chinese torture in guantanamo

Okay, it's been like two months. But that's summer. Couldn't pass this up, however, for magnitude of sickness (and, at this point, obviousness).

NYT: China Inspired Interrogations at Guantanamo

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

So it's basically Manchurian Candidate meets Darkness at Noon. Wonderful.

What. The. FUCK?

Just when you think the Bushies have killed your capacity for outrage... ABCNews: "US Soldiers Did 'Dirty Work' for Chinese Interrogators":

U.S. military personnel at Guantanamo Bay allegedly softened up detainees at the request of Chinese intelligence officials who had come to the island facility to interrogate the men -- or they allowed the Chinese to dole out the treatment themselves, according to claims in a new government report.

Buried in a Department of Justice report released Tuesday are new allegations about a 2002 arrangement between the United States and China, which allowed Chinese intelligence to visit Guantanamo and interrogate Chinese Uighurs held there.

According to the report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine, an FBI agent reported a detainee belonging to China's ethnic Uighur minority and a Uighur translator told him Uighur detainees were kept awake for long periods, deprived of food and forced to endure cold for hours on end, just prior to questioning by Chinese interrogators.

Susan Manning, a lawyer who represents several Uighurs still held at Guantanamo, said Tuesday the allegations are all too familiar.

U.S. personnel "are engaging in abusive tactics on behalf of the Chinese," she said Tuesday. When Uighur detainees refused to talk to Chinese interrogators in 2002, U.S. military personnel put them in solitary confinement as punishment, she said.

"Why are we doing China's dirty work?" Manning said. "Surely we're better than that."

As Attaturk on FDL said: Lady, you're forgetting who's been in charge here for 8 years. Sick.

seasteading

A bunch of libertarians are planning to create new sea-based platform communities. (Wired: "Peter Thiel makes down payment on libertarian ocean colonies") Hopefully it won't go all Randian dystopia like Bioshock!

Big Brother is... making music videos

British rockers The Get Out Clause performed their song "Paper" in front of the now-ubiquitous CCTV cameras in London - then requested the footage under the terms of the Data Protection Act and cut it together to make the video. Pretty smart.

The Obama Doctrine

The American Prospect interviews Obama's foreign policy team and gives him his own Doctrine. It's not just about specific foreign policy issues, but about - as he often says - "the mindset that got us into war in the first place." And more than anything, it's about Democrats finally abandoning their reflexive tendency to play Republican light because they fear looking weak.

Obama is offering the most sweeping liberal foreign-policy critique we've heard from a serious presidential contender in decades. It cuts to the heart of traditional Democratic timidity. "It's time to reject the counsel that says the American people would rather have someone who is strong and wrong than someone who is weak and right," Obama said in a January speech. "It's time to say that we are the party that is going to be strong and right." (The Democrat who counseled that Americans wanted someone strong and wrong, not weak and right? That was Bill Clinton in 2002.)

That's a bit unfair to Clinton, I think, because it comes off as if he's advocating being wrong. I think he was just observing, accurately, the reason Dems got pummeled that year: they hadn't stood up for their beliefs. But of course his wife is Exhibit A of that, as are most of the Boomer Dems in leadership over the last 15 years.

The Obama foreign-policy team describes it as "the politics of fear," a phrase most advisers used unprompted in our conversations. "For a long time we've not seen much creative thinking from Dems on national security, because, out of fear, we want to be a little different from the Republicans but not too different, out of fear of being labeled weak or indecisive," another top adviser says. Identifying that fear as the accelerant of the Iraq War mind-set is the first step to a new and innovative foreign policy. John Kerry was not able to argue for fundamental change in foreign policy because he was consumed by that very political fear. Obama's admonition to Democrats is much like Pope John Paul II's to the Gdansk shipyard strikers -- first, be not afraid.

A good start for a new century. If a few years too late... but it's never too late!

Maddow/Matthews on appeasement flap

The gift that keeps on giving. Maddows guest hosted Countdown last Friday, and had Matthews on to talk about the destructive nature of talking point-driven political culture, in which people mouth magic words to stigmatize their opponents and drive them out of the public square. C&L has the video:

MADDOW: Do you think this is something new? Do you think this is something specific to our current, contemporaneous politics that we have these sort of buzzwords and bumper sticker slogans, whether it’s ‘appeasement,’ or ‘fight over there so we don’t fight them here’ or ‘they hate our freedom,’ any of these terms. Are they designed to be repeated and not to be interrogated?

MATTHEWS: Well, just look at the way people are basically exterminated or tried to be exterminated. Bill Maher makes a comment –which may not have been the right comment–but he was making a point he was trying to make, about stand back weaponry compared to people killing themselves. You can argue about the niceties of that. The Dixie Chicks say something about the war—and they shouldn’t have said it overseas, but they said it. The shutting up of opposition is critical to running a country in an undemocratic way, let’s put it that way. And so you have buzzwords like ‘appeasers’ or ‘cut and run’ and they’re used over and over again by the most mindless people. The trouble with them is they tend to work. The dittoheads can use them. Anyone can use them and they seem to have the same effect. They cause people to run from criticism.

Ollie North, "history guy"?

Jeebus help me.... C&L presents Ollie North defending the appeasement dustup. THIS IS THE LAST PERSON WHO SHOULD TALK ABOUT GIVING SHIT TO AMERICAN ENEMIES. Ahem. Sorry about the screaming. But the stupid, it burns. C&L comment:

For someone who was lucky not to have spent the better part of the last two decades making license plates, he’s got some nerve touching this topic. This is the guy who oversaw the arms for hostages deal with Iran in 1985 (among other crimes), right in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war in which the US was actively and openly arming and supporting Saddam Hussein. Ollie North didn’t just talk with Iran at a time they were our enemy in a proxy-war, he actually helped to arm them, bypassing Congress by violating the Boland Amendment to help fund an illegal war in Nicaragua.

Lacking even a shred of credibility, Fox News’ “history guy” is to the truth in the historical record what Dick Cheney is to gun safety. He shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the subject, and anyone who believes a word of what he says about it is a fool.

Word!