Perhaps you remember George Bush and Tony Blair used to get mad at Al Jazeera for broadcasting tapes of bin Laden, on the grounds the tapes might include secret messages for his minions.

In light of that, here’s an interesting slice of 1953 history from Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. The “Roosevelt” it refers to is Kermit Roosevelt (grandson of Teddy). He’d been sent to Iran by the CIA in order to organize the overthrow of the democratically-elected Mossadegh government:

Roosevelt told the Shah that he was in Iran on behalf of the American and British secret services, and that this would be confirmed by a code word the Shah would be able to hear on the BBC the next night. Churchill had arranged that the BBC would end its broadcast day by saying not “It is now midnight,” as usual, but “It is now exactly midnight.”

This makes me wonder two things:

1. When reporting on the Bush/Blair complaints, did the BBC mention this part of its own history—i.e., happily facilitating the overthrow of a government in a Muslim country?

2. Is the BBC still doing this kind of thing?

EXTRA CREDIT: In the run up to the invasion of Iraq, Andrew Sullivan liked to call the BBC the “Baghdad Broadcasting Company” because it was “actively cooperating with Saddam.”

An old friend of mine, who spent some time in a mental hospital because of some drug issues as a teenager, said something a long time ago that’s reverberating in my head today: The thing about nuthouses is, if you’re not crazy when you go in, you are when you come out.

Last month, the military was telling us that the hunger strike at Guantánamo was diminishing, that it had peaked on September 11 last hear, when 131 prisoners were refusing food, and was now down to only 22 prisoners. They didn’t know why most prisoners had stopped refusing to eat. According to today’s New York Times, the number of hunger strikers is now down to only four. But there’s a good reason for that. Eating is not exactly voluntary. Guards have begun strapping detainees into "restraint chairs" like the one pictured to the left, using riot-control soldiers to keep them still (no details on that), and forcing long plastic tubes  down their nasal passages and into their stomachs. The tubes are inserted and removed so violently that prisoners bleed and pass out. Too much food is put in the tubes, which causes prisoners to defecate on themselves.

If you’re strapped into a "padded cell on wheels," while a tube is forced down your nose, that means you’re no longer refusing meals.

A spokesman for the prison said that the force-feeding was carried out "in a humane and compassionate manner." I think that might just trump Duncan Hunter’s Guantánamo menu recital for the most absurd thing ever said about the treatment of prisoners. Yes, we abuse people, but we do it nicely.

After you read the NYT article, to put it in context, go read the series on Guantánamo in the current National Journal. It’s been obvious for a long time that many of the people caught up in the American gulag, or farmed out to its subsidiaries, were not monsters determined to kill Americans, but ordinary people — victims of mistaken identity or vendettas, people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, prisoners who were simply sold for substantial amounts of money, or even people whose names were coughed up by others under torture. What wasn’t clear is how common these gross errors were.

Corine Hegland’s articles make the matter somewhat clearer. Analyzing 132 government files on prisoners who have filed habaes corpus petitions, and heavily redacted transcripts of 314 tribunals for Guantánamo prisoners, she found that fewer than half were even accused of fighting against the United States or its allies, and that fewer than 20 percent have ever been al-Qaeda members. Only 8 men were  tied to plans for terrorist attacks outside of Afghanistan. Eight. And two of those eight were released, and face no charges at home.

Any error that costs someone his freedom is unacceptable, but this isn’t a matter of a few rare errors. It looks like the innocent, lacking guile and connections, are more likely to be imprisoned than the guilty.

This is insane: A 17-year-old Yemeni teacher, Farouq Ali Ahmed, working in Afghanistan, is warned to get out of the country quickly, because it is no longer a safe place for Arabs. He escapes to Pakistan, without stopping in Kabul to pick up his passport. In Pakistan, he’s handed over to American forces. Being a foreigner without a passport is all the reason needed to send him to Guantánamo. Once he’s there, another prisoner swears he saw him at Osama bin Laden’s private airport, toting an AK-47. That other prisoner seems to make a habit of lying about Yemeni prisoners. He’s claimed to have seen many of them in places they could not possibly have been. But his word — and the fact that, under torture, Mohamed al-Kahtani pointed to Farouq’s picture — is enough to keep the now 22-year-old prisoner at Guantánamo.

The "evidence" against other prisoners is equally ludicrous. A sarcastic "OK, I saw bin Laden five times" at the end of a long interrogation turns up as an admission of guilt. Wearing a model of watch that has a circuit board that has been used for bombs serves as evidence against nine prisoners. Never mind that the watch is sold all over the world. Wear a Casio? Welcome to the gulag.

Suicide looks like a rational response to this nightmare.

