My newest animation is “Dharma Bums,” a simultaneous hat tip to “Lost”–one of my favorite shows–and a send-up of the torture policy that led to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed getting waterboarded 183 times in one month. Because, you know, 182 times just ain’t enough.
Anyway, the video goes up at 4 pm East Coast time. Hope you like it!
U.S. Troops Die For Rapists
American soldiers serving in Vietnam wondered what they were fighting for. U.S. troops in Afghanistan don’t have that problem. They know exactly what they’re fighting for: rapists.
After President Obama’s coming “Afghan surge” there will be 72,000 soldiers in Afghanistan. Their primary mission is to prevent Afghans from overthrowing the unpopular regime of Hamid Karzai, the former oil consultant installed by George W. Bush when the U.S. occupation began nearly eight years ago.
America’s media repeatedly claimed that Afghan women would be better off under the U.S.-supported Northern Alliance puppet government headed by Karzai than under the Taliban. But when I went to Afghanistan and asked women what they thought, they had a different story. The defeat of the Taliban brought about the collapse of law and order, making life even more dangerous, especially for women. “Under the Taliban,” a woman told me, “I watched rapists being executed. Now I see them in the government.”
The Afghan women’s rights group RAWA has repeatedly told anyone willing to listen that there hasn’t been much improvement for women and girls since the U.S. occupation began in 2001. But no one–least of all left-of-center Americans eager to embrace the Afghan war–has wanted to hear what they had to say. “Most women still wear the all-encompassing burqa through fear of attack and social pressure, a third of women in Kabul do not leave the house, forbidden from doing so by the male members of the family, and it is still almost impossible for women to get a divorce,” reported The Sunday Herald in 2005.
Liberal Democrats who cling to Afghanistan as “the good war” the U.S. should be fighting are being forced to confront the ugly truth about their ally. Karzai has signed a law that states that “women cannot leave the house without their husbands’ permission, that they can only seek work, education or visit the doctor with their husbands’ permission, and that they cannot refuse their husband sex,” reported the British newspaper The Guardian on March 31st.
The Shiite Personal Status act applies only to devotees of the Shia branch of Islam, which account for between 10 and 20 percent of the population. How can a secular democratic state have different laws depending on a citizen’s faith? The answer is: It can’t. Afghanistan isn’t secular or democratic. The “new” Afghanistan’s constitution is based on Sharia law–exactly as it was under the Taliban. But the U.S. media has purposefully failed to report the icky truth about our ally.
The new law requires women to have sex with their husbands at least once every four days unless they are sick or menstruating. “Obedience, readiness for intercourse and not leaving the house without the permission of the husband are the duties of the wife,” reads the law of a nation ostensibly invaded by U.S. troops in part to liberate Afghan women. “As long as the husband is not traveling, he has the right to have sexual intercourse with his wife every fourth night,” it says.
Afghan Senator Humaira Namati calls the rape bill “worse than during the Taliban” and said it was rammed through parliament without debate. “Anyone who spoke out was accused of being against Islam,” she said. Several hundred women protesting the law on the streets of Kabul were viciously assaulted by men as police stood back and watched.
In fairness to the responsible male legislators, they did add a provision to protect Shiite women from “dead bed”: Afghan men have to put out “at least once every four months.”
Karzai signed legalized rape into law in order to appease right-wing legislators in an election year. After international criticism, however, he began backpedaling with the lamest of all possible reasons: he didn’t read the bill before he was for it.
“I was not aware of what I had signed,” Afghan parliamentarian Sabrina Saqib said Karzai told her. The legislation “has so many articles,” Karzai told CNN. “Now I have instructed, in consultation with clergy of the country, that the law be revised and any article that is not in keeping with the Afghan constitution and Islamic Sharia must be removed from this law.”
As Karzai BSes for the cameras, hundreds of Afghan women languish in prisons around the country. Their crime? They’re teen brides, some as young as 10, who ran away from much older husbands who purchased them. “In President Hamid Karzai’s Afghanistan, women are still imprisoned for running away from home,” reports The Sunday Herald.
Nice theocracy you got there, Mullah Karzai.
