US Army: "dysfunctional, angry and near losing its honor"

Josh Marshal's blog for May 18, 2004 is a letter from an unidentified (for obvious reasons) US Army intelligence officer in Iraq. The occupation is a disaster, even the US's former supporters can't wait for our troops to leave, and the US Army is degrading itself, he writes. Check it out: Apocalypse Again, From Talking Points Memo 

Torturing the language, abusing the prisoners

Check out Amy Gahran's blog entry for May 21, on Loaded Words and Tortured Definitions, on U.S. media's avoidance of the word "torture" to describe what's been going on in Abu Ghraib.

Recommended reading: America's mercenaries

Outsourcing taken to dangerous extremes -- dangerous to our democracy as well as to other people. Read Should we support our mercenaries too? by another National Writers Union colleague, Don Monkerud.

Tough time for satirists

My friend Don Monkerud has been trying to write satire about the follies of the Bush administration. It's getting really tough. The stuff going on now -- bombing a wedding party and then trashing their own henchman's headquarters (Chalabi) is beyond satire. Take this quote from Bush (that is captured in a film clip in the new documentary, "Control Room," about Al-Jazeera). As Caryn James reports in today's NYT (The War's Dark Side: Filling in the Blanks):

There, President Bush is shown commenting on Americans captured by Iraqis, saying, "The P.O.W.'s I expect to be treated humanely, just like we're treating the prisoners we captured humanely."

Try to satirize that!

Being conspicuously nice to some Iraqis

Sophia Niarchos, a colleague in the New York chapter of the National Writers Union, writes:
This morning in one of my rare viewings of network TV, NBC's Today Show news reported about a very young Iraqi child with a major tumor in the neck area who was brought to the U.S. so that her life might be saved by American doctors in, I think, Ohio (hmmm, isn't that a "battleground" state?). There was video of her being put on a helicopter, of her mother in an interview, of the child herself, of doctors discussing their hopes for a happy ending.

In a country where HIPAA compliance (protecting patient privacy) is required of medical professionals and where photos of flag-draped caskets of unidentified soldiers are (or were) not permitted, how is it that this Iraqi family can have their privacy invaded? Could it have anything to do with the military's need for a "goodwill" story to keep this war looking like a benefit for the Iraqi people? To keep Americans looking like heroes? They haven't shown us the people we murdered, have they?

Kerry, just do it!

Forward from our friends at MoveOn:

Dear friend,

As George Bush's poll numbers drop quickly, John Kerry is facing an important choice -- perhaps the most important choice he'll make in his campaign. He has to decide whether, as some consultants will urge, he should be cautious and run toward the center, or whether he should present a bold agenda for change and rally Americans around a vision for our future.

Through his history, Kerry has made a practice of standing up for bold initiatives to provide health care, protect the environment, and safeguard the right to reproductive choice. Together, we need to let him know that we want him to be his best, boldest self -- to go big, ask more of us, and power his campaign on the politics of hope.

Please join me in calling on John Kerry to "go big" at: www.moveonpac.org

Thank you.

"Condi's a jerk"

You knew that already, of course, but look who's saying it! Read Casualty of War by Wil S. Hylton, in the forthcoming June issue of GQ. "Four years into an embattled Bush administration, Colin Powell is hard at work at something he's never had to worry about before: salvaging his legacy."

Our national embarrassment

I've been pondering a remark by Sen. McCain the other day. When a reporter asked him if he saw some comparison between the tortures of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib with the torture he had experienced (very severe, causing among other things a broken arm) at the hands of the Vietnamese when he was a P.O.W., he dismissed the idea. "I was never sexually humiliated," he said.

Right. There are many ways to be beastly and cruel, to inflict as severe pain as can be imagined on a despised foe. Ottoman Turks used to favor the bastinado, beating people on the souls of their feet. The Romans chained galley slaves to the oars and, when they really wanted to hurt you, resorted to crucifixion. The Chinese had ingenious things they could do involving fingernails, and something called "Chinese water torture." The word "torture" itself comes from twisting, which was one of the things Spanish inquisitors might do to your body if they wanted to force the demons out of you. There must be 50 ways to hurt your brother, if Paul Simon wants to set that to music.

But none of these methods involves sex, kinky or otherwise. The Americans who gleefully posed for those photos with naked Iraqis were not merely depraved, they were/are weird. The only thing like it I've ever heard of -- apart from fantasy novels like Sade's Justine -- were the tortures in the secret prisons of Argentina during the "dirty war" (1976-1983) and in Chile during the reign of Pinochet. But even those twisted twisters didn't grin for the camera. Our Republic is in deep danger -- something is driving people, especially but not only men, to associate sex with violence. I wonder if it doesn't have to do with the great fear of sex, the notion that sexual organs and sexual acts are somehow "dirty," that comes from our evangelical preachers and our evangelical Attorney General. If sex is nasty, then the nastiest thing you can do to someone is force him to give a sexual display. Whereas, if sex is considered more or less normal and pleasurable but the human body is sacred, then the nastiest thing you can do might be to crucify him, i.e., tear his body apart. Different strokes for different sadists.

For a reasoned British view on the Iraq débâcle (though not specifically Abu Ghraib) and what to do about it, see America and Arabia after Saddam by Fred Halliday, 13 - 5 - 2004.

The unknown knowns

A friend just sent me, once again, Donald Rumsfeld's famous soliloquy from his Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing:

As we know, there are known knowns.
There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.

I've read that many times, but what has always bothered me about Rumsfeld and his partners is their unknown knowns, that is, all the things that were perfectly knowable but that Rumsfeld refused to inform himself about, like:

the inevitability of resistance in Iraq, the stupidity of making untrained clerks and service workers into prison guards, the principles of honor and shame in Arab and other cultures, and how to enrage people you claim to be liberating.

We can't be foreigners. We're Americans!

Mr. Bush observed with no irony to Al Arabiya TV: "Iraqis are sick of foreign people coming in their country and trying to destabilize their country, and we will help them rid Iraq of these killers."
(courtesy of Maureen Dowd)