The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
Rumpus Radio Episode 4. Featuring Nick Flynn, author of The Ticking Is The Bomb and Another Bullshit Night In Suck City. Special guest appearance by Joshua Mohr.
Not available iTunes until 6pm tonight, but you can listen to it on your computer right now.
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In her book Tortured: When Good Soldiers Do Bad Things, journalist Justine Sharrock takes a close look at low-ranking soldiers who engaged in acts of torture.
“The U.S. military freed a Reuters photographer in Iraq on Wednesday, almost a year and a half after snatching him from his home in the middle of the night and placing him in military detention without charge.”
The military has yet to explain why they detained the photographer and locked him away for so long, saying the evidence was classified.
...more“Tabor, a soldier at the Lewis-McChord base in Tacoma, Wash., told police he held the little girl’s head backward in a sink of water, Yelm Police Chief Todd Stancil told the the local newspaper, the Nisqually Valley News.”
U.S. Soldier waterboards his daughter, age 4, for not learning the alphabet.
...moreAt the website for the PEN American Center they’ve posted the audio and a transcription of Jonathan Ames reading FBI emails from Guantanamo Bay.
There is something strangely enlightening about Ames’ drone. It’s almost judgement-less, allowing the listener to listen to the emails and receive them in a personal, individual, way—as if they were sent to you from someone you knew.
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Former Army reservist Lynndie England, the international face of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, is suing her biographer for seizing control of what was intended to be a shared copyright. In July, writer Gary S. Winkler abruptly resigned from the limited liability corporation established to handle finances and formed his own.
“All these people would be sitting in their cells doing nothing,” said Kay Allison, 78, the program’s director and owner of Quest Bookshop in downtown Charlottesville. Officials, she contends, “are not looking long-term.”
The Virginia Department of Corrections closes books for prisoners non-profit.
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21-year-old student Jesse Graves started putting up graffiti to promote environmental awareness nearly two years ago, and has never been harassed or arrested. Many of his pieces remain intact on walls around the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus.
Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff calls the former VP a “Sith Lord” and then takes him to the mat:
...more“Driving along the fence line and seeing the Cuban flags and watchtowers, I was struck by the relative peace and quiet that both sides maintain at the one spot where they deal with each other most. In a way, when flag officers and staff from both sides meet each month at the base’s east gate, they continue a long history of pragmatic if ambivalent engagement that started well before Guantanamo became the nightmarish Gitmo.”
Don’t just close Gitmo.
...moreMixing up your OLC memos? Can’t keep your enhanced interrogations straight? Foreign Policy, which not too long ago implemented a generally improved web redesign, has this very useful (and terrifying) timeline of torture.
...more“When it comes to torture, it is not what we did but what we are doing. It is not what happened but what is happening and what will happen. In our politics, torture is not about whether or not our polity can ‘let the past be past’—whether or not we can ‘get beyond it and look forward.’”
Mark Danner on The Red Cross Torture Report.
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“After he was captured in 2001, fighting alongside Taliban forces in Afghanistan, John Walker Lindh became the most hated man in America. He was beaten, vilified, and then—in a strange plea bargain orchestrated by the U.S. government—sentenced to twenty years in a federal prison.
David Rees’ collected Get Your War On is out. It’s actually been out since November, how did we miss this? Check out a new mini-review on Boingboing. Purchase from Powell’s.
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Last week Pennsylvania judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. plead guilty to illegally prosecuting minors, in order to get kickbacks from privately-run juvenile detention centers. Children were sentenced to three months incarceration for making fun of their teachers on MySpace. The judge had closed down a public detention facility in order to make way for his private business partners, underscoring the danger of adding a profit motive to punishment.
WWJD (What Will Jack (Bauer) Do)?
During the presidential campaign, many people worried that a president Obama wouldn’t be able to create new jobs. But I don’t think anyone ever envisioned that in one of his first acts in office he’d actually give the ax to an entire industry.
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Coffee linked to lower dementia risk.
In an effort to strangle San Francisco’s tourist industry, the House GOP suggests transferring Guantanamo prisoners to Alcatraz. (via Angela)
Build your own squid.
The Paris Review interview with Truman Capote.
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Until last night Muntader al-Zaidi, the reporter who threw a shoe at President Bush, had not been allowed visitors for almost a month. There was evidence that he had been beaten and tortured by the security detail of Iraqi prime minister Maliki.
Jack Bauer, that torturing hunk of manliness whose bad days involve more nuclear weapons and sexy double agents than hangovers and parking tickets is back
This interview with Lynndie England adds a layer to Standard Operating Procedure. From the London Guardian: “I’m glad I’m on medication.” …read more
“If the United States could lock up German soldiers during World War II without trying them criminally, why should it not have the same option for al Qaeda fighters?” A forum on what to do with detainees.
From Ross Douthat: “I keep waiting, I think, for somebody else to write a piece about the subject that eloquently captures my own inarticulate mix of anger, uncertainty and guilt about the Bush Administration’s interrogation policy, so that I can just point to their argument and say go read that.
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“What do you expect? We’ve got a major economic problem and I’m the president during the major economic problem. I mean, do people approve of the economy? No. I don’t approve of the economy. … I’ve been a wartime president. I’ve dealt with two economic recessions now.
From Al Jazeera English: An Iraqi journalist arrested after throwing his shoes at the US president has been tortured during his detention, his brother has said. Muntazer al-Zaidi, who called George Bush ”a dog” during his attack, was beaten by security guards after his arrest, Durgham al-Zaidi told Al Jazeera on Tuesday.
From Frieze Magazine: “As reported by the BBC, the Guardian, the Associated Press, Newsweek, The Nation, Mother Jones, SPIN and others (while mocked by right-wing columnists from the Chicago Tribune and The New York Sun), Western pop music has been employed to disorient, ‘prolong capture shock’ and ‘break’ detainees into confession, often through a strategic mixture of high volume, repetition and cultural offensiveness.
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The Miami Herald is for sale.
The Tribune Company is broke.
The Huffington Post is expanding into San Francisco.
Despite the fact that the Wall Street Journal isn’t very good anymore, Newsweek says Rupert Murdoch is saving it.
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