text:
The Boy from Gitmo
Eight years ago, an [REDACTED] Afghan kid—some say he was [REDACTED] years old, others say he was 12—was grabbed in a Kabul marketplace after a grenade attack on two American soldiers. He was interrogated, [REDACTED], and then taken to Guantánamo. He spent his teenage years there, seven in all, confined in a [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] with the supposed "worst of the worst." But then, thanks ot the superhuman efforts of his defense team and one intense [REDACTED] military lawyer, the government's case against him disintegrated. Now he's back in Afghanistan, free as a badly damaged bird, in a [REDACTED] country he barely recognizes, wondering where you go when you grew up nowhere
This is a story about lost and broken things, the rubble from which the phoenix-in this case a C-130 military transport-rises over the Caribbean Sea on a spotless day in September 2008. From 30,000 feet, the surface of the water glitters below like jagged glass, shooting spears of light. The plane stalks east, running parallel to the northern coast of Cuba twenty miles off. On board, Major Eric Montalvo is wedged in a seat, thinking, What the fuck have I gotten myself into now?
A month ago, he'd been working at Parris Island, South Carolina, capping a distinguished career during which he'd won more than 95 percent of his cases. He'd recently bought a big house with a huge kitchen and a fountain out back for his wife and two boys-and had begun to turn his attention to finding a civilian job. And then an e-mail pinged his in-box. Copied to a couple of hundred Marine lawyers, it called for applications to help with the military commissions trials at Guantánamo. Montalvo responded impulsively, stirred by the call to duty. Within a couple of hours, he received word. His retirement had been pulled: He was going to Washington, D.C.
The timing was terrible. The real estate market was imploding, the house couldn't be sold, and Montalvo was forced to leave his family for an indeterminate amount of time. Still, there was worse to come. When he found out he'd been placed on the defense side-when he realized that he'd actually be defending the terrorists-he was stricken. The phone started ringing, colonels he knew on the line repeating the same mantra: "This isn't going to be good for your career, Major." Then the call with his parents. On September 11, Montalvo's uncle Tony had responded with his Harlem fire company to Ground Zero, and Montalvo's parents believed it was black lung that killed him not long after.
Please don't do this, Montalvo's mother told him.
Now the transport sweeps wide around Cuba's eastern tip, an arid land of organ-pipe cacti and big loping rodents called banana rats. Below is Guantánamo Bay itself (a flume of blue water mushrooming inland, teeming with turtles and parrot fish) and then the naval base, a scattering of roads, buildings, and low-slung homes that accommodate the 6,000 troops here. Montalvo's first impression is how foreboding the rocky shoreline seems, how moonlike the landscape. A Caribbean Alcatraz. Somewhere down there, too, are the cages that contain "the worst of the worst"-as Donald Rumsfeld labeled them-alleged Al Qaeda terrorists. Montalvo's stomach burns a little with the thought that he might have to collude with any of them, in any manner. A self-described superpatriot and son of blue-collar parents (mother a hairdresser, father a cargo man for AeroMexico), he grew up in Queens, a skinny Puerto Rican scrapper, then joined the Marines at 18 and morphed into "Mad Dog," his gonzo jarhead persona. Soon he was touted for Officer Candidates School and afterward went on to law school at Temple, emerging with gravitas as this slightly fattened-up (five feet nine, 220 pounds) lawyer of laser logic and indignant rage, trimmed beard flecked gray, and bad attorney's back.
When he first found out he'd been assigned to the defense side, he went and spoke to Colonel Morris Davis, the chief prosecutor for the commissions at the time, and the colonel asked Montalvo if he thought he could handle it. The job would get very personal, he said, but it was also the most meaningful kind of work because it was all about the Constitution. And this is how Montalvo buttressed himself in the face of so many doubters, repeating it back to them. "If I'm going to fight the fight for America," he'd say, "dead center on the Constitution is where I want to be."
He soon finds himself on the top step of the military commissions building, gazing down on a makeshift tent city and sweating through his cammies in the heat. He's been assigned the separate cases of two detainees, and enters a small interrogation room where the first, a Yemeni named Ali al-Bahlul, is chained and shackled to the floor. The detainee is surprisingly lithe, a handsome man with close-cropped hair who speaks impeccable English. He's one of Osama bin Laden's former media operatives, most famous for having made a two-hour video celebrating Al Qaeda's attack on the USS Cole. It's one of the jihad movement's all-time greatest hits, and al-Bahlul is also among the most doctrinaire, having been locked away in solitary for years. As they sit face-to-face, al-Bahlul asks why the Marine is trying to be so accommodating. "Don't you know I'm your enemy?" he says. Montalvo responds that, legally speaking, he feels that a First Amendment argument can be made on his behalf, but al-Bahlul interrupts, jangling his chains. "Don't you know that if that door were opened and we both were out there free, I'd kill you?" Nothing has prepared Montalvo for this kind of venom, but his reaction is visceral. He leans forward and says, "Don't you know that if that door were open and we both were free, I'd kill you first?" When it's over, Montalvo leaves the room shell-shocked, thinking, Jesus, how can I defend that?
It's not just al-Bahlul. He feels it all around: that what's really being played out here is a clash of civilizations. Even the setting, the harsh sun and roiling ocean, evokes a desolation, the sense that in this otherworld there's been an allowance made for some unsayable human brutality. Eye for an eye. Montalvo goes back to his tent, gets some grub, sleeps in double sleeping bags because the air-conditioning blows an arctic frost all night. The next day he's introduced to his second client, Internal Security Number 900. The detainee is said to have committed an attack against two Special Forces soldiers in a marketplace in downtown Kabul, a brazen assault with a grenade that left the soldiers badly maimed but alive.
Before entering the room, Montalvo girds himself, does some deep breathing, pushes through the door in full professional command, and comes face-to-face with...a boy. The kid looks almost goofy, shackled there. He seems shy but unstintingly polite, asking after Montalvo, greeting him with a direct, interested gaze. The room is claustrophobic, the eye of a surveillance camera boring down on them. Where Montalvo felt a hardened knot of despair with al-Bahlul, he can't quite square the soft-spoken boy who sits before him. Is this the little shit who left two soldiers to die in the middle of a bazaar thousands of miles from home?
"They keep accusing me of something I didn't do," the boy says. "I just want to get home to my mother."
He doesn't know it he believes the kid at first, his utterances of his innocence. But he's a kid-and because of that Montalvo feels something shift, a nagging doubt not about the boy but the strange American juggernaut running him down. He leaves and boards the transport plane home, and back in his shade-drawn office in D.C., Montalvo keeps returning to that first meeting. Despite everything, the alleged enemy seemed, well, hopeful. As if a clerical error had been made. Like the boy believes he should be going home soon, once he's been heard by the president or judge or wizard, whoever's in charge. It's that conviction that brings Montalvo to a standstill and makes him feel some odd, sudden weight of responsibility.
He spends hundreds of hours reading the official military reports, and the evidence seems damning. On December 17, 2002, two American Special Forces soldiers, Michael Lyons and Christopher Martin, along with their Afghan interpreter, drive an unmarked, soft-top jeep into a Kabul bazaar. They visit with a couple of vendors whom the team is cultivating as informants. They make a final stop, at a shop selling clocks. Lyons enters, asks the owner, "How is everything?" The shopkeeper responds in broken English, "Everything's fine. How are you?"
"No," says Lyons, "how's everything...for me?"
The shopkeeper goes to the front of the store, scans the street, returns. "Everything's fine," he says. "For you."
Lyons wants twenty-five wall clocks. A long conversation ensues, less haggling than an ercise in trust-building, and then he "tips out," overpaying an encouraging amount of money. Meanwhile, standing guard on the street, Martin has had a chilling premonition, a feeling that he's being watched through the scope of a rifle. When Lyons exits the shop with the interpreter, they quickly load the clocks, and all three hop in the jeep. The marketplace swarms with hundreds, thousands, of people just released from afternoon prayer at the mosque; traffic is bumper-to-bumper. Smoke from the outdoor barbecues wafts thickly with the scent of kebab meat. The jeep nudges forward, unable to merge into the swirl around a traffic circle.
And then a sickening thing occurs: The windshield suddenly shatters, leaving a spiderweb of cracked glass. "What the hell was that?" blurts Lyons in the driver's seat. They've been shot at from the front, he thinks, but there's no sign of attack on the street. Then there's a hollow thud, like an empty bottle rolling on the floor. Martin, riding shotgun, glances over his shoulder at the interpreter, who's scanning the floor of the jeep. Martin looks down, frantically searching back to front, and as he lifts his eyes, a blinding flash of orange engulfs everything.
And then a deafening explosion.
In the next instant, Lyons lies slumped over the wheel, unresponsive, blood gushing from a tear in his femoral artery. His legs are mangled; his left foot is missing a toe. Meanwhile, Martin, who's still in the passenger seat, looks down at his hands to find them covered in blood. But whose? The interpreter, badly wounded himself, flags a nearby taxi, piles the two U.S. soldiers in the back with their feet hanging out the open door, and sends the driver off with directions to get to a German field hospital. The taxi wedges through the crowd, hitting people with the open door as it goes, the bloody legs dangling.
Back at the bazaar, various men are apprehended, but soon the only one left is the main suspect, who is described as "very young and clever" and who was allegedly caught in the act, arm cocked with a second grenade near the smoldering jeep. Unlike a suicide bomber or martyr, the subject is alive, talking, a tangible terrorist potentially packing vital information. Within hours, he supplies a written confession that reads:
I came to Kabul alone from the province of Khost... No one had assigned me this task. I did this myself... I have a grudge against the Brits and the foreigners. They should not be in our country... I ecuted this operation in Pul-e Khishti while they were riding in their Jeep. When they were on the street, I didn't attack them because innocent people were going to be killed. Once they climbed into their vehicle, I threw the hand grenade at them. I am sorry that some Afghans got wounded. I am happy that the foreigners got killed.
From the beginning, the boy is considered the highest security threat, a person whom the U.S. military is eager to add to its growing roundup of Al Qaeda detainees. But the Afghan authorities regard him as valuable quarry, too, refusing to relinquish him. Are they playing for a bribe? If so, they've misread the situation. With American blood still on the market cobbles, heavily armed U.S. Special Forces storm the Ministry of Interior, where the boy is being interrogated. The Americans seize him by one arm as Afghan officials pull back on the other, a literal tug-of-war, but then, there's no contest.
Under U.S. custody, the boy is transferred to a forward operating base in the city, where he is subjected to "a harsh-up," hooded and placed in a prone position for ten minutes, then helped to a chair and exposed to bright lights. The procedure is repeated whenever discrepancies arise in his account. He complains of being thirsty. He slouches and fidgets. The Americans suspect he might be in drug withdrawal.
"Is this what your God wants you to do?" they yell at the boy.
"Did you know that the victims have family and children?"
