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March 31, 2005
If I Pretend Not to See You, You Will Not Exist
The worse it gets, the less we hear of it from the media:
In Iraq, the United States is now detaining a record 10,200 people, more than double the number held five months ago. The number of detainees held in Afghanistan also appears to be on the rise. Individuals detained in Afghanistan by U.S. forces rose from 350 in June of 2004 to 500 in January of 2005. No numbers on Afghanistan are available since January 2005 since the Department of Defense has introduced a policy of classifying information related to U.S. detentions in Afghanistan, including the number of detainees held and the specific legal basis for their detentions."One of the concerning developments we're seeing as U.S. detention operations in these places mature is a trend toward greater secrecy, not less," Pearlstein said. Behind the Wire updates a report Human Rights First issued in June 2004 on the scope and nature of U.S. global detention operations in the "war on terrorism."
That's 10,000 people held under conditions the State Department would condemn, especially if the deed was committed by a nation we did not like. The scope of the torture story is increasing; there are more and more confirmations of people who died under custody. Corroborating evidence is emerging on the "renditions."
In other words, the situation is the exact opposite of the impression one would get by watching news or reading newspapers.
Posted by zeynep at 09:29 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 28, 2005
Oh, That School Shooting.
Well, right on cue, Bush reads into the microphone about the second-deadliest school shooting since Columbine:
President Bush broke his public silence on Saturday about the deadliest U.S. school shooting in six years, touting the government's response "at this tragic time" after some American Indian leaders complained he paid little attention to the rampage.Bush's delayed public reaction to the shooting stood in contrast to his swift and high-profile intervention earlier this week to try to prolong the life of Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged woman in Florida whose feeding tube was removed.
...
Bellecourt cited Bush's decision to break off his Texas vacation to sign emergency legislation on Monday that permitted federal courts to consider appeals by Schiavo's parents to force the reconnection of the feeding tube.
"He does not have any problems flying in to restore the feeding tube to Terri Schiavo. I'm sure if this happened in some school in Texas and a bunch of white kids were shot down, he would have been there too," Bellecourt said.
Let me also predict that, given the widespread criticism of the incredibly callous initial response to the December tsunami, the U.S. will make a large pledge for the today's earthquake off of Sumatra, even if this one does not cause a tsunami, or anywhere near the damage of the first one. (Which I'm all for, as long as it is not simply a shifting of money from one set of victims to another. And while I'm really disgusted by the current hierarchy of victims, with sub-Saharan Africans being treated as the least-worthy, it does not make any of the "higher-valued" victims any less victims.)
Posted by zeynep at 07:57 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
March 25, 2005
More on Eating Disorders: Terri Schiavo's and Others'
Many readers have commented on my post about the discomfort I feel about lack of discussion about Terri Schiavo's bulimia. Many readers criticized my criticism of Michael Schiavo, arguing that it's very hard to help people with eating-disorders.
Point taken. Eating-disorders very tough illnesses. I'll readily concede the possibility Michael Schiavo did all he could before Terri collapsed.
That would make it even more incumbent upon him to speak out as much as possible now, given the unfortunate spotlight. He could speak about how hard it is to reach someone in the grip of this illness. He could try to warn all the young woman out there who could drop brain-dead any moment. Her situation has apparently prompted a boom in living-wills; I wish it would also prompt a will-to-live among all the women who may have skipped or thrown-up their breakfast, lunch, or dinner this very day.
There are conflicting reports about her environment, but it's clear that Terri Schiavo had a serious issue with her body, the body that has now been cut off from all food and water:
Terri never said anything about her weight, but her mother always sensed it bothered her."She cried a lot when she went to get clothes," Mrs. Schindler says.
...
By a year later, Terri had gained back some of the weight she had lost since high school. Meyer says Terri told her that Schiavo had seen her high school graduation picture and warned her "if she ever got fat like that again he'd divorce her."
"I said, 'He's probably kidding,"' she says. "But it was upsetting to her."
Scott Schiavo, Michael's brother, says it was the Schindlers who rode Terri about her weight. He says her brother sometimes showed one of Terri's old driver's licenses for a laugh.
Terri Schiavo was 110 pounds when she died, down from 200. She was throwing up what she ate. She was trying to surive only on liquids. She had stopped menstruating. Hers is the true face of "success" you see in all those diet ads that tout how people can lose dramatic amounts of weight "and keep it off."
