Frederick,

You are changing the subject again. The point, I think, was that you let me know that the "Islamic extremists" are my enemies, and Liz asked how you knew this? by divine injunction? and your response was, that they say so, and that one's kindness was irrelevant, to which Deborah replied, no it's not, and now you bring up an account of Iraqi torture. And I view this as no more than a technique of bringing up someone else's atrocity in order to evade one's own slight transgression. I have been involved in Amnesty International for nearly 20 years, and I'm all too familiar with accounts like this, but not merely in Iraq, in many countries that have been and are still US allies, for instance, a Kurd in Turkey does not fare any better in 'police custody.' But I take exception to your hiding behind these accounts. You presume to tell me who my enemies are, you presume that your evaluation of the situation overrides my evaluation of that same situation, as if you knew better than I who my enemies are, and, furthermore feel entitled to dismiss anyone's objections as irrelevant and useless 'good will' and 'feeling' and then offer this as proof? of what? except the evasions of  your thought?

Rebecca

Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com  

 -------Original Message-------
From: Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 04/04/03 03:06 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [Fwd: The Answer]

> 
> Deborah Russell wrote:
>
> No one's good-heartedness fairmindedness kind-feelings-towards anyone is
> irrelavent, no matter the circumstance.
>
> Deborah Russell


 Tom Newton Dunn for the BBC

                             Their faces stared up at me in black and
white, snap shots of individual lives frozen in time.

                    Dozens and dozens of Iraqi national identity cards
were spread across the chief of police's abandoned large oak desk.

                    All of them were men, aged between around 20 and 50
-- people's sons, husbands, brothers, or fathers.


                    In Saddam Hussein's Iraq, it is a crime not to carry
these identity cards wherever you go, a crime punishable by
imprisonment.

                    We stopped to think why these dozens of men did not
need their ID cards anymore.

                    A young Royal Marine found them in a large bundle
tied roughly with string during a search of Abu al Khasib's police
                    station on Tuesday afternoon, in one of the police
chief's bottom drawers gathering dust.

                    It almost looked like his own sick personal
collection ...

                    The commandos and I knew there was something strange
about the police station as we approached it.

                    Fortified by sand bags, the grim-looking two-story
concrete block was one of only two buildings in the town locals did not
                    want to go into to loot, along with the Baath
Party's abandoned local headquarters.

                    Neither did any of the small quiet crowd who had
gathered in the street to watch the men from Alpha Company force entry
into it want to tell us anything about it ...

                    Only after darkness fell did a man in his 30s
approach the gates of 40 Commando's new headquarters in an old Iraqi
army barracks on the town's outskirts.

                    Giving his name as Dofia Abdullah, and saying he had
important information, he said: "The Baath Party were bad people, they
used to hurt people inside the police station.

                    "You say bad words about Saddam, they take you in
there and you never come out ...

                    At almost the end of the long building's left
corridor, we found the first cell.

                    A damp, eight foot by four foot hole with no natural
or artificial light in it at all, and just a soiled pillow and filthy
blanket on the floor for furniture.

                    It was the first of six just like it, some bigger,
some even smaller, sealed by bolts from the outside attached to heavy
metal or steel cage doors, and all of them disgustingly filthy ...

                    In another cell, a meat hook hung from the ceiling,
and in another a discarded thick line of hose pipe sat idle on the
floor, with no water taps for it to attach to anywhere in sight.

                    Only one, the biggest, had the very roughest
approximation of a toilet in it, a squat hole in the ground that judging
by the dark, putrid grunge over-flowing from it had not been flushed
                    in months.

                    But the last room we saw upstairs, again at the end
of a corridor, initially left us totally bewildered.

                    Unlike every other room on the second floor, it was
empty, apart from two old rubber car tyres and a long electric cable
lead attached to the mains supply, and still live.

                    The room's likely purpose was explained later, after
we had asked around the Commando for a bit, by a Royal Marine officer
who had spent some time in the Balkans on UN service.

                    He said: "Two tyres and an electric cable is
something we came across a lot in Bosnia.

                    "The interrogator would stand on them while prodding
the captive with the live cable so his own feet were insulated from the
high voltage by the rubber ...

                    "Electrocution is not only incredibly painful, but
also very frightening, and the interrogators usually get more out of the
shock effect of it rather than the actual pain the burns cause."

                    The normally jovial and chatty troop of commandos
filed out and blocked the police station's doors in total silence.
>