On watching "South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut" (which actually IS uncut, if commercial filled -- however, because Janet Jackson's boobs are not in this film, the republic will apparently not fall today) on Comedy Central, all's I have to say is:
1) "Blame Canada": One of those moments where the Academy both lost its mind and got things almost, but not completely, right. (After all, it didn't win.)
2) Watching Saddam Hussein, Satan's boyfriend, under current conditions is ... odd. Definitely odd. Kind of creepy feeling, actually.
In the week since Saddam Hussein was hanged in an execution steeped in sectarian overtones, his public image in the Arab world, formerly that of a convicted dictator, has undergone a resurgence of admiration and awe. On the streets, in newspapers and over the Internet, Mr. Hussein has emerged as a Sunni Arab hero who stood calm and composed as his Shiite executioners tormented and abused him.
“No one will ever forget the way in which Saddam was executed,” President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt remarked in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot published Friday and distributed by the official Egyptian news agency. “They turned him into a martyr.”[...]
The concept that anyone managed to do things in a way that made Saddam a martyr, and that the US is perceived to have had something to do with it all, is just ... baroque and appalling.
3) We've pretty much actually turned into the version of the US shown in "South Park", or a reasonably facsimile thereof. (Perhaps an unreasonable facsimile thereof would be a better way to put it.) OK, we're not randomly imprisoning Canadians and exeduting them because they've made all our children pottymouthed; we're randomly imprisoning Arab-looking or sounding people, whether they be Iraqi or American or foreign nationals, and threatening to execute them when we find them guilty of crimes for which we serenely ignore the fact that we have no admissible evidence, pretty much just because we can.
Ali al-Marri, whom the government calls a sleeper agent for Al Qaeda and who is the only person on the American mainland still held as an enemy combatant, spends his days in a small cell in solitary confinement at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. When he is in an ironic mood, his lawyers say, he calls the cell his villa.
Mr. Marri waits there for word from his wife, two sons and three daughters, whom he last saw in 2001, just before his arrest in Peoria, Ill., where he was studying computer science at Bradley University. Letters arrive, but they are late and have words and sentences blacked out. A note his wife sent to him 10 months ago landed recently. It began with a standard Muslim invocation, but a word was missing. Mr. Marri is pretty sure it was “Allah.”
But mostly Mr. Marri waits for word from a federal appeals court, which will soon rule on one of the most urgent questions in American law, one his case presents in stark form: May the government indefinitely detain a foreigner living legally in the United States, without charges and without access to the courts? Mr. Marri, who is 41 and a citizen of Qatar, wants the right to challenge President Bush’s assertion that he is a terrorist and “a grave danger to the national security of the United States.”
The Bush administration says the courts cannot second-guess the president when he decides that someone is an enemy combatant, at least when noncitizens are involved. Detaining combatants is a military rather than a criminal matter, the administration says, adding that its purpose is not to punish the prisoner but to stop him from returning to the battlefield.
The implications of that position are startling, according to a brief filed last month in Mr. Marri’s case by some 30 constitutional scholars. “The government’s interpretation would be vastly threatening to the liberty of more than 20 million noncitizens residing in the United States,” the brief said, “exposing them to the risk of irremediable indefinite detention on the basis of unfounded rumors, mistaken identity, the desperation of other detainees subject to coercive interrogation, and the deliberate lies of actual terrorists.” [...]
And, in going just that one step further than the film, we either torture people ourselves, or export them to friendly countries with appalling policies, and they torture people for us!
January 7, 2007
CAIRO -- "This is how they kidnapped me from Italy ... and how they tortured and imprisoned me in Egypt."
So begins a 6,300-word, handwritten letter, composed in an Egyptian prison cell by radical Muslim cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr. His abduction by the CIA is at the center of an unprecedented judicial proceeding set to open in Italy this week that may ultimately expose to public view one of the agency's most sensitive and controversial operations in its secret war on terror. In a kidnapping case against 26 Americans and five Italian intelligence operatives, including the one-time CIA chief in Rome and Italy's former top spymaster, Nasr, better known as Abu Omar, will speak to the court through his letter, telling his story for the first time in his own words.
According to Abu Omar's written account, obtained by the Tribune, he was walking to his mosque in Milan on Feb. 17, 2003, when he was stopped on the street by a man who identified himself as a police officer. The cleric wrote that he was pulled into a van, beaten and taken by plane to Egypt. He described in detail how his Egyptian interrogators tried to get him to agree to become an informer, and he says he refused. What followed, according to his letter, was torture with electric shocks, beatings that caused him to lose the hearing in one ear, and sexual abuse. For long periods of time, he said in his letter, he was kept in an underground cell "where you cannot distinguish between night and day and the cockroaches and rats and insects walk all over my body night and day."
Abu Omar has been locked away for nearly four years, most of it in Egypt's notorious Torah Prison, some 1,600 miles from the massive Tribunale in Milan, where a preliminary hearing in the case is to begin on Tuesday. Those proceedings could shine the first bright light on the U.S. practice of "rendering" terrorist suspects to other countries for interrogation that allegedly is often accompanied by torture. [...]
[...] Some human-rights groups have cited Abu Omar's "rendition" as a prime example of the "outsourcing of torture" by the Bush administration. But his case is not unique. Egypt, which has often been accused of torturing prisoners, acknowledges taking custody of 60 to 70 radical Muslims abducted by the CIA. The Americans charged in the Abu Omar case--25 current and former CIA operatives and a U.S. Air Force colonel--are fugitives from Italian justice, and none of them are expected in court for this week's hearing. Prosecutors plan to ask the Milanese court to try the Americans in absentia, and the court is expected to agree.
[...] Abu Omar wrote that he was grabbed on the street in Milan and thrown into a van by men who never spoke. When he tried to resist, he wrote, he was "severely beaten" until white foam spewed from his mouth and he became incontinent. Suddenly, his kidnappers, evidently fearing a heart attack or some other cardiac event, "began to tear at my clothes quickly and one of them began to compress on my heart," performing heart massage. The crisis averted, Abu Omar was taken to an airport. A short flight was followed by a longer one, which ended in Cairo shortly after 5 a.m.--in time, he wrote, for him to hear the first call for morning prayer echoing across the Egyptian capital.
Abu Omar wrote that he was driven to a building he later identified as the headquarters of the Egyptian intelligence service, where a man his captors described only as a "great Pasha"--a high-ranking official--asked him: "Do you accept to work with us in exchange for your safe return to Italy?" After refusing to become an informer, Abu Omar wrote, he was allowed to sleep and provided with some food before being given paper and pen, ordered to write his life story, and shown "many pictures of people in Italy (Egyptians, Tunisians, Algerians, Moroccans, etc.)."
Refusals to answer questions were met with electric shocks, "hand beatings," and threats of rape, Abu Omar claimed. "I was hung like slaughtered cattle," he wrote, "head down, feet up, hands tied behind my back, feet also tied together, and I was exposed to electric shocks all over my body and especially the head area to weaken the brain. ..." He also described being tied up and placed on a mattress that was hosed down with water and connected to electricity. Even when he was not being tortured, he wrote, "I was placed near the torture chambers for long periods of time to hear the screams of the tortured and their moans and their howls so that I would collapse psychologically."
According to El Zayat, Abu Omar has tried to commit suicide at least once in captivity....
Life not only imitates art, it exceeds it. Alas.
Posted by iain at January 07, 2007 12:59 AM
