Jenny’s Pennies

From the BBC.

A German citizen has gone to court in an attempt to force his government to seek the extradition of 13 suspected CIA agents who allegedly kidnapped him. Khaled al-Masri says he was abducted in December 2003, flown to a US detention centre in Afghanistan and tortured. Mr Masri was released in May 2004 after his captors allegedly told him he had been mistaken for someone else.

I wish him the best of luck - it’s absolutely appalling that you could be kidnapped and tortured “by mistake” and then receive no compensation what so ever.
And towards the end of the article:

Mr Masri says his case is an example of the US policy of “extraordinary rendition” - a practice whereby the US government flies foreign terror suspects to third countries without judicial process for interrogation or detention. He says he was kidnapped in the Macedonian capital, Skopje, in 2003, flown to a secret prison in Afghanistan, nicknamed the “salt pit” and tortured there. On his flight to Afghanistan, he says, he was stripped, beaten, shackled, made to wear nappies and drugged. Mr Masri says he was finally released in Albania five months later after the CIA realised they had got the wrong man. He told the BBC in February 2007 he had been “traumatised” by his experiences.

Why the hell do they put scare quotes around the word traumatised? Of course he was traumatised, he was freaking kidnapped, taken to a ghost prison and tortured. And then finally after five months of hell the Central Intelligence Agency - what kind of intelligence do they operate on?! - realized they had the wrong guy. Dear BBC “editor”, I think you would be traumatised by that too.

In the light of the Condoleezza Rice interview discussed in this post, this becomes even more … no I’m at loss for words.
From the Independent:

A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.

The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq’s position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.

But the accord also threatens to provoke a political crisis in the US. President Bush wants to push it through by the end of next month so he can declare a military victory and claim his 2003 invasion has been vindicated. But by perpetuating the US presence in Iraq, the long-term settlement would undercut pledges by the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, to withdraw US troops if he is elected president in November.

The timing of the agreement would also boost the Republican candidate, John McCain, who has claimed the United States is on the verge of victory in Iraq – a victory that he says Mr Obama would throw away by a premature military withdrawal.

America currently has 151,000 troops in Iraq and, even after projected withdrawals next month, troop levels will stand at more than 142,000 – 10 000 more than when the military “surge” began in January 2007. Under the terms of the new treaty, the Americans would retain the long-term use of more than 50 bases in Iraq. American negotiators are also demanding immunity from Iraqi law for US troops and contractors, and a free hand to carry out arrests and conduct military activities in Iraq without consulting the Baghdad government.

The precise nature of the American demands has been kept secret until now. The leaks are certain to generate an angry backlash in Iraq. “It is a terrible breach of our sovereignty,” said one Iraqi politician, adding that if the security deal was signed it would delegitimise the government in Baghdad which will be seen as an American pawn.

The US has repeatedly denied it wants permanent bases in Iraq but one Iraqi source said: “This is just a tactical subterfuge.” Washington also wants control of Iraqi airspace below 29,000ft and the right to pursue its “war on terror” in Iraq, giving it the authority to arrest anybody it wants and to launch military campaigns without consultation.

This is their desired end state!? Permanent occupation, more political sectarian violence, more money being spent on the occupation, more soldiers sent to Iraq (how many people do you need to man 50 bases?), more people killed on all sides? That is a victory?
How is permanent occupation a victory? How is forcing a puppet government into signing a contract which means their subjugation to the foreign occupier a victory? How is a a less stable Iraq - which a deal like this will inevitably lead to - a victory? How is something which will make the United States less safe a victory (remember that one of the reasons stated for the 9/11 attacks was the presence of US bases in Saudi Arabia). How would this end the war?

(Really, I’m not as surprised as it may seem. I knew, like all sane people, that the war wasn’t about peace and liberty and justice for all.)

Ok this is a bit late, but.

As you might know, a big conference on Iraq was held in Stockholm last Thursday. Condoleezza Rice was there, and Dagens Nyheter scored an interview, which was overly polite and fawning - it ends with a question about her piano playing career.

And in there, there’s this:

/…/ Or how long does the United States plan to stay militarily in Iraq?
- Well, we are there by invitation of the Iraqis. We are there to help them defend themselves against enemies like al-Qaida, to train their forces so that they can handle their own security, which they to an increasing degree does. The United States does not want permanent bases in Iraq. But we will help the Iraqis to finish the work they have begun - to build a stable and decent society.

