NYTimes articles....
Mar. 5th, 2006 09:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One on a US prison in Afghanistan.
A Growing Afghan Prison Rivals Bleak Guantánamo
By TIM GOLDEN and ERIC SCHMITT
While an international debate rages over the future of the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the military has quietly expanded another, less-visible prison in Afghanistan, where it now holds some 500 terror suspects in more primitive conditions, indefinitely and without charges.
Pentagon officials have often described the detention site at Bagram, a cavernous former machine shop on an American air base 40 miles north of Kabul, as a screening center. They said most of the detainees were Afghans who might eventually be released under an amnesty program or transferred to an Afghan prison that is to be built with American aid.
But some of the detainees have already been held at Bagram for as long as two or three years. And unlike those at Guantánamo, they have no access to lawyers, no right to hear the allegations against them and only rudimentary reviews of their status as "enemy combatants," military officials said.
Privately, some administration officials acknowledge that the situation at Bagram has increasingly come to resemble the legal void that led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling in June 2004 affirming the right of prisoners at Guantánamo to challenge their detention in United States courts.
While Guantánamo offers carefully scripted tours for members of Congress and journalists, Bagram has operated in rigorous secrecy since it opened in 2002. It bars outside visitors except for the International Red Cross and refuses to make public the names of those held there. The prison may not be photographed, even from a distance.
From the accounts of former detainees, military officials and soldiers who served there, a picture emerges of a place that is in many ways rougher and more bleak than its counterpart in Cuba. Men are held by the dozen in large wire cages, the detainees and military sources said, sleeping on the floor on foam mats and, until about a year ago, often using plastic buckets for latrines. Before recent renovations, they rarely saw daylight except for brief visits to a small exercise yard.
"Bagram was never meant to be a long-term facility, and now it's a long-term facility without the money or resources," said one Defense Department official who has toured the detention center. Comparing the prison with Guantánamo, the official added, "Anyone who has been to Bagram would tell you it's worse."
Former detainees said the renovations had improved conditions somewhat, and human rights groups said reports of abuse had steadily declined there since 2003. Nonetheless, the Pentagon's chief adviser on detainee issues, Charles D. Stimson, declined to be interviewed on Bagram, as did senior detention officials at the United States Central Command, which oversees military operations in Afghanistan.
The military's chief spokesman in Afghanistan, Col. James R. Yonts, also refused to discuss detainee conditions, other than to say repeatedly that his command was "committed to treating detainees humanely, and providing the best possible living conditions and medical care in accordance with the principles of the Geneva Convention."
Other military and administration officials said the growing detainee population at Bagram, which rose from about 100 prisoners at the start of 2004 to as many as 600 at times last year, according to military figures, was in part a result of a Bush administration decision to shut off the flow of detainees into Guantánamo after the Supreme Court ruled that those prisoners had some basic due-process rights. The question of whether those same rights apply to detainees in Bagram has not been tested in court.
Until the court ruling, Bagram functioned as a central clearing house for the global fight against terror. Military and intelligence personnel there sifted through captured Afghan rebels and suspected terrorists seized in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, sending the most valuable and dangerous to Guantánamo for extensive interrogation, and generally releasing the rest.
But according to interviews with current and former administration officials, the National Security Council effectively halted the movement of new detainees into Guantánamo at a cabinet-level meeting at the White House on Sept. 14, 2004.
Wary of further angering Guantánamo's critics, the council authorized a final shipment of 10 detainees eight days later from Bagram, the officials said. But it also indicated that it wanted to review and approve any Defense Department proposals for further transfers. Despite repeated requests from military officials in Afghanistan and one formal recommendation by a Pentagon working group, no such proposals have been considered, officials said.
"Guantánamo was a lightning rod," said a former senior administration official who participated in the discussions and who, like many of those interviewed, would discuss the matter in detail only on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy surrounding it. "For some reason, people did not have a problem with Bagram. It was in Afghanistan."
Yet Bagram's expansion, which was largely fueled by growing numbers of detainees seized on the battlefield and a bureaucratic backlog in releasing many of the Afghan prisoners, also underscores the Bush administration's continuing inability to resolve where and how it will hold more valuable terror suspects.
Military officials with access to intelligence reporting on the subject said about 40 of Bagram's prisoners were Pakistanis, Arabs and other foreigners; some were previously held by the C.I.A. in secret interrogation centers in Afghanistan and other countries. Officials said the intelligence agency had been reluctant to send some of those prisoners on to Guantánamo because of the possibility that their C.I.A. custody could eventually be scrutinized in court.
Defense Department officials said the C.I.A.'s effort to unload some detainees from its so-called black sites had provoked tension among some officials at the Pentagon, who have frequently objected to taking responsibility for terror suspects cast off by the intelligence agency. The Defense Department "doesn't want to be the dumping ground," one senior official familiar with the interagency debates said. "There just aren't any good options."
A spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment.
Conditions at Bagram
The rising number of detainees at Bagram has been noted periodically by the military and documented by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which does not make public other aspects of its findings. But because the military does not identify the prisoners or release other information on their detention, it had not previously been clear that some detainees were being held there for such long periods.
The prison rolls would be even higher, officials noted, were it not for a Pentagon decision in early 2005 to delegate the authority to release them from the deputy secretary of defense to the military's Central Command, which oversees the 19,000 American troops in Afghanistan, and to the ground commander there.
Since January 2005, military commanders in Afghanistan have released about 350 detainees from Bagram in conjunction with an Afghan national reconciliation program, officials said. Even so, one Pentagon official said the current average stay of prisoners at Bagram was 14.5 months.
Officials said most of the current Bagram detainees were captured during American military operations in Afghanistan, primarily in the country's restive south, beginning in the spring of 2004.
"We ran a couple of large-scale operations in the spring of 2004, during which we captured a large number of enemy combatants," said Maj. Gen. Eric T. Olson, who was the ground commander for American troops in Afghanistan at the time. In subsequent remarks he added, "Our system for releasing detainees whose intelligence value turned out to be negligible did not keep pace with the numbers we were bringing in."
General Olson and other military officials said the growth at Bagram had also been a consequence of the closing of a smaller detention center at Kandahar and efforts by the military around the same time to move detainees more quickly out of "forward operating bases," in the Afghan provinces, where international human rights groups had cited widespread abuses.
At Bagram, reports of abuses have markedly declined since the violent deaths of two Afghan men held there in December 2002, Afghan and foreign human rights officials said.
After an Army investigation, the practices found to have caused those two deaths — the chaining of detainees by the arms to the ceilings of their cells and the use of knee strikes to the legs of disobedient prisoners by guards — were halted by early 2003. Other abusive methods, like the use of barking attack dogs to frighten new prisoners and the handcuffing of detainees to cell doors to punish them for talking, were phased out more gradually, military officials and former detainees said.
Human rights officials and former detainees said living conditions at the detention center had also improved.
Faced with serious overcrowding in 2004, the military initially built some temporary prison quarters and began refurbishing the main prison building at Bagram, a former aircraft-machine shop built by Soviet troops during their occupation of the country in the 1980's.
Corrals surrounded by stacked razor wire that had served as general-population cells gave way to less-forbidding wire pens that generally hold no more than 15 detainees, military officials said. The cut-off metal drums used as toilets were eventually replaced with flush toilets.
Last March, a nine-bed infirmary opened, and months later a new wing was built. The expansion brought improved conditions for the more than 250 prisoners who have been housed there, officials said.
Still, even the Afghan villagers released from Bagram over the past year tend to describe it as a stark, forsaken place.
"It was like a cage," said one former detainee, Hajji Lalai Mama, a 60-year-old tribal elder from the Spinbaldak district of southern Afghanistan who was released last June after nearly two years. Referring to a zoo in Pakistan, he added, "Like the cages in Karachi where they put animals: it was like that."
Guantánamo, which once kept detainees in wire-mesh cages, now houses them in an elaborate complex of concrete and steel buildings with a hospital, recreation yards and isolation areas. At Bagram, detainees are stripped on arrival and given orange uniforms to wear. They wash in collective showers and live under bright indoor lighting that is dimmed for only a few hours at night.
Abdul Nabi, a 24-year-old mechanic released on Dec. 15 after nine months, said some detainees frequently protested the conditions, banging on their cages and sometimes refusing to eat. He added that infractions of the rules were dealt with unsparingly: hours handcuffed in a smaller cell for minor offenses, and days in isolation for repeated transgressions.
"We were not allowed to talk very much," he said in an interview.
The Rights of Detainees
The most basic complaint of those released was that they had been wrongly detained in the first place. In many cases, former prisoners said they had been denounced by village enemies or arrested by the local police after demanding bribes they could not pay.
