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August 29, 2005
Torture Yes, Poverty-Alleviation No. (Otherwise Known as Our Foreign Policy.)
There are two developments I have been meaning to write about, but have not found the time to do them justice. Fortunately, Body and Soul has covered both. The first is about the outcome of the case for the gruesome torture and murder of a taxi-driver in the Bagram base in Afhanistan.
Punishments were handed down for four American soldiers involved in the brutal murder of an Afghan taxi driver at Bagram prison:One soldier has been sentenced to two months in prison, another to three months. A third was demoted and given a letter of reprimand and a fine. A fourth was given a reduction in rank and pay.
A reminder of what happened to Dilawar:
Mr. Dilawar was a frail man, standing only 5 feet 9 inches and weighing 122 pounds. But at Bagram, he was quickly labeled one of the "noncompliant" ones.When one of the First Platoon M.P.'s, Specialist Corey E. Jones, was sent to Mr. Dilawar's cell to give him some water, he said the prisoner spit in his face and started kicking him. Specialist Jones responded, he said, with a couple of knee strikes to the leg of the shackled man.
"He screamed out, 'Allah! Allah! Allah!' and my first reaction was that he was crying out to his god," Specialist Jones said to investigators. "Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny."
Other Third Platoon M.P.'s later came by the detention center and stopped at the isolation cells to see for themselves, Specialist Jones said.
It became a kind of running joke, and people kept showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out 'Allah,' " he said. "It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes."
A three month sentence.
The soldiers apparently weren't the only ones who thought the way they treated a helpless and innocent man was a joke.
Read more here.
The other is about the U.N. Millenium Summit to be held in September. Apparently, the US, led by Bolton, has basically decided that the summit should not be about the Millenium Development Goals, poverty, climate change, and all the other things it is about. To that end, John Bolton submitted "750 amendments to the draft and called for immediate talks on them" -- only three weeks before the summit. Read more about them here, or simply remember this tidbit:
U.S. complained the section on poverty was too long.
Posted by zeynep at August 29, 2005 09:15 PM