LILEKS (James) Screedyblog

	06 17 05	SCOTTY! GENERAL ORDER 24!
		I can believe that a good-hearted person is truly, deeply, madly worried about Gitmo; I have a liberal friend who’s been worried about Gitmo since the British tabs ran the photos that Shocked the World. You know, the one with the guys in hoods and shackles, portrayed somehow as if they’d been scooped up in Operation Gather Innocent Lambs. From Day One the very existence of the place has been a popcorn hull in the tender gums of the hard left. There was just something ineffably sinister about a detention camp. Never mind that the people sent there were “Unlawful combatants,” a phrase that would seem to bestow, well, a lack of adherence to the very notions of international law the Gitmo-detainee advocates hold dear. Never mind that they get their Korans, their arrows on the cell floor pointing to Mecca – and does anyone doubt that the arrows actually point the right way? Never mind that the food must be prepared by cooks who have to incorporate the prisoners’ convictions that the infidel is unclean, and must don gloves to prevent kafir infestation. Never mind any of that. Hoods. Shackles. Poor dears. It shouldn’t surprise, relly. To some on the hard left, the American soldier comes in two flavors: Grandpa, who died so France could someday take the month of August off to hit the beach, and the Lt. Calley variety who lights a thatch roof with his Zippo, lights his Marlboro with the same, and shoots the fleeing villagers with his Napalm Super Soaker. Those who do not fit the latter model are poor people who joined the military because they had no other options, and are thus to be pitied – unless they do something wrong, in which case economic and ethnic identities are forgotten, and their identity as a military operative trumps all. Vietnam is the template, as ever. Gitmo is a slo-mo My Lai. And why do I keep talking about this? Because they do. As the Durban flap demonstrates: It just never ends. And it won’t. There’s too much political hay to be made undercutting the war, and the consequences be damned. If they want to defeat the war to defeat Bush, well, noted. If they truly believe that the United States is in the same group as the Nazis, the Soviets and Pol Pot, then they’ve shown they have no perspective, no judgment, no sense of nuance, shall we say. And the idea that such comparisons might be picked up in the Middle East and broadcast with glee is irrelevant; they’re parochial to a fault, and care little for anything beyond their reputation and power in Washington. Some, of course, are motivated by others sorts of idealism. From Congressional hearings the other day: The session took an awkward turn when witness Ray McGovern, a former intelligence analyst, declared that the United States went to war in Iraq for oil, Israel and military bases craved by administration "neocons" so "the United States and Israel could dominate that part of the world." He said that Israel should not be considered an ally and that Bush was doing the bidding of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. "Israel is not allowed to be brought up in polite conversation," McGovern said. "The last time I did this, the previous director of Central Intelligence called me anti-Semitic." Imagine that. At Democratic headquarters, where an overflow crowd watched the hearing on television, activists handed out documents repeating two accusations -- that an Israeli company had warning of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and that there was an "insider trading scam" on 9/11 -- that previously has been used to suggest Israel was behind the attacks. (Conyers responds here.) In any case, I don’t expect what I say here will change minds; if chaining terrorists to the floor and messing with the thermostat is the Gulag, the new Auschwitz, then your head is protected by a thick cap of beliefs that can only be penetrated by, oh, a nail expelled by a suicide bomber’s dynamite belt. But we need to find some common ground, no? Perhaps we can agree that only 2000 Jews stayed away from the WTC on 9/11? I have a solution. It’s time to institute Disintegration Chambers in our major America cities. If you recall that episode of Star Trek – and I would be rather stunned if you did not – there were two