It is a time of freedom and fear, of Gaia and of borders, of many paths and the widening of
a universal toll road, emptying country and swelling cities, of the public bought into
privacy and the privacy of the public sold into invisible data banks and knowing
algorithms. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the
planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.
These are the times when maps fade and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards
now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing
for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times,
but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread.
Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.
From Sunday's
New York Times:
U.S. Army Reserve Brigadier General Janis Karpinski "said the prison cellblock where the abuse occurred was under the tight control of Army military intelligence officers who may have encouraged the abuse.
"The suggestion by Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski that the reservists acted at the behest of military intelligence officers appears largely supported in a still-classified Army report on prison conditions in Iraq that documented many of the worst abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad, including the sexual humiliation of prisoners."
"In a letter earlier this year, Sergeant Frederick wrote, "I questioned some of the things that I saw." He described "such things as leaving inmates in their cell with no clothes or in female underpants, handcuffing them to the door of their cell." He added, "The answer I got was, `This is how military intelligence wants it done.' "
"General Karpinski said she was speaking out because she believed that military commanders were trying to shift the blame exclusively to her and other reservists and away from intelligence officers still at work in Iraq.
"We're disposable," she said of the military's attitude toward reservists. "Why would they want the active-duty people to take the blame? They want to put this on the M.P.'s and hope that this thing goes away. Well, it's not going to go away.""
"She said that C.I.A. employees often participated in the interrogations at Abu Ghraib, one of Iraq's most notorious prisons during the rule of Saddam Hussein.
"General Karpinski noted that one of the photographs of abused prisoners also showed the legs of 16 American soldiers — the photograph was cropped so that their upper bodies could not be seen — 'and that tells you that clearly other people were participating, because I didn't have 16 people assigned to that cellblock.'"
Posted by James Cook at 12:02 AM.
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