Posted by zeynep at 02:53 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Second-Deadliest School Shooting? Who Cares?
Did you notice the that the second-deadliest school shooting since Columbine took place last week? Maybe you heard a bit about it, but the coverage disappeared very quickly. Remember the wall-to-wall coverage after the Columbine shooting? On the surface, there is all the elements of the kind of story that would be endlessly discussed. The shooter might have been a Nazi sympathizer. On his website, he posted pictures of the band Nirvana -- the founder Kurt Cobain committed suicide. His blog certainly expressed his troubled soul:
"16 years of accumulated rage suppressed by nothing more than brief glimpses of hope, which have all but faded to black," he wrote in an undated personal biography on one Web site. "I can feel the urges within slipping through the cracks, the leash I can no longer hold…."In the same bio, he listed his occupation as "doormat," and said he was located in "endless scrutiny, Minnesota, United States."
There is even a hero in the story, a guard who refused to run even though he had the opportunity, and caused enough commotion allowing many students to get away. He was killed. So, why aren't we hearing more of this?
Many Native Americans are also wondering about the silence of the administration:
Native Americans across the country -- including tribal leaders, academics and rank-and-file tribe members -- voiced anger and frustration Thursday that President Bush has responded to the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history with silence.Three days after 16-year-old Jeff Weise killed nine members of his Red Lake tribe before taking his own life, grief-stricken American Indians complained that the White House has offered little in the way of sympathy for the tribe situated in the uppermost region of Minnesota.
And the obvious point:
The reaction to Bush's silence was particularly bitter given his high-profile, late-night intervention on behalf of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman caught in a legal battle over whether her feeding tube should be reinserted."The fact that Bush preempted his vacation to say something about Ms. Schiavo and here you have 10 native people gunned down and he can't take time to speak is very telling," said David Wilkins, interim chairman of the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota and a member of the North Carolina-based Lumbee tribe.
Of course, we will soon see a well-choreographed public appearance by the president during which he will read touching words from the tele-prompter.
Posted by zeynep at 02:18 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
March 23, 2005
Due to Today's Developments, Tens of Millions of People Not-Named Terri Schiavo May Die
Here's a real issue for anyone genuinly interested in a life-affirming culture. In order to comply with World Trade Organization requirements, India is moving towards ending its production of affordable generic drug production.
NEW DELHI (AP) -- International aid groups slammed India's passage on Wednesday of a new patent law that ends the decades-old practice of allowing domestic drug companies to make low-cost copies of expensive Western medicines, saying millions of poor people across the world will be affected.The changes in patent rights stem from India's membership in the World Trade Organization, which enhances the country's participation in global trade but requires it to enforce stricter patent rules for its US$5 billion (euro3.8 billion) pharmaceutical industry.
International aid groups said the new law will curb the supply of cheap generic drugs to impoverished nations, threatening the survival of AIDS and cancer patients there.
Some 50 percent of 700,000 HIV patients taking antiretroviral medicines in Africa, Asia and Latin America rely on low-cost drugs from India. A month's dose of a generic AIDS drug cocktail costs US$30 (euro22), or 5 percent of similar drugs sold by Western producers.
"Because India is one of the world's biggest producers of generic drugs, this law will have a severe knock-on effect on many developing countries which depend on imported generic drugs from India," said Samar Verma, regional policy adviser at Oxfam International.
The Paris-based Doctors Without Borders described the Indian move as "the beginning of the end of affordable generics."
Multinational drug companies welcomed the decision.
It's hard to express how maddeningly sad this development is. India itself has 5.1 million HIV-positive people. There are tens of millions of people around the world that are not receiving these life-saving medicines mostly because of their prohibitive cost. If this proceeds in a manner that continues to please the pharmaceutical companies, the suffering will be immense. The death toll will continue to increase.
Will we care?
Posted by zeynep at 04:06 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
March 22, 2005
None So Blind
After two years and more than 1,500 U.S. casualties in a war that has been perhaps the best documented in history, no single photograph from the hostilities in Iraq has emerged as iconic.
