Luise Rainer Dies at 104; ’30s Star Won Back-to-Back Oscars

By ROBERT D. McFadden NY TIMES

Luise Rainer, who left Nazi Germany for Hollywood and soared to fame in the 1930s as the first star to win back-to-back Oscars, then quit films at the peak of her career for occasional stage work and roles as a wife, mother and mountain climber, died on Tuesday at her home in London. She was 104. The cause was pneumonia, Ms. Rainer’s daughter, Francesca Knittel Bowyer, said.

Ms. Rainer was a child of middle-class Jews in Düsseldorf and Hamburg during World War I and came of age in a new Germany of depression, starvation and revolution. Under Max Reinhardt’s direction, she became a young stage and film star in Vienna and Berlin, performing Pirandello and Shaw. She watched the Reichstag burn in 1933 and heard Hitler on the radio. In 1934 an MGM scout signed her to a contract.

She sailed to America on the Ile de France in 1935, a 5-foot-3 ingénue, rail thin, with dark hair and a sweet girlish smile, too innocent for celebrity. But it seemed everyone on board knew who she was. In the saloon on her 25th birthday, the stewards arranged a celebration, and she was serenaded by the Russian operatic bass Feodor Chaliapin and the great violinist Mischa Elman.

She landed in America, a stranger with a guttural Mittel-European accent that had to be subdued. But two years later, Ms. Rainer (pronounced RYE-ner) won her first Academy Award, as the best actress of 1936, for her portrayal of Anna Held, the actress, singer and scorned common-law wife of the showman Florenz Ziegfeld, in MGM’s lavish musical production "The Great Ziegfeld."

Her part, paradoxically, was small. Critics said that a single take — perhaps the most famous telephone scene in film history — captured the Oscar. In it, heartbroken Anna, smiling through tears and struggling for composure, congratulates Ziegfeld on his coming marriage to Billie Burke. She hangs up at last and dissolves in sobs. It is a moving, poignant tour de force, and the brutal camera does not look away.

A year later, Ms. Rainer won her second best-actress Oscar for the role of O-Lan, the stoical peasant wife in "The Good Earth," with Paul Muni as her husband, Wang Lung. Adapted from the Pearl S. Buck novel and produced by a dying Irving G. Thalberg, the movie called on Ms. Rainer for another dimension, an all-but-mute yet shattering performance that conveyed the suffering and endurance of China’s millions.

　

Her second Oscar stunned Hollywood. Greta Garbo, MGM’s leading actress, had been favored for her performance in the title role of "Camille." For Ms. Rainer, it meant fame and a place in history: the first person to win the top acting award in consecutive years, a feat that would be matched only by Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, and Tom Hanks.

She seemed to stand on the threshold of greatness. Even her rivals like Carole Lombard, Norma Shearer and Myrna Loy thought so. So did an adoring public. But behind the scenery, Ms. Rainer was deeply unhappy. Her marriage to the volatile playwright Clifford Odets in 1937 was failing, headed for divorce in 1940. (He was absurdly jealous of Albert Einstein, who had been smitten by Ms. Rainer.)

　

And her career soon went into free fall. She came to regard her Oscars as a curse, raising impossibly high expectations. She made five more pictures for MGM over the next couple of years, but many critics and Ms. Ranier herself called them inferior and a waste of her talents. She said that Louis B. Mayer, the autocratic head of MGM, scoffed at her pleas for serious roles in films of significance.

Beyond unhappiness with her work, Ms. Rainer came to regard Hollywood itself as dysfunctional — intellectually shallow, absurdly materialistic and politically naïve, particularly in what she called its apathy toward the rise of fascism in Europe and Asia, and labor unrest and poverty in Depression America.

She walked out on Mr. Mayer, and her contract was torn up. She was not yet 30, and her meteoric career was all but over. She returned to Europe, studied medicine, aided orphaned refugees of the Spanish Civil War, appeared at war bond rallies in the United States and entertained Allied troops in North Africa and Italy during World War II. She also made one wartime film, "Hostages" (1943), for Paramount.

During the next three decades she appeared in a handful of plays on Broadway and in London, and took occasional roles on television. Federico Fellini enticed her into the cast of his Oscar-winning classic "La Dolce Vita" (1960), but she quit before shooting began, objecting to a sex scene with Marcello Mastroianni that was later cut from the script.

She made one more film, playing an Russian dowager with a craving for roulette in a 1997 British production of Dostoyevsky’s "Gambler." She also appeared at Academy Awards ceremonies in 1998 and 2003 as Hollywood paid tribute to past Oscar winners.

Her activities made small headlines: the once-famous actress, reduced to this or that. But there was an alternate life playing out in the wings for Ms. Rainer. In the summer of 1945 she married a wealthy New York publisher, Robert Knittel. They had a daughter, Francesca, a year later. They lived in London for decades, and in Geneva.

