Live from Austin!

What we really need is for an Army Corporal to waterboard a puppy to death and post the videos on YouTube. Then you’d see people’s heads implode from the cognitive dissonance.

Now that we’ve all accepted torture as a legitimate tool of the US government, the question is simply when it’s appropriate. The answer seems to be: pretty much any time the government doesn’t like what you’re doing.

Navy Veteran Donald Vance became aware of illegal arms sales in Iraq—land mines, rocket launchers, that sort of thing. He reported it to the FBI. In return, he was imprisoned as a “combatant” for 97 days and tortured.

There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.

The America-hating left-wing rumor sheet publishing this news?

Forbes.

Reporter with CNN press pass arrested for asking Rudy Giuliani a question.

Mitt Romney calls for doubling the size of Guantanamo.

It’s pretty scary when John McCain is left sounding like the reasonable one.

 Tony Lagouranis, US army interrogator at Abu Ghraib, quoted in the Washington Post:

“At every point, there was part of me resisting, part of me enjoying,” Lagouranis said. “Using dogs on someone, there was a tingling throughout my body. If you saw the reaction in the prisoner, it’s thrilling.”

[...]

Then a soldier’s aunt sent over several copies of Viktor E. Frankel’s Holocaust memoir, “Man’s Search for Meaning.” Lagouranis found himself trying to pick up tips from the Nazis. He realized he had gone too far.

He has written a book describing his experiences in detail.

If you’ve ever wondered who the unluckiest person in the world is, I think I’ve found him. His name is Abdul Rahim.

In January 2000, he was arrested in Afghanistan by the Taliban. They tortured him. They burned him with cigarettes, smashed his hand, deprived him of sleep, submitted him to water torture, and hanged him from the ceiling. Eventually he “confessed” to being a spy for the United States.

The prison Rahim was being tortured in was captured by US forces in January 2002. Given the circumstances, he probably thought it was his lucky day. He was wrong. The US promptly accused him of being an al-Qaida terrorist—and tortured him. Again.

He’s currently in Guantanamo Bay, one of the many people kept imprisoned without any actual criminal charges being filed against them.

Since Dick Cheney and friends are happy with holding people’s heads under water in order to extract information—they just argue that it shouldn’t be called torture—I imagine Abdul Rahim is pretty used to water torture by now.

In case anyone in the UK is feeling complacent following this week’s US torture legalization, it’s worth noting that the US agreed to return nearly all the UK residents currently being tortured in Guantanamo—and the UK government said it didn’t want them back. Four of them are still being actively torturedinterrogated.

When I first heard that Bush and Rumsfeld had signed off on pro-torture policy documents written by our new Attorney General, one of my first thoughts was: How will they react when American soldiers are tortured by foreign powers?

The answer, amazingly enough, is that they are being consistent. The Bush administration is now fighting Gulf War veterans in court, trying to prevent them from claiming compensation for being tortured by Saddam Hussein. The rationale given is…well, several rationales are given, ranging from the legalistic to the economic, but conspicuously avoiding any discussion of morality. So much for “values”.

I guess Bush and his cronies think torture is no big deal in general—not just when carried out on Arabs. I feel like I ought to at least be glad that everyone tortured at Abu Ghraib is being treated equally badly, whether American or not, but instead I just feel even more horrified. It’s easy to believe that Bush doesn’t give a shit about Iraqis; it’s somewhat harder to accept that he doesn’t give a shit about US veterans either.

With Ashcroft’s departure, George W. Bush has a chance to make a symbolic gesture towards uniting the nation. Instead, he has chosen Alberto Gonzales as the new Attorney General.

That’s the Alberto Gonzales who wrote the memo urging that the president declare the US exempt from the Geneva Convention, because otherwise US behavior could lead to war crimes prosecutions. If you had any doubt that a vote for the Bush administration would be rewarding those who supported torture, that doubt should now be dispelled.

It was also Gonzales who ignored a subpoena to turn over documents relating to Enron. Not exactly surprising, since he was one of Enron’s corporate lawyers when he worked for Vinson & Elkins.

Gonzales was appointed to the Texas Supreme Court by Bush in 1999, where he took cash from Halliburton while overhearing a case against them. Surprise, surprise, the case was denied. He also defended the Texas practice of not bothering to alert consulates when foreign nationals were arrested in Texas, stating that international law did not apply to Texas.

Finally, Alberto Gonzales was the guy Bush relied on to summarize the death penalty cases in Texas for him, so he could decide whether to grant clemency or just have ‘em executed. We all know how that turned out.

So, let the healing commence!

If you watch New Hampshire Public Television (WENH) for a while, chances are you’ll see an advertisement stating that the programming is sponsored by BAE Systems of New Hampshire. The TV ad shows happy smiling families playing baseball to raise money for the American Cancer Research Fund, and ends with the slogan “BAE Systems: A Global Company With A Local Heart”.