This was from a by a Washington Post staff writer, Philip Kennicott. Normally, I would have moved on from that piece after hopefully remembering to close my precipitously dropped jaw, but Kennicott has been a strikingly incisive voice at times, so I kept reading. No, he isn't blind as one might first be tempted to conclude. Nor is he unaware of what is surely the iconic image of this occupation for the rest of the world:
What Kennicott means is that we have not accepted, have not come to a national consensus, about the war:
Despite heroic efforts of photojournalists to document the challenges and successes of the long grind of occupation, no one has captured a picture that has anything like the power of Nick Ut's photograph of a naked girl fleeing a napalm strike in Vietnam (could it be published in a "family" newspaper today?) or Joe Rosenthal's image of the flag raised on Iwo Jima. Those images captured -- or helped crystallize -- a consensus about the wars they represented, a consensus that has yet to emerge about the war in Iraq.
In other words, we remain in denial.
Posted by zeynep at 11:05 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
March 20, 2005
Terri Schiavo's Bulimia: Not on "The Agenda"
There has been a lot of attention on Terri Schiavo as her formal husband, her parents, and the so-called pro-lifers fight over whether her feeding-tube should be removed so that she'll die by starvation or whether she should continue to be force-fed so that she will remain alive in a persistent vegetative state.
Much less mentioned is the fact that Schiavo had this heart attack at a very young age, causing the current persistent vegetative state, because of her bulimia:
When she finally lost 65 pounds in her late teens, men started to pay attention — including the man who would become her husband, Michael Schiavo, who was tall and handsome.But keeping the weight off was a struggle for Terri Schiavo, and years later — after her heart stopped briefly, cutting off oxygen to the brain — a malpractice case brought against a doctor on her behalf would reveal she had been trying to survive on liquids and was making herself throw up after meals. The Schiavos' lawyer said her 1990 collapse was caused by a potassium imbalance brought on by an eating disorder.
It is a cruel twist lost on no one close to the case: A woman who is said to have struggled with an eating disorder is now in the middle of a court battle over whether her feeding tube should be removed so that she can starve to death.
Terri Schiavo was forcing herself to throw up her food. She was denying herself the most human of activities, nourishment. Bulimia is a very dangerous activity. Stomach acids are not meant to travel back up through the esophagus and the mouth, where they will digest one's insides and rot one's teeth. Bulimia also results in serious chemical imbalances which can cause heart attacks -- as it did in Terri Schiavo's case.
I find it hard to believe her husband is not culpable in her bulimia, either through action or inaction. Her illness had progressed to the point she had stopped menstruating. He knew "she had peculiar eating patterns." He must have known about her discomfort with her body. He either reinforced her self-hatred or did not fight hard enough against it. Terri Schiavo's parents also seem to be in denial about her bulimia. The whole bunch of so-called pro-lifers seem only concerned with somehow continuing to force-feed this unfortunate woman without any pretense at discussing our sick culture that causes women to hate their own flesh. With all these Senate bills and last-minute interventions by the Governor, why not fund an eating disorder awareness fund or two? Even just for show, why not use this tragedy to try to warn the who-knows-how-many young women risking a similar end? Why not use this to examine how culture fosters such severe self-hatred in women?
That might actually save lives, you know...
But, instead, we have a public fight whether to force-feed or starve Terri Schiavo, carried out, it seems, mostly by people who care neither about her or about the myriads of young women who could become her any moment. A fight that would not have had to happen if we had just let her eat.
Posted by zeynep at 12:41 PM | Comments (29) | TrackBack
March 17, 2005
Us? Torture?
CIA Director Porter Goss defends U.S. interrogation practices in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing:
CIA Director Porter Goss defended U.S. interrogation practices and rejected any notion that the intelligence community engages in torture. ... “I can assure you that I know of no instances where the intelligence community is outside the law on this,” Goss said. “And I know for a fact that torture is not productive. That’s not professional interrogation. We don’t do torture.”
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Associated Press is compiling lists of the known cases of "Prisoner deaths investigated as involving criminal homicide or abuse by U.S. personnel." (Note how it's merely abuse, not torture, even if the victim ends up dead):
_Mohammed Sayari, Afghanistan, April 28, 2002. Army Special Forces captain reprimanded._Mullah Habibullah, about 28, Bagram, Afghanistan, Dec. 3, 2002. Sgt. James P. Boland, 377th Military Police Company, charged with dereliction of duty; more charges possible against others.
_Dilawar, 22, Bagram, Dec. 10, 2002. Pfc. Willie V. Brand, 377th Military Police Company, charged with involuntary manslaughter, according to documents obtained by Human Rights Watch. Boland charged with dereliction, assault and maltreatment, more charges possible against others.
