A long, divisive war will soon be over

Posted on by Moni Basu
Georgia  soldiers patrolled western Baghdad in 2006

President Barack Obama made a stunning announcement Friday. The war in Iraq would be over in December when virtually all of the remaining 40,000 U.S. troops will pull out and come home
. 
After nine long, divisive years, the Iraq war is finally coming to an end.

I am glad for all those troops who will come home before the holidays to hug their friends and loved ones. 
I am concerned about the future security of Iraq — many of my friends in Baghdad still live in fear.


And, I feel strange that the war will no longer be a headline. It has been so much a part of my life — from my first trip in 2002 under the controlled environment of Saddam Hussein’s information ministry to my last journey there with so-called surge units in 2008.


The night that the United States began “shock and awe,” it was pouring in Atlanta. I rushed in the rain to the Woodruff Arts Center from the Atlanta Constitution newsroom to cover a ceremony honoring Jimmy Carter’s Nobel Peace Prize.

I lived in this tent for almost four months at Camp Striker in 2005.
I remember sitting there, amid nobly dressed ladies and gentlemen beaming with pride, taking in the pomp and ceremony of the evening.


But my mind was elsewhere.


I thought of my friends Salar Jaff and Hala Araim. Were they alright? Had they fled Baghdad? How many people were cowering in fear that night? How many suffered?


It was only a month later when I arrived in Iraq that I found the answers to my questions.


Less than a week after the U.S. bombing started, the 3rd Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team from Fort Stewart was about 100 miles outside the Iraqi capital. They had raced through the harsh Iraqi desert and were eying Baghdad, once the crown jewel of the Middle East.


I met up with some of them in April. Little did they know then how things would transpire in Iraq. In the first weeks of American occupation, the soldiers traveled in soft-skinned Humvees without fear of being blown up.


I thought about the first days of euphoria after the fall of Saddam as I listened to Obama from the CNN newsroom today. In another country not far from Iraq, the same kind of jubilation was unfolding on the streets.


Will Libya succeed in enforcing security so it can get on with the task of building democracy? Or will it turn into terror as Iraq did?


No one can answer such questions with any certainty, of course. We will have to wait and see.


In the meantime, to all my Iraqi friends and the many soldiers and Marines I met over the course of nine years: I raise my glass to your courage. 
 
 

I am born

Posted on by Moni Basu

To borrow from Charles Dickens:

WhetherI shall turn out to be the hero of my own life or whether that station will beheld by anyone else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning ofmy life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) onthe thirteenth day of October. It was remarked that soon after my mother brought me home, a white owl appeared before her on the terrace, glistening in moonlight. 
 
It was Lakshmi Puja day, when Hindus worship the goddess of prosperity, grace, and charm. Lakshmi has a white owl by her side and the bird has come to be known as a sign of good luck. 
 
My mother was then convinced she had done the right thing.
 
By thatI mean that she had picked me up only days earlier at an orphanage in the Maniktola neighborhood of Kolkata. I had been left there, on the doorstep,hours after my birth.
 
Many people I have known in the course of my life have asked me why my natural parents abandoned me. I do not fully know the answer to that. If and when I do,perhaps I shall write more.
 
But what I do know is how lucky I was to have been left at that particular orphanage, run by American missionary Helen Benedict.
 
Mymother had just met Benedict at a luncheon at the Indo-American Society, whereshe was hoping to improve her spoken English. She told me she was attending afashion show. I never quite figured out what a missionary was doing at afashion show, but I am glad that Benedict went that day. 
 
She happened to be seated next to my mother, who lamented that she had not had success in having children. My parents had been married 10 years by then.
 
Benedict perked up.
 
A child was left on her doorstep, she told my mother. Would she like to come and look?
 
My mother went the next day with my grandmother. Many years later, I would see the gate through which she entered the day and meet the caretaker who greeted her.
 
I was only a few days old. Apparently, my mother agreed to take me home the moment she saw me. 
 