warring planets that had long ago decided against waging physical war, and started to wage a virtual one. Computers fought the war, and if your planet’s computer somehow let the other guy’s virtual cobalt bomb in, it would calculate the death toll. Those people who lived in the area hit by the virtual bomb would walk into a Disintegration Chamber and poof! Very tidy, and the infrastructure was left standing. Kirk, naturally, put a stop to it by wrecking the mainframes and snarling “now you have a real war on your hands, Chancellor.” Supposedly the planets would be so frightened by the prospect of ruptured sewer lines they would immediately sue for peace. They never did go back to that system. I would have liked to have seen if the planets stopped warring, or got together and started invading others, or just blew each other up six times over. But that was Kirk: he got the ball rolling, and that was his job. Anyway. Here’s the deal. We decide what constitutes torture, and identify it as the following: insufficient air conditioning, excess air conditioning, sleep deprivation, being chained to the floor, and other forms of psychological stress. The United States is free to use these techniques against hardened terrorists. Those who disagree with the techniques sign a register that records their complaints. When the terrorist finally spills the details of a forthcoming attack, on, say, Chicago, the people who signed the register and live in Chicago are required to report to the Disintegration Chamber. Very simple. Everyone’s happy. Well, no, I imagine not. The standard response would be “I want the interrogators to get the information, but not if it makes prisoners crap in their pants or pull out their hair.” Agreed. I would like them to get the information without any sort of effort whatsoever. It’s a fair cop, guv. Here’s where we’ve stored the fertilizer and here are the names of my associates. Now if you’ll show me to my cell, I’d like to get started whiling away the time until most of the networks are compromised and the Iranian government has fallen, after which we can talk about letting me return home. Jolly good!” But I don’t think that’s going to happen. Conversely, I don’t want them to beat the hell out of these people until they spit names and teeth, in no particular order. But I don’t care if they make them stay awake most of the day for a month or two. I really don’t. I’m sorry. We’re talking about people who will not be satisfied until Israel is gone and the United States crippled. I’d like to know what they know, and if they wet themselves in the process, I do not regard this is as the equivalent of uprooting several million people to Alaska to build a canal dressed only in long johns. Incidentally: just to clarify things for the Eminiarians, Kirk told Scotty to excute General Order #24, which permitted the Enterprise to lay waste to an entire planet. Just for the record: I think that’s rather extreme. Although I would have loved to have heard the debate at Starfleet over that one. ---- Perm link.



	06 15 05	NAZIS NAZIS EVERYWERE AND NOT A PROF TO THINK
		Martin Kaplan has a distinguished resume. I would like to thank Marty for adapting “Noises Off” for the screen, which contained about 27 uninterrupted minutes of Nicole Sheridan in lingerie. He also wrote speeches for Mondale, a man who could sent charging elephants into an instant narcoleptic fit, and he has the sort of scientific, journalistic and creative resume that would make him a fascinating dinner companion, right up until the moment when he said something stupid: "Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at the Annenberg School of Communication at USC, calls the new Christer offensive a drive toward 'theocratic oligopoly. The drumbeat of religious fascism has never been as troubling as it is now in this country,' adding that 'e-mails to the FCC are more worrisome to me than boycotts' in terms of their chilling effect ." In one respect, I’d agree, inasmuch as the FCC seems to take concentrated email bombings too seriously. We’ve gotten 10,000 emails! Yes, but they’re from 493 people. True, but 10,000 emails! Boycotts don’t work; they can’t chill an airplane-sized bottle of chardonnay. But that’s not the point here. “Religious fascism.” One of the mantras you