In addition to her daughter, she is survived by two granddaughters and two great-grandchildren.

The couple loved travel, books, plays, music — their friends included Arturo Toscanini, Marian Anderson, Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht — and especially climbing in the Alps. "He was a mountain climber, and he taught me how to climb," she recalled years after her husband’s death in 1989. "Robert went with a fiddle up to the Matterhorn, and at the top of the Matterhorn he played a Bach sonata."

Luise Rainer was born in Düsseldorf on Jan. 12, 1910, to Heinrich and Emilie Königsberger Rainer. Her father was a businessman and her mother a pianist from a cultured family. Luise became an actress at 16, discovered by Reinhardt at an audition, and joined his Vienna company. Starting in 1928, she appeared in many plays in Vienna and Berlin.

In 1935 she appeared in her first American picture, "Escapade," with William Powell. After her Oscar triumphs, she was cast in five less memorable MGM films: "The Emperor’s Candlesticks" and "Big City" in 1937 and "The Toy Wife," "The Great Waltz" and "Dramatic School" in 1938. Then her star faded.

More than seven decades later, as she celebrated her centenary in 2010, Ms. Rainer, in an interview with The Scotsman, looked back on Hollywood’s golden era with a hint of revenge.

"I was one of the horses of the Louis B. Mayer stable, and I thought the films I was given after my Academy Awards were not worthy," she said. "I couldn’t stand it anymore. Like a fire, it went to Louis B. Mayer, and I was called to him. He said, ‘We made you, and we are going to kill you.’

"And I said: ‘Mr. Mayer, you did not make me. God made me. I am now in my 20s. You are an old man,’ which of course was an insult. ‘By the time I am 40 you will be dead.’ "

She was not quite right. She was 47 when he died. But she outlived him by more than a half-century.

Rectal rehydration and broken limbs: the grisliest findings in the CIA torture report

From London Guardian

 

Parts of the CIA interrogation programme were known, but the catalogue of abuse is nightmarish, especially knowing much more will never be revealed

The full horror of the CIA interrogation and detention programmes launched in the wake of the September 11 terror attack was laid bare in the long-awaited Senate report released on Tuesday.

While parts of the programme had been known – and much more will never be revealed – the catalogue of abuse is nightmarish and reads like something invented by the Marquis de Sade or Hieronymous Bosch.

Detainees were forced to stand on broken limbs for hours, kept in complete darkness, deprived of sleep for up to 180 hours, sometimes standing, sometimes with their arms shackled above their heads.

Prisoners were subjected to "rectal feeding" without medical necessity. Rectal exams were conducted with "excessive force". The report highlights one prisoner later diagnosed with anal fissures, chronic hemorrhoids and "symptomatic rectal prolapse".

The report mentions mock executions, Russian roulette. US agents threatened to slit the throat of a detainee’s mother, sexually abuse another and threatened prisoners’ children. One prisoner died of hypothermia brought on in part by being forced to sit on a bare concrete floor without pants.

The dungeon

The CIA began the establishment of a specialised detention centre, codenamed DETENTION SITE COBALT, in April 2002. Although its location is not identified in the report it has been widely identified as being in Afghanistan. Conditions at the site were described in the report as poor "and were especially bleak early in the program".

The CIA chief of interrogations described COBALT as "a dungeon". There were 20 cells, with blacked-out windows. Detainees were "kept in complete darkness and constantly shackled in isolated cells with loud music and only a bucket to use for human waste". It was cold, something the report says likely contributed to the death of a detainee.

Prisoners were walked around naked or were shackled with their hands above their heads for extended periods of time. About five CIA officers would engage in what is described as a "rough takedown". A detainee would be shouted at, have his clothes cut off, be secured with tape, hooded and dragged up and down a long corridor while being slapped and punched.

A CIA photograph shows a waterboard at the site, surrounded by buckets and a bottle of an unknown pink solution and a watering can resting on the beams of the waterboard. The CIA failed to provide a detailed explanation of the items in the photograph.

At COBALT, the CIA interrogated in 2002 Gul Rahman, described as a suspected Islamic extremist. He was subjected to "48 hours of sleep deprivation, auditory overload, total darkness, isolation, a cold shower and rough treatment".

CIA headquarters suggested "enhanced measures" might be needed to get him to comply. A CIA officer at COBALT ordered Rahman be "shackled to the wall of his cell in a position that required the detainee to rest on the bare concrete floor".

He was only wearing a sweatshirt as a CIA officer has ordered his clothes to be removed earlier after judging him to be uncooperative during an interrogation.

The next day, guards found Rahman dead. An internal CIA review and autopsy assessed he likely died from hypothermia – "in part from having been forced to sit on the bare concrete floor without pants". An initial CIA review and cable sent to CIA headquarters after his death included a number of misstatements and omissions.

