— The weeks reading, straight off the razor wire:
Regarding the reconstruction of Afghanistan, which has apparently hit a snag or two…
At the outset, USAID and its primary contractor, New Jersey-based Louis Berger Group Inc., failed to provide adequate oversight, documents state. Federal audits show that USAID officials in Kabul were unable to “identify the location of many Kabul-directed projects in the field.”
— one school turned out to be outside Topeka, Kansas, where students are taught that men evolving from monkeys is just a theory — the USAID endeavour being the first case in point.
“That we got [the buildings] done this quickly with this little amount of aggravation, I think this should be saluted,” said Larry Walker, a Berger vice president. “We’re very proud of our program. We expect quality problems, we expect delays.”
— indeed, we especially pride ourselves in the high quality of our problems.
Moseley also cited “extraordinary costs,” such as. . .
(more…)
This is the second in a series of special reports by Scot Crawford on the Rumsfeld interrogation protocols in action.
Click here to read the introduction
Click here to read “Going Gitmo, Part I — The Sissy-Slap Gloves Are Off” "Off the Chain — Going Gitmo Part I"
GOING GITMO PART II: THE FUTILITY APPROACH
Scene:
Viewing room outside interrogation cell in which a detainee is bolted to the floor. He is being viewed through a two-way mirror.
- IO: (interrogating officer)
- Well, son, howdja do with the sissy-slap glove tactic? Did he tell you where he learned to use a box cutter?
- Pfc:(interrogating enlisted man)
- Um, no sir. He just started crying and shouting incoherently. I don’t think he understood what the sissy-slap glove meant. Like me. And um, then I put on Benny Goodman and tried the Dance Instruction Technique with him like you said, but he kept throwing himself against the door, so I had to shackle him down again.
- IO:
- Ah. The old “throw yourself against the door” ploy. These men are good. They’ve been trained not to say anything under the harshest duress. Al Qaeda has their own manual for resisting interrogation: How To Resist Talking to People Torturing You. (HTRTPTY) We in the game call it the “Hiterterpity. It’s right snappy to dance to as well.”
continued. . . (more…)
Reviewers have been spanking The Colbert Report for being less companionable and more purely satirical than The Daily Show, but those of us who are getting the tiniest bit tired of John Stewart mugging for love, as if the quality of his material wasn’t enough to keep us in his thrall, are finding Colbert’s more Swiftian posture refreshing.
For those who go to sleep before 11:30 weekday nights and forget to program their TiVos, Colbert plays a Bill O’Reilly-esque talk show monarch, a smart, smug, alpha bastard obsessed with having balls. There’s a segment of the Colbert Report called “Worthy Opponent,” in which Stephen Colbert stands against a red background debates another Stephen Colbert who’s posed against a blue background. The segment’s premise is that the only opponent Colbert can find worthy enough to engage is himself.
On November 11 th, the two Stephens nailed torture. They took the subject, flayed it, extracted its fingernails and made it squawk.
To open, Stephen Colbert Blue pointed out that torture was prohibited by the injunction in our constitution against “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Colbert Red countered by pointing out that “Torture is only cruel and unusual if we don’t do it a lot…. But we’ve been doing it so often, it is now cruel and usual.” Boom-boom.
continued. . . (more…)
McCain struck an emotional chord with his colleagues as he recalled his more than five years in a POW camp.
“Many of my comrades were subjected to very cruel, very inhumane and degrading treatment, a few of them even unto death. But every one of us — every single one of us — knew and took great strength from the belief that we were different from our enemies, that we were better than them, that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or countenancing such mistreatment of them.”
But are we always better than our enemies? You decide.
Who’s Better?
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For those of us who feel compelled to fight for freedom and liberty, no matter how ineffectually, we are starting a page called “Do Something.” Please tell us about groups, organizations, Websites and actions that you think can free us all up a bit, and help us evaluate them for effectiveness and style.
For example, the Committee to Protect Bloggers gives you petitions to sign on behalf of imprisoned, threatened and persecuted bloggers from places as far-flung as Egypt, Iran and New Jersey. 
Unlike Reporters Without Borders (RSF), whose aesthetic of outrage inflicts as much agony as it protests, (their poster, shown at left, is one of the more soothing graphics they offer) the CPB site numbs your agony with the soft, featureless greige of a dentist’s waiting room. If you can stay awake long enough to read about all the injustices against bloggers they post, CPB’s perverse blandness comes as a relief. And, whereas RSF is not really interested in any blogger not under lock and key, CPB features a category called “freed bloggers” to add a fizzy dash of hope to your dram of despair.
CPB will also link you to instructions on how to blog anonymously if you live in some repressive place where you might be persecuted for what you post.
Amnesty International (AI) recalls a Channel 9 TV interview by Laurence Oakes from Oct 18th, 2003, in which President Bush says. . .
No, of course. We don’t torture people in America. And people who make that claim just don’t know anything about our country.
Adds AI…
On the same day, it was revealed that eight US soldiers had been charged with acts of brutality against prisoners of war in Iraq. One of the prisoners had died.
— but it wasn’t in America, see?
Reading about the Jordan bombings in the Los Angeles Times, Nov 10, 05 —
One Western diplomat in Amman, in a 2004 interview, called Jordan “the most effective police state in the region.”
—stop, you’re making me blush. . .
“A lot of the investments are coming because Jordan is safe,” he said. “We don’t have oil. We don’t have water. All we have is stability.”
— had.
the torment continues. . . (more…)
AS TRUE
AS IT GETS
AND AS LONG
AS YOU GET IT
SENATE REJECTS ALITO AS “INSUFFICIENTLY ORIGINALIST”
Bush Names John Adams as Third Pick. “He’s Been Dead for Centuries,” Says President — “You Can’t Get More Originalist Than That.”
McCAIN TO CHENEY:
“OH, YOU’LL TALK.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Senator John McCain, angered by VP Dick Cheney’s insistence that “the US does not torture people,” in the face of blinding evidence to the contrary, has introduced a bill that will allow torturing US officials in certain cases.
“Yes, I know what you’re thinking,” said McCain, “I’ve said I’m against torture, and I am. But these are desperate times. And these men have a track record of secrecy, with the energy bill, the Plame affair, now we have to investigate them to get to the bottom of these CIA prisons; I’m sick of it. The Senate needs latitude to pursue these men and bring them to justice. It is a question of national security.”
When asked what kinds of torture he might be willing to use on the Vice President, McCain said he was looking into various kinds of physical and mental duress. These include forcing him to: go camping with Al Franken, wear Sean John pants for a week, go on active duty as a private in Baghdad, and watch his lesbian daughter have sex. For extreme circumstances, McCain has proposed beating Cheney with steel pipes, leaving him shackled naked to a stone floor in forty degree temperatures for 24 hours, delivering electric current to his genitals, and refusing to give him stem cell therapy that could save his life next time his heart acts up.
Thanks to Ruth Davis Konigsberg, deputy ed. at Glamour, we can now track the national gender deficit at US general interest magazines. But gender inequity in US publishing is a non-issue, said Conde Nast CEO Charles H. (Chuck) Townsend :
Women may not be equally bylined at Harper’s the Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker and Vanity fair, but they are free to write for our other magazines — Harpies’, The Atlantic Monthlies, The New Yorkie and Vanity Table.
The NY Times, like the Shackle Report, cannot contain its amusement over W.’s decision to, as its ed page put it, “expend the minimal clout remaining to his beleaguered administration in a fight to put the full faith and credit of the United States behind the concept of torture.”
But whereas the Times is baffled as to why the president and vice president want to behave in such a blatantly destructive way. . .
(more…)
This is the first in a series of reports from the bowels of American foreign policy
by Scot Crawford
Click here to read the introduction
The following is a transcript of a videotape recorded at the Guantanamo Bay Prison Facility, commonly known as GITMO. The tape was obtained by The Shackle Report’s crack reporter, Shaqi the Shackle, who was on assignment in Cuba.
Well, actually, he was vacationing at the beautiful Club Med resort situated outside the fences at GITMO (for info, go to BayofPigsCruiselines.com) and he found the tape on the beach while he was strolling with his morning Mojito.
In order to cooperate with Donald Rumsfeld’s wishes that the video not be broadcast because it depicts Americans doing illegal and repellent things, which could lower self-esteem of the American citizenry, the Shackle Report has agreed to post only the audio portion in print form.
continued. . . (more…)