Who's to Say What's Obscene?

by Paul Krassner

  What was it again that Condoleezza Rice testified she couldn’t remember telling George Bush? Something about sleeper cells in the United States? Or was it stem cells? Does any reasonable person believe that she really forgot? If she didn’t tell Bush, she was covering her own ass. If she did tell him and he did nothing, she was covering his ass. Maybe the 9/11 Commision should’ve offered her HT-0712, the “Mind Viagra” pill that restores memory in fruit flies and mice. But would that make any difference if she was consciously resorting to blatant deception in the guise of false memory-loss syndrome?

  In Bob Woodward’s book, Plan of Attack, his on-the-record interviews instigated a couple of juicy ass-covering lies.

  Item: Donald Rumsfeld (who, according to Dick Cheney, has “near perfect recall”) said—referring to the impending attack on Iraq—that he didn’t remember assuring Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar, “You can take that to the bank.” Then Woodward produced a transcript of the taped interview, and there it was.

  Item: The New York Times reported that “Secretary of State Colin Powell disputed Woodward’s account. . . . He said that he had an excellent relationship with Vice President Dick Cheney, and that he did not recall referring to officials at the Pentagon loyal to Cheney as the ‘Gestapo office.’ ” Who among us would be unable to recall uttering such an epithet? In fact, Powell later apologized for it.

  Robert Draper’s biography of George Bush, Dead Certain, published in September 2007, reveals a significant lapse in Bush’s memory. He couldn’t recall his disastrous decision, two months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, to disband the Iraqi army, which alienated former soldiers and drove many into anti-American militant groups.

  “The policy was to keep the army intact,” Bush said. “Didn’t happen.”

  Then why, Draper wanted to know, did his chief administrator for Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, issue an order to dissolve the 400,000-person army without pay? After all, the policy was based on information provided by the CIA that the army would remain intact.

  “Yeah, I can’t remember,” Bush responded. “I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy’—what happened?”

  When Ronald Reagan testified before the committee investigating the Iran/Contra scandal, he was unable to recall whether he had approved trading weapons for hostages, testifying 130 times, “I don’t remember.” During his 1980 campaign, there had been rumblings of senility, and Reagan publicly offered to take a senility test if the proper authorities concluded that he had become senile, but nobody ever took him up on it. Perhaps his convenient losses of memory were actually early tremors of the Alzheimer’s disease that plagued him for the last ten years of his life.

  Nowadays, there are other excuses. A reader wrote to the medical advice column, “People’s Pharmacy” by Joe and Teresa Graedon, in the Los Angeles Times:

  “I took Lipitor for more than a year, and I thought I was doing great. My cholesterol levels dropped significantly with no side effects. Then I began having problems remembering names. Sometimes it took me till noon to gather my scattered thoughts enough to work. I couldn’t put a complete sentence together, and I began avoiding situations that required meeting with people. I’m in the advertising and marketing business, but I avoided clients and preferred to work by e-mail. After reading one of your articles that linked Lipitor to memory problems, I immediately contacted my doctor, and he agreed to a holiday from Lipitor. It took a few months, but my memory has returned. Memory problems should be listed as a side effect of Lipitor.”

  And the answer: “Amnesia is listed as an infrequent side effect of Lipitor, and memory loss is noted as a potential side effect of other cholesterol-lowering drugs such as Lescol, Mevacor, Pravachol and Zocor. Although this seems to be rare, we have heard from readers who have had difficulty with names, numbers and concentration while taking one of these. Some have even reported episodes in which they could not remember their address, spouse or occupation.”

  But how to account for the epidemic of memory loss among Bush administration officials?

