Month: February 2006

American gulag

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Torture, force-feeding and darkness at noon — this is Guantanamo, a lawyer for prisoners says.

Every prisoner I’ve interviewed claims to have been badly beaten and subjected to treatment that only could be called torture, by Americans, from the first day of U.S. captivity in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They said they were hung by their wrists and beaten, hung by their ankles and beaten, stripped naked and paraded before female guards, and given electric shocks. At least three claimed to have been beaten again upon arrival in Guantanamo. One of my clients, Fayiz Al Kandari, now 27, said his ribs were broken during an interrogation in Pakistan. I felt the indentation in his ribs….. Continue Reading →

The Brutal Christ of the Armageddonites

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Religious fanaticism in American foreign policy.

A major reason the Armageddonites have become so powerful is that most journalists can’t comprehend that millions of Americans could really want, in this day and age, their God to destroy most of the human race, much less that they are donating millions to promote it (subsidizing settlements on the West Bank and paying for Russian Jews to immigrate to Israel in order to fulfill prophecies faster). Nor do most Americans know that Armageddonites are in the highest levels of government. But it was erstwhile House Majority Leader Tom DeLay who argued that the Iraq war should be supported because it is a precursor to the second coming of Christ….. Continue Reading →

Abu Ghraib Is Not Old News

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No, this is not an old story. The images of naked, bloody, and sometimes dead prisoners printed on Salon.com this week may be of incidents from 2003, but there’s no reason to think they aren’t continuing. The International Red Cross, which the military allows to monitor the prisons, said this week they haven’t been to Abu Ghraib in more than a year because of the dismal security situation….. Continue Reading →

Iraq and the Democratic Empire

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Iraq is the country that the US invaded with the attempt to convert the state and the people from enemy to friend. On the face of it, this sounds rather implausible, of course. Good fences make good neighbors. Friendship and peace are not usually the result of insults, sanctions, invasions, bombings, killings, puppet governments, censorship, economic controls, and occupations. If this generation learns anything from this period, that would be a good start….. Continue Reading →

The next war?

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Why risk it? Stopping Islamism, oil, short-term domestic politics, and Iranian regime change, in that order. With their PNAC dreams of remaking the Middle East, it just might be too much of a honey pot for Bush’s hawkish neo-cons to resist. The only minor complication is that such an imbroglio is not only by definition unwinnable, but is likely to be disastrous — to the point where it could end America’s status as a global superpower. (Which might well be a good thing, but for the horrific loss of mostly civilian life it would entail.)….. Continue Reading →