Beautiful Horizons

Guantanamo

"Guantanamo has been very well run...Guantanamo has been very, very valuable. And I think they’ll discover that trying to close it is a very hard proposition."      Dick Cheney, speaking to Rush Limbaugh

From Harpers, on the Guantanamo "suicides" that the Guantanamo commander dubbed "assymetrical warfare" by the dead men.: 

According to the (Naval Criminal Investigative Service), each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated.

The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously. Al-Zahrani, according to the report, was discovered first, at 12:39 a.m., and taken by several Alpha Block guards to the camp’s detention medical clinic. No doctors could be found there, nor the phone number for one, so a clinic staffer dialed 911. During this time, other guards discovered Al-Utaybi. Still others discovered Al-Salami a few minutes later. Although rigor mortis had already set in—indicating that the men had been dead for at least two hours—the NCIS report claims that an unnamed medical officer attempted to resuscitate one of the men, and, in attempting to pry open his jaw, broke his teeth.

The fact that at least two of the prisoners also had cloth masks affixed to their faces, presumably to prevent the expulsion of the rags from their mouths, went unremarked by the NCIS, as did the fact that standard operating procedure at Camp Delta required the Navy guards on duty after midnight to “conduct a visual search” of each cell and detainee every ten minutes. The report claimed that the prisoners had hung sheets or blankets to hide their activities and shaped more sheets and pillows to look like bodies sleeping in their beds, but it did not explain where they were able to acquire so much fabric beyond their tightly controlled allotment, or why the Navy guards would allow such an obvious and immediately observable deviation from permitted behavior. Nor did the report explain how the dead men managed to hang undetected for more than two hours or why the Navy guards on duty, having for whatever reason so grievously failed in their duties, were never disciplined.

Read the entire article - it's chilling. And it appears that the new Justice Department is dragging its feet in investigating the Guantanamo crimes.

Iran

Iran is, once more, embroiled in violent protests of the corrupt, dictatorial regime.  I have no idea what this outbreak signifies for the immediate survival of the current theocracy, but I am hopeful mass dissidence might bring it to an end in the near term.  Andrew Sullivan has consistently been the best source among bloggers for updates bringing together timely and wide-ranging information on the protest movements in Iran.

Update: More online Iran news from the Times here.

Rachel Maddow destroys an anti-gay "therapist" - great moments in television.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Double Standards

In May 1991, back when I was an active member of Amnesty International's New York Speaker's Bureau, I was invited to speak about AI's concerns in Latin America to a Mensa convention in Tarrytown, NY.

One of the attendees seemed determined to push an agenda of his own. During a Q and A section of the talk, he said that AI's criticism of Israel was unjustified and unfair. Seeking to engage, I asked him on what basis he said that. He responded that Israel was a democracy and it's neighbors weren't, yet AI seemed to determine to focus only on Israel. I told him that was not true. I had a list of AI's publications that included several reports in such countries as Syria, Egypt, Tunisia and Iraq. I pointed out that  I had participated in prisoner cases in Tunisia and Algeria in the recent past as well as campaigns focusing on Iran and Egypt.

He replied that Israel was in a state of war with its neighbors and that you couldn't judge Israel in the same fashion as other countries. I asked him to clarify my understanding of what he was saying: did he believe that there should be a different standard for Israel? He replied that you really shouldn't use the same standards for Israel. I told him that if he believed that there should be more than one standard and Israel's human rights record should not be judged by the same standards as others, then we really had nothing to talk about.

This is just more of the same. Scott has more.  

Sorry dudes, but Jesus wants universal access to health care.

Piss-Poor Judgment

Full disclosure:  I donate to Human Rights Watch and believe in their mission. I also believe that no nation is above criticism, including Israel.

That being said, what on Earth was Marc Garlasco thinking?

A leading human rights group has suspended its senior military analyst following revelations that he is an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia.

The group, Human Rights Watch, had initially thrown its full support behind the analyst, Marc Garlasco, when the news of his hobby came out last week. On Monday night, the group shifted course and suspended him with pay, “pending an investigation,” said Carroll Bogert, the group’s associate director.

“We have questions about whether we have learned everything we need to know,” she said.

The suspension comes at a time of heightened tension between, on one side, the new Israeli government and its allies on the right, and the other side, human rights organizations that have been critical of Israel. In recent months, the government has pledged an aggressive approach toward the groups to discredit what they argue is bias and error.

Injected suddenly into that heated conflict, word of Mr. Garlasco’s interest seemed startling to many. The disclosure ricocheted across the Internet: Mr. Garlasco, an American, was not only a collector, he has written a book, more than 400 pages long, about Nazi-era medals. His hobby, inspired he said by a German grandfather conscripted into Hitler’s army, was revealed on a pro-Israel blog, Mere Rhetoric, which quoted his enthusiastic postings on collector sites under the pseudonym “Flak88” — including, “That is so cool! The leather SS jacket makes my blood go cold it is so COOL!”

This a troubling issue and red meat for the more reactionary elements of Israel's support. When I spoke to a Mensa group once for Amnesty International, I was accused by someone in the audience of being involved with an organization that had an animus towards Israel. I engaged the critic in dialogue as to why he felt this way and in essence, it came down to his belief that you could not judge Israel by the same standards as other nations at which point I told him if he actually believed that, then we really had nothing to talk about.

Why Garlasco could not have foreseen the impact of the news of his collecting is stupidly naive. His defense is rather, lame, for lack of any better term:

“I’ve never hidden my hobby, because there’s nothing shameful in it, however weird it might seem to those who aren’t fascinated by military history,” he wrote. “Precisely because it’s so obvious that the Nazis were evil, I never realized that other people, including friends and colleagues, might wonder why I care about these things.”

This is why we have museums and he ought to donate these items to a museum; preferably the Holocaust Museum.

He should also listen to his colleagues at HRW:

He [Yaron Ezrahi, a professor of political science at Hebrew University in Jerusalem ] said, however, that Human Rights Watch’s credibility might have been wounded because Mr. Garlasco’s hobby “has armed the right-wing fanatics” who “work day and night to demonize any individual or organization that raises questions about the military practices of Israel when they end up even with unintended civilian casualties.”

And that is one thing that seems to especially trouble Ms. [Helena Cobban, a blogger and activist who is on the group’s Middle East advisory committee] Cobban, who said in an interview that the controversy played into the hands of the government and its helpers in the fight.

“They have been given this deus ex machina gift,” she said, “about the discovery of Garlasco and his out-of-hours hobby.”

Honestly, what was he thinking?

A Broken Clock Is Right Twice a Day IV

The Wall Street Journal editorial page is not a place where one would usually look for moral clarity. They downplayed the brutality of the Pinochet regime and they have been apologists for any number of right-wing dictators , but they are right in this case:

The Muslims of Southeast Asia have long distinguished themselves by the practice of a tolerant form of Islam. The case of a Malaysian Muslim woman sentenced by an Islamic court to six lashes of the cane for drinking beer calls that reputation into question.

Under Malaysian law, all ethnic Malays are considered Muslims and are bound by Islamic law, which outlaws alcohol consumption. The defendant in this case, Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno, pleaded guilty, paid a fine and asked to be lashed in public. The court declined. The 32-year-old mother of two will be caned in jail in the coming days.

This is no trivial punishment. "At the end of the caning, those who receive more than three strokes will be in a state of shock," a Singaporean director of prisons explained in a 1974 interview. "Many will collapse." No wonder Malaysian civil courts outlaw caning as a punishment for women.

I have no idea what the WSJ position was in the Michael Fay case, but in any event, caning is barbaric and this is the sort of action that is red meat for Islamophobes.

Roger Cohen, in Iran...

...and with the demonstrators, has a great column here.

Dark smoke billowed over this vast city in the late afternoon. Motorbikes were set on fire, sending bursts of bright flame skyward. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, had used his Friday sermon to declare high noon in Tehran, warning of “bloodshed and chaos” if protests over a disputed election persisted.

He got both on Saturday — and saw the hitherto sacrosanct authority of his office challenged as never before since the 1979 revolution birthed the Islamic Republic and conceived for it a leadership post standing at the very flank of the Prophet. A multitude of Iranians took their fight through a holy breach on Saturday from which there appears to be scant turning back.

Read the whole thing.

And Andrew Sullivan's "live-blogging" the Iranian uprising is absolutely indispensable right now.

Colbert in Iraq - Don't ask...

The Colbert Report is coming direct from Iraq this week, with Stephen performing for the troops under auspices of the USO.  The first night included Colbert getting a buzz-cut in solidarity with the troops, administered personally by General Ordierno at the order of President Obama, beamed in on a live telecast. Last night's show included this piece, which seemed to be well received and proved once again that nobody in journalism and/or infotainment has a bigger pair than than America's favorite dorky faux-conservative:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Formidable Opponent - Don't Ask, Don't Tell
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Stephen Colbert in Iraq

Memorial days

I have no easy answers to the Israel/Palestine conflict. Nor do I encourage glib moralizing on either side.  But without an honest accounting of history, there is no way of creating an honest path to the future - which of necessity is some sort of compromise between two uncompromising claimants on a tiny strip of land.  At Tony Karon's "Rootless Cosmopolitan", we get some insight from an Israeli into the ethnic cleansing that shaped the creation of the Israeli state. Useful background when one is tempted to rush to judgement against the Palestinians as engaged in an irrational vendetta against perennial victims who happen to be more like "us" than "them."