During those first five hours, he tells a more elaborate story than the one in his thumbprinted confession. Now there are others who are in charge-men he knows only as "39" and "42"-and he claims that he never threw the grenade at all; rather, he thinks a man by the name of Nadir did. He claims to have met these men at a mosque in Pakistan, where they recruited him and took him to a nearby training camp. He stayed there for about two weeks with about a dozen others. He spent a lot of time sleeping there, he says. He would eat, the older men would give him white pills that made him dizzy and made people look small; sometimes the men gave him injections in the leg, and he would wake up hours later with his pants undone and everyone laughing at him. Is it all made-up? He's frightened, perhaps trying to tell them what they want to hear so he can go home. The hood goes on, comes off. The only unchanging fact seems to be that the boy was subdued that December afternoon, not far from two bloodied and maimed American soldiers. And now he feels as if he's suffocating. They keep asking questions, blasting him with words until he loses his grip on them, until an opaque glow comes down between him and them, and he slips into sleep while sitting straight up in the chair.
Sitting in his own chair in his office before the little shrine he's built with the flag and mementos from his military career, Montalvo wades through bos and folders and computerized case files, tracking the ghost of the boy back in time. It's odd, what's there and what isn't, what gets emphasized and what doesn't. Initial military reports on the night of the boy's arrest identify him as not being "any more clean or dirty than the typical Afghan," or appearing "much like every other Afghan; not covered in mud, however not freshly showered." But a military videotape of the U.S. interrogators doing their work that first night suddenly can't be found. Then there are the nearly two months the boy spends in the prison at Bagram Air Base, days full of forced standing and stress positions, hoodings and physical assaults, at a time that coincides with an array of heightened abuses, including threats of rape and the two beating deaths of other prisoners. (One, a taxi driver, is left hanging in his cell for four days while guards pummel his legs to uselessness.)So what more might have happened to him there?
After the boy has been shackled, hooded, and put on a plane for Guantánamo, after he finds himself whisked from the broken bone of war-torn winter to the humid Tropics-and put in a "cage," or "punishment place"(as the boy later calls it), for thirty days in isolation-after his life zeros to a captivity where, feet from an ocean, he can see only small patches of parched earth and cacti, the record becomes partially more clear. There are logs in which the guards employ a coded language to detail events of each day. "Alfred Hitchcock on the block" alludes to a visit from a psychologist to a detainee; a "three-piece suit" refers to the shackle system used to move prisoners. A "reservation" means an interrogation (those sometimes with torture), while "Flyer" or "FF" refers to the Gitmo-styled "Frequent Flyer Program," a sleep-deprivation tactic during which the boy is moved approximately every two hours and fifty-five minutes, from cell to cell, 112 times total, for roughly two straight weeks in May 2004. Even his weight tells a story: 130 pounds...160...151...142...119... What does a forty-pound dip in a growing male indicate?
The boy appears again and again, in Gitmo's strange pointillism, hungry, lonely, trading for what little he can, his every transgression etched in the permanent record by an ever changing rotation of guards:
"...came to Kilo block to take [detainee] to Reservation...placed...in 3 piece suit...found a breakfast roll in [detainee's] orange shorts; 3 salt packets; extra styrofoam cup; empty packets of tea, peaches, salted nuts, and lemon poppy seed pound cake were found in cell...Punishment: Loss of rec x 3 periods; Remove all comfort items x 3 days; loss of hot rations for breakfast and dinner."
"...did destroy his cup and demand a new one. Loss of CI x 4 days."
"...refused to give meal up unless he got soap. When he got soap he still refused to give up meal. Detainee later gave his meal to guard #2."
It goes on and on, the petty rebellions, the hoarding of salt packets, the cross-block talking, the covering himself with a blanket when forced to defecate under the eye of the guard, etc. When the punishments add up, he finds himself in isolation, and the guards mark his hourly activity on charts with single words:_ sleeping, sitting, praying, reading, reservation_... It goes on like this for weeks: pacing, sitting, sleeping, reservation...
Montalvo learns of the boy's 2003 Christmas Day suicide attempt, the boy bashing his head repeatedly against the wall until he's bloodied and hauled to the hospital. He reads the psychologist's evaluation in which the boy's homesickness and depression are seen as a feint, or fabrication, but also a sign of his vulnerability, and so it is recommended that he be isolated for another thirty days in order to break him. And finally he comes to the photographs.
The photographs arrive on a disk from the prosecution, jammed with files and miscellany, as part of the discovery process. It takes another defense lawyer on the team weeks to realize they're even there, a small cache from the boy's initial strip search the night of his arrest. He stands in a room, under pale light, naked before the men of Lyons and Martin's unit. His face is photographed, revealing a nasty gash across the bridge of his nose (apparently at the hands of the Afghan police). And then the camera lens examines the rest of him: his arms and legs, his torso and butt. Montalvo can't shake one photograph, taken from low and behind, the boy standing with his arms outstretched while a U.S. soldier stands before him, face-to-face, an American flag draped on the wall behind the boy's right shoulder. Another soldier sits with legs crossed in the corner, talking with others just out of the frame. It seems so composed.
There are more, including pictures of the boy's penis. According to a statement by Major Kenneth Chavez, the operations officer in charge of the detainee, he's examined with "all of his clothes off; with only men present." Claiming to have seen photographs of the exam, another soldier, Warrant Officer David Alan Rolbiecki, says that he remembers that Jawad's "genital area, as well as his chest and armpits, had been shaved, which is consistent with a martyr."
It's plain to Montalvo that anyone would look at those same pictures and see a boy too young to have reached puberty, that the pictures are more about humiliation than anything. No-this certainly doesn't feel like justice anymore, he thinks, but some strange violation of it.
Over the seven years of the boy's incarceration, the government puts forth many versions of the detainee: They allege that he claimed to have foreknowledge of 9/11, owned a shop in Khost, and was a member of a group with close ties to bin Laden. The claims seem preposterous for a boy at best 15 or 16 when arrested, but moving toward trial, the defense requests funding to send a private investigator to Afghanistan. When the request is denied, Montalvo volunteers for the trip, nominating fellow defense attorney Christopher Kannady to ride shotgun. They travel without backup, one carrying a nine-millimeter, the other a knife. On the day they plan to go to the marketplace in the shadow of the blue-domed mosque called Pul-e Khishti, Montalvo procures a convoy from the nearby U.S. base. But at the bazaar, the U.S. soldiers start shouting, threatening, and the crowd begins to threaten back. Montalvo and Kannady scramble to document the crime scene, where the incident took place, where the boy allegedly was subdued, where the eyewitnesses were. They work as quickly as possible, filming, photographing, interviewing. They push into a nearby restaurant, one with a blue awning, where the hostility seems so thick Montalvo has a flash of how easily he could become Lyons or Martin. And where would that leave his kids? Which raises another question: What the hell is he doing here?
Montalvo and Kannady track down some of the prosecution's main witnesses: The Afghan police officer whose testimony is central to the government's case claims he subdued the boy that December day with his judo, but he also claims that he pointed a gun at the boy's head when he went to throw a second grenade and muttered, Dirty Harry-style, "I wouldn't do it." Other witnesses admit to having been bribed for their testimony, and yet another confesses to have been sitting far across the river. Then there are the Kuchis, a nomadic tribe to which the boy belongs. Montalvo thinks it important to reach out to one of the chieftains, an intimidatingly large mujahideen hero named Shirhan, in order to try to ascertain background on the boy. But in that first meeting, the translator has a hard time deciphering Shirhan's accent as he grows more and more agitated. "He's a boy," Shirhan bellows. "He must be brought back." Montalvo, fearing that the tribal chief might settle things by violence, plays for a quick wrap-up and a contact number. Suddenly three of Shirhan's men reach into their robes. Montalvo catches Kannady's eye, fearing a drawdown, flickering a message-you go left, I'll go right-and then the Kuchi tribesmen, all at once, pull out their...cell phones.
The boy's father was also a mujahideen fighter, killed in the first year of the boy's life in a battle with the Soviets. Which left his mother to raise him. When they meet her, she sits invisibly inside her light blue burka, and though Montalvo isn't allowed to address her directly, the keening notes of her sobs are unmistakable. She claims her son was 12 when he was arrested, and to Montalvo's mind the fact jibes with what he knows. Unlike the al-Bahluls of the world, who face their incarceration with defiance-spitting and throwing feces at the guards-the boy is known to call out his mother's name in the moments of his deepest despair.
The world sees a flicker of that despair during a 2008 hearing at Guantánamo. In a reporter-filled courtroom, with the defense by his side, the boy demands to be heard by the judge, speaking out in Pashto. "I want to express that I have been punished a lot," he says, and launches into a disjointed ramble, referencing, among others, a "big commander," "the red prison person," and "some tape kind of cell or cage." He touches on his constant blindfolding and then the sleepless rooms in which he's exposed to twenty-four-hour cycles of bright light. "Why am I sitting here, why am I in the prison?" he pleads. "I am asking you this question."
And yet the case against him has already begun to unravel. David Frakt, who leads the defense, hammers at the foundation of the charges-three counts of attempted murder and three of serious bodily injury-while the lead military prosecutor, Darrel Vandeveld, abruptly quits, claiming the prosecution is "a charade." In a burst of conscience, Vandeveld will later write a letter that rails against his side's cavalier conduct, referencing an inherited trial notebook that represents five years of government effort, calling it "a first-year law student's untutored attempt to evaluate the case." To Vandeveld's mind, the boy holds no intelligence value ("[His] youth, his lack of any but the most rudimentary education, and his manifest gullibility marked him, at best, as a low level foot soldier") and, worse, has been abused by both Afghans and Americans, while a military behavioral specialist at Guantánamo has recommended more abuse for the detainee in an effort to extract information from him. ("I lack the words to express the heartsickness I experienced when I came to understand the pointless, purely gratuitous mistreatment of [the detainee] by my fellow soldiers.")
In closing, Vandeveld writes, "[H]ad I been returned to Afghanistan or Iraq, and had I encountered [the detainee] in either of those hostile lands, where two of my friends have been killed in action...I have no doubt at all-none-that [the detainee] would pose no threat whatsoever to me.... I respectfully ask this Court to find that [his] continued detention is unsupported by any credible evidence."
Not long after Vandeveld's resignation, the judge rules that all of the boy's statements, having come as a product of torture, will be inadmissible. On July 30, 2009, the court grants the defense a petition of habeas corpus. The Department of Justice concedes that this boy, Mohammed Jawad, is no longer detainable, and he is ordered released.
Montalvo delivers the news himself at the gate to Camp Iguana. When Jawad approaches that day, he's already telling Montalvo about another detainee, a Uighur in the camp who needs representation. Montalvo interrupts him. "Your case is over," he says. "You're going home." There, on the spot, the boy falls to his knees and begins praying. After several minutes, he rises with tears in his eyes and hugs Montalvo through the gate.
A month later, Montalvo flies back to Afghanistan to help return the boy. Jawad is taken back separately, just as he came, hooded and cuffed on a transport, but forever marked now. When he touches down in Kabul, more confusion ensues. The Americans encourage the Afghan authorities to detain him. But then Montalvo intervenes again, commandeering Jawad at the office of the Afghan attorney general, taking him home to his mother at last.
In a room, she waits for her son. And then comes a young man with an impressive beard and blemished skin, a heavy brow, and dark, penetrating eyes. Her first reaction is, no, there must be some mistake here. But the man insists he belongs to her. She reaches out, to touch his head, her hand to the spot where her son had always had a knob, and then she knows and can't speak anymore, holding him close.