hear invoked from time to time is “words mean something.” But they obviously don’t. When intelligent men can make such a specious observation you realize that “fascism” has ceased to mean anything at all, and exists now as an all-purpose slur, a tar-soaked brush to slap on anything you don’t like. Whether the Soup Nazi actually believes in exterminating the Jews and bending the nation towards race-based collectivism and militarism is irrelevant; what matters is that he doesn’t want to give you some of that yummy chowder. If one means “religious fascism” as the use of the power of the state to achieve a particular moral objective, you could argue that progressive taxation is “fascism,” inasmuch as it assumes that the rich should pay more for the good of all, and this moral imperative should be enforced by law. I would not make that argument, because it would be vile. Progressive taxation is many things, but it’s not fascism. On the other hand, I’m at a disadvantage here; if gentlemen like Mr. Kaplan feel free to drop the f-bomb in order to claim the moral high ground, why should I stand down here in the moat complaining? So I put it to you that Mr. Kaplan is a fascist himself. Period. There you go! That's easy. If pressed, I will only note that there are some of his ideas which bear a resemblance to policies one occasionally finds in fascist states - inasmuch as he wrote comedy movies, and they had funny films in Hitler's Germany, too. I mean, draw your own conclusions, people. It’s curious that this word should re-enter domestic politics at the same time we are not only fighting actual religious fascists, but are embroiled in a controversy over the mistreatment of the tome they regard as their instruction manual. It’s like screaming about “Domestic nuclear targeting engineers” during the Cuban missile crisis. I suspect Mr. Kaplan subscribes to the fashionable notion that people who email the FCC to complain when a sitcom uses the Eucharist as a running gag – literally – are part of the dark bolus of god-bothered maniacs. Fanatics. Wild-eyed nutbombs who want to unite the world under the rippling banner of God Uber Alles first, and have the miserable sectarian wars after the secularists are dead. James Dobson, Osama – are not both filled with terrible certainties? Is not an email campaign to bring down a TV show the metaphorical equivalent of bringing down a skyscraper? Granted, a writer who jumps from a cancelled show usually lands on his feet. But they have a certain poetic symmetry, no? No. And anyone who tries to make the point deserves to be struck in the face with a thick, wet, cold haddock. Not that they make that point, to be fair; I’m marshalling my Clone Army of strawmen here as usual. But Kaplan’s remarks suggest he would find common cause with those who insist the problem is not the particulars of religious belief but the extent to which you take them seriously. You’re permitted to lodge complaints, but only if you come from a secular perspective. By all means, protest – dissent is patriotic! – but keep that Christer stuff in the church. As the dyslexic might say, I don’t have a God in this fight; I am well aware that much in pop culture I enjoy or tolerate would be GONE if some folks had their way. But I would prefer to reserve the right to argue against some of their positions from a spiritual as well as secular perspective. In fact I suspect that if a groundswell of moderate-to-liberal Christians fought back the “fundamentalists” and used spiritual language to make common cause with the secularists, there would be little talk of theocracy or religious fascism, even if the motivations were equally devout. Wait until an American author is brought up on charges, like Orianna Fallaci. and the bien-pensants are forced to confront, again, a form of religious fascism closer in spirit and form than their fevered speculations about the dark hordes of emailers. The intellectual agony will be delicious to watch. But it's depressing to consider. What will it take? Note: if Mr. Kaplan had said he feared a drumbeat of fundamentalist religious intolerance, I wouldn’t have spent a jot on the observation. “Religious fascism,” though – that pricked up my ears. Words do mean something. They truly do. Or so I believe. (Devoutly.) --- Perm link.
