Allegations Upend Lives of 2 Muslims in Army

 

Shortly before Christmas 2009, they graduated from boot camp, proud just to have made it. But as they prepared to leave Fort Jackson, S.C., they were instead questioned by military investigators who suspected them and three other Moroccan immigrants of plotting to poison fellow soldiers.

For the next 45 days, they were placed under a form of barracks arrest, prevented from calling their families without sergeants present, forbidden to speak Arabic to each other and required to have escorts to the mess hall and the bathroom. No charges were filed, but their laptops, cellphones and passports were confiscated.

Only after the intervention of a Muslim chaplain were they finally allowed to go back to their homes. Last May, the Army concluded that the allegations against them — initially raised by a relative of a soldier — were unfounded. But the Federal Bureau of Investigation has kept its inquiry open, officials say. As a result, the men have been unable to receive security clearances, become citizens, deploy to Iraq, obtain concealed weapons permits or get government jobs, the soldiers say.

“Am I one of them, a soldier?” Specialist Lyaacoubi, 34, asked in an interview. “Or am I like one of those prisoners in Iraq?”

The handling of the two soldiers’ cases underscores the conflicted nature of the military’s relationship with its Muslim troops since the Fort Hood shootings in November 2009. A Muslim soldier, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, is accused of killing 13 people there.

Specialists Lyaacoubi and Bahammou were recruited into a program intended to put Arabic-, Dari- and Pashto-speaking immigrants in uniform to help frontline commanders operate in Afghanistan and Iraq. In a promotional video from 2008, an Army officer said the program — known as 09 Lima, after the Army designation for interpreter jobs — “saves both American and local lives.”

Having Muslims in uniform also helped the military combat the view propagated by Al Qaeda — but also held by many Muslims — that the United States was at war with Islam. Perhaps for that reason, the Army chief of staff at the time, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., strongly defended the need for Muslim troops and warned about harassment of them after Major Hasan was arrested.

Despite the general’s pleas, however, Specialists Lyaacoubi and Bahammou say they were swept into a tide of suspicion after the Fort Hood shootings, which occurred midway through their Fort Jackson training.

Treated with dignity during the first half of their training, they say other soldiers ransacked their bunk room and called them “garbage” soon after the shootings. When he was initially detained at Fort Jackson in 2009, Specialist Lyaacoubi said an interrogator told him: “We are at war with Islam. And you are Muslim.”

Mikey Weinstein, president and founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit group representing the two soldiers, said his group had seen a steady increase in Muslim clients who claimed they had been discriminated against since Fort Hood. He called the Army’s Fort Jackson investigation “draconian and clearly unconstitutional.”

In recent days, the Army has begun acknowledging problems with the way it handled the soldiers at Fort Jackson. An internal review that has not been made public found that they were treated in an “overly restrictive” way because they were not allowed to contact anyone for weeks. But the review did not find evidence of racism or harassment, Maj. Gen. Stephen R. Lanza, the Army’s chief spokesman, said in a letter.

General Lanza defended the Army investigation, even though it came up empty. “To not do so — had these alleged threats turned out to be credible, and in light of the Fort Hood shooting incident that took place mere weeks before these allegations — would have been an unconscionable dereliction of duty and leadership on our part,” he wrote.

But the Army has been unable to explain why the F.B.I. continues to investigate the men. The F.B.I. declined to comment because the case is continuing.

 

First: The Inner Lives of Wartime Photographers

 

Covering conflict is perilous for anyone — reporters, local stringers, the drivers and interpreters we depend on — but photographers are more exposed, in at least two senses of the word. They need a sustained line of sight to frame their photographs; a reliable source is never enough. And they cannot avert their eyes; they have to let the images in, no matter how searing or disturbing. Robert Capa’s famous advice to younger photographers — “Get closer” — translates in combat to “get more vulnerable,” both literally and emotionally.

Back in 2000, Joao and Greg Marinovich, a shooter who was my partner and guide on journalistic adventures in South Africa, published a book called “The Bang-Bang Club,” about four photographer friends who worked together during the bloody death rattle of apartheid. By the time Greg and Joao wrote their account, they were the only survivors. Kevin Carter, a charismatic, talented, addled mess of a man, had run a garden hose from his exhaust pipe into his car and, while smoking a hypnotic mix of methaqualone and marijuana, composed a suicide note. That same year, 1994, Ken Oosterbroek, the grown-up of the quartet, was shot dead in a crossfire in Thokoza township. Greg, who was standing nearby that day, took a bullet to the chest but eventually recovered. After chasing wars around the globe for another five years and being wounded three more times, Greg retired from combat work to write and do less hazardous photography and video documentaries. And that left only Joao, wedded to the life and seemingly invulnerable.

When I called on Joao at Walter Reed Army Medical Center last week — where he is getting accustomed to his new robo-legs and fighting off waves of infection — Greg was also visiting. Most afternoons, Joao straps on his prostheses and circles the physical-therapy room for an hour and a half, clinging to a walker. He’s months from being able to walk on his own, and until then he’s confined to a bed or a wheelchair, attached to a colostomy bag and a stream of antibiotics. His attitude is amazingly resilient. (The first time I visited Walter Reed, I remarked that he didn’t seem to be any older. “No,” he replied, “but I’m a bit shorter.”) Still, the serial operations and infections have made him more somber. As medics came and went tending to Joao’s gauges and nozzles, we spent a few hours discussing the various predicaments of their field, beginning with the obvious mystery: Why do they do this crazy work?

