The Beagle Blog

Have the Phone Lines Been Cut?

The New Iraq revealed itself again last week, white-hot and glowing, this time as an American-made House of Horrors, with the darkened outline of Abu Ghraib prison shamefully flickering amidst the thunder and lightning of a country already wickedly incandescent with violence.

Stateside, the oral oscillations by the torturers' superiors were as rife and as marked as the martial pulsations that continued to punish Iraq for resisting the American occupation. The verbal landscape of the Bush administration took huge swings between truth and reversion:

Bush only recently learned of these heinous acts through viewing the pornographic keepsakes belonging America's Far Less Than Finest. Bush and Rumsfled were clearly apprized of the torture and rape of Iraqis in late January.

Bush traveled halfway round the world to (you must understand) publicly apologize to Iraq. Bush apologized in private to a third party.

Bush proclaimed that torture and degrading sadism was "not the American way." It is.

Rumsfeld averred that words about ill-treatment weren't enough to alert him, he needed pictures. To his everlasting embarrassment, no one questioned that.

It's all a shaking, shuddering mess on both sides of the world. And no wonder: Rumsfeld and Myers forgot and left the paper specifying Abu Ghraib's chain of command back at the office. Under, perhaps, a pile of brass knucks, pay stubs, and electrodes? Worse, the Abu Ghraib prison has no plans to close. Thus, officially no one knows who's in charge and it's full speed ahead.

America is shamed before itself and the world as its network of torture houses from Cuba to Afghanistan comes to light. Remember the abbreviation Gitmo for Guantanamo, the no-rights limbo? Gulag offers a more accurately descriptive guttural for the extra-legal torture camp that served as the model for the Iraqi House of Horror. Homocides at the Baghram Airport facility, batterings at Camp Bucca, the transfer of detainees to countries like Egypt and Jordan that unabashedly practice torture, the sun never sets. . . on the American way.

Placing yourself beyond the law, but especially beyond the laws of fundamental morality, pulls you down to a profoundly low level. America is in a deep ethical hole. How about let's cover it up?

Take a look here and feel the eerie silence of a totally controlled America.

Rumsfled protests that it was illegal to reveal those debauched photos (it was a military family that tipped off the original whistleblowers, 60 Minutes II). It looks like he'll be stopping any more potential illegal acts (of exposing egregious American injustice) by isolating the troops before they reveal further the moral wasteland this administration has successfully sought to achieve in Iraq and America.

Keep those cards and letters coming? Sorry, the whole system is down. Calls for justice are illegal and cannot be completed at this time.

Verse

The Waters of Babylon

In Tennessee a stream
Low and winter-small
Braiding with stones and light
Goes by unnoticed slowly to the lake below.

Twelve years old, standing, slamming
On the rare thick ice in the winter woods
Beyond my home, to make it flow
Small, moving water trapped in the winter tightened ice

I brought it up by my heels
Then go the short, shoe-wet distance home
Warm, welcome dinner, o mother, father
O where do the waters of Babylon flow?

The War We Really Lost

The debacle of Iraq darkly occludes the less mentioned slippage of the stalemate in Afghanistan back into tribalism, Taliban, and narco-economy. And though both wars have produced dubious claims of victory, nothing certain has been accomplished and nothing lasting so far achieved. But it is the loss of the big war, the War for Oil (and natural gas), that is the resounding defeat for the U.S.

Limited supplies and increased global demand are the long understood geophysical and economic commonplaces that are so poorly hidden in the neo-conservative manifestos that trumpeted power and domination in pathetically altruistic terms.

A cynic has said of Iraq that it was our oil under their sand which impelled the rash and the covetous into an illegal war, even as they venally used the sacrificial proxy of our finest sons and daughters to make the grab. The lesson of Iraq and of Afghanistan: American military might and foreign energy resources are a volatile mix, just as native sand and the native oil under it are joined persuasively in rights held by the property holders. It's called nationhood. Other people's resources are their own. Stealing them is called neoconservatism. Failing to steal them now has the same name. Typical of the mentally over-swollen, the Napoleonic neocons never had a Plan B.