	06 14 05	Flag Day
		I get lots of emails like this at work. They make me tired. From the crusading Rex Curry, Attorney at Law: Teachers, students, school boards and schools all over the USA received this open letter. Please help spread the word. Flag Day (6-14) is a good day to remove the flag from schools. Goes without saying. And let’s burn some forests on Arbor Day, too. And what better day to commit suicide than your birthday. Please help, and also educate everyone about these new historical discoveries: 1. The original Pledge of Allegiance to the USA's flag used a straight-armed salute and it was the source of the salute of the monstrous National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazis). The gesture was not an ancient Roman salute. I recall using the hand-over-the-heart gesture when I was growing up; we reserved the Sieg Heiling for the glorious moment when the principal made announcements over the loudspeaker. 2. The Pledge began with a military salute that then extended outward toward the flag. Due to the way that Francis Bellamy (the Pledge's creator) used the gestures, the military salute led to the Nazi salute. Something tells me we’ve gone from point A to point C without quite explaining the matter of point B, no? 3. Bellamy was a self-proclaimed socialist in the nationalism movement and his dogma influenced socialists in Germany, and his pledge was the origin of their salute. Many people forget that "Nazi" means "National Socialist German Workers' Party." A mnemonic device is the swastika (Hakenkreuz in German). Although the swastika was an ancient symbol, it was also used sometimes to represent "S" letters joined for "socialism" under the German National Socialists. I have the feeling we’re getting off track here, but I assume this will all tie together. How the discoveries were made is a fascinating story in itself. I made the discoveries by accident during legal research involving litigation about the pledge. As a libertarian lawyer, and the USA's favorite flagologist, I do pro bono work educating students and others about the right to reject the ritualism. I remember that show to find the USA’s favorite flagologist! I was on Fox. Three judges – a genial ursine guy who pretty much approved of the flagologist doin’ what he did, dawg; a perky little bosomy fireplug who did a wonderful job of making the worst flagologist feel better, and an unsparing acerbic Brit who once reduced a flagologist to tears for insufficiently communicating his contempt for the Burkina Faso flag. Then there was a phone poll. I forgot all about that. Fight the flag hags and their flag fetish. Government's schools should not teach kids to verbally fellate flags each morning. It is like a brainwashed cult of the omnipotent state. For adults it is childish. Remove the pledge from the flag, remove flags from schools, remove schools from government. One word, Rex: focus. The Bellamy dogma was the same dogma that led to the "Wholecaust" (of which the Holocaust was a part): 62 million killed under the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; 35 million under the Peoples' Republic of China; 21 million under the National Socialist German Workers' Party. It was so bad that Holocaust Museums could quadruple in size with Wholecaust Museums to document the entire slaughter. Three words, Rex: try to focus. In the USA, government took over education and imposed segregation by law and taught racism as official policy. The USA's behavior was an example for three decades before the Nazis. As under Nazism, the Jehovah's Witnesses, and blacks and the Jewish and others in the USA attended government schools that dictated segregation, taught racism, and persecuted children who refused to perform the straight-arm salute and robotically chant the pledge. Some kids were expelled from government schools and had to use the many better alternatives. That there were such alternatives, and that one could freely leave to use them, seems to suggest that the US took advantage of that opt-out clause in the Wholecaust. There were acts of violence. When Jesse Owens competed in the 1936 Olympics in Germany, his neighbors attended segregated government schools where they saluted the flag with the Nazi salute. Amazing, but true! And when Joltin’ Jack Flabbergast competed in the 1931 Ten-Pin Bowling Playoffs in Hoboken, his neighbors attended grocery stores where they exchanged money for food – just like in Nazi Germany! The U.S. practice of official racism even outlasted the horrid party. And the schools and the Pledge still exist. The Pledge is still the most visible sign of the USA's growing police state. Timeline: Nazi Germany, a racist state, was defeated in 1945. American laws that violated 19th century legal guarantees of racial equality were finally enforced by the 60s. But somewhere in South Dakota right now, local property taxes still fund a kindergarten. As if that’s not horrible enough, the Pledge not only continues, it’s the most visible sign of the growing police state. Somewhere right now cadets are reciting the Pledge, right before they take Etc etc. I heard this guy, or someone who also champions this cause, on the Medved show, and it was a slightly more coherent version of this. It could all be true, for all I know – although what I’ve read of Edward Bellamy makes him seem like a silly head-in-the-ether utopian who seemed to think human nature would be repealed by a voice vote. Whatever. I bring this up as a classic example of how to turn off your intended audience. At the end all they remember is something about a fellating Wholecaust. Note to the author: just because someone is a “nationalist” and a “socialist” it doesn’t meant they’re a Nazi, anymore than someone being a vegetarian and a drinker of water makes them a fish. --- Perm Link.