  In May 2004, Newsweek stated that a memo written by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales after the September 11 attacks may have established the legal foundation that allowed for the abusive treatment of Iraqi prisoners. Newsweek reported that in January 2002, Gonzales wrote to President Bush that, in his judgment, the post-9/11 security environment “renders obsolete [the Geneva Convention’s] strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.” Quaint! According to Newsweek, Colin Powell “hit the roof” when he read the memo, and he fired off his own note to Bush, warning that the new rules “will reverse over a century of U.S. policy and practice” and have “a high cost in terms of negative international reaction.” But then, on Meet the Press, he claimed that he did not recall the Gonzales memo. Huh?

  There’s an explanation, though. In November 2003, Powell was interviewed in Washington by Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed, correspondent for a London-based Saudi newspaper. Referring to Powell’s description of his international killer-schedule, Al-Rashad asked, “So do you use sleeping tablets to organize yourself?”

  “Yes,” Powell replied. “Well, I wouldn’t call them that. They’re a wonderful medication. How would you call it? They’re called Ambien, which is very good. You don’t use Ambien? Everybody here uses Ambien.”

  So I decided to check out the side effects of Ambien: “Sleep medicines may cause the special type of memory loss known as amnesia. When this occurs, a person may not remember what has happened for several hours after taking the medicine. This is usually not a problem, since most people fall asleep after taking the medicine. Memory loss can be a problem, however, when sleep medicines are taken while traveling, such as during an airplane flight, and the person wakes up before the effect of the medicine is gone. This has been called ‘traveler’s amnesia.’ Memory problems are not common while taking Ambien. In most instances memory problems can be avoided if you take Ambien only when you are able to get a full night’s sleep (7 to 8 hours) before you need to be active again. Be sure to talk to your doctor if you think you are having memory problems.”

  If you remember to talk to your doctor, that is.

  In May 2004, an issue of Neuron confirmed previous models of memory recall that found sensory-specific components of a memory are preserved in sensory-related areas of the brain. The hippocampus can draw on this stored sensory information to create vivid recall. Which is why, even after you’ve returned from a vacation, you may still fully recall the sights, sounds, tastes and smells of some of its particularly memorable moments. For their study, the researchers mapped brain activity in human volunteers who sampled different odors and viewed pictures of various objects.

  Speaking of different odors, during the 2007 Republican primaries, Fred Thompson claimed that he doesn’t remember much about the 2005 Terri Schiavo controversy concerning whether the severely brain-damaged woman’s husband had the right to remove her feeding tube after she had spent fifteen years as an unconscious political football. “I can’t pass judgment on it,” Thompson said. “That’s going back in history. I don’t remember the details of it,” even though in the summer of that same year he discussed that case with John Roberts when he helped prep him for his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, and in November he appeared in a Law & Order episode about a husband trying to disconnect his wife’s feeding tube over her family’s objections. Rudy Giuliani also pleaded a faulty memory when a reporter asked him if he had supported the efforts to keep Schiavo alive. “I believe I did,” he replied. “It’s a while ago—I am not sure now.”

  In April 2009, former CIA director Porter Goss wrote in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post that he was “slack-jawed to read that members [of Congress] claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as ‘waterboarding’ were never mentioned.” He labeled these claims “a disturbing epidemic of amnesia.” But House S
peaker Nancy Pelosi managed to remember that “The CIA was misleading the Congress” and that “The only mention of waterboarding at that briefing was that it was not being employed.”

  This was another case of Bill Clinton’s infamous rationale, “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” Here, it was the CIA briefing Congress in September 2002 that “We are not using waterboarding,” knowing that the truth was “We have been using waterboarding.” And the irony is that such torture, ostensibly to extract truth from accused terrorists, was actually used to extract lies from them in order to lend support to the Bush administration’s lies about the non-existent relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida.

  As for short-term memory loss, Wes Nisker writes in The Big Bang, the Buddha, and the Baby Boom: The Spiritual Experiments of My Generation:

  “Recent research in molecular biology has given us a clue to the connection between THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, and the actual experience of getting high. It turns out that our body produces its own version of THC and that the human brain and nervous system have a whole network of receptors for this cannabinoid-like substance. That means you’ve got a stash inside of you right now, and nobody can even bust you for it. Our body’s natural THC was discovered by Israeli neuro-scientists, who named it anandamide, from the Sanskrit word for ‘inner bliss.’