Yeah there are a load of stuff to bite into in that answer (about permanent bases for instance), but… The US are in Iraq by invitation of the Iraqi people to help them defend themselves against al-Qaida? Really? I thought you were there to find those WMDs? No wait, sorry, it was to remove Saddam Hussein. No wait, sorry, it was to bring peace and freedom. No wait, sorry…

And that - the statement that the US are in Iraq by invitation from the Iraqis - got no follow up question. Nothing. What kind of a journalist makes stuff like that (and more) just pass by?! (yeah, I know the answer…)

I have a new article up on Amnesty Sweden’s website.

Steven Miles, M.D. works at the University of Minnesota and has written the book Oath Betrayed - torture, medical complicity and the war on terror about how medical personnel has been involved in torture and other human rights violations in the so called “war on terrorism”. My article is based on a lecture that Miles did in Stockholm in April. A shorter version of the article is also published in the new issue of Amnesty Press (#2/08).

(In that issue, there is more from me: a report from Amnesty Sweden’s general meeting 2008 and a book review of Catrin Ormestad’s Gaza - en kärlekshistoria - a highly recommended book!)

I’m back home again after having worked for over a week at a huge multinational military staff exercise. It’s always weird to come home after one of those. Suddenly you have to chose what to wear in the morning, there’s no handy pockets all over your clothes to put all the stuff you need into (and don’t tell me that’s what a purse is for), people look at you weirdly when you say “affirmative” instead of yes, and nobody in the civilian darkness understands what the hell you’ve been doing and how you can love it so much.

I worked with fighter pilots (swoon…) and god, what I wouldn’t do to be one of them. I’m too short and my eyesight is crappy so that career path is closed for me, but I would do pretty much anything for the person who would take me up in a Gripen fighter jet. (Pilots welcome to put their offer in comments!)

But now it’s back to business - literally: I’ve just registered my own company and I’m now a freelance writer for real!

I’m sick, feeling like crap and have a book review to work on. I direct you to read this:

Sources: Top Bush Advisors Approved ‘Enhanced Interrogation’
Detailed Discussions Were Held About Techniques to Use on al Qaeda Suspects

It’s a sad world we’re living in. But I’m just an onlooker from an insignificant country whose cowardly prime minister didn’t dare to raise the question of Guantanamo and other human rights abuses when meeting with Bush because it could “damage relations”.

Wolfrum of Shakesville said:

So is impeachment still off the table? Because the U.S. has been hijacked by bloodthirsty ghouls and cowards. Of course, this report is not unexpected, and will be cheered by the right wing. It actually wouldn’t be that surprising if the White House allowed this story to get out. They’ve softened up the public enough to the idea of torture, after all.

Can someone please explain: a consensual blow-job is grounds for impeachment, war crimes and lies that has killed hundreds of thousands are not? A sad world indeed.

Apparently nipple piercings are the latest weapon al-Qaida. So thinks the American Transportation Security Administration (TSA) anyway.

Hamlin, 37, said she was trying to board a flight from Lubbock to Dallas on Feb. 24 when she was scanned by a Transportation Security Administration agent after passing through a larger metal detector without problems.

The female TSA agent used a handheld detector that beeped when it passed in front of Hamlin’s chest, the Dallas-area resident said.

Hamlin said she told the woman she was wearing nipple piercings. The agent then called over her male colleagues, one of whom said she would have to remove the jewelry, Hamlin said.

Hamlin said she could not remove them and asked whether she could instead display her pierced breasts in private to the female agent. But several other male officers told her she could not board her flight until the jewelry was out, she said.

She was taken behind a curtain and managed to remove one bar-shaped piercing but had trouble with the second, a ring.

“Still crying, she informed the TSA officer that she could not remove it without the help of pliers, and the officer gave a pair to her,” said Hamlin’s attorney, Gloria Allred, reading from a letter she sent Thursday to the director of the TSA’s Office of Civil Rights and Liberties. Allred is a well-known Los Angeles lawyer who often represents high-profile claims.

Applying pliers to the torso of a mannequin that had a peach-colored bra with the rings on it, Hamlin showed reporters at the news conference how she took off the second ring.

She said she heard male TSA agents snickering as she took out the ring. She was scanned again and was allowed to board even though she still was wearing a belly button ring.

It’s clear that the male TSA agents, on a stupid power trip, used Hamlin for their own entertainment: A chance to ogle her breasts and snicker at her pain and humiliation. You know, setting off the metal detector should be the cause of a more thorough inspection. As in 1) a hand-held detector (that wand thing they run over your body), 2) a same-sex pat down and finally 3) same sex visual inspection. Once it was clear that the “threat” in this case was nipple piercings, the TSA agents should have apologized for the inconvenience and wished Hamlin a safe journey.