	06 13 05	Gitmo, Continued, Ad Infinitum
		The true horror of American Torture has been revealed. Let me make light of it. Says Time: ” On Dec. 2, Rumsfeld approved 16 of 19 stronger coercive methods. Now the interrogators could use stress strategies like standing for prolonged periods, What, he made them stand in line for eight hours to vote? Fiend. isolation for as long as 30 days, removal of clothing, forced shaving of facial hair, playing on “individual phobias” (such as dogs) and “mild, non-injurious physical contact such as grabbing, poking in the chest with the finger and light pushing.” If you’ve read accounts of the Soviet gulag you may recall the tales of men forced to march ten miles to a labor site in shoes made of cardboard and frozen spit, and digging hard dead beets from permafrost with hands that hadn’t seen mittens in three years. “Light pushing” in this context was a rifle butt to the chin, twice. Did the 19 methods in the Bill of Cruelty itemize “poking in the chest with the finger” as a separate method, or was it folded into a general go-ahead for acting like a high-school gym teacher? According to the log, al-Qahtani experienced several of those over the next five weeks. Good. The techniques Rumsfeld balked at included “use of a wet towel or dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation.” “Our Armed Forces are trained,” a Pentagon memo on the changes read, “to a standard of interrogation that reflects a tradition of restraint.” Nevertheless, the log shows that interrogators poured bottles of water on al-Qahtani’s head when he refused to drink. Interrogators called this game “Drink Water or Wear It.” This is how articles are written, conventional wisdom chopped pressed and formed: the techniques Rumsfeld “balked at” – meaning, I assume, did not permit – did not include actual suffocation, but the use of a wet towel that would induce the misperception of an emanation of a penumbra of suffocation. NEVERTHELESS. Key word, that. Lines crossed not in fact but in spirit. He balked at fake suffocation, aye; NEVERTHELESS the climate of pain and retribution did not forbid men from freely dumping bottles of Dasani on the heads of the detainees. Why, it was a game to the interrogators. “Drink Water or Wear it.” Spiritually, it’s a first cousin to Saddam’s game, “Use Tongue Then Lose It.” After the new measures are approved, the mood in al-Qahtani’s interrogation booth changes dramatically. The interrogation sessions lengthen. The quizzing now starts at midnight, and when Detainee 063 dozes off, interrogators rouse him by dripping water on his head or playing Christina Aguilera music. Djinni in a bottle, no doubt. According to the log, his handlers at one point perform a puppet show “satirizing the detainee’s involvement with al-Qaeda.” So Doug is part of the torture crew, then. From the ever-prescient Pythons: Vercotti: Doug (takes a drink) Well, I was terrified. Everyone was terrified of Doug. I've seen grown men pull their own heads off rather than see Doug. Even Dinsdale was frightened of Doug. 2nd Interviewer: What did he do? Vercotti: He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious. And at one point the reader might assume that if something really bad had happened, we might have read about it by now. I know a little bit about modern journalism, and we tend to emphasis the splintery plunger up the butt over the mocking puppet show. In any case, this detail makes you almost want to weep in frustration; domestic politicians are posturing for the camera, huffing about then horrors of Gitmo, insisting that the rest of the world won’t forgive us until we close the joint down and pave it. Over what? A Punch and Judy show? If we gang-mimed the guy and had 17 men in striped shirts with white makeup pantomime falling out of a burning skyscraper, would the critics demand we not only let the guy go but pay him a per diem for his troubles? I’ve read the story twice, and I keep wondering if I missed the part where the suspected 20th hijacker spits teeth into a chamberpot rimming with own bloody urine while massaging the welts the jumper cables left on his groinal division. I mean, I take all that for granted, because our soldiers are all killbot brutes - except for the lower-class ones who got drafted against their will and can only hope Bruce Springsteen sings a monotonal account of their disaffection. Puppet shows and secret code / I don’t know who to trust / I’m the metaphorical twin of old Tom Joad / inasmuch as we both dealt with dust / his was the kind that got in your eyes / mine gets in your gun / but they both get down deep in your