Benedict advised her that she ought to first consult my father. I suppose there was a chance that he might not have agreed — as much chance as there is of  snow falling in Kolkata.
 
He had already picked out a name. Monimala. Garland of pearls.
 
At seven days old, I was taken home. To an old house at 206 Barrackpur TrunkRoad on the campus of the Indian Statistical Institute. The banisters were wrought iron, the floors, marble. The courtyard was shaded by tall coconut palms.
 
My mother told me when I was much older that she had gone up the narrow stairs, up to the roof and seen the white owl. She felt unfiltered joy and relief, like monsoons after a searing May.
 
Many pages of my life are yet to be written.
 
But the first chapter begins with my great fortune — a child left at an orphanage who came into the home of a brilliant mathematician and his beautiful wife. That child might have grown up in slums, might not have been educated.Instead, she traveled the world and grew up to write about it.
I tell you this story on my 49th birthday.
 
Many people still ask me about my natural mother and father. But I tell them I had only one set of parents. They are long gone now but they gave me a life for which I will be eternally grateful. Yes, I an adopted child. Their blood does not run through my veins. 
 
But I have something much more potent — their love.

A man of peace, but not the prize

Posted on by Moni Basu

Three pioneering women — Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberian Leymah Gbowee and Tawakul Karman of Yemen — won the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize Friday.
The Nobel committee recognized them for their “non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.”
It made me think, as I always do every October when this coveted prize is announced, about the life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, known to the world as the Mahatma, or great soul.
And that he was.
The driver of India’s independence movement, Gandhi remains the world’s strongest symbol of contemporary non-violent practices, his civil disobedience practices served as a model for the civil rights movement in America. 
He was nominated for the peace prize in 1937, 1938. 1939, 1947 (the year India won freedom from Britain) and in 1948, just before he was assassinated. That year, the Nobel committee decided to make no award on the grounds that “there was no suitable living candidate.’
Something to think about.

Joy and Death

Posted on by Moni Basu

Two stories I have covered in the past came to resolutiontoday. Both involved international campaigns that urged freedom for whatsupporters called unjust imprisonment.
One ended in decided joy; the other the opposite.
The first was the reunion on an Omani tarmac of two youngAmerican men held in Tehran’s Evil prison for more than two years. Iranianauthorities finally released Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer. They ran down thesteps of the jet that ferried them to freedom and into the arms of loved ones.
Go to CNN coverage
Among those anxiously waiting was Sarah Shourd, alsoarrested with Fattal and Bauer for crossing into Iranian territory when theywere hiking in Iraq’s northern Kurdish region. Shourd, released on bail a yearago, is engaged to be married to Bauer.
She had not been able to savor her own freedom fully untilthis day. I know that from what she said about her ordeal on CNN last year.
Much closer to home, another drama unfolded. Authorities inmy home state of Georgia put to death by lethal injection Troy Davis, who hadbeen on death row for two decades for murdering an off-duty police officer,Mark MacPhail, in Savannah.
 
I first began writing about about the Davis case when it came beforethe clemency board three years ago. I spent time with his sister MartinaCorreia, who has fought from the very beginning for her brother’s release.Davis and his family have always argued that he was innocent and set up by thepolice to take the fall for MacPhail’s killing.
Later, I reported a deeper story with my colleague SonjiJacobs about the murder. After reading hundreds of pages oftrial transcripts and police records, I did not know what to think except thatthere was enough doubt in the case that a man’s life ought naught to be takenwithout further exam.
Here is part of that story that appeared in the AtlantaJournal-Constitution in November, 2007:
The police had nothing.

No fingerprints, tire tracks or murder weapon.The bullets extracted from MacPhail and empty shell casings found on the ground— all from a .38-caliber pistol — provided the only physical evidence.

Soon, though, police would tie the shooting ofMichael Cooper at the pool party, where Davis and Collins had been earlier thatnight, to the killing of MacPhail. The weapon in both, they said, was a.38-caliber gun.

A cop was dead and “there was a lot ofpressure to get somebody, ” recalls Louis Tyson, who was on the Savannahpolice force and knew the Davis family.

