Slowly, slowly... what does Bush have in common with Radovan Karadzic?

Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld's next roomate?

The news that the Pentagon is going to release the names of prisoners to the Red Cross is interesting for a lot of reasons...the fact that we haven't been puts us squarely on the side of the North Koreans, the North Vietnamese, the Russians, the Japanese, the VietCong, Shining Path and on and on and on. One of the basic humanitarian functions of the Red Cross has been to assure prisoners that their conditions are being monitored and that they need not fear summary execution. Another is informing families that their loved one's are alive. We have spent decades demanding this information and railing against the axis of evil-doers who refused to provide it. I am not an expert on the Geneva Convention, beyond the basics that ever soldier knows and the stuff I had to take in various courses. But, during the Bush years, this sets us squarely on the side of Pyongyang, Hanoi, Moscow, Tojo and other folks that we portrayed as beasts and minions of the devil. I think it makes various pieces of the Pentagon and its leadership probably indictable at the Hague for war crimes.

Oh, and then there's the news from Newsweek:

According to two sources—one who has read a draft of the paper and one who was briefed on it—the report describes how one detainee, suspected USS Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was threatened with a gun and a power drill during the course of CIA interrogation. According to the sources, who like others quoted in this article asked not to be named while discussing sensitive information, Nashiri's interrogators brandished the gun in an effort to convince him that he was going to be shot. Interrogators also turned on a power drill and held it near him. "The purpose was to scare him into giving [information] up," said one of the sources. A federal law banning the use of torture expressly forbids threatening a detainee with "imminent death."

Well, that definitely opens up the problem, and addresses directly the issue of whom we are and whom we want to be. It's particularly interesting and relevant as Quentin Tarantino's new fantasy opens.
I have no real problem in war with killing enemy leaders. Individual soldiers for whatever reason is a radically different solution and, if  you don't have a war, that's a different situation. Not to quibble, but we don't have a war. We have some clusterfucks on-going. One might argue, successfully, that we have an ideological conflict and I could live with "Wanted Dead or Alive" posters going up all over the middle east. But, once we get them alive, then we're responsible to keep them alive. It may be reassuring to want to say with the basterds that killing "Natzis is out bidness, and bidness is good..." but not giving into temptations like that is one of the reasons that I can say that the expected breakout of Jeffersonian democracy and Friedmanesque capitalism (Milton, not Tom, although Tom carried a lot of water for them) was powered not merely by propaganda but by idealism...note that ideology and idealism have the same root.

Oh, remember the bad guys torturing Chloe's boyfriend with the power drill in 24 a few years back. Was some retired agent or paramilitary or hell, the agency itself, providing technical assistance? Or, worse yet, were the same guys inventing what went on getting hints from 24? 

Speaking of Tarantino, I caught a bit of him talking about the film and what he had been listening to while working on it over on "Little Stevens's Underground Garage" and one was this song from a very silly movie, Roy Orbison's "With this much shit, there has to be a cowboy ", which he didn't use in the movie. Tarantino said nice things about the film, which scares me a lot. Our most famous auteur is insane, but we knew that already.  I'd skipped that movie and probably still will, and couldn't find a video of th song by Roy. However, this is from a Gibson sponsored celebration of Roy's birthday a while ago by Peter Conroy, and it's worth listening too both in and out of context.