Remember this column the next time you watch a flag-draped coffin returning from Afghanistan. The young man inside that box didn’t die for nothing. He died to protect rapists.
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
Any computer experts who use Blogger would be most useful right now.
I can’t post images to the . Here’s the situation:
When I click the Load Image icon in the Create New Post screen, it cycles through and then says “done”. But there’s no code, and no image. Usually there’s a string of code.
I’ve tried clearing my cache in Firefox. Nothing.
The workaround I’ve discovered is to create an entirely new blog, load the image up there, then cut and paste the code for the image from there into the .
I am trying to move to WordPress–which is itself a nightmare–but in the meantime, I’d like to have this basic functionality at Blogger. Anyone got a clue what’s going on?
Why Bush Must Go to Prison
Do you believe in “intelligent design”? It’s the argument that the universe is so logical that it must have been planned out by a master creator. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, single-handedly disproves the existence of such a God.
Friedman is the nation’s most prominent opinion writer. He wins journalistic prizes. Audiences shell out big bucks to hear him speak. Book collections of his columns become bestsellers for months on end. Yet the dude can’t write. I’m not talking about his opinions. Friedman doesn’t know how to arrange nouns and verbs in a way that is pleasing to readers of the English language. He is to writing what George W. Bush is to oratory.
Stranger still is Friedman’s role as über barometer of conventional wisdom. When Congress, media tastemakers and thus most Americans bought into Bush’s Saddam-has-WMDs story, Friedman did too. When the Iraq War started to go wrong but officially acceptable opinion wanted to stay and “finish the job,” so did he. When everyone threw up their hands in disgust, Friedman was there with them.
Of course, he was wrong. He’s always wrong. But he’s always in perfect sync with conventional wisdom–which is almost always wrong.
Friedman’s prose appears to have barely survived the linguistic equivalent of a harsh interrogation technique: “Because that is when Al Qaeda’s remnants will try to throw a Hail Mary pass–that is, try to set off a bomb in a U.S. city–to obscure its defeat by moderate Arabs and Muslims in the heart of its world.” Did he get this sports metaphor from some think tank neocon, or was he lame enough to make it up himself? Whether he leads or follows the average mean of the mainstream, Friedman’s role as the nation’s ultimate bellwether is what makes him worth reading.
Which is why it’s so disquieting to read Friedman support of Obama’s refusal to prosecute torturers. Times Tom may be a fool. His logic is certainly hopeless. But the people who matter–Congress, editors and producers at the big papers and broadcast networks and thus most of the public–agree with him.
Seven years after accounts of torture by American soldiers and CIA operatives first became public, the revelation that one detainee had been waterboarded 183 times in a single month has sticken a Katrina-like nerve. Conventional, mainstream, average, generic U.S. public opinion wants something done about it–an investigation, maybe prosecution of a few of the attorneys who authored the Torture Memos–but nothing close to genuine accountability. Friedman’s April 29th column reflects this internal conflict:
“Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has testified to Congress that more than 100 detainees died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, with up to 27 percent of these declared homicides by the military. They were allegedly kicked to death, shot, suffocated or drowned. Look, our people killed detainees [Friedman’s emphasis], and only a handful of those deaths have resulted in any punishment of U.S. officials.”
By Friedman’s math, the military admits to the torture-murders of 27 people. He’s low-balling. He doesn’t include detainees murdered by the military in other places like Guantánamo or the Navy’s fleet of prison ships, killed by the CIA at secret prisons, or slaughtered by foreign torturers after being “extraordinarily renditioned” by the U.S. Even so, 27 is a lot. No one would suggest letting a serial killer off the hook for 27 torture-murders.
Friedman does. “The president’s decision to expose but not prosecute those responsible,” he writes, is justified. Why? Because “justice taken to its logical end here would likely require bringing George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and other senior officials to trial, which would rip our country apart.”
“Rip our country apart.” Wow.
Granting prosecutorial immunity to war criminals like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell is already “tearing the country apart.”