Human rights lawyers generally contend that the Supreme Court decision on Guantánamo, in the case of Rasul v. Bush, could also apply to detainees at Bagram. But lawyers working on behalf of the Guantánamo detainees have been reluctant to take cases from Bagram while the reach of the Supreme Court ruling, which is now the subject of further litigation, remains uncertain.
As at Guantánamo, the military has instituted procedures at Bagram intended to ensure that the detainees are in fact enemy combatants. Yet the review boards at Bagram give fewer rights to the prisoners than those used in Cuba, which have been criticized by human rights officials as kangaroo courts.
The two sets of panels that review the status of detainees at Guantánamo assign military advocates to work with detainees in preparing cases. Detainees are allowed to hear and respond to the allegations against them, call witnesses and request evidence. Only a small fraction of the hundreds of panels have concluded that the accused should be released.
The Bagram panels, called Enemy Combatant Review Boards, offer no such guarantees. Reviews are conducted after 90 days and at least annually thereafter, but detainees are not informed of the accusations against them, have no advocate and cannot appear before the board, officials said. "The detainee is not involved at all," one official familiar with the process said.
An official of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, Shamsullah Ahmadzai, noted that the Afghan police, prosecutors and the courts were all limited by law in how long they could hold criminal suspects.
"The Americans are detaining people without any legal procedures," Mr. Ahmadzai said in an interview in Kabul. "Prisoners do not have the opportunity to demonstrate their innocence."
Under a diplomatic arrangement reached last year after more than a year of negotiations, Afghan officials have agreed to take over custody of the roughly 450 Afghan detainees now at Bagram and another 100 Afghans held at Guantánamo once American-financed contractors refurbish a block of a decrepit former Soviet jail near Kabul as a high-security prison.
Because of the $10 million prison- construction project and an accompanying American program to train Afghan prison guards, both of which are to be completed in about a year, military officials in the region have abandoned any thought of sending any of the Afghan detainees at Bagram to Guantánamo. Still, many details of the deal remain uncertain, including when the new prison will be completed, which Afghan ministry will run it and how the detainees may be prosecuted in Afghan courts.
Pentagon officials said some part of the Bagram prison would probably continue to operate, holding the roughly 40 non-Afghan detainees there as well as others likely to be captured by American or NATO forces in continuing operations.
Prisoner Transfers Stalled
Until now, military officials at both Bagram and Guantánamo have been frustrated in their efforts to engineer the transfer to Cuba of another group of the most dangerous and valuable non-Afghan detainees held at Bagram, Pentagon officials said.
Three officials said commanders at Bagram first proposed moving about a dozen detainees to Guantánamo in late 2004 and then reiterated the request in early 2005. In an unusual step last spring, the officials added, intelligence specialists based at Guantánamo traveled to Bagram to assess the need for the transfer.
But as Central Command officials were forwarding a formal request to the Pentagon for the transfer of about a dozen high-level detainees, at least one of them, Omar al-Faruq, a former operative of Al Qaeda in Southeast Asia, escaped from the Bagram prison with three other men. Mr. Faruq had first been taken to Bagram by C.I.A. operatives in late summer 2002, but was removed from the prison about a month later, a soldier who served there said.
Two officials familiar with intelligence reports on the escape said that last July, after Mr. Faruq had been returned to Bagram by the C.I.A., he and the other men slipped out of a poorly fenced-in cell and, in the middle of the night, piled up some boxes and climbed through an open transom over one of the doors.
In August, weeks after the escape, a Defense Department working group called the Detainee Assistance Team endorsed the Central Command's recommendation for the transfer of nine Bagram detainees to Guantánamo, two officials familiar with the matter said.
Since then, the recommendation has languished in the Pentagon bureaucracy. Officials said it had apparently been stalled by aides who had declined to forward it to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld out of concern that any new transfers to Guantánamo would stoke international criticism.
"Out of sight, out of mind," one of those officials said of the Bagram detainees.
An editorial on the coming abortion crises. Joy.
Sizing Up the Opposing Armies in the Coming Abortion Battle
By MONICA DAVEY
Pierre, S.D.
BEYOND the borders of South Dakota and its fewer than 800,000 residents, no one pays much attention to the long list of bills to restrict abortion that the state's legislators ponder nearly every year. But last week, when they passed the most sweeping abortion ban in the country in more than a decade, the reverberations reached far beyond quiet Pierre.
Finally, some abortion opponents happily announced, the chance to overturn Roe v. Wade was close at hand. Presumably, this bill, if signed into law by the governor, would eventually reach a remade, more receptive United States Supreme Court.
But even as abortion opponents declared a "full frontal attack" on Roe, the 1973 decision that found a constitutional right to an abortion, one question emerged: Which side of the abortion battle will benefit? Activists on both sides claim they have the advantage, but they can't both be right.
The South Dakota strategy itself has already splintered the anti-abortion movement. One faction is chafing at the timing of this campaign, wondering aloud whether the court — and, perhaps more important, the American public — will really embrace a complete reversal of Roe just yet.
Some, like Daniel McConchie of Americans United for Life, which did not take part in the South Dakota effort, said they would have preferred to reduce abortions by continuing to press for restrictions like waiting periods, parental and spousal notification laws, and the prohibition of certain types of abortion — quieter measures that draw less attention and strike a less head-on blow to Roe.
"There is tension," Mr. McConchie said, between those who agree with him about abortion but not about strategy. "A lot of those people — what we tend to think of as the purists — in essence think that people who would push a more incremental approach are sellouts. I understand that type of zeal, but there is a severe penalty you can end up paying."
Those who pressed for the chance to overturn Roe said they had seen hints already that the new Supreme Court, with two recent appointments by President Bush, might be open to reconsidering Roe. One such hint, they said, came just last week, when the court announced it would review a challenge to a federal law prohibiting an abortion procedure, what these opponents call partial-birth abortion.
"It's the right thing," said Leslee Unruh, leader of the National Abstinence Clearinghouse. "It's like Martin Luther King's approach — it's never the wrong time to do what's right. South Dakota is in a unique position to do something for the 800 children aborted every year."
But these opponents are also counting on the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens and the appointment by President Bush of another justice amenable to overturning Roe — all uncertain calculations, Mr. McConchie said. Think of what damage may be done, he said, if the court hears the case, but reaffirms Roe. And, should their forces devote money to this strategy, he asked, over all other efforts?
In some ways, the split mirrors the rift among gay-rights advocates over the question of same-sex marriage. Some gay-rights advocates pressed for marriage as the ultimate goal, while others warned that a slower approach, seeking other legal rights for gay couples, for instance, might stir less fury and be more effective.
As it turned out, after the Massachusetts Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2003, the reverberations were fierce. Opponents campaigned in many states for constitutional amendments to bar gay marriage, and in 2004, 11 states passed such amendments.
But even as the anti-abortion forces wrestled with internal division, abortion-rights leaders were repeating their mantra that a challenge to Roe would awaken their complacent supporters and strengthen their side of the national debate.
Representatives from groups like Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Naral Pro-Choice America said they were receiving hundreds of calls and e-mail messages from people around the country.
But a full-fledged national fight over the right to abortion must also be a chilling prospect for abortion-rights advocates.
The legal costs of fighting the South Dakota law in court — as Planned Parenthood has already pledged to do — are certain to be steep, but there could soon be more states with similar laws to fight. Kentucky and Ohio have already considered such measures, and other states might well be emboldened by South Dakota.
"It sounds a very dire signal that states think that they can pass laws that ban abortions and have them upheld by the newly configured Supreme Court," said Eve C. Gartner, a lawyer for Planned Parenthood.
And if, in the end, the Supreme Court were to overturn Roe, the ensuing battle for abortion-rights advocates would be complicated and costly, too.
Separate campaigns would be needed in every state, and even then, some would surely be lost — particularly those in states that already have so-called trigger laws on their books that would make most abortions illegal as soon as Roe is overturned. They include Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana and South Dakota.
A sense of building momentum — the hints of a more conservative Supreme Court, the loud statement from at least one state legislature, the prospect of a long court fight — could help build steam for abortion opponents. Just as those opposed to gay marriage seemed to draw strength and rising support from their early election victories, those opposed to abortion may see the new political climate as a call to action.
In South Dakota, Gov. Mike Rounds, a Republican who said he is inclined to sign the abortion ban in the coming weeks and send it on to face a lengthy court challenge, acknowledged that it might, at least for this moment, energize some otherwise dormant abortion-rights supporters.
On the other hand, he said, it will also most likely energize another silent group: those at the opposite end of the spectrum, a frustrated segment that had given up on overturning Roe in the blur of passing decades.
"Only time will tell," the governor said.
On the size of a family.
A Family or a Crowd?