In addition to the information about the prisoners, the article told me something intriguing about the lawyers who represent them. It’s not surprising: Initially, they assumed their prospective clients were guilty. They took cases because they believed in due process. Even monsters are entitled to their day in court. What they have learned about those prisoners gave them a deeper understanding of the importance of their work. If monsters aren’t entitled to all the benefits of the law, it becomes very, very easy to deny those benefits to the innocent as well. And unless the law is allowed to work its magic, there’s no way to know the difference. It’s not theory any more.

If we’ve learned anything over the past five years, it ought to be that the importance of due process isn’t just a nice thought for good times. The fact that in its absence the innocent will suffer is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt by what has happened at Guantánamo and other military detention sites. And now it should be obvious to anyone paying attention that the lack of due process has nothing to do with the nature of the detainees, but the nature of the people who are holding them. Detainees’ lawyers are convinced that the abuse of the hunger strikers is a direct result of the Graham amendment, which cuts prisoners off from access to the courts.

They do this, and God only knows what else, because they know they can.

During my little experiment with comments last week, I noticed this post in a thread about the Toles cartoon:

SP4 Tomas V. Young (Ret) Says:

As a veteran of the war in Iraq who knows a thing or two about “traumatic and life-altering injuries” although not to the point of the soldier depicted in the cartoon (I was lucky enough to only be paralyzed from the chest down.) I can safely say that the cartoon was far less offensive than the unfortunate accidents I have when the external catheter I wear for when the bladder I can no longer control decides to “function” or the hours of frustration I get when I try to make love to my wife and none of the options presented to us have worked. And it certainly is not as offensive as hearing the pro war/anti-cartoon crowd say that I shouldn’t “whine” about my situation because I volunteered and that sounds to me like they are saying that I got what I deserved. So take what they say with a very large grain of salt, they have no idea about how veterans with traumatic injuries feel, because if they did they would do best to use this cartoon in their new laugh therapy program.

In an email, reprinted here with permission, the author elaborates:

I want to start off by saying that I am not whining. I am merely talking about all the things I deal with everyday. I know that I volunteered and I have to live with that. But I want you to know that I volunteered to go to where the all evidence told me to go which was pretty much every other middle eastern country that wasn’t Iraq (that’s the conservative disclaimer.) And I still support armed action against those countries, although not as much now as it’s safe to say our armed action has been spread wafer thin (that one’s for the liberals.) But this business with the cartoon needed the opinion of a so-called “traumatically life-altering” injuries, although thankfully not as seriously as the strip portrayed.

Being a paralyzed veteran of a war that our own president has admitted was started on false terms I have alot to be upset about. Not only do I have to deal with the injury itself and the physical limitations that come with it but I get a cool sidekick called PTSD that leaves me jumpy, unreasonably angry at times, and equally unreasonably depressed and on top of that I get to have great memories of what it was like to walk but the equally great memories of the friends I had that did not make it back from the land of sand (I know it may be hard to read in print but those are sarcastically “great” memories.) I go through things that constantly make me feel shitty and I look for every little bit of humor I can squeeze out of a life that now offers little. Saying this I laughed my ass off at the caroon an in fact it is the background for my desktop. I am more offended at the fact that I received these injuries in a unarmored open air truck and although I can’t speak for anyone else I’d be willing to bet I’m not the only “traumatically life altered” veteran who thinks so.

Tomas specifically asked me to include his email address, which is Tomasyoung8@aol.com, and to mention that he’ll be on 60 Minutes this coming Sunday. There’s a long interview with him here.

Tristero at Hullaballo articulates something I’ve been grappling with pretty much my entire career:

The objects of satire are often - always? - respected authority figures or ideas within the culture of the satirist. WITHIN the culture, not OUTSIDE the culture. Even in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, the object of satire is not really the third world country to which Bill Boot has been booted by an editor who confused two Boots. It’s the British press’s hopeless, corrupt reporting from such countries. The satire was directed directly at institutions that were part and parcel of Waugh’s upper class British Twitworld.

In contrast, as I see it, Islam is not part of mainstream Danish culture. Mohammed has no genuine cultural authority the way, say, the royal family might. To call the cartoons satire, therefore, seems to me inaccurate. It’s simply ridicule, and ridicule of a figure from a culture that, from within Denmark - the satirizing culture - is Other. Danes are heaping scorn and humiliation on someone’s religion, someone who is not Us. Someone who doesn’t look like us, doesn’t act like us, doesn’t think like us, isn’t as rich as us. And just can’t be us.

And this is why so many right wingers have suddenly become free speech absolutists on the issue of the Danish cartoons. Right wingers hate satire, but they love ridicule.