Denmark whirls away at twenty percent wind power. And America? Americans have had a long standing order from the War President to get out and shop more. However, today Americans have been advised to get out of Saudi Arabia, en masse, for fear of their lives.

America has lost its superficial and wasteful way of life in these two wars. Oil shortages have already started and there's nothing cyclical about it. The graph of oil resources has a linear trajectory heading down toward zero. And no program other than the failed oil-grab (and the Hydrogen Car) has ever been mentioned by the two unelected oil men.

A Venezuelan war for oil would fare no better than the Iraqi one, for the world in general is wising up to flim-flam men like Cheney who offer nothing but demand heart's blood and national treasure. While at Halliburton, Cheney was an enthusiastic proponent for easing trade restrictions imposed on Azerbaijan and Iraq for their human rights abuses. It was part of Plan A, the only plan they've ever offered: Blood for Oil.

The sword and cross has fared no better than the hammer and sickle. A U.S.-Russian partnership for (their) oil will finally be talked up when the U.S. realizes colonial control of the Middle East is a discredited and expired option. But these are the two empires that have died fighting each other and their own internal dysfunctions. Moreover, both empires have devolved into shambling plutocracies, and reviving either alone would take honest work and clearer economic and political communication within their crumbled structures. Not mergers or big deals. And not global thievery or another collusion of raw power such as we have woefully witnessed in the U.S.-U.K. assault in the Middle East. There's nowhere to turn but self-reliance, a word today as foreign as oil.

America is running on empty ideas and nearly empty tanks. What Rumsfeld and his empire engineers have failed at is mind-boggling: they have been turned away from the Gas Pumps of the World. The one big idea of the neocons (make war not energy) is dead. For lack of any other, consequently so is America's frenetic getting and spending, and the driving to do it.

It is now left for us to make peace and merge with, in as gentlemanly a fashion as can be mustered, the billions of the world's people who live on less than two dollars a day. And establish, in the final array, some real justice.

Gentlemen, start your SUVs! (A horrible metallic grinding, a coughing and sputtering, then silence). Gentlemen?

It's A Round World After All

While the Bush scientific team insists the world is ecologically agreeable and about six thousand years old, at the same time their international affairs diviners conjure up a world as flat as a Bresinski chessboard. In that ante-diluvian scheme, the world belongs to the hardest hitting, most aggressive player. Reconcilliation and compromise are as out of date as evolution and the greenhouse effect.

But concerning the age of the world, I can assure you that millennia more than six are needed to explain or excuse the political and moral perfidy of just four years of the Bush administration. Rest equally assured, the real shape of the world is not, of itself, a might makes right, two-dimensional desert. As you were always taught, the world is as orbicular as an archery target or Olympics logo, and change is always possible.

While this commonplace of geography may be lost on the night-filled astrologers at the Bob Jones and Liberty University joint observatories, what wakes me up is the historical shape the Bush administration has left the world in. Their best roadmaps could have been drawn by MC Escher:  Endless war, endless fiscal corruption, endless war, endless fiscal corruption. Etc.

Today three bombs exploded in Athens, where the Summer Olympics will begin soon. The 1972 siege at the Munich Olympics in which eleven Israeli athletes were murdered by Palestinian terrorists is wrenched back into memory. It was a brutal, world-staining event.

Thank goodness that thirty-two years later, the Israeli-Palestinian problem has been long ago wisely and amicably solved. Or as we should more pragmatically observe, the Greek government has felt compelled to spend $1200 million on security for the first games to be held since 911. That's enough money to hire some less encumbered scientists and ethicists for the world at large and for the Bush administration in particular, but the political will to change is lacking. It's frozen in 1972.

True enough, old theories produce predictable results. Violence gets violence is one of those. And bad theories induce ruin. Might makes right is one of those.

Problems ignored persist, even while they may take strange new shapes. Justice for Palestine is one of those.

The world is round, but not it's spinning. The silence created is ominous, and familiar. In Tel Aviv, in New York, in Baghdad and in Athens, once again before the storm, the moored world waits.

