Little Earthquakes

While some of the righty blogs that we occasionally read are already waxing triumphant over Freedy McFreederton's inexorable and godly march toward Freedom, we are reminded instead of the facts before us.

A suicide car bomber blasted a crowd of police and national guard recruits Monday as they gathered for physicals outside a medical clinic south of Baghdad, killing at least 115 people and wounding 132 — the single deadliest attack in the two-year insurgency.

Torn limbs and other body parts littered the street outside the clinic in Hillah, a predominantly Shiite area about 60 miles south of Baghdad.

Monday’s blast outside the clinic was so powerful it nearly vaporized the suicide bomber’s car, leaving only its engine partially intact. The injured were piled into pickup trucks and ambulances and taken to nearby hospitals.

It would be nice to assume that Lebanon and Egypt were about to hold true plebiscites, but the fact of the matter is that neither of them have been terribly predisposed to such a thing in the past, and sadly, Lebanon may just devolve into yet another civil war with the extraction of Syrian troops. This is not an argument for continued Syrian troop presence in Lebanon, mind you, just a reasonable assumption as to a fairly likely consequence of their withdrawal. But sure, we can do more martial-law elections of anonymous lists of candidates in those places too, or perhaps a pseudo-democratic endorsement of Mubarak's son.

One popular conservative assumption is that "liberals" must objectively be hoping for US failure in Iraq to remain ideologically consistent. Not only is this repugnant, it is also flat-out untrue. But this is standard procedure for the fallacious argumentative style employed by many neo-cons. Indeed, one gets the distinct impression that ontological consistency is far less important than finding -- or, more likely, inventing -- an opportunity to pound the straw-man "liberal" they so excel at conjuring. They'll step over the shenanigans of this administration every time, if they can trump up some perceived "liberal" treachery, real or imagined.

The facts of the matter about Lebanon and the Syrian troop presence, as well as the fractious nature of the region, are not too difficult to research. Even a token glance at the facts indicates that all this premature talk about "tipping points" and "Kuhnian paradigm shifts" is just that -- premature talk.

Amidst all this happy talk about the spreading of democracy, it seems that we still need to clean up our own house before we presume to lecture the rest of the world about democratic principles. But hey, it's always fun to try and hop that moral high horse, isn't it?

A British detainee at Guantanamo Bay has told his lawyer he was tortured using the 'strappado', a technique common in Latin American dictatorships in which a prisoner is left suspended from a bar with handcuffs until they cut deeply into his wrists.

The reason, the prisoner says, was that he was caught reciting the Koran at a time when talking was banned.

....

But it is clear the disturbing claim is only the tip of the iceberg. Under the rules the United States military has imposed for defence lawyers who visit Guantanamo, Stafford Smith has not been allowed to keep his notes of meetings with prisoners, and will not be able to read them again until they have been examined and de-classified by a government censor.

He cannot disclose in public anything the men have told him until it too has been been de-classified, on pain of likely imprisonment in the US.

Stafford Smith has drawn up a 30-page report on the tortures which Begg and Belmar say they have endured, and sent it as an annexe with a letter to the Prime Minister which Downing Street received shortly before Christmas. For the time being - possibly forever - the report cannot be published, because the Americans claim that the torture allegations amount to descriptions of classified interrogation methods.

However, Stafford Smith's letter to Tony Blair - which has been declassified - says that on his visit to the Guantanamo prisoners, he heard 'credible and consistent evidence that both men have been savagely tortured at the hands of the United States' with Begg having suffered not only physical but 'sexual abuse' which has had 'mental health consequences'.

Thousands of documents obtained last month under the US Freedom of Information Act by the American Civil Liberties Union support the claims of torture at Guantanamo, which has apparently continued long after the publication last April of photographs of detainees being abused at the US-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. They include memos and emails to superiors by FBI and Defense Intelligence Agency officers, who say they were appalled by the methods being used by the young military interrogators at Guantanamo.

....

Stafford Smith says in his letter to Baroness Symons that Begg made a false written confession after being tortured in February 2003, when two agents who had abused him at Bagram - where Begg witnessed the deaths of two prisoners officially classed as homicide - came to Guantanamo. But neither he nor Stafford Smith have been allowed to see this statement, which apparently forms the main grounds for his continued incarceration. Stafford Smith asks the Foreign Office for help in obtaining a copy, and asks: 'What kind of civilised legal system does not allow the suspect to see his own statements? How can the prisoner's statement be said to be classified information when, if it were true, the prisoner would already know it?'

As Bush as already noted, he has had his "accountability moment", and Americans have decided that this sort of banana-republic torture-chamber shit is just okey-doke with them, so long as they don't have to look at it. Setting the obvious questions of morality aside for a second, what practical utility has been achieved by these methods? What useful information has been gleaned? I submit that had anything truly beneficial been gained, these guys would have shouted it from the highest rooftops, to bolster their flimsy case that it was all "worthwhile".

Instead, they continue to conceal and deny. Some of the interrogators sound like they actually get off on it. This is a problem with torture pretty much anywhere -- the people you have on hand to employ these despicable methods (and I'm not talking about making them wear an Israeli flag soaked in pork chops and menstrual blood; I'm talking about forcing them to stick their fingers up each other's anuses and suck each others' cocks; I'm talking about using the strappado and sending them to Egypt to have their fingernails ripped out with a pair of pliers) are by definition and by nature sadists.

Anyone who thinks it's been "worth it", even though no one's been convicted of anything (indeed, none of them have even been tried or charged), and the government has found no information of value to defend their actions, should do a little light reading on a true American original, Dan Mitrione.

We are better than this. It is time we started walking the talk. That is what real democracy is all about.