Heartwarming stuff. Unless, of course, you know who BAE Systems actually are.

They used to be known as British Aerospace, until they merged with Marconi in the late 1990s. They’re the UK’s number one defense contractor, and one of the largest arms manufacturers worldwide. They make warplanes, ships, submarines, radar systems—everything from gyroscopic compasses to weapons of mass destruction.

One of their more well-known products is the Hawk fighter-bomber. During the 1980s and 90s, BAE Systems sold 40 Hawk aircraft to the Indonesian government, who used them to help with the attempted genocide in East Timor. The UK Labour government shipped them another 16 after the genocide started, saying that they were powerless to revoke an arms contract signed by the previous government. Of course, that doesn’t explain why they extended the contract to avoid it expiring during the EU arms embargo on Indonesia…

You might also know BAE Systems via their subsidiary Heckler & Koch. The H&K MP5 was standard issue for Indonesian troops in East Timor during the genocide. To get around inconvenient trade embargoes, BAE Systems licensed the design to MKEK, a Turkish company who were happy to sell the weapons to Indonesia. (You may also remember seeing one of them pointed at Elian Gonzales.)

BAES are on very good terms with the US government too, to the tune of $5 billion a year. (That’s a very nice tune, it goes cha-ching.) BAE gets special treatment from the Pentagon, being allowed to trade as if it was a domestic arms company. That means lots of juicy contracts fighting “The War Against Terrorism”.

They’re also close friends with the regime in Saudi Arabia, allegedly thanks to their purchasing houses, yachts and hookers for Saudi officials via a corporate slush fund. In 1995, investigative reporters caught BAE staff on film offering electroshock batons for sale as torture equipment, and admitting that they had sold 8,000 to the Saudis and thousands more to the Chinese, who are particularly fond of using them against Tibetans. The great thing about BAES electroshock batons is you can torture someone for hours and not leave a mark. For some reason, they fail to mention all this on their home page, merely stating that they are “innovating for a safer world”.

When the UK government tried to start an anti-corruption initiative, BAE Systems actually refused to take part. In fact, they are so sleazy that the Bush administration accused them of being corrupt. All of which makes the WENH ad rather surreal, but not as surreal as the fact that BAES have the titanium composite cojones necessary to publish a corporate social responsibility page.

So, next time you see the happy smiling faces of the BAE Systems children on WENH, perhaps like me you’ll wonder what happens when one of them asks “What do you do at work, Daddy?”

Yes, I know, all the bad things happen in other parts of BAE Systems. The New Hampshire people make teddy bears for orphans. No, actually they’re the Information and Electronic Warfare Systems unit, who make the guidance systems for the happy fighter jets that fly over Aceh.

A few more bad apples. It’s starting to look as American as bad apple pie:

Allegations that American soldiers routinely tortured and maltreated detainees have emerged from a third Iraqi city, renewing fears that abuse similar to that inflicted in Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad has been systematic and widespread.

American soldiers in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul beat and stripped detainees, threatened sexual abuse and forced them to listen to loud western music, according to statements seen by the Guardian.

[...] Haitham Saeed al-Mallah, a Mosul-born engineering graduate, says his house was raided by seven American soldiers in January. “I was handcuffed and hooded and was then taken to an unknown place which they call ‘the disco’, where they played very loud music as one of their means of torture.”

He adds: “They left me standing for hours, handcuffed and hooded, which made me quite disorientated. Then I was kicked very hard on my stomach, which was followed by continuous beating with a stick and with their boots until I fell unconscious. I only woke up after they poured over my head very cold water, which caused me great suffering.”

Mr al-Mallah says he was taken to a room where there was a “group torture”.

He adds: “I heard nothing but screaming and suffering of detained Iraqis. The usage of cold water along with beating seemed to be a standard procedure. We were then asked to perform exhausting exercises of squatting while they were playing extremely loud (and dirty) music.

“Whoever fell to the ground out of exhaustion would receive painful beating and cold water. We were prevented from going to the toilets despite our pleas, which made many of us soil ourselves.”

[...]

Mr al-Mallah says the next day, he saw “a young man of 14 years of age bleeding from his anus and lying on the floor.

“He was Kurdish and his name was Hama. I heard the soldiers talking to each other about this guy, they mentioned that the reason for this bleeding was inserting a metal object in his anus.”

Mr al-Qutaji, who was detained in March, says he and other Iraqi lawyers have been unable to stop abuses because US forces have been given immunity from prosecution.

—Guardian

There are around 100 children being detained, and there have been other claims of children being raped while in US custody. But the glass is half full according to the Washington Post, who report that things are immensely improved at Abu Ghraib these days. They don’t specifically mention fewer children being raped, but let’s assume it’s an oversight.