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 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.

So it’s a total disaster in New Orleans. Three levees are breached, one of them has a hole over 150 meters across. 80% of the city is under water up to 6 meters deep. The entire city is without electrical power or water supply. It’s estimated that it will be 9–12 weeks before they can even get rid of the water, much less get the city habitable. Interstate 10 is broken chunks of floating concrete; there’s no route into the city for trucks and other major vehicles. Mississippi reports at least 110 dead; Louisiana hasn’t even begun counting—but there are bodies floating in the water-and-sewage filled streets. It’s estimated that up to 100,000 people were unable or unwilling to leave the city. The death toll could be in the tens of thousands by the time it’s all over. The official message is simple: everyone must leave New Orleans.

The Red Cross has around 40,000 people in emergency shelters. Another 25,000 are going to be sleeping in the Houston Astrodome. They won’t be going home any time soon, as once the water is drained from the streets every building will have to be checked for structural soundness and shored up; every sewer line will need to be inspected. Then, of course, there will be the electrical infrastructure to replace, and the leaking gas lines to fix. In the mean time, some of the people left alive in the city are looting. Police are finding it hard to stop them, what with meters-high piles of debris that they have to cut through with chainsaws even to be able to patrol on foot.

So the residents of New Orleans who evacuated might get to go home to a ruined shell of a home with no electricity, by Christmas if they’re lucky. But right now, the water’s still rising… the Army engineers who were trying to repair the levees have been forced to abandon the city. The National Guard is facing the problem that most of its members were shipped out to Iraq to make up for low troop numbers, so the city is basically lawless at this point.

The New Orleans aquarium is gone; sealions are wandering the empty space where it used to be. The President’s Casino is missing too. The public library is paper maché. Boats weren’t safe either, with an 8 meter wall of water hitting the coast.

It’s not just New Orleans either. The BBC have a photograph of an oil rig that was smashed into the Cochrane Bridge in Mobile, Alabama. Most of Mobile is apparently without electricity too. Biloxi, Mississippi is without electricity, water and sewerage.

Damage estimates so far are around $25 billion, it’ll probably be the worst hit for the insurance industry ever. Since the worsening storms over the last few years had already brought many insurance companies close to bankruptcy, I imagine a few will collapse this year.

2004’s hurricane season was close to the worst ever. This year’s hurricane season is only half over and has already surpassed it. It appears that the severity of hurricanes may be directly linked to global warming, while the frequency of them is rising with the natural periodic rise in ocean surface temperature. Combine the two and you have a deadly combination. Katrina was more than 300 km across, and meteorologists say things could have been much worse. If you think the Kyoto protocol would harm the US economy, that’s nothing compared to what a decade of steadily-worsening hurricanes will do to it.

Now let’s set the wayback machine to February 2005:

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has identified millions of dollars in flood and hurricane protection projects in the New Orleans district.

Chances are, though, most projects will not be funded in the president’s 2006 fiscal year budget to be released today.

In general, funding for construction has been on a downward trend for the past several years, said Marcia Demma, chief of the New Orleans Corps’ programs management branch.

In 2001, the New Orleans district spent $147 million on construction projects. When fiscal year 2005 wraps up Sept. 30, the Corps expects to have spent $82 million, a 44.2 percent reduction from 2001 expenditures.

Of course, all the levee construction in the world wouldn’t have saved New Orleans from this disaster—but it might have reduced the death toll and damage a bit. But hey, at least we all got our wartime tax cuts, right?

Will this tragedy be enough to silence the people who say that everything is OK, that global warming is a myth, that it’s a good idea to send the National Guard to Iraq, that we should keep cutting spending on infrastructure and emergency planning so we can finance a war and still have tax cuts?

I’m betting it won’t. They’ll keep shrieking their denails, and ultimately they’ll get away with it because their beliefs are so much more palatable than the unpleasant reality. I predict that the Climate Change Science Program and NASA’s studies of climate change will still get their budget cut next year. Why even study whether global warming might be causing these disasters, when you can just choose to believe it isn’t?

And remember, this is not a partisan issue. Democrats supported the major budget cuts for the US Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans, and the cancellation of a study into what would happen if a hurricane hit the city. Democrats voted for the war in Iraq. When the Senate voted 95-0 against the Kyoto protocol on the grounds that it would result in economic harm to US industry and would exclude some nations (Senate Resolution 98 in 1997), those voting included John Kerry and Ted Kennedy.

New Orleans in particular is a problem people have known about for a long time. It was just waiting to happen, like the big earthquake in San Francisco, or Mount Rainier showering Seattle with ash and red hot debris. The big question in my mind is whether people will learn, or whether they’ll carry on as before and build a New New Orleans right where the last one was. Either way, I never got to see New Orleans, and now I never will.

Reuters:

U.S. Army soldiers in Iraq filmed themselves kicking a gravely wounded prisoner in the face and making the arm of a corpse appear to wave, then titled the effort “Ramadi Madness” after the city where it was made.

The video, made public on Monday, was shot by Florida National Guard soldiers. They edited and compiled it into a DVD in January 2004, with various sections bearing titles such as “Those Crafty Little Bastards” and “Another Day, Another Mission, Another Scumbag.”

[...]

Documents showed that the Army deemed the actions shown on the video “inappropriate” rather than criminal.

“It didn’t rise to the level of criminal abuse, according to the investigations,” said Lt. Col. Jeremy Martin, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon. “Clearly, the soldiers probably exercised poor judgment … and I’m sure that they were admonished by their command for their actions.”

I can just see Apple’s sales pitch…

iMovie makes it easy to work with the footage of your latest atrocities.

• Connect your camera and let Magic iMovie do the rest.
• Take on more systemic patterns of abuse thanks to major performance gains.
• Blur out the faces of perpetrators and emphasize the action with special effects.
• The new “US Atrocity” theme automatically adds thumbnail buttons to the DVD menu. Click on an Iraqi to see his face being kicked in!
• Use the library of sound effects to add audience applause.

The US army is planning to deploy a new system for targeting air strikes: soldiers will be able to enter the coordinates on a Windows CE handheld, and transmit them via a mobile phone text message to the jet pilots. Responding to safety and reliability concerns, the military intelligences behind the system reassuringly explain that when Windows CE crashes, it only takes 12 seconds to reboot it.

I saw Time and Newsweek on the newsstand in Harvard Square.

Let’s face it, we all knew what this week’s cover picture was going to be. But just for once, I’d have liked to have been surprised. I’d have liked them to do something tasteful, something which treats the subject with dignity and sorrow, rather than exploiting it.

But no, we got big lurid photographs of planes flying into buildings and exploding in a searing fireball of aviation fuel.

They could have printed a plain black cover with the word “After”. They could have printed the names of victims. They could have picked out photos of some of the heroes who gave their lives trying to save others. They did none of those things; they went for sensationalism, exploitation and overkill; they forced America yet again to look at an image already seared into the collective consciousness. Maybe I’m misreading the national consciousness, but I just don’t think anybody needs or wants to see that fucking image again.

CNN is worse. They now have a seemingly permanent graphic “America at war” with the latest scare headline below it, and round the clock coverage as we play the “Where’s Osama?” game. Loving profiles of war hardware are interspersed with interviews with military insiders about how much butt we’re going to kick, where we’re going to kick it, when we’re going to kick it, and so on.

Of course, CNN would love a war. Especially a really big, messy one. Their ratings always go up in a war. You may think I’m being exceptionally cynical to ascribe such base motives to them, but just go watch the coverage for a few minutes and look for the subtext.

Yes, we’re at war. They haven’t told us who we’re at war with, but as soon as they decide, we’ll sure be at war with them, so keep watching. We’re going to kick some ass. We’re not sure where we’re going to kick it, or who’s ass it’s gonna be, but ass will be kicked, and you’ll see it here. Look at the shiny ships, look at the big planes. And now, a word from our sponsor, the US Army. Enroll now and bomb a raghead! So, when can we expect to start enjoying a real war? Let’s ask an expert in disinformation from the Pentagon, who helps us write our stories…

I don’t know anyone who wants a war. Like with the whole Clinton fiasco, there seems to be a total disconnect between the media and the population. Then again, the People’s Republic isn’t exactly typical of America as a whole, and there are plenty of people on the net who are willing to stomp along with the drumbeat.