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
It wasn't surprising when, a couple of months ago, the city of Manassas, Va., set off a debate over how government should define "family." The Virginia suburbs of Washington are a relatively liberal part of a conservative state. If there were a corner of Virginia ready to do battle over whether the American family is an outdated myth, this would be it. But that was not what the city authorities were talking about.
Manassas has seen a rapid influx of immigrants over the last decade. As in suburbs and smaller cities elsewhere, this has created quality-of-life complaints. Sometimes the outrage is over the jornaleros who gather at Home Depots to solicit daywork. Elsewhere, the gripe concerns overcrowding. One 23-year-old Mexican told The Palm Beach Post a couple of years ago that he, too, thought 10 unrelated workers living in a two-bedroom apartment was too much. "Eight people — three in each bedroom and two in the living room — that should be the maximum," he said. This is the problem in Manassas.
When crowding becomes commonplace, neighborhoods change. Parking disappears, and mountains of trash appear on the sidewalk on collection day. Between June 2004 and June 2005, The Washington Post reported, Manassas used its zoning code to move 400 people out of crowded single-family houses. But complaints persisted that huge, multigenerational extended families, including distant and sometimes dubious cousins, were making virtual boardinghouses out of homes built for a couple and two kids.
Manassas could not change the rules on how much living space each resident requires; those are set by the state. But the city can regulate how buildings are used. So in early December, Manassas tightened its definition of the adjective "family" in terms like "single-family home." Whereas the old code defined "family" as pretty much any group of people related by blood or marriage, the new definition limited it to immediate relatives of the homeowner. Parents, children and siblings were family; uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews were not.
For decades, the family has been at the center of America's culture wars. Often, the quarrelers break into predictable camps. The traditionalist side takes the family for something natural, self-evident and unchanging, with certain absolute rights that no government can violate. The reformist side holds that the family is a "social construct" that is destined to change as individuals make choices and governments pass laws that reflect new mores.
But look now. The traditionalists are hoist with their own petard. When the real desiderata of American life — convenient parking and garbage-free sidewalks — are at stake, Joe Sixpack is as willing to meddle with the traditional family as are Heather's Two Mommies. And sheltering distant relatives in various kinds of trouble — the laid-off, the dropped-out, the pregnant — is what American (extended) families have always been for. The American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, handed a rare opportunity to cast its foes as un-American, was planning to sue Manassas not just because it "targets families based on their nationality" but also for "an unconstitutional government infringement on the right of family members to live together." The new ordinance began to look like a losing hand. In January, the city repealed it.
But the battle may only be beginning. After all, the restrictive definition of family that was just drubbed in Manassas differs little from standard suburban operating procedure. In threatening Manassas with a lawsuit, the A.C.L.U. cited a 1977 Supreme Court decision that rejected an attempt to limit tenants to members of a nuclear family. "The tradition of uncles, aunts, cousins and especially grandparents sharing a household along with parents and children," wrote Justice Lewis Powell Jr., "has roots equally venerable and equally deserving of constitutional recognition." This is little help. Powell's words may be soaring enough to bully small-town politicians with, but they date from before the days of, for instance, covenanted child-free apartment complexes. The day-care industry, Medicaid and assisted living have all made the multigenerational family less desirable, less workable and less "normal." In short, no one in the Virginia case came up with an idea of the "single-family home" that possessed a sturdy internal logic.
Perhaps that means that, in Manassas and towns like it, it has lost its logic. The crisis in Manassas had two aspects. On the one hand, Latino immigrants do retain a robust esteem for the extended family, which many other Americans have fallen away from. On the other, whether legal or illegal, they crowd into these houses at least partly because they cannot afford to do anything else. There are now entire regions of the country — including parts of Northern Virginia — where there is no affordable traditional housing for those who work at, or near, the minimum wage.
Whether we think the purpose of families is producing babies, fostering love, tending the aged or protecting chastity, they have one thing in common. They are organized to address concrete problems, not to dispense utopian malarkey. Governments can kick problems down the road in a way that families cannot — whether the problem is a husband drinking his wages away or housing prices that have lost their apparent logical relation to hourly pay. The immigrants in Manassas are behaving like families in this sense. They are adapting their city's "single-family" housing stock to the realities of the labor market — with an indifference to government say-so that used to be called Yankee ingenuity.
On the end of storytellers in Morocco
Keeping a Moroccan Tradition Alive, One Tale at a Time
By MARLISE SIMONS
MARRAKESH, Morocco — It's time for work and Mohammad Jabiri heads for Jemaa el Fna, the main square of Marrakesh, often called the cultural crossroads for all of Morocco.
Stooping a little, he weaves through the crowds, past the snake charmers and their flutes, the racket of drummers and cymbalists, the cheers for the acrobats and the shouting of the kebab vendors, until he stakes out a quiet spot for himself.
Mr. Jabiri is a storyteller, a profession he has practiced for more than 40 years. Every day, he conjures up a real or imagined past that is filled with ancient battles and populated with sinners and prophets, wise sultans and tricky thieves.
For this he needs few props: he puts down a small stool and some colored illustrations. The rest is performance. His eyes can grow large and magnetic and his voice booms or whispers, depending on the intrigue.
Mr. Jabiri, 71, is one of eight bards still performing publicly in the Marrakesh region of southern Morocco. But most, like him, fear that their generation may be the last in a line that is as old as this medieval city.
These men descend from the era — long before radio and television, movie theaters and telephones — when itinerant narrators brought news and entertainment to country fairs and village squares.
Yet somehow, Mr. Jabiri still manages to defy the formidable electronic competition.
"Some people feel that television is very far away from them," he explained to a visitor. "They prefer making contact, they prefer hearing live stories."
And so they did on a recent afternoon, as Mr. Jabiri called out a blessing, raised his right hand and began the tale of the young woman who fell in love with a saintly hermit. But the hermit rejected her as an envoy of the devil, so she decided to lie down with a shepherd who crossed her path, became pregnant and said it was the hermit's child.
As the story unfolded over the next hour, it took on several subplots with unexpected twists and turns. The audience was made up of men only, some sitting on the ground, some leaning on their bicycles. Women are not supposed to stop and listen to wild or bawdy tales.
"Young people like stories from '1,001 Nights' because there is less religion," Mr. Jabiri said later that day as he listed his considerable repertoire.
"Older people like stories about the life of the Prophet and his companions," he said. "They like war stories, battles between the Muslims and the Persians or between the Muslims and the Christians. People also like miracles, like Jesus Christ healing the blind."
Students of local customs say the stories are a great melting pot of religious and folk tales from the region's Berber, Gnawi and Arab traditions.
Mohammad el-Haouzi, a biologist who grew up near the square, said he loved the ever changing spectacle of jugglers, healers, musicians and storytellers. "I may stop by at night when I need some distraction," he said. "You can eat, laugh, have your teeth fixed or your body painted."
Mr. Haouzi has heard uncounted tales here, and even when he knows them, they rarely sound the same. The magic is in the telling, he said, and the mood may change with the narrator's antics, or the shouting or taunting from the audience. The tales may be moralizing or burlesque or may spoof the powerful.
"One man often parodied the bombast of television journalists," Mr. Haouzi said. "He had the crowds howling with laughter."
Juan Goytisolo is a rare European expatriate who speaks Morocco's Arabic dialect and understands the storytellers. A prominent Spanish writer who has lived here since the 1970's, he is devoted to Jemaa el Fna and its artists. They inspired his novel "Makbara," he said.
In a cafe overlooking the square, he spoke admiringly about the "old masters" he has known, their improvisations and pranks, and the tricks they use to capture and hold their audience. Some may start a fake fight to attract listeners. He recalled that "Sarouh, a very strong man who is dead now, would lift a donkey up into the air. As it started braying, people would come running. 'You fools,' he would yell at the crowd. 'When I speak about the Koran nobody listens, but all of you rush to listen to a donkey.' "
Another narrator, seeing the crowd thin, would shout, "All those cursed by their parents must leave," Mr. Goytisolo said with a chuckle. "So of course everybody would stay, and pay."
Mr. Goytisolo has been the driving force behind a movement to protect the square, which he calls a "great and rich cultural space, that is in danger of being drowned by commerce, by the pressure to develop." The group has in recent years managed to block projects like a tall glass tower and an underground garage. Cars have now been banned altogether.
He also obtained help from Unesco, which in 2001 designated the square part of the "Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity."
Over the past few years, students have used video recorders to document the sights and sounds of the square, and some of the storytellers have visited schools, Mr. Goytisolo said, "so that children know there is more than the canned stuff they see on television." But he worries, he said, that the old masters are dying and not being replaced.
Mr. Jabiri said that in his youth it was easier for a storyteller to make a living. Although he could barely read and write, he learned his trade by listening to older bards and imitating them. Finally, he wanted to see the world and, he recalled with pride, told his stories as far away as Casablanca, Fez and Meknes.