First and foremost, it confirms many people’s suspicion that there are two systems of justice in America: one for the rich and powerful and another for you and me. If I kidnap a man and hold him overnight, I face the death penalty or life in prison. Bush and his top officials ordered the kidnapping of tens of thousands of men as young as 12 years of age, the torture of thousands and the murder of hundreds. Until America’s official mass murderers are treated as harshly as its freelance psychos, Americans will view their justice system as something to be feared rather than respected.
Not only does extending executive privilege into retirement–and not even conservatives think there’s a legal basis for this–encourage lawless behavior by current and future political leaders, it feeds partisanship. Republicans impeached Bill Clinton for lying about a BJ. He was also disbarred (and rightly so). Nixon, on the other hand, resigned before being impeached and never faced a jury. If Bush and his minions get away with murder, does that mean that only Democrats are subject to the rule of law?
If the officials who ordered torture, the legislators who let it happen, the lawyers who justified it and the men and women who carried it out are not held accountable, the message will not be–as Obama seems to believe-that the Bush years represented some weird aberration in American history. Obama will be telling the world that the 2008 election changed nothing, that legal illegality could return at the drop of a hat (or the detonation of a dirty bomb), that his Administration protects the criminals and thus endorses their crimes. Millions of Americans, many of whom voted for him, already feel alienated from a country that expresses values that it doesn’t live up to. Refusing to prosecute Bush deepens their cynicism.
Cynicism, Mssrs. Friedman and Obama, is what’s ripping the guts out of America every second of every day. Only consistent and fair application of the law can begin the healing.
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
Unfortunately, there appears to be more bugs with posting images to Blogger. So I’ve gone ahead and posted today’s cartoon to the Archives.
It Takes a Nation of Torturers to Hold Us Back
I suppose I should take a bow.
For eight long years (years that passed like centuries for the misérables rotting in cages at Guantánamo and Bagram and Abu Ghraib and Diego Garcia and Bulgaria and the U.S. Navy’s fleet of prison ships) no one cared about torture. Law professors, politicians, and journalists justified it. Even liberals didn’t care: there wasn’t one major protest march against beating or raping or drowning people to death. Strange but true: the only forces raging against the collective madness that warped the American psyche after 9/11 were human rights organizations and a couple of cartoonists.
The syndicated political cartoonist Matt Bors and I took point, repeatedly ridiculing and ranting about the Bush Administration’s torture policies and Americans’ tacit tolerance of it in cartoons we knew would be reprinted in only a handful of publications. Editors and readers advised us to “stop obsessing” and “move on.” Award committees passed us over in favor of cartoonists who bought Bush’s tall tales about WMDs in Iraq. We were blackballed.
At least they didn’t shove a flashlight up my ass. That is a favorite interrogation tactic at Gitmo (and Bagram, where Obama plans to send the Gitmo victims next).
Perhaps the declassification of CIA documents revealing that the CIA waterboarded one man 183 times (why not 182? Why not 184?) prompted Americans’ newfound distaste for taxpayer-funded dungeons. Maybe it was the juvenile stupidity displayed by Bush’s legal eagles: “As we understand it, you plan to inform Zubaydah that you are going to place a stinging insect into the box, but you will actually place a harmless insect in the box, such as a caterpillar,” one memo said. Because, you know, they don’t have caterpillars in the Northwestern Frontier Province.
Whatever the cause, better late than never (though not for the dozens of fathers, brothers and sons murdered in American torture chambers), but things have come full circle. Americans are against torture again. Some Congressmen are calling for investigations into Bush’s war crimes. President Obama, forced to backpedal on his infamous inclination to “move forward” rather than compel the CIA’s goons to “look over their shoulders” while applying electrodes to the genitals of 14-year-old Afghan boys, seems amenable to throwing the Dirty Half Dozen–the six Bushie lawyers including John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Alberto Gonzáles–to the tender mercies of a special prosecutor.
My favorite aspect of the discussion involves whether or not torture works. “High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the Al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country,” Obama’s national intelligence director argued last week. Key suspects “provided much valuable information under less severe treatment, and the harsher handling produced no breakthroughs,” countered The New York Times about the newly released documents.
I don’t care if torture works. I don’t give a damn if torture could reveal a plot that would cost millions of lives. I would rather die in a terrorist attack than live in a society that relies upon torture to protect itself. But what do I know? Maybe I’ve just been brainwashed by my Christian upbringing.
