Jeffrey Goldberg, whose two-part 2002 New Yorker article about Hezbollah got a lot of new attention this past summer during Israel’s war with that globalized terrorist organization, has a book out.

It’s excerpted on NPR’s site. Goldberg describes what it was like after he was captured and taken to a prison in Gaza early in 2001:

I was left alone for quite a while. I assumed the goal of my captors was to provoke in me a neurasthenic crisis, to give me time to manufacture dire thoughts about torture, or at the very least, habeas corpus, which is not a cherished value of Arab security services. It was clever of them to leave me alone. It was my misfortune to be familiar with the many creative methods of torture employed by interrogators of the Palestinian services. The previous June a Palestinian in the custody of the Preventative Security was asphyxiated to death. Not long before that, a group of Palestinian students at Birzeit University, on the West Bank, were beaten and threatened with rape by other agents of Preventative Security. The crime of these students was to have thrown rocks at the visiting French prime minister. There were many stories of cruelty in Arafat’s prisons. Two of the more common modes of torture were shabeh and farruja. In shabeh, a prisoner is bound in a kneeling position, his arms pulled back and tied to the ankles. The prisoner is then left hooded for several hours. This torture causes hellish pain in the joints, and it stimulates an overwhelming desire to die, according to people I know who have survived this treatment. In farruja, the prisoner is bound in similar fashion, but then lifted off the floor, suspended from a hook. (During the Inquisition, this was known as the “Queen of Torments.”) Prisoners in Palestinian jails are often beaten — usually on the soles of the feet, with rubber truncheons. They are sometimes hooded for long periods of time; and burned as well, with molten plastic, or cigarettes.

On the other hand, this wasn’t Syria.

Another book to add to the growing pile…

Clive Davis, who supported the Iraq war, links to an editorial in the Telegraph:

The truth is that the question of evacuating our Servicemen from Iraq is rarely addressed on its own merits; rather, it has become an extension of the earlier debate about whether the invasion was justified. Those who had argued most strongly against the war barely paused to touch up their banners before demanding that the troops be repatriated. Their attitude drove many of the war’s supporters into a bloody-minded determination to see things through.

Davis also cops to having been bloody-minded. I suppose I could say there has been a measure of bloody-mindedness in my support for the war. The anti-war position of my cohort, colleagues, and even my friends was infuriatingly empty-headed and utterly devoid of knowledge: it was the default position of a well-intentioned but completely unexamined mind-set. The more I encountered it, the more hot-headed I became.

Pulling back to get a little perspective, I find my position much closer to Norm Geras’s:

Sometimes there is a justification for opposing tyranny and barbarism whatever the cost. Had I been [alive and] of mature years during that time, I hope I would have supported the war against Nazism come what may, and not been one of the others, the nay-sayers. The same impulse was at work in my support for the Iraq war. Even so, I am bound to acknowledge that, though I never expected an easy sequel in Iraq, much less a ‘cakewalk’, I did not anticipate a failure on this scale, and had I done so, I would have withheld support for the war without giving my voice to the opposition to it.

I still believe in the cause. And I will stay bloody-minded about that, even as I mourn the lost opportunities and rage about the administration’s incompetence and carelessness and arrogance, which helped bring us to this awful pass.

Robert McCrum extols Orhan Pamuk’s achievements, and says Pamuk deserves the Nobel Peace Prize in addition to the prize for Literature, which he was awarded:

He is also a brave [writer], speaking out for free expression in a country where powerful factions have wanted to put him in prison for daring to describe the Armenian massacres as genocidal, and for challenging a repressive silence at the highest levels of government and society about the universal issue of human rights. Moreover, he has done this with that instinctive determination to assert the duty of literature to transcend political barriers that has always characterised the great artist. As Pamuk himself put it in 2000: ‘Freedom of thought and expression are freedoms which people long for as much as bread and water. They should never be limited by nationalist sentiment, or (worst of all) business and military interests.’

…

Rarely in modern times has a novelist found the voice to tell his people the daring, possibly transgressive, stories about themselves that they crave. Not since the days of dissident literature in the USSR has a writer been so much the spokesperson for a generation. In Turkey this has brought the adulation of the young.