Detectives began to interview people in theBurger King drive-through lane, in the parking lot by the bus station, acrossOglethorpe Street at the Thunderbird Inn.

Their accounts of what happened varied. But onedetail was critical: Witnesses agreed that one of the men gathered around Youngwore a white shirt; the other, yellow. And it was the man in white, they said,who first struck Young with a handgun, then shot MacPhail.

At 7:55 p.m. that day, police got a break. Coles,accompanied by his lawyer, walked into the Criminal Investigation Bureau officein Savannah. Coles told police that he saw Davis with a .38-caliber gun at thepool hall and that he had used it to hit Young on the head.

Immediately, police focused their investigationon Davis. They added a color Polaroid of him to a photo lineup. In the next fewdays, they tracked down Davis’ family and friends and searched the homes of hismother and sister.

News of the manhunt appeared on television and innewspaper articles. Davis’ trial attorneys would describe it as the “mostintensive investigation probably done in the history of this county.”

They would also argue that police had fallen forColes’ statements “hook, line and sinker.”
And another excerpt:
On Aug. 19, 1991, exactly two years afterMacPhail’s murder in a downtown Burger King parking lot, Davis went on trial atthe Chatham County courthouse.

The prosecution put on the stand nine witnesseswhose testimony, they said, proved beyond a doubt that Davis was the killer. 

Fairly consistently, witnesses said a man wearing a white T-shirtpistol-whipped a homeless man, Larry Young, and then shot MacPhail beforefleeing the scene.

Perhaps most damning was the testimony of Young’sgirlfriend, Harriet Murray. She said a man wearing a white T-shirt pointed hisgun at MacPhail and shot him before the police officer could pull his gun outof his holster. MacPhail was down on the ground when the man shot him two orthree more times, Murray testified.

She pointed in court to Davis, identifying him asthe person wearing the white shirt that night. “He had a little smile onhis face, a little smirky-like smile, ” she said.

Dorothy Ferrell, who was across the street fromthe Burger King, identified Davis in court and said: “I’m real sure,positive sure, that that is him, and you know, it’s not a mistakenidentity.”

Antoine Williams, who had just arrived to workthe graveyard shift at the restaurant, also identified Davis as the shooter.Davis’ neighbor Jeffrey Sapp testified that Davis confessed to the killing justhours after MacPhail died.

When Coles took the stand, he admitted arguingwith Young but said Davis hit the homeless man. He said he had already turnedaround to run from the parking lot when MacPhail was shot.

Questioned about why he sought out lawyer JohnCalhoun the day of the murder, Coles told the jury he had worked for Calhoun”off and on.”
The attorney had accompanied Coles to the policestation, where he told officers that he saw Davis with a .38-caliber gun justbefore the murder.

“Why didn’t you just go straight to thepolice?” asked defense attorney Robert Falligant.

“I don’t know, ” Coles said.”That’s what I chose to do.”

What Coles had not told police was that he, too,owned a .38-caliber gun. He later would admit it and say he had stashed the gunin some bushes before going to the Burger King. Coles had been convicted of carryinga concealed weapon and could not legally carry a gun.

During the trial — and since — Davis’ variousattorneys have repeatedly asked why Coles and another man at the scene, Daryl”D.D.” Collins, weren’t ever considered suspects by police. Why wasn’tColes’ house searched after they learned he was carrying a gun that night —the same type as the murder weapon.

Police never recovered a murder weapon — orColes’ gun or the one he said Davis owned. 

An expert on ballistics, however,testified that shell casings found near MacPhail’s body matched those found inthe subdivision where another man, Michael Cooper, had been shot earlier thatnight at a pool party. Davis was linked to both locations.
And later in the story:
Davis was convicted and sentenced to die. But ashe aged on Death Row, witnesses changed their stories:

Murray said in a statement signed in 2002 that itwas the man following Young who hit him and shot MacPhail.