In politics, in society, in science, where progress is the villain, the future is the victim.

But change is always possible, and when the victim is the future, the solutions are in the present.

So it's a round world, after all. It's just stuck.

Postcards From Hell

We know which country these postcards are coming from, but look closely at that last plea for help. Does the blood-stained postmark say Abu Ghraib prison or, perhaps, Camp Bucca?

Oh, there's always been a few misunderstandings between the Iraqi tortured and their American torturers, like the colonel who got in a public relations mess last month concerning the throwing of a man to his death from a bridge.

That was an out of the way, al fresco killing, not part of the brick and mortar New Iraq gulags. In Iraq, it generally appears the permanent dungeons and torture shops they're (re)building are professionally run by a dangerous network of moral cave-dwellers and dead-enders. Small world. After the American-led rebuilding of Iraq, Dante wouldn't need a map. He'd be giving them out.

Daylight and What the Ruins Show

Despite the best efforts of an ossified and conniving corporate media (Fox, CNN, you know I mean you), all the slippery cards are now face up on the table. And the table is in the center of the plaza. And the plaza is lit in brightest daylight.

The flim-flam "War on Terror" has been convincingly revealed to be no more than a contrived, cynical policy designed to bring the Middle East to its political and economic knees. At this late date, if you need to know more, press absolutely any button on your browser.

The house of Bush is busted. But what do you win?

Andrew Greeley in the April 30, 2004 Chicago Sun-Times sums it all up, but more importantly gives the pay off: "Americans who support the war share in its criminality." CST

So here we are, busted in tawdry Vegas, which never looks worse than in empty-handed daylight. And there's still the bill to pay. It gets worse. Starting today, there's an extra penalty for those who still claim or feign ignorance.

Nightline's All-American Morgue - Too Mature?

Call me sentimental, but as I look back at this invasion and pick and choose photos for my own Book of the Dead, I get most depressed about the slaughtered children. Whether by cluster bomb or checkpoint machine gun, the young have suffered and died like there is no God, except maybe an Old Testament divinity like that radical disciplinarian and plague-giver Yahweh. Could this be Bush’s own model for retributive and collective justice? It seems so. That stern God’s heaviest season in epochs, he’s been busy dividing the sodomy from the torture at America’s Gothic reconstruction effort, the blood-spattered Abu Ghraib prison. Unfortunately, old Yahweh hasn’t been able to keep his eye on all the children for all the adult mayhem going on. A little more justice on the ground is in order, but the wielders of twenty-first century might are still ruling there recklessly, and the children, our and theirs, are still dying.

Bush’s army (and ours) has brought obituary-making justice to nearly a thousand inhabitants of Fallujah--some of them armed combatants but many of them helpless children. None of these fallen appeared on Nightline’s bittersweet photographic elegy. However, the retributive justice now at work in Fallujah and elsewhere makes the pseudo-ethical guarantee that more violence is certainly just around the corner. In particular, the chaotic urban “justice” now in play is saying yes to volumes more confused violence. “Let no fountain be dry!” in the midst of their own intractable droughts, those old Gods said. But then why does it keep raining pictures of the dead? “Bring ‘em on!” and “Stay the course!” some moral Simpleton says.

When old Yahweh said Abraham give me your son, he was really only kidding. It was a loyalty contest and false-gods ratings war that only an Old Testament divinity could appreciate. But when Bush says give me your sons and daughters, he keeps the knife in his hands-–and theirs. As has been made clear (to the point of moral clarity?), this administration's own version of a loyalty contest is also a "for us or against us" proposition. Cluster bombs, civilian-flooded hospitals and morgues and all. I guess even the Iraqi children are against us?

