05.25.04
Posted in Rants at 1:46 am by Thomas
Here is the story of Sean Baker, who was a soldier at Guantanamo, until the faithful day in January 2003, when he had to wear a prisoner overall as part of a training exercise in the camp.
He got handed over to four soldiers who did not know his identity and who immediately started to beat the crap out of him. To quote Sean Baker:
“They grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and unfortunately one of the individuals got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me while I was face down,” said Baker. “Then he – the same individual – reached around and began to choke me and press my head down against the steel floor. After several seconds, 20 to 30 seconds, it seemed like an eternity because I couldn’t breath. When I couldn’t breath, I began to panic and I gave the code word I was supposed to give to stop the exercise, which was ‘red.’”
But, Baker says, the beating didn’t stop. “That individual slammed my head against the floor and continued to choke me,” he said. “Somehow I got enough air, I muttered out, ‘I’m a U.S. soldier, I’m a U.S. soldier.’”
Baker says it wasn’t until one of the soldiers noticed what Baker was wearing did the exercise stop. “He saw that I had BDU’s and boots on.”
So while the US government still talks about “individual cases” of “abuse” in Iraq, we are now slowly getting the full picture. For several years now, torture and murder have been used as a standard practice in military prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo.
It seems obvious that US Military Intelligence has been decending into a medieval mode of operations were violence and torture have a higher priority than actual intelligence work.
Torture taints us all. This is the complete self-destruction of American foreign policy and it will drag down all free democratic countries in their struggle to establish more democracies on this planet.
The terrorists must be laughing in their caves.
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Posted in Rants at 12:50 am by Thomas
I just heard the president’s speech about the US plans for the transition of power to a Iraqi government after June 30th.
He badly mis-pronounces the name of the Abu Ghraib prison camp 3 times in one minute. In three different ways! It sounds like he has never heard that name before.
Don’t believe me? Check it out for yourself. Here is the Real Audio stream from the PBS site – fast-forward to 20:45 and listen for about a minute for the full oratory fiasco.
How is that possible? I mean, really? That is the place where US soldiers tortured inmates and whose name has been mentioned over and over again on all news outlets. Bush and his aides must have had dozens of meetings for hours and hours about this subject.
Why does he not know this name?
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05.13.04
Posted in Rants at 10:43 pm by Thomas
via the Daily Kos:
1999 US Report to UN Committee Against Torture:
Every act constituting torture under the Convention constitutes a criminal offense under the law of the United States. No official of the Government, federal, state or local, civilian or military, is authorized to commit or to instruct anyone else to commit torture.
The Geneva Conventions are clear rules on how to conduct warfare, implemented for self preservation. They are the ultimate “Do onto to others As you would have them Do onto you.”
Every soldier in every even halfway civilized country for the last 50 years learned these rules. They are part of basic training and the lesson may only take an hour or so, but the impact of these rules is immediate and no soldier will forget them since it is these rules that will guarantee his survival and well-being if he should get captured.
All signatories of the Geneva Conventions implemented them as national law, as did US Congress, who ratified them as federal law.
They are the law.
And now we have this.
Both Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the No. 2 official at the Pentagon, and Gen. Peter Pace, the No. 2 U.S. general, admitted that the current official interrogation rules implemented in Iraq violate the Geneva Conventions.
These interrogation rules instruct US soldiers in how to implement what is generally known as TORTURE.
These rules were clearly approved by the generals in the field and at least signed off on by Pentagon lawyers. Legally and morally, this makes them war criminals, nothing else.
Since the Bush administration came to power they were fighting the creation of the International Criminal Court and it becomes now more and more clear why this was of such a high priority for them. From somewhere high up in this administration somebody has been actively supporting these actions in complete disdain of international law and human rights.
They have brought untold suffering to the victims of these interogations and they have brought shame onto the United States. They should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
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Posted in Photography at 1:08 am by Thomas
Last week I took one of my vintage Kodak Brownie Bull’s Eye cameras up for a hike into the Marin Headlands above the Bay of San Francisco. The latest addition to my collection is a small macro lens made by Kodak that fits on the front of the Bull’s Eye – you are seeing the first result above this paragraph (click on the image for a large version).
The weather was fantastic and I ended up on a hill that I hadn’t visited before with a glorious view of the Headlands just above the Golden Gate Bridge with San Francisco in the background… here is another picture taken with the heaviest chunk of Bakellite ever produced by Kodak.
And in case you are wondering, I’m using Agfa Optima ASA100 120-format color film. The camera originally used 620 film that is not produced anymore, but by cutting down the outer diameter of the Agfa plastic spools it is possible to run them through the camera just fine…
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05.11.04
Posted in Sad Stuff at 1:56 am by thomas
As I’ve mentioned before, the US has pretty much destroyed its credibility, and the US administration is already facing the results of that.
Last week the Sudanese, of all people, criticized the United States for the torture of Iraqi prisoners. This was in response to the protest of the US against the re-election of Sudan to the UN Human Rights Commision.
