Giving Up The Ghost

Memo to Donald Rumsfeld and the CIA: GOOD THING WE'RE DUMB.

Back in the 80's, in Central America, there was a term. This term described people snatched by the government, taken prisoner, and never seen again. No lawyers, no family, no official acknowledgement from the government that they were in custody. They were "the disappeared". This was the tool of brutal dictators with no regard for human rights.

Today, we have a new word. "ghost detainees". We've discussed this here before. It's when someone is snatched by the government, taken prisoner, never seen again, denied access to lawyers and family, and there's no official acknowledgement that they were ever taken. The difference between "the disappeared" and "ghost detainees" is that the latter is apparently the tool of First World republics, not Third World dictatorships.

Actually, now that I think about it, there's a second difference. When people were "disappeared", it was widely considered a deplorable thing to do, and was roundly denounced by all civilized people. Groups like Amnesty International were listened to by the press and public. Whereas the United States can freely admit to having held up to 100 "ghost detainees" in custody, hiding them from the Red Cross, and the media and public are still fucking around with swift boats and poring over PDF'ed memos with a fine-toothed comb.

The United States has admitted to war crimes and human rights violations numbering in the triple digits, and everyone who should be giving a fuck is farting around trying to determine which models of IBM typewriter could make superscripts. The CIA is mimicking the worst aspects of the fucking KGB! There was a time when this would have been considered, oh, I don't know, IMPORTANT when it was revealed to the public. But not now, apparently.

I mean, I distinctly remember a month or two ago, commenting on how obscene and ridiculous it was when it was ONE ghost detainee, and how I could not believe that people were getting away with it. Little did I know what they were getting away with And continue to get away with. This came out, by the way, as part of the Abu Ghraib investigation. You remember that, right? That thing that was just "a few bad apples" and some "fraternity pranks" according to the right-wing echobox, that in fact was the whole fucking barrel, the guys who loaded the barrel, the quys who built the barrel, the guys who ordered the barrel to be built... and that's just what the military said after investigating ITSELF.

Luckily for us, the Rumsfeld Doctrine is pioneering new ground in moral relativism. According to the Rumsfield Doctrine, as long as something anywhere is even slightly worse, there's no need to get too worked up about a few electrocuted genitals, disappeared brown people, or murders.

"Has it been harmful to our country? Yes. Is it something that has to be corrected? Yes,'' he said. ''Does it rank up there with chopping off someone's head off on television? It doesn't. It doesn't." Rumsfield, explaining his Doctrine to the docile sheep of the United States press corps, who dutifully reported the statements verbatim to a nation full of sessile fucksponges who soaked it up and felt better about themselves because they didn't cut anyone's head off on live television today.

Set aside the polls for a second. Forget Vietnam. Forget lying about Vietnam, even. There are real, actual reasons to hate the fuckers that are running things, and real, actual reasons to at the very least be deeply disappointed in the people running against them who are also saying nothing. We have disappeared 100 people, and not only is there no uproar, no apology, or even more than a half-hearted COVERUP, it's not even a fucking campaign issue.

I swear, I'm starting to think we DESERVE four more years of this. Well, not me. And obviously not most of the readers of this space. But the country in general. Maybe, with another term in office, people can stop following POLITICS long enough to notice what the actual GOVERNMENT is up to. Discard their blind party loyalties and the yammering of right-center versus far-right for long enough to notice what we are becoming. The only thing that keeps me from adopting this worldview wholeheartedly is the sinking suspicion that it would not work, and after four extra years of war crimes and bullshit and a ruling class with complete contempt for 95% of the population they're allegedly accountable to, we'd still be on our asses, the polls would still be 50/50, and three quarters of us would still be sitting November out. Because we're deeply, deeply, DEEPLY fucking dumb.

The Ninety-Four Deadly Sins

Ninety-four.

Memo to every last one of you right-wing pundit motherfuckers, from Limbaugh on down, who got up on Fox News and Crossfire and all those other fucking pundit shows that have formed their own self-contained pundit ecosystem. YOU ARE DUMB.

