The morality of American intervention was always
controversial. Opposition attracted the support of former President
Grover Cleveland, Andrew Carnegie, and perhaps the most articulate
of critics, Mark Twain. Trials for war crimes eventually cast a
shadow over the Philippines campaign.
Jones manages an even-handed narrative of this bitter
period and notes that even Teddy Roosevelt ultimately wondered
whether the cost of imperial power might be greater than its
benefits. At one point he even said, “America’s dream of empire had
passed.”
Although Jones does not say so, World War II changed all
that.
nathan| 3.7.12 @ 7:53AM
Oh please they weren't using "enhanced" interrogation, they were torturing those people using a method handed down from the Inquisition, something those "Holy" inquisitors (acting on the authority of the popes) knew perfectly was torture too. And some of those Americans were courtmartialed for it. So can we once and for all dispense with this "enhanced" nonsense? We have been TORTURING people folks, for years in direct violation of US law, in direct violation of the oath the soldiers took when they signed up, and in direct violation of the internation agreements we signed. And don't please don't justify it with "good" intentions. In a book about Japanese war crimes, there's an interview with a Kempetai officer who tortured more 50 POW's. He had the best of intentions too. All the war criminals in their own minds did. And I don't recall at Nuremburg or Tokyo that we let "good intentions" get in the way from telling those people that only ACTIONS count. And bad actions like waterboarding KSM 150 times as described here, and as the author of this article makes clear is TORTURE folks, is never justified. And by authorizing it Bush and Cheney violated their oath of office and should have been impeached along with whoever else authorized it.
Now enough already. We have been acting too much like the bad guys. West that day in that room with the Iraqi police officer was a bad guy, nothing noble about it. Let's start owning our misdeeds, and then make sure we stop doing them.
ENOUGH!
Lullabys, Legends and Lies| 3.7.12 @ 8:32AM
Allen West's a bad guy now, huh? You are out of your mind!! Obviously, you've never served, because if you had, you'd know you would do "whatever" you had to do, to get the information that would save your fellow Comrade!! Bad guy? My ass!! He's an American Hero, and soon to be, most likely, the next Vice President, followed shortly thereafter by President!!
Conservative Not Republican| 3.7.12 @ 9:58AM
This is what war does to you. Makes a virtue of torture. Turns good to bad. Turns good people into monsters. Forces you to do unspeakable things. That is why true conservatives are non-interventionists. Remember Abu Ghraib
Richard Ryan| 3.7.12 @ 3:08PM
Torturing a terrorist is easy to condemn when you are far from the action, safe and cozy at home. If you can honestly say
"no!"
when your own friend, child, or spouse's life is in danger, then fine. As for me, I would want anything and everything done to save the innocent.
One if by land...| 3.7.12 @ 4:58PM
Then away with the Constitution! Who is innocent? What a silly comment.
PaulyD| 3.7.12 @ 9:52AM
Nathan,
You're clueless. Waterboarding is not torture in the physical sense. The technique was derived from training we do on our own personnel to SIMULATE the torture they might experience at the hands of their captors. We use it precisely because it does NOT do any physical damage to the trainee. But the person being water-boarded can be drowned if the interrogator/trainer is incompetent. The interrogated/trainee knows this, so they are always in doubt. Therefore the technique works because the terror is psychological.
If we really wanted to torture we could copy Al Qaeda in Iraq. They used power drills in children's eyes and ears in front of their parents in order to get the parent's cooperation. And of course you know what they liked to do with car batteries, don't you?
But leave it to Liberals to strain at gnats while they swallow camels.
Jack in Wi.| 3.7.12 @ 4:04PM
The Phillipinos had been fighting for their independence from Spain for years. The American surpression of the Philipino indendence movement is one of many disgraceful episodes of American history. Over 4,000 American troops lost their lives and over 200,000 Philipinos were killed in this needless war. It led to endless involvement of the USA in the Far East. None of these involvements were of any benefit to the USA and it's citizens.
Alan Brooks| 3.7.12 @ 6:00PM
Main point is, our imperialism is the same as the Brits and the French, but in '45 we were in fact the Colossus bestriding the world.
Now we are experiencing imperial overstretch-- yet at least Mike Johnson is not going on about subsidized law school contraception! always be thankful for small favors.
