Here's a report on the ongoing FBI investigation into the Pakistani men who were recently arrested in Lodi CA over terrorism concerns. They had attended terrorist training camps while visiting Pakistan. A curious thing has happened, small planes have been seen flying over the Lodi area since the arrests. While many believe the planes are related to the investigation, no one's talking. Here's the money quote:

A Cessna 182 flies over Lodi. The plane, which is owned by a Delaware company, is one of at least two that have been circling over the city for nearly four weeks. (Courtesy photo by Ken Cantrell) The city is small enough that when a medical helicopter makes one pass overhead, citizens look up. When gang problems flare and local police officers team up with the California Highway Patrol to make use of a helicopter, police dispatchers are besieged with calls from citizens.

So, when white planes began circling over Lodi about four weeks ago -- around the same time scores of FBI agents converged on the city to conduct a terrorism investigation -- people took notice.

"He's doing something. He's doing some reconnaissance," said Lodi resident and pilot Arlene Farley, who even got out binoculars to peer up at one of the planes.

What the planes are doing remains a mystery, though most people believe the activity coincides with the FBI investigation that led to the arrests of five Lodi men. In other parts of the country, small planes have flown in circles over cities also under investigation on ties to domestic and international terrorism.

How long will the planes stay in Lodi?

What are they doing?

Where are they from?

Can they really see anything from that high up in the sky?

Assuming they're government-run, how much are they costing taxpayers?

Some of those questions go unanswered as local and federal officials remain mum.
- posted by Purple Unicorn @ 11:28 PM

 
Here's a piece by news correspndent Riz KHan who has worked for the BBC and CNN. He has decided to go to work for al-Jazeera because as he says he feels it has been misunderstood in the West. The accusations in the West of anti-U.S. bias don't detract from the fact that al-Jazeera is widely respected in the middle East for stirring things up in an area of the world with not much press freedom. Here's the money quote:

For more than a decade, both the BBC and CNN ruled the sphere of international news -- and I was one of the few lucky enough to work extensively for both of them during that time. Then, in the mid-'90s came a TV upstart from Qatar, a tiny country in the Gulf. Few channels have raised temperatures the way Al Jazeera has in both the West and the Middle East.

Only one problem . . . no one outside the Arab-speaking world understands it. So, how has it become one of the best recognized brands on earth? Well, it has hoards of unsolicited spokespeople for and against it. Yes, probably mostly against it but, again, I wonder how many of them have actually watched it and -- more importantly -- understood exactly what was being said. I, for one, don't speak Arabic and I'm in no position to judge it with honest, firsthand objectivity . . . so I keep an open mind.

However, I travel a lot and make a point of informally canvassing the opinion of people on how they view the television industry. Put into perspective, Al Jazeera is highly watched and at least quietly respected for stirring things up -- especially in countries where freedom of the press is at best a discretionary term.

Consistently, I listened to Middle Easterners complain about how they felt Western networks had sold out on the way they covered the news, particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq. They felt that Al Jazeera was filling the gap.
- posted by Purple Unicorn @ 11:53 PM

 
Here's an important review of a new play "Nine Parts of Desire" by an Iraqi-American playwright Heather Raffo. The reviewer, Wall Street Journal's Terry Teachout finds that the play which is about the reaction of various Iraqis from different walks of life to the Iraq war, is remarkably objective in that the characters (all played by Raffo herself), express different points of view about the war. This is opposed to most contemporary drama on political themes which almost uniformly supports the political Left. Here's the money quote:

You see a lot of plays when you're a drama critic, and you don't always get to pick them. That isn't necessarily a bad thing. Most of us have a way of sinking deeper into the velvet-lined ruts of our own well-established tastes when left exclusively to our own devices. To be a working drama critic, on the other hand, is to engage with what's out there, good and bad alike. Just because I expect to be exasperated by a show, or bored silly, doesn't mean I can afford to pass it by. Besides, I've been a critic long enough to know that only a fool writes his review on the way to the show. I can't tell you how often I've been surprised at the theater--both ways.

The most recent play to surprise me was a one-woman show called "Nine Parts of Desire." In it, Heather Raffo, an Iraqi-American actress and playwright, portrays nine characters based on a large and diverse group of real-life Iraqi women--a doctor, a painter who ran the Saddam Art Center, a political exile living in London, a young girl who loves the music of 'N Sync--whom she interviewed over the past decade. As interesting (and timely) as it sounded on paper, though, I hesitated before going to see "Nine Parts of Desire," because I feared that its perspective on life in Iraq would prove to be both predictable and tendentious. Specifically, I assumed that the characters would give every indication of having been carefully chosen (and their utterances no less carefully edited) so as to support a particular point of view about the war in Iraq, and that this point of view would be well to the left of center.

Why did I make these assumptions about a play I hadn't seen? Because I've seen, read and heard about enough contemporary American and British plays to know that the political point of view of most of their authors is well to the left of center. Henry Luce, the founder and publisher of Time and Life, was once asked why he hired so many liberals to write for his magazines, given that his own political views were unabashedly conservative. "For some goddamn reason," he replied, "Republicans can't write." Well, they've learned how, but for some other goddamn reason, they don't write plays. Of the 200-odd new plays I've seen in my two years as a working critic, not one could be described as embodying a specifically right-wing political perspective, nor do I know any New York-based playwrights or actors who are openly conservative.

For this reason alone, the odds were good that "Nine Parts of Desire" would reflect in a more or less explicit way the political consensus of what New Yorkers working in theater like to call "the theater community," and that it would do so in a way so blatant as to kill any semblance of drama. Yet it didn't. Never did I feel, not even for a moment, that Ms. Raffo was making her characters tell us what we--or she--wanted to hear. Some of them supported the war, others opposed it. Most expressed no settled opinion about the war, even though its continuing effects permeated their lives, and it soon became clear that her purpose in writing "Nine Parts of Desire" had been not to make a statement about the American presence in Iraq, but simply to suggest something of what it feels like to live there.
- posted by Purple Unicorn @ 11:51 PM