So this is the happily ever after, the mother-and-child reunion, the tribe killing the fatted lamb to celebrate the answer to their prayers. And this is Montalvo, the gung-ho superpatriot born on Flag Day, the man with a Marine shrine in his office, who's never voted for a Democrat in his life, having ecuted his military duties with thoroughness-some might dare say "honor." But he's now forever the guy who defended a terrorist. People lambast him on the Internet. He's lost two years from his wife and kids. The military-his beloved military-has threatened him with the removal of his security clearance and a court martial, though it never acts on those threats. Even after he's left the military, after he's finally retired and gone to work for a private firm, he's marked. He leaves after six months, when the firm begins to lose business based on his "past affiliations." And the grief he's caused his own parents: How can he not question the cost? "This has been a monster," he acknowledges. "I wish I weren't at the head of the spear."
Why, though, does he say it in the present tense rather than the past? The rest of the defense team has moved on: Several attorneys pick up other Gitmo cases; Frakt turns back to teaching law school and the occasional public-speaking gig on the Mohammed Jawad case, sometimes with Vandeveld, the old prosecutor, by his side. And yet Montalvo can't seem to let go of the case itself, the minutiae of it. He is 41 years old, and when he thinks about the boy it all feels terribly personal, triggering some bristling righteousness that he can't contain. "Look, we took a boy, and we put him in a cage for seven years and tortured him," he repeats over and over again. "We broke him to the point where he trusts no one, and then we threw him back among potentially shady operators, with no support whatsoever. God forbid he pulls a trigger or causes the death of someone. It'd be on my hands now."
It sounds selfless and perhaps a little grandiose, principled and perhaps seeded with something else-disillusionment, hope, guilt, an unsettling anger? After all, just how much does one newly retired Marine really owe the supposed enemy? Isn't it time to go home to his family now?
But he's not just chasing the ghost of the boy anymore. What moves him, what constitutes an inner cosmology, is a mystery even to him, one that occasionally surfaces in fragments. It's funny how memory floods the present, how everything organizes itself around lodestars: the boy in the casket, the lost father. He remembers the day he came home from school at age 12 and his mom told him one of his best friends had been sodomized and stabbed to death. He remembers the wake, the open coffin, his buddy there, unsavable. And then there's the secret of his father, one kept for the first thirty-eight years of Montalvo's life because his mother always thought him "too tenderhearted" to handle it. That is, his father is not his father, that he's not Puerto Rican but Italian, the son of a man named Sal Armenia, who's dead now. He pores over an old file that he obtains, full of legal documents that attach him to his real biological father. There's a coldness to the law, a crystalline logic. But it helps him understand that he's no longer the person he thought he was, that nothing can be trusted. It makes him feel at times like there's some cable or track connecting him to another world that might explain this one.
Now Montalvo speaks to Jawad once a week by phone-and finds himself increasingly troubled by the tone of the calls. The transition has been hard, leaving him sluggish and isolated. And then there are the necessities: food, shelter, work. Upon his immediate return, Jawad meets with President Hamid Karzai, who pledges to help him find a suitable house and to provide financial assistance. But like so many promises in the swirl of the new Afghanistan, this one doesn't take hold, and as the weeks pass, Montalvo can hear Jawad's hurt and anger and, worse, his detachment. The kid is floating away. After time has played the slow, cruel trick of robbing him of his most important developmental years, the clock has started again, seemingly at breakneck speed, as if it means to devour him now.
Montalvo senses this, the shell Jawad has become, his defenselessness, from 7,000 miles away. "Take a victim, revictimize him, and dump him on a street corner, and you have a guppy trying to breathe," he says.
The only way to solve it is to go back to Afghanistan. So that's what he plans to do, invade this time to save the fatherless boy.
Kabul in the morning is cold, unsplintered sunlight and the ash taste of burning refuse blooming from somewhere beyond the walls of the guesthouse compound. It's December, almost seven years to the day of Jawad's arrest, and Montalvo emerges from his lair to the courtyard bulked in a gray hoodie, jeans, and a blue watch cap. He knows the risks of being here, outside the wire, heading into the slums south of the city. With each passing week, kidnappings and suicide bombings have been on the rise in the capital. Five U.N. employees have just been gunned down in a guesthouse attack.
Out on the street, the morning hustle is on, and there waiting by the curb is a pickup truck with shot suspension, an Afghan man at the wheel. Today, Montalvo hopes to do some recon-suss out Jawad's living situation, observe the elements surrounding him, assess the risks. He's come to reestablish a plan with Jawad, one that might include doctor visits, school, a job. A low cloud of dust sparkles over the boulevard. "Might as well draw a bull's-eye on yourself in that thing," says Montalvo, gesturing when a white Land Rover lumbers by, marked in black letters: u.n. On the sidewalks, the women cocooned in blue burkas seem to float with their heads tilted down against the backdrop of bullet-pocked walls.
Eventually the traffic thins; the city falls away. The land opens in rolling scree-covered hillocks of a gray-orange glow. Kabul occupies a narrow slot in a valley surrounded by the towering Hindu Kush mountains. Ten miles from the center of the city looms the old Darul-Aman Palace (translated as "abode of peace"). Having caught fire in the '60s and then blown to smithereens by the warlords Hekmatyar and Dostum, who spent much of the '90s destroying the city, the structure stands as its own misshapen symbol. Now, among its hollowed towers and crumbling walls, schizophrenics and heroin junkies skitter in the rubble. Even in broad daylight you can hear them howl.
The pocked dirt road leading into the slum of Chilsutoon runs along the Kabul River, which trickles in a logy flow in winter. A quarter mile along, a dimly etched figure in the dust appears, resolving into a young man, oddly fresh among the squalor. He wears a burgundy Kandahari hat with mirrored decorations, a brown sweater, black sandals, and a camel-colored blanket wrapped over his upper body for warmth. This is Mohammed Jawad. Since returning, he's become something of a celebrity, recognized on the street by little kids and old people alike. On his wrist he wears an oversize black watch, an accoutrement of the moneyed, though he doesn't seem to have any. He has thick black hair, close-set eyes, small ears, a wide face with handsome angles that breaks into a smile when he sees Montalvo. They embrace in the street warmly; then Jawad quickly leads him down an alley of caked mud, hemmed by rough earthen walls, running with open sewage, and littered with empty cigarette packs. He comes to a wooden door, pushes into the courtyard of the place he calls home-a concrete structure-then leads Montalvo up a set of stairs to a common room with red cushions and pillows on the floor.
Montalvo has taken pains to keep the time and day of his visit vague, just in case. Yet within ten minutes of arrival, a formal parade of men starts filing into the room. They wear turbans and Kandahari hats, too, beards, cloaks, scarves, and wool blankets draped over their shoulders. From earlier visits, Montalvo already knows Jawad's uncles-whose names translate as Uncle Good Flower and Uncle Avenger (Jawad, as it turns out, translates as "generous person")-and his maternal grandfather, an exquisite-looking old man with a wisp of gray beard and ghostly, cataracted eyes. And now comes Shirhan, the tribal leader, the prototype of nomad-warrior-mujahideen, accompanied by three or four boys who throw white candied almonds, a special greeting that causes Montalvo to flinch. ("Oh-okaaay," he exclaims as one bounces off his biceps, then giggles.) Out comes a cloth that gets laid on the floor, and then a tray with plates and bowls. Green tea, crunchy corn. And the smells of the delicious Kabuli pilau with rice, carrots, and raisins, and hidden chunks of meat, tender and cinnamon-flavored. It's all a gift from Jawad's mother, unseen somewhere in the house.
As much as everyone in the room defers to Shirhan, and as much as the crowd huddles close around Jawad, their long-lost son, Montalvo the Marine is the honored guest, which brings another sort of pressure. In the past, Shirhan has asked him for little favors, to check up on a person or two, say, to see if they've ended up in Bagram, or in some prison beyond, something Montalvo's not at all inclined to do. "Important not to get into horse-trading here," he says. "In the end, we don't know who any of these guys are."
Montalvo and Jawad seem at ease with each other, and Montalvo is quick to joke with him. "You looking for a girl?" he says. "We need to find you a girl." Is this even appropriate conversation for a devout Muslim? Jawad smiles at him-which absolves Montalvo of all the things he may represent for this crowd: like, first and foremost, America. Uncles Good Flower and Avenger sit on either side of their nephew, with contented expressions. In the melee of laughter and competing voices, in the full flush of goodwill, Shirhan leans over and whispers something to the translator, who repeats it to Montalvo. It sounds like: I can no longer guarantee your safety here. The translator repeats it in a low voice.
"Jesus," mutters Montalvo. "Is this a kidnapping now?" Then, to Shirhan and his men: "Well, that's our cue, sirs. It's been nice." He stands and authoritatively shakes all the hands, and tries to navigate the crowd out the door, down the narrow stairs, out into the alley with its open sewer, everything heightened by that little drip of fear, back out to the dirt road where the cars are supposedly waiting. But when he gets there-out in the sun-the cars are gone.
Montalvo fidgets at the idea of becoming the exact target he'd hoped to avoid being. The group stands like a herd of horses, Shirhan tapping out numbers on his cell phone with his thick fingers (which one of his murky contacts might he be calling?), Jawad sinking back into the protection of the alley (he seems ethereal, half gone, floating away), Montalvo scanning the road.
Finally, vehicles appear. Montalvo heaves a sigh of relief. "What a clusterfuck," he says.
In the middle of Kabul, in a concrete villa behind high walls that houses the offices for an NGO called Children in Crisis, an Afghan therapist talks about Jawad's fear. He was so full of fright when he first came home that they kept him on tranquilizers and sedatives. The therapist talks about his depression and his trouble concentrating and his mistrust of authority figures. Jawad regularly dodges his weekly appointments, he says, to the point where he no longer bothers to schedule them. When Montalvo hears this, he can barely suppress his concern, and a little fury, too, directed at the therapist. "He's very fragile. He needs to be talking all the time about what happened," he says, "sometimes a little, sometimes a lot."
There's also an Afghan doctor here and two caseworkers, all members of the team Montalvo has assembled to save the boy, who sits among them in the circle, following the conversation as if it's all about someone who's not there. Then suddenly his fingers flutter up to his temples, and his head drops. Montalvo addresses him in a big-brotherly tone, one kindly though gently admonishing. "They can't help you if you don't show up for your appointments, Jawad. So-why aren't you showing up?"
Jawad understands-and can speak-more English than he allows after his time at Gitmo, but whenever asked a question, he leans forward, fingers steepled before his mouth, waiting for the translation, considering for a moment, quickly scanning the room (making flitting, almost nervous eye contact), and then speaking in Pashto, a pause belonging to someone who has learned to weigh his words, been scrubbed of anything impulsive or rambunctious or irrepressible.
"Because of the house problem," Jawad says finally. (Jawad has made it clear in earlier phone calls to Montalvo that he fears the neighborhood in which he lives, wants a cot after seven years on one at Guantánamo, and dreams of a computer, a refrigerator, or taxi, but would first take a good stove that doesn't leak smoke everywhere.)
Montalvo pushes again. "We're gonna deal with the house," he says. "But why aren't you showing up for these appointments?"