But now, foreign tourism has brought inflation and, earning two or three dollars per day, he can no longer afford the bus fare to travel or pay for a bed. He sees change all around him. Some of his colleagues are sick and have stopped coming. Two young apprentices working in Marrakesh have a long way to go.
As dusk falls on the square, Mr. Jabiri is still telling his tale and it has reached a critical moment. The pregnant young woman, the hermit and the shepherd have all been summoned to be judged by the king. The king tells the hermit he will be beheaded, but he can make one last wish.
At this point, Mr. Jabiri abruptly stops and suggests that his enraptured audience make a payment so he can continue. He collects his coins, intones a blessing and, his voice rising and his eyes large and wide, he completes his tale, in which the baby speaks and saves the hermit, who falls in love with the young woman. At least this story has a happy ending.
On the popularity of curling
A Taste of the Olympics, Easy as Picking Up a Broom
By KATIE ZEZIMA
WAYLAND, Mass., Feb. 25 — For the last two weeks, Matt Durso's life has revolved around curling, an Olympic sport that he had never played and, to be honest, did not fully understand.
To better grasp the game, Mr. Durso, 22, a student at Lyndon State College in Lyndonville, Vt., and two friends woke up early Saturday morning and drove three and a half hours to Broomstones, a curling club in this town 18 miles west of Boston, to attend a learn-to-curl open house. "I've been watching every match every day," Mr. Durso said. "I've been obsessed."
And so, it seems, have millions of other people around the country who are becoming entranced by a sport many liken to shuffleboard on ice.
The United States Curling Association's Web site crashed on Feb. 16, when it received 12.5 million hits. The association said dozens of clubs around the country held open houses this month, capitalizing on the Olympic coverage, and many drew record turnouts.
Pete McCuen, the president of the Ardsley Curling Club in Ardsley-on-Hudson, N.Y., said traffic on the club's Web site had tripled in recent weeks and the club was busy booking corporate events and parties. In Los Angeles, more than 120 people have signed up in the past week to an Internet mailing list about starting a curling club.
Here at Broomstones, more than 1,000 aspiring curlers showed up for the five-hour open house, some waiting outside upwards of an hour in snow and temperatures in the 20's. "There's a lot of buzz out there," said Dan Williams, the club's president.
Much of that stems from increased broadcast time thanks to the sport's popularity in the 2002 Salt Lake City games. This year, NBC broadcast 26 Olympic curling matches. Through Thursday, 37 million viewers had watched curling, the network said. That number does not include the men's gold-medal match or the bronze-medal match, which the United States team won.
"People get hooked when they watch," said Bev Schrader, a spokeswoman for the United States Curling Association. "I think they're realizing the challenge, the finesse, and a lot of people are intrigued by the strategy."
The sport originated in Scotland and is extremely popular in Scandinavia, where the Swedish women's team was in a rock video, and in Canada, where "curling clubs are like bowling alleys," said Chuck Sharkas, a member of the board of directors of the Kettle Moraine Curling Club in Hartland, Wisc.
The aim of the game is to slide a 42-pound piece of granite, known as a stone or a rock, closest to the center of a bull's eye. The strategy comes in landing the stone nearest the center or in a position where it can block the stone of an opponent.
A player twists the handle of the stone to aim it. After the stone is cast on the ice, which is textured, two players preceed it and sweep the ice in front of it to control the angle at which its path bends, or curls, hence the name.
"It's kind of like chess, but with exercise," said Stephen Szczesniak, 30, a systems analyst from Marlborough, Mass., who attended the Broomstones open house.
Casting a stone is not easy, nor is running on ice while squatting and sweeping. But the sport can be played by people of all ages who dream about a shot at Olympic glory.
"I think at its core the reason why I really, really enjoy watching curling is I think it's the only chance I have at ever winning an Olympic medal in my life," said Ethan A. Brosowsky, an actor and producer who is part of the Los Angeles group. "You look at downhill skiing or bobsledding and say, 'I can never do that, not in a million years.' But with curling it's different."
Mr. Brosowsky, 24, watched the sport during the 2002 Olympics but really got into it this year, recording every match and staying up until 2 a.m. watching them. He and others worry that the cost of starting a curling club would be prohibitive. The clubs are like country clubs, with members paying several hundred dollars to join for the season, which runs from about October to March. A set of stones can start at $8,000.
But none of that appears to deter the fanatics. "I'm broke and I would absolutely do it," Mr. Brosowsky said. "I would spend my last dollar."
Avid curlers said one of the biggest draws of the sport was its social aspect. Tradition says that the winning team buys the losing team a round of drinks, and everyone sits around the bar and rehashes the match.
"There's a lot of civility in the game," said Dan Johnson, communications officer of the Dallas-Fort Worth curling club. "There's handshaking before and after. You call your own fouls. There's no referee. You're expected to abide by the traditions of the game."
"It just kind of hooks you," he said.
The folks at Broomstones, at the open house, were trying to reel people in. Aspiring curlers were taken onto the ice in large groups every 15 minutes, and each person got a chance to throw a stone. Mr. Durso volunteered to go first. He put his foot in a starting block, raised his hips and let the stone go, then turned around, raised his hands in the air and stepped off the ice.
"This is so cool," said Mr. Durso, who signed up for a learn-to-curl session next month. "Plus it's a very obscure thing to say you do."
On test scores and television
Study Finds Test Scores Not Lowered by Television
By ELIZABETH JENSEN
Does television rot children's brains? A new study by two economists from the University of Chicago taps into a trove of data from the 1960's to argue that when it comes to academic test scores, parents can let children watch TV without fear of future harm.
Matthew Gentzkow, 30, an assistant professor of economics at the university's graduate school of business, and Jesse M. Shapiro, 26, a research fellow, have waded into controversial territory that is usually the domain of psychologists and educators.
"The notion that television has terrible effects on very young children is widely believed and discussed," said Mr. Gentzkow. He noted that he was not predisposed to a "television is good" argument; he even conducted an earlier study that found that television lowered voter turnout.
Most studies that find negative effects from television compare groups of children who watch television to those who do not, even though the economic situations of the two groups are in all likelihood very different, Mr. Gentzkow said. The new study, however, was based on what the authors call a "natural experiment" that resulted from the way television was introduced in the United States in the late 1940's and early 1950's, when some cities got TV service five years ahead of others.
Data from cities where preschoolers were exposed to the new technology, and data from cities where they were not, was correlated with test scores from about 300,000 students nationwide in 1965, as collected in the Coleman Report, a survey done under the Civil Rights Act. The study also looked at test scores from pre- and post-TV age groups within cities.
The result showed "very little difference and if anything, a slight positive advantage" in test scores for children who grew up watching TV early on, compared to those who did not, said Mr. Shapiro. In nonwhite households and those where English was a second language or the mother had less than a high school education, TV's positive effect was more marked.
There is very little that television has not been blamed for when it comes to children, whether it be shortened attention spans, a predilection to violence, earlier sexual activity or a general decline in values. The American Academy of Pediatrics became so concerned about its effects that it suggested in 2001 that children under 2 watch no TV, and that preschoolers older than 2 be limited to one to two hours a day of "quality" programming.
But many parents routinely ignore that warning. Average TV viewing among 2- to 5-year-olds — the youngest viewers tracked by Nielsen Media Research — crept up to 3 hours and 40 minutes a day in the 2004-5 TV season. A host of cable channels have are dedicated to the tiniest viewers.
Elizabeth A. Vandewater, associate professor of human development at the University of Texas and director of the Center for Research on Interactive Technology, Television and Children, praised the new study for adding "more evidence that television is not uniformly evil or bad," but said that it ignored "a host of evidence that shows that content matters a lot."
She said that "there is a huge body of evidence that educational television" can be good for children, as well as strong evidence that "violent content is related to antisocial aggressive behavior."
Mr. Gentzkow said the work had nothing to say about how television affects a child's focus, aggression or other behaviors, and that it merely looked at academic outcomes.
The authors also said the study was not meant to evaluate television content in the 1950's versus that of today. But Mr. Shapiro noted: "If you look at the top five children's programs in the 1950's and the equivalent list from 2003, the content is not as different as you might have thought."
The study was released this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group of academic researchers based in Cambridge, Mass. The group is better known for putting out statistical analyses on the state of the economy. But it also serves as a forum for disseminating working papers of new economic research that has yet to be peer-reviewed, including the television study. Mr. Gentzkow said the study had been submitted for peer review to The American Economic Review.
A Growing Afghan Prison Rivals Bleak Guantánamo
By TIM GOLDEN and ERIC SCHMITT
While an international debate rages over the future of the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the military has quietly expanded another, less-visible prison in Afghanistan, where it now holds some 500 terror suspects in more primitive conditions, indefinitely and without charges.
