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The relative freedom of a newly democratic Iraq and the recent improvement in security have allowed a gay subculture to flourish here. The response has been swift and deadly.
In the past two months, the bodies of as many as 25 boys and men suspected of being gay have turned up in the huge Shiite enclave of Sadr City, the police and friends of the dead say. Most have been shot, some multiple times. Several have been found with the word “pervert” in Arabic on notes attached to their bodies, the police said.
Iraq remains religious, conservative — and still violent. The killers, the police say, are not just Shiite death squads, but also tribal and family members shamed by their gay relatives. (And the recent spate of violence has seemed aimed at more openly gay men, rather than homosexuality generally.) . . .
Clerics in Sadr City have urged followers to help root out homosexuality in Iraqi society, and the police have begun their own crackdown on gay men.
“Homosexuality is against the law,” said Lt. Muthana Shaad, at a police station in the Karada district, a neighborhood that has become popular with gay men. “And it’s disgusting.”
For the past four months, he said, officers have been engaged in a “campaign to clean up the streets and get the beggars and homosexuals off them.”
Gay men, he said, can be arrested only if they are seen engaging in sex, but the police try to drive them away. “These people, we make sure they can’t get together in a coffee shop or walk together in the street — we make them break up,” he said. . . .
In 2005, the country’s most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued a religious decree that said gay men and lesbians should be “punished, in fact, killed.” He added, “The people should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing.” The language has since been removed from his Web site.
An Iraqi GLBT advocate living in exile claims that gay men in Iraq are being subject to a loathsome, and fatal, form of torture: their anuses are being glued shut, after which the victims are force-fed a mixture that induces diarrhea, leading to their deaths.
Ali Hili, the London-based leader of Iraqi LGBT, was cited as making the claims in an April 21 article appearing at Queerty.
The Queerty item stated, "Buoying the theory that it’s the ’anal sex’ part of being gay that really infuriates homophobes, Iraqi militants are reportedly gluing shut the anuses of suspected gays.
"Repeat: Gluing shut their anuses. With a glue so resilient, you need surgery to remove it," the article continued.
"This is torture, and some 60 men have already been attacked with it."
An openly gay member of Congress, [Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colorado] has been investigating the treatment of gays in Iraq for several months, and last week he spoke through a translator by phone to a transgender Iraqi man who said he had been arrested, beaten and raped by Ministry of Interior security forces. Human-rights groups tracking the issue also passed Polis a letter, allegedly written from jail by a man who said he was beaten into confessing he was a member of the gay-rights group Iraqi-LGBT. The group said the man had been sentenced to death in a court in Karkh and finally executed.
"Is there anyone to help me before it is too late?" said the letter. Its author's name was being withheld to protect his family.
Polis carried some of that evidence with him to Iraq and presented State Department officials in Baghdad with a letter outlining the allegations and pressing members of the Iraqi parliament's human-rights committee.
"We will see whether the Iraqi government is serious about protecting the human rights of all Iraqis, and we can also see what role our own State Department can play in helping to protect this minority in Iraq," Polis said by phone Wednesday after leaving Iraq.
When human rights are undermined, those responsible sometimes claim to be defending virtue and national interests. In late 2001, as drastic measures were brought in supposedly to defeat terrorism, US attorney general John Ashcroft condemned critics: "to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends. They encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of evil." Many people were convinced, or intimidated into silence. The grim consequences continue to come to light.
The rhetoric of patriotism and morality is currently being used to try to justify the same gender marriage (prohibition) bill in Nigeria. Sex between men is already illegal, but this bill could be used to imprison people of the same sex who live together "as husband and wife or for other purposes of same sexual relationship" and anyone who "witnesses, abet[s] and aids" such a relationship. Not surprisingly, it has been condemned by human rights activists in Nigeria and internationally. . . .
In a statement supporting the bill, [Anglican] Archbishop Akinola starts with his own (contested) interpretation of the Bible, and warns, "Any society or nation that approves same sex union as an acceptable life style is in an advanced stage of corruption/moral decay. This bill therefore seeks to shield Nigeria from the complete annihilation that will follow the wrath of God should this practice be accepted as normal in this land." . . . The fact that these dire predictions have not come to pass elsewhere in the world does not deter him. . . . In this apocalyptic worldview, it can be too risky to love one's neighbour as oneself.
But violating human rights ultimately damages morality and national wellbeing. According to a former judge advocate general of the US Navy, Admiral Hutson, "In dealing with detainees, the attitude at the top was that they are all just terrorists, beneath contempt and outside the law so they could be treated inhumanely . . . we had Abu Ghraib and its progeny. The self-respect of the military and the country was diminished. Our international reputation will be tarnished for generations." The Nigerian authorities should take note.