Shackled to the wall

The CIA in the first half of 2003 interrogated four detainees described as having "medical complications in their lower extremities": two had a broken foot, one had a sprained ankle and one a prosthetic leg.

CIA officers shackled each of them in a standing position for sleep deprivation for extended periods until medical staff assessed they could no longer maintain that position.

"The two detainees that each had a broken foot were also subjected to walling, stress positions and cramped confinement, despite the note in their interrogation plans that these specific enhanced interrogation techniques were not requested because of the medical condition of the detainees," the report says.

‘Rectal feeding’

CIA operatives subjected at least five detainees to what they called "rectal rehydration and feeding".

One CIA cable released in the report reveals that detainee Majid Khan was administered by enema his "‘lunch tray’ consisting of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts and raisins was ‘pureed and rectally infused’". One CIA officer’s email was in the report quoted as saying "we used the largest Ewal [sic] tube we had".

Rectal feeding is of limited application in actually keeping a person alive or administering nutrients, since the colon and rectum cannot absorb much besides salt, glucose and a few minerals and vitamins. The CIA administered rectal rehydration to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed "without a determination of medical need" and justified "rectal fluid resuscitation" of Abu Zubaydah because he "partially refus[ed] liquids". Al-Nashiri was given an enema after a brief hunger strike.

Risks of rectal feeding and rehydration include damage to the rectum and colon, triggering bowels to empty, food rotting inside the recipient’s digestive tract, and an inflamed or prolapsed rectum from carless insertion of the feeding tube. The report found that CIA leadership was notified that rectal exams may have been conducted with "Excessive force", and that one of the detainees, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, suffered from an anal fissure, chronic hemorrhoids and symptomatic rectal prolapse.

The CIA’s chief of interrogations characterized rectal rehydration as a method of "total control" over detainees, and an unnamed person said the procedure helped to "clear a person’s head".

Waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah and KSM

The report suggests Abu Zubaydah was a broken man after his extensive interrogations. In CIA documents he is described as having become so compliant that "when the interrogator raised his eyebrows" he would walk to the "water table" and sit down. The interrogator only had to snap his fingers twice for Abu Zabaydah to lie down, ready for water-boarding, the report says.

"At times Abu Zubaydah was described as ‘hysterical’ and ‘distressed to the level that he was unable effectively to communicate’. Waterboarding sessions ‘resulted in immediate fluid intake and involuntary leg, chest and arm spasms’ and ‘hysterical pleas’. In at least one waterboarding session, Abu Zubaydah ‘became completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth’ ... Abu Zubaydah remained unresponsive until medical intervention, when he regained consciousness and ‘expelled copious amounts of liquid’."

The CIA doctor overseeing the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said that the prisoner was ingesting so much water that he or she was no longer concerned that regurgitated gastric acid was likely to damage his oesophagus. But, the doctor warned, the CIA should start using saline, because his electrolytes were becoming too diluted.

The forgotten man chained to a wall

One CIA interrogator at COBALT reported that "‘literally, a detainee could go for days or weeks without anyone looking at him’, and that his team found one detainee who ‘as far as we could determine’, had been chained to a wall in a standing position for 17 days’.’ Some prisoners were said to be like dogs in kennels: "When the doors to their cells were pened, ‘they cowered.’"

In April 2006, during a CIA briefing, President George W Bush, expressed discomfort at the "image of a detainee, chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper, and forced to go to the bathroom on himself". This man is thought to be Ridha al-Najjar, who was forced to spend 22 hours each day with one or both wrists chained to an overhead bar, for two consecutive days, while wearing a diaper. His incarceration was concealed from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Sleep deprivation

Sleep deprivation involved keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours, usually standing or in stress positions, at times with their hands shackled above their heads. At least five detainees experienced disturbing hallucinations during prolonged sleep deprivation and, in at least two of those cases, the CIA nonetheless continued the sleep deprivation." One of the prisoners forced to say awake for seven-and-a-half days was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Most of this time he was forced to stand. The report says that former CIS director Michael Hayden was aware that Mohammed had been deprived of sleep for this period.

At the direction of the White House, the secretaries of state and defence – both principals on the National Security Council – were not briefed on the programme’s specifics until September 2003 Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

CIA lied to officials

The White House, National Security Council (NSC) and others were given "extensive amounts of inaccurate and incomplete information" related to the operation and effectiveness of the CIA’s detention and interrogation programme. No CIA officer briefed the president on the specific CIA enhanced interrogation techniques before April 2006. The CIA did not inform two secretaries of state of the locations of CIA detention facilities, despite the foreign policy implications and the fact that the political leaders of host countries were generally informed of their existence. FBI director Robert Mueller was denied access to CIA detainees that the FBI believed was necessary to understand domestic threats.

