One of the types of music I listen to, usually on nights when sleep is difficult but comfort of the familiar is not desired, is Persian Classical. I have posted on this at least once before. The first encounter I have had with this stream of music was back in the Napster dark ages when I hit upon tracks from Kayan Kalhor's album "Night Silence Desert". This music sounded deeply familiar but also somewhat removed, as if I was looking at a woman standing behind a screen; a woman who appears familiar, as if I have seen her somewhere before and held her in a long-ish gaze but at the same time who is not traceable in my memory. This encounter also lead me to write this sequence.

Subsequent to this meeting, I have eagerly borrowed all the Persian Classical music I could lay my hands on at the public library, and the most notable of all these albums would be "Without You", featuring three excellent Persian masters: Mohammad Reza Shajarian (on voice), Hossein Alizadeh (on tar or the guitar like lute), and the previously mentioned kamancheh (spike fiddle) mastero, Kayan Kalhor. Thus, great was my joy when I discovered the following recording of a concert given by these musicians on YouTube. You take delight too! Oh, this is a pdf file that contains liner notes of of the CD "Without You", providing an intro to Persian Classical Music and these musicians. And from what I could gather from the comments at YouTube, it is the sublime poetry of Hafez (it shimmers and dances even in the bad English translations I have read) which is being sung in Part 1.

Wall Street Journal is an excellent (and reliable) source of "news", as even its ideological enemies such as Noam Chomsky have pointed out, mainly because business requires good information to make/ base its decisions on. Its "opinion" boviating is a different matter entirely except, perhaps, as a fertile hunting ground for writers at Comedy Central or cartoonists.

But first some background: as a "brown" man (or a "maccaca", in the terminology of a racist Senator, who thankfully will no longer be the front runner for the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination) living in the US, the recent case of Maher Arar scares the bejesus out of me. Yes, the United States can very well deport folks like me at its own pleasure but when the White House's Tonto, i.e., US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales defends US conduct in handling the Maher Arar case, by saying that while the US did in fact deport the Canadian citizen, the US was "not responsible for his removal to Syria", it gets really surreal. O Wise Tonto, how did that towel head (telecommunications engineer) Arar get to Syria then? By camel was it? Or does FBI/CIA now have a Star Trek transporter at hand at New York's JFK Airport?

Arar has managed to extricate and completely clear his name from the Kafka-esque turn his life took this past week after a Canadian Commission of Inquiry declared that what happened to him was totally fcuked-up. Today, even the Canadian (WSJ supported, Conservative) Prime Minister Stephen Harper (who previously had asked the (then) Liberal government why they were "defending a suspected terrorist") has come around to the opinion that Arar's case was travesty of Canadian policing and "Western" values. But do you think this satisfies the boneheads who man the WSJ "Opinion" desk? No! This is what those buffaloes regurgitated today:

"Take the case of Maher Arar, an apparently innocent Canadian citizen who was arrested at JFK airport in September 2002 and turned over to Syria -- a process known as "rendition" -- where he actually appears to have been tortured. According to some of our media colleagues, this shows that CIA officials can't be trusted with the authority they're seeking under the proposed new Detainee Act to use a number of "stress techniques" against high level al Qaeda detainees.

But Mr. Arar's case proves exactly the opposite. For starters, it was the Canadian government that supplied what appears to have been bad information about Mr. Arar's alleged al Qaeda ties.

These opinion buffaloes, who apparently are also human beings, have actually appeared to have lost all sense of rationality. Ye Brother Kafka, looke down upon these wretches and smite them so that the next time they do know what they are apparently blabbering about. But this is minor when you get to the breathtaking leap of logic next:

More to the point, the temptation to get vital information by "rendering" such suspects for interrogation by governments that have little respect for human rights will only increase if the CIA's own al Qaeda interrogation program is shut down. This may make some in Congress feel better about themselves, but it won't do much for the "rights" of those interrogated.

The White House has been negotiating over the issue with Senator John McCain so U.S. interrogators aren't left in legal limbo because Congress refuses to define our obligations under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. It's precisely such legal clarity that will limit potential abuses, rather than leaving Article 3 open to interpretation by individuals -- or by the likes of Syria, since as it stands every country in the world interprets Article 3 in its own way now."

Did you get it? No? Let me simplify this line of buffalo thinking for you:

1. Better make the CIA's interrogation program legal because if you don't, CIA will have to "render" apparently innocent folks like Maher Arar "for interrogation by governments that have little respect for human rights."

2. Since Syria (and other countries like it) interprets Article 3 in its own way now, better get in the boat with them and provide "legal clarity" to the "potential abuses" that are kosher (freezing in the nude okay, electric prods to the balls not so okay).

"Crucial to any compromise is that the new rules not only protect CIA interrogators under relevant U.S. law (the 1996 War Crimes Act), but also assert our understanding of our obligations under Geneva. This is not about "rewriting" Geneva, as Mr. McCain and others have previously suggested; it is about the necessity of fleshing out what vague Article 3 prohibitions against "humiliating" treatment and the like actually mean.

President Bush has been very strong on this issue so far. We trust he won't endorse anything now that falls short of the comprehensive legal clarity he's been right to demand."

Hey you, apparently Christian buffaloes, do you have a Bible at hand? Look up Matthew 7:1 or Luke 6:31 sometime will ya if you really want to "clarify" what "humiliating" treatment is, and whisper the same in both the Lone Rider's and Tonto's ears:

All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye so to them; for this is the law and the prophets.

And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.

Many years later while listening to Schubert at night and tasting salt on his lips,

he yearns to be at that past shoreline again, where salt, like laughter in the air, was everywhere:

within, without. It laid its hands over them as they huddled in the hull-shade, away from an unrelenting sun,

and left white sweaty maps he carried (along with old songs made new) for a night or so, on his back into this arcless journey.

Schubert, salt, songs, shoreline.