Call me ecumenical, but the current rules for photo memorials on illegal wars should be neo-liberalized. For once, let’s take all the time and all the space we need to grasp what’s really happening to all of humanity in Iraq. Thus, persons of any nationality or any age may qualify (with exceptions that follow). To win you simply have to be killed. To place you must either kill others, be wounded yourself, or wound others. Thus the harmed and the harmful are represented as the fundamentally inseparable elements of war, which is the case. As in old Yahweh's version, there's a place for children like Abraham’s son, the sacrificial altar, but more truthfully urbanized into the cities-wide shambles Iraq has become. Lest the cynical conclude Bush's new version of endless justice is just godless war and carnage, kindly refer to his own musing that in these trials he "was chosen by God." As in all contests of this sort, friends and family members of the chosen won't be participating. Federal office holders and all their sons and daughters are exempt. Finally, minorities are encouraged to apply. As even a cursory look at Nightline’s sorrowful pantheon shows, their participation has been outrageously disproportionate to the public acknowledgment their deaths
have so far been given. Wolfowitz himself is several hundred sympathy cards behind.

Nightline announced only the first seven hundred adult American winners Friday night. But, if we finally face the detestable facts, the international version of this contest has involved so many first place winners (hundreds of young and once-tender children included) that thousands of the foreign-born dead, the traumatized and the maimed were unable even to be mentioned on Nightline's funereal special. Amazingly, not one child was represented except by the misled young men and women who killed them as they themselves were killed. Isn’t it time to correct the record and stop this horrifying circle of violence? As amazingly, some think not.

Breaking a few eggs in making come true the modest proposal for a New Iraq as an oil-pumping, democratic, Christian-leaning New Jerusalem New Mecca has had minor setbacks for its American neoliberal chefs and their keep-it clean media helpers. For one thing, there's just not been enough space on the cake to credit all the posthumous contributors, many of whom never lived long enough for their names to be entered in the Book of the Living or a photograph of them to be taken, except in death. But as we light the candle on the New Iraq's first birthday cake, a future pregnant with opportunities to make up for past missed ones is revealing itself: John Kerry, The New York Times, John McCain, Ted Kennedy, and even two minor prophets, Thomas Friedman and David Kay, demand that the killing contest be expanded. Britain says so, too, and plans to send another four thousand soldiers into the whirlwind. The old gods must be smiling.

Nightline's all-American photo morgue was a grim and patriotic start, but the current decimation of our best soldiers and of hapless civilians in Fallujah, including innocent young ones, begs the question: Isn't it about time we started thinking about the children? Ours, most just old enough to fight, and theirs, just old enough to die?

Shock and Awe: Now in Triple X

A picture reprinted from The New Yorker, which also reports that videos of these atrocities have been seized. The subjects were forced to pose having oral sex. In another photo, they were forced to masturbate in front of a female soldier. Contrary to the least laws of humanity, of Chrisitianity, and of Islam, these abominations are representative of numerous other reprehensible acts committed against helpless Iraqi prisoners of war.

The Department of Defense (the place behind the blue drapes which slips Barbara Starr and Jamie McIntyre their pathetic talking points) bears responsibility.

Is Rumsfeld a pornographer? You bet. His Shock and Awe snuff films had a cast of thousands, and the survivors got these S & M parts. All in all, an epic tale, wouldn't you say? I see what Richard Perle meant when he said, as epically: "If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war . . . our children will sing great songs about us years from now." Is war hell? No, war is filth. Hell is for heroes of the likes of Rumsfeld and Perle.

If the top positions at the Department of Defense are not all cleared out by Monday morning, it simply means the DVD is coming out soon. Military discounts will apply. What the hell is this:

George W(hite) Bush - Call Him Abuna

George W. Bush, April 30, 2004 Press Conference:

". . . there's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren't necessarily – are a different color than white can self-govern."

Not the same as "ours"? Can you say that in a way Latinos and Blacks and Asian Americans can understand?

Bush should be red-faced about his patronizing, assumtive racism, but saying that would definitely insult Native Americans, whose certainly must be relieved that their skin color "is not the same as ours."

And who are these "lots of people" that doubt old darkie can really pass muster? Bush's Yahwehist base? The State of Florida, Division of Elections? The Bob Jones Glee Club? Trent Lott? Certainly, not whites in general. Certainly, no one in the modern world. So who have you been hanging out with, Bwana?

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"Bwana":   (E Afr) often used as a form of address or respect:   master. Etymology:   19c, Swahili, ultimately from Arabic abuna, our father.