The White House kept key members of its team in the dark

At the direction of the White House, the secretaries of state and defence – both principals on the National Security Council – were not briefed on the programme’s specifics until September 2003. An internal CIA email from July 2003 noted that the White House was "extremely concerned" that defence secretary Colin Powell "would blow his stack if he were to be briefed on what’s been going on."

Wrongfully detained

Among its findings, the report says that: "The CIA did not conduct a comprehensive or accurate accounting of the number of individuals it detained, and held individuals who did not meet its own legal standard for detention."

The CIA acknowledged to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) in February 2006 that it had wrongly detained five individuals throughout the course of its detention programme. The report’s review of CIA records indicates that at least 21 additional individuals, or a total of 26 of the 119 (22%), of detainees identified did not meet the CIA’s standard for detention.

The report calls the number "a conservative calculation" and notes it does not include "individuals about whom there was internal disagreement within the CIA over whether the detainee met the standard or not, or the numerous detainees who, following their detention and interrogation, were found not to ‘pose a continuing threat of violence or death to US persons and interests’ or to be ‘planning terrorist activities’.

With one exception, the reports says there are no CIA records that indicate that anyone was held accountable for "the detention of individuals the CIA itself determined were wrongfully detained."

CIA misled the press

The CIA gave inaccurate information to journalists in background briefings to mislead the public about the efficacy of its interrogation programme, the report reveals.

"In seeking to shape press reporting … CIA officers and the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs (OPA) provided unattributed background information on the program to journalists for books, articles and broadcasts, including when the existence of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program was still classified," the report said.

It also added that when this still-classified information was published, the CIA did not, as a matter of policy, submit crime reports – highlighting a gulf between officially sanctioned leaks and non-sanctioned whistleblowing, the latter of which is often heavily prosecuted.

The report refers to Ronald Kessler’s book The CIA At War. An unidentified party at the CIA – the name and office is redacted – decided not to open an investigation into the publication of classified information by Kiessler "because ‘OPA provided assistance with the book.’"

An article by Douglas Jehl in the New York Times also contained "significant classified information," which was also not investigated because it was based on information provided by the CIA.

Both the book and the article, the report continues, contained inaccurate information about the effectiveness of CIA interrogation programs, and untrue accounts of interrogations.

Many of the inaccuracies the CIA fed to journalists, the report says, were consistent with inaccurate information being provided by the agency to policymakers at the time.

Police Violence Seems to Result in No Punishment

Big City

By GINIA BELLAFANTE NY TIMES

When a grand jury on Staten Island declined, on Wednesday, to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the killing of Eric Garner, some critics blamed Staten Island itself, easily equating it with a culture of police coddling and conservatism. But grand juries, so willing to issue indictments in so many instances, rarely do so in cases involving police officers who have killed civilians. And they have failed to do so in far more liberal environments — in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx.

The year 1999 was a horrific one for police shootings in New York City. On Feb. 4, Amadou Diallo was killed in the doorway of a Bronx apartment building after the police, mistakenly believing he was reaching into his pocket for a gun, fired 41 shots. Several months later, at the end of August, Gidone Busch, a mentally disturbed Orthodox Jewish man, was shot a dozen times in Borough Park in Brooklyn by four police officers, after he struck one on the arm with a hammer. A few days later, in September, an unarmed man named Richard Watson was fatally shot by the police in Harlem after he fled on foot in the wake of an accusation that he had evaded a taxi fare.

Mr. Watson’s death represented the fifth fatal shooting by police officers in four weeks. The new millennium would get underway with the killing of Patrick Dorismond in March 2000 after an undercover narcotics agent shot him outside a Midtown Manhattan bar; he too was without a weapon. None of the police officers involved in the Busch, Watson or Dorismond cases faced criminal charges. Officers in the Diallo case were acquitted. Thirteen years after the shooting, the Police Department gave one of them, Kenneth Boss, the right to use his gun again.

In the current moment, police violence, like campus sexual assault, seems to be in a pandemic phase. Last month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that 461 felony suspects had been killed by police officers across the country last year, the highest figure in two decades. We are possibly, if not surely, experiencing a crisis of manhood in which the young respond to their fears in a time of rising insecurity with a concomitant blast of brutality. Darren Wilson, who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.; Officer Pantaleo; and Peter Laing, the police officer who killed Akai Gurley last month in the Pink Houses in Brooklyn, are all in their 20s.

Whatever the collective psychological causes, it is almost certain that the absence of real repercussions impedes restraint.

"If you believe in deterrence theory," as Jeffrey A. Fagan, a Columbia University law professor who specializes in policing, put it to me, "then you believe that people will refrain from wrongdoing if they believe that punishment is real. But the legal system is incapable of creating the same kind of deterrent effects for police officers." Right now, there would appear to be no obvious downside to the use of excessive force beyond personal upset and dislocation.

