Jenny’s Pennies

Reports BBC:

Military archives spanning nearly four decades of civil war in Guatemala will be opened to the public, the country’s President Alvaro Colom has announced.

Some 250,000 civilians were killed or disappeared in the 36-year conflict, which was ended in a1996 by a UN-sponsored peace agreement.

Mr Colom made Monday’s announcement from the balcony of the National Palace overlooking Guatemala’s Central Square. Demonstrators had gathered from all over the country to hear the news.

“We are going to make all of the army’s archives public so we can know the truth, to start building on a foundation of truth and justice,” Mr Colom told the hundreds-strong crowd.

This is a good initiative, but questions arise on if and how the evidence found in the archives will be used against serving or retired military officers (government forces were the main perpetrators in the conflict, that many label as genocide). In 2006, I listened to a lecture by Orlando Rodriguez from ODHAG (Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala, the Guatemalan Archbishop’s Office for Human Rights). One of the things he said was that there is a “conflict over history” in Guatemala:

- There are people who don’t want to talk about what happened, that want it kept quiet. The state has not acknowledged its responsibility, and has not apologized to the victims. What happened needs to be discussed. We can’t build a new society based on a lie.

The whole article is here (in Swedish).

I hope that the opening of the archives can be the beginning of a true healing process in Guatemala, and that impunity for the perpetrators will be ended.

The Seminal has more here, and I had a link to Amnesty International about impunity in Guatemala in Friday food for thought a while ago.

Today, the outgoing head of the National Service Administration (Pliktverket), Mr Björn Körlof, has proposed making military conscription gender-neutral in Sweden. (You can read an explanation in English of how the conscription assessment process works here).

A very good idea according to me - if we are to keep the conscription system (which is in no way mandatory nowadays, due to budget cuts and downsizing of the armed forces) we should of course have an equal system with the right man or woman in the right place.

Many commenters that I have read today seem to agree with Mr. Körlof.
The anti-feminist side have long played the “well, conscription is only mandatory for boys and you are not complaining about that“-card when women in Sweden talk about societal gender inequality, and they seem mostly happy with the idea. Sweden’s most well know MRA Per Ström thinks that it is a great idea, although somehow (but not surprisingly) he comes to the conclusion that it is the feminists’ fault that we haven’t got a gender neutral conscription law yet.

Well, my experience is that it has mostly been men and conservatives, not feminists and progressives, who have been against women in the military, with the arguments that it will effeminate the military, it will distract the male soldiers, women can’t carry as much as men, they haven’t got the mental capacity to act cold blooded as they are too emotional and can’t use logic, they are too weak, too short and they have periods and breasts and vaginas and other yucky stuff that boys can’t handle.

Of course, the “debate” (i.e. the newspapers’ comments sections and blog links) has also had its fair share of comments along the lines of “well, next we should say that we only fight gender-neutral enemies with the correct queer theoretical ideas”, an argument so ridiculous that it only deserves ridicule back, but which also show how misogyny and anti-gay feelings are intertwined and demonstrates the fear some people have for anything or anyone not within their preconceived notions of “manhood” and “womanhood”.

And then there are the people - both men and women - who compare military service to pregnancy, saying that women already have their nine month “conscription” and therefore should be exempt from the military one. This argument is so stupid I don’t even know where to begin. But it is also scary, because it contains the idea that while men pay their tribute to the fatherland by enlisting in the military, women do it by having children. Pair that with these ideas, and I’m having a nightmare.

Luckily, it looks like Mr. Körlof’s ideas might become reality soon. The minister of defense (who was a conscientious objector!) has announced that he will start a parliamentary commission on the future of the conscription system, including the question of gender neutrality. Sweden’s supreme commander Håkan Syrén is also for a gender neutral conscription law, and so is many political parties.

British pilots who served in the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) during World War II will be given a special merit award. Of the people who worked for ATA, 15 women and 100 men are alive today. Their job was to fly Spitfires, bombers and other aircraft between bases and back to factories for repair, and also to ferry them up to the front line where the fighter pilots would take over.

Even though they were not allowed to fight, ATA duty was not without danger. Amy Johnson, the first female pilot to fly alone from Britain to Australia, was one of the 154 ATA pilots who were killed during their work.

Another female pilot was Wendy Sale-Barker, aunt of the Conservative politician Lord James Douglas-Hamilton. From the BBC article:

Lord James said that on one occasion his aunt crashed on her way from Cape Town to Cairo and had to be rescued from the Kenyan bush.

Speaking about the honour, he said: “I think they were able to fly every bit as well as the men and they did not receive the recognition which many of us feel they deserved.

“It is very refreshing indeed that they are now receiving that recognition belatedly, but they did give invaluable service to their country - notwithstanding their quite excessive modesty.”

I wanted to be a fighter pilot when I was younger, but physical obstacles made that impossible. These ladies were so cool and I would never have their guts!

