the Shackle Report

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

From the NY Times on our military taking care of its own:

TALKING VETERANS DOWN FROM DESPAIR

The new National Veteran’s Hot-Line is part of a specialized effort by the Department of Veterans Affairs to reduce suicide by enabling counselors, for the first time, to instantly check a veteran’s medical records and then combine emergency response with local follow-up services.

—A step up from the old days, when there was a recording that said; “Hello, and welcome to Veteran’s Phone! If you would like to re-enlist, press or say 1! If you would like to re-enlist, press or say 2! If you would like to re-enlist, press or say 3! If you know the way you would like to kill yourself, press or say the first three letters of the method you’ve chosen! For example, for gunshot to the head, press 484!”

Kerri J. Childress, a department spokeswoman, said Monday that there were an average of 18 suicides a day among America’s 25 million veterans…experts agree that veterans are more likely, perhaps twice as much, to commit suicide as people who have never served in the military…

—Until the Bush years. Now civilians are offing themselves at nearly the clip of vets. So much for the carping about military people having to shoulder the whole burden for our neato wars. Anyway, it’s all good. Suicide is the new death.

“For years people thought that asking questions about suicide put the thought in people’s mind, but now we know that’s not true,” said Dr. Kemp, who travels throughout the country training V.A. staff.

—Yep, there’s the military. Ol’ Johnny-on-the-spot with current psychological thinking. I believe it was the famous psychologist Sigmund “Oooga-Booga, Mommy Touch My Spear” Freud who dispelled that notion in 60,000 BCE, with his cave drawings of people committing suicide because life just generally sucked Dad’s ass.

Some breaking news from the Shackle Report:

MILITARY TO DRAFT SUICIDAL VETS

In response to reports about the high rate of suicide among veterans of military service, the Pentagon has announced plans to send veterans with suicidal thoughts back into action.

Major General Corporal Admiral Dick “Fuck’em” Stalinski, the Pentagon’s new Soldier Czar who’s spearheading the new assault, unveiled the policy in Washington today:

“In keeping with the military’s long-standing ‘War on Waste’, we’re going to streamline our treatment of these little pussy-pants, namby-pamby, oh-I-want-to-die veterans and put them back where they can do the most good for their country – Iraq and Afghanistan. I mean, think about it. If they want to die, what better way to do it than sending them running through hostile fire? It’s way better than sending them running through friendly fire. We all know the results of that policy. This way, they can eliminate a few threats on their way out, their family gets a nice ribbon, and there’s no need for expensive hot lines and counselors. And it’s better than choking to death on your own vomit under a bridge. No one likes to see a US Soldier like that. A civilian, sure, whatever, do us all a favor and put a stop to your own whining. But a man in uniform? Bad for morale.”

— Scot Crawford

The Shackle Report was created as a humor site because, after 9-11 the torture lobby was so well tolerated by the public there didn’t seem to be much that believers in the universality of human rights could do other than laugh at our own political impotence.

But that is obviously changing now. There is enough evidence to implicate the White House in the deliberate flauting of international and national anti-torture law. There’s clear evidence, too, that they tried conceal their flauting with that most popular of flaut-concealers: lying through their teeth. The government should have no license to knowingly break laws, especially when breaking the law weakens the country. It is time to demand that the government be held accountable.

Here’s an excellent video by www.CondiMustGo.com Please go to their site and sign their petition to McCain, Obama and Clinton asking for Rice’s resignation. Better yet, write a letter or make a call on your own. (Email is so easy to send that politicians tend to discount it.)

We first heard of this campaign via Charles Kaiser’s excellent piece on “Torture Fatigue” at RADAR Online.

Carmen Gentile, a name Pynchon should have made up, reports in today’s NY Times that the feds haven’t given up on trying to convict six men accused of planning a “ground war” culminating in an atttack on Chicago’s proudly erect Sears Tower. Previous trials, in which the accused presented evidence that they were entrapped by FBI double agents posing as Al Qaeda reps, ended in hung juries.

[The defendants' names, which few of us will manage to remember, are, for the record: Patrick Abraham, Burson Augustine, Rotschild Augustine, Narseal Batiste, Naudimar Herrera and Stanley G. Phanor.] No evidence of the plot has been produced by US investigators, but one of the accused has been caught on tape saying that he wanted to “kill all the devils,” a line obviously lifted from the Pope’s bedside journal.

