It's going to get much, much worse. This is what fascism looks like, as practiced by our military police in Iraq.

After a few days of interrogation, Abdulrazzaq said he was taken to Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad. There he lived in a tent with 40 other prisoners. Showers were available once a week when Army water tankers pulled up in front of portable bathrooms. A liter of water was expected to last each prisoner a week, he said, and a weekly Army MRE augmented their one meal a day.

Unruly prisoners were placed in shipping containers used to house the prison dogs, he said. The smell inside was horrible, and detention there would last days.

He was interrogated every two weeks. He was taken to a room with his hands and feet tied together, he said, then thrown on the floor. In that position, he would endure hours of questioning, much of it designed to elicit a confession that he was part of the insurgency or inform on his neighbors -- many of whom, he said, were already tent mates.

Then one day he was informed at 5 a.m. that he was being released. He never saw a lawyer or any evidence against him.

(Thanks to Billmon for the link.) The torture and abuse have been systematic, throughout a 16-camp gulag and God knows how many ad hoc holding cells on military bases. This is policy, and as the responsible officer of government Bush deserves nothing less than war-crimes prosecution for it. Let's hope this WaPo article is the beginning of sustained press attention, and not just the sort of one-off, just-till-the Jackson-trial-heats-up kind of thing we've become so sadly accustomed to.

Update: Bremer was informed last November about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. He was uninterested. Put him in the dock. Put every one of these motherfuckers in the dock.

posted by michael  7:04:16 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Blue (-state) meanies. Never let it be said that Carl Hulse failed to lend Bill Frist a hand. The first third of Hulse's A1 story today, co-authored with Robert Pear, on process delays imposed by Senate Democrats in protest of their being shut out of legislative decision-making ("Feeling Left Out on Major Bills, Democrats Turn to Stalling Others" in the print headline), reads as if the ol' Tennessee cat-killer himself had written the indictment:

Senate Democrats, shut out of Congressional negotiations on Medicare and other important bills last year, are blocking House-Senate negotiations on other bills unless they are guaranteed a voice in writing the final legislation.

The tactic has infuriated Republicans and contributed to election-year paralysis as the House and Senate struggle to work out compromises needed to make law. ...

Republicans say the parliamentary tactic, which has not been used extensively in the past, illustrates the extent to which Democrats will go to block legislation, even bills with bipartisan support. They say Democrats are trying to usurp the power of the Republican majorities in the Senate and the House. Senate Republicans say they will force the issue this week by requiring votes on the formation of conference committees.

"To think the minority can write a predetermined outcome to every bill that comes through the Senate is pretty presumptuous," said Senator Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, the majority leader.

The opening concludes with an outrageous example of Democratic perfidy:

Republicans say Senate Democrats are also blocking measures on charitable giving and job training. Bills to provide tax breaks for charitable giving were approved by lopsided votes, 95 to 5 in the Senate in April 2003 and 408 to 13 in the House in September. The jobs bill provoked fiery partisan debate in the House, but the Senate passed its version by unanimous consent.

Though Hulse doesn't go on to report it, it seems likely that those Democratic bastards are also blocking bills that would honor motherhood and provide free candy to orphans. He follows this graf with a quote from Nancy Pelosi, accusing Republicans of having "forgotten that we are here to work cooperatively to get the job done for the American people": the only purpose for placing the quote as he does is so that Hulse can convict the Democratic leadership of talking out of both sides of its mouth.

The fact that Daschle's Dems are fighting back against the most thumpingly partisan Senate leadership in memory cuts no ice with Hulse, who seems flabbergasted that the Democrats should be proving such meanies. It's not the first time Hulse has given his pal Dr. Frist a pass. Back in March, Reading A1 noticed him writing about a little anti-Kerry show staged after passage of the so-called "Unborn Victims of Violence Act": Hulse was uninterested in noting, though it seemed essential context, Bill Frist's explicitly stated program (as reported in the WaPo) of turning the Senate legislative agenda into an all-culture-war, all-the-time election year extravaganza. For Hulse, apparently, it's only partisan when the Demos are doing it.

What's bizarre about today's article is that its middle third is chock-full of examples of the Republican obstructionism (specifically, as the article states, "abuse of the conference process") that's led to the current pass. The middle grafs exist in almost perfect disconnect from the outer portions of the article. The work of Robert Pear, maybe? Did Hulse even bother to read his colleague's writing? Nevertheless, the true Hulse-ian persona reemerges at the article's end, when we get a story whose moral, as with the Pelosi quote, is that you just can't trust those Dems:

Experts on Senate procedure recalled one precedent. In 1994, Republicans, then in the minority, prevented the Senate from going to conference on a campaign finance bill.

The Senate and the House had passed radically different versions of the campaign legislation. Democrats in the two chambers had worked out a detailed informal agreement, which could have been ratified in a conference. Senate Republicans rejected the terms of the deal. ...

"Gridlock is making a big comeback," Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, said then. It was Democrats who expressed outrage and complained of obstructionist tactics at that time.

Hah! They speak with forked tongue! Hulse goes on to let McConnell explain just why the Republicans were right to do what they did then, "in an isolated case," while the Democrats are entirely in the wrong now. And he generously gives the Senator from the Dark Side the article's final word, which unsurprisingly is a ringing condemnation of the Dems' current tactics as "a stunning perversion of the democratic process." Can't blame Hulse there, though. If anybody would know about perversions of democracy, it'd be Mitch McConnell.

posted by michael  6:33:54 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Remember thou art but mortal. Supposedly, a reminder that Philip of Macedon had a slave whisper to him—or that was whispered to Roman generals as they rode in their triumphal cars. Either way, I was put in mind of it by a Brad DeLong post about the limits of certainty:

There are times ... when I think that the hallmark of true intelligence is to recognize that one may not know everything, and that one should take special care to avoid actions that are impossible or very costly to reverse. ...

As Oliver Cromwell said: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, consider that you might be mistaken."

Would that our war preznit had a lackey on duty in the Oval Office ready to repeat "Consider that you might be mistaken" every time another excellent adventure was about to be authorized.

The lesson about leaders and certainty ought also to be propounded regularly to the corporate press. A propos of support for, or opposition to, the Iraq war, Josh Marshall notes the

tendency to polarize this debate to its weakest, most simplistic extremes. Nader is consistent; Bush is consistent; Kerry, by failing to be an imbecile, is in the wishy-washy middle, neither fish nor fowl, a flipflopper, waiting for the next flip from which to flop.

The "Gotcha!" games played by imbeciles like Pumpkinhead Russert—the formal parody to which the mainstream media have reduced independent, fact-checking journalism—do enormous damage to the hope for sane, responsible government, by stacking the deck against anybody intelligent enough, in Brad's sense, to recognize that democratic leadership cannot be a matter (for the most part) of world-be-damned certainty. And against anybody with a record of public service that might validate that sort of intelligence.

posted by michael  11:05:11 AM  
tell me about it []