Conservative Not Republican| 3.7.12 @ 10:02AM
Another chickenhawk speaks! Let us waterboard you and then see what you think. Christopher Hitchens was waterboarded. And he was a NeoConman. His verdict. Hell yeah it was torture. Easy for you to say in your mommy's basement in your pajamas.
Alan Brooks| 3.7.12 @ 6:03PM
besides, the intelligence gained from waterboarding or any other torture wont help modernize Ashcanistan or Iraq.
So torture fails on at least two counts.
nathan| 3.7.12 @ 10:27AM
Please both of you, give me a break.
Paul, we are not judged by what others do. Our standards are the Constitution, US law, and the Torture convention and waterboarding violates everyone of those. You really, honestly you really want to defend an interrogation method used by the Inquisition? Honestly? One that the Kempetai officer admitted to using? One that some of those Americans in the Philippines and later in Vietnam got courtmartialed for? Really?
Besides the fact that torture broadly doesn't work. I mean 150 times with KSM? Give me a break, at the end he was giving the names of his teachers, his mother, anyone he could think of, he was probably naming Bush and Cheney for goodness sakes. The physiology of torture makes most of the information we get largely unreliable.
And again with West, he didn't take an oath to defend his men. He took an oath to do what? uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. And the principles that are part of that document. Both of you, and those who jump on my behind later, show me the article of the constitution that allows us to abuse helpless detainees for any reason. Cite the relevant passage. Show me the quotes from the Founders that support any of this. Please give me a quote from Washington who insisted that detainees be treated properly, or Madison, or Jefferson, or any of them. You, Paul, you the "conservative" here, show me a quote from any of the Founders, cite a passage from any of the Founding documents that justify what West did. Just one.
You can't. They don't exist. So who really is the conservative here sir?
I don't care about good intentions. Actions and actions alone matter. When we behave like the bad guys we are the bad guys. When West let his men beat up that police officer and then carried out the mock execution, he became a self confessed war criminal. He violated US law, his oath of office. His intentions who cares about those? The intentions of the that Kempetai officer who tortured 50 POW's, they were in his mind good too. You going to give him a free pass on "good intentions"? Or was he a war criminal? And if he was (absolutely he was) then so is West. And so are the men who waterboarded KSM 150 times and the man who threatened to torture a detainee's kids in front of him (Abu Ghraib), and the men who flew detainees to the middle east to be tortured there and frankly both Bush and Cheney for authorizing these acts. By their actions we know them, who cares about their noble intentions. The inquisitors were acting on the authority of the popes. I don't see anyone praising them do you?
Actions only. Our standard here is not what the bad guys do. Our standards here again is the Constitution, the Torture Convention Reagan himself supported, our standard here is US Code. We aren't supposed to be like the other guys. We're better than they aren't we? Sean talks all the time about American exceptionalism. Not when we torture people, whatever the reason. Then we're not exceptional, we're just everyone else.
Folks this an appeal to be really exceptional. To hold to the principles of the Founders. To be what we say we are. Which means this all has to stop. To be real conservatives.
Now you may blast away! :)
THKrupp| 3.7.12 @ 11:02AM
Nicely said
albert constantine jr.| 3.7.12 @ 12:28PM
Nathan, I've seen a number of your other posts on this and related issues. Your message seems to be fairly consistent, but since I don't think I am alone when I say that when I want context, I evaluate a message, the messenger, the circumstances and anything else that might be relevant.
To that end, if you don't mind sharing some of your resume' in this regard, as I'm not asking to berate you, but to further the debate. Have you ever been charged with handling prisoners, deriving intelligence, protecting an entity (military unit, the public at large or what have you), enforcing a law, defending someone charged, lobbied for civil liberties or any other relevant activity that would cause someone to give your opinions any more weight than that of any other educated, concerned and thoughtful citizen?
I recognize that some are uncomfortable suggesting that some opinions should have more weight than others, but I must confess that I don't share this discomfort in every instance. I tend to value the opinion of an M.D. over the opinion of a non-medical professional in issues of health (though I recognize the existence of malpractice and self-interest in any profession).
nathan| 3.7.12 @ 1:28PM
Resume:
Personal resume is that of a long time conservative (HONEST! LOL) who supported Goldwater in 1964 before I was a teenager and knew why I was doing it. I was reading National Review probably before most of you knew the magazine existed. I have never voted for a single democratic candidate.
I've lived and worked abroad. Beyond that I'm not crazy about about talking about for work related issues. I have learned more than one foreign language and I've served in non Christian countries.
My primary field of study, not my only field has been history. But my "hobby" going back before my teen years is the Holocaust. I know more about it than most anyone here, of that I'm quite sure. And largely for that reason plus the fact the fact that I'm really really into the Founders, I'm an individual rights absolutist.
We look back on the last century and I will ask you all, seriously what lessons do you want to take from what happened? Auschwitz didn't happen in a week or a month. It happened slowly as people, in many cases good people, well intentioned people who thought they were doing the right thing said, sure, we can go THIS far in abusing these people but it won't go further. But it always goes further. We can't be a little bad, you can't be cross lines and think some day you won't cross more.
Pauly I'm sorry I'm not going to agree with you on this. You were waterboarded in controlled circumstances by people you trusted. KSM was not being interrogated that way. He had no way of knowing how long it would last. And I'm sorry I have books in my library on the Inquisition and they did use it and use it with some frequency.
But again, people will say and do say anything under torture and broadly you can't determine the point at which it's real stuff and it's not. Every expert you read on this subject says the same thing.
But the other problem is determining if the person is a bad guy. In the case of West's policeman, how did he know he knew anything? In far too many cases we're abusing people who are just plain innocent. The Canadian sent to the middle east who was horribly abused, he's not the exception, he's the rule. And if you read Matthew Alexander's book the interrogator who was in Iraq and who got the information that led to the air strike on the second most important bad guy there, you understand you DON'T have to do any of this. We don't have to compromise our principles and values. He didn't and look at how successful he was.
Pauly again with all due respect mock executions are illegal. They are illegal under US law. Who says so? Judge Andrew Napolitano. Read his books some time. He disagrees with you on this. he makes it clear that both the US Constitution does bind US forces overseas, West included and so does the US Code. But the torture convention does too along with the various Geneva convention and no there are no exclusions for "unlawful" combatants. Find the wordings. You can't they aren't there.
Again why are any of you defending actions that we hung people for at the Tokyo war crimes trials? Waterboarding was named in some of the bills of indictments. It's not harmless, it plays with your mind the way it's done. It can permanently mess people up. We don't have the authority or right to do this. No. I'm sorry but no.
Again, we're better than this. Matthew Alexander and others showed that you can get all the information you need without laying a hand on people. We don't need to compromise our principles, our beliefs.
I'm sorry, but I want us to be who we say we are, I don't want us to be them. And Pauly, I get what you're saying, but every bad guy has "good intentions" for bad actions. We just can't go there. We had wondeful intentions for committing genocide against the Indians. Southerners abused blacks for the best of intentions. No again no. Actions only. The world only sees the actions. The world only saw the man tied to a shower head at Abu Ghraib and beaten to death. We can't do this.
Fire away.
PaulyD| 3.7.12 @ 1:39PM
OK. Points taken.
albert constantine jr.| 3.7.12 @ 6:58PM
Nathan:
Thank you for the partial feedback. I similarly was backing AuH2O before I appreciated the significance of what conservatism or liberty meant, spent a lot of time overseas, speak languages other than English (including in my home for several years), and am a student of history (though not my major field of study).
Among the reasons I ask is your denunciation of Alan West would carry more weight with me if you had been a battalion commander similarly situated, and resolved the matter favorably without resorting to his methods. Certainly I don’t think that only those who have walked in his shoes are able to criticize (all are free to do so), but when one accused of wrongdoing is entitled to a jury of peers, proper voir dire establishes the depth and validity of the peerage. If I recall correctly, Alan West’s conduct was investigated, but did not result in court martial.
As someone who has sworn oaths to support and defend the Constitution in thirty years of both military and law enforcement employment, I take my words very seriously. I believe that this involves knowing what the plain text is, what relevant case law holds, and the processes established for governing, as well as amendment. I don’t believe it is a “living document”, but I believe the words mean things, they were chosen for purposes, and (to use once again a phrase frequenly employed) it is not a suicide pact.
