War Is A Dirty Business

I guess it's a good thing that our country is already viewed as vile and corrupt in the Middle East. I'd hate to think that the behavior of our interrogators was changing opinions for the worse. According to Maureen Dowd's preview of a pending book by a former army sergeant...

A female military interrogator who wanted to turn up the heat on a 21-year-old Saudi detainee who allegedly had taken flying lessons in Arizona before 9/11 removed her uniform top to expose a snug T-shirt. She began belittling the prisoner - who was praying with his eyes closed - as she touched her breasts, rubbed them against the Saudi's back and commented on his apparent erection.

After the prisoner spat in her face, she left the room to ask a Muslim linguist how she could break the prisoner's reliance on God. The linguist suggested she tell the prisoner that she was menstruating, touch him, and then shut off the water in his cell so he couldn't wash.

"The concept was to make the detainee feel that after talking to her he was unclean and was unable to go before his God in prayer and gain strength," Mr. Saar recounted, adding: "She then started to place her hands in her pants as she walked behind the detainee. As she circled around him he could see that she was taking her hand out of her pants. When it became visible the detainee saw what appeared to be red blood on her hand. She said, 'Who sent you to Arizona?' He then glared at her with a piercing look of hatred. She then wiped the red ink on his face. He shouted at the top of his lungs, spat at her and lunged forward," breaking out of an ankle shackle.

"He began to cry like a baby," the author wrote, adding that the interrogator's parting shot was: "Have a fun night in your cell without any water to clean yourself."

Orwell's 1984 retold and set in America 2014

This sounds like a really interesting book. In America 2014, Dawn Blair tells the story of Winston Smith and a nightmare America ten years in our future. George W. Bush (here Blush) is in his fourth term as President and the United States are now known as God's United States.

Picture a totalitarian United States just ten years from now: With no end in sight to the War on Terror, a fourth-term President George Blush rules without restraint. The Constitution has been replaced with a “Patriotic Citizen’s Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” and America has been renamed “God’s United States.” The Blush Administration has finally “freed” America of its “treasonous” opposition party, “subversive” media and “obstructionist” judges.

In this starkly terrifying political thriller, Winston Smith is a young, successful producer of patriotic commercials for the Department of Homeland Security. While working to fulfill his dream of making a contemporary film version of 1984, he runs afoul of government censors, is forced to stand trial in a nightmarish courtroom, and faces brutal execution in a privatized prison. Rescued by a mysterious, powerful young woman and a band of teenaged computer hackers, he joins the Resistance and becomes swept up in a deadly struggle to undermine his government’s stranglehold on power and information.

As it conjures up a frightening--and highly controversial--vision of the future, Dawn Blair's gripping novel of American dystopia lays bare the most incendiary political issues of the present day.

The link contains an excerpt of the book and the new Patriotic Citizens Bill of Rights and Responsibilities (Passed by Congress and Ratified in 2009). I'll be looking for this one at my local library.

Policies of Fear

A somewhat interesting article in the Washington Post, illustrates how the administration kept people in a state of fear in the months leading up to last November's election. Now, magically, the dangers have all gone away. Maybe John Ashcroft was right. Maybe the objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved.

In April, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced that al Qaeda terrorists might strike during this week's presidential inauguration festivities in Washington. The warning was part of a drumbeat sounded by U.S. officials throughout 2004 that terrorists were seeking to launch attacks both during and after the election season.

Nine months later, the threat level has been lowered, and Ridge, speaking at a news conference last week, said there is no evidence of a plot to disrupt President Bush's inauguration. Previous warnings, Ridge explained, stemmed from threat reports tied to the elections -- not to the inauguration more than two months later.

"There is nothing that we've seen, not just today, but over the period of the preceding several weeks, that gives us any reason to even consider, at this point, raising the threat level," Ridge said.

When are people going to start holding this administration accountable for making blatantly false statements to further their agenda?

Miscarriage of Justice?

According to the website for Howard Dean backers in Virginia, a new proposed law will make it a criminal offense for a woman to have a miscarriage and not report it to the police within twelve hours.

"When a fetal death occurs without medical attendance, it shall be the woman's responsibility to report the death to the law-enforcement agency in the jurisdiction of which the delivery occurs within 12 hours after the delivery. A violation of this section shall be punishable as a Class 1 misdemeanor."

The “report of fetal death” asks for the woman’s full name, her history of prenatal care, her marital status, her education history, her previous deliveries (if any), and a number of other very intrusive data items.

The actual list of required information is about thirty bullet points in the article. If you want to see the text of the actual proposal click here.

At this rate, masturbating will be a federal crime by 2015.

Representative Robert T. Matsui, 63, Dies

From the "Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get me" department.

House Representative Robert T. Matsui, a California Democrat, died due to pneumonia linked to a rare bone-marrow disease, myelodysplastic disorder.

Mr. Matsui was the third-ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee and the ranking Democrat on the Social Security Subcommittee. He was a fierce opponent of the creation of private savings accounts in the Social Security system, an effort that President Bush has said will be a centerpiece of his second term.

Now I'm not suggesting that the Bushes are actually having people killed now. But I may be suggesting Karl Rove is.

Jerry Orbach, 1935-2004

What a drag. Even though I never watched Law and Order I remember Jerry Orbach from other stuff like F/X. I really liked him a lot. You can forgive him for Dirty Dancing and A Gnome Named Gnorm.

Jerry Orbach, who won fame on the New York stage as one of the last bona fide leading men of the Broadway musical and global celebrity on television as a New York detective on NBC's "Law & Order," died on Tuesday night. He was 69.

Mr. Orbach died at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, a hospital spokeswoman said.

The cause was prostate cancer, his manager, Robert Malcolm, said.

In performances that spanned a half century, the Bronx-born Mr. Orbach came to embody two beloved New York archetypes: the musical matinee idol, to which he gave a refreshingly modern spin with his rugged and idiosyncratic persona, and the shrewd, irascible cop, a role he honed to a razor's edge as Detective Lennie Briscoe on "Law & Order."