the Shackle Report

This is the third in a series of special reports by Scot Crawford on the Rumsfeld interrogation protocols in action.

Click here to read the introduction

GOING GITMO PART III: LIGHTS OUT

Scene:

In Part 2, “The Futility Approach”, the Interrogating Officer (IO) at Gitmo explains to a (Pfc) how using BISCUITs (Behavioral Science Consultation Teams) will help them torture detainees better. BISCUIT leader Dr. Duress (DD)arrives early, and along with IO and Pfc, is standing outside an interrogation cell looking through a two-way mirror at a detainee who is shackled to the floor.

_________________________________________________

coming next in the Gitmo series: Biscuits from Scratch

click here for previous scene — "Off the Chain — Going Gitmo II"

Off the Chain — Going Gitmo — Intro

The week’s reading, straight off the razor wire:

SATURDAY

And this on European Muslim women’s mad dash to equality:

Unlike their homebound elders, these emancipated Muslim women use the Internet and spend hours in proliferating Islamic chat rooms. Web sites are now favorite trysting places, a chance for risk-free “halal dating,” that is, interacting with men in a way that violates no social or religious codes.

—Okay good. Next, halal ass-fucking…

FRIDAY

Re: the latest good news in the Israeli/Palistinian conflict:

Sharon to Undergo Repair of Hole in Heart

— Diplomacy. That’s what I’m talkin’ about.

THURSDAY

Re: the Catholic Church’s recent get-together to discuss whether babies who die before baptism should be sent to Hell, or Limbo (nice place generally, but God doesn’t hang there), or the big one, right on to Heaven:

“Even though Augustine himself would not be particularly tolerant of a doctrine that is kinder to unbaptized children, you could still say that a move in that direction would have an Augustinian quality to it,” he said.

— Augustine, reached on his celestial cellphone, comments: “No, what I said was; Hell is for babies.”

The theology is complicated, but the bottom line is that Augustine, believing in mankind’s original sin, persuaded a church council in 418 to reject any notion of an “intermediary place” between heaven and hell. He held that baptism was necessary for salvation, and that unbaptized babies would actually go to hell…It was “a pretty grim doctrine,” said the Rev. Gerald O’Collins, an Australian Jesuit and co-author of “A Concise Dictionary of Theology” (Paulist Press: 2000). “You’re either in hell or you’re not.”

In a related story, there’s this from Dick Cheney about whether or not the President has the right to do anything he pleases to whomever he pleases as long as there’s a war on…

“Either we’re serious about fighting the war on terror or we’re not,” he said.

—Either we are, or we’re not, eh? Lemme think…Ok, “not”! Let’s just go to hell with the babies.

— S. C.

WEDNESDAY

Citing the SF Chronicle, a certain georgia10 at www.dailykos.com points out that the Iraqi factions are forming their own armies now. . .

Beyond the purple fingers, beyond the false claims of progress. . .Shiite and Sunni leaders, we learn, have started forming sectarian armies to patrol their regions. The Kurds already have their own armed force. The religious Shiite group which had the best showing in the election is refusing to acknowledge Sunni complaints, urging “national unity” [but refusing] to install anyone except a member of their own religious party as Prime minister.

A nation on the cusp of civil war.

— Maybe they are learning from us, after all.

TUESDAY

On Christmas, Iraq gave us a gift that keeps on giving:

Mosul — one of two cities named by U.S. President George W. Bush before the election as a model of progress in Iraq — has been at the forefront of complaints of voter fraud this year.

— But, my dear: For Bush, voter fraud is progress.

MONDAY

Until we are finished training Iraqi jailers US military will not let them get their hands on any of our detainees, reported the NY Times Christmas Eve . . .

“Bottom line, we will not pass on facilities or detainees until they meet the standards we define and that we are using today,” the commander, Maj. Gen. John D. Gardner of the Army, said in a telephone interview this week from Iraq. . .

The general’s remarks also come at a time when. . .at Abu Ghraib, where crowding contributed to the worst of the prisoner abuses that occurred in late 2003, there are 4,924 detainees, nearly 40 percent over what the military considers ideal capacity.

— By “the standards we define and are using today,” that’s not “crowding;” that’s “closeness.”

— M. C.

