“That’s the church my parents were married in,” says lovely Roberta. And then she whispers: “People used to practice black magic in the basement.”
Roberta is the woman designated to ferry us about Turin, the royal city in Piedmont at the foot of the Italian Alps. By Italian standards, this town is calm and efficient and sane.
(I just discovered this essay on an obsolete blog that I’d forgotten I’d ever had. Seems I wrote it on May 20, 2005. I’m proud of this piece. So I’m going to resurrect it.)
_______________
In February 2002, President Bush announced that the Geneva Conventions would not apply to prisoners associated with Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
(This story about Hurricane Mitch was initially published in Fathom.)
If you live somewhere, you don’t want me to visit. No, really. I’m approximately as safe to have around as the Grim Reaper. In fact, I seem to be his official advance scout. I can’t count the places that have experienced genuine disaster soon after welcoming me with warm, soon-to-be-severed arms.
Nothing so unnatural as “natural causes.” Look, I designed the whole system of demise, and I assure you, disease and old age were an afterthought. Ideally, men should kill men. I’ve been tweaking the man-killing-man scenario for millennia, and I’m not sure many of you recognize what I’ve had to go through to arrive at the current virtuosic state of affairs.
At last we have details regarding “special rendition” (or, if you prefer, “extraordinary rendition” — a phrase which is even more doubleplusgood). This is important. If you are mistakenly kidnapped and tortured by the CIA, it’s useful to know what to expect. The intrepid Dana Priest (WaPo’s new star, now that Woodward has become Dubya’s pet hack), has written yet another remarkable exposé of the Cheney/Bush reign of (t)error — Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake.