War & Peace: May 2005 Archives

Yes, they do.

Don't know why I should be surprised, but I certainly am sickened yet again! 

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.

Oh, there's so much many more stories like this in this article.

Anyone who still thinks this war was a good idea or we somehow have the moral high ground are sadly deluded. Amazingly, there are still people like that in the so-called liberal Bay Area...

O.K., I can understand it's bad to get a story wrong. I can agree that Newsweek should be really really really sure it can trust its sources. But hold them responsible for the deaths in the riots?

Afghanistan's government said Tuesday that Newsweek should be held responsible for damages caused by deadly anti-American demonstrations after the magazine alleged U.S. desecration of the Quran, and it suggested that foreign forces may have helped turn protests violent.

Pakistan joined the international criticism of the magazine's article and said Newsweek's apology and retraction were "not enough."

What if the story had been reported by an Afghani or Pakistani newspaper?  How many times have Egyptian or Saudi papers made some incendiary (and often anti-Semitic) accusation?

And what if the story is actually true? 

Erik Saar, a former Army translator at Guantanamo Bay who has written a book about mistreatment of detainees at the military prison, said in interviews and in his book that he never saw a Koran flushed in a toilet but that guards routinely ignored prisoners' sensitivities by tossing it on the ground while searching their cells.

And numerous detainees, whose stories are uncorroborated, have said to various media outlets that at detention facilities in Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan, the Koran was stepped on, tossed on the floor and placed in latrines.

"They tore the Koran to pieces in front of us, threw it into the toilet," former detainee Aryat Vahitov told Russian television in June 2004.

A simple question: after U.S. interrogators have tortured over two dozen detainees to death, after they have wrapped one in an Israeli flag, after they have smeared naked detainees with fake menstrual blood, after they have told one detainee to "Fuck Allah," after they have ordered detainees to pray to Allah in order to kick them from behind in the head, is it completely beyond credibility that they would also have desecrated the Koran?

Andrew Sullivan nails it.

Accuracy, however, may not have been his purpose here. When pressed by the same reporter on whether or not he thinks genocide is occurring in Darfur, Zoellick refused to endorse Powell’s affirmative finding. “It’s been a terrible series of events,” he said, “and as you know, there’s a debate. The [United Nations] did a legal analysis of whether this was genocide, and their conclusion was that it was crimes against humanity as opposed to genocide.”

Zoellick's equivocating on the genocide question was depressing to those who are closely monitoring the crisis in Darfur. "It was sucking up to the Sudanese regime in the worst way," the International Crisis Group's John Prendergast said. Worse, Zoellick’s backpedaling on Powell’s finding, which was reached after researchers interviewed more than 1,000 refugees from Darfur, may hint that there’s a new administration plan afoot for the situation.

"Zoellick is not some State Department official acting on his own,” Prendergast told me, “but was deliberately signaling a shift in administration policy."

The whole sorry story... 

But just in case you are still reading, yes, it's official, our president really is a lying sack of shit. Actually, they got a truckload of shit-sacks in the White House...

British memo indicates Bush made intelligence fit Iraq policy

By Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - A highly classified British memo, leaked in the midst of Britain's just-concluded election campaign, indicates that President Bush decided to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein by summer 2002 and was determined to ensure that U.S. intelligence data supported his policy.

The document, which summarizes a July 23, 2002, meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair with his top security advisers, reports on a visit to Washington by the head of Britain's MI-6 intelligence service.

The visit took place while the Bush administration was still declaring to the American public that no decision had been made to go to war.

"There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable," the MI-6 chief said at the meeting, according to the memo. "Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD," weapons of mass destruction.

The memo said "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq since the U.S. invasion in March 2003.

The White House has repeatedly denied accusations made by several top foreign officials that it manipulated intelligence estimates to justify an invasion of Iraq.

 We now resume our regularly scheduled programming. Here's another sack o'shit.

Well, it's a little late now, isn't it?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A majority of Americans do not think it was worth going to war in Iraq with support at the lowest level since the United States launched the invasion in 2003, according to a CNN/USAToday/Gallup poll released on Tuesday.

Fifty-seven percent of those polled said it was not worth going to war compared to 41 percent who thought it was. In a February poll, 48 percent said the war was worth it and half said it was not.