Jawad steeples his fingers again, exhales. "Listen," he says, gazing intently at Montalvo, "when I was in Guantánamo, the psychologists asked questions. 'Do you like Arabs?' "-as it turns out, a common saying directed at disobedient children in Afghanistan invokes an Arab as the bogeyman-"And when I said, 'No, they frighten me,' then they moved me into the camp with Arabs. Everything I told them, they used against me."
The other reason for skipping appointments, says Jawad, is that he doesn't want to remember all that has happened to him. When he thinks about it-the memories of his incarceration-his head hurts so badly he sometimes has to lie down. Which is partly why he never seems to leave the house, has given up on a job or taking classes in hopes of becoming the doctor he dreams to be. "He does nothing right now," declares Montalvo, turning back to the doctors. "This nothing is also a disease for him."
And so the question of the moment becomes how to reanimate Jawad-until Jawad himself interrupts. "I have something to say," he says, and the room stills. He then describes a recent evening when he woke to a knock at the door. His aunt had answered. From upstairs, Jawad heard murmuring. Two men, their faces covered, had demanded to see him. His aunt told them to leave at once. They left-but then returned on another night soon after, late, only to be turned away again. Clearly they were intent on making their shadowy presence known, but who were they? What did they want? And how long before they merely take what they want?
Jawad has no answers to these questions, only fear, a spindled pain in his head. "I just want to live in peace," he says. He seems suddenly cranky. Clearly he's been at it for too many hours. The perceived threat-the dark riders from some myth looking to devour him-discomposes him so much that he abruptly rises to leave the room. "When I'm scared, I read the Koran," Jawad says. In his absence, the team members let their conjecture fly, presuming the men at the door that night to have been Taliban, or worse.
Montalvo wearily runs a hand over his face. He looks pale, a little sick, as if he's just been punched in the gut. "Do you see what we're up against here?" he says in disgust. "We think it's over, but it's just beginning."
After the meeting, Montalvo tries to arrange the next day's rendezvous. "I'm sorry to say this," announces Jawad, "but I can't be seen with you. There are people who think I'm a spy for the Americans." Montalvo belies no anxiety, responds simply: "Okay, Jawad, but I'd like to see you a little while I'm here." Then, when Jawad leaves with his uncles, Montalvo says, "I can't tell what kind of shit he's pulling now."
For the next few days, Montalvo careens across the city from meeting to meeting, trying to rouse support, funds, a flicker of interest for Jawad. He meets with Afghanistan's leading human-rights lawyer to solicit help. Then he powwows with a representative from UNICEF, a French woman named Christine, with whom he contemplates the idea, proposed by Afghan officials, of moving Jawad to England. When Karzai's schedule proves impenetrable-Montalvo hopes to press him to make good on his initial promise of support-he solicits Sayed Hamed Gailani, the 79-year-old head of one of the country's most influential families, a fabled mujahideen leader and now deputy speaker of the senate, who warmly receives the American. Over pomegranate juice and pastries, Montalvo states that his great fear is that now Jawad has become "distracted."
"We are tremendously carried away by your human sentiments toward Jawad," responds the old man. "You know, Jawad is an exceptional case for us. He is one of us, the best of us. When we were under Soviet occupation, his father gave his life for Afghanistan as a freedom fighter, leaving a widow and an orphan, so we feel a deep obligation. And yet his tribe, the Kuchis, have fought with the militants against the government. Those militants have made handsome offers to use him, and those who offer are not doing it for God but to expand their own ranks. So we must try to educate him and help as best we can."
There's a swirl of futility to these conversations, as if everyone is biding their time until Montalvo leaves. "I couldn't agree more, Your Excellency," he says, unwavering. "Someone has to take responsibility for him. But in the end, who will that be?"
Somewhere in the slums south of the city, Jawad is in his cell, sleeping, pacing, praying... Then, on the fourth day, in the week just before Christmas, he finally rings Montalvo's phone. He thinks it best to meet at Montalvo's guesthouse-the one across from the Iranian embassy, with its black-masked guards-far from the prying eyes of his Chilsutoon neighbors. He arrives with Uncle Good Flower and Uncle Avenger. They park in the street, then come through two checkpoints, past the guards armed with Uzis, who vaguely pat the three men down, after which they enter the inner sanctum. Before the war, before the little compound had been bought by a BBC cameraman and decorated with old Winchesters and vintage movie posters, Osama bin Laden had installed his fourth wife, his alleged favorite, here. Now it has a lively bar and good pizza, packed with the odd lot of Western security people and aid workers, journalists, and contractors.
Thus, Jawad's entrance is met by some uneasy stares. He seems relieved to retreat to Montalvo's room. "I've been missing you, Jawad," booms Montalvo, walking across the courtyard with an arm slung over his shoulders. "Why you been hiding out on me?"
In the room, Montalvo provides bullet-pointed updates of his conversations and negotiations of the past few days. Jawad sits and listens, but it's clear he's losing patience. His leg bounces up and down; his fingers butterfly up to his temples and down again. He tells Montalvo that he'd like all the case files so that he can review them, to remember all those things that happened to him back there, in that humid cage. And although he can't really read English, he keeps asking for them, over and over. "Do you remember the cameras they had at Guantánamo, the ones in the corners of the room every time we met?" he says. "I want all that film, too." As Montalvo tries to explain how security cameras work-that it's doubtful that any of the video at Guantánamo still exists-there sits Jawad, the shattered mirror, grasping to put the pieces back in order to catch sight of himself.
"I didn't want to ask you this when you were at the house," he says now to Montalvo, "but why are you here?"
Montalvo absorbs the translation, blinks, and-rather than replay the twenty hours in coach it has taken to get "here," or his separation again from his family during Christmas; instead of relating the conversation he had with his eldest son ("This isn't fair," he'd said. "Why do you keep leaving us to go see that boy?"), not to mention the danger involved every time he sticks his bristly head outside the gate-he resettles his big frame on the seat. He betrays no emotion, replying calmly, "Look, Jawad, I came to see you because I'm worried about you-and I'm here to get you squared away."
"What about the case?" shoots Jawad.
There's been some preliminary talk about filing a lawsuit against the U.S. government-something Jawad is very keen to do with Montalvo's support, though Montalvo knows "the shitstorm" a case like this will cause back home and the daunting odds of it going forward in the first place.
"If this is something you really want," says Montalvo, "then we're going to have to go through everything that happened to you again. Is that something you think you can do?"
"I want to know when somebody's going to apologize to me for what they did," Jawad says. "I've already told you all about what happened. Over and over." He's touching different parts of his body-his shoulder, his stomach, as if remembering. "Why do I have to go through all of that again?"
In a brief moment of downtime, Montalvo has done a little Christmas shopping, buying a rug for his wife and some slingshots for the boys. He returns to the marketplace near the blue-domed mosque, Pul-e Khishti, walking in Jawad's footsteps yet again, to eat lunch in the restaurant with the blue awning where all the stares from blanket-wrapped men make him skittish again. Is there a boy out there waiting to lob a grenade through the door? Why does he tempt fate like this?
Perhaps it's something unconscious, a felt affinity, the proximity to one's possible annihilation, that renews one's commitment to his ideals. Being here this time, too, has triggered that unconscious need to do something for those who can't do for themselves. He's made a series of calls to embassies and orphanages to try to adopt an Afghan girl-a plan he hasn't even cleared with his wife-only to find that being American means he can't. He registers his disappointment ("Now what will her life be like?"), then carries on.
At the guesthouse, Montalvo and Jawad meet one last time, ensconced in Montalvo's room, with time almost run out. It has dawned on Montalvo that, in the glacial, corrupt flow of Afghanistan, he isn't going to fix Jawad with one, or two, or maybe even three visits. This is going to be a life project, an exorcism of anger. One thing Jawad has taken from Guantánamo is a willingness to speak his mind. On the day of his return to Afghanistan, just after being freed, he was filmed by Reuters forcefully excoriating the U.S. military for the way it was treating Gitmo detainees, in particular the way it had disrespected Islam. Montalvo had stood off to the side listening to him like that, on the verge of proselytizing. Afterward, he cautioned Jawad to stop "talking smack." What he didn't tell him then was that when the devout young man spoke with that underlit fury, he seemed to all the world like the very zealot the Americans said he was.
What flickers on their faces now, however, as they lean over the table, is a gauzy weariness. They both need each other, that much seems true, but why? As proof that it's not been a dream? Unlikely as this fragile coexistence remains, they affirm for each other all that is absurd and perverse about what has indeed actually transpired-from September 11 to Gitmo to the war on terror to all those mistakenly tortured to this journey back to find some unfindable reconciliation-that it's all real. Somewhere inside, Jawad knows that he can't put himself back together-or won't-just as Montalvo understands he can never put back together his own shattered sense of American promise and justice. How do you mend a net infinitely rent?
Montalvo asks Jawad to stay and eat lunch with him, but Jawad insists that he has to be at the mosque for prayer, and keeps glancing at his oversize watch. Home and mosque, those are the only two places he feels comfortable. He fiddles with his water glass, smooths his vest, and stands to leave, when a huge blast sounds somewhere nearby, shaking the room, rattling the lights, trembling the water in the glass.
"Damn-that didn't sound good," says Montalvo.
From the courtyard a huge bloom of smoke can be seen, rising up through the air roughly a quarter mile away. A suicide bombing, in front of another guesthouse. Just like that, eight are dead, forty wounded. Several buildings have been crushed. Sirens fill the city, which comes to a standstill. Montalvo watches the smoke rise higher in the sky. "Looks like you're having lunch with us, Jawad," he says.
In the guesthouse restaurant they sit at a long table, suffering the stares of the Western clientele. Jawad eats French fries, smiles at Montalvo, and is the perfect polite guest, but his eyes keep skittering around the room, then down to his watch. Finally he sits with his hands folded in his lap. Soon he will exit through the barriers and checkpoints and disappear into the smoky void of Kabul-the city acting again as if nothing has happened, the sparkled dust clouds over the boulevards, the menace in every slow-moving vehicle, the cleanup operation of body parts and bone bits, viscera and glass fragments, nearing completion for the day.
Mohammed Jawad will soon go back to his mother, who'll be waiting, preparing dinner-but also back to his own fate again, to some deeper nothingness. He'll walk out under that plume of acrid smoke, where anything, any act of violence or kidnap, is possible. In the months to come, he'll be briefly rearrested by the Afghan police, held passingly by the U.S. military, and finally flee to Pakistan, in order to "live in peace," as he'll tell Montalvo on the phone, in tribal lands where he hopes no one can reach him, not even his uncles-who, it turns out, are not who he first thought they were.
But now he steals a glance at Montalvo, who's laughing at a joke. Others in the restaurant-the contractors and war profiteers and hangers-on-look up again from their meals, register the noise, the image of a burly American consorting with what appears to be the enemy, and then go back to stabbing their food, heads down, in low whispers. Montalvo will never be able to explain it to them, or anyone. Not even his kids. This boy needs him. It's that simple. If Jawad is unhappy to be missing prayer, he doesn't show it. If Montalvo harbors his own discontent, he doesn't show it, either. They're together, having both waited much longer than this to be free.


