"The Americans hope that, by adopting a mea culpa position, they can reduce the harmful effects of the photos. That remains to be seen."
With characteristic understatement, BBC world affairs correspondent Paul Reynolds looks back on an appalling week and forward to find, obviously enough, that the "Iraq abuse portends hard times" (BBC).
It's only today that I've more or less caught up on the mess of it all, with help from a fine post about 'Fighting for Civilisation' (Blaugustine, May 1 entry) -- having, I'm sorry to say, missed Natalie and Augustine's first blog anniversary...
It's a bit late now, but: "Keep it up, the pair of you!"
I've even finally read Seymour Hersh's devastating 'Torture at Abu Ghraib' New Yorker article, which was about as good as it gets for a thoroughly miserable, cold and wet afternoon.
Natalie's earned 16 comments with that entry of hers and taken her admirable spirit along to other corners of the web. One of her blogrolled buddies, Andrew, livens things up further with a copy of a letter he sent to Disney's Michael Eisner (at The Super Nova Scotian). Here's just a sample of the kind of thing I really couldn't do better myself:
"Your corporation prides itself on educating as well as entertaining and this is a clear lesson to our young people that money is far more important than freedom of speech. In addition by boosting Michael Moore's sales in this way you will draw many more teenagers away from your products and towards a more balanced view of the world."
Writing like that cast my mind back to the furore of cons -- David Hardy's 'truth (sic) about Bowling for Columbine' -- and pros -- Erik Möller's 'defense of Moore' (kuro5hin) -- last summer.
In these insane times and with no apparent prospect of an improvement in the weather for at least another couple of days, I intend to do very little in the near future apart from catch up on mail, the blogosphere and my friends.
One of those friends, François, mailed me this morning, perturbed to see 'taliesin's log' grind to a halt. He's far from alone in remarking that it's "étrange comme quelqu'un qui a eu l'habitude de chroniquer sur les génocides géants africains peut se retrouver marqué par un fait divers de quartier," but I've had a hell of a week trying, in vain, to shake off the black dog blues that gradually overwhelmed me since last Saturday night's killing.
Finally, I've got a week's "holiday" under the Factory's fairly strictly enforced policy of "take it or lose it" by June 1. My insides have begun to sort themselves out despite routinely overdosing on ill-advised stimulants during the past six-day stretch at AFP, and I woke up this morning as immensely glad of the break as I knew perfectly well that those who encouraged me to keep right on working last week were right.
This evening, equally cheered to have the Kid around again for a couple of days, I was halfway into my pyjamas when there was a mighty rap on the door. It proved to be an amiable senior officer from the police judiciaire, who had a few more questions to ask both me and Marianne, but also brought some good news about progress in the homicide investigation, which is decidedly off the record.
I think I can say without prejudice to the inquiry that, rather as I'd swiftly begun to suspect, poor Amine was, pretty much, an innocent who paid with his life in a "war" almost every bit as nasty, on a small scale, as the past week in Iraq.
Before that, Jean-Paul was kind enough to 'phone from the Canteen and leave a message saying he and François were having lunch there and "where are you?" Within five minutes, I'd joined them, though the Kid politely declined, having eaten already.
Another couple of days like this and I think I'll have got my morale back...
10:44:42 PM link 
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