British doc film, on US prison violence. 50 min. @ 80 mb.

Posted by: slothrop | Jul 6 2005 17:37 utc | 4

Robin Cook:

…[Bush and Blair’s] present approach is fatally flawed by two delusions.
The first is the belief that they will win if only they can kill, capture or bury under rubble every insurgent. After relentlessly pursuing this approach for two years, the US military is worse off than when it started. In June there were more casualties among coalition troops and Iraqi forces than a year ago in the same month – before the handover of sovereignty that we were promised would transform security. We will continue to lose this conflict until US forces grasp that they breed more insurgents by the indiscriminate use of firepower and by putting higher priority on killing rebels rather than protecting civilians.
The second delusion is the insistence that military occupation of Iraq is the solution to the violence and not a large part of its cause. No strategy to end the insurgency is going to succeed unless it includes an exit plan for foreign troops.

However, the “sovereignty” to which we handed off some power is surpassing their teachers:

The Observer (UK), July 3, 2005
Revealed: Grim World Of New Iraqi Torture Camps
Secret torture chambers, the brutal interrogation of prisoners, murders by paramilitaries with links to powerful ministries… Foreign affairs editor Peter Beaumont in Baghdad uncovers a grim trail of abuse carried out by forces loyal to the new Iraqi government
The video camera pans across Hassan an-Ni’ami’s body as it is washed in the mosque for burial. In life he was a slender, good-looking man, usually dressed in a dark robe and white turban, Imam at a mosque in Baghdad’s Adhimiya district and a senior official of the Muslim Clerics Association.
When I first interviewed him a year ago he was suspected of contacts with the insurgency. Certainly he supported resistance to US forces.
More recently, an-Ni’ami had dropped out of sight. Then, a little over a month ago, relatives say, paramilitary police commandos from ‘Rapid Intrusion’ found him at a family home in the Sha’ab neighbourhood of northern Baghdad. His capture was reported on television as that of a senior ‘terrorist commander’. Twelve hours later his body turned up in the morgue.
What happened to him in his 24 hours in captivity was written across his body in chapters of pain, recorded by the camera. There are police-issue handcuffs still attached to one wrist, from which he was hanged long enough to cause his hands and wrists to swell. There are burn marks on his chest, as if someone has placed something very hot near his right nipple and moved it around.
A little lower are a series of horizontal welts, wrapping around his body and breaking the skin as they turn around his chest, as if he had been beaten with something flexible, perhaps a cable. There are other injuries: a broken nose and smaller wounds that look like cigarette burns.
An arm appears to have been broken and one of the higher vertebrae is pushed inwards. There is a cluster of small, neat circular wounds on both sides of his left knee. At some stage an-Ni’ami seems to have been efficiently knee-capped. It was not done with a gun – the exit wounds are identical in size to the entry wounds, which would not happen with a bullet. Instead it appears to have been done with something like a drill.
What actually killed him however were the bullets fired into his chest at close range, probably by someone standing over him as he lay on the ground. The last two hit him in the head.
The gruesome detail is important. Hanging by the arms in cuffs, scorching of the body with something like an iron and knee-capping are claimed to be increasingly prevalent in the new Iraq. Now evidence is emerging that appears to substantiate those claims. Not only Iraqis make the allegations. International officials describe the methods in disgusted but hushed tones, laying them at the door of the increasingly unaccountable forces attached to Iraq’s Ministry of the Interior.
…Six months ago, Human Rights Watch (HRW) laid out a catalogue of alleged abuses being applied to those suspected of terrorism in Iraq and called for an independent complaints body in Iraq.
…To add to HRW’s allegations of beatings, electric shocks, arbitrary arrest, forced confessions and detention without trial, The Observer can add its own charges. These include the most brutal kinds of torture, with methods resurrected from the time of Saddam; of increasingly widespread extra-judicial executions; and of the existence of a ‘ghost’ network of detention facilities – in parallel with those officially acknowledged – that exist beyond all accountability to international human rights monitors, NGOs and even human rights officials of the new Iraqi government.
What is most shocking is that it is done under the noses of US and UK officials, some of whom admit that they are aware of the abuses being perpetrated by units who are diverting international funding to their dirty war.
…Post-mortem images show a dozen or so farmers from the insurgent hotbed of Medayeen who were apparently seized by police as they slept in one of Baghdad’s markets and whose bodies were discovered on a rubbish dump in shallow graves to the north of the city. Like an-Ni’ami, their bodies also bore the marks of extensive torture before execution, most with a bullet to the head.