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|more useful options
Re: My "if" is failing!by graff (Chancellor)
|on Nov 29, 2012 at 02:56 UTC ( #1006148=note: print w/replies, xml )
|Need Help??
I'm wondering if maybe you're going about this the wrong way. You gave us this description of the task:
I am parsing an HTML file for a word in a foreign language. If the word is found, it will add it to a file.Your code expects you have a file called "test.txt" that contains one or more (Urdu?) words. BTW, is the text in that file UTF-8 encoded? Have you made sure that your script is reading it correctly?
Then your code expects you have a file called "platts_wkg.html", which is assumed to contain one or more matches to the words in test.txt. Is the html file encoded the same way as test.txt? Have you checked whether some of the words that "ought" to match might be using numeric character entities (e.g. ب or ء for the Urdu letter "b")?
But there are some problems with the OP logic:
In other words, your "if" statement is not failing - it's doing what the logic says it should do. The problem is that the logic is wrong.
I think you should start by reading all the contents of "test.txt" before you open the html file. Combine all the target words into a single regex, and then do just one pass over the html data - like this:
If there's something you want to do with lines that don't match for any of the target words, you can put an "else" clause in the while loop that reads from the html file. But in that case, I would again recommend that you avoid doing anything that involves manual input to the script for each html line - put stuff into an array or hash, print it to a separate file, and deal with it in some way that's likely to be easier and less error-prone.
In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom

subset: commoncrawl


text:
If you have a small outdoor space where people like to gather and hang out – maybe it's the perfect people-watching spot – get them off their feet with a deep seating patio rocker in natural wood that blends in with its surroundings, yet provides ultimate comfort. Fiesta Red Stripe outdoor cushions provide a debonair touch that's enhanced by the Sky Blue outdoor lumbar pillow. Add the matching side table to hold beverages, outdoor candles or even a small plant.
|Outdoor Living Spaces
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At the moment it just contains a simple channel control, control over the active cuelist and links to html pages with the hanging plot and focus plot of the current show. The hanging plot itself has an imagemap which allows you to select the fixtures by touching them on the .jpg. It will need alittle html fiddling if you want to use the plots section and ofcourse you'll have to create the imagemap yourself if you want to use that.
I have a few questions though.
Is it possible to source the script.mq page and then run the commands directly? At the moment they are all linked to full urls containing the commands. Which is creating a few problems.
I've tried smething along the lines of :
Code: Select all
<script type="text" src="127.0.0.1/scripts.mq"></scripts>
<!-- to run the command-->
HC.select('command line variable')


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Schwellenländer bieten unserer Ansicht nach im Vergleich zu Industrieländer nach wie vor ein besseres Wachstumspotenzial. Der langfristige Trend einer höheren Durchdringung des Konsumsektors und steigenden Wohlstands, dürfte für diese Märkte ein gutes Fundament für die Zukunft darstellen.
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Paneer is one of my favorite ingredients to cook with.Every time i make some paneer at home i want to cook something different.This time as the title says i combined paneer and cashews.Here the Paneer/cottage cheese is cooked in a combined onion ,tomato and cashew gravy.This is one of the tastiest dish i have cooked.Simply melts in your mouth.The green bell pepper compliments the paneer well.
Paneer cubes - 20 nos
Onions - 2 medium size , diced
Tomatoes - 2 medium size, diced
Green bell pepper - 1 medium size, diced
Frozen green peas - 1/4 cup
Ginger- Garlic - 1 tbsp, finely chopped
Green chillies - 3 nos ,slit
Curry leaves - 1 whole sprig
Broken Cashews - 3 tbsp, divided 2 + 1
Cumin seeds - 1 tsp
Turmeric pdr - 1/2 tsp
Chilli pdr - 1/2 tsp
Coriander pdr - 1 tsp + 1/2 tsp
Sugar -1/2 tsp
Salt to taste
Water as reqd
First we need to brown the paneer cubes.For that spread some butter on the bottom of a pan.Put the paneer cubes on it and brown 2 sides of the cottage cheese/paneer.Remove and keep it aside.
Next step is to prepare the gravy.For that heat some oil in a pan.Add finely chopped ginger garlic, green chillies and curry leaves.Saute for a few secs.Add chopped onions and some salt.Let it caramelize.Then add turmeric pdr,chilli pdr and coriander pdr.Saute for a minute.Now add the diced tomatoes.Let it cook for some time.Check salt.Transfer the contents into a food processor ,add 2 tbsp of cashews and enough water to help grind it smoothly.Keep aside.
In the same pan heat a tsp of butter and oil.Add cumin seeds and 1/2 tsp of oriander pdr .Then add the diced green bell pepper and the remaining broken cashews.Add salt.Saute until the pepper is slightly soft.Add the frozen peas.Saute until the peas get warmed up.Add the onion tomato gravy.Pour enough water to make the consistency thin.Stir in the Paneer cubes.Cover and let it simmer for 5-8 mins.Serve warm with rotis,rice,bread.


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Dear Colleagues:
Peer review is the cornerstone on which NIH bases its funding decisions. While the individual NIH Institute and Center (IC) Directors are ultimately responsible for deciding which applications to fund, we rely heavily on the assessments of expert scientists from around the country.
Researchers who apply to the NIH for funding have their applications evaluated in two stages. After an initial review panel, called a study section, provides a written critique of the proposal's strengths and weaknesses, applications are shared with the relevant IC Advisory Councils for an additional level of review. Whereas study sections consist primarily of researchers with expertise in specific areas of science, interested members of the public as well as content experts comprise our Advisory Councils.
Last month, Dr. Richard Nakamura, Director of the NIH Center for Scientific Review (CSR), spoke to the National Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases Advisory Council about a new initiative that will help us make distinctions between the outstanding proposals that we consider for funding. He also described a program that will bring additional talented investigators into the review process. We expect these activities will further improve the quality of advice that we receive from study sections, the feedback that is provided to applicants, and, ultimately, how we are investing the American public's tax dollars in medical research. I would like to share the highlights of these activities with you, and provide you with some helpful links that you can follow if you wish to learn more.
New scoring guidance: Since 2009, study section members have rated applications on a scale of one through nine, with one representing the most favorable. Evaluation of this method has revealed that, across all applications, scores have been concentrated around the rating of two, making it difficult to distinguish between highly meritorious applications. Beginning this spring, reviewers have been receiving updated scoring guidance, which is available for all to read at https://internet.csr.nih.gov/reviewerorientation/ScoreDescriptorsVD9309.pdf. These revised descriptions for the numeric scores are intended to help reviewers focus on the potential impact of the proposed research. If you are interested in learning more about this change and how it is being implemented, I encourage you to visit https://public.csr.nih.gov/aboutcsr/NewsAndPublications/PeerReviewNotes/Pages/Peer-Review-Notes-May2013part4.aspx.
The Early Career Reviewer (ECR) Program: As part of NIH's commitment to training the next generation of biomedical and behavioral researchers, CSR is inviting full-time faculty and researchers who lack prior study section experience to join the Early Career Reviewer (ECR) program. Through the program, participants will learn to become effective reviewers. It also will help emerging researchers advance their careers by exposing them to the peer review process and connecting them with experts in related fields. Because prior NIH grant experience is not required, the program is expected to enrich the pool of NIH reviewers by providing an avenue to engage scientists from institutions that have limited NIH support.
One of the best ways to learn how NIH decides which grants to fund and to build strong grant writing skills is to serve as a peer reviewer. If you or someone you know would benefit from the ECR program, please visit https://public.csr.nih.gov/ForReviewers/BecomeAReviewer/ECR .
NIH is immensely proud of our peer review process. It represents the worldwide gold standard for funding scientific research, and these changes are poised to make it even better. Each year, our volunteer reviewers assess the rigor and potential public health impact of nearly 85,000 grant applications. To all those who donate their time, please know how essential it is to the functioning of NIH and that we greatly value your service.
Stephen I. Katz, M.D., Ph.D.
National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases
National Institutes of Health


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Friday, January 6, 2012
This just in!
7:01 AM | Posted by D'zines from the heart | Edit Post
I've just released some fantastic new products to my exclusive store at Berry Sweet Scraps for this week! Come check out all the berry sweet goodness for your scraps stashes!
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In 1948, Norbert Wiener published Cybernetics, which defined cybernetics as 'the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine'. In the recent years, cybernetics has contributed to tremendous advances from intelligent control to smart management of Cyber-Physical-Social Systems (CPSS). A variety of specialized journals and books has been published to tackle various aspects of these topics. The intelligent control techniques of cybernetics usually include, but are not limited to: artificial intelligence, machine learning and evolutionary computation. It is known that control system and external environment are usually treated separately in the traditional control. With the help of novel technologies such as cloud computing, big data and intelligent systems, the concept cyber-physical systems (CPS) was coined to describe the seamless connection and coordination between computational (or cyber) and physical resources. In addition, due to the unprecedented sphere and speed of influence experienced in the cyberspace and its profound impact on the way, we behave and interact with each other in some extent. Therefore, social and human dynamics must be integrated as a part of any effective CPS design and operation, thus inserting social factors into CPS is reasonable and well justified. Based on the above discussions, CPSS is presented, in which CPS is tightly conjoined, coordinated, and integrated with human and social characteristics. It will offer new opportunities and call for the advancement of interdisciplinary theory in both human and computational studies.
The aim of this special issue is to celebrate the 70th Anniversary of Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener, and call for the most advanced research in the field of cybernetics. Specific topics of interest include but are not limited to:
- History and Survey of Cybernetics;
- Recent Developments of Learning, Computational Games, and Artificial Intelligence;
- Modeling, Analysis, and Intelligent Control of Cyber-Physical Systems;
- Representation, Analytics, and Smart Management of Cyber-Physical-Social Systems;
- Knowledge Automation and Automation of Intelligence;
- Perspectives on Intelligent Technology and Future Cybernetics
Important Dates
- Deadline for submission: December 31, 2017
- First round of review: April 15, 2018
- Deadline for submission of revised manuscripts: May 31, 2018
- Final decision of acceptance: June 30, 2018
- Tentative publication date: October 30 2018
Submission Guidelines
Prospective authors are invited to submit their manuscripts electronically, adhering to the IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics guidelines.
Note that the page limit is the same as that of regular papers. Women's Handmade Ladies Bag Europe Bag Color Simple America Clutch Flower 1 And Evening QEQE 3 dzqfEwd and be sure to select the special issue name "Celebration of 70th Anniversary of Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener." Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts, to the ScholarOne portal. If requested, abstracts should be sent by e-mail to the Guest Editors directly.
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- Box Marble Clutch MILLY Multi Box Multi Marble Clutch MILLY MILLY Marble Prof. Fei-Yue Wang, The State Key Laboratory for Management and Control of Complex Systems, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Qingdao Academy of Intelligent Industries, China. Email: firstname.lastname@example.com
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AMD Radeon™ HD 7800M series graphics
Powerful graphics performance. Play your games; enabling the maximum detail levels, resolutions, and frame rates, the AMD Radeon™ HD 7800M Series GPUs featuring the new 28nm "Graphics Core Next" (GCN) architecture is equipped to support the latest technologies, such as PCI Express® 3.0 and the incredibly efficient AMD Enduro™ technology; to help give you the best in gaming, productivity, entertainment, and battery life - for at home and on the go1.
Ready for Microsoft Windows® 8 and DirectX® 11.1 gaming!
Additional hardware (e.g. Blu-ray drive, HD or 10-bit monitor, TV tuner) and/or software (e.g. multimedia applications) are required for the full enablement of some features. Not all features may be supported on all components or systems - check with your component or system manufacturer for specific model capabilities and supported technologies.


