THIS MODERN WORLD

From the blog of a reservist currently in Iraq:

Every contract on at least one of the Uber-Bases, since April 2006, has a “No Sex Slavery” section. This is actually required (Maybe as a late reponse to DynCorp abuses in other theatres, or more likely because of a different scandal that never hit the press). And it is not just a ‘Dude, I totally promise I won’t buy a sex slave while I am here’ but more than a page devoted to combating all the various loopholes by which one could acquire a sex slave under contract.

Follow the link to read the full boilerplate.

You might wish America weren’t a country that needed a Torture Awareness Month. But we are, and June is it:

June 26th is the date that the United Nations has marked as the International Day in Support of Survivors and Victims of Torture. This year a coalition of human rights, civil liberties and faith organizations have joined TASSC International, a leading survivors organization, in declaring June “Torture Awareness Month.” This awareness raising month is an effort to respond to the growing evidence that the United States government is engaging systematically in the use of torture and inhuman treatment as part of the “war on terror.”

Follow the link to TortureAwareness.org for lots more information, upcoming events and suggested action. People with blogs may also wish to visit Bloggers Against Torture and join up. Even the blog-less will find it has a fantastic round-up of blogosphere anti-torture writing.

(Via Nell of A Lovely Promise.)

“Anyone who expresses shock at the thought of U.S. Marines slaughtering women and children is just trying to score political points.”

Look, there are two options here. You’re either appalled by this, or you’re fucked in the head. End of story.

…remember, this is what we’re talking about:

At 5 p.m. Nov. 19, near the end of one of the most violent days the Marine Corps had experienced in the Upper Euphrates Valley, a call went out for trucks to collect the bodies of 24 Iraqi civilians.

The unit that arrived in the farming town of Haditha found babies, women and children shot in the head and chest. An old man in a wheelchair had been shot nine times. A group of girls, ages 1 to 14, lay dead. Everyone had been killed by gunfire, according to death certificates issued later.

That’s what right wingers are defending when they say, “insurgents often hide among the population,” or, more generally, “in wartime, shit happens.”

You think there were insurgents hiding behind the babies, or that group of little girls? You think shooting the old man in the wheelchair nine times was a necessary act of war?

Peter Daou has more, including this bit, which captures something I’ve been wanting to write about:

In their rush to ascribe malicious motives to anyone who draws attention to the horrors in Iraq, these people ignore the obvious, i.e. that the greater the aberration, the more newsworthy, not the less. In other words, it’s because the war’s critics have faith in the character of our troops and our nation that they are so deeply troubled by such grotesque deviations from the norm. It is the war’s critics, not its blind supporters, who assume the best about our military and who harp on stories like Haditha because it is contrary to everything they believe about America. The contrast is stark between those who rise in condemnation and those who shrug off a few slaughtered women and children.

My friend Paul Bass, who has been covering Joe Lieberman for a very long time, has some thoughts on the Lieberman/Lamont race:

Lieberman understands how, in campaigns, you can make people forget all that. You can change the subject by making fun of your opponent for being rich. Then, with millions of dollars from wealthy donors, you can reinvent your record.

Watching Lieberman and Lamont these past few weeks, I had to wonder: Am I the one with amnesia?

So I went up to the attic and pulled out my Lieberman file, with clippings and documents collected from covering him during his three terms in Washington.

It was true. My memory was faulty. I had remembered that, out of the eye of voters back home, Lieberman developed working alliances with the most hypocritical and dangerous right-wingnuts like Ralph Reed and Charles Murray and Bill Bennett. But I had forgotten just how extensive a record he had accumulated.

* * *
Now it’s true that Lieberman earns high marks on Democratic interest group “report cards.” That’s because he plays a shell game in which liberal interest groups are complicit. He gets the “right” mark for voting against Samuel Alito’s Supreme Court nomination, for instance. But he gives the Bush administration the vote it needs to make Alito a judge, by voting to stop a filibuster.

Similarly, he held back on voting for Clarence Thomas’s nomination until the first Bush administration saw it had the votes. Then Lieberman could safely vote against Thomas and earn the “right” grade.

It’s fine for Lieberman to join Republicans in ideological arguments. He does that a lot for someone still calling himself a Democrat. And when he can publicly excoriate President Clinton for having sex with an intern – then hold back on President Bush’s immoral lying about Iraq and illegal spying on Americans – he steps over not just a party line, but an ethical line as well.

It’s also true that Lieberman has acknowledged some errors. He told me in past interviews that he was wrong to vote with Helms on the gay-bashing proposal. He said he erred in joining the Cheney group. But such after-the-fact admissions ring hollow when he continues to oppose gay marriage, or when he accuses critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq war of endangering national security.

More here. I saw Joe Lieberman give a talk awhile back, explaining how he was going to vote to confirm Torturin’ Al Gonzales because he believed in “giving people the benefit of the doubt.” While I’m not 100% convinced that Ned Lamont is God’s Gift to Democrats, I do believe I will take Joe’s advice and give Ned the benefit of the doubt.

(Incidentally, Paul is a veteran of New Haven altweeklies, and has taken that spirit to the web with the news site he runs, the New Haven Independent. Plenty on the Lieberman race and more there.)

If you listen to Limbaugh or Hannity, you’ll learn pretty quickly that the right wing party line on Haditha is that we should not “rush to judgment.” By discussing the case as it unfolds, by printing information clearly supplied to them by military sources, the media are apparently making it impossible for Our Troops Who Are Defending Our Freedom to get a fair trial.

Because of course you know how Limbaugh and Hannity and Fox News never, ever engage in speculation or discuss any ongoing legal case of any sort until such case has been fairly resolved in a court of law.

(The strategy here is obviously to try to run out the clock — defer any discussion of the actual issue until enough time has passed that they can switch into “that’s old news, nobody cares about that anymore” mode….)