Context dammit!

Media, US Foreign Policy
Published on

It’s nice that the Nation gets outraged about Obama approving cooperation between the US military and one of the more infamous Indonesian murder squads:

Yesterday’s announcement by the Obama administration that it is resuming military ties with the mass-murdering war criminals of Indonesia’s special forces ought to give us pause. Because the new relationship with Kopassus, the Indonesian thugs, has little or nothing to do with concrete U.S. interests in Indonesia – do we have any, anyway? – and everything to do with building a Great Wall around China.

But it would be nice had the article also acknowledged America’s important role in enablihing the Kopassus to commit their crimes. It was in an earlier struggle against supposed communism that several million people got murdered for being communist, or socialist, or just leftist or in the way. It’s was the US who armed the killers and led the killing and who supported the Indonesian military as they committed one warcrime after another, from the invasion of East Timor to the counterinsurgency in Papua New Guinea. In short, while this article does criticise current policy, by its silence on the history of American support for Indonesia, it helps whitewash this history, making the US seem more innocent in this than it really is. All that remains for a reader not familiar with this history is a vague awareness that this Indonesian unit is bad and Obama in the wrong for wanting to support it, but unaware that the very crimes for which Kopassus was responsible were instigated on behalf of America and that America has supported it throughout these crimes.

How to torture children the ministry of justice approved way

Policing, Torture, UK politics
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More news to make you forget any nostalgia for New Labour you may have had. It turns out the Ministry of Justice has written a torture manual on how to restrain children in private prisons, according to the Observer:

Some of the restraint and self-defence measures approved by the Ministry of Justice include ramming knuckles into ribs and raking shoes down the shins. Other extraordinary passages in the previously secret manual, Physical Control in Care, authorise staff to:

â–  “Use an inverted knuckle into the trainee’s sternum and drive inward and upward.”

â–  “Continue to carry alternate elbow strikes to the young person’s ribs until a release is achieved.”

â–  “Drive straight fingers into the young person’s face, and then quickly drive the straightened fingers of the same hand downwards into the young person’s groin area.”

[…]

Published by the HM Prison Service in 2005 and classified as a restricted government document, the manual guides staff on what restraint and self-defence techniques are authorised for use on children as young as 12 in secure training centres. The centres are purpose-built facilities for young offenders up to the age of 17 and run by private firms under government contracts.

Locking up children as young as twelve is not enough for these sadists, they have to be handed over to for profit jails to be tortured there because obviously keeping order normally is too difficult or too expensive for these fuckers. And it wouldn’t have come to light if some of the poor kids tortured like this hadn’t killed themselves in desperation, leaving their parents devastated and looking for answers. One more piece of the sordid lawandorder legacy New Labour has left behind.

It helps sometimes to state the obvious

Race, Wingnuts
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Tim Wise on white privilege:

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters–the black protesters–spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government. Would these protesters–these black protesters with guns–be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

One minor quibble: if we imagine the tea party protests happening not against Obama but against Bush and his policies, do we think they would have recieved the same amount of media and political support/approval as they do now? It’s not just white privilege that gets the teabaggers their free out of jail cards: it’s also that they are broadly in line with an important part of elite opinion as well. Setting aside their own motivations, rightwing leaders in politics and the media find the movement an useful tool to pressure Obama. This perhaps as much as white privelege explains the indulgent way the teabaggers have been treated.

Insult to injury

Tony Blair, Uh? WTF?
Published on

If this is a joke, it’s a sick one:

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has been named the recipient of the 2010 Liberty Medal.

Constitution Center CEO David Eisner said Wednesday that the medal will be presented to Blair in Philadelphia on Sept. 13 by former President Bill Clinton.

The National Constitution Center gives the annual award to individuals or organizations whose actions strive to bring liberty to people around the world.

The medal was first given in 1989 and comes with a $100,000 cash prize. Previous winners have included U2 frontman Bono, former South African President Nelson Mandela and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter.

I can only echo Sunny’s bewilderment. Did he get this for helping liberate some two million or so Iraqis and Afghans from their lives, or what?

QotD: Death of a thousand budget cuts

Comment of the Day, Life under Capitalism
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Whitehall Watch gets the real impact of the proposed ConDem budget exactly right:

But the real impact is going to be not on public jobs – important as they are – as on the services that people get. The poorer you are, the more dependent you are on public services and provision. The more money you have, the more you have options to provide for yourself if you need to and public services fail to deliver. This doesn’t show up in any of the economic analysis of the impact of the Budget on the population, because public services aren’t priced. The effect on many vulnerable people will be devastating.

It’s not just the people dependent on disability or unemployment benefits who are vulnerable, but also the many more families who need public services to survive, as their wages are not enough to pay for all their necessities. These people may not be exactly poor now, but will be if the budget is enacted.