_Unidentified person, Wazi Village, Afghanistan, January 2003. Under investigation.
_Jamal Naseer, 18, Gardez, Afghanistan, March 2003. Under investigation.
_Unidentified person, Camp Bucca, Iraq, May 12, 2003. Soldier reprimanded for not using warning shots before killing someone trying to enter the camp.
_Abdul Wali, 28, Asadabad, Afghanistan, June 2, 2003. CIA (news - web sites) contractor David Passaro charged with assault.
_Dilar Dababa, Baghdad, June 13, 2003. Died of head injury. USA Today reported he died during interrogation.
_Obeed Hethere Radad, Tikrit, Iraq, Sept. 11, 2003. Soldier discharged for voluntary manslaughter for not warning escaping prisoner before shooting him.
_Manadel al-Jamadi, Abu Ghraib, Iraq, Nov. 4, 2003. Died during interrogation. Several Navy SEALs charged; and two CIA personnel under investigation.
_Abdul Wahid, Helmand province, Afghanistan, Nov. 6, 2003. Badly wounded man dies in U.S. custody. No U.S. charges The Denver Post reported he died at interrogation facility while shackled and gagged.
_Muhamad Husain Kadir, Taal Al Jal, Iraq, Feb. 28, 2004. Pfc. Edward Richmond, 25th Infantry Division, received three years in prison for voluntary manslaughter.
_Karim Hassan, 36, Kufa, Iraq, May 21, 2004. Capt. Rogelio Maynulet, 1st Armored Division, facing court-martial over what he described as mercy killing of wounded Iraq militiaman.
_Unidentified person, 16, Sadr City, Iraq, Aug. 18, 2004. Staff Sgt. Johnny M. Horne Jr., Fort Riley, Kan., sentenced to three years in prison in another purported mercy killing. Staff Sgt. Cardenas J. Alban, also from Fort Riley, convicted and sentenced to one year confinement.
_Three unidentified people, Sadr City, August 2004. Sgt. Michael P. Williams and Spc. Brent May, from Fort Riley, facing murder charges.
_At least 6 more investigated by U.S. Army.
Note that these don't include dozens that are ruled "justifiable homicide" under very untransparent conditions. And again, these are only the publicly known cases.
Where's the outrage?
Posted by zeynep at 06:51 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
March 16, 2005
Wolfowitz as World Bank President...
Paul Wolfowitz is nominated to the presidency of the World Bank. Since the World Bank is neither democratic nor transparent, whoever is nominated by the U.S. always gets the job. So while it may be a done deal, I suggest that we hold him to his statements on odious debt -- a concept he suddenly figured out when it came to Iraq:
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was even more pointed on that issue, telling a Senate hearing: "I hope they [Paris, Moscow and Berlin] will think about how they can contribute to helping the Iraq people get on their feet. . . . I hope, for example, they'll think about the very large debts that come from money that was lent to the dictator to buy weapons and to build palaces. . . . I think they ought to consider whether it might not be appropriate to forgive some or all of that debt."
Posted by zeynep at 03:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
He would have preferred 'non-judicial' punishment
That's what Army 1st Lt. Jack Saville's lawyer said after his client was sentenced to 45 days after he pled guilty to "having two Iraqis thrown at gunpoint into the Tigris in Samarra." One of the young Iraqi man died, although the U.S. soldiers claimed his death was faked. The family of the young Iraqi gave permission to the U.S. government to exhume the remains of their son to confirm the death but somehow that just couldn't be done.
That's right. 45 days for having killed a man. Oh, yes, also $12,000 in docked pay. Such a shining example of our culture of life.
Saville's lawyer, Frank Spinner, told reporters afterward he would have preferred "non-judicial" punishment, but admitted, "I can't really complain about the sentence."
Let's even assume that the 19 year-old Zaidoun Hassoun had survived, even though the preponderance of the evidence indicates that he did not. Forty-five days for attempting to kill a person is justice? A nineteen year-old who had violated a curfew imposed by an occupying army gets a death sentence, whereas the man who laughed and ordered two young man to jump into a dangerous river at gunpoint gets 45 days?
Marwan Fadil, who survived the incident, testified in Perkins' trial that he and cousin Zaidoun Hassoun, 19, begged for mercy and soldiers laughed as Hassoun drowned.They had been detained for violating curfew.