  “The scientists believe that our system produces this THC equivalent to aid in pain relief, for mild sedation, and also to help us forget. It is very important that we forget, because if we remembered everything that registers our senses from moment to moment, we would be flooded with memory and could not function. So anandamide helps us edit the input of the world by blocking or weakening our synaptic pathways, our memory lanes.”

  The next time somebody reminds you, “Don’t bogart that joint,” at least you’ll have a scientific explanation, if you can only remember what it is.

  TRASHING THE RIGHT TO READ

  Before Kenneth Foster’s death sentence was revoked at the last minute in August 2007, he had read a book, Welcome to the Terrordome, and he wrote a letter to the author, Dave Zirin:

  “I have never had the opportunity to view sports in this way. And as I went through these revelations I began to have epiphanies about the way sports have a similar existence in prison. The similarities shook me. Facing execution, the only thing that I began to get obsessive about was how to get heard and be free, and as the saying goes, you can’t serve two gods. Sports, as you know, becomes a way of life. You monitor it, you almost come to breathe it. Sports becomes a way of life in prison, because it becomes a way of survival. For men that don’t have family or friends to help them financially, it becomes a way to occupy your time. That’s another sad story in itself, but it’s the root to many men’s obsession with sports.”

  Zirin writes, “It didn’t matter if he was on death row or Park Avenue, I felt smarter having read his words. But even more satisfying was the thought that thinking about sports took his mind—for a moment—away from his imminent death, the 11-year-old daughter he will never touch and the words he will never write. I thought sending him my first book, What’s My Name Fool? Sports and Resistance in the U.S., would be a good follow-up.”

  But a form titled “Texas Dept. of Criminal Justice, Publication Review/Denial Notification” stated that this book about sports history was banned from Death Row because “It contains material that a reasonable person would construe as written solely for the purpose of communicating information designed to achieve the breakdown of prisons through offender disruption such as strikes or riots.” Two pages were specifically mentioned.

  Page 44 includes a quote from Jackie Robinson’s autobiography referring to the blatant racism he suffered early in his rookie season: “I felt tortured and I tried to just play ball and ignore the insults but it was really getting to me. For one wild and rage-crazed moment I thought, ‘To hell with Mr. Rickey’s noble experiment. To hell with the image of the patient black freak I was supposed to create.’ I could throw down my bat, stride over to that Phillies dugout, grab one of those white sons of bitches, and smash his teeth in with my despised black fist. Then I could walk away from it all.”

  And page 55 includes a passage about Jack Johnson’s defeat of the “Great White Hope,” Jim Jeffries: “Johnson was faster, stronger and smarter than Jeffries. He knocked Jeffries out with ease. After Johnson’s victory, there were race riots around the country in Illinois, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Texas and Washington, D.C. Most of the riots consisted of white lynch mobs attacking blacks, and blacks fighting back. This reaction to a boxing match was one of the most widespread racial uprisings in the U.S. until the 1968 assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”

  Zirin points out that “There was a time in Texas when it was illegal to teach slaves to read. The fear was that ideas could turn anger often directed inward into action against those with their boots on black necks. It is perhaps the most fitting possible tribute to Jackie Robinson and Jack Johnson that they still strike fear into the hearts of those wearing the boots.”

  In the Dallas County jail, one of the largest in the country, all publications are refused, including daily newspapers such as the Dallas Morning News. “They seem to have a rather callous disregard for the Constitution,” said Paul Wright, publisher of Seattle-based Prison Legal News, with a circulation of 6,000. He filed a federal lawsuit challenging the ban on First Amendment grounds, and won. His lawyer, Scott Medlock, prisoner rights attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, points out that some jails have argued that prisoners can watch TV news in jail, so they don’t need access to publications.