Now this may sound like petty diplomatic bickering to some, but it’s a first sign of how much the free world has lost in the downfall of the US. Before the Iraq war and the Human Rights violations by the US, all the free and democratic nations had the only surviving super power on their side in the fight against torture.
Now, all that is left is a bunch of militarily divided European countries and a few of the Asian democracies, whose complaints are words in the wind.
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05.07.04
Posted in Rants at 1:38 am by Thomas
Well… I kinda thought I’m not doing another rant for a while after my little explosion over the Iraqi prison scandal… but after reading this today I just can’t help myself. Stuff like this has to get linked until there is no excuse for not knowing.
Sy Hersh, the journalist who published the original allegations against the Abu Ghraib prison staff, was interviewed today on Fox News by Bill O’Reilly. Now Fox News is a openly right leaning media outlet, so if they can’t avoid to publish stuff like the following quote, we can assume that there is something to it.
OK… here is the link to the O’Reilly Factor.
And here is the quote that will blow your head clean off:
HERSH: First of all, it’s going to get much worse. This kind of stuff was much more widespread. I can tell you just from the phone calls I’ve had in the last 24 hours, even more, there are other photos out there. There are many more photos even inside that unit. There are videotapes of stuff that you wouldn’t want to mention on national television that was done. There was a lot of problems.
There was a special women’s section. There were young boys in there. There were things done to young boys that were videotaped. It’s much worse.
There is no excuse. None.
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05.06.04
Posted in China at 1:02 am by Thomas
While re-googling some of the search words that bring visitors to this site, I noticed that many people are looking for images of Buddhist art in Asian countries.
Here is a small collection of Buddhist Art Of China, which is part of the Huntington Archive of Buddhist and Related Art.
I’ve visited both the Longmen and Yungang Caves in China and this collection of high-resolution images of these caves brought back a lot of good memories.
Especially the Yungang caves impressed me with their sheer number and size. It is so hard in our fast-living times to even imagine that generations of monks and craftsmen were working on these caves over hundreds of years, slowly chipping away the stone to create these huge works of art.
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05.04.04
Posted in One World at 12:58 am by Thomas
After my little rant yesterday, here another piece on the situation in Iraq…
I found this very interesting article on the current situation, “Whose Chaos Is This Anyway?” by Mark LeVine who recently visited the country and had a chance to talk to many Iraqis and also to some of the US bureaucrats who are attempting to run the country.
From his report it sounds like the situation even in Baghdad is still chaotic with 6 hours of power outages on an average day, lawlessness everywhere and the airport aswarm with American war profiteers.
The most mindblowing part for me was the almost touching little interview towards the end with the USAID bureaucrat who is trying to reform Iraqi hospitals… who never left the Green Zone and had never seen an Iraqi hospital in her life.
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05.03.04
Posted in Rants at 1:00 am by Thomas
For more than a year now we had to watch a once great country bang its collective head against an immovable object. Thousands had to die and billions were wasted on a misconceived project of improving the world by force – as if such a thing had ever worked before.
Even before the war, all of us who were marching against a war in Iraq had the feeling that nothing good could come out of yet another war to improve the world.
But once the fighting started, at least for a week or so, I trusted the planners in the White House and Pentagon to at least have a plan, any plan really, on how to make this work. I mean, at least they’ve been thinking this through for more than ten years, and if they wanted to extract the oil from Iraq, they had to stabilize the country first…
Not these people. Intelligent planning was not on their agenda. A bunch of murderous idiots had taken over the country and they would not stop, would not relent until they had destroyed the United States that we know and loved.
Even a few weeks into the war, when the looting started, it became clear that there are not enough troops in the country, and the ones there are excellently trained and equipped for only one thing – invading a country and toppling the current government.
And for one long year now we had to witness the slow-motion downfall of a giant:
- The US military is hopelessly overstretched and thanks to the mistreatment of the soldiers by their own government, recruitment will be a challenge for some time to come.
- Friends and allies have been ignored, ridiculed and alienated to the point where most of Europe will politically not be able to do anything for the US in the Middle East.
- The dollar is weak and the Asian economies are running out of steam in their effort to prop it up against their own currencies.
And that’s just for starters.
And then this week we all got to see how deep this pool of shit really is that we are wading in. American soldiers, secret agents and private mercenaries are using one of Sadam’s very own prison camps to terrorize and kill Iraqis.
American foreign policy will not recover from this desaster for decades, and any hope for a postitive American involvement in the Middle East have just been flushed down the toilet by a bunch of moronic soldiers taking happy vacation pictures of themselves torturing Iraqi prisoners.
The only thing left to do is pack up and go home. The US soldiers don’t want to be there. The Iraqis don’t want them to be there. There is no chance for peace in Iraq until all are gone.
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05.02.04
Posted in Science at 11:37 pm by Thomas
While googling around for something completely different, I stumbled over this little site: Color Matters.
This is a collection of essays and about colors, how the brain processes them and how they are used in our modern world.
It’s a small enough collection to go through during a lunch break, but filled with startling little facts. Did you know that our skin “sees” in color?
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