Pentagon officials have often described the detention site at Bagram, a cavernous former machine shop on an American air base 40 miles north of Kabul, as a screening center. They said most of the detainees were Afghans who might eventually be released under an amnesty program or transferred to an Afghan prison that is to be built with American aid.
But some of the detainees have already been held at Bagram for as long as two or three years. And unlike those at Guantánamo, they have no access to lawyers, no right to hear the allegations against them and only rudimentary reviews of their status as "enemy combatants," military officials said.
Privately, some administration officials acknowledge that the situation at Bagram has increasingly come to resemble the legal void that led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling in June 2004 affirming the right of prisoners at Guantánamo to challenge their detention in United States courts.
While Guantánamo offers carefully scripted tours for members of Congress and journalists, Bagram has operated in rigorous secrecy since it opened in 2002. It bars outside visitors except for the International Red Cross and refuses to make public the names of those held there. The prison may not be photographed, even from a distance.
From the accounts of former detainees, military officials and soldiers who served there, a picture emerges of a place that is in many ways rougher and more bleak than its counterpart in Cuba. Men are held by the dozen in large wire cages, the detainees and military sources said, sleeping on the floor on foam mats and, until about a year ago, often using plastic buckets for latrines. Before recent renovations, they rarely saw daylight except for brief visits to a small exercise yard.
"Bagram was never meant to be a long-term facility, and now it's a long-term facility without the money or resources," said one Defense Department official who has toured the detention center. Comparing the prison with Guantánamo, the official added, "Anyone who has been to Bagram would tell you it's worse."
Former detainees said the renovations had improved conditions somewhat, and human rights groups said reports of abuse had steadily declined there since 2003. Nonetheless, the Pentagon's chief adviser on detainee issues, Charles D. Stimson, declined to be interviewed on Bagram, as did senior detention officials at the United States Central Command, which oversees military operations in Afghanistan.
The military's chief spokesman in Afghanistan, Col. James R. Yonts, also refused to discuss detainee conditions, other than to say repeatedly that his command was "committed to treating detainees humanely, and providing the best possible living conditions and medical care in accordance with the principles of the Geneva Convention."
Other military and administration officials said the growing detainee population at Bagram, which rose from about 100 prisoners at the start of 2004 to as many as 600 at times last year, according to military figures, was in part a result of a Bush administration decision to shut off the flow of detainees into Guantánamo after the Supreme Court ruled that those prisoners had some basic due-process rights. The question of whether those same rights apply to detainees in Bagram has not been tested in court.
Until the court ruling, Bagram functioned as a central clearing house for the global fight against terror. Military and intelligence personnel there sifted through captured Afghan rebels and suspected terrorists seized in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, sending the most valuable and dangerous to Guantánamo for extensive interrogation, and generally releasing the rest.
But according to interviews with current and former administration officials, the National Security Council effectively halted the movement of new detainees into Guantánamo at a cabinet-level meeting at the White House on Sept. 14, 2004.
Wary of further angering Guantánamo's critics, the council authorized a final shipment of 10 detainees eight days later from Bagram, the officials said. But it also indicated that it wanted to review and approve any Defense Department proposals for further transfers. Despite repeated requests from military officials in Afghanistan and one formal recommendation by a Pentagon working group, no such proposals have been considered, officials said.
"Guantánamo was a lightning rod," said a former senior administration official who participated in the discussions and who, like many of those interviewed, would discuss the matter in detail only on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy surrounding it. "For some reason, people did not have a problem with Bagram. It was in Afghanistan."
Yet Bagram's expansion, which was largely fueled by growing numbers of detainees seized on the battlefield and a bureaucratic backlog in releasing many of the Afghan prisoners, also underscores the Bush administration's continuing inability to resolve where and how it will hold more valuable terror suspects.
Military officials with access to intelligence reporting on the subject said about 40 of Bagram's prisoners were Pakistanis, Arabs and other foreigners; some were previously held by the C.I.A. in secret interrogation centers in Afghanistan and other countries. Officials said the intelligence agency had been reluctant to send some of those prisoners on to Guantánamo because of the possibility that their C.I.A. custody could eventually be scrutinized in court.
Defense Department officials said the C.I.A.'s effort to unload some detainees from its so-called black sites had provoked tension among some officials at the Pentagon, who have frequently objected to taking responsibility for terror suspects cast off by the intelligence agency. The Defense Department "doesn't want to be the dumping ground," one senior official familiar with the interagency debates said. "There just aren't any good options."
A spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment.
Conditions at Bagram
The rising number of detainees at Bagram has been noted periodically by the military and documented by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which does not make public other aspects of its findings. But because the military does not identify the prisoners or release other information on their detention, it had not previously been clear that some detainees were being held there for such long periods.
The prison rolls would be even higher, officials noted, were it not for a Pentagon decision in early 2005 to delegate the authority to release them from the deputy secretary of defense to the military's Central Command, which oversees the 19,000 American troops in Afghanistan, and to the ground commander there.
Since January 2005, military commanders in Afghanistan have released about 350 detainees from Bagram in conjunction with an Afghan national reconciliation program, officials said. Even so, one Pentagon official said the current average stay of prisoners at Bagram was 14.5 months.
Officials said most of the current Bagram detainees were captured during American military operations in Afghanistan, primarily in the country's restive south, beginning in the spring of 2004.
"We ran a couple of large-scale operations in the spring of 2004, during which we captured a large number of enemy combatants," said Maj. Gen. Eric T. Olson, who was the ground commander for American troops in Afghanistan at the time. In subsequent remarks he added, "Our system for releasing detainees whose intelligence value turned out to be negligible did not keep pace with the numbers we were bringing in."
General Olson and other military officials said the growth at Bagram had also been a consequence of the closing of a smaller detention center at Kandahar and efforts by the military around the same time to move detainees more quickly out of "forward operating bases," in the Afghan provinces, where international human rights groups had cited widespread abuses.
At Bagram, reports of abuses have markedly declined since the violent deaths of two Afghan men held there in December 2002, Afghan and foreign human rights officials said.
After an Army investigation, the practices found to have caused those two deaths — the chaining of detainees by the arms to the ceilings of their cells and the use of knee strikes to the legs of disobedient prisoners by guards — were halted by early 2003. Other abusive methods, like the use of barking attack dogs to frighten new prisoners and the handcuffing of detainees to cell doors to punish them for talking, were phased out more gradually, military officials and former detainees said.
Human rights officials and former detainees said living conditions at the detention center had also improved.
Faced with serious overcrowding in 2004, the military initially built some temporary prison quarters and began refurbishing the main prison building at Bagram, a former aircraft-machine shop built by Soviet troops during their occupation of the country in the 1980's.
Corrals surrounded by stacked razor wire that had served as general-population cells gave way to less-forbidding wire pens that generally hold no more than 15 detainees, military officials said. The cut-off metal drums used as toilets were eventually replaced with flush toilets.
Last March, a nine-bed infirmary opened, and months later a new wing was built. The expansion brought improved conditions for the more than 250 prisoners who have been housed there, officials said.
Still, even the Afghan villagers released from Bagram over the past year tend to describe it as a stark, forsaken place.
"It was like a cage," said one former detainee, Hajji Lalai Mama, a 60-year-old tribal elder from the Spinbaldak district of southern Afghanistan who was released last June after nearly two years. Referring to a zoo in Pakistan, he added, "Like the cages in Karachi where they put animals: it was like that."
Guantánamo, which once kept detainees in wire-mesh cages, now houses them in an elaborate complex of concrete and steel buildings with a hospital, recreation yards and isolation areas. At Bagram, detainees are stripped on arrival and given orange uniforms to wear. They wash in collective showers and live under bright indoor lighting that is dimmed for only a few hours at night.
Abdul Nabi, a 24-year-old mechanic released on Dec. 15 after nine months, said some detainees frequently protested the conditions, banging on their cages and sometimes refusing to eat. He added that infractions of the rules were dealt with unsparingly: hours handcuffed in a smaller cell for minor offenses, and days in isolation for repeated transgressions.
"We were not allowed to talk very much," he said in an interview.
The Rights of Detainees
The most basic complaint of those released was that they had been wrongly detained in the first place. In many cases, former prisoners said they had been denounced by village enemies or arrested by the local police after demanding bribes they could not pay.
Human rights lawyers generally contend that the Supreme Court decision on Guantánamo, in the case of Rasul v. Bush, could also apply to detainees at Bagram. But lawyers working on behalf of the Guantánamo detainees have been reluctant to take cases from Bagram while the reach of the Supreme Court ruling, which is now the subject of further litigation, remains uncertain.
