TW3 … and breathing underwater

That Was The Week That Was … pretty dismal. I was hoping for a laugh this week, but … well, so it goes. The deformed veggie’s should be a heads-up for us all, by the way.

I’m being held cyber-prisoner in the Pea Patch, kids … I can’t keep a connection, so it’s slow going blog-wise. Weather is the usual culprit, and since the ever-eroding infrastructure is even more primitive here, I’m used to frustrating restarts in the wet spring … but this has been the WETTEST spring followed by the WETTEST summer. I can’t believe it’s the 4th soon; the usual hoorah here includes the big fireworks show shot off the little island in the middle of the lake surrounded by boats who gather for the festivities — this year the island is under water, has been for months, and few can afford a $1000 fill-up, so I have no idea how it’s going to play out. I guess the only good part of this is that the onslaught of personal fireworks won’t start any fires.

I can’t get around the web today — but I grabbed one piece for bonus, a bit of a laugh even if it’s a rueful one. Christopher Hitchens is a repugnant gent, and a raging Righty who has added dense smoke to the machine over the years; keeping that in mind, you’ll appreciate the article. 11 seconds — Reality Check!

I’ll try again tomorrow.

Jude

HARPER’S WEEKLY REVIEW
July 1, 2008

The Supreme Court overturned the 32-year ban on handguns
in Washington, D.C., ruling 5-4 that there is a Second
Amendment right to own a gun for personal use. Justice
John Paul Stevens wrote in his dissent that the court’s
ruling, its first on the Second Amendment in 70 years,
showed a lack of “respect for the well-settled views of
all of our predecessors on the court, and for the rule of
law itself.” The National Rifle Association promptly
brought lawsuits against five other cities with handgun
bans, including San Francisco, Chicago, and Oak Park,
Illinois. “It’s just completely befuddling,” said the Oak
Park village manager, “that our Supreme Court would be in
alliance with the gangbangers.” The court also determined
that Exxon need pay only $507.5 million (about four days’
worth of recent profits) of the $5 billion in punitive
damages initially awarded to victims of the 1989 “Valdez”
oil spill, and that child rapists should not be sentenced
to death if their crime “did not result, and was not
intended to result, in the victim’s death.” John McCain
disagreed with that ruling and suggested that by executing
those found guilty of “the most heinous of crimes” the
United States could protect the innocence of its children,
while Barack Obama suggested that the rape of a small
child, “six or eight years old,” could be punished by
death without violating the Constitution. Some Obama
supporters were taking his middle name, Hussein, as their
own; “My name is such a vanilla, white-girl American
name,” said Ashley Hussein Holmes. Ireland was expecting
its first recession since 1983.

The North Pole was melting faster. Robert Mugabe, ruler of
Zimbabwe since 1980, was sworn in as president after he
ran unopposed and won more than 85 percent of the popular
vote, a percentage roughly equal to the national
unemployment rate. He called for “unity” and invited
former candidate and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai
to attend his inauguration. “This,” said a spokesman for
Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), “is an
unbelievable joke.” Mugabe supporters entered the house of
an MDC councillor and shouted “Let’s kill the baby” as
they shattered the legs of his 11-month-old son, Blessing;
a plan was discovered that called for 2 million MDC
members to be “internally displaced”; and 3 million
Zimbabweans were living in South Africa, where 62 people
were killed in recent anti-immigration rioting. The CIA
expanded its covert operations in Iran, and Italy planned
to fingerprint all Gypsy children. President George
W. Bush announced that North Korea was off the “state
sponsors of terrorism” list. North Korea then blew up the
obsolete nuclear cooling tower at Yongbyon and took
delivery of a U.S. ship carrying 38,000 tons of food; the
nuclear and food deals, said officials, were
unrelated. Police in South Korea fired water cannons at
protesters as Condoleezza Rice visited Seoul. “We don’t
need U.S. troops,” read a protest slogan, “we don’t need
U.S. mad cows.”