To that end, I believe when the Bush administration, charged to protect set out to determine what was prohibited by treaty and law, and (if I might oversimplify for brevity’s sake) concluded that interrogation methods that did not involve serious physical injury or death such as waterboarding did not meet the definition of torture and was not proscribed, that such an inquiry is proper. One might (and many did) conclude differently, but I believe the actions were a good faith attempt to maximize what they believed was necessary to protect us from further attack, and not merely because they were indifferent to the Constitution or too lazy to comply with the treaty.
In my experience, it is much easier to be absolute in an academic environment than it is in one where you are duty-bound to protect people as well as principles. I have seen the untrained and unethical attempt to circumvent the rights contained in the Constitution, though in my view it was usually because they were lazy or motivated by something other than the desire to do the right thing.
While the road to hell may be paved with good intentions, those who travel it are usually fueled by bad ones. While good faith alone is not sufficient to guarantee bad outcomes, and eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, I would be hesitant to condemn everyone whose methods to protect liberty do not coincide exactly with my own.
nathan| 3.8.12 @ 11:43AM
Pauly, Albert, thank you. I appreciate that we may disagree here but we didn't call each other names and there was no feeding of the trolls. This is how these discussions should be. My sincere appreciation for a calm and rational discussion on this. Thank you again.
PaulyD| 3.7.12 @ 12:00PM
1. Water-boarding was not derived from the Spanish inquisition. I've been water-boarded. I should know.
2. Water-boarding worked on KSM, for the reasons I stated above. Yes, any person being interrogated eventually starts making stuff up if it will get the interrogator to stop. We still got valuable intel out of him.
3. Enemy combatants are not entitled to Constitutional protections unless they are on U.S. soil.
4. LTCOL West was in Iraq and did nothing more than frighten the person he was interrogating. If West had taken it to the next level and shot his prisoner in the knee, you might have a case.
There is a Law school trope that it is better to let a thousand guilty persons go free than convict one innocent man. You are using the same logic when you argue we are better than all this. Tha's fine, but what you view as our strength, our enemy views as weakness. They only understand force and if something as relatively harmless as waterboarding gets them to talk, we need to do it.
PaulyD| 3.7.12 @ 12:19PM
My 12:00 pm post above is a reply to Nathan's 10:27 am post. I have blasted away. :-)
aware| 3.8.12 @ 6:10AM
Unless you were also at the Inquisition I fail to see how you "being waterboarded" somehow supports your contention that it is not derived from said Inquisition.
Plus, in order to get the real effect, I suggest you be waterboarded by say the Bloods or the Crips. I think not knowing how it ends greatly enhances "enhanced" interrogation.
West is a big supporter of NDAA, like so many "conservatives", which sets the stage for full blown Police State with the next False Flag. Liberty, like the constitution, is just a fading memory among the "conservative" saviors we are supposed to think will save us. Except when they want your votes.
Thomas Paulick| 3.7.12 @ 12:20PM
A short article like this can't possibly consider the circumstances surrounding the Philippine War in any detail, but it may be useful to append the most important background facts to Mr. Johnson's article.
1. Roosevelt, Lodge, Mahan, and others certainly wanted the US to be a world power, but they had far less to do with the Spanish American War and our inevitable involvement in the Philippines than historians carelessly tell us. McKinley made these decisions - the same McKinley that Roosevelt accused of having "the backbone of a chocolate eclair". McKinley sometimes spoke in the platitudes of imperialism, but his motivations were much more complex and moral.
2. Under Spain, the Philippines had been misgoverned almost as badly as Cuba had been. Had McKinley left the islands to Spain (or, as it turned out, to any other nation), he would have incurred a huge burden of moral guilt, both personal and national.
3. There was no chance - none - that the Philippines could have retained their independence. They blocked the sea lanes connecting British colonial possessions in Asia. Hence, Britain asked McKinley for a first option to purchase the islands if the US were unwilling to possess them. Germany intended to take control of them, and Admiral Otto von Diederich's East Asia squadron harrassed Admiral Dewey for weeks after the Battle of Manila Bay. Japanese Prime Minister Yamagata Aritomo intended to take control of the islands if they were left "free". Japanese control would have threatened both Russia and Britain, seriously complicating US relations with both countries. Japan and Britain both preferred that the US take the islands. (In fact, the US decision to assume control of the Philippines contributed importantly to the "Great Rapprochement" with Britain that occurred under the regime of McKinley and John Hay, and that of their opposite number Lord Salisbury, because McKinley's decision prevented the tension between European colonial powers from becoming even more dangerous.)