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Post your answer as a comment. I'll hold off releasing any comments for 24 hours. The first one with the correct answer wins. I will only post mostly correct answers to avoid embarrassment. The winner will be treated to a free lunch with a very famous person, or me.
There could be two winners. If the first correct answer isn't from an undergraduate student then I'll select a second winner from those undergraduates who post the correct answer. You will need to identify yourself as an undergraduate in order to win. (Put "undergraduate" at the bottom of your comment.)
Some past winners are from distant lands so their chances of taking up my offer of a free lunch are slim. (That's why I can afford to do this!)
In order to win you must post your correct name. Anonymous and pseudoanonymous commenters can't win the free lunch.
Winners will have to contact me by email to arrange a lunch date.
UPDATE: The molecule is S adenosylmethionine (SAM). It is the major methyl donor in biochemical reactions. Today's winners are Sean Ridout and William Grecia.
Nov. 2009: Jason Oakley, Alex Ling
Oct. 17: Bill Chaney, Roger Fan
Oct. 24: DK
Oct. 31: Joseph C. Somody
Nov. 7: Jason Oakley
Nov. 15: Thomas Ferraro, Vipulan Vigneswaran
Nov. 21: Vipulan Vigneswaran (honorary mention to Raul A. Félix de Sousa)
Nov. 28: Philip Rodger
Dec. 5: 凌嘉誠 (Alex Ling)
Dec. 12: Bill Chaney
Dec. 19: Joseph C. Somody
Jan. 9: Dima Klenchin
Jan. 23: David Schuller
Jan. 30: Peter Monaghan
Feb. 7: Thomas Ferraro, Charles Motraghi
Feb. 13: Joseph C. Somody
March 5: Albi Celaj
March 12: Bill Chaney, Raul A. Félix de Sousa
March 19: no winner
March 26: John Runnels, Raul A. Félix de Sousa
April 2: Sean Ridout
April 9: no winner
April 16: Raul A. Félix de Sousa
April 23: Dima Klenchin, Deena Allan
April 30: Sean Ridout
May 7: Matt McFarlane
May 14: no winner
May 21: no winner
May 29: Mike Hamilton, Dmitri Tchigvintsev
June 4: Bill Chaney, Matt McFarlane
June 18: Raul A. Félix de Sousa
June 25: Raul A. Félix de Sousa
July 2: Raul A. Félix de Sousa
July 16: Sean Ridout, William Grecia


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Join the Community to Make Change
The Catalyst community—including you—is one of our biggest strengths. We learn from you and grow with you. We gather you to exchange ideas, advice, and support. We meet you in person and online. We celebrate you and we talk about you. And most importantly, we give you the opportunity to connect with and inspire one another.
The more engaged you are with others who share your goals, who can offer advice, knowledge, and experiences, the greater your impact will be. We encourage you to take advantage of the Catalyst community as a resource for issues related to workplace inclusion. Comment on our blogs, research, and events. Start conversations. Meet one another through our Community Directory. Share our work on your social networks. Make an impact.


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Note to readers: Barry Schrader's "DeKalb County Life" column will appear on the first Tuesday of each month.
In 1898, Annie Glidden and a few other DeKalb women formed the Library Whist Club to raise money to buy books for the fledgling library, which had opened in 1893 in a room above the City Council chambers.
The club continues to meet today, but the original membership of 21 has been reduced to 12. There is a waiting list for those who would like to join, probably more difficult than getting into a P.E.O. chapter.
Originally the game was whist, but after a few years they changed to auction bridge, then contract bridge and later duplicate bridge, which they play today.
A Daily Chronicle article on the group's history in 1993 reported they had donated 10,140 books by that time, so 20 years later the total must be near 11,000, but DeKalb Library Director Dee Coover said they have stopped counting.
Initially the club donated books only after members had perused them "to make sure they reflected the correct moral tone." But after a few years, the city's librarians were entrusted with making decisions on book selections. I wonder what they would have thought of "Catcher in the Rye" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover" or even "Huckleberry Finn" in those early days.
The 12 women meet each Monday afternoon during the fall and winter for refreshments and some serious card playing. They rotate among members' homes and have alternates or substitutes on call when a member cannot attend. Such was the case one day last month when I visited the club and two women were there as alternate players.
They elect a president, vice president, secretary and treasurer, as well as select a scorekeeper who totals the year's cumulative scores to determine a winner. The scorekeeper for the past 10 years has been Elaine Johansen, who joined in 1975 at the invitation of the late Jane Bradt.
The late Charlie Bradt (Jane's husband) once told me that in his teenage years he was allowed to fill in at the last minute when they were short of players. I recall Charlie still playing bridge at Oak Crest when he was almost 107; he passed away at age 108 two years ago.
The longest-tenured club member is Phyllis Moore, who joined 40 years ago. Her husband, Frank, like most other spouses, manages to leave the house each time she hosts the club and knows not to return until the women have departed, so he says.
In addition to Moore and Johansen, the other members are club President Fran Erickson, Marti Birkett, Shirley Johnson, Mary Pearson, Virginia Larsen, Nancy Mecklenburg, Bev Murphy, Barbara Sherman and Bonnie Yocum.
You've got to have a lot of respect for this group, staying together for 115 years, keeping focused on the goal of helping the library acquire more books, and enjoying themselves with a game of bridge along the way.
These women and thousands of other DeKalb residents have a monumental task ahead of them, trying to raise several million dollars in the next few months so the state grant for expanding the library can be secured.
• Barry Schrader can be reached via email at firstname.lastname@example.com or though P.O. Box 851, DeKalb, IL. 60115.


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Corn: This week of corn trade should stay under pressure until we see what new-crop number the USDA gives on Friday. Bulls can use the already known level of support at 532 to buy short-term this week. Bears will have to allow for some type of bounce before selling aggressively but can confidently take control at least through this week. Weather is still key but might take second place of importance at least until Friday's report. Planting estimates for Monday ranged between 12% and 20% and came in at 12%…Ryan Ettner
Soybeans: Allendale sees old-crop soybean ending stocks being reduced slightly on Friday's report, from 125 to 124 million bushels. The USDA will be releasing new-crop estimates for the first time on Friday. The average guess for new-crop ending stocks is 239 million bushels with a wide range of 147 million at the low end and 398 at the high end. We see USDA posting new-crop stocks at 238.
The Bloomberg survey showed that world ending stocks for both old crops soybeans are expected to come in at 62.4 mmt. Last month the USDA put world ending stocks at 62.63 mmt. The average guess for the 2013-14 ending stocks was 67.9 mmt.
On the domestic demand front, the cash market continues to struggle to get farmers to move soybeans. Cargill announced it will be shutting its Lafayette, Ind., soybean processing facility starting mid-month. It is likely this facility will remain closed until new-crop supplies come in. This follows last month's announcement about closure of its Emporia, Kan., plant. With the cash market continuing to struggle to get beans to move off farm, old-crop beans should find support on price dips. New-crop beans will likely struggle to rally as if the bean planning pace picks up as anticipated…Jim McCormick
- Wheat export inspections came out at 16.64M bu, which were below the estimates ranging from 23.0-27.0M bu.
- The wheat complex finished lower on Monday on pressure from a better six- to 10-day forecast and a weaker corn market. The dollar added pressure as well.
- Dry conditions continue to affect the soil moisture in Southern Russia's wheat growing area, which could lower production and prevent Russia from increasing new-crop wheat exports as previously estimated. This could continue to bring buyers to the U.S. wheat market.
- Allendale estimates total U.S. winter wheat production of 1.530M bu, which is larger than average estimates of 1.494M bu. Allendale estimates total U.S. ending stocks of 676M bu, which is slightly higher than the average guess of 658M bu for Friday's USDA Supply/Demand report. Overall, we may see lower ending stocks from April's report, but a big global supply of wheat may limit the upside.
- Spring wheat planting progress seen at 23% versus last year's pace of 82%. Wheat Good-to-Excellent conditions are down 1% from last week to 32%. Wheat could find short-term support due to delayed corn and winter wheat plantings.
- July Chicago wheat gapped lower overnight and closed near the lows of the session…Alex Bassett


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In principle, I can't support the use of military power where no important national interest is at stake. And it's hard to see what interest we have in Zimbabwe. But the temptation to overthrow Robert Mugabe, one of the world's cruelest tyrants, is strong. The current "election" campaign has been an opportunity for Mugabe to flaunt his despotism. This, though, is going a little too far:
A baby boy had both legs broken by supporters of President Robert Mugabe to punish his father for being an opposition councillor in Zimbabwe.
Blessing Mabhena, aged 11 months, was seized from a bed and flung down with force as his mother, Agnes, hid from the thugs, convinced that they were about to murder her.
She heard one of them say, "Let's kill the baby", before Blessing was hurled on to a bare concrete floor.
Zimbabwe is one of a number of African countries in which independence has been a disaster. There is no end in sight. I don't know what the solution is, but if an international effort can be put together to depose Mugabe and try to restore Zimbabwe to the normal world, we should participate.
To comment on this post go here.