Apart from that are the broad latitude and deference that prosecutors give police officers in these cases. "The way the questioning often goes, it allows the officer to set forward a narrative that gives a series of justifications for his actions," Professor Fagan said. That narrative has to be challenged, and in many cases it isn’t.

　

As anyone who has watched "Law & Order" knows, the relationship between police officers and prosecutors is typically steeped in fealty, which is why advocates of police reform have called for independent prosecutors to be assigned to cases involving potential criminal misconduct on the part of the police.

"Is there hand-in-hand complicity? I believe there is," Jeffry L. Emdin told me. Mr. Emdin, a former assistant district attorney in the Bronx, represented the family of Ramarley Graham, an unarmed teenager who was shot and killed by a police officer, Richard Haste, two years ago. "The district attorney’s office works daily with members of the N.Y.P.D.," Mr. Emdin said. "I’ve had A.D.A.s vouch for the credibility of officers coming under civil rights violations," he told me, referring to prosecutors who could be expected to bring charges.

In one instance he had a client who alleged that a police officer broke his nose in a precinct house. "The D.A.'s office said, ‘No, no, he couldn’t have done that.’ "

The city believes that requiring police officers to wear cameras, a program that is to begin immediately, will help reduce instances of transgression. It’s hard to absorb the logic of that after the Garner decision, given that the existence of a video demonstrating the use of a chokehold on Mr. Garner failed to persuade the grand jury that Officer Pantaleo’s actions even demanded a criminal trial.

In a television appearance on Wednesday night, the city’s public advocate, Letitia James, called upon Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to push for independent prosecutors in these cases. Asked about this the next day, Governor Cuomo, whose initial response to the Garner decision was relatively dispassionate, deflected. "I think we should look at the whole system," he said. "I don’t think there’s any one answer."

A New Age of Activism?

From Eric Garner and Michael Brown to the Ballot Box
Charles M. Blow NY TIMES

There seems to be a new age of activism rising. From Occupy Wall Street, to the "Stop Watching Us" march against government surveillance, to the Moral Monday protests, to the People’s Climate March, to the recent nationwide protests over the killings of men and boys of color by police, there is obviously a discontent in this country that is pouring into the streets.

And yet much of it confounds and frustrates existing concepts of what movements should look like. Much does not fit neatly into the confines of conventional politics or the structures of traditional power.

It’s often diffuse. It’s often organic and largely leaderless. It’s often about a primary event but also myriad secondary ones. It is, in a way, a social network approach to social justice, not so much captain-orchestrated as crowd-sourced, people sharing, following and liking their way to consensus and collective consciousness.

If there is a unifying theme, it is at least in part that more people are frustrated, aching for a better America and a better world, waking to the reality of the incredible fragility of our freedoms, our democracy and our planet. It is a chafing at grinding political intransigence and growing political corporatism. It is a rejection of the obscenity of economic inequality. And it is a collective expression of moral outrage over systemic bias.

The suspicion of bias, in particular, is what the most recent protests have been about. They are about a most basic question concerning the nature of humanity itself: If we are all created equal, shouldn’t we all be treated equally? Anything less is an affront to our ideals.

Bias in the system often feels like fog in the morning: enveloping, amorphous and immeasurable. But individual cases, like the recent ones, hit us as discrete and concrete, about particular unarmed black men killed by particular policemen — although those particular policemen are representative of structures of power.

These cases make easy focal points for rallying cries, and force us to ask tough questions about the very nature of policing, force and justice:

When is the line crossed from protecting and serving to occupying and suppressing? When do officers stop seeing their role as working for and with a community and start seeing that role as working against and in spite of it? If bias exists in society at large, how do we keep it out of, or at least mitigate the effect of it on, every level of the criminal justice system, from police interactions to prison sentences?

There is a thin line between high-pressure policing and oppressive policing. Heavy hands leave bruised spirits, and occasionally buried bodies.

It cannot be said often enough that most police officers are not bad actors, but neither are most citizens.

Yet prejudice is a societal poison; each of us is in danger of ingesting it, and many of us do. We are constantly making judgments, but most of us are not wearing a holster with a gun. That is when the ante is upped about the nature and quality of those judgments: Did they unfairly weigh against any particular groups? How much force was used and how quickly?

　

This is why the people are in the streets. There are too many nagging questions, not enough satisfying answers. The people want their pain and anger registered.

"But in a way, this [holding impromptu demonstrations and marches] is the part that can drive longtime activists to distraction: that this...

But in a way, this is the part that can drive longtime activists to distraction: that this kind of people power doesn’t neatly translate into political power. Why not follow the recent examples of activists for gay rights and immigrant rights, who pressured politicians and worked through the political and judicial systems to achieve specific policy objectives?

Indeed some activists have already moved beyond chants for "change" and begun to develop sophisticated answers to the retort, "change what?". The trick is to redirect the passions before they dissipate, to maintain momentum when the media attention fades, and to amplify raised voices with votes cast.