…Then there is Tahar Mohammed Suleiman al-Mashhadani, seized from the Abu Ghraib neighbourhood from early prayers outside a mosque with a number of other men, again by paramilitary police from Rapid Intrusion. When his body was found by family members in the morgue – 20 days after his arrest – he had been tortured almost beyond recognition.
These are not isolated cases. For what is extraordinary is the sense of impunity with which the torture, intimidation and murder is taking place. It is not just in Baghdad. In the majority Shia south, far from the worst ravages of the insurgency, there are also emerging reports consistent with the abuses in the capital.
If there is a centre to this horror, it is Baghdad’s Ministry of the Interior, and the police commando units that operate from there.
…It was here – 12 months ago – that there was the first intimation that something was going seriously wrong. On the second day of Iraq’s new government, US military police were forced to raid the Guest House to ‘rescue’ dozens of alleged criminals, scooped up in a sweep of the city, who were being subjected to beatings and forced confessions of their crimes.
Back then officials were happy to justify the violence – and angry at the US intervention. Criminals and terrorists expected a good beating, one official said, proud of his 100 per cent confession rate.
…A taxi driver, the college graduate stopped his car in March to buy food in a market. When a bomb exploded nearby, he went to look at the damage. Arrested at the scene by soldiers from the Iraqi National Guard, he says he was handed over to the Ministry of the Interior.
…For his part, Zaid says he was hung by his arms, but not for so long that it caused any permanent damage. His ordeal was largely to be subjected to threats of violence as up to eight guards circled him during his interrogation. But Zaid claims he witnessed what happened to men brought from another detention facility, a barracks run by the Wolf Brigade, who were kept in the same area as Zaid until his parents paid a hefty bribe for his release.
‘I saw men from Samarra [another insurgent stronghold] and from Medayeen. Some appeared to have wounds to their legs,’ he recalled. ‘There were others who could not use their spoon properly. They had to hold it between their palms and move their heads to the spoon.’
…What is most important about Zaid’s testimony is that it makes clear a link exists between the Ministry of Interior and the torture being conducted out of sight at other centres. Iraqi and international officials named several of these centres, including al-Hadoud prison in the Kharkh district of Baghdad.
A second torture centre is said to be located in the basement of a clinic in the Shoula district, while the Wolf Brigade is accused of running its own interrogation centre – said to be one of the worst – at its Nissor Square headquarters. Other places where abusive interrogations have been alleged include al-Muthana airbase and the old National Security headquarters.
…It is not just in Baghdad. Credible reports exist of Arab prisoners in Kirkuk being moved to secret detention facilities in Kurdistan, while other centres are alleged in Samarra, in the Holy Cities and in Basra in the south.
There is a significance to all this that goes beyond the everyday horror of today’s Iraq. In the absence of weapons of mass destruction, the human rights abuses of Saddam Hussein’s regime became more important as a subsidiary case for war.
It has been a theme that has been constantly reiterated: it was horrific then, and it is better now. The second may still just be true. In many aspects there may be some improvement, but the trajectory of Iraq now on human rights is in danger of undermining that last plank of justification.
…In Iraq’s Ministry of Human Rights, close to the Communications Tower and the location of one of the secret interrogation centres, they were marking the international day for the victims of torture. As officials gathered for chocolate cake and cola under posters that read ‘Non to torture’, some senior officials are in no doubt that torture in their country is again getting worse.
The deputy minister, Aida Ussayran, is a life-long human rights activist who returned from exile in Britain to take up this post. She concedes that abuses by Iraq’s security forces have been getting worse even as her ministry has been trying to re-educate the Iraqi police and army to respect detainee rights.
‘As you know, for a long time Iraq was a mass grave for human rights,’ she says. ‘The challenge is that many people who committed these abuses are still there and there is a culture of abuse in the security forces and police – even the army – that needs to be addressed. I do not have a magic solution, but what I can do is to remind people that this kind of behaviour is what creates terrorists.’
…If Ussayran is robust about her country’s problems with human rights abuses, others are convinced that, far from being the acts of rogue units, the abuse is being committed at the behest of the ministry itself – or at least senior officials within it.
‘There are people in the ministry who want to use these means,’ said one. ‘It is in their ideology. It is their strategy. They do not understand anything else. They believe that human rights and the Convention against Torture are stupid.’

