you know, being a functionary," he continued. "I think that's the risk of these jobs, even if you start out with a lot of energy and vision."

But overall, Veitch suggested that his tenure went better than he expected.

"When I became Dean, I was told that my job is to find artful ways to say 'No' to people, so you don't alienate them," he said. "The happy circumstance of this last four or five years is that I've been able to say 'Yes' a lot."

This article appears in Tuesday's issue of the New School Free Press. Photo courtesy the New School.

Ejected!

Here and there, I hear stories of Macbook CD drives that fail their owners. I became a statistic, with regard to this issue, a few months ago - not even a year after I owned my Macbook.

Well, a recent article in Slashdot, an online repository of news for the computer nerd/hacker community, might shed some light on the ornery attitude of Mac's disc drives.

Last weekend, the British Mail on Sunday gave out free copies of "The Jazz Singer" on a new, environmentally-friendly DVD called EcoDisc, which is half as slim as your average DVD. But the EcoDisc can get stuck into Mac disk drives, and the Mail slapped a warning label onto the promotion. Mac owners, too excited to pass up the free offer, slipped the super-slim discs into their drives anyway.

"We inserted this damm Ecodisc into our Apple Mac before realising the implications of using an EcoDisc, and the disc drive no longer works," a PC Pro reader is quoted as saying in one article. "I have booked the computer in for repairs and it is likely to cost �60 plus VAT [sic] to repair."

Ray Wheeler, the managing director of ODS, which manufacturers the EcoDisc, told PC Pro that this wasn't a big deal. "We've produced over ten million of these discs - we've had less than a dozen phone calls," he said. All the same, it looks like Mac has been naughty: "[Mac] uses an ejection system that doesn't get approval from the DVD Forum."

Disappointing, to say the least. But this is no smoking gun, when it comes to my own Mac's problems. After all, mine certainly ejects all of my CDs and DVDs. The problem is that it refuses to do anything but eject them.

Healing, Day 5

It's finally been five days since Dr. Beaty ripped those awkwardly-placed wisdom teeth from my mouth. Already I've broken at least three rules - the ones about not drinking alcohol, chewing soft foods and smoking. The bleeding has stopped and I don't feel great amounts of pain, so it doesn't seem like I have "dry socket."

But the wounds are still fresh. And who would've thought that a mere kernel of pop corn could become such a pain in the ass?

Last night, hanging out with some friends at the Waterfront in San Diego, I tossed down a few kernels smothered in Tabasco sauce, along with a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale (which is either a great or terrible thing to mix with Vicodin, depending on who you ask). Inevitably, a few hours later, my tongue started exploring those weirdly-shaped, soft, sensitive gashes in the back of my mouth. After a few moments, the tongue made out a sharp texture. I concluded that it was a tiny, unpopped piece of detritus from my bar snack.

So far, I've tried prescription mouth-wash, a plastic syringe and about a yard of dental floss. But nothing has rid my gums of that damn little piece. I try to get by, but to know that a piece of food is just hanging out in my mouth can be unnerving.

Thankfully, I've got a check up on Wednesday. Ideally, the trained dentists will do their magic and I will walk away feeling a bit more secure about the future of my mouth. That, or a pop corn kernel will be embedded in my gums forever. We'll see...

Let Your Mind Be Free

Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. "Let your mind be free." Doo na na na na na! Doo na na na na na! "Let your mind be free." Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.

About two hours ago I just bought Bad Boy Bill's "Bangin' The Box, Vol. 3," a collection of bouncy, sparkling, infectious Chicago house hits from the late-1990s. I've been looking for a good compilation of this stuff lately. While perusing the scanty electronica collection at Off the Record, my eyes made out the bright neon text of the packaging and the grandeur of the man on the cover of this curious assortment, which rounds out at a hefty 45 tracks. I'm not sure where Bad Boy Bill and the rest fit into the history of house in Chicago, where DJs gave birth to that repetitive electronic genre in the 1980s. I'm not even sure if all the artists listed here are just Bad Boy Bill's pseudonyms. But I am a sucker for compilations and this was printed on a Chicago label in 1998, so it must be at least kind of legit (no matter that I couldn't tell you what "legit" house is). After a moment of deliberation with myself, I brought the comp to the counter.

