the Shackle Report

Go No More a-Rovin’ this Halloween.. Click on this image of recently indicted Scooter Libby for your downloadable Scooter Halloween mask. Mix and match with any of the paper shackles shown below.

What to do if invited to a Halloween event at the last minute?

Great costumes take planning, shopping and, worse, sewing.

But here at the Shackle Report, we’ve discovered that you can put together a serviceable “US detainee,” “enemy combatant” or “alleged administration perjurer” costume using nothing more than a boxcutter, a gluestick and a straightedge ruler.

Step one is to assemble your materials.

(A) Choose newspaper or magazine articles on topics that shackle you. Are you a slave to fashion? Try Vogue. High end garbage? Try Absolute. Old cars? NASCAR? Options abound. . .

click here for (more…)

If you enjoy a good scare, try making a Dick Cheney pumpkin for Halloween. I did, and now people who see it flee screaming, as if from a subpoena, giving me the temporary illusion of having some power. But how, you ask, can one embed a Dick as slippery as Vice P. Cheney in one’s pumpkin? Answer?

continued. . . (more…)

The ghost of Rosa Parks, who died yesterday, when asked to give up its seat to a white man, refused, provoking grumblings in the white cracker Baptist and Methodist sections of heaven. “I didn’t come all this way to be disrespected,” said the shadow of the civil rights icon’s former self. “Besides, I own this give-up-your-seat issue, and I’m not letting go ‘vit for nobody.”

Hanging onto your seat is important, explained Parks’ ghost, not because a bus seat is worth anything in itself, but because seats of this type inspire Americans to fight for justice, whereas beatings, killings, torture and assault seem to get them either too excited or too bored to do anything but play with themselves.

“I worked on numerous cases with the NAACP,” Mrs. Parks recalled of her earlier efforts,, “but we did not get the publicity. There were cases of flogging, peonage, murder, and rape. We didn’t seem to have too many successes.”

It wasn’t until 1955, when she was arrested for refusing her seat in the “colored section” of a crowded bus to a white man in Montgomery Alabama, that Americans were galvanized to fight for civil rights.

Today, however, Parks volunteered to ride in the back of the hearse, following her stay in the rotunda. “No indignity in that,” explained her shade. “Sooner or later everybody rides in back.”

Travocity Rules

by Scot Crawford

People sometimes ask me; “Scot, why are you so fascinated by torture?”

“Beats me,” I say.

I don’t know why torture fascinates me. It always has, though. As a child, I loved to curl up on my bed of a rainy Sunday, and read accounts of Apache Indians staking white people to the desert sand with wet rawhide that would then dry and cut off their circulation so their hands and feet fell off. Then, the Indians would slit open the whites’ abdomens and pull their entrails out to roast in the sun, and even cut their eyelids off so their eyes boiled in their sockets like eggs.

Eventually, I matured and moved on to the Oz books.

The fascination with torture never left me, though. So, when I saw that my government was using my tax money to torture people at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, I was sucked right back in. I felt like a kid again.

But, my childish enthusiasm notwithstanding, I don’t think my government should torture people, no matter who they are or what they may know. And I don’t think this way on principle. I don’t like adhering to principles, since they so rarely seem to apply to this world, and I don’t object because torture is barbaric, immoral, or degrading to everyone involved. All of that is true, but I’m not squeamish about abusing murderous assholes if some good can come of it. It’s that torture is not ultimately effective.

Okay, if a nuclear bomb is going to destroy NYC in fourteen minutes and the dude you have in custody can tell you where it is, go ahead, cut his eyelids off and boil his eyes. Give it a shot. But I bet it still won’t work, because a man in that position is probably way too convinced of his mission to help you, which is, paradoxically, what you’re asking him to do when you torture him. You’re saying: “Help me. Bet this hurts. Help me.”

Anyway, Keifer “24” Sutherland isn’t in this show. Too bad, because things would work out better if he was on the case.

Also, it’s common knowledge among intelligence personel that when you use torture you get more enemies than useful information. The Israelis say the results aren’t worth the bad blood it creates, and I tend to believe them; I mean, if anyone would know. So I don’t think that my country is torturing people because it is good military and strategic policy. I think it’s because there are a lot of people in the military, bottom to top, who never moved on to the Oz books: They do it because they like it. And because Apaches did it to some white folks, back in the day.

TIME Magazine ran an article in its June 20th, 2005 issue featuring a log US military personnel kept on the interrogation of one of the detainees at Gitmo. The log was like a print version of the Abu Ghraib photos, except that it aroused no public outcry. It should have. The descriptions are appalling, and absurd beyond words. Interrogators used methods like “sissy-slap” gloves, and “Close Proximity of a Female” , (see if you don’t believe me). They also poured water on a the head of a prisoner who was on a food and water strike and called it the “Drink Water or Wear It Game”.

“Game”? The article in TIME reported other twisted, stupid shit as institutionally approved interrogation technique, making all Americans look like twisted, stupid shitheads. The actions of the interrogators are a unique mixture of travesty and atrocity. “Travocity”, I call it. Sadly, “Travocity” isn’t a website that offers quickie travel deals to Cuba.

And I kept running across that same travocity in a series of articles I saw in the NY Times and elsewhere, which reported that the U.S. military was now using people from the healing professions — psychologists and psychiatrists — to help them devise techniques to break the detainees, and that these doctors were called “Biscuits”, for Behavioral Science Consultation Teams, and that there was some controversy within the medical community over whether it violated the Hippocratic Oath to have people who had vowed to “do no harm,” helping with torture. I don’t think there’s a controversy there.

I’m writing these pieces to try to to deal with this increasingly travocitous world, my unwilling complicity in my government’s actions, and my desire to escape culpability, to get “off the Chain.”

. . . go to first episode "Off the Chain — Going Gitmo Part I"

more background via NEWSWEEK’S "Torture Debate"

If the American people gave you $204.5 billion to spend furthering the cause of freedom and democracy, how would you spend it? Use the “Contact us” form in the “Pages” box at left. Answers that are amusing, brilliant, surprising and sensible will be posted, and while I’m not promising anything spectacular, I wouldn’t be surprised if we gave the three best entries a charming (if inexpensive) little gift.

HINT: Answers like “Education” are sensible but not amusing, brilliant or surprising. Answers like “Give everyone in the world a kitten” is amusing, brilliant and surprising, but not sensible, as it would result in a pathetic number of hungry people drowning or roasting their kittens, which is really not what we mean by “democracy”. The devil’s in the “and” of this contest.