4. In 1900, the Philippines consisted of more than 3000 islands inhabited by about 8 million people belonging to more than 40 different ethnological groups, speaking different dialects estimated to number anywhere from 16 to 87. The islands stretched over 1100 miles north to south and 600 miles east to west. A majority of the inhabitants were illiterate and lived at a subsistence level. There was, in fact, no “Filipino People” whom Emilio Aguinaldo could have represented, even if he had understood all of the languages and been in contact with all of the tribal groups. The most basic task of the US governors was to unify the disparate (and often mutually hostile) peoples for whom they were responsible as a result of the war with Spain.
Aguinaldo represented a very small, well-educated middle-class elite, as revolutionaries so often do.
5. The US did enormous good in the Philippines, as in Cuba, superior to the best efforts of the best classical empires of antiquity and even to what Britain was doing in South Asia.
6. Any detailed look at the Philippines in 1900 leads the investigator to one man: McKinley, whom one biographer called "one of the most obscure major political figures in American history." Modern historians so often (stupidly) accuse McKinley of "imperialism". In fact, it was McKinley who established that the US would never become a genuine imperialist power.
7. There are a lot of good books about McKinley. Margaret Leech described the man (and won the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes for it), H. Wayne Morgan the politician, William H. Armstrong the soldier, David Trask and Lewis Gould (separately) the Commander-in-Chief, and Lewis Gould the President. An even more impressive picture can be gotten from the people who served under McKinley. A Journal of the McKinley Years by Charles Dawes is one example; two others are the two-volume biography of Elihu Root by Philip Jessup and the biography of John Hay by Tyler Dennett. The Journal of John Davis Long is valuable, as are big biographies of Leonard Wood (by Hermann Hagedorn) and William Howard Taft (by Henry Pringle). James Hitchman’s Leonard Wood and Cuban independence, 1898-1902 is short, strong, and very interesting. The Rhetoric of Empire by Marilyn B. Young focuses on the Boxer Rebellion, the Open Door Policy, and the background of these events. Brian M. Linn’s The Philippine War is considered the best book written so far about the US counterinsurgency during 1898-1902.
Drek| 3.7.12 @ 1:24PM
Something is being left out here.
Weren't the "Huks" muslim? And aren't these muslims the very same muslims that the present Philippine government has such problems with?
albert constantine jr.| 3.7.12 @ 1:29PM
I think during this insurgency they were the "Moros" before they were "Hukbalap", but my recollection may be defective.
W| 3.7.12 @ 4:52PM
I believe the Huks were commies after WW II.
Dimitry Aleksandrovich| 3.7.12 @ 4:25PM
Cuba and the Phillipines where we liberated those nations from Spanish Imperialism and then decided to stay and become imperialists ourselves. We would have been better off to stay out of it all together.
Ron Paul 2012
Lacy Underall| 3.7.12 @ 5:28PM
Hey, at least it gave us the 1911 .45.
albert constantine jr.| 3.7.12 @ 6:13PM
As much as I enjoyed Orange Tang, I think old slabsides is one of the best byproducts of a government project.
sirbourbon| 3.7.12 @ 6:29PM
The charge up "San Juan Hill has been very costly for America. Wm. Randolph Hearst filled his newspapers with war stories, Teddy got his glory and Henry Cabot Lodge used his boyhood friend Teddy, as a surrogate to play out his fantasies of the Sir Walter Scott stories of heroism he devoured as a kid.
What a price for mankind to have to pay for the fantasies of a few war lovers!
In the 20th century the NYTimes and other copy cat dailies published fanciful stories about Iraqi soldiers marching into kuwait and stopping off at a hospital to pitch babies out of windows. Lies, but those lies worked to propagandize Americans to go to war. This time to save a dispicable kuwaiti king not to save peasants under Spanish rule!
America has been captured by war lovers of both parties. It matters not that Dems or Repubs are in power, both share the war philosophy equally and put it to practice!
Occasionally Republicans get it right. Herbert Hoover said of WWII that the only victors would be the communists. How right he was!