Human intelligence is a theory, Not a Fact, Asserts Science Prof at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

The Rude Pundit, often a bit screamy for our taste (not that screams aren’t appropriate) has crafted a useful “Loyal Citizen’s Contract With the American Government” for Bush apologists and fellow spymasters to sign, granting the executive branch all the powers it needs in order to become the Iron Chef of the world and rule supreme. Here are a few choice excerpts:

“I (the undersigned) believe President George W. Bush when he says that the United States of America is fighting a ‘new kind of enemy’ that requires ‘new thinking’ about how to wage war. . .

“… I believe that the President of the United States has the power to mitigate any and all laws passed by the Congress and that he has such power granted to him by his status as Commander-in-Chief in the Constitution as well as the 2001 Authorization of Military Force, passed by the Congress, which states that the President can use ‘all necessary and appropriate force’ in prosecution of the war. Therefore, I grant the United States government the following powers:

“a. that the National Security Agency, under the direction of the President, may tap my phone lines and intercept my e-mail without warrant or FISA oversight;

“b. that the President may hold me or other detainees without access to the legal system for a period of time determined by the President or his agents;

“c. that the President may authorize physical force against me or other individual detainees in order to gain intelligence and that he may define whether such physical force may be called ‘torture’. . .

“I agree that the Judicial and Legislative branch should be allowed no oversight of these activities. . . I also agree that virtually all of these activities may be conducted in complete secrecy and that revelation of these activities amount to treasonous behavior. . .

“3. Finally. . . should such abuse or misinterpretation [of these powers] occur, I agree that such actions are mere errors and no one should be subject to investigation, arrest, or employment action as a result.

Please visit Rude Pundit for the rest, and forward to anyone you feel might want to sign it. Better yet, stick it to the Patriot Act-ors directly.

Take it off; take it all off.

In an effort to encourage me to stop comparing myself to magazine covergirls, The Swedish Ministry of Health and Social Affairs has created a delightful interactive graphic, systematically un-retouching a model.

I had a lot of fun stripping the whites from this fetching little person’s eyes , fattening her face and thickening her waist, but I’ve got to say, after I was all done deconstructing her, I’d still kill to have her cheekbones.

(But thanks to chaos digest for the link, anyway. I know you meant well. )

The weeks reading, straight off the razor wire:

WEDNESDAY

On the great strides the Saudis are making on their journey out of Medieval times:

JEDDAH, 18 December 2005 — Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah met yesterday with the participants of the 5th National Dialogue Forum “Us and Others”…

— “You vacuum, I’ll dust,” he said.

The United States had long been the nation of choice for wealthy Saudis to educate their children. Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to Washington and a graduate of Georgetown University, noted that two-thirds of his nation’s cabinet ministers had been educated in the United States. “We have a kind of umbilical relationship with American universities…

— …and with your airlines.”

He urged the students, most of them recent high school graduates, not to socialize only among themselves but to get to know Americans. “Learn the ways of American life,” he told them. “The American people are friendly and hospitable.”

— Travel to Baghdad, and you will see.

TUESDAY

And from the ongoing saga of Hurricane Katrina:

Ms. Pereira said she lost more than her mother and her home – she lost her “false sense of protection,” the notion that the government would be there to help in a crisis.

— Hang onto the “false” part…

MONDAY

From a US general re: the security situation in Iraq:

“A gun on every street corner, although visually appealing, provides only a short-term solution,” the general wrote in the journal, Military Review…

— And at this time of year, without a gun on every corner, it’s just not Christmas.

Maj. Gen. Thomas R. Turner II, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, said that within six months he expected Iraqis to lead [military] operations in about half of his division’s area of responsibility in north-central Iraq, an area the size of Louisiana.

— And, oh, the fun they’ll have in New Orleans.

— Scot Crawford

AS TRUE
AS IT GETS
AND AS LONG
AS YOU GET IT

NEW IRAQI MILITARY SCORES FIRST MAJOR VICTORY OVER US

Baghdad, Iraq — US officials have confirmed to the Weekly Whatever that the newly-trained Iraqi military has dealt the US its first major defeat in the War on Terror.

“It was a classic one-armed pincer move,” said US Army General Sebastian Yourefired. “It was like War 101, really, but they caught us napping, and their execution was flawless. You know how they say a battle plan never survives first contact with the enemy? Theirs did. They spanked us good.”

The battle, taking place at the first Dunkin’ Doughnuts franchise to venture outside the Green Zone and set up shop on a devastated corner in Fallujah, was a brief yet brutal demonstration of the Iraqi military’s newly acquired battlefield prowess.

“We kicked their bare, white asses, man!” shouted one elated Iraqi Colonel, a Sunni Arab recently allowed back into the Iraqi military when the US realized the Iraqis had none.

Preliminary reports indicate that not only were the US Marines crushed, but the vaunted US Air Force suffered defeat as the Iraqi Air Force batted American planes from the skies with diplomatic immunity.

Said one shaken, unidentified American pilot: “We gotta rethink this whole exporting democracy business, now.”

A New Federal Survey Finds that F U CN RD THS, U R 2, 2 UNUSL.

Before we send the torture issue off to some foreign dungeon to moulder in secret until its next political reprieve, can we please take a moment to detonate the main point that pro-torture advocates like the Weekly Standard’s Charles Krauthammer keep deploying in defense of the dark arts?

We’re talking about the ticking-bomb, here. That nuclear bomb set to go off in just a little while whose wherabouts somebody in our custody probably knows but feels reluctant to divulge. If we’re in a mad rush to find out where that horrible weapon is, the argument goes, and torture is the only way to get the information we need in time to save thousands of lives, shouldn’t we use it?

Well, no. Because wouldn’t some detainee who wishes us ill be most strongly inclined to lead our intelligence department on a wild-goose chase precisely when every moment is precious? By the time we find out (s)he’s lying. . .

Well, you see the logic of the situation. A real enemy, the sort of person reluctant to tell us where a dirty bomb is set to detonate, is the last person in the world whose torture-induced testimony you can trust in a crunch.

Those who have pondered the problem and still choose to believe otherwise must have some motive other than military utility for wanting to give the the executive branch the right to break another person’s will by force.

We have no way of knowing which of the various possible motives for advocating fruitless state cruelty is at work in each individual case: Power itself? The power to implement a particular agenda? Kink? Re-enactment of childhood trauma? A desire to transcend the limited power of the individual through identification with an all-powerful state? A nostalgic yearning for the feeling of safety one had as an infant when protected by benevolent parents who seemed to hold the power of life and death in their hands? The possibilities are too numerous and subtle to attach to torture-friendly political players with any confidence of accuracy. But still, it’s useful to note who falls into this category, and we are grateful to the torture debate for having amplified the ticking of their minds so that we might locate them in time.

Hey, we won. If by “we” you mean the majority of Americans who just somehow couldn’t fit condoning torture into their personal profiles.

Yes, facing a flat-out rebellion in the House as well as the Senate, our president has finally capitulated to Senator John McCain. No more cruel and degrading treatment — as defined in military field manuals — of detainees,. No more Fed-Exing interrogation subjects to secret Eastern European prisons or Egyptian torture chambers. Maybe.

Now we can hold our heads up while trying to wiggle out of whatever it is we’re fighting in Iraq: Instability? People who hate democracy? People who are uncomfortable seeing women dressed in scanty clothing out in public? People who hate the feeling of their faction suddenly being out of power? People upset about being invaded? People who feel exploited when foreign business that pay low wages and few taxes take over their country’s largest industries? People who would prefer that the world’s second-largest oil supply be under the control of Islamic fundamentalists? People with nothing better to do? Whatever.

I already miss the moral simplicity of the torture issue, and the way it winnowed out the compassionate conservatives from. . . well, from those whose compassion is so highly selective, most of us would probably call it something else, if we thought about it hard enough.

Anyway, break out the champagne. As of Dec 16th, we’re not torturers anymore. The nightmare is over. If only.

Both houses voted to wrest control over W.O.T. detainees from the executive branch this week, this business of waterboarding and secret C.I.A. prisons and whatall having become just too embarrassing to ignore. Here’s a few choice items:

The Washington Post not only had a nifty little report on the

House’s support for a torture ban, it also provided a link that lets you see how your reps voted on the torture bill.

Not only that, but they give you the tally by state, party, sex, and, in a flight of media-slutty fancy, astrological sign.

Pisces and Leo were the clear winners in the anti-torture heats, opposing torture by factors of 4.5 and 4.33 respectively. Geminis turn out to be the thumbscrew people, opposing torture by a factor of only 1.35.

Meanwhile, the Senate, as the NYT reports,

. . .is poised to approve a measure that would require the Bush administration to provide Congress with. . .regular, detailed updates about secret detention facilities maintained by the United States overseas, and to account for the treatment and condition of each prisoner. . .Another measure included in the bill. . .would require the White House to provide classified intelligence documents on Iraq that have until now been withheld from Congress.

The NYT got feisty, too, referring to this, the McCain amendment and other signs of Congressional rebellion as a sign of lawmakers’ “unease” with the techniques being used in “what the administration calls its war on terrorism. ”

The big news here is that the NYT is no longer willing to agree that what this administration is conducting is, strictly speaking, a war on terrorism. It could be a war on something else, like, say, the Geneva Accords, or Democracy, or truthfulness. Or, maybe it isn’t a war at all, but more like an psychotic assault at the edge of a lonely pond on terrorism, or a spoof on terrorism in which we imitate everything terrorists do in order to show them how silly it looks. The New York Times isn’t saying. All they’re saying is that we don’t necessarily buy this “war on terror” thing you guys in the White House are pushing.

Qaeda-Iraq Link U.S. Cited Is Tied to Coercion Claim Reports The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 – The Bush administration based a crucial prewar assertion about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda on detailed statements made by a prisoner while in Egyptian custody who later said he had fabricated them to escape harsh treatment, according to current and former government officials.

Oooops.

Well, okay, so maybe, and I say maybe, we could possibly have started an unprovoked war based on bad data obtained under what we’ll call duress (which is different from torture because we don’t condone or permit torture). But at least you can’t accuse us of being dishonest: When Condoleza Rice told the Europeans earlier this week that our interrogation policies saved lives, did she say our interrogation policies saved everybody’s life? No. Right. She didn’t, see?

It’s so easy now to say, “Oh, boo hoo, two-thousand American soldiers died in Iraq for no reason,” but you’ll never know how many hundreds of thousands of Americans didn’t die in Los Angeles on Oscar night thanks to our interrogation policies now, will you? So would you please pipe down and stop discouraging our troops? These kids are out there getting shot at just to protect us, after all. And just because we happen to momentarily have bit of egg on our tie, doesn’t mean it won’t hurt us even more to look weak-willed, self-hating and cowed.

And the horror of history is? That last bit might be true.

HELP SAVE ALLAH’S FACE

You know those four Christian Peacemaker Team activists about to be beheaded this Thursday by Muslim fanatics in Iraq? Well, guess what? Unlike most of us, the poor bastards don’t deserve it! Not only has C.P.T. publicly opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it was documenting U.S. torture tricks in Abu Ghraib prison long before the mainstream press broke the story.

If their captors follow through with their threats to decapitate these four, it’s going to make Islam look pretty stupid. And you don’t want that. Besides, how often do you get to send a petition in arabic to crazy people?

Even if you think it’s futile, just for sentiment’s sake, why not add your worthless name to a petition signed by countless peace movement luminaries? (Best viewed with IE) Hey: It can’t hurt. And if you save somebody’s head, think how proud you’ll feel.

U.S. Secret Prison Interrogations Saving Innocent European Unborn Lives, Rice Says, and Besides, We Never, Ever Torture the People We Whisk Away and Hide, So Back Off!

Judge ’s Courtroom Use of Penis Pump Faces Stiff Sentence in Oaklahoma.

AS TRUE
AS IT GETS
AND AS LONG
AS YOU GET IT

JAY-LO’S ASS STOLEN

J-Lo’s best ass, the one everybody loved, has been missing since shortly after the release of Out of Sight in 1998. “I just woke up one morning and it wasn’t there,” explained the diva. “I thought that maybe I mislaid it, you know, left it at Ben’s, and some other woman got it, but he swears no.” Investigators would not release the names of suspects, but, off the record confided to the WW: “We think it was the same fleshophobe who stole Madonna’s original cheeks. And we’re pretty sure he’s gay.”

BUSH DECLARES GIANT U.S. TRADE DEFICIT “INSIGNIFICANT”

December 3rd — WASHINGTON “The really big news,” the President told the nation in his address yesterday “is that my economic policies have created thousands of new jobs down in New Orleans and over the pond in Falluja.”

MAUREEN DOWD MAKES ARIANNA HUFFINGTON DISAPPEAR

With release of her book, and its companion article in the New York Times Magazine, Witticist Maureen Dowd obliterated any sign of her rival, blogster Arianna Huffington last month.
Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher of the NY Times, who answers to the name of Pinch, said, “There is, as you know, room in America for only one woman pundit at a time, and our sources, who declined to be identified due to their being me, determined that it should be our woman pundit, even though none of us want to marry her.”
A spokesperson for Huffington confirmed that the Greekish doyenne of liberalism has gone missing and showed us a note she left before her eclipse that read cryptically, “Of course men are necessary, you cock-climbing hypocrite.”

TERROR DETAINEES DEMAND INVISIBILITY DECLARES RUMSFELD

“The men we have rounded up at random in anti-terror sweeps throughout the world are so ashamed of their association with terrorism, however slight, that they have requested that their names and locations remain unknown, even to their lawyers,” said the Defense Secretary. Responding to critics who accuse him of violating the Geneva strictures against transporting suspects to secret torture dungeons, Rumsfeld retorted: “Accusing them of something, trials, names and all that, would be cruel and a violation of international law. The spirit of it.”

And the month has just begun. . .

ACLU Reveals Secret Interrogation Project

by Scot Crawford

(Off the Chain temporarily suspends its coverage of the Gitmo situation in order to bring you this special report.)

The ACLU today announced that it has been engaged in a project to obtain information from captured terrorists, unbeknownst to the Pentagon or the State Department.

The project, code named “Operation Be Nice”, was begun in secret in January of 2004, and, according to the president of the ACLU, Ms. Nagabe Lafarza-Smith, has proved an unmitigated success. “We wanted to be sure it would work before we told anyone. Now, we can say without reservation that our methods work. Mr. Rumsfeld? Take a memo!”

The story begins with the capture of a high-level Al Qaeda operative in Pakistan in 2004 by the ACLU’s top-secret, crack kidnapping team, the FLIPPERS, which is an acronym for; Foppish, Licentious, Independent, Pompous, Pious, Educated, Retrieval Squad.

“The FLIPPERS are less well-known than the SEALS, or the Delta Force, but, believe me, they are (more…)

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Shop yourself into submission, at. . .

. . .The Chain Store.

Shackle Report’s online shop is open for Christmas, featuring all things shackle-related (however obliquely) accompanied by our painfully honest product descriptions.

For now we are pushing books and a bit of jewelry. But eventually, we hope to seduce you into buying a wide range of items that will help you escape the humdrum world of paying for things you bought in an effort to avoid thinking about how deeply into debt you’ve fallen.

And now, for a sample book:

Cosmos-politan

If you’ve ever wondered whether the human mind is a sort of shackle all on its own, this is the book you can’t finish that thought without. It is a new translation of Witold Gombrowicz’s classic (40’s) excursion into the joys and pitfalls of obsessive paranoid narrative, the nearly universal impulse to imagine that one thing leads to another. Droll, sexy and smarter than a slap, Witold has . . .

continued at "the chain store"

— The week’s reading, straight off the razor wire:

Reporter Ian Fisher, filing from Rome yesterday, for the NY Times

Human Rights Watch has released a list of 26 “ghost detainees” it says are being held incommunicado by the United States at secret foreign prisons.

— Oh, ghosts, great. As if Halloween wasn’t so over. . .

About 100 people are being held without charges in prisons outside the United States, experts estimate. . .
Marc Garlasco, senior military analyst for the rights group, said the list was the most complete possible. . .

— But you know how it is: Some people just never R.S.V.P., and then you get your no-shows and crashers.

“One thing I want to make clear is we are talking about some really bad guys,” Mr. Garlasco said. “. . .One of our main problems . . .is that if illegal methods such as torture are being used against them,” trials may “either be impossible or questionable under international standards of jurisprudence.”

— Yeah, but who said anything about trials?

The Bush administration has said it will respond to inquiries from European nations about the transfer and detention of terror suspects, insisting that American actions have complied with international law.

— That would’t, by any chance, be “international law,” ca. 1230, would it?