Salon magazine published another round of photos from the Abu Ghraib torture scandal that broke in the spring of 2004. One photo is of the body of Manadel al-Jamadi. One eye is open, fixed and glassy; the other purple and swollen shut. A bloody bandage rests on the side of his face. According to the photo’s caption, Mr. al-Jamadi died in CIA custody at Abu Ghraib. There was no official record of his imprisonment. He was a man who wasn’t there, who came into existence only after he died.
Another photo shows a man who was, according to a report by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, “mentally deranged” and “required special restraints due to his behavior.” Indeed, the man’s wrists and ankles and bound, but he is nonetheless shown inserting an object into his anus. We don’t know why he’s sodomizing himself – is it because he’s deranged, or did U.S. troops force him to do it? They certainly didn’t stop him, choosing instead to take a photo, which was then passed around until it became part of the investigation.
A third photo is a wider shot of the famous image of the hooded man standing on the box with electrodes attached to his fingers. The new image shows Staff Sgt. Ivan “Chip” Frederick off to the side, nonchalantly clipping his fingernails. Spc. Sabrina Harman, who put the electrodes on the man’s fingers, told investigators, “I was joking with him and told him if he fell off he would be electrocuted.” Some joke, what fun.
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All Politics Is Local
It’s winter in Vermont, although it’s been in the 40’s for most of the season, there’s no snow on the ground and my neighbor, Tom, is moping about the house. He has a new collapsible ice shanty, auger and tip-ups sitting in his basement unused, because the ice on Lake Champlain (what there is of it) is not thick enough to support ice fishing.
So we distract ourselves in other ways. Town meeting falls on March 7 this year. For most Vermont towns, it means a day-long discussion of town business at the town hall, punctuated by a dish-to-pass lunch. There are too many people (40,000) in Burlington for us all to gather in one spot, so we just vote at our ward polling places.
The mayor’s seat is open for the first time in over a decade and five candidates are running. There’s a Republican, Democrat and a Progressive. In Burlington, Progressives are not a “third party,” they’ve controlled the mayor’s office for all but two of the past 25 years. There are also two independent candidates, whose primary function is to provide comic relief at campaign events. One vowed to solve the city’s financial woes by going to Iraq “to get some of those bundles of money I saw the troops throwing around like footballs on TV.” Whatever, dude.
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