Saville asn't even discharged from the Army, in spite of testimony from another American soldier who said it was just part of a bet:
Earlier Tuesday, former soldier Terry Bowman testified that before the Balad incident, Saville laughed and said it was part of a bet with another platoon over who would do such a thing first.
The prosecution simply did not push the actual manslaughter charge. The jury did not believe or care that the death had occurred:
The most serious charge originally brought against Saville, a single manslaughter count, wasn't pushed by prosecutors. He was found not guilty of that offense.In the first instance, on Dec. 5, 2003, a Balad man was arrested for unspecified reasons and driven to the Tigris, where he was tossed into the river. A soldier testified that Saville said his platoon had a bet with another unit to see which would be the first to use the river-dunking method to punish defiant Iraqis.
The second incident, on Jan. 3, 2004, came hours after a mortar attack killed a friend of Saville's commander, who had issued what prosecutors called an "illegal order" to round up several identified suspects and kill them. Two suspected curfew violators, neither suspects in the mortar attack, were nabbed, taken to the Tigris and forced off a ledge into the river.
One of those Iraqis testified at the trial of a Saville subordinate, Staff Sgt. Tracy Perkins, that he swam to safety but his companion drowned.
A body was retrieved from the river about two weeks later and a videotape of the wake was produced, but jurors weren't convinced that a death occurred.
Lt. Saville did apologize to the victims. He further expressed remorse "for putting fellow troops in increased danger by inciting insurgent Iraqis, who portrayed the incidents as war crimes."
Imagine that.
Posted by zeynep at 12:02 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
March 13, 2005
It was not us, really. We say so.
So, Pentagon exonerates Pentagon:
The Pentagon said its policies and top officials did not cause the mistreatment of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, but in a report released on Thursday cited a series of missed opportunities to correct lapses that led to the abuses.The latest and most wide-ranging abuse report, by Navy inspector general Vice Adm. Albert Church, largely tracks the Pentagon's previous contention that its leaders were not directly responsible for sexual and physical mistreatment of prisoners.
Plus, not only is it not our fault, it's their fault:
The report said U.S. servicemembers "may have at times permitted the enemy's treacherous tactics and disregard for the laws of war ... to erode their own standards of conduct."
Meanwhile, even more evidence is emerging to the systematic nature of the torture:
Unreleased U.S. Army reports detailing the deaths of two Afghan men who were beaten to death by American soldiers show that military prison abuses began in Afghanistan in 2002, and were part of a systematic pattern of mistreatment, a human rights representative said Saturday. More than two dozen American soldiers face possible criminal prosecution — and one already is charged with manslaughter — in the deaths at the main U.S. detention facility in Bagram, just north of the Afghan capital of Kabul.As documented by the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, the men died a year before the photographed horrors at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, according to John Sifton, the Afghanistan researcher for the New York-based Human Rights Watch.
Cover up? What cover up? The Pentagon says it is not a cover up, and that's that.
Posted by zeynep at 04:24 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 10, 2005
Pajamas! He arrived in Pajamas!
The wires report that:
"A suicide bomber blew himself up at a Shiite mosque during a funeral Thursday, killing 47 people....
"After the cloud of smoke and dust dispersed, we saw the scattered bodies of the fallen and smelled gunpowder," said Adnan al-Bayati, another witness.
At least 47 people were killed and more than 90 wounded, said Dr. Saher Maher, speaking from a hospital in the city."
Someone targeted a Shi'ite funeral in such a savage attack. But what's the top story in Yahoo top news? Or on CNN? The important stuff, of course.
A pajama-clad Michael Jackson arrived late for his trial today.
Oh, my.
Posted by zeynep at 04:04 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
March 09, 2005
Rendered by Mistake
Isn´t this great? Sending people off to be tortured is now reported as "one of the most important secret weapons in the war on terror." The only problem? A few people have been "rendered" by mistake. If only we could get that under control:
You may not have heard the term "rendition," at least not the way the Central Intelligence Agency uses it. But renditions have become one of the most important secret weapons in the war on terror.In recent years, well over 100 people have disappeared or been "rendered" all around the world. Witnesses tell the same story: masked men in an unmarked jet seize their target, cut off his clothes, put him in a blindfold and jumpsuit, tranquilize him and fly him away.
