Antiwar.com Blog

Via Mark Elf at jews sans frontieres: Perdition II – this time it’s personal

“ALAN RICKMAN is about to become the latest Hollywood star to light the blue touchpaper on the powderkeg that is Arab-Israeli politics.” Or should that say “the latest ex. -Hollywood star” since “he is thought to be sympathetic towards the Palestinian cause”. Anyway, Alan Rickman is directing a play titled My Name is Rachel Corrie. which is due to open at the Royal Court in 2005…..but will it open at the Royal Court next year?

Read the rest….

It will be interesting to see how Tony squirms out of this one:

Diplomats and peers have joined scientists and churchmen to urge Prime Minister Tony Blair to publish a death toll in the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

In an unusual open letter to the premier made available to Reuters, the 44 signatories said Blair had rejected other death counts from the war — figures span 14,000 to 100,000 — without releasing one of his own.

Any totalling of the Iraqi war dead could embarrass Blair ahead of a general election expected in months in a country that opposed the U.S.-led war.

The group urged Blair to commission an urgent probe into the number of dead and injured and keep counting so long as British soldiers remain in Iraq alongside their American allies.

“Your government is obliged under international humanitarian law to protect the civilian population during military operations in Iraq, and you have consistently promised to do so,” they wrote in the letter to be published on Wednesday.

“However, without counting the dead and injured, no one can know whether Britain and its coalition partners are meeting these obligations.”

The inquiry, they added, should be independent of government, conducted according to accepted scientific methods and subjected to peer review.

<

Senior officers at the SEALs headquarters said other photos are “consistent with the use of tactics, techniques and procedures in the apprehension of detainees,” Navy Cmdr. Jeff Bender said. He cited as an example a photo in which a uniformed man is holding the head of a prisoner to pose him for a picture for “identification purposes.” A gun with an attached flashlight is being used to illuminate the detainee’s face for the photograph, Bender said.

UPDATE: An AWC reader comments:

Hey! I often use a flashlight attached to a high-powered rifle when I am working around the house or when I am taking family pictures and need a little extra light. I am sure the fact the muzzle is embedded in this fellow’s ear and the light really not on his face at all is purely accidental. The SEAL’s thumb pressed in to the prisoner’s throat is probably there to reassure him that nothing bad will happen to him.

It all makes sense to me, just like the policies of the Commander in Chief: spend all the money you want at home, lower taxes at the same time, tell everyone you are defending the dollar as its value descends below that of the Mexican peso, plan wars all over the planet with an army stretched tighter than a military drum. I mean, how could anyone disagree with anything here?

FBI agents witnessed “highly aggressive” interrogations and mistreatment of terror suspects at the US prison camp in Cuba starting in 2002 – more than a year before the prison abuse scandal broke in Iraq – according to a letter a senior US Justice Department official sent to the US army’s top criminal investigator.

In the letter obtained by The Associated Press, the FBI official suggested the Pentagon didn’t act on FBI complaints about the incidents, including a female interrogator grabbing a detainee’s genitals and bending back his thumbs, another where a prisoner was gagged with duct tape and a third where a dog was used to intimidate a detainee who later was thrown into isolation and showed signs of “extreme psychological trauma.”

One US Marine told an FBI observer that some interrogations led to prisoners “curling into a foetal position on the floor and crying in pain,” according to the letter dated July 14, 2004.

Thomas Harrington, an FBI counterterrorism expert who led a team of investigators at Guantanamo Bay, wrote the letter to Major General Donald J Ryder, the army’s chief law enforcement officer who’s investigating abuses at US-run prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantanamo.

Harrington said FBI officials complained about the pattern of abusive techniques to top Defence Department attorneys in January 2003, and it appeared that nothing was done.

How many times can they point to “bad apples” and “isolated incidents” before the people running this horror show are held accountable? How about holding the real bad apples accountable:

Bad apples courtesy of Tom Tomorrow

OK, one last time: For those who want my head, the relevant contact info is here. Some of you apparently think, based on my old bio, that I am a teacher. Wrong. I am a full-time editor at Antiwar.com, and I have no problem with consumers complaining about my product. Complain away.

But it does raise an interesting question. If I were still a teacher, would it be unethical for people to contact my employers about opinions I expressed on the World Wide Web? What if I wrote the following?

“If molesting children best served the interests of the American people, then it would neither be moral or immoral.”

Think that would be fair game?

In my initial post on Max Borders, I wrote that his standard operating procedure is to

(1) make assertions so outrageously stupid and/or vicious that they far surpass the worst caricatures of right-wingers;

(2) whine that those who either recoil in horror or laugh their asses off aren’t addressing his arguments.

Now that he has been so kind as to make my case for me (“If you read something you don’t agree with [or more likely, something you just don’t understand]”), I’d like to note that the misunderstanding of Max Borders has now reached epidemic levels:

*Matt Yglesias
*Justin Logan
*Gene Healy
*Will Wilkinson
*John Lopez
*David Beito

For the last time: I didn’t call for Borders to be fired, in part because I’m not such a grinch, and in part because the lousy advocate of bad policies is always preferable to the skilled one. I don’t think there’s anything improper, however, about letting an organization know that one disapproves of statements made in a public forum by its employees. I seem to recall a lot of grumbling about Dan Rather over the last several months, and Dan Rather never posted an essay on the web arguing that Bush should be defeated — why is it inappropriate to give IHS an earful about the arguments its program director makes on his weblog? This is not repeating a private conversation, or the details of Borders’ personal life. It’s commenting on his friggin’ blog, for Pete’s sake.

And to the Borders commenter who said I’d scream bloody murder if someone called for my head: get real. People do call for my head all the time, sometimes literally. Borders fans are welcome to do it themselves: here’s our contact info. I will probably disagree with the reasons someone wants me fired, I may argue against them, but I’m not going to pitch a fit about it.