If angry men are a mortal threat to us all, we have a lot of locking up to do. And, guess what? We’re doing it! (See post following).

Read it and weep, scream, stagger around gobstruck:
The NYT’s David Barstow ran a breakthrough piece April 20th on how The Pentagon and White House war mongers used dozens of supposedly independent military analysts as “a Trojan Horse” to distort and control news, making our bloody foreign misadventures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo sound like playdates. Barstow kicks ass, names names, and stays as even-handed as is appropriate in cases if info-rape.

This piece is not a conspiracy theory but an unusually well-documented revelation of actual conspiracies to deceive the public. . .

The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.

These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”

Damn! Next thing you know we’ll learn that drug companies use doctors as message force multipliers too, and that a few powerful media conglomerates are message-force-multiplying all our information and that Murdoch is buying Newsday.
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The week’s reading, straight off the razor wire:

From the Washington Post on foresight:

AFGHAN COMMANDOS EMERGE

The commandos carry the best U.S. rifles, wear night-vision goggles and ride in armored Humvees, but they are not Americans, they’re Afghans — trained and advised by U.S. Special Forces teams that are seeking to create a sustainable combat force that will ultimately replace them in Afghanistan.

“This is our ticket out of here,” a Special Forces company commander said.

—He continued: “The sooner we can get home, the sooner we can start training to fight these guys in ten years.”

Commandos compete for selection and go through 12 weeks of initial training at Camp Morehead, south of Kabul.

The regimen hones the skills of commandos far beyond those of their Afghan army peers, U.S. combat advisers say. In marksmanship, for example, commandos fire more than 6,000 rounds of ammunition in their initial training alone, while the average Afghan soldier fires 60 rounds in training each year.

The commandos’ high-quality gear and training is an advantage that few regular Afghan security forces have.

The commandos also receive $50 in extra pay each month — raising the total pay of a junior sergeant, for example, to $200 — as well as better equipment than their regular army counterparts and a double ration of food.

—Smart. Very smart.

From The Shackle Report on new strife in Afghanistan:

AFGHAN MILITARY TURNS ON ITSELF

In a totally unforeseen and unwelcome development in Afghanistan, regular Afghan Army troops have attacked Afghan Special Forces troops in uncoordinated raids throughout the country that closely resemble anarchy.

“They get better food, more bullets, better training, nicer uniforms, it’s bullshit,” said one Afghan Army soldier through an American interpreter. “Fuck that.” He then went to join his comrades raiding Special Forces refrigerators, rifling closets, upending ammo boxes, and cavorting around like kids with toys.

“We’ll have to call in the Americans, I guess,” said one gloomy Afghan Special Forces soldier, after his platoon was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of dissaffected regular army troops. “Guess we’re not so special after all.”

YOU HEARD IT HERE FOIST

The Gotten

Misha Defonseca’s bestselling memoir Misha, about a six-year-old Jewish girl being raised by wolf packs while fleeing Nazis across Europe during the Holocaust, turned out to be a pack of lies so preposterous children raised by oxen were skeptical. Previous admirers of Ms. Defonseca’s book, notably Elie Weisel, have sheepishly now come forward and claimed that their judgement was distorted from having been raised by Jews. Lawsuits are pending.

— Scot Crawford

A treat is in store for all you Shackle Reporters and Reportees: Lizz Winstead, who co-created The Daily Show with Madeleine Smithberg, is presenting “the #1 Infonewsment Network” on the Web. Her network is called, 24/7 –let us do the thinking for you.

The programming is still rough around the edges but at least it has edges. Like The Daily Show, 24/7 is media-smart, left of Obama, and a welcome gust of elitism in a pop culture too brain-soft too tell its Waterloo from its water weight.

Generously, the network is offering you — the eyeballs — an opportunity to get hard — and fast — for bathing suit season. Just tune in to Waterboard Abs. The fitness segment is one of a string of skits on “Wake Up World,” 24/7′s six-hour morning show. Winstead hosts as “Hope Jean-Paul,” a Kathie Lee Gifford-ish bubbling fount of banality and traumatized cheer.

The skit goes on too long (as I have here). But I guarantee that you will feel lighter after seeing it than you felt after Hairspray.