Farmers in Britain, under attack by fuel-poaching gangs,
were creating secure collective fuel-storage compounds for
their red diesel, which is used to power tractors. In West
Sussex a man named Jon Ward put dogs in his garden and
razor wire on his fences to keep thieves away from his
heating oil. “Let the bastards try it now,” he
said. “Shotgun is also at the ready.” Gardeners across
Britain were reporting a harvest of deformed, dangerous
vegetables, traced back to the Dow AgroSciences herbicide
aminopyralid, which can wind up in manure. It was
“scandalous,” said a woman with a patch near Bushy Park in
London, “that a weedkiller sprayed more than one year ago,
that has passed through an animal’s gut, was kicked around
on a stable floor, stored in a muck heap in a field, then
on an allotment site and was finally dug into or mulched
on to beds last winter is still killing ’sensitive’ crops
and will continue to do so for the next year.” Saudi
Arabia announced that it had detained 520 people suspected
of links to Al Qaeda, and 20-year-old Kazakh supermodel
Ruslana Korshunova jumped to her death from a Manhattan
apartment building. “My dream,” she once wrote on a
website, “is to fly.” Scientists found that humans laugh
because they are surprised by new patterns, that they grow
happier as they grow older, and that their sense of
adventure is located within the ventral striatum; they
also found that they can easily remember happiness and
sadness, but, with the exception of some groups of Asian
Americans, often have trouble recalling mixed
emotions. People also sleep poorly when they eat at night,
and tend to overeat as they contemplate their own deaths.

– Paul Ford
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/07/WeeklyReview2008-07-01

bonus

Hitchens Gets Waterboarded, Withdraws from Iraq in 11 Seconds
Warmongerer and neocon Christopher Hitchens just noticed that waterboarding is torture!
John Dolan, AlterNet
July 2, 2008

Stop the presses! Christopher Hitchens just noticed that waterboarding is torture!

Hitchens announced the news like he’d brought it down from Mount Sinai, in a Vanity Fair article. “Believe me,” he told a waiting nation, “it’s torture.” Well, yeah. It usually is, when it happens to you. When it happens to somebody else, it’s “extreme interrogation.” I thought everybody over the age of 5 knew that, but as usual, I misoverestimated the media. Hitchens’ tame little torture session is the biggest S&M video on the web since “9½ Weeks.”

Hitchens’ video is totally fake — there’s even soft-rock background music playing on the video, better music than you usually get at the dentist’s office, and his “interrogators” treat him more like a client getting a mud pack at a spa than a real suspect in Iraq. That makes it even more disgusting that Hitch caved in after only 11 seconds of having water poured over a towel on his face. Eleven seconds! Think about the timeline here: For five long years he supported this stuff when it was happening to other people. Once it happened to him, he needed exactly 11 seconds to see the light.

Of course if Hitchens had been a real Iraqi suspect, they’d never have had to waterboard him at all. They do that to tough suspects, not wimps like him. In a real torture cell, everything would be a lot tougher from the start. For example, Chris wouldn’t be in the nice dress shirt and slacks he’s wearing on the video. He’d be naked — a gross image, what a lifetime of booze and lying does to the body, but we have to be hard-nosed here — because keeping the prisoner naked is basic interrogation strategy, especially with a culture as horrified of gettin’ nekkid as Arabs are. You’ll recall that in those Abu Ghraib pictures, the prisoners were naked.

So that’s fake already, and the video gets faker as it goes. The guys
“interrogating” him are fat, middle-aged, mild-mannered dudes. They don’t even yell at him. A real suspect in Iraq would be snatched off the street, smacked around until he passes out, stripped and dumped into a cell with a hood over his head. He wouldn’t be able to sleep off his misery, either, because sleep deprivation is one of the oldest, most effective tortures. The interrogators would maintain this schedule for hours, days, weeks, depending on how well and how soon the victim breaks down. When they think he’s ready — like, they notice with satisfaction that he screams like a steam whistle every time he hears footsteps in the corridor — they drag him out of his cell and strap him onto that waterboarding table.

Well, Chris is a busy man and didn’t have time for all that background research, so what you see in this video is a guy who hasn’t been so much as slapped or yelled at. Who probably just finished a 10-martini lunch at some upscale restaurant. That’s ridiculous enough, but the interrogators make it even more ridiculous with their little introduction to the torture session. One guy says, “All right, listen up, I’m going to give you some instructions …” Then he tells the fat man on the table, “We’re going to place metal objects in each of your hands,” and if he feels “unbearable stress” at any time, all he has to do is drop the objects and they’ll stop.