They do it for the most mundane of reasons (to feed their families) and the most idealistic (to make the world pay attention) and the most visceral (it is exhilarating; it is fun) and the somewhat existential.

“It becomes your identity in so many ways,” Joao said. “This is my identity. This is all I’m known for. Nobody sends me out to go shoot beautiful pictures for travel articles, you know?”

Greg, while conceding there is much about the life he misses, implored his best friend to give it up. But Joao hopes to go back to it as soon as he is firmly on his high-tech feet.

“I wish I was in Libya right now,” he declared at one point.

“If this hadn’t happened, or if you were in a position physically, you would go back?” Greg asked.

“If I was in a position to, yeah. Why not?”

“Why not? You’re asking me? I don’t know, what about your family, Joao?”

Joao, who has an endlessly patient wife and two young children, paused for a time.

“The families are very brave,” he concluded.

Perhaps because they are the sharp end of our journalistic spear, combat photographers have long been subjected to mythologizing. The most common myths are that combat photographers are reckless of spirit, or why else would they take such chances, and hard-shelled of heart, or how else could they bear it? “The Bang-Bang Club” was just made into a movie (which played at the Tribeca Film Festival to disappointing reviews), and one of its failings is that it falls for both of these superficialities. It shows the moments of cowboy exuberance — Greg, played by Ryan Phillippe, sprinting across a sniper alley to fetch Cokes for his thirsty comrades — but ignores the exquisite caution, the calculation of every footfall, the patient diplomacy that is more the rule in conflict coverage.

Another scene has Greg, at the site of a massacre, carefully adjusting the lighting so he can photograph a dead child while his girlfriend breaks down in horror.

“Maybe you have to be like that to do what you do,” she tells him afterward.

“Be like what?” the movie version of Greg asks.

“I think you have to forget that those are real people.”

Bill Keller is executive editor of The New York Times.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 8, 2011

An essay this weekend on Page 11, about photographers who cover wars, refers imprecisely to Chris Hondros, a photographer who was killed last month while covering Libya’s rebel militia. He was a senior staff photographer for the Getty Images agency, not a freelancer. The essay also misstates the year that Joao Silva was on assignment for The New York Times in Najaf, Iraq. It was 2004, not 2006.

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President to Travel to Ground Zero to Honor Lives Lost

Mr. Obama, in his first visit as president to ground zero, plans to lay a wreath at a memorial to the nearly 3,000 victims of the 9/11 attacks. He will also meet privately with family members of the victims, firefighters and other rescue workers who died in the September 2001 attacks.

“He wants to meet with them and share with them this important and significant moment, a bittersweet moment,” the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said on Wednesday.

It is a quiet coda to a week that began with a stunning announcement by Mr. Obama, just before midnight on Sunday, that a team of Navy Seals had stormed Bin Laden’s hiding place – a heavily-fortified compound in an affluent town not far from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

Mr. Obama invited former president George W. Bush to join him at ground zero, but Mr. Bush declined. A spokesman for the former president said he appreciated the invitation but wanted to stick to his policy of staying out of the public spotlight since he left office.

For Mr. Bush, ground zero was the site of one of the iconic moments of his presidency. Days after the World Trade Center towers collapsed, he traveled to the smoldering wreckage to thank the rescue workers, delivering his speech through a firefighter’s bullhorn.

The White House was quick to say it took no offense at Mr. Bush’s decision not to attend, saying that Mr. Bush was invited in the spirit of unity that Mr. Obama said he hoped would prevail in the wake of Bin Laden’s killing, just as it prevailed after the killings perpetrated by Bin Laden nearly a decade ago.

“We’ve made clear that this is a moment of unity for Americans and a moment to recall the unity that existed in this country in the wake of the attacks on 9/11,” Mr. Carney said.

Mr. Obama visited ground zero while a presidential candidate, but he has not been there since entering the White House. He does not plan a deliver a speech, a decision that White House officials said was calculated to avoid any appearance of exploiting the families of the victims for political gain.

“NYC is about honoring the victims and their families,” one senior administration official said.

On Friday, the president will go on the road again to Fort Campbell in Kentucky for a less somber occasion: to pay tribute to those who flew the Navy Seal team to Bin Laden’s compound deep inside Pakistan. The Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, which provided air transportation for the Navy assault team, is based at Fort Campbell.

 

Classic Commodore 64 lives again

。 7 April 2011 Last updated at 06:10 ET The revamped machine has a familiar look and feel Fans of retro computing will soon be able to buy a modern PC clad in a classic case.

Commodore is making a Windows PC that fits inside a boxy beige shell that looks exactly like its original C64.

The 8-bit machine was released in 1982, had 64 kilobytes of memory and became one of the best-selling computers ever.

Commodore's updated version will run Windows 7 but also has an emulator capable of playing games written for its ancestor.

Commodore has started taking orders for the C64x, priced at $595 (￡364), and said the machines would ship between May and June. It is expected to appear in shops later in the year.

The machine's internal hardware will be based around a dual-core Intel Atom D525, a chip typically found in notebook computers.

Its 1.8Ghz chip is far faster than the 8-bit 1MHz MOS 6502 processor used in the 80's original.

California Games was one of the most popular titles for the original Commodore 64

The C64x will also use an integrated Nvidia graphics chip and buyers have the option of equipping a model with a Bluray DVD player.

All the hardware for the machine fits inside the keyboard case.

The first models will sport the same taupe colour scheme as the original along with a "clicky" keyboard familiar to anyone who used the older C64 or its predecessor, the Vic 20.

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