Faux Outrage

Please spare me before I puke on my brand new shoes.

Hands in the air, expressions of surprise - "Who? Us? Couldn't be us, we don't do things like that."

I'm as disgusted as any one could and should be by the nasty pictures of grinning soldiers and tortured prisoners that have flooded television screens and the Internet. I am also not in the least surprised, and neither should you be.

Our military, government, and intelligence services have excelled at the extraction of information from unwilling subjects through the use of intimidation, humiliation, mental and physical abuse, threat of death, and just plain death. We've practiced these arts all over the world over the past 60 years in service of our expanding empire. I could list a bunch of countries where we've employed these tactics, but that is a matter of history - go read a book.

More importantly are the consequences of these acts, and the further consequences of the publicity surrounding these specific cases.

The former is something the rest of the world either knew or suspected, which is why liberating Armies sporting American flag patches are often seen not as liberators but as killers, oppressors. We the citizenry, believing every instinct we have to be a good one, fail to recognize how our military adventures are percieved by others.

In the latter case, our leaders are very disappointed - that those pictures ever came to light. "A few rogue soldiers" we are told. Those old enough to remember will recognize that phrase from the glory days of the CIA, when an operation that went horrifically wrong (as in, became public) would be blamed on "rogue agents."

Watching this play out has been highly educational, and not a little bit entertaining. We have Rush limbaugh equating the entire episode to a fraternity prank. While it is true that fraternity pranks have resulted in severe injury and death, that was not their intention.

Tonight, the Reident-In-Thief will once again appropriate the nation's airwaves to explain his policy in Iraq, as if therre is anything left to explain in the face of indiscriminate torture and murder. Remember that wedding celebration bombed by US warplanes? The one that the head of our armed forces in Iraq said was not a wedding celebration, but a terrorist conclave? That there were only weapons found, but no food or any evidence a wedding had taken place?

Now there is a videotape of the event. A video shot by a man killed in the raid. Scenes in the video, which show the celebration following a wedding ceremony, match those of the location where the bombing took place.

More importantly, faces in the video match those on the bodies in the morgue.

Indictments are in order, all the way to the top.

Repeat after me:

It's abuse, not torture.

This from Donald Rumsfeld, the man who chose to parse language over whether or not the fighting in Iraq could be considered "guerilla warfare" or not. A reporter reading from the Defense Department's own glossary called him out on that one.

Then came the word "insurgency." He denied it was appropriate until the fighting became more fierce, more like actual warfare than mere insurgency. At that moment, "insurgency" became the term of the moment.

Abuse, not torture.

Put Iraqi military uniforms on those doing the humiliating, plant American faces on those naked forms lying in heaps on the concrete floor, and ask me again whether this is mere "abuse." Remind me why the killing of four Americans and the mutilation of their bodies is any worse than the humiliation, berating and physical torutre of Iraqi prisoners, some of whom died, is any different?

From the beginning of this War On Terror and the sideline Pre-emptive War On Iraq the US government, particularly in the form of Donald Rumsfeld, has gone out of its way to repudiate international law and jurisdiction in any matter involving the United States. We could fight wars unprovoked, take prisoners and hold them for years without charge and without representation, and even brand our own citizens as "enemy combatants," and lock them up, incommunicado, indefinitely.

Rumsfeld made light of the Geneva Convention, which protects our own troops in the event of capture, and allows prosecution, for war crimes, by those who fail to follow its strict rules governing the treatment of prisoners of war. The US has established a worldwide network of extra-judicial prisons, beyond the rule of American and international law. The only comparison that comes immeidately to mind is the old Soviet gulag, where people went to disappear or be murdered.

This sums up proper handling of prisoners:

Prisoners of war must be humanely treated at all times. Any unlawful act which causes death or seriously endangers the health of a prisoner of war is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions. In particular, prisoners must not be subject to physical mutilation>, biological experiments, violence, intimidation, insults, and public curiosity. (Convention III, Art. 13).

The United States has participated in some of the most egregious tactics of interrogation and terror during our adventures in Guatemala and other places, where US officials, military and civilian not only engaged in such practices, but taught others how to emulate them.

The ugly truth in all of this is thet United States has, and is engaging in unambiguous war crimes. Donald Rumsefeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush are all responsible and should be indicted and prosecuted.

Good to be back.

The Seizure Jig has gotten the better of me lately.

So I've been fixing other people's computers and buying computers for other folks. Not sure how I wound up doing so, but it has been both rewarding and immensely frustrating at one and the same time. One I did for a friend of ours was well worth any trouble - they're good folks who run their own business and have two little ones. Buying a new computer was not really high on the spending priority list, so they asked me to look at it, and I told them I could make it run in stable fashion by wiping it clean and installing Win2000pro. Endless pop ups, redirects, and freezes were plaguing this thing, making it unusable.

It worked, at least at my place while undergoing testing - I don't know if they have set it up yet.

A computer at my wife's workplace needed replacing and they had gotten some quotes in the $600-$700 range, high for what they need to do. The box being replaced was an overbuilt monster IBM P-III 400mHz which weighed an even ton. I surfed on over to MWave.com, where computer parts abound, and they'll build and test it the way you like it served. I configured and bought my own machine from them, and they did an excellent job. This was a fun task - assembling a computer on someone else's dime and knowing it would be a solid, reliable box for years to come.

Also at her workplace is an HP Pavilion 6630, an all-in-one discount special, based on an Intel Celeron 500mHz processor, and everything else planted on the motherboard. Unfortunately, that old adage about getting what you paid for applies to this pathetic little wimpy ass computer. Slow, slow, slow, and now it appears the on board graphics are failing. It is alleged that using an old PCI video card will interrupt the on board graphics system, replacing it.

Uh, yeah.

I did pretty much all I could, but the PC card would freeze at the startup screen even though the computer continued to boot normally. Very weird, and likely cannot be fixed without getting down to component level on the motherboard, and paying a tech to do that would buy a nice Athlon - based box.

Guess I'll be buying another computer...