In the Spanish conflict most US troops deployed to the Phillipine Island despite the noise associated with the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor.The USS Maine was used as the spark to get the propaganda machine into high gear. It worked! Hearst had his war atrocities stories in his newspapers to boost his sales and to use US troops to kill people that Hearst,Roosevelt and Lodge didn't even know.
Had the US Senate had just a handful more of anti-war senators that war would never had put America on the road to empire that we have never departed from since the days of Teddy and his lunatic war philosophy.
albert constantine jr.| 3.7.12 @ 10:07PM
---------------and speaking of "crazy Asian wars", I haven't seen anything from POST American here today.
POST American| 3.7.12 @ 11:45PM
POST the unprecedented, psychopathically
'debt friendly' ---First World War
POST the London-Wall Street funded,
enabled and empowered Bolshevik
coup d'etat--
"The Federal Reserve has pumped
so many BILLIONS into [--NAZI--]
Germany that they dare NOT
name the total."
Rep. Charles McFadden
1935
--EVEN NOW--
And NOW-----Think 2012!
---------------------Think RED China!
-----------------------THINK FAST!
----------------HUAC/ Nuremberg 2012---------------
Rich Rostrom| 3.7.12 @ 11:54PM
Drek| 3.7.12 @ 1:24PM "Something is being left out here... Weren't the "Huks" muslim?"
No. The Hukbalahap originated as an independent faction of the Filipino resistance to the Japanese. It was more populist and ethnic-Asian than the official Resistance, which was dominated by the ethnic-Spanish elite. (There were no pure Spanish in the Philippines, but in general, the higher the social status, the greater the proportion of Spanish ancestry. The "peasant masses" were almost pure Asian.)
After the war, the Huks remained active, opposing real or alleged government corruption and cronyism with armed resistance. They soon morphed into a Communist guerrilla movement, which by the early 1950s threatened to topple the government.
The Huks were defeated by Ramon Magsaysay, who reformed the Army and devised effective COIN strategies.
The Moslems of the Philippines are called "Moros" (a name applied by the Spanish for obvious reasons). They fought against the US colonial government in the 1900s, well after the Philippine national rebellion had been resolved; much of the fighting was done by Filipino troops in US service.
The Moros became noted for going "amok": that is, drug-addled suicide attacks. The Army's Colt .45 pistol was developed in response - as a weapon that would not only kill a crazed Moslem attacker, but knock him down at once.
The Moro insurrection was defeated by about 1912, and the Moros were quiescent till the 1960s. Since then, Moro discontent has led to the formation of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, and to renewed Moro guerrilla activity.
joetentpeg| 3.8.12 @ 8:47AM
Sir, you appear well-informed on this subject.
There's a "war story" in the ex-military/veteran blogosphere of an incident during the war in which Gen. "Blackjack" Pershing is rumored to have captured 50 of the Moros.
The Moros were charged with war crimes and sentenced to death by firing squad at which time Pershing ordered the squad to dip their cartridges in pig fat (or blood) prior to placing them in their rifles.
He then had 49 of the Moros shot, buried with the pig carcasses in a pit, and gave instructions to the "survivor" to spread the word on the consequences of their muslim fanaticism.
The story goes that the Moros ceased their "war on the infidels" for the next 50 years.
Was wondering if you, the commenters, Mr. Johnson, or Mr. Jones could verify this alleged incident.
Richard| 3.8.12 @ 4:50AM
Quite right, Mr. Rostrum, even the trivia about the army .45 that was the official USA military pistol for nearly a century.
Question: Why are Americans so quick to condemn US soldiers for their actions, in this case US tactics and techniques in the Moro rebellions? "Temperocentricism" is a scholarly flaw these critics need to remember.
aware| 3.8.12 @ 5:48AM
When "we" are in "their" country, and "they" resist, it's a "rebellion"?
sirbourbon| 3.8.12 @ 11:55AM
Herbert Hoover's magnum opus : Freedom Betrayed, Herbert Hoover's Secret History of the Second World War and its Aftermath.
Reviews: Tom Bethell at The American Spectator:
http://www.hoover.org/news/100486
Father James Thorton at The new American.com
and this at Scribed:http://www.scribd.com/doc/71965183/Freedom-Betrayed-Herbert-Hoover-s-Secret-History-of-the-Second-World-War-and-Its-Aftermath-Edited-with-an-Introduction-by-George-H-Nash