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.
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.
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.
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.