As at Guantánamo, the military has instituted procedures at Bagram intended to ensure that the detainees are in fact enemy combatants. Yet the review boards at Bagram give fewer rights to the prisoners than those used in Cuba, which have been criticized by human rights officials as kangaroo courts.
The two sets of panels that review the status of detainees at Guantánamo assign military advocates to work with detainees in preparing cases. Detainees are allowed to hear and respond to the allegations against them, call witnesses and request evidence. Only a small fraction of the hundreds of panels have concluded that the accused should be released.
The Bagram panels, called Enemy Combatant Review Boards, offer no such guarantees. Reviews are conducted after 90 days and at least annually thereafter, but detainees are not informed of the accusations against them, have no advocate and cannot appear before the board, officials said. "The detainee is not involved at all," one official familiar with the process said.
An official of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, Shamsullah Ahmadzai, noted that the Afghan police, prosecutors and the courts were all limited by law in how long they could hold criminal suspects.
"The Americans are detaining people without any legal procedures," Mr. Ahmadzai said in an interview in Kabul. "Prisoners do not have the opportunity to demonstrate their innocence."
Under a diplomatic arrangement reached last year after more than a year of negotiations, Afghan officials have agreed to take over custody of the roughly 450 Afghan detainees now at Bagram and another 100 Afghans held at Guantánamo once American-financed contractors refurbish a block of a decrepit former Soviet jail near Kabul as a high-security prison.
Because of the $10 million prison- construction project and an accompanying American program to train Afghan prison guards, both of which are to be completed in about a year, military officials in the region have abandoned any thought of sending any of the Afghan detainees at Bagram to Guantánamo. Still, many details of the deal remain uncertain, including when the new prison will be completed, which Afghan ministry will run it and how the detainees may be prosecuted in Afghan courts.
Pentagon officials said some part of the Bagram prison would probably continue to operate, holding the roughly 40 non-Afghan detainees there as well as others likely to be captured by American or NATO forces in continuing operations.
Prisoner Transfers Stalled
Until now, military officials at both Bagram and Guantánamo have been frustrated in their efforts to engineer the transfer to Cuba of another group of the most dangerous and valuable non-Afghan detainees held at Bagram, Pentagon officials said.
Three officials said commanders at Bagram first proposed moving about a dozen detainees to Guantánamo in late 2004 and then reiterated the request in early 2005. In an unusual step last spring, the officials added, intelligence specialists based at Guantánamo traveled to Bagram to assess the need for the transfer.
But as Central Command officials were forwarding a formal request to the Pentagon for the transfer of about a dozen high-level detainees, at least one of them, Omar al-Faruq, a former operative of Al Qaeda in Southeast Asia, escaped from the Bagram prison with three other men. Mr. Faruq had first been taken to Bagram by C.I.A. operatives in late summer 2002, but was removed from the prison about a month later, a soldier who served there said.
Two officials familiar with intelligence reports on the escape said that last July, after Mr. Faruq had been returned to Bagram by the C.I.A., he and the other men slipped out of a poorly fenced-in cell and, in the middle of the night, piled up some boxes and climbed through an open transom over one of the doors.
In August, weeks after the escape, a Defense Department working group called the Detainee Assistance Team endorsed the Central Command's recommendation for the transfer of nine Bagram detainees to Guantánamo, two officials familiar with the matter said.
Since then, the recommendation has languished in the Pentagon bureaucracy. Officials said it had apparently been stalled by aides who had declined to forward it to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld out of concern that any new transfers to Guantánamo would stoke international criticism.
"Out of sight, out of mind," one of those officials said of the Bagram detainees.
An editorial on the coming abortion crises. Joy.
Sizing Up the Opposing Armies in the Coming Abortion Battle
By MONICA DAVEY
Pierre, S.D.
BEYOND the borders of South Dakota and its fewer than 800,000 residents, no one pays much attention to the long list of bills to restrict abortion that the state's legislators ponder nearly every year. But last week, when they passed the most sweeping abortion ban in the country in more than a decade, the reverberations reached far beyond quiet Pierre.
Finally, some abortion opponents happily announced, the chance to overturn Roe v. Wade was close at hand. Presumably, this bill, if signed into law by the governor, would eventually reach a remade, more receptive United States Supreme Court.
But even as abortion opponents declared a "full frontal attack" on Roe, the 1973 decision that found a constitutional right to an abortion, one question emerged: Which side of the abortion battle will benefit? Activists on both sides claim they have the advantage, but they can't both be right.
The South Dakota strategy itself has already splintered the anti-abortion movement. One faction is chafing at the timing of this campaign, wondering aloud whether the court — and, perhaps more important, the American public — will really embrace a complete reversal of Roe just yet.
Some, like Daniel McConchie of Americans United for Life, which did not take part in the South Dakota effort, said they would have preferred to reduce abortions by continuing to press for restrictions like waiting periods, parental and spousal notification laws, and the prohibition of certain types of abortion — quieter measures that draw less attention and strike a less head-on blow to Roe.
"There is tension," Mr. McConchie said, between those who agree with him about abortion but not about strategy. "A lot of those people — what we tend to think of as the purists — in essence think that people who would push a more incremental approach are sellouts. I understand that type of zeal, but there is a severe penalty you can end up paying."
Those who pressed for the chance to overturn Roe said they had seen hints already that the new Supreme Court, with two recent appointments by President Bush, might be open to reconsidering Roe. One such hint, they said, came just last week, when the court announced it would review a challenge to a federal law prohibiting an abortion procedure, what these opponents call partial-birth abortion.
"It's the right thing," said Leslee Unruh, leader of the National Abstinence Clearinghouse. "It's like Martin Luther King's approach — it's never the wrong time to do what's right. South Dakota is in a unique position to do something for the 800 children aborted every year."
But these opponents are also counting on the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens and the appointment by President Bush of another justice amenable to overturning Roe — all uncertain calculations, Mr. McConchie said. Think of what damage may be done, he said, if the court hears the case, but reaffirms Roe. And, should their forces devote money to this strategy, he asked, over all other efforts?
In some ways, the split mirrors the rift among gay-rights advocates over the question of same-sex marriage. Some gay-rights advocates pressed for marriage as the ultimate goal, while others warned that a slower approach, seeking other legal rights for gay couples, for instance, might stir less fury and be more effective.
As it turned out, after the Massachusetts Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2003, the reverberations were fierce. Opponents campaigned in many states for constitutional amendments to bar gay marriage, and in 2004, 11 states passed such amendments.
But even as the anti-abortion forces wrestled with internal division, abortion-rights leaders were repeating their mantra that a challenge to Roe would awaken their complacent supporters and strengthen their side of the national debate.
Representatives from groups like Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Naral Pro-Choice America said they were receiving hundreds of calls and e-mail messages from people around the country.
But a full-fledged national fight over the right to abortion must also be a chilling prospect for abortion-rights advocates.
The legal costs of fighting the South Dakota law in court — as Planned Parenthood has already pledged to do — are certain to be steep, but there could soon be more states with similar laws to fight. Kentucky and Ohio have already considered such measures, and other states might well be emboldened by South Dakota.
"It sounds a very dire signal that states think that they can pass laws that ban abortions and have them upheld by the newly configured Supreme Court," said Eve C. Gartner, a lawyer for Planned Parenthood.
And if, in the end, the Supreme Court were to overturn Roe, the ensuing battle for abortion-rights advocates would be complicated and costly, too.
Separate campaigns would be needed in every state, and even then, some would surely be lost — particularly those in states that already have so-called trigger laws on their books that would make most abortions illegal as soon as Roe is overturned. They include Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana and South Dakota.
A sense of building momentum — the hints of a more conservative Supreme Court, the loud statement from at least one state legislature, the prospect of a long court fight — could help build steam for abortion opponents. Just as those opposed to gay marriage seemed to draw strength and rising support from their early election victories, those opposed to abortion may see the new political climate as a call to action.
In South Dakota, Gov. Mike Rounds, a Republican who said he is inclined to sign the abortion ban in the coming weeks and send it on to face a lengthy court challenge, acknowledged that it might, at least for this moment, energize some otherwise dormant abortion-rights supporters.
On the other hand, he said, it will also most likely energize another silent group: those at the opposite end of the spectrum, a frustrated segment that had given up on overturning Roe in the blur of passing decades.
"Only time will tell," the governor said.
On the size of a family.
A Family or a Crowd?
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
It wasn't surprising when, a couple of months ago, the city of Manassas, Va., set off a debate over how government should define "family." The Virginia suburbs of Washington are a relatively liberal part of a conservative state. If there were a corner of Virginia ready to do battle over whether the American family is an outdated myth, this would be it. But that was not what the city authorities were talking about.
Manassas has seen a rapid influx of immigrants over the last decade. As in suburbs and smaller cities elsewhere, this has created quality-of-life complaints. Sometimes the outrage is over the jornaleros who gather at Home Depots to solicit daywork. Elsewhere, the gripe concerns overcrowding. One 23-year-old Mexican told The Palm Beach Post a couple of years ago that he, too, thought 10 unrelated workers living in a two-bedroom apartment was too much. "Eight people — three in each bedroom and two in the living room — that should be the maximum," he said. This is the problem in Manassas.
When crowding becomes commonplace, neighborhoods change. Parking disappears, and mountains of trash appear on the sidewalk on collection day. Between June 2004 and June 2005, The Washington Post reported, Manassas used its zoning code to move 400 people out of crowded single-family houses. But complaints persisted that huge, multigenerational extended families, including distant and sometimes dubious cousins, were making virtual boardinghouses out of homes built for a couple and two kids.
Manassas could not change the rules on how much living space each resident requires; those are set by the state. But the city can regulate how buildings are used. So in early December, Manassas tightened its definition of the adjective "family" in terms like "single-family home." Whereas the old code defined "family" as pretty much any group of people related by blood or marriage, the new definition limited it to immediate relatives of the homeowner. Parents, children and siblings were family; uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews were not.
For decades, the family has been at the center of America's culture wars. Often, the quarrelers break into predictable camps. The traditionalist side takes the family for something natural, self-evident and unchanging, with certain absolute rights that no government can violate. The reformist side holds that the family is a "social construct" that is destined to change as individuals make choices and governments pass laws that reflect new mores.
But look now. The traditionalists are hoist with their own petard. When the real desiderata of American life — convenient parking and garbage-free sidewalks — are at stake, Joe Sixpack is as willing to meddle with the traditional family as are Heather's Two Mommies. And sheltering distant relatives in various kinds of trouble — the laid-off, the dropped-out, the pregnant — is what American (extended) families have always been for. The American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, handed a rare opportunity to cast its foes as un-American, was planning to sue Manassas not just because it "targets families based on their nationality" but also for "an unconstitutional government infringement on the right of family members to live together." The new ordinance began to look like a losing hand. In January, the city repealed it.
But the battle may only be beginning. After all, the restrictive definition of family that was just drubbed in Manassas differs little from standard suburban operating procedure. In threatening Manassas with a lawsuit, the A.C.L.U. cited a 1977 Supreme Court decision that rejected an attempt to limit tenants to members of a nuclear family. "The tradition of uncles, aunts, cousins and especially grandparents sharing a household along with parents and children," wrote Justice Lewis Powell Jr., "has roots equally venerable and equally deserving of constitutional recognition." This is little help. Powell's words may be soaring enough to bully small-town politicians with, but they date from before the days of, for instance, covenanted child-free apartment complexes. The day-care industry, Medicaid and assisted living have all made the multigenerational family less desirable, less workable and less "normal." In short, no one in the Virginia case came up with an idea of the "single-family home" that possessed a sturdy internal logic.
Perhaps that means that, in Manassas and towns like it, it has lost its logic. The crisis in Manassas had two aspects. On the one hand, Latino immigrants do retain a robust esteem for the extended family, which many other Americans have fallen away from. On the other, whether legal or illegal, they crowd into these houses at least partly because they cannot afford to do anything else. There are now entire regions of the country — including parts of Northern Virginia — where there is no affordable traditional housing for those who work at, or near, the minimum wage.
Whether we think the purpose of families is producing babies, fostering love, tending the aged or protecting chastity, they have one thing in common. They are organized to address concrete problems, not to dispense utopian malarkey. Governments can kick problems down the road in a way that families cannot — whether the problem is a husband drinking his wages away or housing prices that have lost their apparent logical relation to hourly pay. The immigrants in Manassas are behaving like families in this sense. They are adapting their city's "single-family" housing stock to the realities of the labor market — with an indifference to government say-so that used to be called Yankee ingenuity.
On the end of storytellers in Morocco
Keeping a Moroccan Tradition Alive, One Tale at a Time
By MARLISE SIMONS
MARRAKESH, Morocco — It's time for work and Mohammad Jabiri heads for Jemaa el Fna, the main square of Marrakesh, often called the cultural crossroads for all of Morocco.
Stooping a little, he weaves through the crowds, past the snake charmers and their flutes, the racket of drummers and cymbalists, the cheers for the acrobats and the shouting of the kebab vendors, until he stakes out a quiet spot for himself.
Mr. Jabiri is a storyteller, a profession he has practiced for more than 40 years. Every day, he conjures up a real or imagined past that is filled with ancient battles and populated with sinners and prophets, wise sultans and tricky thieves.
For this he needs few props: he puts down a small stool and some colored illustrations. The rest is performance. His eyes can grow large and magnetic and his voice booms or whispers, depending on the intrigue.
Mr. Jabiri, 71, is one of eight bards still performing publicly in the Marrakesh region of southern Morocco. But most, like him, fear that their generation may be the last in a line that is as old as this medieval city.
These men descend from the era — long before radio and television, movie theaters and telephones — when itinerant narrators brought news and entertainment to country fairs and village squares.
Yet somehow, Mr. Jabiri still manages to defy the formidable electronic competition.
"Some people feel that television is very far away from them," he explained to a visitor. "They prefer making contact, they prefer hearing live stories."
And so they did on a recent afternoon, as Mr. Jabiri called out a blessing, raised his right hand and began the tale of the young woman who fell in love with a saintly hermit. But the hermit rejected her as an envoy of the devil, so she decided to lie down with a shepherd who crossed her path, became pregnant and said it was the hermit's child.
As the story unfolded over the next hour, it took on several subplots with unexpected twists and turns. The audience was made up of men only, some sitting on the ground, some leaning on their bicycles. Women are not supposed to stop and listen to wild or bawdy tales.
"Young people like stories from '1,001 Nights' because there is less religion," Mr. Jabiri said later that day as he listed his considerable repertoire.
"Older people like stories about the life of the Prophet and his companions," he said. "They like war stories, battles between the Muslims and the Persians or between the Muslims and the Christians. People also like miracles, like Jesus Christ healing the blind."
Students of local customs say the stories are a great melting pot of religious and folk tales from the region's Berber, Gnawi and Arab traditions.
Mohammad el-Haouzi, a biologist who grew up near the square, said he loved the ever changing spectacle of jugglers, healers, musicians and storytellers. "I may stop by at night when I need some distraction," he said. "You can eat, laugh, have your teeth fixed or your body painted."
Mr. Haouzi has heard uncounted tales here, and even when he knows them, they rarely sound the same. The magic is in the telling, he said, and the mood may change with the narrator's antics, or the shouting or taunting from the audience. The tales may be moralizing or burlesque or may spoof the powerful.
"One man often parodied the bombast of television journalists," Mr. Haouzi said. "He had the crowds howling with laughter."
Juan Goytisolo is a rare European expatriate who speaks Morocco's Arabic dialect and understands the storytellers. A prominent Spanish writer who has lived here since the 1970's, he is devoted to Jemaa el Fna and its artists. They inspired his novel "Makbara," he said.
In a cafe overlooking the square, he spoke admiringly about the "old masters" he has known, their improvisations and pranks, and the tricks they use to capture and hold their audience. Some may start a fake fight to attract listeners. He recalled that "Sarouh, a very strong man who is dead now, would lift a donkey up into the air. As it started braying, people would come running. 'You fools,' he would yell at the crowd. 'When I speak about the Koran nobody listens, but all of you rush to listen to a donkey.' "
Another narrator, seeing the crowd thin, would shout, "All those cursed by their parents must leave," Mr. Goytisolo said with a chuckle. "So of course everybody would stay, and pay."
Mr. Goytisolo has been the driving force behind a movement to protect the square, which he calls a "great and rich cultural space, that is in danger of being drowned by commerce, by the pressure to develop." The group has in recent years managed to block projects like a tall glass tower and an underground garage. Cars have now been banned altogether.
He also obtained help from Unesco, which in 2001 designated the square part of the "Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity."
Over the past few years, students have used video recorders to document the sights and sounds of the square, and some of the storytellers have visited schools, Mr. Goytisolo said, "so that children know there is more than the canned stuff they see on television." But he worries, he said, that the old masters are dying and not being replaced.
Mr. Jabiri said that in his youth it was easier for a storyteller to make a living. Although he could barely read and write, he learned his trade by listening to older bards and imitating them. Finally, he wanted to see the world and, he recalled with pride, told his stories as far away as Casablanca, Fez and Meknes.
But now, foreign tourism has brought inflation and, earning two or three dollars per day, he can no longer afford the bus fare to travel or pay for a bed. He sees change all around him. Some of his colleagues are sick and have stopped coming. Two young apprentices working in Marrakesh have a long way to go.