It was just seven bad apples. That's what we heard over and over from you apologists. Just seven bad apples. That was your talking point, along with "fraternity prank" and claiming everyone who thought this was a big deal was pro-terrorist and anti-soldier. But most of all, we heard "it was just seven".

Of course, it was ninety-four. Hell, it was MORE than ninety-four, because the Army, in its infinite wisdom, counterd your Abu Ghraib Seven as ONE. And your fraternity pranks left 39 people in our custody dead. So keep an eye on the right-wing pundits today. You think all those people who said "just seven" will be retracting? Correcting? Apologizing? No. What you will hear is them echoing, over and over again, two words from the Army report on the Army's abuses. And those two words are not "ninety" and "four", they are "not" and "systemic".

See, the Army investigated the Army, and the Army determined that there were 94 cases of abuse. That's a matter of record. 39 corpses is also a matter of record. It's data. The cases exist, they were counted, they ended up at 94. But the abuse was "not systemic", and "an aberration", according to the subjective part of the report the Army issued on its own practices.

The abuses occurred in 16 different prison facilities. But they weren't systemic. Two thirds of ALL detainees, not just those officially "abused", were held for a month, over 60 times longer than the 12 hour maximum mandated by regulation. But the problems aren't systemic. Prisoners were given food with rat shit in it, but the problems weren't systemic. In Afghanistan, prisoners were living in their own shit, but the problems weren't systemic.

Interrogators regularly used unapproved interrogation techniques. Well, they weren't exactly "unapproved". We said it was OK for the filthy terrorists in Guantanamo Bay, but not OK for the filthy terrorists in Iraq. I can see where that might be confusing. Very confusing. And aberrant. And not systemic at all.

The investigation didn't actually look into some of the most serious charges from the Taguba report that kicked off the whole scandal, like the "ghost detainees". We have those in the US, too. People we capture, and then hide from everyone, especially the Red Cross. That little minor aberration wasn't investigated at all. But the problems weren't systemic.

That's what you'll hear from the pundits. Over and over again. In a desperate attempt to put this whole thing away in a corner, they will seize on those two words and wield them like a jackhammer. And then spend the next half hour discussing the horrible crimes Sandy Berger committed by taking a couple of copies of classified documents home with him.

Which was INCREDIBLY FUCKING STUPID, by the way. On several counts. The right has shown complete willingness to make shit up ouf of whole cloth to smear the left with. You do not then hand them a minor incident that they can blow up into a major breach of national security. A couple of copies in a jacket pocket suddenly became original classified documents, stolen and smuggled out in Sandy Berger's boxer shorts.

And then, when the Justice Department agreed months ago to keep the whole minor investigation quiet and out of the press, the Democrats actually BELIEVED them. That makes Charlie Brown look like a cynical pragmatist during backyard football practice, that does. "Oh, sure. We won't leak this at all. You can trust us. Just ask Valerie Plame".

I mean, if this is how things go down now, imagine how fucked we'd be if there were any systemic problems.

Nobody Gives A Damn

OK, I really don't get it. I don't. Someone needs to explain this to me, because you think you have a pretty good grasp of how this shit is supposed to work. You're pretty sure that as stupid and bad and retarded and insane as everything is, you've got a reasonable grasp on the upper limit. And then you check the news, and you read this:

"I was requested by the director of central intelligence to take custody of an Iraqi national who was believed to be a high-ranking member of Ansar al-Islam. And we did so. We were asked to not immediately register the individual. And we did that. He has been treated humanely. There's no implication of any problem. He was not at Abu Ghraib. He is not there now. He has never been there to my knowledge." - Donald Rumsfeld.

A bit of context not included in the direct quote. The "registering" in this instance means telling the Red Cross that we have this prisoner of war in our custody, as required by the Geneva Convention and any number of other international laws regarding POW's. And "not immediately" means "we hid him from the Red Cross for SEVEN MONTHS until the news media somehow got the story".