I believe — because the optimist in me must — that votes will soon, somehow, follow the passion, that people will come to see marching not as a substitute for voting but a supplement to it, that more people will work to effect change inside the system as well as outside it.

One of the people’s greatest strengths in a democracy is the flexing of political muscle and the exercising of political power, through ballots and boot leather. This new activism has the potential to create a new political reality. And it will. Eventually. I hope.

The Observer view on America’s broken justice system

Obama must stop wavering over police violence against civilians
THE LONDON GUARDIAN Editorial

The highly publicised killing of Michael Brown, a young black man, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, last August was a dreadful event that led to violent local protests and expressions of outrage across the US. The shooting last month, again by a white police officer, of a 12-year-old black boy, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio, provoked a similar outpouring of fury and grief. Now the case of Eric Garner, also black, who was choked to death when New York police officers, also white, arrested him, has proved a tipping point. The ensuing nationwide uproar has produced numerous spontaneous demonstrations that continued into the weekend.

The protesters’ prime target is egregious police violence and abuse, which seems to many Americans to be endemic and deeply threatening. The broader concern is a justice system that routinely discriminates against racial minorities. In the words of commentator Vincent Warren, the main issue is "systemic, institutional racism in police forces throughout our country", underpinned, unwittingly or otherwise, by legal and court processes that typically favour the appointed agents of law and order over the rights and protections of the ordinary citizen.

It was not the circumstances surrounding Garner’s death that provoked street "die-ins" in New York and elsewhere, but the incomprehensible decision of a grand jury not to bring charges against the police officer, Daniel Pantaleo, whose chokehold, recorded on video, killed him. A similar decision in Ferguson not to prosecute Darren Wilson, who shot Brown, also sparked calls for reform. Even in a heavily armed nation with a strangely permissive approach to gun violence, this confluence of three high-profile, lethal injustices had a shocking impact. The American justice system gave the world the benchmark, "three strikes and you’re out". On this basis, heads should roll. Someone, surely, should pay?

Apparently not. The official response to the killings, from Barack Obama and the attorney-general, Eric Holder, downwards, has been dilatory, dispassionate and disappointing. The president cuts a dispirited figure in these post-midterm days. There was a gap, he said, between America’s "professed ideals" and the day-to-day reality facing minority groups trapped by poverty, poor housing, failing schools and persistent discrimination. But there had been "commissions before, there have been task forces, there have been conversations and nothing happens", he lamented. So what could be done? Obama’s solution was to set up yet another task force, to investigate the Garner case. This in addition to the two ongoing Justice Department inquiries in Ferguson.

Such a half-hearted approach will not do. Police violence, particularly involving black people, is a recurring national problem. So, too, is racial discrimination. According to the Ferguson Action network, set up after Brown’s death, a black person in the US "is killed by someone employed or protected by the US government every 28 hours". In Cleveland, where Tamir Rice died, police were guilty of using "excessive and unreasonable force" in up to 600 incidents investigated before 2013. Police forces in New Orleans, Seattle, Albuquerque, Oregon, Connecticut, Puerto Rico and Warren, Ohio, are all supposedly implementing reforms after accusations of systematic civil rights violations. Repeated failures by the justice system to treat black people equally, the misuse of prisons to disproportionately incarcerate young blacks, the "militarisation" of police forces through their acquisition of lethal, army-style equipment, a culture of impunity among law enforcers emboldened by an oppressive, post-9/11 security mindset, the inability of federal and state governments to oversee autonomous city police forces and the failure of a polarised national body politic to address minority concerns comprise the national backdrop to the recent killings.

Only a truly national reform programme can begin to eliminate abuses. Ferguson Action’s manifesto is a good starting point. Its demands include a comprehensive, Cleveland-style review of local police departments, the publication of race-related data, uniform best practice standards and community-based alternatives to incarceration. Most importantly, perhaps, the manifesto calls on Obama to initiate "a national plan of action for racial justice". Obama should listen. For a disempowered president nearing the end of his term, and as the first black man to occupy the White House, what better way to leave his mark?

Kent Haruf, Novelist of Small-Town Life in Colorado Plains, Dies at 71

By WILLIAM YARDLEY NY TIMES

Kent Haruf pulled a wool cap over his eyes when he sat down at his manual typewriter each morning so that he could "write blind," fully immersing himself in the fictitious small town in eastern Colorado where he set a series of quiet, acclaimed novels, including "Plainsong," a 1999 best seller.

Mr. Haruf often wrote a chapter a day, most recently in a prefabricated shed in the backyard of his home in Salida, Colo., where he died on Sunday at 71. Punctuation, capitalization, paragraphs — they waited for the second draft. The first usually came quickly, a stream of imagery and dialogue that ran to the margins, single-spaced.

