Category: depressing

Insanity

You know, I remember reading, a while ago, a popular book on profiling by FBI profiler John Douglas. He said that a lot of people try to pull an insanity defense, but the really insane people are pretty easy to pick out: they’re the ones who are easily caught, because they’re out of touch with reality enough not to cover their tracks.

For example they might form a corporation to protest corporations, and kill a police officer to protest police brutality, and publish manifestos confessing to their crime and explaining why they did what they did. They might push away their family and fight tooth and nail against attempts to force them to be declared insane, in the belief that they will be vindicated by the contents of a gigantic manifesto they are preparing.

That’s of course the kind of person who needs the insanity defense most, the kind of person who will refuse it unless forced into it — but the adversarial justice system we have encourages each side to care more about winning than about the truth. So prosecutors (and prosecutor-sympathetic judges) will allow a plainly crazy guy to represent himself all the way to the electric chair.

Here’s the story.

At first when I read this story I was going to react to the way they portray him as some kind of “terrorist of the left,” and I was going to speak up as one humble left-wingish type and say UM PLEASE NO MURDERING IN OUR NAME WE ARE NOT ABOUT MURDERING ANYBODY WHATSOEVER AND THAT INCLUDES POLICEMEN THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

But reading more about it, political considerations seem completely beside the point. This kid’s completely crazy. And he’s probably going to die for being crazy.

A Brutal Iraqi Regime

(Human Rights Watch, 26-1-2005)

Methods of torture cited by detainees include routine beatings to the body using cables, hosepipes and other implements. Detainees report kicking, slapping and punching; prolonged suspension from the wrists with the hands tied behind the back; electric shocks to sensitive parts of the body, including the earlobes and genitals; and being kept blindfolded and/or handcuffed continuously for several days. In several cases, the detainees suffered what may be permanent physical disability.  
 
Detainees also reported being deprived by Iraqi security forces of food and water, and being crammed into small cells with standing room only. Numerous detainees described how Iraqi police sought bribes in return for release, access to family members or food and water.  

Saddam Hussein’s tactics? No, those are all things that our good friends and partners, the Interim Government have done on our watch.

But hey, at least they’ll respect our copyright regime and sell their oil in USD rather than Euro. The people of Iraq can take comfort that in those respects they are now free. In terms of not being subject to arbitrary torture and detention by an evil regime, well…. not so much.

Link via MeFi, though I’m sure this is going to be all over the American media, because they’re so liberal.

Timely Protest of the School of the Americas

Several protesters were arrested and jailed for trespassing on Fort Benning, location of America’s terrorist training ground, the School of the Americas, during the annual protests there. (They mark the anniversary of the rape and murder of American missionaries by United States-sponsored Salvadoran death squads.)

Ah, those were the Reagan years. Sponsoring death squads who rape and murder American churchwomen.

Old news? No, all the cool conservatives are advocating the “Salvadoran Option” for Iraq. It worked so well in Central America! Why not? We put the guy in charge of the original death squads plans, John Negroponte, in charge in Iraq.

Good thing this is all in the news. Oh, wait, it’s not in the news? Huh. I thought we had a liberal media…

Via Colin from ISCABBS, friend of protestor Dan Schwankl, who will be spending the next 90 days in Federal prison.

From the SOAW web page:

The US Army School of Americas (SOA), based in Fort Benning, Georgia, trains Latin American soldiers in combat, counter-insurgency, and counter-narcotics. SOA graduates are responsible for some of the worst human rights abuses in Latin America. In 1996 the Pentagon was forced to release training manuals used at the school that advocated torture, extortion and execution. Among the SOA’s nearly 60,000 graduates are notorious dictators Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador, and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia. Lower-level SOA graduates have participated in human rights abuses that include the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the El Mozote Massacre of 900 civilians…

In an attempt to deflect public criticism and disassociate the school from its dubious reputation, the SOA was renamed to “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC)” in 2001.

Literal Killing Machines

Via Father Jake Stops the World, a Times Online article on “killer robots.”

“These robots have no fear,� John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an online military research firm in Virginia, said. “They can advance into enemy fire in a way that human soldiers will not.

“What’s more, these robots don’t need retirement benefits, they don’t have to be paid a re-enlistment bonus and they can be boxed up and warehoused between wars. They also, of course, don’t have loved ones who miss them and mourn them — and they can be produced in huge numbers.�

What is unsaid is that robots also have no conscience. A constant problem with human soldiers is that humans have a problem with killing. We have this thing called a conscience. If we have to kill it tends to mess up our minds, and we are liable to suffer for it for the rest of our lives, with PTSD and the like. It used to be that most soldiers in a given war never even shot anyone, but in and following the Korean War America found ways to condition its soldiers to make a higher percentage of them willing and able to kill, and we all know what spectacular success we’ve had in war in the latter half of the 20th century. This is the logical culmination of such policies.

Another thing that’s kinda unmentioned in this article is that presumably the people these robots are shooting at will indeed have “loved ones who mourn them and miss them.” And those loved ones are going to want revenge, and they are going to find ways to take revenge, and when they do so, they’re not going to go after the robots.

I’d be more geeked about these killer robots if they heralded an age when we’d all just build robots and let them fight it out, and didn’t get humans involved on either end. But that’s not what I’m expecting here.

Ever notice that with every development of military policy under the Bush administration, America more strongly resembles a bad guy in a Hollywood movie? The good guys never employ robot warriors. It’s always the bad guys with the soulless killing automatons. And under Gonzalez and Bush’s “pro-torture but we don’t call it torture” policies, America embodies the melodramatic Nazi bad guy who says “Ve haff vays of making you tok.”

Shouldn’t that be telling us something?