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Friday, May 20, 2005

So where's the right-wing outrage about this?
Posted by Jill | 7:03 AM

The keystone of the right-wing outrage at Newsweek is that seventeen people died in anti-American violence. "Newsweek lied, people died", they scream, conveniently ignoring the massive lies of the administration they so mindlessly and slavishly support; the lies that got us into this mess in the first place.

One would think they actually cared about those seventeen deaths.

I say bullshit.

Despite all the frothing on the right, the substance of the Newsweek story remains intact. What does not remain intact is the claim of its source that it saw the claims of abuse on one particular memo. This is what the right is latching onto in a desperate attempt to discredit the journalist who was at the forefront of the Clinton impeachment foofarah, conveniently ignoring the fact that Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said emphatically that the violence in Afghanistan is triggered far more by rage at Hamid Karzai than about a 2-paragraph blurb in an American magazine.

But then, it's so much more fun blaming Newsweek for everything short of the crucifixion of Jesus, right? It's astounding how simple-minded these people can be, even the ones who you'd think are smart enough to know better.

What a tangled web we weave indeed.

Let me repeat: I have no great love for Michael Isikoff. In fact, it pisses me off royally when journalists do crap like this, if for no other reason than that they hand the right ammunition. If I, a humble blogger, know how these people work, how ruthless they are and how they'll resort to any means necessary to destroy anyone who disagrees with them, how come the suits at Newsweek and CBS News and everyone else who's been burned by what may be planted sources and documents don't know that yet? And what's it going to take?

This morning the New York Times is reporting horror stories about the treatment of Afghan prisoners:

Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.

The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.

Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he punched a hole in the bottom, the interpreter said, so as the prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully into Mr. Dilawar's face.

"Come on, drink!" the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the prisoner gagged on the spray. "Drink!"

At the interrogators' behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.

"Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.

Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.

The story of Mr. Dilawar's brutal death at the Bagram Collection Point - and that of another detainee, Habibullah, who died there six days earlier in December 2002 - emerge from a nearly 2,000-page confidential file of the Army's criminal investigation into the case, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.

Like a narrative counterpart to the digital images from Abu Ghraib, the Bagram file depicts young, poorly trained soldiers in repeated incidents of abuse. The harsh treatment, which has resulted in criminal charges against seven soldiers, went well beyond the two deaths.

In some instances, testimony shows, it was directed or carried out by interrogators to extract information. In others, it was punishment meted out by military police guards. Sometimes, the torment seems to have been driven by little more than boredom or cruelty, or both.


Now, the wingnuts will say that since these people are prisoners, anything that happens to them is deserved. To that I ask, aren't we supposed to be better than this? Aren't we supposed to set an example to the rest of the world? How can we blast people like Saddam Hussein and other butchers when officially-sanctioned butchery is official policy of the U.S. as well?

And even if you think that being Bully of the World is A-OK, shouldn't we be concerned about what this kind of dehumanization is doing to the soldiers participating in it?

You see, unlike the people who think Lynndie England and her ilk acted alone, that they are just wild cards, nasty, bad kids who violated official policy, I see the young people who are stuck working in these prisons as victims as well -- victims of a policy that dehumanizes them so that they CAN perform acts like those described in this and other reports.

Can you imagine what these kids are going to be like when they get home? How do you torture another human being on a daily basis and then go home and live a normal life?

It's very easy to put one of those goddamn ribbon magnets on your SUV, blast Toby Keith out the speakers, and claim you're supporting the troops. But if you really care about the young people that George W. Bush has sent to fight a war he hasn't a clue how he wants to win, you have to be alarmed about how military policy is turning them into animals.

And anyone who thinks that this kind of activity is scaring the kind of person in the Middle East who is willing to die for Allah in a blaze of glory, guess again. We're not engendering respect, or even fear from these people; we're engendering nothing but rage. It is U.S. policy that leads to this violence, not simply a poorly-sourced news story.
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