I thought this week was going to be better but my professor sprung a take-home exam that was a bitch and I haven't had the opportunity to write as much as I want. I do want to welcome and thank new visitors who came over from the Prometheus6 web blog. Now that's the kind of site that I've noticed as being absent from the mainstream of political blogging and more deserving of attention - a person of color with a strong opinions about what's happening.
I don't have a lot of time since I've got a big exam tomorrow, but I did want to throw my thoughts in on this whole Iraqi prison torture mess.
First, whoever did the occupation planning is a MORON. You don't liberate a country from a dictator and then take residence in the same buildings that he used to opress his people. We are using the same palaces and prisons that Saddam did! This makes us how different from Saddam?
Not only is using the prison Saddam used to torture Iraqis completely dumb, to use it to torture even more Iraqis is downright idiotic. Now, how are Iraqis and the rest of the Arab world to believe that we (or democracy since that's what we keep telling them we're bringing) any better than the brand of oppression delivered by Saddam? Or as one prisoner more eloquently put it:
"Where is the freedom, Bush?" yelled one man, who yanked off his artificial leg and held it in the air. "Is this freedom?"
Finally, the U.S. military line here is bullshit:
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the spokesman for the American military here, delivered a powerful and unqualified public apology, but added: "Please understand that that is a small number of soldiers doing the wrong thing. They do not reflect the 150,000 coalition soldiers and the 130,000 American soldiers and marines that are out there every day providing security for your nation."
They have to say that in order to prevent the whole country from going apeshit which is pretty much what's going to happen. They also can't say that because it's just not true. The U.S. military fights its wars by dehumanizing the enemy. Whether they are "towelheads," "gooks," "Krauts," or "Japs," the point is to use the slur to minimize the trauma on an 18-year old that they are going around killing people. If they dehumanize someone to the point that they're no longer human, then arguably they also aren't killing another human being, but something that is less so.
That would explain this behavior:
U.S. soldiers who detained an elderly Iraqi woman last year placed a harness on her, made her crawl on all fours and rode her like a donkey, Prime Minister Tony Blair's personal human rights envoy to Iraq said Wednesday.
Is it any surprise then that these prisoners would be treated so inhumanely? It's not just this one prison in Iraq, but across the spectrum of military activities that the US engages in across the world. Are Afghanis treated an more humanely? Some of them wallowed away for years in legal limbo in the Guantanamo Bay detainment Camp X-Ray. It may not be torture, but certainly not in keeping with human rights.
The Washington Post even defends this rediculous standard of treatment as necessary:
In one important respect, Mr. Rumsfeld was correct: Not only could captured al Qaeda members be legitimately deprived of Geneva Convention guarantees (once the required hearing was held) but such treatment was in many cases necessary to obtain vital intelligence and prevent terrorists from communicating with confederates abroad.
This is utter nonsense. First, the vast majority of those being held have had spurious relations with terrorism at best, which is why so many are finally being let go. Second, no one including the Washington Post has been able to objectively determine whether those detainees actually have had something to do with terrorism since the military isn't making them available for scrutiny. The military isn't very credible in this regard. Third, the very fact that they are being held as unlawful combatants is in itself a somewhat dubious claim, since the protections of the Geneva convention are in fact, human rights. Human rights cannot be legitimately removed by any institution or body.
Finally, it burns me that this country, the self-proclaimed paragon of freedom and democracy would deny human rights (or any democratic rights, for that matter) on the basis of inconvenience. There is such a thing as principle and I'm outraged at the behavior that is perpetuated in my name.
These morons aren't making us any safer - they are adding fuel to the fire of world hatred of this country.
Next update: after Saturday when exams are over (at last!)
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