The ring of the return oriented him, as did the familiar world he saw in his mind’s eye: the community he called Holt, a composite of towns in Colorado’s eastern plains where he had lived as a boy. His father was a Methodist minister, and the family moved often.

"Plainsong" describes the interlocking lives of several families: aging brothers, a pregnant teenager they take in, young boys whose mother suffers from depression. It was the first book he wrote using his distinctive regimen — he produced much of it in the summers while he taught at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale — and he spent six years writing it. Critics praised his spare sentences and the depth and believability of his characters and their circumstances.

Writing in Newsweek, Jeff Giles called the book "a moving look at our capacity for both pointless cruelty and simple decency, our ability to walk out of the wreckage of one family and build a stronger one where it used to stand."

"Plainsong" made Mr. Haruf (rhymes with "sheriff") something of an overnight sensation, even though he was 56 at the time and had been writing for more than 30 years.

He was rejected when he first applied to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in his 20s, and he was rejected when he sent early stories and novels to publishers. After several years he was accepted at the Writers’ Workshop; its overseers relented when they learned that he had moved his family to Iowa City, determined to enroll.

More rejection awaited, but he eventually broke through. He published his first novel, "The Tie That Binds," about a woman who gives up her chance for love to care for her difficult father, in 1984. Six years later he wrote his second, "Where You Once Belonged," about a football hero turned criminal.

His first two books brought him critical respect but few readers. "Plainsong" brought both, settling in on best-seller lists in both hardcover and paperback and being named a finalist for the National Book Award. It was also made into a television movie in 2004.

"Plainsong" earned Mr. Haruf enough money to allow him to retire from teaching at Southern Illinois, but he continued to write blind.

"It takes away the terror when you’re blind and you can’t go back and rewrite a sentence," he told The New York Times in 1999. "It calls for storytelling, not polishing."

In 2004 he published "Eventide," which focused on some of the same characters as "Plainsong." Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani said that it had "the whiff of the formulaic" but that "Mr. Haruf makes us care about these plain-spoken small-town folks without ever resorting to sentimentality or clichés."

Nine years later he wrote "Benediction," also set in Holt. It was a finalist for the inaugural Folio Prize, awarded by the Folio Society in Britain. In May 2015 his publisher, Knopf, is scheduled to release his novel "Our Souls at Night," which Mr. Haruf finished this summer.

"I’m doing the copy editing on it right now," his wife, Cathy Haruf, said this week after confirming his death, of complications of a lung disease. "I said, ‘Don’t you dare die before you finish it.’ "

Alan Kent Haruf was born on Feb. 24, 1943, in Pueblo, Colo. He grew up in the towns of Wray, Holyoke and Yuma, all in the northeastern part of the state, before moving to Canon City for junior high and high school.

He attended Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln and in 1965 moved to Turkey to work as a Peace Corps volunteer. He received conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War, and worked in a hospital and an orphanage as part of his alternative service.

He spent a decade teaching high school English in Colorado and Wisconsin before being hired as an assistant professor at Nebraska Wesleyan. He was 41 when he sold his first literary work, a short story, to the magazine Puerto del Sol.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by three daughters, Sorel Haruf, Whitney Haruf and Chaney Matsukis; five stepchildren, Amy Dempsey, Joel Dempsey, Jennifer Dempsey, Jason Dempsey and Jessica Hedayat; his brothers, Mark and Verne; a sister, Edith Russell; and many grandchildren. His first marriage ended in divorce.

After Mr. Haruf finished his first drafts, usually well before lunch, he would pull back his cap and take a look.

"He only got off home row a couple of times and typed gobbledygook," Mrs. Haruf recalled. "That’s not bad for all those years."



The Darkest Hour

The death of Eric Garner will not quietly fade away as police and their supporters wish. The cynical callus execution of this man will in time be seen as a pivotal moment when a majority of rational Americans are repulsed and begin to accept the idea of serious police reform. 

None of this is new, reform came in the 1880s after a number of well reported incidents of police brutality and again right after WW1 and WW2 and of course the 1970s.

It seems that from time to time a radical cleaning out of the ranks becomes necessary.

Eric Garner's death speaks quietly and persuasively the extent of moral and ethical corruption by police and the city officials and a serious breakdown in fundamental state authority.

The grand jury unwittingly adds serious incentive for reform. 
David A Fairbanks

 

　

No Charges in Eric Garner Chokehold Case for N.Y.P.D. Officer

 

 

By J. DAVID GOODMAN, AL BAKER and MARC SANTORA

A Staten Island grand jury voted on Wednesday not to bring criminal charges in the death of Eric Garner, a black man who died after being placed in a chokehold by a white police officer.

The decision was reached after months of testimony, including from the officer who used the chokehold, Daniel Pantaleo. The grand jury reached its decision less than two weeks after a grand jury in Ferguson, Mo., declined to bring charges against a white officer who fatally shot an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown.