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Everybody should have a Chinese Guy.
Jackie has a Chinese Guy.
And I have a Chinese Guy. His name is Dan Ming.
*TK organized the trip. Me, him, a Haitian production assistant, and whatever we could carry on our backs. A year ago I was shooting in Africa. When we were done, TK stayed behind and hitchhiked into the Congo where he spent a month in jail being accused of being a CIA agent. So the point is, we had no idea what the fuck we were doing in Haiti.
But his blog is not about Haiti. This blog is about How To Own Your Own Dan Ming.
First, ownership is not a hobby. It is a responsibility. Yes, owning a Dan Ming can be a very rewarding experience, but remember, Dan Ming was Made in ChinaTM. Do not let children under five years old play with him unsupervised in lieu of choking hazards.
I used to think he was C-3PO because there were many similarities between them. Skinny yellow robot, skinny yellow man. One is fluent in three million galactic languages, the other speaks three million forms of Friend Zone. You can detatch C-3PO's limbs; Dan likes yoga. They both like white chicks.
Dan Ming likes white chicks.
But having travelled the world over with my Chinese Protocol Droid, I realize he's not C-3PO at all. C-3PO wore the same yellow suit wherever he went. Dan Ming morphs. No matter what climate or culture we get dropped in, Dan is like a magical GI Joe figure with an endless line of accessories (though he was clearly designed by George Lucas). I have no idea where Dan stores the clothes he does for every location we go to. As far as I know, all he brings with him on the plane is his iphone, several thousand dollars*, and three or four relatives in the cargohold.
*Chinese people do not like debt and therefore avoid credit cards whenever possible. This makes them extremely attractive to home invading Korean thugs. But warning…Dan's ancestors were all eunuchs who got their balls chopped off - yet they still managed to breed. The only other creatures that ever managed to do this were the velociraptors in Jurassic Park.
When you buy your own Dan Ming, don't expect him to just start entertaining you with his fancy costumes and ability to pass off low waisted hugs as harmlessly platonic. First of all, when you open the box, you might be shocked to see how much assembly is required:
(extra small child labor hands sold seperately)
This may be an overwhelming challenge to assemble your first Dan Ming, but listen up White People, if you can take 30 minutes to assemble the Ikea Svortik Coffee table, you can take the fucking time to click Dan Ming's leg into place. Or at least activate Dan's head so that he can instruct your maid in Spanish to do the rest.
So now you've activated your Dan Ming. Where to start? What to do? I suggest exploring DESERT DAN mode.
This starter position is a good way to get acquainted with the basic survival mechanism of your Dan Ming, namely his uncanny ability to recirculate his urine internally to keep himself hydrated. In combination with Chinese herbal remedies, Dan Ming can survive indefinitely in the desert. Give him a supply of tiger penis powder, and he will actually turn into a terracotta soldier and live forever.*
*I have never eaten tiger penis powder, but I would assume it tastes something like Goretex- the waterproof material that covers rain gear and Canadians. One day scientists plan to clone human cells around Goretex creating artificial organs. I believe science has not only created that organ, it has created an entire man out of Goretex.
That man is Dan Ming.
GORETEX DAN is waterproof and virtually indestructible. His shiny high tech blue skin deflects gun shots and racial taunts.
However, he is not completely invincible as you can see below.
The blue goretex armour decreases his Wisdom enough that high level Wizards have a good shot at him. I would suggest using a MAGIC FIREBALL and aiming it at his iphone. After slaying him, collect gold coins, health potions, and $6300 in US cash.
For those of you who might still be thinking – "I like Dan, but…I wish he were more white." The new upgrade comes with a SCUBA DAN mode.
White chicks like to strap explosive water tanks onto their backs and swim underwater. White guys end up strapping on tanks and following them, sometimes to their own deaths. This is where western culture's fascination with mermaids comes from. Also, it's why Australia exists.
If Dan ever dies, it will surely be underwater trying to give a friend zone hug to a busted Nicole Kidman looking mermaid.
There are no mermaids in the Middle East, but there is IRAQI FREEDOM DAN.
GI Cho
If we're ever serious about catching Osama Bin Laden, activate five of these tough sons of bitches. There is no IED in the world that can blast through Dan's schzechuan skin.
Of course sometimes, Mings go bad. Bin Laden could get wise and offer him 72 busted Nicole Kidman looking mermaids to flip sides, and then we would have to contend with the ultimate weapon of mass destruction - AL QAEDA DAN.
His WMD is MSG.
Thankfully, an actual Ming did go to heaven and all that happened was the mermaids played Charlotte Gainsbourg records, nullifying Osama's offer.
Finally, for advanced collectors, you can play with Dan in the snow. Collect enough Mings and you can invade Planet Hoth and crush the Rebel Alliance once and for all.
Charlie don't ski.
Anyway, the point of this blog is that two weeks ago Dan died in a horrible sudoku accident. We will all miss him.*
* Obviously not true. It's hard to kill a man who drinks tiger penis powder.


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Some of the stands are permanent structures, often selling fireworks and Virginia hams in addition to veggies. Other stands are simply pick-up trucks, parked alongside the shoulder of the road, accompanied by a handmade sign planted about five feet in front of the lowered tailgate. One of my favorites is a guy who is selling 50 pound sacks of potatoes for about ten bucks. You just can't get that kind of deal anywhere else!
I had mentioned earlier the "secret – locals only" market, known as the Fresh Market. This is the stand where you take what you want, and leave the money in a box. Totally on the honor system…and it works. See the pics above and below for a sample of their wares.
Since moving to the Eastern Shore, and getting to know many of the farmers, I have a new appreciation for how hard they work for us. One of the best things a parent can do is teach their kids that foods don't just show up at the supermarket – they all start one way or another with the farmer. Willie Nelson knew this years ago when he started the Farm Aid concerts.
I know President Obama is quite busy these days, what with trying to solve the ills of Wall Street with a reorganization of the Health Care System, all the while trying not to slip on oil washed up from the BP Oil Spill, so I give two "green thumbs" up to the fine Commonwealth of Virginia for helping Mr. Obama out with this one.
That's right, August 1 – 7, 2010 is "Celebrate Virginia Farmer's Markets" week. No matter where you are, there is probably a Farmer's Market somewhere nearby. I just spent a week up in the Shenandoah Mountains and saw plenty of them. For more information on Virginia's Farmer's Markets, check out http://www.vdacs.virginia.gov/vagrown/.
Know your food – thank your farmer!


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In the age of a cocktail revolution, the most important aspect of all cocktails has been ignored. ICE
Ice can make or break a cocktail. Dilution, the melting of ice in the mixing and drinking process can ruin a cocktail by putting too much or too little water in your drink and throwing off the delicate balance. The other problem is chilling. We all like our drinks to be ice cold, but we don't like them to be watery cold.
The solution is bigger ice cubes. A bigger ice cube has the added bonus of chilling the contents of a shaker can or cocktail and not diluting the cocktail full of water. This is why Névé was invented.
Today, we will talk about chemistry and equilibrium. And booze, yes, booze is important.
Everything wants to be in equilibrium. So if you have a cocktail, with normal machine made ice cubes in it, the cocktail wants to get cooler and the ice cubes want to get warmer.
The ice cubes can exchange their cold for the cocktail's hot, where they have exposed surface area. So they do. It's called heat transfer.
In theory, the ice cubes are supposed to stop melting once they hit equilibrium and are as warm as the cocktail. In theory. But, we all know that THAT never happens. Eventually the machine made ice cubes melt away and disappear and your cocktail is diluted. Things are different with Large ice cubes.
Large ice cubes have less surface area, which are sites of heat transfer, so they don't melt as quickly as a bunch of small ice cubes in the same volume. Which means your drinks stays true to its potency and it's stays colder longer. Huzzah!
Bartenders know that bigger ice cubes are better. That's why sometimes you see them jabbing ice picks into blocks of ice. That's so old school though, and it's not cost effective. Nowadays, you can get yourself some pre-made large ice cubes from Névé Ice.


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