Keys Corner

Talk about incompetent (again)- despite several warnings from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), that they needed to keep an eye on the Iraqi nuclear installations, the USA has let 350 tons of high explosive be stolen from under their noses. The explosives can be used in powerful conventional weapons or to detonate nuclear devices.

Never mind: Bush junior tells us that the world is much safer now, than it was before he initiated the invasion of Iraq, so everything must be OK. I hope.

When George W. Bush was elected president, and particularly after September 11, I saw that the values and principles of open society needed to be defended at home. September 11 led to a suspension of the critical process so essential to a democracy – a full and fair discussion of the issues. President Bush silenced all criticism by calling it unpatriotic. When he said that “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” I heard alarm bells ringing. I am afraid that he is leading us in a very dangerous direction. We are losing the values that have made America great…

Read the full text of Soros’ speach this week at the National Press Club, Washington here.

(via vowe dot net)

Now, why am I not surprised? And this is the government that is preaching democracy to the rest of the world…

Evidence of prisoner abuse and possible war crimes at Guantánamo Bay reached the highest levels of the Bush administration as early as autumn 2002, but Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, chose to do nothing about it, according to a new investigation published exclusively in the Guardian today...

... President George Bush signed off on the establishment of a secret unit that was given advance approval to kill or capture and interrogate “high-value” suspects – considered by many to be in defiance of international law – an officially “unacknowledged” programme that was eventually transferred wholesale from Guantánamo to the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Hersh, who broke the story of the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam war, makes his revelations in a new book, Chain of Command, which leaves senior figures in the Bush administration far more seriously implicated in the torture scandal than had been previously apparent.

A CIA analyst visited Guantánamo in summer 2002 and returned “convinced that we were committing war crimes” and that “more than half the people there didn’t belong there. He found people lying in their own faeces,” a CIA source told Hersh…

The above report is based on information from Seymour Hersh, the journalist who broke the story in 1969 of the cover-up of the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam war.

That master of muddled statements has provided us with another gem yesterday, the Guardian reports:

Had we to do it over again, we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success, being so successful so fast that an enemy that should have surrendered or been done in escaped and lived to fight another day…

You can now tour the Gulags where Stalin incarcerated people who opposed his government. The weather is so perishingly cold that you can only visit in June and July each year. The price is a bargain £400 for a 12-day trip.

I wonder how long we will have to wait to visit America’s Gulag? Talking of which, The Guardian reports that the Iraq war will cost each American over $3400 – the annual cost of the war would be enough to provide health care for more than half of the 43 million US citizens who lack medical insurance.

The British seem to have a better deal – the Queen’s annual running costs amount to the equivalent of two bottles of milk (61 pence) per Briton per day.

I can’t help feeling there is some truth in the critisism, that the Americans have too few forces on the ground in Iraq, when I read that looters are driving off with complete office complexes. The buildings, not the contents.

Philip G. Zimbardo ran an experiment in 1971 in Stanford University which predicts the behaviour found in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Originally intended to be run over two weeks, with two groups of randomly selected, healthy, normal students playing the roles of prisoners and guards, the experiment had to be stopped after six days because the prisoners were being maltreated and sexually abused by the guards:

I ended the study prematurely for two reasons. First, we had learned through videotapes that the guards were escalating their abuse of prisoners in the middle of the night when they thought no researchers were watching and the experiment was “off.” Their boredom had driven them to ever more pornographic and degrading abuse of the prisoners.

Second, Christina Maslach, a recent Stanford Ph.D. brought in to conduct interviews with the guards and prisoners, strongly objected when she saw our prisoners being marched on a toilet run, bags over their heads, legs chained together, hands on each other’s shoulders. Filled with outrage, she said, “It’s terrible what you are doing to these boys!”

Video film of the wedding the American military denied had taken place has emerged.

And Susan Sontag comments on the brutalisation of society in America, which results in neither Bush’s administration (e.g. James Inhofe, Republican member from Oklahoma: “more outraged by the outrage” over what the photographs show) nor a portion of the American public seeing anything particularly wrong with the photographs of torture of Iraqis which are still emerging in the American press. Sontag makes similar points to those Michael Moore made in his film Bowling for Columbine in 2002.

No wonder Rumsfeld feels it neccessary to ban cameras, camcorders and camera-cellphones in Iraq’s military zones.

Update – 2004-05-26:
The Register thinks we might have been hoaxed on the claim that Rumsfeld banned cameras etc. in the military – the source could have been an article in The Daily Farce.

The US military has once again a different take on events in Iraq from the rest of the world. Last Wednesday in the middle of the night the US forces either conducted an air- and ground-assault on a wedding party, killing over 40 guests, including 25 women and children, or on a dangerous way station used by armed foreign insurgents who cross the border into Iraq.

The families and lawyers of the US soldiers who have been accused of abusing and maltreating Iraqi prisoners say they were only following orders.

This was also the defence of the Germans prosecuted by the Allies (USA, USSR, Britain and France) for war crimes at the International Military Tribunal at Nürnberg nearly 60 years ago.