And an almost real one, but inland: this story from Fallujah:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1387460,00.html
will also sadden anyone.
Doug
On 9-Jan-05, at 8:15 PM, Stephen Vincent wrote:
> A therapist friend - speaking of clients - calls January "the trough."
> I am
> afraid this country, this USA is in it deep. I am not sure when
> disgust will
> roar into rage and "Bush-As-Normal" is going to be history or what.
> But the
> revelations - below in Newsweek - at so-called "Gitmo" & the
> Pentagon-White
> House league of Perpetrators are off the hook. This ain't Poetry.
> Poe's Rats
> are definitely running the Pit. And the Senate is going to confirm
> Gonzales!
> This is sick, sickening. This sanctioned "internal terrorism", I am
> afraid,
> will do nothing but destroy this country.
> **
>
> Alberto Gonzales will likely be confirmed. But that won't stop the
> widening
> scandal over Gitmo detainees
>
> By Michael Isikoff
> Newsweek
> Jan. 17 issue - Ibraham Al Qosi's stories seemed fairly outlandish
> when they
> first surfaced last fall. In a lawsuit, Al Qosi, a Sudanese accountant
> apprehended after 9/11 on suspicions of ties to Al Qaeda, charged that
> he
> and other detainees at Guantanamo Bay had been subjected to bizarre
> forms of
> humiliation and abuse by U.S. military inquisitors. Al Qosi claimed
> they
> were strapped to the floor in an interrogations center known as the
> Hell
> Room, wrapped in Israeli flags, taunted by female interrogators who
> rubbed
> their bodies against them in sexually suggestive ways, and left alone
> in
> refrigerated cells for hours with deafening music blaring in their
> ears.
> Back then, Pentagon officials dismissed Al Qosi's allegations as the
> fictional rantings of a hard-core terrorist.
>
> But in recent weeks a stack of declassified government documents has
> given
> new credence to many of the claims of abuse at Guantanamo. The
> documents are
> also raising fresh questions about the Bush administration's handling
> of
> detainees at a time when a prime architect of that policy, White House
> counsel Alberto Gonzales, is facing a Senate confirmation vote as the
> president's nominee to be attorney general.
>
> Many of the documents come from an unexpected source: the FBI. As part
> of a
> Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the American Civil
> Liberties
> Union, the bureau has released internal e-mails and correspondence
> recording
> what their own agents witnessed at Gitmo. Coupled with accounts from
> other
> agencies such as the Defense Intelligence Agency—also released as part
> of
> the FOIA lawsuit—the FBI reports amount to a powerful case that many
> of the
> scenes alleged by Al Qosi and other Gitmo detainees may actually have
> happened. (Al Qosi is still in Gitmo, facing charges before a military
> tribunal.) And the reports suggest that the interrogation scandal is
> not
> going away any time soon, even if Gonzales is confirmed, as expected.
>
> Many of the FBI accounts came from conscience-stricken agents troubled
> by
> what they had witnessed. One agent reported seeing a detainee sitting
> on the
> floor of an interrogation cell with an Israeli flag draped around him
> while
> he was bombarded by loud music and a strobe light—almost exactly what
> Al
> Qosi had alleged. Another reported seeing detainees chained hand and
> foot in
> fetal positions, in barren cells with no chair, food or water.
>
> Jan. 6: Alberto Gonzales blamed the abuses at Abu Ghraib on a lack of
> training and renegade prison guards, not the legal memos he wrote.
> NBC’s
> Pete Williams reports.
> In one account that seemed to parallel the sickening scenes from Abu
> Ghraib
> Prison in Iraq, an FBI agent reported the way in which a female U.S.
> Army
> sergeant sexually humiliated a shackled male prisoner during Ramadan
> and
> even "grabbed his genitals."
>
> Pentagon officials acknowledge that, frustrated by detainees' refusal
> to
> talk, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had approved "aggressive"
> interrogation techniques to be used at Gitmo. But last week, stunned
> by the
> new disclosures, Gen. Bantz Craddock, chief of the U.S. Southern
> Command—which runs Gitmo—ordered a full-scale inquiry into the FBI
> agents'
> allegations, which appear to go far beyond anything authorized.
> Craddock
> wants to know why allegations from seemingly credible government
> agents had
> not come to the U.S. military's attention sooner.
>
> After hearing of the FBI memos, NEWSWEEK has learned, Sens. Dianne
> Feinstein
> and Patrick Leahy fired off angry letters to FBI Director Robert
> Mueller
> demanding to know why he failed to disclose his own agents' complaints
> when
> they questioned him about Gitmo in a hearing last May. Feinstein last
> week
> called Mueller's evasive answers at the time "gobbledygook." When her
> comment was reported on NEWSWEEK's Web site, Mueller called Feinstein
> to
> express regret that he hadn't kept her better informed. As the
> inquiries
> continue, he may not be the only U.S. government official who has
> further
> explaining to do.
> © 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
>
>
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 Canada
(780) 436 3320
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
The poet is ecstatic, having dreamt of this visit for weeks.
He takes Erato’s face, dribbling and wild, between his hands
and kisses her gently as if she were a runaway teenager.
Diana Hartog
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