Or, to put it another way, they believe that the Geneva Conventions are “quaint”…

Posted by: OkieByAccident | Jul 6 2005 18:18 utc | 6

it’s not just you

Posted by: annie | Jul 6 2005 18:55 utc | 8

Ugh, and it’s not remembering my personal info either. That was me, whining about the slowness. Slow to post too!
@ Slothrop;
I haven’t seen that video on prison violence; I don’t really have my computer set up for it. (No sound.) However, I used to be quite involved (in Canada) in the prison abolition movement, so I will comment.
I think prisons are a much more important issue than most people realize, and have been for a long time, and for a huge array of reasons that I can only begin to touch on here.
At the basic, symbolic level, they represent our failure as a society to deal in a compassionate, practical or effective way with difficult people. And, practically speaking, people are difficult for very many reasons. Maybe they are “bad”; there are a few people I think truly are, but I also think they are really quite rare. The vast majority of people are in prison because of the intersection of racism, poverty, and the failure of society to deal with mental health, housing and employment issues. In short, when I was involved and I doubt things have changed much, the majority of people incarcerated in Canada on any particular day were there for unpaid fines. And mind you, when you talk about the “prison system”, in Canada there are really three systems and they are fairly different. There are the local jails where people spend time before trial (and they may be there for years) or where they serve very short sentences. There are the provincial prisons, where people serve sentences of under two years. And there are the federal penitentiaries, where sentences of two years or over are served. The provincial prisons are damned nasty; the federal pens are horrid, and the local jails are cesspits. A lot of people plead guilty just to get the hell out of them.
Canada imprisons an insane number of people, and the rate in the U.S. is, I believe, seven times higher.
This is turning out a bit disjointed. It’s such a huge topic I hardly know where to start. Sorry.
We know U.S. prisons have been a source of manpower and er, “management techniques” for Abu Graib and the American Gulag – maybe we should call it the Second American Gulag, since I think it is very much an offspring of the prison system. After all, the U.S. public has been demanding “tough on crime” and “Super-Maximum-Prisons” for decades now, in spite of the fact that they patently do nothing to improve safety or quality of life for the population as a whole.
There is also the whole issue of having privatised prison management, which to me is purely evil. It is inevitable, that, having found a way to make prisoners “pay their way”, these industries want more labour. So, lets pass more laws and lock up more “criminals”!
I have to wonder if one of the reasons the U.S has so much poverty and yet so little effective social action amongst poor people has to do with the fact that the gov’t has successfully siphoned off many the potential leaders of such a movement and locked them up?
Of course, this also keeps a whole slew of other people employed, and between the incarcerers and the incarcerees, it helps disguise the sorry state of the U.S. economy generally. At the same time, it contributes to the sorry state of the economy, because it withdraws all these people from the possibility of doing anything actually useful.
I see a lot of parallels between the changes to the prison system in the last 30 or 40 years and how the government is run now. Particularly the army. Why have prisons if they aren’t going to be making money? (Why have an army, if it isn’t going to be making money? – Set it to work pillaging!) Why have prisons run by the government when you can contract out the work? (Why have the army feed and house its soldiers? – Contract that out!) And so on and so forth.
Gah.