soul / whaddya mean, sing “Born to Run”? He is taken to a new interrogation booth, which is decorated with pictures of 9/11 victims, American flags and red lights. He has to stand for the playing of the U.S. national anthem. Okay, this is torture. But only if you’re interrogating a poster on the Democratic Underground. His head and beard are shaved. He is returned to his original interrogation booth. A picture of a 9/11 victim is taped to his trousers. Al-Qahtani repeats that he will “not talk until he is interrogated the proper way.” Meaning what? Forced to kneel before a camera and confess you’re a Jew before your head is sawed off? Invasion of Space by Female: Over the next few days, al-Qahtani is subjected to a drill known as Invasion of Space by a Female Mind you, this is considered punishment. Right now across America there are guys who are seriously peeved because they ordered “Invasion of Space by a Female IV” on pay-per-view and the cable went out. They’re on the phone admitting they wanted it, and demanding they get IV and V no charge, understood? and he becomes especially agitated by the close physical presence of a woman. Then, around 2 p.m. on Dec. 6, comes another small breakthrough. He asks his handlers for some paper. “I will tell the truth,” he says. “I am doing this to get out of here.” He finally explains how he got to Afghanistan in the first place and how he met with bin Laden. In return, the interrogators honor requests from him to have a blanket and to turn off the air conditioner. One suspects it isn’t the presence of a woman that bothers him; it’s the fact that she doesn’t take any guff, looks him in the eye, laughs at him, blows smoke rings in his face and generally fails to behave like one of the 72 docile celestial whores he was promised. In short: he was broken by the concise application of cultural insensitivity. You know, there’s a word for college professors who get freaked out by women in positions of confident authority, and it isn’t “tenure.” Do you have a problem with that? Then this will freak you out anew: Soon enough, the pressure ratchets up again. Various strategies of intimidation are employed anew. The log reveals that a dog is present, but no details are given beyond a hazy reference to a disagreement between the military police and the dog handler. This is one of those telling details that describes the chasm between the culture of the American soldiers and the culture of the terrorists. What can you make of men who are scared of women and dogs? But a much more serious problem develops on Dec. 7: a medical corpsman reports that al-Qahtani is becoming seriously dehydrated Because they’ve been withholding water and beating him in the kidneys with the Brooklyn Yellow Pages while the guards belt out “Singin’ in the Rain”? , the result of his refusal to take water regularly. Remember drink or wear it? So he doesn’t want to drink it. Under Rummy’s Rules of Torture, no bout #19 is “Let him die, if that’s his wish. Scratch one off, move along.” Right after #18, “Poke him in the sternum, but not more than five times in 30 seconds.” But no: He is given an IV drip, and a doctor is summoned. An unprecedented 24-hour time out is called, but even as al-Qahtani is put under a doctor’s care, music is played to “prevent detainee from sleeping.” Nine hours later, a medical corpsman checks al-Qahtani’s pulse and finds it “unusually slow.” An electrocardiogram is administered by a doctor, and after al-Qahtani is transferred to a hospital, a CT scan is performed. A second doctor is consulted. Al-Qahtani’s heartbeat is regular but slow: 35 beats a minute. He is placed in isolation and hooked up to a heart monitor, TIME reports. Because he didn’t drink the water. This guy got more medical care than anyone in non-Gitmo Cuba, and of course he survives to experience additional indignities, such as having a picture of a nude woman hung around his neck. That’s where the story ends in the web version. You’ll have to read the cover story to learn the entire tale. Because it’s the most important story in the world this week. If the 20th hijacker had been on a plane, and the author of the Time story had been killed fighting with him in the aisle before the plane hit its target, and we knew this from cell-phone dispatches, there would be an award named after the journalist. With a yearly banquet. Chicken, probably; it’s always chicken. With some limp asparagus no one ever eats, but it looks nice on the plate. After three years, the award would go to someone who exposed how soldiers in Afghanistan used a Koran as a doorstop. Or so sources said. --- Perm Link.