Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

I was looking around on the Apple Quicktime video site today, and came across an album entitled, My Brightest Diamond - Bring Me The Workhorse

Albums these days tend to have titles that boil down to babble. Lyrics too. It’s as if the musicians know that the songs need a human voice, but don’t really have much to say, just a bunch of chords and notes that sound cool together, so they create the equivalent of lorem ipsum.

The sad thing is that the music itself from My Brightest Diamond wasn’t really that interested. It just kind of wandered around, never getting any place.

Yet, here’s how the musician described the meaning of the album: “Reconciling all the complex emotions found in each of us.” Reconciling ALL the complex emotions found in each of us?!? Nothing could do that, except if the sun exploded and ended all life on Earth. This phrase represents the ultimate in pretense.

It reminded me of a review of Bob Dylan’s new album that I heard a few days ago on NPR. The reviewer seemed to think that the album was a work of genius, with wonderful music combined with poetic lyrics. I was interested. Then, they played a song from the album. The music was boring and unoriginal, and the lyrics were superficial, without much meaning.

If the music hadn’t been produced by Bob Dylan, nobody would bother to give it a second look. There’s too much in the music industry these days of the worshipping of legends, babbling praise without consideration for the real value of what’s being said.

Lately I’ve taken to reading turn of the century literature (Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, etc.) and I’m quite proud of myself, to be frankly honest. The kids of stories such as those that I just listed above are often hard to read for most people, such as my father, because of how the dialect and sentence structure has changed in the last one hundred years or so. Myself, I can read them and enjoy them.

But one common thing I’ve noticed in almost all of the stories is that, if these stories can be taken as an indicator of how people were back then, I’m honestly surprised that the human race survived from all the damn fainting that’s in them. Currently, I’m reading Dracula and thus far I have counted a minimum of around seven people fainting or coming close to it. In one of the Sherlock Holmes stories I had read, a woman (Watson’s future wife) fainted after hearing that Holmes and Watson were shot at.

In these stories people faint over things which, in this day and age, would merit a pair of wide eyes. And the cure-all for a faint or near faint? BRANDY! I wonder, did it ever occur that people might have been fainting because they were loaded up on the brandy as a cure for nearly fainting? Like I said, I’m surprised the human race survived all the fainting. I’m pretty sure more than a few people must’ve cracked their heads open after hearing about that really bad hangnail Mary got that evening.

One of the problems I have with the novel Dracula isn’t so much the fainting, but more how Bram Stoker, when referring to a child, would use either the words “child” or “it” rather than “the boy,” “the girl,” “he,” or “she.” Is that how kids were viewed to Mr. Stoker? As an “It”?

Other than that, these are good books, which I shall have to return to. I just wanted to do a mini-rant.

~ Damen

 

There’s a reason that I’m not a politician. I’m not too fond of saying what people want to hear at the expense of saying what needs to be said.

Tonight, here’s what needs to be said: I trust the writers of the Internet more than I trust the readers of the Internet.

Technorati’s data on the blogs support this prejudice of mine. Tonight, just hours after President Bush announced that he has personally approved activities that are, in any traditional interpretation of the meaning of the law in America, illegal, what are the Internet’s readers searching for the most? They’re searching for information about Suri, Tom Cruise’s daughter that he had with Katie Holmes. They’re searching for anything having to deal with Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter who was killed by a stingray barb to the chest a few days ago.

They are NOT searching for anything having to do with the secret prisoner of war camps for torture that President Bush now admits he authorized.

What are the key terms that the Internet’s writers are writing about? According to Technorati, among the top terms are Bush, Iran and Iraq.

This isn’t just a one-day pattern. Time and time again, the people who write the content of the Internet show that, on the whole, they are willing to write about the serious issues of the day. Time and time again, the people who read what’s on the Internet show that, on the whole, they aren’t interested in the serious issues of the day. They’d rather read about celebrities, sex scandals and gossip.

Consequently, I have a lot more respect for people who write for the Internet, as a group, than I do for people who merely read online, as a group. If this makes you, as a reader, angry, so be it. I’m not writing this to make you happy. If you want happy talk, look elsewhere.

I’m writing this in order to serve notice to online readers that they ought to sit back and reflect on their priorities. Yeah, I’m getting preachy. Yes, I’m telling you what you ought to do. This is not a time when the American nation is going to be served by people sitting back and sipping pepppermint tea, using I statements and seeking consensus with the people who our driving our country into the ditch. This is the time to stand up and shout, “Damn it, this has gone too far, and I’m not going to sit back quietly and let it happen any longer!

Disagree with me? Go on. Prove me wrong. Don’t be a reader. Be a writer. Sign up on the link on this page to become a writer here on the Irregular Diaries. Don’t be a namby pamby wallflower. Speak your mind!

Last night, I went with my dad to rent some films from the local 7-11 and when we were checking them out, this guy came in and asked to use the bathroom, but the clerk told him the bathroom shuts down at 8:30pm. This confused both my dad and myself, but while I was content to shrug my shoulders and chalk it upto stupidity, he had to ask the obvious.

“Why 8:30?” he asked. He sounded incredulous but otherwise polite, but he cashier got huffy in her reply of “It’s for my safety.”

Now, when someone starts talking like a smartass in the way she did, he’s gonna feel the need to make them sound like an idiot. So he said, “Why? You afraid the toilet’s gonna overflow?”

With that remark, I could literally see her puff up with righteous indignation and she threw out a retort that you could tell was one she thought was the one that would shut him up. And she also said it louder than was necessary; “No, I’m afraid someone will come out here and kill me!”

To which my dad’s reply was; “Oh that start that at 8:30, huh?”

After that, she clamed up and didn’t say anything else and I couldn’t hide my laughter.

But reflecting on that, I started thinking about other retarded “security measures.” See, if someone was gonna kill her, they’d do it when coming through the front door, not when coming out of the can. And besides, if someone was gonna kill her, why would a locked bathroom stop him, unless his weapon of choice is a plunger and a roll of T.P.

When I was going to middle school after the Columbine shootings, they started putting up metal detectors and searching the kids as they came into the school but there were more holes in their security than a block of swiss cheese.

They had barred off all the entrances except the ones closest to the parking lot in order to funnel the to the metal detectors. But the doors they were using opened up to a set of secondary stairways.

First off, if you wanted to avoid the metal detectors all together, all you had to do was, after you came up the first set of stairs to the main floor, just turn left and go right up to the second floor where there were no metal detectors! Both my locker and my first class were on the second floor, but at least a third of the kids would go up this stairway, walk down the hall, then go down the main stairway and to their class, all with never being searched.

Another flaw with their security was that when looking through a kid’s backpack, it’d largely be just a token glance and they wouldn’t even open their binders (which can easily hide a large pistol and a good amount of ammunition).

And another, most glaring flaw, was that once the bell rang they would start putting up the walk-through scanners, whether or not there were still kids who haven’t been searched. Like they think any kid who’s going homicidal and is gonna start blowing hell out of their school is gonna make a real effort to be on time.

So let’s see, even with all this money spent on security for schools, how hard would it be to go on a shooting spree?

Show up ten or fifteen minutes late with your shotgun and handguns, stick them in your locker, and wait until lunch. When they let out, go to your locker and you’ll be on the six o’clock news.

I’ve seen this type of security in practice with the government, as well as the local gas stations and middle schools and I can’t help but wonder why we’re spending so much money on security measures that don’t work. We could take about half or two thirds of the security funding and give every school in America brand new textbooks and computers as well as keeping up the wonderful level of security that we currently have.

~ Damen

The Daily Record

30 August 2006
MIRACLE IS SUNK

A PRIEST has died after trying to demonstrate how Jesus walked on water.

Evangelist preacher Franck Kabele, 35, told his congregation he could repeat the biblical miracle.

But he drowned after walking out to sea from a beach in the capital Libreville in Gabon, west Africa.

One eyewitness said: “He told churchgoers he’d had a revelation that if he had enough faith, he could walk on water like Jesus.

“He took his congregation to the beach saying he would walk across the Komo estuary, which takes 20 minutes by boat.

“He walked into the water, which soon passed over his head and he never came back.”

And people wonder why I think religion can be a bad thing.

That preist can have all the religion and faith he wants, but I’ll still take science and a life vest.

Tonight I tried…

A splash of cranberry juice mixed with lime-flavored carbonated water: standard rice-cake yummy.

A splash of Midori melon liqueur mixed with lime-flavored carbonated water: oh yummy yum yum yum yum.

What’s your preferred form of liquid enjoyment?

September 11th

As memories unfold,
And memories don’t lie!
September 11th,
Was the day thousands died!
To those with the memory,
And to those that are lost.
My memory of love,
Goes out to each one that is lost!

But our government laughs,
As people cry each day.
That was the reason why,
To go to war this way!
For millions more will die,
Just from that 4 plane crash.
How can our government and those,
Be so stupid, to kill millions more like that?

But revenge is with blood,
Those who are lost, want to see!
How long can their memories go on,
Before the whole World is gone?
But September 11th cannot go on each day,
After the 2 buildings has collapsed.
But Americans lies with pity,
As the wars go on after that 11th day.
How can our people be so stupid,
To remember September 11th this way????

Written on September 11, 2006, by the President of U.S.A. in 2008 and 2012
Keith Ray Elam
http://www.foreverparty.com

On one of my other commonly visited web-sites I posted an artical after reading this post by Peregrin Wood and it has sparked off a debate on terrorists and torture.

One of the members, whom I disagree with (to put it nicely and under a heaping helping of sugar) and whom is a conservative (but not a republican, oh no, perish the thought!) said he thinks torture should be illegal but is just fine with “extreme tactics.” This statement got me thinking about an anti-smoking commercial I once saw.

Tell me, if I take a rabid, vicious, snarling, snapping, growling German Shepherd named Fang and rename him “Fluffy”…is anyone gonna want to pet him?

That’s all they’re doing now. It’s not torture, it’s “extreme tactics!” Torture is immoral and illegal! We’re not doing anything illegal; we’re just using “extreme tactics.” That’s a mighty thick coat of veneer and sugar.

A pile of shit by any other name is still a pile of shit. If I call it mud, will the kids want to play in it?

I just saw this when I logged onto YIM. I thought everyone here would like to see it.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060918/ap_on_re_mi_ea/photographer_detained

U.S. holds AP photographer in Iraq 5 mos

By ROBERT TANNER, AP National Writer

The U.S. military in Iraq has imprisoned an Associated Press photographer for five months, accusing him of being a security threat but never filing charges or permitting a public hearing.

Military officials said Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi citizen, was being held for “imperative reasons of security” under United Nations resolutions. AP executives said the news cooperative’s review of Hussein’s work did not find anything to indicate inappropriate contact with insurgents, and any evidence against him should be brought to the Iraqi criminal justice system.

Hussein, 35, is a native of Fallujah who began work for the AP in September 2004. He photographed events in Fallujah and Ramadi until he was detained on April 12 of this year.

“We want the rule of law to prevail. He either needs to be charged or released. Indefinite detention is not acceptable,” said Tom Curley, AP’s president and chief executive officer. “We’ve come to the conclusion that this is unacceptable under Iraqi law, or Geneva Conventions, or any military procedure.”

Hussein is one of an estimated 14,000 people detained by the U.S. military worldwide — 13,000 of them in Iraq. They are held in limbo where few are ever charged with a specific crime or given a chance before any court or tribunal to argue for their freedom.

In Hussein’s case, the military has not provided any concrete evidence to back up the vague allegations they have raised about him, Curley and other AP executives said.

The military said Hussein was captured with two insurgents, including Hamid Hamad Motib, an alleged leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. “He has close relationships with persons known to be responsible for kidnappings, smuggling, improvised explosive device (IED) attacks and other attacks on coalition forces,” according to a May 7 e-mail from U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Jack Gardner, who oversees all coalition detainees in Iraq.

“The information available establishes that he has relationships with insurgents and is afforded access to insurgent activities outside the normal scope afforded to journalists conducting legitimate activities,” Gardner wrote to AP International Editor John Daniszewski.

Hussein proclaims his innocence, according to his Iraqi lawyer, Badie Arief Izzat, and believes he has been unfairly targeted because his photos from Ramadi and Fallujah were deemed unwelcome by the coalition forces.

That Hussein was captured at the same time as insurgents doesn’t make him one of them, said Kathleen Carroll, AP’s executive editor.

“Journalists have always had relationships with people that others might find unsavory,” she said. “We’re not in this to choose sides, we’re to report what’s going on from all sides.”

AP executives in New York and Baghdad have sought to persuade U.S. officials to provide additional information about allegations against Hussein and to have his case transferred to the Iraqi criminal justice system. The AP contacted military leaders in Iraq and the Pentagon, and later the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad.

The AP has worked quietly until now, believing that would be the best approach. But with the U.S. military giving no indication it would change its stance, the news cooperative has decided to make public Hussein’s imprisonment, hoping the spotlight will bring attention to his case and that of thousands of others now held in Iraq, Curley said.

One of Hussein’s photos was part of a package of 20 photographs that won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography last year. His contribution was an image of four insurgents in Fallujah firing a mortar and small arms during the U.S.-led offensive in the city in November 2004.

In what several AP editors described as a typical path for locally hired staff in the midst of a conflict, Hussein, a shopkeeper who sold cell phones and computers in Fallujah, was hired in the city as a general helper because of his local knowledge.

As the situation in Fallujah eroded in 2004, he expressed a desire to become a photographer. Hussein was given training and camera equipment and hired in September of that year as a freelancer, paid on a per-picture basis, according to Santiago Lyon, AP’s director of photography. A month later, he was put on a monthly retainer.

During the U.S.-led offensive in Fallujah in November 2004, he stayed on after his family fled. “He had good access. He was able to photograph not only the results of the attacks on Fallujah, he was also able to photograph members of the insurgency on occasion,” Lyon said. “That was very difficult to achieve at that time.”

After fleeing later in the offensive, leaving his camera behind in the rush to escape, Hussein arrived in Baghdad, where the AP gave him a new camera. He then went to work in Ramadi which, like Fallujah, has been a center of insurgent violence.

In its own effort to determine whether Hussein had gotten too close the insurgency, the AP has reviewed his work record, interviewed senior photo editors who worked on his images and examined all 420 photographs in the news cooperative’s archives that were taken by Hussein, Lyon said.

The military in Iraq has frequently detained journalists who arrive quickly at scenes of violence, accusing them of getting advance notice from insurgents, Lyon said. But “that’s just good journalism. Getting to the event quickly is something that characterizes good journalism anywhere in the world. It does not indicate prior knowledge,” he said.

Out of Hussein’s body of work, only 37 photos show insurgents or people who could be insurgents, Lyon said. “The vast majority of the 420 images show the aftermath or the results of the conflict — blown up houses, wounded people, dead people, street scenes,” he said.

Only four photos show the wreckage of still-burning U.S. military vehicles.

“Do we know absolutely everything about him, and what he did before he joined us? No. Are we satisfied that what he did since he joined us was appropriate for the level of work we expected from him? Yes,” Lyon said. “When we reviewed the work he submitted to us, we found it appropriate to what we’d asked him to do.”

The AP does not knowingly hire combatants or anyone who is part of a story, company executives said. But hiring competent local staff in combat areas is vital to the news service, because often only local people can pick their way around the streets with a reasonable degree of safety.

“We want people who are not part of a story. Sometimes it is a judgment call. If someone seems to be thuggish, or like a fighter, you certainly wouldn’t hire them,” Daniszewski said. After they are hired, their work is checked carefully for signs of bias.

Lyon said every image from local photographers is always “thoroughly checked and vetted” by experienced editors. “In every case where there have been images of insurgents, questions have been asked about circumstances under which the image was taken, and what the image shows,” he said.

Executives said it’s not uncommon for AP news people to be picked up by coalition forces and detained for hours, days or occasionally weeks, but never this long. Several hundred journalists in Iraq have been detained, some briefly and some for several weeks, according to Scott Horton, a New York-based lawyer hired by the AP to work on Hussein’s case.

Horton also worked on behalf of an Iraqi cameraman employed by CBS, Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein, who was detained for one year before his case was sent to an Iraqi court on charges of insurgent activity. He was acquitted for lack of evidence.

AP officials emphasized the military has not provided the company concrete evidence of its claims against Bilal Hussein, or provided him a chance to offer a defense.

“He’s a Sunni Arab from a tribe in that area. I’m sure he does know some nasty people. But is he a participant in the insurgency? I don’t think that’s been proven,” Daniszewski said.

Information provided to the AP by the military to support the continued detention hasn’t withstood scrutiny, when it could be checked, Daniszewski said.

For example, he said, the AP had been told that Hussein was involved with the kidnapping of two Arab journalists in Ramadi.

But those journalists, tracked down by the AP, said Hussein had helped them after they were released by their captors without money or a vehicle in a dangerous part of Ramadi. After a journalist acquaintance put them in touch with Hussein, the photographer picked them up, gave them shelter and helped get them out of town, they said.

The journalists said they had never been contacted by multinational forces for their account.

Horton said the military has provided contradictory accounts of whether Hussein himself was a U.S. target last April or if he was caught up in a broader sweep.

The military said bomb-making materials were found in the apartment where Hussein was captured but it never detailed what those materials were. The military said he tested positive for traces of explosives. Horton said that was virtually guaranteed for anyone on the streets of Ramadi at that time.

Hussein has been a frequent target of conservative critics on the Internet, who raised questions about his images months before the military detained him. One blogger and author, Michelle Malkin, wrote about Hussein’s detention on the day of his arrest, saying she’d been tipped by a military source.

Carroll said the role of journalists can be misconstrued and make them a target of critics. But that criticism is misplaced, she said.

“How can you know what a conflict is like if you’re only with one side of the combatants?” she said. “Journalism doesn’t work if we don’t report and photograph all sides.”

Yet more AP goodness about the loving treatment by American soldiers.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060918/ap_on_re_mi_ea/in_american_hands

U.S. war prisons legal vacuum for 14,000

By PATRICK QUINN, Associated Press Writer

In the few short years since the first shackled Afghan shuffled off to Guantanamo, the U.S. military has created a global network of overseas prisons, its islands of high security keeping 14,000 detainees beyond the reach of established law.

Disclosures of torture and long-term arbitrary detentions have won rebuke from leading voices including the U.N. secretary-general and the U.S. Supreme Court. But the bitterest words come from inside the system, the size of several major U.S. penitentiaries.

“It was hard to believe I’d get out,” Baghdad shopkeeper Amjad Qassim al-Aliyawi told The Associated Press after his release — without charge — last month. “I lived with the Americans for one year and eight months as if I was living in hell.”

Captured on battlefields, pulled from beds at midnight, grabbed off streets as suspected insurgents, tens of thousands now have passed through U.S. detention, the vast majority in Iraq.

Many say they were caught up in U.S. military sweeps, often interrogated around the clock, then released months or years later without apology, compensation or any word on why they were taken. Seventy to 90 percent of the Iraq detentions in 2003 were “mistakes,” U.S. officers once told the international Red Cross.

Defenders of the system, which has only grown since soldiers’ photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib shocked the world, say it’s an unfortunate necessity in the battles to pacify Iraq and Afghanistan, and to keep suspected terrorists out of action.

Every U.S. detainee in Iraq “is detained because he poses a security threat to the government of Iraq, the people of Iraq or coalition forces,” said U.S. Army Lt. Col. Keir-Kevin Curry, a spokesman for U.S.-led military detainee operations in Iraq.

But dozens of ex-detainees, government ministers, lawmakers, human rights activists, lawyers and scholars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the United States said the detention system often is unjust and hurts the war on terror by inflaming anti-Americanism in Iraq and elsewhere.

Building for the Long Term

Reports of extreme physical and mental abuse, symbolized by the notorious Abu Ghraib prison photos of 2004, have abated as the Pentagon has rejected torture-like treatment of the inmates. Most recently, on Sept. 6, the Pentagon issued a new interrogation manual banning forced nakedness, hooding, stress positions and other abusive techniques.

The same day, President Bush said the CIA’s secret outposts in the prison network had been emptied, and 14 terror suspects from them sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to face trial in military tribunals. The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down the tribunal system, however, and the White House and Congress are now wrestling over the legal structure of such trials.

Living conditions for detainees may be improving as well. The U.S. military cites the toilets of Bagram, Afghanistan: In a cavernous old building at that air base, hundreds of detainees in their communal cages now have indoor plumbing and privacy screens, instead of exposed chamber pots.

Whatever the progress, small or significant, grim realities persist.

Human rights groups count dozens of detainee deaths for which no one has been punished or that were never explained. The secret prisons — unknown in number and location — remain available for future detainees. The new manual banning torture doesn’t cover CIA interrogators. And thousands of people still languish in a limbo, deprived of one of common law’s oldest rights, habeas corpus, the right to know why you are imprisoned.

“If you, God forbid, are an innocent Afghan who gets sold down the river by some warlord rival, you can end up at Bagram and you have absolutely no way of clearing your name,” said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch in New York. “You can’t have a lawyer present evidence, or do anything organized to get yourself out of there.”

The U.S. government has contended it can hold detainees until the “war on terror” ends — as it determines.

“I don’t think we’ve gotten to the question of how long,” said retired admiral John D. Hutson, former top lawyer for the U.S. Navy. “When we get up to ‘forever,’ I think it will be tested” in court, he said.

The Navy is planning long-term at Guantanamo. This fall it expects to open a new, $30-million maximum-security wing at its prison complex there, a concrete-and-steel structure replacing more temporary camps.

In Iraq, Army jailers are a step ahead. Last month they opened a $60-million, state-of-the-art detention center at Camp Cropper, near Baghdad’s airport. The Army oversees about 13,000 prisoners in Iraq at Cropper, Camp Bucca in the southern desert, and Fort Suse in the Kurdish north.

Neither prisoners of war nor criminal defendants, they are just “security detainees” held “for imperative reasons of security,” spokesman Curry said, using language from an annex to a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing the U.S. presence here.

Questions of Law, Sovereignty

President Bush laid out the U.S. position in a speech Sept. 6.

“These are enemy combatants who are waging war on our nation,” he said. “We have a right under the laws of war, and we have an obligation to the American people, to detain these enemies and stop them from rejoining the battle.”

But others say there’s no need to hold these thousands outside of the rules for prisoners of war established by the Geneva Conventions.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan declared last March that the extent of arbitrary detention here is “not consistent with provisions of international law governing internment on imperative reasons of security.”

Meanwhile, officials of Nouri al-Maliki’s 4-month-old Iraqi government say the U.S. detention system violates Iraq’s national rights.

“As long as sovereignty has transferred to Iraqi hands, the Americans have no right to detain any Iraqi person,” said Fadhil al-Sharaa, an aide to the prime minister. “The detention should be conducted only with the permission of the Iraqi judiciary.”

At the Justice Ministry, Deputy Minister Busho Ibrahim told AP it has been “a daily request” that the detainees be brought under Iraqi authority.

There’s no guarantee the Americans’ 13,000 detainees would fare better under control of the Iraqi government, which U.N. officials say holds 15,000 prisoners.

But little has changed because of these requests. When the Americans formally turned over Abu Ghraib prison to Iraqi control on Sept. 2, it was empty but its 3,000 prisoners remained in U.S. custody, shifted to Camp Cropper.

Life in Custody

The cases of U.S.-detained Iraqis are reviewed by a committee of U.S. military and Iraqi government officials. The panel recommends criminal charges against some, release for others. As of Sept. 9, the Central Criminal Court of Iraq had put 1,445 on trial, convicting 1,252. In the last week of August, for example, 38 were sentenced on charges ranging from illegal weapons possession to murder, for the shooting of a U.S. Marine.

Almost 18,700 have been released since June 2004, the U.S. command says, not including many more who were held and then freed by local military units and never shipped to major prisons.

Some who were released, no longer considered a threat, later joined or rejoined the insurgency.

The review process is too slow, say U.N. officials. Until they are released, often families don’t know where their men are — the prisoners are usually men — or even whether they’re in American hands.

Ex-detainee Mouayad Yasin Hassan, 31, seized in April 2004 as a suspected Sunni Muslim insurgent, said he wasn’t allowed to obtain a lawyer or contact his family during 13 months at Abu Ghraib and Bucca, where he was interrogated incessantly. When he asked why he was in prison, he said, the answer was, “We keep you for security reasons.”

Another released prisoner, Waleed Abdul Karim, 26, recounted how his guards would wield their absolute authority.

“Tell us about the ones who attack Americans in your neighborhood,” he quoted an interrogator as saying, “or I will keep you in prison for another 50 years.”

As with others, Karim’s confinement may simply have strengthened support for the anti-U.S. resistance. “I will hate Americans for the rest of my life,” he said.

As bleak and hidden as the Iraq lockups are, the Afghan situation is even less known. Accounts of abuse and deaths emerged in 2002-2004, but if Abu Ghraib-like photos from Bagram exist, none have leaked out. The U.S. military is believed holding about 500 detainees — most Afghans, but also apparently Arabs, Pakistanis and Central Asians.

The United States plans to cede control of its Afghan detainees by early next year, five years after invading Afghanistan to eliminate al-Qaida’s base and bring down the Taliban government. Meanwhile, the prisoners of Bagram exist in a legal vacuum like that elsewhere in the U.S. detention network.

“There’s been a silence about Bagram, and much less political discussion about it,” said Richard Bennett, chief U.N. human rights officer in Afghanistan.

Freed detainees tell how in cages of 16 inmates they are forbidden to speak to each other. They wear the same orange jumpsuits and shaven heads as the terrorist suspects at Guantanamo, but lack even the scant legal rights granted inmates at that Cuba base. In some cases, they have been held without charge for three to four years, rights workers say.

Guantanamo received its first prisoners from Afghanistan — chained, wearing blacked-out goggles — in January 2002. A total of 770 detainees were sent there. Its population today of Afghans, Arabs and others, stands at 455.

Described as the most dangerous of America’s “war on terror” prisoners, only 10 of the Guantanamo inmates have been charged with crimes. Charges are expected against 14 other al-Qaida suspects flown in to Guantanamo from secret prisons on Sept. 4.

Plans for their trials are on hold, however, because of a Supreme Court ruling in June against the Bush administration’s plan for military tribunals.

The court held the tribunals were not authorized by the U.S. Congress and violated the Geneva Conventions by abrogating prisoners’ rights. In a sometimes contentious debate, the White House and Congress are trying to agree on a new, acceptable trial plan.

Since the court decision, and after four years of confusing claims that terrorist suspects were so-called “unlawful combatants” unprotected by international law, the Bush administration has taken steps recognizing that the Geneva Conventions’ legal and human rights do extend to imprisoned al-Qaida militants. At the same time, however, the new White House proposal on tribunals retains such controversial features as denying defendants access to some evidence against them.

In his Sept. 6 speech, Bush acknowledged for the first time the existence of the CIA’s secret prisons, believed established at military bases or safehouses in such places as Egypt, Indonesia and eastern Europe. That network, uncovered by journalists, had been condemned by U.N. authorities and investigated by the Council of Europe.

The clandestine jails are now empty, Bush announced, but will remain a future option for CIA detentions and interrogation.

Louise Arbour, U.N. human rights chief, is urging Bush to abolish the CIA prisons altogether, as ripe for “abusive conduct.” The CIA’s techniques for extracting information from prisoners still remain secret, she noted.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s willingness to resort to “extraordinary rendition,” transferring suspects to other nations where they might be tortured, appears unchanged.

Prosecutions and Memories

The exposure of sadistic abuse, torture and death at Abu Ghraib two years ago touched off a flood of courts-martial of mostly lower-ranking U.S. soldiers. Overall, about 800 investigations of alleged detainee mistreatment in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to action against more than 250 service personnel, including 89 convicted at courts-martial, U.S. diplomats told the United Nations in May.

Critics protest that penalties have been too soft and too little has been done, particularly in tracing inhumane interrogation methods from the far-flung islands of the overseas prison system back to policies set by high-ranking officials.

In only 14 of 34 cases has anyone been punished for the confirmed or suspected killings of detainees, the New York-based Human Rights First reports. The stiffest sentence in a torture-related death has been five months in jail. The group reported last February that in almost half of 98 detainee deaths, the cause was either never announced or reported as undetermined.

Looking back, the United States overreacted in its treatment of detainees after Sept. 11, said Anne-Marie Slaughter, a noted American scholar of international law.

It was understandable, the Princeton University dean said, but now “we have to restore a balance between security and rights that is consistent with who we are and consistent with our security needs.”

Otherwise, she said, “history will look back and say that we took a dangerous and deeply wrong turn.”

Back here in Baghdad, at the Alawi bus station, a gritty, noisy hub far from the meeting rooms of Washington and Geneva, women gather with fading hopes whenever a new prisoner release is announced.

As she watched one recent day for a bus from distant Camp Bucca, one mother wept and told her story.

“The Americans arrested my son, my brother and his friend,” said Zahraa Alyat, 42. “The Americans arrested them October 16, 2005. They left together and I don’t know anything about them.”

The bus pulled up. A few dozen men stepped off, some blindfolded, some bound, none with any luggage, none with familiar faces.

As the distraught women straggled away once more, one ex-prisoner, 18-year-old Bilal Kadhim Muhssin, spotted U.S. troops nearby.

“Americans,” he muttered in fear. “Oh, my God, don’t say that name,” and he bolted for a city bus, and freedom.

___

EDITOR’S NOTE — The Associated Press staff in Baghdad and AP writers Andrew Selsky in San Juan, Puerto Rico; Matthew Pennington in Kabul, Afghanistan; Anne Plummer Flaherty in Washington, and Charles J. Hanley in New York contributed to this report.

I just read that today’s Rolling Stone will have an article saying that, in Georgia, in 2002, Diebold (a) ran the elections themselves; and (b) patched the software on their machines that were going to be used in Democratic counties.

It’s not on Rolling Stone’s site, yet; guess I’ll have to go buy a copy.

Peace Protest October 5 - Deja vu
Black arm bands, peace symbols, sit-ins, the Moratorium - as the sixties gave way to the seventies, these and other acts of civil disobedience by young people, and, increasingly, by mainstream Americans made the continuing prosecution of the Vietnam war and untenable position to defend. Frightened by dissent, the Nixon administration took the steps that finally assured its undoing; by 1974, our troops were home and an Imperial Presidency had been brought down. But not before 54,000 GI’s had been killed.

Today, the chorus of dissent is muted, but growing. Let us not wait for some distant threshold of American and Iraqui dead before we take the actions necessary to end this war. It’s time to take it to the streets in numbers that can’t be ignored. An opportunity to be heard is at hand on October 5 when World Can’t Wait will be calling for a national day of protest. A local clothing stoe, Waking Up, is closing that day so that its employees can attend the protests. Let’s join them in any way we can. Here are the palns for the Detroit protest from the World Can’t Wait website:

At 12:30 pm the main march will begin gathering at Gullen Mall in the center of Wayne State University. At 1:30pm we will begin a march downtown to the City County building for our rally at 4:30pm. On the march we will pass by several points such as schools, stores, etc, where we will have built for the day, and pick more people up, thus growing in numbers. After the rally at the City County building, we will move a few blocks north to Grand Circus Park for a “World Can’t Wait, Drive Out the Bush Regime” encampment. This is the same spot where “Camp Casey Detroit” was last year. The length of our encampment is to be determined, but we will be having music, poetry, and impromptu tours of symbols of the crimes committed by the Bush regime in Detroit. detroit@worldcantwait.org

I’ll be there, and after the GCP event, it’s over to the DBC for some Liberal Drinking!

Cross posted at detroit.drinkingliberally.org

We at Irregular Times used to have a nice campaign bumper sticker for Maine Democratic Congressman Mike Michaud. It was there for Michaud’s supporters to find online, and put on their cars to help spread the word that the people in Michael Michaud’s district supported him.

No more.

Mike Michaud betrayed Maine today. Mike Michaud betrayed Democrats today. Mike Michaud betrayed all America today when he voted for H.R. 6166, a bill that revokes the right of habeas corpus, legalizes torture, gives George W. Bush retroactive immunity from prosecution for war crimes and provides blanked immunity to other war criminals, allows secret evidence to be used against suspects, removes the right to a speedy trial, and even gave police the right to enter your home and search through your things without getting a search warrant.

Shame on you, Michael Michaud, for voting for this piece of totalitarian, anti-freedom legislation. You no longer have the support of Irregular Times.

That means that now, whenever voters in Maine search for the name Michael Michaud on Google or in the CafePress search engine, they will find the following new bumper sticker design where the old pro-Michaud bumper sticker used to be.

We’ll be taking this action for all the Democrats in the House of Representatives who voted for HR 6166 today. This issue is bigger than partisanship. It’s about the values of the Revolution of 1776. It’s about defending American freedom from tyranny.