Posted by: Ferdzy | Jul 6 2005 19:37 utc | 10

Oh fer Pete’s sake. That was me too.

Posted by: Ferdzy | Jul 6 2005 19:46 utc | 12

Comments on MoA are terribly slow right now.
Sorry for that. Typepad, the hoster of this and many other blogs, has serious system problems. Most of them are related to scaling a service to higher demand and obviously the don´t have real scaling experts like me (no joke).
Sorry again.

Posted by: b | Jul 6 2005 20:08 utc | 14

@Ferdzy
William Rivers Pitt:

When the United States jumped into World War II, President Roosevelt ordered the American economy be put on a wartime footing. This was a sound decision: the country had to speed its industrial capabilities up to a sprint in order to manufacture a huge fighting army out of whole cloth. The action was successful beyond measure. The economy was invigorated, the war was won, and in the process the military/industrial complex, so named by President Eisenhower, was established as a power player in the American economy.
In 1947, President Harry Truman put forth the Truman Doctrine, a broad policy of foreign intervention to combat the feared spread of Communism around the world. The Doctrine was essentially created by a small band of men like Paul Nitze, who were the precursors of what we now call neo-conservatives. Nitze, it should be noted, was the mentor of Paul Wolfowitz, who went on to be the mentor of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
The establishment of the Truman Doctrine, the establishment of the “permanent crisis” that was the Cold War, required that the American economy remain on a wartime footing. There it has remained to this day, despite the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the threat of a global communist takeover. Ten thousand books have been written on this subject, on the impact of our wartime economic footing upon domestic policy, the environment, global affairs and politics. In the end, however, the fact that our economy is set on a wartime footing means one simple thing.
We need wars.
Without wars, the economy flakes and falls apart. Without wars, the trillions of dollars spent on weapons systems, military preparedness and a planetary army would dry up, dealing a death blow to the economy as currently constituted. Without wars or the threat of wars, the populace is not so easily controlled and manipulated.

Welcome to Wars-R-US, your nonstop shopathon of death.

Posted by: DeAnander | Jul 6 2005 20:14 utc | 16

Thanks for the explanation, B. It feels like the rest of life these days — like swimming in molasses. But, I’ll grit my teeth and persevere.
Thanks for that link DeAnander. So much better said than I am able to do, but exactly what I was thinking.

Posted by: Ferdzy | Jul 6 2005 20:38 utc | 18

slothrop link @ 01:37 PM is the 4th in a four part UK docu series (Excellent) … my earlier link re Gauntanamo being Part 2 … will try to source and post working links to parts 1 & 3.

Posted by: Outraged | Jul 6 2005 20:49 utc | 20

It just never ends…
You might have to use Bugmenot.com to get in:
National Guard erases data related to intelligence unit Despite a request from a state senator that it preserve all documents related to a controversial intelligence unit, the California National Guard erased the computer hard drive of a retiring colonel who oversaw the fledgling project.
Third columnist caught with hand in the Bush till
Michael McManus, conservative author of the syndicated column “Ethics & Religion,” received $10,000 to promote a marriage initiative.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jul 6 2005 21:11 utc | 22

