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.

Hello?!

An item my daily paper (Helsingin Sanomat):

The mosque in Norway's Bergen is in such a bad state of repair the county officials have stated it can't be used for worship from the end of March onwards (i.e. it could collapse on people). The community has a new building, but renovating it for mosque use will take years due to lack of funds. One of the Moslem community leaders has "threatened" (direct translation from my paper) they will start to use the city square for their Friday prayers. Kenneth Rasmussen - a representative of the "Demokratene" (anti-foreigner party, I am told) in the city council, no less - has responded by announcing a counter-plan of tying pigs' trotters to lampposts and playing pigs' grunts and squeals on loudspeakers. Apparently this charming individual has served in the UN troops (!) in Somalia and Lebanon and has used making pig noises from his car windows to get through throngs of pedestrians.

I mean really. Since when was it ok to behave like a pig towards legal organisations and communities of people (no pun or offence to pigs intended) openly and in the public eye? Remind me? Is this somehow going to bring back the victims of 9/11, or decrease the threat of fundamentalism? Do explain?

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?

Shocked

Anna Politkovskaja has been murdered. I am shocked. She was such an incredibly brave individual, but had such a high public profile I thought they wouldn't dare touch her. I was wrong.

I expect the official reaction will be "inquiries will be made" etc, and nothing will ever come to light. The world we live in, the world we live in.

Fish or fowl?

Last night, I saw "Darwin's Nightmare", a documentary by the French film-maker Hubert Sauper, on the Nile perch trade and the misery it seems to be creating in the regions around Lake Victoria. It is some years ago I read about how the introduction of this species of large predatory fish was wreaking havoc in the ecosystem of the African lake. I had no idea (ignorant European that I am) about the breadth of the humanitarian disasters linked to it: none of the filleted fish is consumed locally, two million Europeans eat it daily. The locals are left with the skeletons and heads of the catch, which in African conditions begin to deteriorate rapidly. The village communities around the lake consist of young fishermen working for the fisheries. Women, it seems, are reduced to handling the rotting carcasses prepared for local consumption, or - you guessed it - prostitution, their customers being both the foreign pilots of the freight planes and the local fishermen. HIV/aids spreads, people die, orphaned children live on the streets. Apparently, the freight planes fly in arms for various warring factions, returning then to Europe full of fish fillet.

I am aware that all may not be quite as the director makes it seem. I found some very annoyed online comments on the film, including these as samples: this viewer's review ripped into the film, denying the socio-economical misery in the area is caused by the fisheries. Also The Tanzanian Embassy in France wrote an articulate and indignant response to it, too. However, no-one is denying - or indeed can deny - the misery itself exists. It's not as if I have been unaware of poverty and global inequality till now, of course, but the imagery in the film was, at times, pure Dante, and the peoples' stories were tales of an unfairness of unbearable magnitude. It has left me feeling disturbed, helpless, guilty.

15, with girlfriend

Meet 15 and the strange new phenomenon, a girlfriend. Isn't he handsome? (Ok, she's nice too, but he's *my kid*)

Some random passer-by had called him, my child, a "faux-artsy young drug addict". Out of all these attributes, "young" is accurate. Not everyone is used to kids dressing in black (after all, it's been fashionable only for, um, thirty - fifty years), and bigots will be bigots.

Let me hereby announce my personal refusal to being a part of the bigoted and racist society the Western world seems to be deteriorating into. I read an article a couple of days ago by a very admirable Finnish Palestinian woman, Umayya Abu-Hanna, who is minority cultures coordinator at the Finnish Art Museum, a columnist, an author, and previously an elected Green Party representative in the Helsinki City Council, amongst other things. She has had some of her work-related email to the UK randomly filtered out - ostensibly because some instances are not allowing email from people with the syllable Abu in their name. What next? Wear a badge to show your ethnicity, at all times, so people can keep an eye on you?

Detestable.

Oh shit

So much for the ceasefire.

More moral dilemmas

Did you people read this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,,1844559,00.html

Apparently, the information leading to the foiling of the terrorist attacks on air traffic last week was received through torture.

I don't mean this as a cop-out. I am quite sincere when I say I have no solutions to anything. Anything.

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.

Pig's ear

So many goings-on in the world leave me with a powerful sense of powerlessness combined with a real anger. I wish I knew what to do. I wish I was all-powerful to do it. Instead, I download a badge to display on this site. It does seem pretty meager.

What I want to know is if a sufficient amount of people really cared, would it really make a difference? In other words, is there hope?

Addendum to previous: I was reading my Sunday papers online and came across an article or two that made me just so livid with the state of everything. I am here in the US as a guest and consequently feel it is not my place to rant and rave about my host nation, but surely, surely anybody can see it is morally unjustifiable to imprison children like this (not that I agree with imprisoning adults in this fashion either)?

Cue more bad news: some wanker throws his children off a 14th story balcony to spite his wife, the death toll in Indonesia rises exponentially, peace seems ever more distant to people in East Timor, and so on.

And the Pope had gone to Auschwitz. Do you know, I couldn't believe it that no previous Pope has!

I am not a religious person – there have been periods in my life when I have tried to or hoped I could be, but I am endowed with a scientific world view and cannot change that. But when I read what the Pope had said in Auschwitz, something about how this ultimate evil leaves us with a silence that calls to God, why did you allow this, I did feel something like recognition. I feel like my silence shouts up to the "heavens", the universe that surrounds us, if you are there, oh intelligent alien life forms, make sure you don't come down here. I would be so embarrassed to show you what a pig's ear my species has made of paradise.

© 2006 Anna MR

Argh

There are times when it (the world) all just seems too much. I sit at home worrying about the fact I have a great many grey hairs and not enough to do. Meanwhile, people held in cages in Guantanamo riot for the right to commit suicide, Palestinian communities are running out of the most basic necessities, school children stab each other willy-nilly in Britain.

Maybe I am still afflicted with the omnipotency fallacy of early childhood, as I am sure I should be able to do something about it all, and that my failure to sort everything out is due to a personal shortcoming for which I am responsible.