Crawling, part deux

Here's the second part of Matthew's crawling adventure.

Matthew's starting to crawl

Here's Matthew's latest technique for crawling. Not perfect but it's somewhat effective!

More on Survival School

An interesting take on Survival School, from a Marine Corps officer graduate of the school who urges that it be closed as archaic, outdated and pernicious.

Gives a whole new meaning to the word "slap happy"

This isn't actually news, but the report on the treatment of "enemy detainees" has been released and it's stunning. They literally took SERE instructors and "reverse engineered" their tactics into methods for torturing people.

Here's the report

From page xx:

"(U) On December 30, 2002, two instructors from the Navy SERE school arrived at GTMO. The next day, in a session with approximately 24 interrogation personnel, the two SERE instructors demonstrated how to administer stress positions, and various slapping techniques. According to two interrogators, those who attended the training even broke off into pairs to practice the techniques." (emphasis added)"

I went through Survival School in the early 1990s when I was reassigned into an airborne position. Survival School is fun: You spend some quality time in Eastern Washington State, hiking around the woods, learning how to survive and get rescued by search & rescue choppers and then the SERE trainers "capture" you and send you to a fake POW camp. At the camp, you are hooded, buried alive, denied sleep, put in stress positions and interrogated. At the end, they raise the American flag and everyone has a beer. Very touching.

As the report makes clear, the units that train airborne military personnel are NOT interrogators. They aren't actually getting any information from the trainees. They are playing a role designed to give airmen experience with what might happen to them if they get shot down and captured by an enemy.

For example, there were pilots in the first Gulf War who got shot down and captured by the Iraqi army. They were tortured routinely as part of their interrogations. One told us about his experience getting his teeth wired to a car battery in a contraption that he called the "Sony Talkman". The Iraqis demanded to know how USAF bombs were being guided to their targets. His method of resistance was to provide false but credible information. He told them that the US military had satellites with lasers so powerful that they could illuminate a target from space that the laser-guided bombs could seek out. The truth was that special forces teams had to infiltrate the territory and illuminate the target from several hundred yards away.

So let me get this straight. We found some guys in the military who are paid to torture, demean and otherwise fuck up military personnel in order to prepare them for a hellish POW experience. We flew them down to Gitmo and trained military policemen in these methods so that they could be used on Gitmo prisoners. These methods that were DESIGNED to be illegal and violations of the Geneva Convention?

Hitch Switch

After September 11th, Christopher Hitchens was one of the left-wing writers who veered hard right. He tirelessly defended the war in Iraq in the leadup to the invasion and has never stopped, even after all the pretenses that were use to justify the war have been shown to be faulty (WMD), mendacious (9/11 connected to Iraq) or overstated ("beacon" of democracy).

And yet we now see that Hitchens is praising the Democratic nominee for President for his rhetoric and policy with respect to Pakistan. In Slate, he writes that

Sen. Barack Obama has, if anything, been the more militant of the two presidential candidates in stressing the danger here and the need to act without too much sentiment about our so-called Islamabad ally. He began using this rhetoric when it was much simpler to counterpose the "good" war in Afghanistan with the "bad" one in Iraq. Never mind that now; he is committed in advance to a serious projection of American power into the heartland of our deadliest enemy. And that, I think, is another reason why so many people are reluctant to employ truthful descriptions for the emerging Afghan-Pakistan confrontation: American liberals can't quite face the fact that if their man does win in November, and if he has meant a single serious word he's ever said, it means more war, and more bitter and protracted war at that—not less.

Habeas

From today's glorious 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court finding the Detainee Treatment Act unconstitutional and affirming that the men held prisoner at Gitmo have habeas rights under the Constitution:

"Officials charged with daily operational responsibility for our security may consider a judicial discourse on the history of the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 and like matters to be far removed from the Nation’s present, urgent concerns. Established legal doctrine, however, must be consulted for its teaching. Remote in time it may be; irrelevant to the present it is not. Security depends upon a sophisticated intelligence apparatus and the ability of our Armed Forces to act and to interdict. There are further considerations, however. Security subsists, too, in fidelity to freedom’s first principles. Chief among these are freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adherence to the separation of powers. It is from these principles that the judicial authority to consider petitions for habeas corpus relief derives."

- Kennedy, J.

That ain't nothing but the truth, my friends. Nothing but the truth.

Boozing with Hillary

Go on, NY Times editors, why not just come right out and say that Hillary was drunk?

"And then there was Wednesday night’s airborne bourbon swig in front of reporters on her plane, with Mrs. Clinton holding court for the diminishing press pool accompanying her.
Fernando Suarez, a reporter for CBS News who has been traveling with Mrs. Clinton’s campaign since October, asked her if she had ever been to Mount Rushmore before her visit there earlier in the day. Mrs. Clinton said she in fact had.
'Before you were born,' she added, looking at Mr. Suarez, who is 29, and noting that 'I did a lot of things before you were born.'
She swirled the bourbon in her glass and nodded mischievously.
'And thank god you weren’t around,' Mrs. Clinton continued. 'Or I wouldn’t have enjoyed any of them.'"

This, from an article entitled "High Spirits for a Battler Who Is Low on Delegates"....