DeAnander,
“Wars-R-US”
This seems a good place to start. If we live in a society that operates off the deep-logic of “we need wars”, then what is an effective way to work to change this?
Or to come from an angle raised in a prior thread, all past opposition has not failed simply because the nation continues to suck at the war teat. Our politics has been built to support all sorts of different wars, and the only way out is a patinet resistance of small means. Gandhi did not shoot the British, he made salt, and then the British shot themselves in the feet.
Social Security reform is one way in which the neo-cons have shot themselves in the feet, making unmistakable that they mean not only to enrich themselves, but also to impoverish US. It is a real victory, but before long it will be an old victory instead of an ongoing one, and we will have to rely on them shooting other feet.
OK, but let’s digest for a moment why it was possible to win this one. It was possible even despite the buying up of the media because people still know this is their own issue. And it was possible because the buying of the media has discredited it. Like the USSR, we are heading into a time when people will believe rumors more than the media. This is a whirlwind they have sowed and we will all reap. Rumor has always been powerful under aristocracies. Rumor will be believed more because rumor is the original which think tanks merely copy, because in times like we are entering it pre-assumes that aristocrats abuse the language.
Like citizen k, people grown up on Fox TV do not believe that leftists mean what they say. Nor do they believe that the right wingers mean what they say either. Everyone translates.
They have spent three decades torturing the language, and what are the results? Distrust. More and more people are ready to listen to the actual people around them, people once discounted as more ignorant than the experts. But the experts and institutions have proved to be for sale – and this is where we are now. The challenge is to speak in trustworthy language, and for all that I value my studies, this means not speaking in the language of the treacherous academy. Here I agree with citizen k. But I disagree that we should ever try to sell. I think that would make us smell like users – like PR flacks, and incidentally it plays right into the PR playbook (elitist liberals, etc.). No, better we should simply make our points about what a mess the current crowd in control of Washington and the other state capitols is making of the place.
So yes, let’s start with Wars R US by all means. This is exactly the sort of thing that needs explaining – how our ‘betters’ have decided based on their own version of game theory economics that our deaths in wars make their economy better.
GWB – “ I think it was worth it.”
Yes, he would.

Posted by: citizen | Jul 6 2005 21:25 utc | 24

Or, how about this sort of analysis straight from Bartcop, Issue 1557?
 

Subject: torture? what torture?
 Maybe the Pentagon’s just not aware of the senior army officer’s torture participations?
 I saw this statistic in the middle of some NPR story just the other day. It went like this:
 The total number of hours spent by our House of Representatives on collection of witness
 testimonies on whether Clinton mishandled his holiday greeting card list? Answer: 140 hrs.
Total number of hours devoted by our House of Representatives to investigate U.S. prisoner
abuses in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo? Answer: 5 hrs.
See? Maybe that explains it?
With our representatives devoting so little time to investigating torture, maybe the Pentagon’s apparent ignorance of the officer’s being considered for promotion was just an oversight.
(But why am I still left swooning? Maybe because I’m so impressed with the streamlining process
for reviewing really important scandals now that we’re under the guidance of the moral majority?)
dada ~ as exerpted from “Those Dizzying Statistics” at http://dadadada2u.blogspot.com/
 
 If America had a free press, they might highlight that 140 hours vs 5 hours crap,
 but we don’t.
 We have a worship-Bush-24/7 press..
 

Or to amplify – if prison torture is the one thing that most efficiently turned the world’s stomach about what the U.S. is doing in Iraq, if it is the most effective recruiting source for terrorists in Iraq elsewhere, how dare the Cheny Admin. claim that they are actually trying to reduce terrorism? No, this and the subsequent promotions of all senior people enabling the tortures is proof that the Cheneyites are satisfied to burn out America’s image – and to mangle our soldiers’ minds – as much as necessary.

Posted by: citizen | Jul 6 2005 21:47 utc | 26

…and it asserts the president’s authority to deploy ground combat forces on U.S. territory “to intercept and defeat threats.”
The document, titled “Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support,” was signed June 24 by acting Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England and is now a basis for organizing troops, developing weapons and assigning missions. It was released late last week without the sort of formal news conference or background briefing that often accompanies major defense policy statements.
“The move toward a domestic intelligence capability by the military is troubling,” said Gene Healy, a senior editor at the Cato Institute, a nonprofit libertarian policy research group in Washington. “The last time the military got heavily involved in domestic surveillance, during the Vietnam War era, military intelligence kept thousands of files on Americans guilty of nothing more than opposing the war,” Healy said. “I don’t think we want to go down that road again.”
Military Expands Homeland Efforts
In case you haven’t been paying attention:
Police, FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, and the Pentagon are now essentially one– under the direction of John Negroponte and Porter Goss, who answer directly to the White House.
Feeling safer?
– glassfrequency

Posted by: snow-moon | Jul 6 2005 22:04 utc | 28

the nice mr negroponte – him i fear – as i would have been frightened by reinhard heydrich

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 7 2005 0:53 utc | 30

I was idly trying to see who made the quip about having a choice about how to approach the gallows, and ran across an excerpt from one of Sam Smith’s books:

Mississippi writer Tom Lowe, for example, argues that, “The greatest evils in the world arise from two illusions:
The illusion that “We have no choice.” This belief manifests itself in various forms, the most prominent ones being the belief in the immutability (and often the depravity) of human nature and the almost religious belief in the justice and rightness of laissez faire economic systems. This is ordinarily the illusion of the right. It is a flight from responsibility.
The illusion that we can perfect ourselves and our society. This is a corollary of the belief that people and their behavior are solely the product of their environment. This is ordinarily the illusion of the left. It is a flight from responsibility . . .
The truth lies neither in the left or the right or in some middle-of-the-road position that borrows from both sides. The truth is that we are responsible for everything we do and for everyone and everything our behavior affects, and that responsibility extends to our collective, as well as our individual, behavior. Responsibility is like a seamless web — we are all connected with each other and ultimately with the entire world. It encompasses the choices we make in our capacity as spouses, as parents, as voters, as stockholders, as corporate officers, as employers, as public officials, and as purchasers of goods, but it extends to the entire planet.
This sense of being individually responsible yet part of a seamless web of others produces neither certainty nor excuses. One can, one must, be responsible without the comfort of being sure. Camus once admitted that he would be unwilling to die for his beliefs. He was asked why. “What if I’m wrong?” And when he spoke of rebellion he also spoke of moderation…

In light of the lefty/righty barfight smouldering still on a nearby thread, this might be an interesting discussion-mover…

Posted by: DeAnander | Jul 7 2005 3:52 utc | 32

Peak Oil is now official: OPEC can’t meet west’s oil demand, say Saudis

The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries will be unable to meet projected western demand in 10 to 15 years, Saudi officials have warned.
At today’s prices, the world will need the cartel to boost its production from 30m to 50m barrels a day to 50m by 2020 to meet rapidly rising demand, according to the International Energy Agency, the energy watchdog for consuming countries.
But senior Saudi energy officials have privately warned US and European counterparts that Opec would have an “extremely difficult time” meeting that demand. Saudi Arabia calculates there is a 4.5m b/d gap between what the world needs and what the kingdom can provide.

Posted by: b | Jul 7 2005 6:53 utc | 34

Avian flu special: The flu pandemic: were we ready?

Welcome to my weblog. I’m Sally O’Reilly, a freelance journalist based in Washington DC. I’ve been researching a book on pandemic preparedness. But now the time for preparation has run out.
26 December 2005 It’s an emergency — official
…

A (bloggged) scenario of a global epidemic published by Nature.

Posted by: b | Jul 7 2005 8:17 utc | 36

madsen has this tantalizing snippet in his typings today:

Hours before the London bombings took place, a highly-connected U.S. intelligence source, speaking on a condition of anonymity, postulated that Vice President Dick Cheney and a cabal of neo-conservatives working in his office and the Pentagon had prior knowledge of the 911 terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon and used them for maximum political advantage. Bush, who reportedly had no pre-knowledge of the specific attacks, was nevertheless used as a stage prop by the neo-cons, going to locations where he was instructed to go and parroting pre-prepared anti-terrorism statements.

anyone know where this postulation was presented or to whom it was proffered? not finding any references

Posted by: b real | Jul 7 2005 18:46 utc | 38