I read a sage bit of wisdom in Simon Reynolds' Generation Ecstasy the other day. The gist of the book's introduction is that, to the average ecstasy-addled party boy hoofing it on the dance floor, history is not a concern. That dancer's vision is a timeless affair in a world rocked by oscillating surges of rhapsody and interspersed with planes of unflappable ambiance. When I'm out hunting for new tracks, I may as well be like the beast. Forget "intelligent dance music." Now it's high time I give in to my guiltiest, most electrified of pleasures. For 74 minutes, at least...

Photo: Bad Boy Bill mans the turntables in 2000, by Jewels.

Clarifier: Pardon the faux pas, but I do mean to say "mix" when I refer to this compilation.

Empty Lots

Yesterday, my dad led me to Rancho Bernardo on the same route he took in October after the San Diego Fire Department invited him, his fiancee and her daughters back to the neighborhood. They had to evacuate for a couple days because a wildfire had started eating up the houses and hills just a few blocks away from their new house. Luckily, after the fire was contained, my dad's place turned out fully preserved - except for a few burn marks in the wicker chairs on the patio.

Many San Diegans think of Fall as a time when the dry winds of the Santa Ana desert head westward and create the kind of atmosphere where a simple brush fire can grow into a conflagration that crosses a highway and lays waste to millions of dollars worth of property. Naturally, the 60 mph winds of this season fueled the Witch Creek Fire, which consumed Rancho Bernardo. The wind battered the blaze here and there, sending red-hot embers floating through the air and placing them inside giant plastic garbage cans or on top of front yards' hedges. Their appetites thus whetted, the embers hatched fires themselves, whereupon those grew and grew until they could eat houses whole. And that they did.



Dad gestured to blackened pile of branches creeping alongside someone's preserved house. I looked far into the distance at the miles of blackened rolling hills. When we turned onto Duenda Street, he pointed out empty lot after empty lot. "There's one," he said. "There's one. There's one." The lots used to be houses. They had been cleansed of charred material possessions, dreams and aspirations wolfed down by fire. Now, for the most part, they were squares of flat dirt.

Rancho Bernardo, for all its lush shrubbery, is chiefly a land of concrete sidewalks, asphalt roads and tar highways. In part, all of this sprawl saved the neighborhood from total destruction. Today, winding streets with bright green shrubs and block-wide stretches of huge, million-dollar homes dominate. But they are interspersed with these signs of ruin.

Just around the corner from dad's house, we arrived at one of the first new houses, still under construction and right nearby a few empty lots. A moment after I snapped a picture of the new house, an older woman and her daughter walked up to us. The older woman had lost her house in the blaze. Her daughter, a middle-aged woman who wore sweatshirt that said "Brooklyn," which she had bought at an Old Navy in San Diego, did not lose her house.

The daughter said that this new house's owner was the brother of a trainer for San Diego's football team, the Chargers. Apparently, the family got a lot of help. "They want to get it up before Christmas," she said. The doors of the new house were open, and any curious bystanders were welcome to take a look. The mom and daughter had just taken a tour. Dad and I opted not to check it out - even though the new construction was, for all of Rancho Bernardo's seeming affluence, quite a rare sight.

Off!

As of 11 p.m. tomorrow, if both legs of my airborne adventure keep on track with the time-stamps of my online itinerary, I will be in San Diego. It's been a long haul, this semester. I've discovered a lot of new things about myself - for instance, that I have become a hopeless workaholic. Even now, free from the burden of any school responsibilities, I am making a mental index of all the shit I have to get together, all the ducks I've got to line up, and all the pages I've got to write before May 2008 comes around.

All the same, I've been doing hardcore research on YouTube. So far, I've managed to compile a list of selections that anyone could enjoy:

Michael Jackson's "Thriller" gets the Bollywood touch.

Van Hammersly's brand of edu-tainment.

"The Goofy Movie" from a David Lynch perspective.

Every video on YouTube that features Tom Waits.

Finally, my absolute fave: new developments in the world of gabber.

Now, off to happy hour. Then, to San Diego!