Interview with a torturer

Correction - an "enhanced interrogation technician", I suppose. The BBC link, sent to me by a friend, is for an Owen Bennett-Jones interview with Tony Lagouranis, a former US army interrogator in Iraq who has written a book about his experiences. I shall put it out here for your use, if you have 26 minutes and 30 seconds to spare. Don't, however, expect it to brighten up your Sunday mood.

What really does me in is the fact this is a man who did his college degree in Ancient Greek, philosophy, mathematics, and joined the army to "learn Arabic and pay off his student loans" (an advert for free university education if ever I heard one). In other words, not exactly someone you'd immediately have down as a person who'd enjoy - or even agree to - inflicting pain and terror on another human, for a living. Only following orders, yes. He says that. My worry is most of us are like this - that there is no inherent moral stance which we adhere to, that if and when put in a position, we will just follow orders.

Unfair horrible shit that makes me really angry

I was reading Zappy's blog this morning. He's an Iraqi father, bit younger than me, likes Nirvana, favourite book 1984. His daughter had just escaped unharmed from a bombing on her way to school. I left him a message. I just wanted to express something - that I thought of them, something. In his reply, Zappy pointed me towards one of Raed Jarrar's blog entries. There I learned that some guy has made a song about killing Iraqi girl children, and was airing it on YouTube. It has been taken down - I checked - but apparently some other ignoramus with a radio station or something intends to record the song.

It makes me furious to know I am sitting here in my cosy life, while around the world people are committing and being subjected to unspeakable horrors. Why isn't there anything I can do?

Idiot?

I have been reading Dostoyevsky's Idiot for at least a month now. I love Russian literature, and am not daunted by thick books. This one, however, just doesn't seem to get going, although I am well into Book 2 - it is as if D is just introducing and introducing and introducing, be it characters or backgrounds or events that'll probably start unfolding, or whatever, but nothing actually ever starts. I shall have to nip into the library tomorrow to renew it - again. They'll probably think I am illiterate.

I have noticed the computer behaves funny (this is indeed the technical term for it) whenever I visit one of the Iraqi blog sites I have discovered in the last week or so - it goes all slow at obeying orders - I mean *even slower* than usual. I wonder why this is.

Made in USA?

I saw a picture from bombed Lebanon on the Finnish news yesterday. Atop a building utterly collapsed, someone had planted a banner saying "Made in USA". Today, I read in the paper that Iran has promised an "unlimited budget" to aid the rebuilding of Lebanon. Now, although I don't hold individual Americans personally responsible for what their, um, great leader undertakes in his wisdom, it remains a fact that Israel gets massive military and financial support from the US. So, one can understand the feeling on the groundroots level in Lebanon may well be that the bombings (by the US-funded Israel) are in fact made in USA - and the rebuilding is made in its (current? future?) archenemy, Iran. This is not, I emphasise, to express my personal preference for a fundamentalist Iran (over a near-fundamentalist US?). Neither do I mean to equate the government of any country with its people. However. The people in Lebanon, as elsewhere, put together the pieces of information they receive from their news sources and draw conclusions from their own standpoints. Their conclusions will be biased, for sure. With lives lost, homes bombed to the ground, infrastructure destroyed, whose wouldn't? We in the West receive our news biased by governmental opinion as well. Trouble is, people in the great Western powers are culturally programmed to think the information they receive is impartial, objective, correct, "what actually happens", rather than filtered through the alliances and agendae of their government.

How much money is the US going to give for rebuilding in Lebanon? Does anyone know? Even if one wouldn't piss in the general direction of namby-pamby humanitarian objectives, wouldn't it be politically expedient to be seen to be the good rebuilders, rather than the bad bombers?

Meanwhile, the civilian death toll in Iraq is said to be over 3400, much more than in Lebanon, with no end in sight.

I actually believe most people in the world, given the chance, would prefer just to live their lives, bring up their children, mind their own business, without a driving need to kill each other. Really. And by "given the chance", I mean (amongst other things) the chance to grow up without an atmosphere of vengeance and hatred. Which is seriously lacking in the modern society, worldwide.