As I wrote two weeks ago, the Dirty Half Dozen lawyers ought to be prosecuted for constructing an illegal CYA framework to justify heinous acts by government torturers. An attorney who perverts logic and the law as follows is far too dangerous to be allowed to walk among free men: “Although we do not equate a person who voluntarily enters a weight-loss program with a detainee subjected to dietary manipulation as an interrogation technique, we believe that it is relevant that several commercial weight-loss programs available in the United States involve similar or even greater reductions in caloric intake.”
An officer of the court who doesn’t pack up his office supplies and type up a resignation letter rather than write the following suffers from both psychosis and stupidity: “Although the abdominal slap technique might involve some minor physical pain, it cannot, as you have described it to us, be said to involve even moderate, let alone severe, physical pain or suffering.” Do a Google Image search on John Yoo, author of many of the Torture Memos: the pudgy little pig would break down in tears if he ran out of hand lotion.
Jail the lawyers, preferably for life. But don’t forget their bosses. As has been amply documented, Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld and others personally signed off on specific acts of torture. They ordered the Dirty Half Dozen to draft those memos to provide them with legal cover.
Lawyers don’t write law; they interpret it. If a corporate executive relies on bad legal advice, he goes to jail. Hiring a crappy lawyer isn’t a defense. Bush and his war council should spend the rest of their lives at Guantánamo. Since he’s continuing Bush’s detention policies, so should Obama.
And let’s not forget the CIA and military torturers, the so-called little fish. As servicemen learn during training, it is illegal to follow an illegal order. An order to torture or abuse prisoners of war violates U.S. law and international treaty obligations, as well as international law. When given such an order, it is every person’s moral and legal obligation to refuse it, even if means facing a court-martial. Everyone involved with torture deserves prosecution, including the physicians and psychologists who sat in on sessions that involved “harsh interrogation techniques.”
At the Nuremberg trials that followed World War II, hatemongers like the Jew-baiting newspaper publisher Julius Streicher were prosecuted for promoting racist Nazi ideology. Surely an analogy can be found for right-wing torture fans like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, who repeatedly fanned the anti-Muslim hatred that led to our current shame. Even Bill Maher, libertarian-cum-liberal post-ABC firing, was pro-torture after 9/11.
In the end, of course, we are all to blame. It was the American people’s moral obligation to rise up as one against a government that carried out torture in our name. Yet we didn’t lift a finger. If only there was a prison big enough to hold all of us.
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
There’s an article on the BBC website about political cartooning and Barack Obama. It contains some quotes by me.
Since 2006 I’ve been working three days a week at United Media as Editor of Acquisitions and Development. My job was finding new talent–comic strip artists, columnists and writers of puzzles–to syndicate to newspapers. Needless to say, this was a difficult time to pitch new features to papers.
Considering the circumstances, I enjoyed remarkable success. My first feature was a daily newspaper version of “Diesel Sweeties,” by R. Stevens. If not the first transition of a webcomic to daily form, it was certainly the most successful. Unfortunately for print readers, the artist decided to focus on his online work and ended the strip. After that came Tak Toyoshima’s “Secret Asian Man,” the first daily comic strip about Asian-Americans by an Asian-American cartoonist. It remains in syndication today, and continues to garner attention. I recruited Signe Wilkinson to draw “Family Tree,” a family strip with an ecological bent filtered through Signe’s uniquely jaundiced eye, and “Family Tree” keeps getting sales as comics pages get slashed. There was also Keith Knight’s “The Knight Life,” in which Keith transitioned his autobiographical alt weekly strip “The K Chronicles” to the daily form. It is a success. Most recently were the daily comic version of Stephanie McMillan’s political cartoon “Minimum Security” and “Rip Haywire,” an updating and parody of adventure comics by Dan Thompson.
I am proud of what I accomplished. Not only did I bring some smart, cool cartoons to wider audiences, I also breathed some life into the daily comics pages, which most readers agree are horribly moribund. I found that I am made to be an editor, helping creators realize their own voices more efficiently and effectively.