This story begs a lot of questions:
Why did they all have to be there to observe the piercing removal - to defend each other if she were to use her pierced nipple super powers and blow up the airport? Why did they only force her to remove her nipple piercings and not the belly-button ring? Is it a more dangerous threat to air travel safety to have metal in one part of your body than in another? If the nipple piercings were so dangerous, then why was Hamlin allowed to keep the jewelry and carry it on board the plane?

The TSA has said that the agents followed the policy (yeah, right), but that the policy regarding body piercings will now change.

You know, when this type of stuff happens, many people say that the victim should just suck it up and deal. That she or he is making too big a deal out of it. That it probably wasn’t too bad. That we need to accept things like this in order to be Safe^TM. I’ve traveled quite a bit, and have experienced power abuse and violations, although nothing as bad as what Hamlin went through, from security personnel and border agents. Most of the time, we just bow our heads and hold back our anger, relieved to be let into the country or onto the plane. Kudos to Hamlin for standing up for her rights and speaking out!

More about the story from Cara here and here, and at Shakesville here.

This week marked the five year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. So, this week the Friday Food for Thought is dedicated to that subject. As it is Good Friday (in Swedish called Långfredagen, the long Friday), a day which for many people means reflection and silence, it seems fitting to post this today, even though I am in no way religious.

What you should read:

A war of utter folly, by Hans Blix, head of the UN inspections in Iraq 2003 (the Guardian):

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a tragedy - for Iraq, for the US, for the UN, for truth and human dignity. I can only see one gain: the end of Saddam Hussein, a murderous tyrant. Had the war not finished him he would, in all likelihood, have become another Gadafy or Castro; an oppressor of his own people but no longer a threat to the world. Iraq was on its knees after a decade of sanctions.

The elimination of weapons of mass destruction was the declared main aim of the war. It is improbable that the governments of the alliance could have sold the war to their parliaments on any other grounds. That they believed in the weapons’ existence in the autumn of 2002 is understandable. Why had the Iraqis stopped UN inspectors during the 90s if they had nothing to hide? Responsibility for the war must rest, though, on what those launching it knew by March 2003.

By then, Unmovic inspectors had carried out some 700 inspections at 500 sites without finding prohibited weapons. The contract that George Bush held up before Congress to show that Iraq was purchasing uranium oxide was proved to be a forgery. The allied powers were on thin ice, but they preferred to replace question marks with exclamation marks.

‘We live in a nightmare. Death and carnage is everywhere’ Ali, Baghdad resident (the Guardian):

“I stood there in the middle of it all. I saw people picking bodies up and carrying them. A police car arrived and the police started to fire bullets in the air. I ran away and hid at the entrance of a shop. When a woman saw me, she started screaming. There was blood on my arm and on my leg.” A friend of Ali’s stopped a passing ambulance and helped him into it. Inside, he found a man whose face was black from burns and whose shoulder was covered with blood. A younger man was bleeding from his legs. “When he tried to lift one of them it bent not at the knee but from the middle of his thigh,” Ali says. “He was screaming, ‘Fix my leg! Fix my leg!’ ”

At the hospital, Ali and the others sat in a corridor waiting to be treated by the overstretched medical team. “There were children there who were all red,” he remembers. “It looked as if they had no faces, they were so covered with blood.”

After waiting a while he was transferred to another hospital, where a doctor examined him. “The doctor told me I just had two bits of shrapnel in my arm and leg,” Ali says. “He asked me why I was crying. I told him it wasn’t for myself but for all the boys and girls around me.”

Am I a torturer? (Mother Jones)

When I first set off to interview the rank-and-file guards and interrogators tasked with implementing the administration’s torture guidelines, I thought they’d never talk openly. They would be embarrassed, wracked by guilt, living in silent shame in communities that would ostracize them if they knew of their histories. What I found instead were young men hiding their regrets from neighbors who wanted to celebrate them as war heroes. They seemed relieved to talk with me about things no one else wanted to hear—not just about the acts themselves, but also about the guilt, pain, and anger they felt along with pride and righteousness about their service. They struggled with these things, wanted to make sense of them—even as the nation seemed determined to dismiss the whole matter and move on.

This, perhaps, is the real scandal of Abu Ghraib: In survey after survey, as many as two-thirds of Americans say torture is justified when it’s used to get information from terrorists. In an abc/Washington Post poll in the wake of the 2004 scandal, 60 percent of respondents classified what happened at Abu Ghraib as mere abuse, not torture. And as recently as last year, 68 percent of Americans told Pew Research pollsters that they consider torture an acceptable option when dealing with terrorists.