I’ve had dentists who did root canals on me without being that nice; they stuck to “this is going to hurt.” More to the point here, putting the victim in “unbearable stress” is, uh, the whole point of torture, or “extreme interrogation,” or whatever you want to call it. The last thing you’d ever do is give the victim a sense of power, like he can stop the process by dropping a “metal object” on the floor.

That kind of etiquette is what you get from those expensive dominatrixes English dudes like to get whipped by, or those nerf BDSM sites that talk about “consensual power exchanges.” What reminded me most of those BDSM sites is the “code word” they tell Hitchens he can use to stop the waterboarding: “That word is red, R-E-D.” They ask him if he understands and he says, “Yes, sir.” That “sir” only added to the ridiculous porn feel here, like Hitchens was paying a hundred pounds an hour to have Baron Whipsong or Lady Cruella, whichever way he likes it, wear out their riding crop on his eager little bum.

The real thing isn’t nearly so nice. After you’ve been beaten on bruises (which hurt more each time) for a few days, they slam the cell door open, screaming abuse at you, kick you to your feet and take you down the corridor, slamming your head into the walls as often as they feel like it, and strap you down. And all the time they’re screaming: “OK, you worthless (Arabic obscenity here) — We’re through with you! We don’t even want you any more! Ever drown before, (obscenity)? Ever go swimming head-first, (obscenity)?”

If you remember “The Big Lebowski,” you can get a better idea of what waterboarding is like by remembering the scene where the Dude walks into his bungalow, where Jackie Treehorn’s yuppie thugs are waiting for him. The blond one grabs the Dude’s hair and runs him headfirst into the toilet, screaming, “Where’s the money, Lebowski? Where’s the money, shithead?” See, the point is to show overwhelming, terrifying power over the suspect, not give him little safety words.

But all that niceness doesn’t matter once the torturer’s helper takes a plastic milk container full of water and pours it, bit by bit, over a towel covering Hitch’s face. The “metal object,” whatever it is, drops after 11 seconds. And of course these fake interrogators are all over Hitch, making sure he’s OK. That’s also totally fake, but why bother listing any more fake features of this nonsense? The truth is that anybody who’s been through as much dentistry as I have knows that nobody holds out under torture. It’s not just the pain, it’s the fear of the pain. I used to try to be a hero like the ones in my war books every time I went to have a root canal from the mean old Armenian who did our dental work. He scrimped on the Novocain, so I had plenty of scope to practice. And I learned the same thing any sane person knows by the time they grow up: Nobody can resist torture. Just like anybody knows what having water poured over a towel on your face is like: It’s like drowning. Duh. Anybody who wanted to know that already knew it.

So why does Hitchens make such a big show of just realizing it now, after five years of supporting it? To me, the answer’s easy: He’s withdrawing from Iraq, making a big Jesus-on-the-cross demonstration, like a public punishment, for supporting the war all this time. By getting himself tortured in this half-assed way, he gives himself a reason to see the light, desert from the Neocon forces before it’s too late. Karl Rove won’t be happy, though, because the last thing the GOP wants is for people to start realizing what we’re actually doing in Iraq. Reminds me of the debate about abolishing flogging with the cat-o’-nine-tails in the British Navy. The first time the bill was introduced, everybody laughed at how ridiculous a notion that was. Then somebody thought of having a real cat-o’-nine-tails introduced to the House of Commons, a bloody old Exhibit A. Nobody said a thing; they just voted unanimously to forbid it.

That’s all it takes to change anybody’s mind about torture, getting one little 11-second whiff of it, even if it’s nowhere close to the real thing. The interesting thing is not that Hitchens changed his mind; it’s the strategic thinking that made him decide to do it now. The timing of this little martyr is the key here, and what it tells you is that Hitchens is declaring martyrdom and getting out. He just unilaterally withdrew from Iraq, and in only 11 seconds. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

1 comment July 3rd, 2008