Unfortunately, my position as acquisitions editor has been eliminated, and I am out the door–like so many Americans these days, with a mortgage I have to pay somehow.
So if you’re a creator who was hoping to pitch me something, I’m sorry–I can’t help you anymore. If you need a cartoonist, a writer, or an editor, or anything else, please drop me a line. I need work, and fast.
Americans Lose Their Savings and their Minds
When the revolution comes, the tribunal will turn to two sources to determine who should be arrested: a list of the 500 highest-paid CEOs and the Styles section of The New York Times.
Real unemployment is over 20 percent. Millions of people are losing their homes to foreclosure. We’ve been at war for eight years, with nothing to show for it but a million-plus corpses and trillions in new debt. The United States, in the midst of full-on economic collapse, is teetering on the brink of political implosion. Which has driven some people to…doga.
“Nationwide,” an article in the April 9th Times Styles section explains, “classes of doga–yoga with dogs, as it is called–are increasing in number and popularity.”
Doga. The name alone inspires lovely fantasies of firing squads. Above the piece and above the fold are photos of dogs being levitated, stretched, and used as weights. Understandably, they generally look puzzled, if not mystified. The online version has a slideshow chronicling the torment of a yellow mutt, his hind quarters being yanked into the heavens by his ever-so-serious Spandex-clad owner. Downward-facing-dog gone wild. The poor beast wears that Admiral Stockdale look: who am I? why am I here?
Why are you doing this to me?
Times reporter Bethany Lyttle, who probably never dreamed she’d end up writing this sort of thing when the thought of becoming a journalist first crossed her mind, paints a grisly tableau in but 45 horrifying words: “In Chicago, Kristyn Caliendo does forward-bends with a Jack Russell draped around her neck. In Manhattan, Grace Yang strikes a warrior pose while balancing a Shih Tzu on her thigh. And in Seattle, Chintale Stiller-Anderson practices an asana that requires side-stretching across a 52-pound vizsla.” One wonders, will she have the animal put to sleep in the event of weight change? Will she buy an entire set of dogs, to cover the weight range as her fitness improves?
During the last few months Times political writers have been wondering aloud why Americans haven’t reacted to losing their jobs and houses by rioting. Here, just a dozen ever-shrinking pages away, is the answer. They’re freaking out, all right. But being Americans, they’re freaking out weirdly.
If you’ve read this far–and I wouldn’t blame you if you’d already thrown this down in disgust–you’d might as well know what doga is. Doga!
“Doga,” reports The Times (which doesn’t run comics or advice columns because those features aren’t serious enough), “combines massage and meditation with gentle stretching for dogs and their human partners. In chaturanga, dogs sit with their front paws in the air while their human partners provide support. In an ‘upward-paw pose,’ or sun salutation, owners lift dogs onto their hind legs. In a resting pose, the person reclines, with legs slightly bent over the dog’s torso, bolster-style, to relieve pressure on the spine.”
Ready! Aim! Fire! No need for caskets. A shallow grave will suffice. But there’s more.
Skeptics of doga, by taking the idea seriously, unintentionally provide the best quotes. “Doga runs the risk of trivializing a 2,500-year-old practice into a fad,” the paper quotes a yogi in, naturally, Portland (the one in Oregon, obviously). Ya think? “To live in harmony with all beings, including dogs, is a truly yogic principle. But yoga class may not be the most appropriate way to express this.” She thinks about this stuff. Me, I’m holding out for boga–yoga with bugs.
Doga is the perfect end-of-empire moment for a nation wallowing in self-indulgence. The Romans puked out their engorged guts in their vomitoria; we drop $20 a class to drape our yowling schnauzers over our flabby tummies. And as with every great American trend of mass idiocy, controversy swirls arounds doga.
Brenda Bryan, a 43-year-old dogi and yogi (doyogi? yodogi? bowwowwowyippiyagi?) in Seattle, has written the book on doga. “It’s a new field so there can be confusion about what doga is and isn’t,” she says. Why be confused? I know what doga is. Doga is stupid.
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
Thus endeth the sneak preview from my upcoming graphic novel, “The Year of Loving Dangerously.” Hope you like it.