Candles, Clergy, and Communion for 57,000 Apopalix Now!

By SEWER CHANNEL
Published: April 12, 2008

The Pope will straddle second base in Yankee Stadium and field fungos, but stand over center field at Nationals Park in Washington and test for steroids in the wafers. Should it rain, there are 100,000 ponchos with “I love Ratzinger” emblazoned on them in scarlet ink silk-screened on a gold lamé background in reserve at the Bronx stadium. Additionally, three Polish nuns have dusted off a gold and silver garment, hand-woven more than a century ago, for the pontiff to wear at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in the capital in case of a dirty bomb.

Tickets for the stadium Mass, allocated to parishes based on average Sunday attendance divided by pregnancy rates, then distributed by lottery to those who have failed their GEDs and can also produce a government-issued photo identification. Ticket scalping is punishable by Ex-Communication and All Hell in Damnation.

With all its spiritual, political and cultural significance, the six-day visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Washington and New York next week is a daunting logistical operation involving everything from candles and catering to cell phone ring-tones (“I love you Popee Popee Babee” by Shakira, and “Fuck me Fuck Me FUCK ME, Big White Daddee” by Little Kim), not to mention ciboria, metal receptacles originally used for Necco™ Wafers, that now hold communion wafers in Nostalgia Pax cellophane wrappers. (Pez™ bid for the contract, but the Vatican rejected the designer’s proposal of plastic figurines dispensing communion wafers “directly from Jesus’s rib meat.”)

Among the profound — and mundane — questions planners are confronting: How do 530 priests and deacons give communion to 57,000 people in 14 minutes?

“I just want to make sure it’s done reverently and safely,” the Rev. Msgr. Wallace A. Harris, the event coordinator for the Sunday afternoon Mass at Yankee Stadium on April 20, said at a practice Wednesday afternoon. Over 500 Nathan’s hot dog vendors have been specially trained to dispense the wafer with the appropriate exhortation, “Wafers! Wafers! Wafers he-are! Gehtchyor wafers while they’re hot!!”

Priests — coming from as far as the Australian Outback — are assigned based on dates of birth, daily Crystal meth intake and number of nine year old boys despoiled, with the youngest (and most able-bodied) assigned to the upper deck, where stairs are narrow and steep and the winds strongest. There, the trembling of pre-pubescent erections will be most apparent. (more…)

AS TRUE
AS IT GETS
AS LONG
AS YOU GET IT

THANKS AMERICA!

Nuri Al Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister has announced a new military training program in which Iraqi Army personnel will train American soldiers how not to fight their own people.

“The Iraqi people are very grateful to the Americans for all their excellent training and support of the Iraqi military,” said Mr. Maliki. “We know we can never fully repay them for their generosity, but we would like to give them more than just access to oil and a permanent playground for their operations.”

Mr. Maliki went on to say that he believed the American military, though a formidable fighting force like no other the world has ever seen since the beginning of time, had its flaws. “What will happen when a new civil war erupts in America, and American soldiers must balk at killing their own families, and run away? Will they know how to not eliminate the threat when the chips are down, or will they simply kill everyone they think is the enemy because those are their orders? This, we can show them.”

The new program will exploit longstanding rivalries between the various branches of the US military, pitting Army against the Marines, Air Force against Navy, and the CIA against everyone else. “No more will these rivalries be acted out on football fields,” says Mr. Maliki.

The Iraqis have set aside a neighborhood in Baghdad for the exercises, after sending in the Marines to clear it of all residents and raze it to the ground, reminiscent of the American operation in Fallujah. A replica of Des Moines, Iowa will then be built, and the families of American service members will be flown in to take up residence there while the training is in progress.

“We want to make it as realistic as possible,” said Mr. Maliki. “Practice all you want, but when it is your father and mother in the house when you call in an airstrike from your fighter pigeons, that is the do or die moment, when you either stand up with your boots on the ground like an American, or run away with your boots in the air like an Iraqi.”
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The week’s reading, straight off the razor wire:

The story of an alarming development from Haaretz:

NEW ANTI-DRUG CAMPAIGN EQUATES SMOKING POT WITH TERRORISM

Israel’s Anti-Drug Authority has launched a new campaign featuring Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, aimed at deterring Israelis from smoking marijuana.