This, by the way, is not quite worthy of causing a brain embolism. That Rumsfeld would directly order the kind of "disappearance" usually attributed to third world dictators is not outside the range of shit I'd suspect he's capable of. Even his apparent feeling that we can just take him at his word because he's American and we don't need to follow those pesky laws because, well, we're American, that, again, is not what I would call a startling revelation.

Hell, the fact that he used Abu Ghraib, implying that Abu Ghraib is the only place anyone is even capable of being mistreated in the entire world, that's not quite enough to start blood fountaining from my ears.

"I'm never disappointed in my secretary of defense. He's doing a fabulous job and America's lucky to have him in the position he's in." - George W. Bush, after discussing the matter with Rumsfeld.

The secretary of defense, caught breaking the law, tells the President he got caught breaking the law, and the President, being a retarded lawn gnome in a suit, stands behind him 100%. The secretary of defense then holds a press conference in which he admits to breaking the law, shrugs it off, and goes about his business.

And yes, this makes me angry, but still, not completely beyond the new record-setting levels of pale we've been conditioned to accept. No, what pushes me over the edge into a fucking seizure is that nobody is going to bat an eye. Already nobody's batting an eye. CNN is all a-jitter over a suspected Al-Qaeda training video. If Google News is to be believed, over an hour after Rumsfeld admitted to outright criminal behavior, this admission has barely made a ripple across the news cycle. And as trite as it is, I can't help but think back to Clinton and his blowjobs and once again wonder, what the fuck? After all, as I watched CNN YESTERDAY AFTERNOON, there was a big news piece about Clinton's blowjobs, and nothing about Rumsfeld. Stupid liberal media.

You know who needs to be paying attention to who? All you Democrats who've had your lips super-glued to John McCain's ass need to watch your bestest buddy. I don't even particularly understand the McCain worship, what with it being largely dependent on putting your hands over your ears and yelling LA LA LA LA LA everytime anyone mentions the "Keating Five" or "savings and loan scandal". But whatever. You all love the McCain so much you want him to be Kerry's Vice-President. He's such a maverick. He's so bipartisan. If his dick were a lever, Archimedes could move the moon.

John McCain was a prisoner of war. John McCain understands the importance of the Geneva Convention. John McCain should understand that the Geneva Convention exists because you can't just take people's word for it when they say they're treating prisoners humanely. Even someone as honest and forthright as Donald Rumsfeld. If John McCain has one tenth of the alleged near-godlike integrity people seem to imbue him with, he cannot sit quietly as Rumsfeld admits publicly to intentionally, willfully, and casually violating the GC. Let's all watch together, shall we? I know where I'm placing MY bets, but I'd still love to be pleasantly suprised.

Hey, Wasn't There Something About Torture?

Memo to all you suckers out there: YOU ARE DUMB.

Seriously. If anyone out there is still in the "it was just seven bad apples performing fraternity pranks" crowd when it comes to U.S.-sanctioned torture, you need to stop staring at what you had for breakfast two hours ago, pull your head out, and join the rest of us in the big wide world of PAYING ATTENTION.

I know it's not easy, what with non-stop footage of people walking slowly past a casket occupying your time 24/7, but bear with me here. Things are still happening outside of Washington DC's necrophilic orgy, and if you've been relying on the "bad apples" theory to help you sleep at night, better stock up on warm milk.

Obviousy, the Bush Administration does not support torture. We know this, because John Ashcroft and Scott McLellan told us so. Scott McLellan, as White House press secretary, must be inherently trustworthy. After all, the job description of "press secretary" is to go out and tell the press what he's been TOLD TO SAY. And if he's been told to say the Bush administration doesn't support torture, and it wasn't true, he'd do what all the other press secretaries do all the time. Tell the truth, blow the whistle, and become famous. Riiiiight.