March 19 2008 will mark the five year anniversary of the war in Iraq. On this day, a large number a bloggers will speak out against the war in the Iraq War Blogswarm.
I am writing a post for this and so can you! To learn more, go to March 19 Iraq War Blogswarm.

Today, Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter published a letter to the editor from Shahbaz Khan. He had gone to the bank to open a new account. He writes (my translation):

In the morning, a clerk calls me and asks what country I am from, where I am born and what citizenship I have. I have to give them all this information to open an account. Sweden, I answer to all the questions. ‘I’m sorry, but your name showed up on our list from the EU over terrorist names’, the woman says /…/ The bank does have my personal number*, isn’t that enough? ‘No we don’t use the personal number, we have a list of names that we check’ says the woman. So, if I change my name to Daniel Karlsson, it would be cool? The woman agrees. I can hardly believe it. And if it hadn’t happened to me personally, I would have doubted that it was true. A change of name, and you’re through the net.

So, what kind of “security” is that EU list of terrorist supposed to provide? A false one, it is. If you change your name to Daniel Karlsson, you’re off. Because we can’t start tracking all the Daniel Karlssons now, can we? A terrorist is called Shahbaz. Not Daniel.

Shabaz Khan writes:

Instead of efficient and necessary surveillance to protect the society, broad strokes are drawn all across Sweden and the EU. All of you with a certain name, consider yourself targeted. This is called contraproductivity.
What you are suspected of is not based on your actions, but on your name. You are a suspect, and there is nothing you can do about it. This is hard to swallow in a society that preaches that everyone is judged by their actions.

Indeed.
It should be noted that it is perfectly possible to track all changes of name that Swedish citizens do. The information is there, and we have the technology. But somehow the authorities chose not to. Because it would target, you know, normal people. People with names like Daniel Karlsson. So it is better limited to people like Shahbaz Khan. You know, the terrorists.

*Personal number = a number every Swedish citizen is given, consisting of your date of birth and then four unique digits, such as YYMMDD-XXXX.

/co-written with my husband Markus, who should have a blog of his own, but piggybacks here instead.

So, CIA has admitted that they have used the torture technique known as waterboarding. Of course, they emphasize that it was a long time ago, and only in three cases, and only on the really bad guys. Yeah right. And they admit it on “super Tuesday”, when the news are likely to drown in the flood of primary election frenzy. Hm.
And they “may” use it again.

John McCain, the republican presidential candidate who seems likely to win his party’s nomination, has spoken out against torture. McCain is a Vietnam veteran and was a prisoner of war for over five years. In November 2005, in a piece for Newsweek called “Torture’s terrible toll” he wrote:

Obviously, to defeat our enemies we need intelligence, but intelligence that is reliable. We should not torture or treat inhumanely terrorists we have captured. The abuse of prisoners harms, not helps, our war effort. In my experience, abuse of prisoners often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear-whether it is true or false-if he believes it will relieve his suffering. I was once physically coerced to provide my enemies with the names of the members of my flight squadron, information that had little if any value to my enemies as actionable intelligence. But I did not refuse, or repeat my insistence that I was required under the Geneva Conventions to provide my captors only with my name, rank and serial number. Instead, I gave them the names of the Green Bay Packers’ offensive line, knowing that providing them false information was sufficient to suspend the abuse. It seems probable to me that the terrorists we interrogate under less than humane standards of treatment are also likely to resort to deceptive answers that are perhaps less provably false than that which I once offered.

About waterboarding, he wrote:

For instance, there has been considerable press attention to a tactic called “waterboarding,” where a prisoner is restrained and blindfolded while an interrogator pours water on his face and into his mouth-causing the prisoner to believe he is being drowned. He isn’t, of course; there is no intention to injure him physically. But if you gave people who have suffered abuse as prisoners a choice between a beating and a mock execution, many, including me, would choose a beating. The effects of most beatings heal. The memory of an execution will haunt someone for a very long time and damage his or her psyche in ways that may never heal. In my view, to make someone believe that you are killing him by drowning is no different than holding a pistol to his head and firing a blank. I believe that it is torture, very exquisite torture.

The whole piece is available at Truthout.

In a study from 2007, Metin Basoglu and Maria Livanou from King’s College in London, UK and Serbian psychiatrist Cvetana Crnobaric, asked whether there was any difference between physical and psychological torture. The study is published in Archives of General Psychiatry (payment required to access the article). The subjects, who had experienced torture during the civil war in former Yugoslavia, stated that the worst experiences were fake executions (such as waterboarding - my comment), watching someone you know being tortured, rape, and isolation. A text about the study, in Swedish, is available here.

CIA hasn’t said anything about what kind of “intelligence” they got from waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Nothing about how it averted terror attacks or gave them the location of Osama bin Laden. Maybe all they got was the latest Green Bay Packers lineup.