For days, the New York Police Department has been preparing for a new round of protests, which first began in the city after the Ferguson decision and were expected to continue and possibly grow if the grand jury declined to bring charges against the officer.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, saying that it was a "deeply emotional day" for the Garner family and all New Yorkers, acknowledged that many people would not agree with the grand jury’s decision.

"Today’s outcome is one that many in our city did not want," Mr. de Blasio said in a statement. "Yet New York City owns a proud and powerful tradition of expressing ourselves through nonviolent protest. We trust that those unhappy with today’s grand jury decision will make their views known in the same peaceful, constructive way.

"We all agree that demonstrations and free speech are valuable contributions to debate, and that violence and disorder are not only wrong, but hurt the critically important goals we are trying to achieve together."

The officer at the center of the Staten Island case released a statement offering the family of Mr. Garner his sympathies.

"I became a police officer to help people and to protect those who can’t protect themselves," Officer Pantaleo said. "It is never my intention to harm anyone, and I feel very bad about the death of Mr. Garner. My family and I include him and his family in our prayers and I hope that they will accept my personal condolences for their loss."

Jonathan C. Moore, a lawyer for the Garner family, said they hoped that federal prosecutors would continue to examine the case, and he urged people upset by the decision to voice their dismay, but to do so peacefully.

"We’re astounded by the outcome of the grand jury process and that after hearing months of evidence and having deliberated that they would find no true bill as to any potential criminal charge," Mr. Moore said in a phone interview.

"It’s very upsetting to us – we obviously hope that the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District, Loretta Lynch, will take a close look at this."

In Ferguson, protesters and police officers clashed in the streets almost immediately after Mr. Brown’s killing by Officer Darren Wilson in August; riots erupted on the night the grand jury’s decision was announced last month. By contrast, in late August, a demonstration on Staten Island over the death of Mr. Garner, 43, proceeded without confrontation or arrest.

Police Commissioner William J. Bratton, speaking at a news conference earlier on Wednesday, said that he expected any protests to be peaceful and that the police were prepared to deal with anyone seeking to cause trouble.

"We have had quite a bit of time to prepare for the events that will unfold here for the next few days," Mr. Bratton said.

While seeking to ensure that people can voice their opinions, Mr. Bratton said the police would "take forceful action" against those who used the protests to break the law.

The grand jury, impanelled by the Staten Island district attorney, Daniel M. Donovan Jr., in September, has weighed evidence, including a cellphone video recorded by bystanders of Mr. Garner’s violent arrest, and heard testimony from the officers involved.

Grand juries determine whether enough evidence exists for a case to go forward to a criminal trial, either before a jury or a judge. By law, they operate in secret and hear only evidence presented by prosecutors, who also instruct the grand jurors on the law. Defense lawyers are barred from speaking. For a decision, 12 jurors who have heard all the evidence must agree.

In a statement, Mr. Donovan said that he was constrained by law from discussing details of the case but that he had petitioned the court for "authorization to publicly release specific information in connection with this grand jury investigation."

He expressed his condolences to the family and said that his office conducted a thorough investigation that "spanned four months."

They conducted "over 38 interviews" and located 22 civilian witnesses, he said. Investigators also spoke with the emergency responders who provided medical treatment both at the scene and at the hospital, and expert witnesses in the area of forensic pathology, policies, procedures, and training of police officers.

"I assured the public that I was committed to a fair, thorough, and responsible investigation into Mr. Garner’s death, and that I would go wherever the evidence took me, without fear or favor," he said. In the end, he said, the grand jury faithfully executed their duty.

An indictment was considered only against Officer Pantaleo, who testified last, on Nov. 21, his lawyer, Stuart London, said. The other officers received immunity, he said.

The case exposed apparent lapses in police tactics – chokeholds are banned by the Police Department’s own guidelines – and raised questions about the aggressive policing of minor offenses in a time of historically low crime. The officers involved, part of a plainclothes unit, suspected Mr. Garner of selling loose cigarettes on the street near the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, a complaint among local business owners.

Mr. Garner’s death hastened an effort to retrain all the department’s patrol officers and brought scrutiny on how officers who violate its rules are disciplined. Officer Pantaleo has been stripped of his gun and badge.

It was unclear whether Officer Pantaleo would return to enforcement duties. Commissioner Bratton said he would remain on suspension pending an internal investigation by the Police Department.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who is scheduled to hold a news conference with Mr. Garner’s family later in the evening, said that he was not surprised by the decision and that he had little faith in local prosecutors when it came to pursuing cases against the police.

"People thought we were being extreme," Mr. Sharpton said. "But now, I think you can see, we have no confidence in the state grand juries, whether in Ferguson or in New York, because there is an intrinsic relationship between state prosecutors and the police; they depend on the police for their evidence, they run for office and depend on the unions for endorsements."