  Prison Legal News is also preparing a lawsuit against the Utah Department of Corrections for a policy that bars all books except those that are shipped directly from Barnes & Noble. Generally, prisons require that books be sent directly from the publisher or a major distributor, for security reasons. Otherwise, a spokesperson for one jail explains, “There’s a possibility something could be in one of the pages that we don’t want. There could be little bits of drugs in the pages.”

  “We have not yet sued them.” Wright told me, “since they only sporadically censor us and aren’t letting us develop a good fact pattern.”

  A spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said that its jails allow inmates to receive books from booksellers after checking to see whether they can be fashioned into a weapon, promote violence or have sexually explicit content. Across the country, only paperbacks are accepted. Hardcovers are rejected because they provide “source material” for fashioning weapons. When the Supreme Court ruled that law libraries did not have to be provided to prisoners, jails in Montana not only removed the entire contents of the law library, but they also removed the typewriters.

  Washington State has tried to keep Prison Legal News itself out of prisons. First, the Department of Corrections prohibited inmates from receiving nonprofits. PLN sued and won. Next, the state issued a rule that inmates couldn’t receive publications that were paid out of their trust accounts. PLN managed to get that rule overturned too. Then the prisons adopted a policy of not delivering subscription-renewal notices. PLN took that to court and succeeded in getting the policy reversed. PLN has won similar lawsuits or settlements in Alabama, California, Michigan, Nevada and Oregon.

  While serving five years in a California prison for growing medical marijuana, Todd McCormick contributed a couple of stories—about his experiences with psilocybin and ketamine—to my collection, Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs: From Toad Slime to Ecstasy, and when it was published, I immediately sent him a copy. But the warden rejected it “because on pages 259–261, it describes the process of squeezing toads to obtain illicit substances which could be detrimental to the security, good order and discipline of the institution.”

  This was pure theater of cruelty. Federal correctional facilities do not have a toad problem, and outside accomplices hav
e not been catapulting loads of toads over barbed wire fences to provide the fuel for a prison riot.

  McCormick wrote to me, “Can you believe this shit! I wonder how much we pay the guy/girl who actually sits and reads every book that comes in for offending passages. How about you tear out pages 259-261 and re-send this book back with a copy of the rejection and a notation that the offending pages have been removed.”

  Which is exactly what I did. This time, though, my cover letter to the warden was ignored, and the book was returned, stamped Unauthorized. I had called their bluff. Obviously, McCormick was being punished simply because he could be. I then corresponded with several friends in prisons around the country to find out what inmates had not been allowed to read. I wanted to see other examples of arbitrary and frivolous censorship by prison personnel. Here are some results of my informal survey:

  • “The Texas Department of Corrections blocked Bo Lozoff’s Breaking Out of Jail, a book about teaching meditation to prison inmates.”

  • “Disallowed: Trainspotting because of its ‘glorification of drug use.’ Tom Robbins’ Still Life With Woodpecker because it has a chapter that ‘contains information about bombmaking.’”

  • “An inmate couldn’t get nude pictures of his wife sent to him but he could get a subscription to Playboy. The rationale: A wife deserved more respect.”

  • “They kept out The Anarchists Cookbook. And no kiddie porn, no tales or photos suggesting sex with a guard, no photos showing frontal or rear nudity—not even a wife or friend.”

  • “The Utah prison system banned Rolling Stone as being an anarchist publication.”

  • “A Revolution in Kindness is banned from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola as ‘a threat to internal security.’ It was intended for Herman Wallace, who contributed an essay about how he organized a chess tournament on his cell block as a way of easing tensions and minimizing violence between inmates. Wallace is one of the Angola Three—Black Panthers who have been in solitary confinement for [more than three decades] trying to improve conditions in the ‘bloodiest prison in America’ in the early 1970s.”