As dusk falls on the square, Mr. Jabiri is still telling his tale and it has reached a critical moment. The pregnant young woman, the hermit and the shepherd have all been summoned to be judged by the king. The king tells the hermit he will be beheaded, but he can make one last wish.
At this point, Mr. Jabiri abruptly stops and suggests that his enraptured audience make a payment so he can continue. He collects his coins, intones a blessing and, his voice rising and his eyes large and wide, he completes his tale, in which the baby speaks and saves the hermit, who falls in love with the young woman. At least this story has a happy ending.
On the popularity of curling
A Taste of the Olympics, Easy as Picking Up a Broom
By KATIE ZEZIMA
WAYLAND, Mass., Feb. 25 — For the last two weeks, Matt Durso's life has revolved around curling, an Olympic sport that he had never played and, to be honest, did not fully understand.
To better grasp the game, Mr. Durso, 22, a student at Lyndon State College in Lyndonville, Vt., and two friends woke up early Saturday morning and drove three and a half hours to Broomstones, a curling club in this town 18 miles west of Boston, to attend a learn-to-curl open house. "I've been watching every match every day," Mr. Durso said. "I've been obsessed."
And so, it seems, have millions of other people around the country who are becoming entranced by a sport many liken to shuffleboard on ice.
The United States Curling Association's Web site crashed on Feb. 16, when it received 12.5 million hits. The association said dozens of clubs around the country held open houses this month, capitalizing on the Olympic coverage, and many drew record turnouts.
Pete McCuen, the president of the Ardsley Curling Club in Ardsley-on-Hudson, N.Y., said traffic on the club's Web site had tripled in recent weeks and the club was busy booking corporate events and parties. In Los Angeles, more than 120 people have signed up in the past week to an Internet mailing list about starting a curling club.
Here at Broomstones, more than 1,000 aspiring curlers showed up for the five-hour open house, some waiting outside upwards of an hour in snow and temperatures in the 20's. "There's a lot of buzz out there," said Dan Williams, the club's president.
Much of that stems from increased broadcast time thanks to the sport's popularity in the 2002 Salt Lake City games. This year, NBC broadcast 26 Olympic curling matches. Through Thursday, 37 million viewers had watched curling, the network said. That number does not include the men's gold-medal match or the bronze-medal match, which the United States team won.
"People get hooked when they watch," said Bev Schrader, a spokeswoman for the United States Curling Association. "I think they're realizing the challenge, the finesse, and a lot of people are intrigued by the strategy."
The sport originated in Scotland and is extremely popular in Scandinavia, where the Swedish women's team was in a rock video, and in Canada, where "curling clubs are like bowling alleys," said Chuck Sharkas, a member of the board of directors of the Kettle Moraine Curling Club in Hartland, Wisc.
The aim of the game is to slide a 42-pound piece of granite, known as a stone or a rock, closest to the center of a bull's eye. The strategy comes in landing the stone nearest the center or in a position where it can block the stone of an opponent.
A player twists the handle of the stone to aim it. After the stone is cast on the ice, which is textured, two players preceed it and sweep the ice in front of it to control the angle at which its path bends, or curls, hence the name.
"It's kind of like chess, but with exercise," said Stephen Szczesniak, 30, a systems analyst from Marlborough, Mass., who attended the Broomstones open house.
Casting a stone is not easy, nor is running on ice while squatting and sweeping. But the sport can be played by people of all ages who dream about a shot at Olympic glory.
"I think at its core the reason why I really, really enjoy watching curling is I think it's the only chance I have at ever winning an Olympic medal in my life," said Ethan A. Brosowsky, an actor and producer who is part of the Los Angeles group. "You look at downhill skiing or bobsledding and say, 'I can never do that, not in a million years.' But with curling it's different."
Mr. Brosowsky, 24, watched the sport during the 2002 Olympics but really got into it this year, recording every match and staying up until 2 a.m. watching them. He and others worry that the cost of starting a curling club would be prohibitive. The clubs are like country clubs, with members paying several hundred dollars to join for the season, which runs from about October to March. A set of stones can start at $8,000.
But none of that appears to deter the fanatics. "I'm broke and I would absolutely do it," Mr. Brosowsky said. "I would spend my last dollar."
Avid curlers said one of the biggest draws of the sport was its social aspect. Tradition says that the winning team buys the losing team a round of drinks, and everyone sits around the bar and rehashes the match.
"There's a lot of civility in the game," said Dan Johnson, communications officer of the Dallas-Fort Worth curling club. "There's handshaking before and after. You call your own fouls. There's no referee. You're expected to abide by the traditions of the game."
"It just kind of hooks you," he said.
The folks at Broomstones, at the open house, were trying to reel people in. Aspiring curlers were taken onto the ice in large groups every 15 minutes, and each person got a chance to throw a stone. Mr. Durso volunteered to go first. He put his foot in a starting block, raised his hips and let the stone go, then turned around, raised his hands in the air and stepped off the ice.
"This is so cool," said Mr. Durso, who signed up for a learn-to-curl session next month. "Plus it's a very obscure thing to say you do."
On test scores and television
Study Finds Test Scores Not Lowered by Television
By ELIZABETH JENSEN
Does television rot children's brains? A new study by two economists from the University of Chicago taps into a trove of data from the 1960's to argue that when it comes to academic test scores, parents can let children watch TV without fear of future harm.
Matthew Gentzkow, 30, an assistant professor of economics at the university's graduate school of business, and Jesse M. Shapiro, 26, a research fellow, have waded into controversial territory that is usually the domain of psychologists and educators.
"The notion that television has terrible effects on very young children is widely believed and discussed," said Mr. Gentzkow. He noted that he was not predisposed to a "television is good" argument; he even conducted an earlier study that found that television lowered voter turnout.
Most studies that find negative effects from television compare groups of children who watch television to those who do not, even though the economic situations of the two groups are in all likelihood very different, Mr. Gentzkow said. The new study, however, was based on what the authors call a "natural experiment" that resulted from the way television was introduced in the United States in the late 1940's and early 1950's, when some cities got TV service five years ahead of others.
Data from cities where preschoolers were exposed to the new technology, and data from cities where they were not, was correlated with test scores from about 300,000 students nationwide in 1965, as collected in the Coleman Report, a survey done under the Civil Rights Act. The study also looked at test scores from pre- and post-TV age groups within cities.
The result showed "very little difference and if anything, a slight positive advantage" in test scores for children who grew up watching TV early on, compared to those who did not, said Mr. Shapiro. In nonwhite households and those where English was a second language or the mother had less than a high school education, TV's positive effect was more marked.
There is very little that television has not been blamed for when it comes to children, whether it be shortened attention spans, a predilection to violence, earlier sexual activity or a general decline in values. The American Academy of Pediatrics became so concerned about its effects that it suggested in 2001 that children under 2 watch no TV, and that preschoolers older than 2 be limited to one to two hours a day of "quality" programming.
But many parents routinely ignore that warning. Average TV viewing among 2- to 5-year-olds — the youngest viewers tracked by Nielsen Media Research — crept up to 3 hours and 40 minutes a day in the 2004-5 TV season. A host of cable channels have are dedicated to the tiniest viewers.
Elizabeth A. Vandewater, associate professor of human development at the University of Texas and director of the Center for Research on Interactive Technology, Television and Children, praised the new study for adding "more evidence that television is not uniformly evil or bad," but said that it ignored "a host of evidence that shows that content matters a lot."
She said that "there is a huge body of evidence that educational television" can be good for children, as well as strong evidence that "violent content is related to antisocial aggressive behavior."
Mr. Gentzkow said the work had nothing to say about how television affects a child's focus, aggression or other behaviors, and that it merely looked at academic outcomes.
The authors also said the study was not meant to evaluate television content in the 1950's versus that of today. But Mr. Shapiro noted: "If you look at the top five children's programs in the 1950's and the equivalent list from 2003, the content is not as different as you might have thought."
The study was released this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group of academic researchers based in Cambridge, Mass. The group is better known for putting out statistical analyses on the state of the economy. But it also serves as a forum for disseminating working papers of new economic research that has yet to be peer-reviewed, including the television study. Mr. Gentzkow said the study had been submitted for peer review to The American Economic Review.
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Date: 2006-03-06 02:30 am (UTC)Not complaining, but when you said you'd rarely post about Afghanistan, when you did, did you *have* to post about Bagram itself?
Only you, con, only you, :-p
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Date: 2006-03-06 03:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 03:10 am (UTC)brat-sister
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 02:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 02:30 am (UTC)Not complaining, but when you said you'd rarely post about Afghanistan, when you did, did you *have* to post about Bagram itself?
Only you, con, only you, :-p
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 03:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 03:10 am (UTC)brat-sister
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 02:59 am (UTC)