But John Ashcroft says so too, and if anyone would know about the Bush administration's attitude toward torture, it'd be John Ashcroft. Because Ashcroft is the one the Bush administration asked to look into whether or not it'd be OK TO TORTURE PEOPLE.

Ashcroft's response, by the way, basically boiled down to "If the people actually doing the torturing say they didn't -mean- to torture anyone, they'll probably get away with it". Oh, and he also provided the legal opinion that the President can do whatever the hell he wants as long as he's acting in his role as Commander In Chief, and laws barring torture really don't apply to him.

In case you're still confused, allow me to provide you with a lewd analogy including profanity to possibly clear things up. This is as if a creepy, 37-year-old gym teacher at the local high school were to spend, say, three hours a night on the Internet researching age-of-consent laws for his state, educational ethics, and district policy, and then claiming he is in NO WAY interested in fucking the head of the cheerleading squad.

But hey. Let's all take a big hit of the crack for a second so we can pretend that they're not lying. Which means they're incompetent fucktards, not evil fucktards. Because they went to a bunch of lawyers and asked them to prepare a 50+ page report on whether or not they could get away with something they DIDN'T EVEN WANT TO DO. Can you imagine how many billable hours went into that? Makes Pentagon hammers look like a bargain.

I mean, at least when 800 of our tax dollars are spent on a toilet seat, it's being used for shit containment. I suppose Ashcroft and Bush could wipe their asses with this report, but why bother, when they've got a perfectly good Constitution and flag to tide them over until at least November?

At least the assholes who think it doesn't matter what we do to brown furriners because they're brown furriners are ignorant evil redneck fucks with a firm grasp of reality. They know we're torturing people as policy, they just don't CARE. But the "bad apples" people need to realize that our current administration felt the need to check to see just how much torture they could get away with. And I guess we're all finding out the answer to that together, ain't we.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled non-stop coverage of DUDE IN A BOX.

Inhofe.

Memo to James Inhofe: Perhaps, when you are done hating brown people, justifying rape, and condoning the systematic use of torture by American military intelligence, could you please take your Oklahoma redneck panhandle skunk-fellating senatorial fat ass out behind the woodshed, and I know you have a woodshed, and kindly fuck yourself? Thanks.

It's bad enough when the Limbaughs and the Hannities of the world sit on their asses and call torture and rape "frat pranks" *. I expect that bullshit out of them. That's their job. But a standing senator, even a Southern one, when confronted with widespread, gross, filmed human rights abuses by American soldiers, should not be saying shit like:

"I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment." No, and that's part of the fucking PROBLEM, you Cro-Magnon racist. Genetic stains like you who think it's just dandy to do whatever you want to whoever you want to further your dubious goals are precisely the reason why acts that should be unthinkable are now policy. Just as soon as I'm done vomiting in my own mouth at the thought of assholes like you running things, it'll be ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"The [Red Cross] report says some coalition military intelligence officers estimated 'between 70 percent and 90 percent' of the detainees in Iraq 'had been arrested by mistake. They also attributed the brutality of some arrests to the lack of proper supervision of battle group units.' " - Associated Press.

"These prisoners, you know they're not there for traffic violations. If they're in cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands and here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals." - Senator James Inhofe, whose words were admittedly somewhat muffled as they had to be forced through a mouthful of Dubya's feces.

This guy makes Zell Miller look like Fred Rogers. They're in custody, they're brown, and they are, in his own words, PROBABLY guilty of something, so it's OK to do whatever we want to them in order to see if they'll say anything bad about their neighbors. Hooray for America! These are your leaders, people. They run your country. Little Hitlers with cowboy hats just waiting to ram a chemical light up the bunghole of anyone who disagrees with them.

"I would guess that these prisoners wake up every morning thanking Allah that Saddam Hussein is not in charge of these prisons." - Inhofe again, GUESSING WRONG about shit he should already know.