They're describing U.S. agents collaring terrorism suspects. Some notorious terrorists such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the mastermind of 9/11, were rendered this way.
But as Correspondent Scott Pelley reports, it's happening to many others. Some are taken to prisons infamous for torture. And a few may have been rendered by mistake.
Is anyone interested in actually asking why they hate us? That people whose family members and friends and neighbors have been tortured, bombed, killed "by mistake" may be a lot more likely to believe the only language the West speaks is the language of violence...
Posted by zeynep at 03:51 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
March 07, 2005
Mistreatment of Detainees? You must be Insane! It's just Ramadi Madness.
A soldier who tried to report the torture of detainees was found to be insane" at the insistence of his commanding offier and evacuated from Iraq in restraints on a stretcher when he refused to back down:
An Army intelligence sergeant who accused fellow soldiers in Samarra, Iraq, of abusing detainees in 2003 was in turn accused by his commander of being delusional and ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation in Germany, despite a military psychiatrist's initial judgment that the man was stable, according to internal Army records released yesterday....
Although his name is not listed in the documents, the episode precisely matches events described publicly last year by California National Guard Sgt. Greg Ford, a former state prison guard and Navy SEAL team medic whose complaints were dismissed by the Army in October 2004 as lacking sufficient evidence. Ford said last night, after hearing what the documents stated, that he is the sergeant described.
The soldier complained that he had had to resuscitate abused detainees and urged the unit's withdrawal. He told investigators that the unit's commander, an Army captain, responded by giving him "30 seconds to withdraw my request or he was going to send me forcibly to go see a psychiatrist." The soldier added: "I told him I was not going to withdraw my request and at that time he confiscated my weapon and informed me he was withdrawing my security clearance and was placing me under 24-hour surveillance."
A witness in his unit told investigators that the captain later pressured a military doctor -- who had found the soldier stable -- into doing another emergency evaluation, saying: "I don't care what you saw or heard, he is imbalanced, and I want him out of here."
The next day, after the doctor did another evaluation, the soldier was evacuated from Iraq in restraints on a stretcher to a military hospital in Germany, despite having been given no official diagnosis, according to the documents. A military doctor in Germany ruled he was in stable mental health, according to the documents, but sent him back to the United States for what the soldier recalls the doctor describing as his "safety."
Well, many of us have been referring to the worldwide detention system the U.S. has set up with no oversight as "the Gulag." I guess this completes the circle: now, just as in the Soviet Union, people of conscience are being declared insane.
There was another part of the story where a soldier "compiled a 20-minute video" titled "Ramadi Madness" documenting the torture and the maltreatment. When the video was found, the unit's commander immediately knew what the urgent task at hand was:
The unit's commander told Army investigators he was concerned about the images becoming public and promised to take steps to "minimize the risk of this and other videos that may end up in the media."...
In the "Ramadi Madness" case, investigators determined the video "contained footage of inappropriate rather than criminal behavior" and determined that the detainee who was kicked was not abused.
The "inappropriate" behavior included "a soldier kicking a wounded detainee in the face and chest in the presence of 10 colleagues and soldiers positioning a dead insurgent to appear to wave hello."
Imagine if we had found photos of dead American soldier posed as if giving a thumbs up to the camera. And some Islamic cleric or official had said it was "inappropriate" but not enough to warrant any punishment. Imagine our horror.
Posted by zeynep at 11:37 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
March 03, 2005
Culture of Life
Yet another reminder of how little non-rich, mostly non-white life is valued in this world:
Three million newborns who die each year could be saved with low-tech and low-cost measures but are condemned because funding and research is devoted to high-tech solutions used almost exclusively by the rich, an international study said Thursday.Every year, four million babies die in the first month of life, according to research announced Thursday and being published by the international medical journal The Lancet. That amounts to more than 10,000 neonatal deaths per day.
''Virtually all (99 percent) occur in low- and middle-income countries, yet most research, publications, and funding focus on high-tech care for the one percent of deaths that occur in rich countries,'' the study said.
...
Measures to prevent three million of the four million annual newborn deaths are startlingly simple and cheap.
They range from tetanus immunization--involving two 20-cent injections--during pregnancy to exclusive breastfeeding, clean delivery, and antibiotics to treat illness.