Critics of the administration’s interrogation policies warn that the ramifications will be felt across the globe, including by Americans unlucky enough to be imprisoned abroad. Foreign-policy scholars fear the fallout from Abu Ghraib has already weakened the U.S. military’s anti-terrorism capabilities. Lawyers warn about war-crime tribunals. But hardly anyone is discussing the repercussions already being felt here at home. It’s the soldiers tying the sandbags around Iraqis’ necks and blaring the foghorns through the night who are experiencing the effects most acutely. And the communities they’re returning to are reeling as a result.

Posting will resume on Tuesday - I’m going to my parents for Easter, no internet access.
Have a good Easter. Peace.

I apologize for not doing this yesterday - I had a migraine that threatened to explode my head. So here, one day late, is my Iraq War Blogswarm 2008 contribution. I really want to write something smart, something new, something that sums it all up. But what can I offer? I have never seen war. I type in the comfort of my warm apartment, with snow glistening in the sunshine outside, my breakfast beside me and my loved ones only a simple phone call away. What can I say that isn’t simply platitudes, that isn’t just a reiteration of what so many have said before me, about the lies, the atrocities, the pain and the suffering. My love is coming home tonight, we’re making easter candy. When night falls, we’ll turn on the lights, run water to make tea and then sleep peacefully knowing that nothing bad will happen to us tonight. Half a world away, people are dying, crying, ripped to pieces by shrapnel, humiliated, debilitated. Half a world away, people are lied to, asked to be cannon fodder, asked to lose their lives and limbs for some grand idea, told they are heroes but treated like trash. What can I say?
——————————
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the hunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes of thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

My gut feeling is to agree with Per Gudmundson in today’s Svenska Dagbladet (and it doesn’t happen often that I agree with their editorials).

Background for non-Swedish readers: a few days ago, the Swedish police performed searches at members of Svenska Motståndsrörelsen, SMR (the Swedish Resistance Movement). Weapons and explosives were found, and three men are detained for illegal possession of weapons and preparation to inflict serious damage (I guess that means blowing stuff up).

SMR is a neo-nazi organization which wants to abolish democracy and create an authoritarian national socialist society, hates Jews, Muslims and homosexuals, and struggles for the ultimate victory of the national socialist ideology and the creation of a new world order. (More in Swedish at Expo here.)

They have organized paramilitary training camps for their members, they idolize people like Hitler (obviously) and William Pierce, they want racial war, obviously store weapons and explosives, and their leader, Klas Lund, has been convicted of bank robbery, assault, illegal possession of firearms and manslaughter.

So, my gut feeling is to agree with Per Gudmundson when he says that the SMR members should be charged using the law on terrorist crime. Because that law says that terrorism is (big disclaimer about me not being a legal expert and knowing how to translate legal text accurately) to seek to “instill grave fear in a population” or “to seriously destabilize basic political, constitutional, economical or social structures in a state”. And that seems to fit pretty nicely with a movement that wants to destroy our society and install a dictatorship.

But.
Just as Svensson, Christian Engström and Mårten Schultz, I think that we should be careful to use the terrorism rubber stamp. Individuals can be guilty of acts of terrorism, but to label a whole movement or organization as “terrorist” is problematic. Especially when the organization or group is incoherent and multifaceted - that may not be the case with SMR, but it is certainly true of other organizations that we, in the era of the “war on terror” have put the terrorist label on.

And, as Christian Engström writes - the law on terrorism has mostly been used against non-Swedish citizens. It has allowed the state to deport them to torture and to freeze their assets, all in breach of human rights and rule of law. Even though it is tempting to put an equal opportunity spin on it and for once use the terrorism law against shiny white very Swedish people, we’d better not. Terrorism can and should be addressed using our perfectly fine “normal” laws.

And I really don’t want something like this in Sweden - The law HR.1955: Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007, which is being passed in the USA. It defines “homegrown terrorism” as: the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the United States or any possession of the United States to intimidate or coerce the United States government, the civilian population of the United States, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.

This is what the American Civil Liberties Union have to say about it (they’re not too excited, as you can imagine). A snippet:

“Law enforcement should focus on action, not thought. We need to worry about the people who are committing crimes rather than those who harbor beliefs that the government may consider to be extreme.”

So true. So even though my gut feeling tells me that of course the SMR members should be tried as terrorists, the implications, real and possible, makes me think that it might not be such a good idea after all.