Murray said: “The man following Larrystarted digging in his pants for a gun and slapped Larry in the side of theface with it . . . I saw the man who was arguing with Larry . . . and whoslapped Larry shoot the police officer.” Coles had testified that he wasthe person following and arguing with Young.

In 2000, Ferrell signed an affidavit saying thatshe was on parole in 1989 and feared she would be locked up again if she didn’ttell police what they wanted to hear. “I don’t know which of the guys didthe shooting because I didn’t see that part, ” she said in her statement.

In his affidavit, Williams said: “I wastotally unsure whether [Davis] was the person who shot the officer.” AndSapp said: “I told them Troy confessed to me. None of it was true.”

Three others — Anthony Hargrove, Shirley Rileyand Darold Taylor — stepped forward after the trial and said Coles confessedto killing MacPhail. Hargrove said Coles admitted letting a man named Troy takethe fall.
MacPhail’s family waited many years to see theman convicted of killing him brought to justice. They have lived with the agonyof a case that has been left hanging year after year, their loss relived everytime a legal proceeding brought Mark MacPhail’s name back into the headlines.
I cannot imagine that pain.
On the other hand, thousands of people worldwidehad doubts about Davis’ guilt. Did he pull the trigger on that hot Savannahnight? Or was it someone else? Perhaps we will never know the answer withabsolute certainty.
But we will never be able to bring Davis back tolife. He died from a lethal injection at 11:08 p.m. Wednesday.
  1.  

Cancer

Posted on by Moni Basu
My friend Anita died last night.

The news hit me today in the CNN newsroom like the blast of a bomb. I had fully intended to go visit her after my return to Atlanta this week. Now, I will never see her again.I will never hear her infectious laugh again. It made my husband Kevin’s bursting laugh seem demure.

 I probably never would have had the journalism career I have if it had not been for Anita. My resume landed on her desk somehow, and she wanted to hire me on the national copy desk. I will be forever grateful to her for having faith in me.

 Anita fought cancer for many years. Thursday night, she lost the battle. She left behind a beautiful daughter, Kc, who will now have to navigate life without the nurturing of her mother.

 Tomorrow, I journey to San Francisco, to be with another strong woman in my life — my aunt, my father’s little sister. I grew up calling her Phoolpishi, which means aunt of the flowers, her bloom faded with years of physical suffering.

Like with Anita, her cancer is back with a vengeance. Like Anita, she is strong. A fighter like I could never be.

She has endured and survived and is still with hope.I did not get a chance to see Anita again. Not on this earth anyway. But I will see my Phoolpishi tomorrow. And when I do, I will hear Anita’s laugh surround me, fill me with warmth like an old English hearth on a bone-chilling day.

A future star

Posted on by Moni Basu











This summer, another crop of interns spent time with us at CNN, working in various departments from the CNN Wire to Headline News. Chelsea Bailey was one of them.

Young, bright, smart, personable, curious. Chelsea has all the qualities to make a great journalist. Most of all, I appreciated her eagerness to learn and her verve for life.

She reported and wrote about all sorts of topics — from a vial of killer Ted Bundy’s blood helping to solve cold cases to Florida fishermen catching a massive shark. She helped me report one my stories about a group of devout Hindus suing a restaurant for having served them meat.

At other times, she was part of the wires team, updating daily stories or gnashing her head to come up with a new angle to the heat wave report.

Always, she approached her assignments with a big smile.

I taught a magazine writing class at UGA last semester and discovered the incredible rewards of working with young people who want to take up my profession, especially in a time when print journalism is undergoing a zillion changes. I miss teaching now. So when Chelsea and Molly Green showed up from the University of North Carolina this summer, I found an added dimension to my days at work, and relished it.

Working with Chelsea made me see journalism with fresh eyes. She helped energize me, inspired me to carry on.

Thanks for all your hard work, Chelsea. I will miss you. And I know you will shine.

Heading West: The Stage Stop

Posted on by Moni Basu






On the last day of our vacation, we get back in the car — after two days in Denver — and head back west on a scenic drive towards Boulder. Back on winding roads with magnificent vistas.