"Dhia al-Shweiri said he too was stripped naked during his stay in the prison and the humiliation was worse than the torture he endured under Saddam Hussein. 'It's OK if they beat me. Beatings don't hurt us, it's just a blow. But no one would want their manhood to be shattered'" - The Associated Press.

Oh, wait! Inhofe said even more to hate! "I am also outraged that we have so many humanitarian do-gooders right now crawling all over these prisons looking for human rights violations, while our troops, our heroes are fighting and dying."

Let me get this absolutely straight, because if there's one thing a Republican Senator from Oklahoma would like you to beleve he prefers, it's "absolutely straight". We are, in the as-specific-as-he-can-manage words of our paint-drinking president, over there fighting to stop the EVIL-DOERS. Those that DO EVIL. And according to Inhofe, our mission to thwart those who do evil is being hampered by hordes of... wait for it... DO-GOODERS. Those who DO GOOD. Yes, if it weren't for all those pesky doers of good, we'd have dealt with those doers of evil once and for all. Got it? Good. I mean, evil. I mean, um, some kind of nebulous moral area between "good" and "evil" that is the only acceptable moral outlook according to boiling anal warts like James Inhofe.

*Yeah, frat pranks do frequently include torture and rape, but I don't think that's what Limbaugh meant.

Defenders Of The Indefensible

Memo to defenders of the indefensible: YOU ARE DUMB."

"As a result, there are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq." - George W. Bush.

Except for the chambers where American troops tortured Iraqi civilians, of course. On the second point, is sodomizing someone with a chemical light or a broomstick qualify as a "rape"? Bush -might- get out on a technicality on that one. We've removed the rape rooms and replaced them with shove-stuff-up-the-butt rooms. The mass graves thing is true, though. We're doing a much better job of spreading the corpses around.

Now, that's a harsh, fairly political, cynical, pessimistic assessment of the meaning of the abuses in the Abu Ghraib prison. But no matter what your political affiliation, we can all agree that the inhumane abuse of Iraqis detailed in the Pentagon report (that the military may have sat on for months before photographs forced their hand) must be investigated, should not be tolerated, and are a bad thing. Basic human decency and values trump everything else.

Or they would, if a lot of people weren't borderline psychopaths, insane jingoists, and messenger-blaming morons. What's that, you say? How could anyone support torture and abuse? How could anyone blame those who brought it to light? 

It appears the typical method is to send an e-mail to CBS to bitch. And most of them signed their names, which means I get to use them, and someday, when they discover Google, and wonder what's been written about them on the Internet.... MERRY CHRISTMAS.

Betsy Berra wrote a letter that'd make Yogi cringe at the logic. "We've just lost the goal of helping anyone over there because of this show, and God help us. You are no better then those who did these horrible acts. Your reports are bringing down this country." Yes, in Betsy Berra's deluded world, pouring acid on someone, and exposing that act in the hopes of stopping it, are MORALLY EQUIVALENT. This country is being brought down because of people criticising torture. Betsy Berra is a fuckhead whose moral compass is made out of scrap paper, crayon, and bits of string.

John Threadgill needs to look up the word "destructive" in the dictionary. "I find it very wrong that our soldiers mistreated confined Iraqis. What I find even more destructive is that you do not find the time to report what has been accomplished with what the good soldiers have done." Darn that pesky mistreatment! He makes it sound like they took away the prisoners' cable. I don't know exactly what the proper ratio is in John Threadgill's mind. How many smiling Iraqi schoolchildren does CBS have to show every time they expose a case of torture? Five? Ten? How many smiling schoolchildren are there?

Art Kettunen, Mike Schuchman, Pam Anderson, and "Jeanie" are very confused, stupid people. They seem to think that the Iraqi people have been sitting around, happy and content and occupied, sitting quietly in their living rooms, when suddenly "60 Minutes II" came on, they learned about these atrocities, and decided to go and kill Americans. Do they think these stories are not getting out? Do they think that even worse stories and rumors, true or otherwise, are not spreading throughout the country? How can Iraqis get upset by "60 Minutes II"? I live HERE, and I don't know when 60 Minutes II is on. We dropped BOMBS on the country, not CARE packages featuring satellite dishes, 80-hour TiVos, and electronic Arabic translation devices.

"Do you really think this is going to help this situation? Don't you think the government can correct this situation without you publicizing it? Of course they can. " - That was Pam Anderson, by the way. Let's see. The report detailing the abuse was completed in March of 2004. Six of the soldiers involved were given severe administrative reprimands today, just a few days after the pictures came out. Seems like the government was in no hurry to correct the situation until it was publicized, doesn't it? Dumbass.

But at the end of the day, it's people like "J Guzzi" "I say they should give those troops medals. An eye for an eye.", and Sally Ainsley "They had to pose for pornographic pictures? So what. We cannot imagine sitting at home on our couches the horrors our soldiers must face every day. Why not focus your attention on the unfair practices of our enemy?" that earn the deepest enmity that I can scrape up. Using the deaths of four paid mercenaries as an excuse to justify atrocities toward civilians on our end. It doesn't get through to people like this that the people in Abu Ghraib were largely just people picked up off the street in sweeps. In their world, everyone in the country was on that bridge with a rope in their hand, and deserved what they got. And anyway, we're Americans, we're always right.

The lesson, of course, is one that even I can't seem to fully internalize. That there is no opinion in this country so stupid, so callous, so fucking redneck, racist, insane, cruel, or pitiful that you won't find a half-dozen people willing to sign their name to it and put it out there in public. DUMB.

Short Takes

Memo to the US Army, Guantanamo Bay Division: YOU ARE DUMB.

According to the Herald Sun in some city I forgot to type (which, by the way, is one of Rupert Murdoch's babies), an inmate at Guantanamo Bay who was recently freed has reported that one of the techniques used against him during sleep deprivation was the non-stop playing of Bruce Springsteen's "Born In The USA". 

I can only assume that the same brilliant intelligence that led to the whole mess in the first place was also responsible for analyzing the lyrics to the Springsteen song and determining, just like Ronald Reagan did, that Springsteen wrote the song out of pure, unbridled love for his country, his bandana overflowing with rah-rah patriotism. And we wonder why they haven't found the weapons yet.

I mean, shit, if I had to listen to "Born" non-stop, I'd consider it torture, too, but let's face it, "Dancin' In The Dark" would be three times as effective and barely one tenth as ironic.

Memo to Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer: DON'T BE DUMB.

Variety is reporting that Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer are negotiating for the film rights to the game "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time", widely believed by everyone who is not wrong as the single best game released in 2003.

They should consider themselves hereby warned: fuck this up, and I will be much crankier than usual. Which should tell you something. Remember Pac-Man? Remember how we all waited for the home version, so we could finally play Pac-Man on our Atari 2600's? And then it came out? Remember that sinking disappointment in the pit of your stomach after you played it for the first time, with the square "vitamin" instead of the fruit and the weird dashes and the ghosts not turning blue and that PANK PANK PAPANK sound? If you're in the target audience for this website, you're probably weeping openly at the memory. I know I am.

A shitty Prince of Persia movie, to me, would be MORE DISAPPOINTING. Hiring Brendan Fraser as the Prince, for example. Hiring Jennifer Garner as Farah. Letting Akiva Goldsman come within five miles of anything remotely related to the movie. These would all be mistakes. Don't make them. Don't be DUMB.

Memo to the guy in front of me at the gas station: YOU ARE DUMB.

You spent FIFTY ONE DOLLARS in one sitting on scratch and win instant lottery tickets. Learn math, or forever forfeit your right to complain about taxes. Your choice.

Memo to everyone:

It's been a couple of long weeks full of rage and anger. And at the end of it all, I think we need a break. Take a deep breath, think of something calming. Like a cloud. Yeah, a nice fluffy cloud.

See what they've done! People are so dumb, they've PISSED OFF THE CLOUDS. My work must continue. See you Monday.