Underneath the image, the poster reads: “Hezbollah is clearly planning to flood Israel with narcotics. Narcotics pose a strategic threat to Israeli society. Whoever uses narcotics is giving a hand to the next terrorist attack.”

—Oh, those fucking Muslim terrorist basta…

THREE ISRAELIS NABBED IN UK IN ONE OF WORLD’S LARGEST HASH RAIDS

Three Israelis were arrested on Wednesday at the Southampton port in Britain on suspicion of trying to smuggle over six tons of hashish, according to reports revealed on Wednesday.

—Oh, jeez…

The police have been on the trail of these three suspects for the last year and a half. The suspects were identified as Hazi Serbero, 57, Moshe Kaidar, 81, and Mordechai Hirsch, 67.

Five others are suspected of involvement in the crime – four of them Pakistani nationals and the fifth from the Balkans.

— Scot Crawford

YOU HEARD IT HERE, FOIST

DUTCH LAUNCH INITIATIVE TO USE DRUGS TO “BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER”

Citing a recent story in Haaretz regarding a drug trafficking ring that brought together Israelis, Pakistanis and people from the Balkans in a plot to saturate the United Kingdom with hashish, but oddly not as an act of terrorism, the government of the Netherlands has unveiled a new plan to promote international cooperation using the already existing drug import and export structures.

“Clearly, the world of drugs is a place where people with different religious beliefs and long-standing animosities can find common ground,” the Dutch said in a statement released to the press. “Therefore, we are setting the stage to allow people of all nations, creeds and colors to import drugs into our country, free of any interference by the government. It is our view that resolving these conflicts is more important than the possible ill-effects of taking drugs on our population. We call for the rest of the world to join us in this initiative, and halt the banning of drug trafficking, in the name of world peace.”

— Scot Crawford

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

From the NY Times about a peaceful transfer of power:

FIGHT FOR SADR CITY A PROVING GROUND FOR IRAQ MILITARY

Iraqi soldiers, suffering from a shortage of experienced noncommissioned officers, have often been firing wildly…

—Managed to hit their officers, apparently.

“In case I see a bad guy I will not arrest him,” the Iraqi soldier said through an American military interpreter. “I will kill him immediately to get revenge for my guys who were lost.”

“That is absolutely understandable,” Lieutenant Bowen responded. “If they have a weapon and if you ID them as a JAM member, eliminate the threat.”

—These Iraqis will never stand on their own if they can’t learn to talk like normal military people. What the hell does “kill him to get revenge” even mean?

The militias have their own unique way of signaling the presence of the foes. The Americans say the militias have been using trained pigeons to signal the presence of American and Iraqi troops.

—The tanks and planes and bombs and the reek of fear and frustration weren’t enough of a tip for them, I guess.

—I suppose this is the nature of our new kind of war. Soon our F-16s will be swooping around over Iraq engaged in dogfights with pigeons. Top Gun! Eliminate the threat!

But the American and Iraqi soldiers had a more immediate concern: stopping the sniper fire down a nearby ally.

“The Iraqi Army hasn’t cleared it because they don’t have enough troops,” Lieutenant Bowen said. “They don’t feel secure as they move down these alleyways. I think a lot of that is because they might be new. I think a lot of it is them being green.”

—I think a lot of it is them thinking “Hey, I don’t think I want to get my ass shot off by my cousin for thirty fucking bucks a month. Where’s an officer I can shoot?”

— Scot Crawford

In order to have prisoners to torture, the administration must have prisoners in its custody, so it hates relinquishing suspects merely because there is no evidence against them. To that end it has repeatedly plead for the right to hold captives without trial, indefinitely and for undisclosed reasons, in effect sentencing them to a life behind bars before a verdict has been legally reached. If there is any activity more characteristic of tyranny, none come to mind.

Lewis Caroll nailed this perversion of justice in Alice in Wonderland‘s royal trial:

`No, no!’ said the Queen. `Sentence first–verdict afterwards.’

`Stuff and nonsense!’ said Alice loudly. `The idea of having the sentence first!’

`Hold your tongue!’ said the Queen, turning purple.

Currently, two US citizens, Shawqi Ahmad Omar and Mohammad Munaf, are in an Army-run detention center in Baghdad on so-far unproven criminal charges, awaiting transfer to the Iraqis. Both claim to be innocent.
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A: Torture Memo Man!

Harry Shearer, of Spinal Tap and The Simpsons fame, has a Sunday night radio program called, in burst of francophilic liberality, “Le Show,” and on his April 6th broadcast, in case you missed it, he sang a song to commemorate the achievements of lawman John C. Yoo, Bush’s former Justice Department enabler.

Yoo’s now famous “torture memo” was released this week after years in classified obscurity. The memo explicitly approves the sort of rights abuses that the Bush-Cheney administration blamed on “a few bad apples” once photos from Abu Ghraib were widely published.

Yoo’s amazing claim is that America’s chief executive, as guardian of our nation’s safety, can order any sort of interrogatory abuse short of organ failure or death in the name of “national self defense” without violating the universal human rights recognized in Geneva, the word “universal” being, presumably, just one of those filler words international people throw around meaninglessly, like “human,” and “”rights.”

If you click on the “more info” button on Shearer’s site, you can pull up the whole song, a sample of whose lyrics include these delightful lines:

Got some evil doers and
they just won’t say “Boo,”
A little pain and torment might
change their point of view,
But before you waterboard them
You wonder could they sue. . .
One guy has got the answer:
The one to ask is. . . Yoo!

CHORUS:
Who is Yoo?
He just wrote and ran.
Who is Yoo?
Torture Memo Man.

Who is Yoo?
He just banned the ban!
Who is Yoo?
Torture Memo Man.

Shearer’s song explains that Yoo now teaches at law Berkeley, where he can explain to his students how and why the Bill of Rights has expired.

AS TRUE
AS IT GETS
AS LONG
AS YOU GET IT

SEXFARE!

— Scot Crawford

After admitting that he has tried marijuana and cocaine, has been unfaithful to his wife numerous times, has injected heroin (but not in the vein), has sodomized children, has stepped on rodents while wearing high heels for sexual gratification, has invested in Exxon, has supported legislative initiatives to publicly lash illegal immigrants, has liked French people, has supported pre-emptive military strikes on Iran and North Korea, and has supported both jailing welfare recipients and forcing people to join the welfare rolls, Governor David Paterson of New York has now launched an initiative to require prostitution rings to provide Braille versions of the photographs of the available women on their websites.

“I have a dream,” said the Governor on Wednesday at a press conference to announce the first major initiatives of his budding Governoralty, “and that is to see the day when blind people are not subjected to the soft bigotry of traditional photographs of prostitutes. As the disabled are now given the right to park close to stores and offices, I am going to see to it that blind people are able to make considered, informed judgments about which girl they’ll be spending their hard-earned dollars on.”

Insisting that “no one but the blind know what it’s like to be blind”, the governor dismissed objections that his hooker-braille initiative amounted to reverse discrimination that would leave a blind man feeling that he did not get his girl by virtue of his merits, but because special legislation broke trail for him. Critics cited Clarence Thomas’ recent autobiography, which made the point that despite his awesome career trajectory he had always felt bitter and soiled by the knowledge that he only got there because white people let him.

“Feeling soiled is part of the package,” said the Governor. “No one who goes to prostitutes feels all pure and good about it; that’s the point of the thing. We should, nay, we must, level the playing field, so blind men, like ex-Governor Spitzer, have equal access to sex-on-demand, and that the sex he purchases should be as gratifyingly fake as any man’s.”

He went on to point out an income disparity along racial lines, which makes it so black men run greater risks of acquiring STD’s, getting beaten and robbed by an addicted prostitute, and sleeping with some “wretched crackitute who spends her condom money on drugs” because they can’t afford the upscale prostitutes whose lives are good enough that they don’t want to die from having sex with desperate, sad little men who are afraid of women and think that’s a bad thing.

“It is time for government to tip the scales in favor of those who have traditionally been left out of the safe-sex world,” said Mr. Paterson. “That is why I am authorizing the Bank of New York to offer Subprime Sex Loans to all people, of all races. The only standard for approval shall be applying. As our great President George Bush brought about an ownership society throughout our great land by permitting lending institutions to approve mortgages for people without any money, secure jobs, or the capacity to be wary of that which is too good to be true, especially when it is presented by someone who makes his living playing with money not his own, we shall free the sexually and financially frustrated to explore their risk-taking selves in a safe and affordable manner.”
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