We decide to pull off the highway in Rollinsville, hoping to grab a sandwich and something to drink. We are not sure about the tiny town at first. There’s an antique shop and a place called the Stage Stop. “Serving hicks, hippies and bikers since 1868,” says the sign atop the door. There are paintings on plywood on the walls and hardly anyone in the place.

We dare to go in to check out the lunch menu and are pleasantly surprised. Pulled pork and chicken salad sandwiches. Home made potato chips. Garden salads. We order and wonder about the place; ask the young waiter what it’s all about. Soon enough the owner shows up.

His name is Patrick Schuchard and for years, he taught art at the University of Washington in St. Louis. When he’d had enough, he and his wife, Carol Crouppen Schuchard, moved out here — this was where his father used to bring the family for vacations when he was growing up.

They live in a nearby town called Eldora but have a studio here. And the Stage Stop.

The building was originally the Toll Gate Barn for the Butterfield Stage Coach Company that ferried people across the continental divide through the Rollins Pass. Schuchard loved the civil war-era wooden building with its rough hewn post and beam timbers. He bought it, restored it and turned it into a cafe, bar and dance hall where artists like Judy Collins, Three Dog Night, Dave Matthews Band and others have graced the stage. This part of Colorado was hippie central once, Schuchard tells us.

Les the bartender stands before the old bar and tells us how the place was haunted. He has heard ghosts whispering.

Schuchard says two women once walked in and told him that many years ago their great uncle had hung himself in the basement of the building. Not a comforting feeling. But then again, the place was also a butcher shop in one of its many incarnations.

He shows us around the place, tells us of his dreams and ambitions for this unlikely establishment. He points to the oldest building in town, gives us history. Stephen Stills still has a house around here, Schuchard says.

He convinced a chef from a Boulder restaurant to come out here to cook. He wanted sophistication.

“We’re not trying to o nostalgia here.” he says. “I could have made it a very Western place. But I’m trying to make a peculiar brand of beauty.”

We are fascinated with the art on the walls and inquire about Schuchard’s work. Soon enough, we are inside the studio filled with his and his wife’s art. All of it seems surreal in this town, tucked away in the Rocky Mountains. I am glad we stopped.

Heading West: Being and nothingness

Posted on by Moni Basu






I have traveled to many lands but nowhere have I seen the landscape change as rapidly or as often as it did on our road trip through Wyoming.

I see the Tetons in the rear view now, white peaks contrasting against blue sky, as the highway winds downward into flatter lands formed of earth as red as Georgia clay. We drive into DuBois, a true cowboy town where the main road is dotted with a few eateries and shops and an old sign that says “Homestead.” We poke our heads into an antique shop filled with old spurs, bits and colorized photographs. We eat burgers at the Cowboy Cafe. They are big enough to fill the belly of any hungry ranch hand.

We keep driving, not knowing where we will sleep tonight. Through the Wind River Reservation, past cows and even elk, and into Lander, where a mean wind whips through a main street that feels empty. This is an old mining town. It was the westward terminus of the “Cowboy Line” of the Chicago and North Western Railway. This is “where rails end and trails begin.”

I close my eyes and try to imagine this place as it was a century ago.

There are plenty of dude ranches nearby. I am told that’s a source for tourist dollars these days.

We keep driving. Into an abyss of nothingness. Nothing we can see but sagebrush and rolling hills in the distant. There are stretches of highway where we do not see any trailers, ranches, animals. No signs of life anywhere.

It’s a strange feeling for me. I would not want to be alone here, I think.

It takes several hours to reach Rawlins. We think about staying there but keep moving. I can’t stand the melancholy of a another town past its prime hanging heavy on every corner.

We turn right onto Highway 287, which will take us back into Colorado. It is evening when we reach Fort Collins. Downtown is bustling in this college town. People are spilling out of cafes and restaurants. I hear one man discussing Jean-Paul Sartre’s brand of existentialism.

We had come from nothingness into being. Or was it the other way around?

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