''At less than one dollar per capita [person] per year in additional spending to provide these life saving interventions to 90 percent of mothers and babies, the cost is affordable,'' said Gary Darmstadt, a Johns Hopkins University academic and research adviser to the aid group Save the Children USA, which helped produce the study.
Mind you, we aren't just cheap and uncaring. It's worse, much worse:
If funding and services for newborns are failing to reach the world's poorest, the same is to be said of global aid in general, according to a report last week from international charities Oxfam and ActionAid.The groups accused the wealthiest nations of failing the poor with a ''self-serving and hypocritical'' system of aid, saying 40 percent of it is ''tied,'' forcing developing countries to buy overpriced goods and services from donor countries.
It accused the United States and Italy of being the worst culprits in so-called aid ''round tripping,'' spending some 70 percent of their aid on their own companies.
Posted by zeynep at 11:16 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
March 02, 2005
Man Tortured to Death; CIA Officer in Charge Promoted; Move Along
Are we just supposed to get used to this pattern?
In November 2002, a newly minted CIA case officer in charge of a secret prison just north of Kabul allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young Afghan detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets, according to four U.S. government officials aware of the case.The Afghan guards -- paid by the CIA and working under CIA supervision in an abandoned warehouse code-named the Salt Pit -- dragged their captive around on the concrete floor, bruising and scraping his skin, before putting him in his cell, two of the officials said.
As night fell, so, predictably, did the temperature.
By morning, the Afghan man had frozen to death.
After a quick autopsy by a CIA medic -- "hypothermia" was listed as the cause of death -- the guards buried the Afghan, who was in his twenties, in an unmarked, unacknowledged cemetery used by Afghan forces, officials said. The captive's family has never been notified; his remains have never been returned for burial. He is on no one's registry of captives, not even as a "ghost detainee," the term for CIA captives held in military prisons but not registered on the books, they said.
"He just disappeared from the face of the earth," said one U.S. government official with knowledge of the case.
The CIA case officer, meanwhile, has been promoted, two of the officials said, who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to talk about the matter. The case is under investigation by the CIA inspector general.
And it's not like there is much going on to hold top people accountable. I'll watch this lawsuit if for no other reason to see the words like Rumsfeld ... responsible ... for ... torture, in print.
Posted by zeynep at 11:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 01, 2005
All Those Horrible Things Other People Do
How timely. Just as the State Department issues its annual Human Rights report, I received a copy of "America's Disappeared." This year, the hypocricy has exceeded tolerable limits for even historicaly cautious organizations:
In an unprecedented move, the US Human Rights Network, a network of more than 160 US-based human rights organizations, today issued a memorandum to President George Bush decrying the current state of human rights in the US, as the US State Department released its annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.“It is the height of hypocrisy for the US government to issue a report condemning human rights abuses in other countries at a time when it is violating these very same standards at home and abroad,” said Ajamu Baraka, Executive Director of the US Human Rights Network (USHRN).
That's right. There's no U.S. chapter in the report:
The United States is not monitored by the State Department, but Michael Kozak, assistant secretary for human rights, said, ``The events at Abu Ghraib were a stain on the honor of the U.S. There's no two ways about it.''
Things have gotten so bad that not only do we outsource torture from time to time, we criticize the recipient countries for ... torture:
The State Department's annual human rights report released yesterday criticized countries for a range of interrogation practices it labeled as torture, including sleep deprivation for detainees, confining prisoners in contorted positions, stripping and blindfolding them and threatening them with dogs -- methods similar to those approved at times by the Bush administration for use on detainees in U.S. custody....
The State Department report also harshly attacked the treatment of prisoners in such countries as Syria and Egypt, where the United States has shipped terrorism suspects under a practice known as "rendition." An Australian citizen has alleged that under Egyptian detention he was hung by his arms from hooks, repeatedly shocked, nearly drowned and brutally beaten. Most of his fingernails were missing when he later arrived at Guantanamo Bay.
Nonetheless, the prize for the best-absurdity-pronounced-with-astraight-face goes to the State Department press release itself:
The State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor issued the annual reports for 196 countries February 28.The reports identified serious problems in several Middle East countries, including: arbitrary arrests, torture of detainees, incommunicado detention, trials without due process, lack of access to legal counsel, poor prison conditions, long pretrial detentions, and the death of prisoners in police custody.
All those horrible things other people do.
Posted by zeynep at 10:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack