the Shackle Report

Not only did Alex Gibney’s “torture is unamerican wait, no, not any more” documentary, “Taxi to the Dark Side” win the Academy award for best torture doc, (Gibney also made Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, the smartest media piece on corporate mayhem of that era, we also have Justine Sharrock at Mother Jones thoughtfully publishing a torture playlist to enhance your anti-torture movie experience. As she explains:

Music has been used in American military prisons and on bases to induce sleep deprivation, “prolong capture shock,” disorient detainees during interrogations—and also drown out screams. Based on a leaked interrogation log, news reports, and the accounts of soldiers and detainees, here are some of the songs that guards and interrogators chose.

She offers up 22 songs America tortures prisoners with, from Decide’s “Fuck Your God” and The Bee Gee’s “Stayin’ Alive,” to Prince’s “Raspberry Beret. “

It would have been great had they played any one of those songs behind Gibney’s punchy little acceptance speech:

Wow. Thank you very much, Academy. Here’s to all doc filmmakers. And, truth is, I think my dear wife Anne was kind of hoping I’d make a romantic comedy, but honestly, after Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition that simply wasn’t possible. This is dedicated to two people who are no longer with us, Dilawar, the young Afghan taxi driver, and my father, a navy interrogator who urged me to make this film because of his fury about what was being done to the rule of law. Let’s hope we can turn this country around, move away from the dark side and back to the light. Thank you very much

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The pro-torture crowd, offended by the speech’s ballistic precision, turned out in force on freerepublic.com to slam Roger Ebert for having given such an unpatriotic film four stars.

This via RADAR online

BERLIN (AP) – A new store is selling fashions produced and inspired by prisoners, including a T-shirt that was designed by inmates in Texas.

Striped shirts, gray hoodies and dark brown jackets are the mainstay of the men’s collection at Haeftling, or Prisoner, which opened Friday in the German capital.

Miniskirts made of coarse denim and sweaters with hidden pockets—useful for smuggling drugs past prison guards—make up the ladies’ label.

“Our entire look is robust and adjusted to prison,” said spokeswoman Karola Schoewe. “We use hard materials and there will never be a lot of color.”

A limited T-shirt edition was designed by inmates in Texas—with prints of voluptuous women similar to the tattoos that adorn some prisoners’ arms and chests.

Convicts at prisons all over Germany are involved in the production and receive between $2.65 and $3.39 an hour for their work, said Ahmad Keyaniyan, who opened the Berlin store.

“The prison administrations love the whole idea and their inmates are really proud that their creations get recognition in the real world,” Keyaniyan said.

Not all the clothes are created or designed behind prison walls—some of the street wear is produced by regular workers in Poland and India.

But Keyaniyan says that 3 to 5 percent of every item he sells goes to prisoner-related charities, among them Amnesty International and the German Initiative against Death Penalty.

Besides clothes, Haeftling also sells bed sheets, dish towels and espresso beans roasted by inmates.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

In a story entitled, Waterboarding Focus of Inquiry by Justice Dept, the NYT’s Scott Shane reports that “The cloak of secrecy that long concealed the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program and its legal underpinnings has gradually broken down.”

True? You be the judge:

After C.I.A. director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, publicly admitted for the first time two weeks ago that the agency used waterboarding in 2002 and 2003 in the interrogation of three Qaeda suspects, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey refused to stage criminal investigations of waterboard-weilding interrogators or their superiors. His logic was that they could not be prosecuted for what the Justice Department had assured them were legal actions.

Booted out of the C.I.A.’s boudoir, the case has ended up squirming in the lap of H. Marshall Jarrett, the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR). At issue for him is “the circumstances surrounding the drafting” of the Justice Deptartment legal memorandum dated Aug. 1, 2002 and drawn up by pro-torture lawyer, John Yoo, then signed by Jay S. Bybee, then head of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC)…

In case you missed it, “The document declared that interrogation methods were not torture unless they produced pain equivalent to that produced by organ failure or death.”

According to Steven G. Bradbury — acting OLC chief since 2005 — waterboarding, which makes a bound man feel like he’s drowning and about to die, doesn’t qualify as a pain “equal to death.” For granting “legal approval for waterboarding and other tough methods, even when used in combination,” he may also find himself a target of the OPR’s inquiry:

Mr. Jarrett’s office is “examining whether the legal advice in these memoranda was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys.” He has promised to declassify enough information to make this assessment possible.

Meanwhile, Democratic senators, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island are lobbying President Bush to withdraw Bradbury’s longstanding nomination, thus removing his authority at the OLC…

“Despite the virtually unanimous consensus of legal scholars and the overwhelming weight of legal precedent that waterboarding is illegal,” the senators wrote, “certain Justice Department officials, operating behind a veil of secrecy, concluded that the use of waterboarding is lawful.”

The cloak (or veil) of secrecy doesn’t look too “broken down” to us, and not only because cloaks don’t break so much as tear or disintegrate or burn or get shredded. But this particular shroud of secrecy does finally seem to be wearing a bit thin.