It is very rare to get someone with the same stratospheric levels of arrogance and incompetence as you find in Dick Cheney. Let's go to the tape: A war launched on false premises, a trillion dollar debt in a period of growth, a destruction of America's moral standing, the loss of one major city (New Orleans) and the devastation of another (New York City), two horribly bungled military campaigns that have trapped his successors for decades, a political party decimated for a generation, his closest aide in jail for obstruction of justice, his own [lesbian] daughter and grand-child targeted by his own party as second-class citizens in the state they live in. And a war criminal. Did I miss anything?
Why is this man not laughed off every TV set he walks onto?
"The Democrats had long labeled the impeachment debate a distraction from the urgent business of a great nation. But the Republicans argued that the pursuit of justice is the business of a great nation. In winning this point, they caught the falling flag, producing a triumph for the rule of law, a reassertion of the belief that no man is above it, and a rebuke for an arrogance that had grown imperial," - Peggy Noonan, December 21. 1998.
"It’s hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents [the OLC torture memos] and sending them out to the world and thinking, ‘Oh, much good will come of that.’ Sometimes in life you want to keep walking . . . Some of life has to be mysterious." - Peggy Noonan, April 19, 2009.
Remember also that the issue with Clinton was perjury in a civil suit. That required impeachment. But war crimes?
Here's a picture of what Noonan wants to keep "mysterious" - in other words, hidden, buried, ignored, and denied: the aftermath of "enhanced interrogation" performed at Abu Ghraib prison, Baghdad, 2004, by American soldiers by and with the approval of the Bush White House.
That was your American government at work, fellas - not Nazis or Communists in some murky old black-and-white movie, but your government and mine.
Disgusting is not a strong enough word for what has been done in the name of the American people; horrifying and revolting are more like it. And yet Noonan and her ilk, in their fancy Prada high heels and their goody-goody act, want to keep walking right on by, eyes closed, pretending everything is just wonderful.
My own mother, a plainspoken Texan who did not suffer fools gladly, had a short, swift way to sum up a woman like that; and it rhymes with witch.
Torture is the weapon of cowards and bullies and monsters.
Simulated waterboarding by volunteers at a protest rally.The focus on water-boarding misses the main point of the program.And Sullivan on what Cheney did to the Constitution (emphasis mine):
Which is that it was a program. Unlike the image of using intense physical coercion as a quick, desperate expedient, the program developed "interrogation plans" to disorient, abuse, dehumanize, and torment individuals over time. The plan employed the combined, cumulative use of many techniques of medically-monitored physical coercion. Before getting to water-boarding, the captive had already been stripped naked, shackled to ceiling chains keeping him standing so he cannot fall asleep for extended periods, hosed periodically with cold water, slapped around, jammed into boxes, etc. etc. Sleep deprivation is most important. . . .
The underlying absurdity of the [Bush] administration's position can be summarized this way. Once you get to a substantive compliance analysis for "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" you get the position that the substantive standard is the same as it is in analogous U.S. constitutional law. So the OLC must argue, in effect, that the methods and the conditions of confinement in the CIA program could constitutionally be inflicted on American citizens in a county jail.
In other words, Americans in any town of this country could constitutionally be hung from the ceiling naked, sleep deprived, water-boarded, and all the rest -- if the alleged national security justification was compelling. I did not believe our federal courts could reasonably be expected to agree with such a reading of the Constitution.
The Western anathema on torture began as a way to ensure the survival of truth. And that is the root of the West's entire legal and constitutional system. Remove a secure way to discover the truth - or create a system that can manufacture it or render it indistinguishable from lies - and the entire system unravels. That's why in the West suspects are innocent before being found guilty; and that's why in the West even those captured in wartime have long been accorded protection from forced confessions. Because it creates a world where truth is always the last priority and power is always the first.
This is not a policy difference. It is a foundational element of Western civilization. The way Cheney constructed it, it was not even a mere war-power. Since the war had no geographical boundaries, since an enemy combatant could be an American citizen or resident, since the enemy could never surrender, and since the war could never end, the dictatorial powers, allied with the power to torture, destroyed the balance of the American constitution. Until this is fully accounted for and the law-breakers brought to justice, that constitution remains with a massive breach below its waterline. It may not sink immediately; but its fate is sealed unless this precedent is not just moved on from, but erased.
George Orwell:
And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't really mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.
Nineteen Eighty-Four, complete, free, online. Read it. Give a damn.
While you still can.
The Democrats won't be in office forever. What happens when the Cheneys of this world return from the Dark Side?
The WDL makes it possible to discover, study, and enjoy cultural treasures from around the world on one site, in a variety of ways. These cultural treasures include, but are not limited to, manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings.Here's a quick sampling, there's lots more where this came from.
Items on the WDL may easily be browsed by place, time, topic, type of item, and contributing institution, or can be located by an open-ended search, in several languages. Special features include interactive geographic clusters, a timeline, advanced image-viewing and interpretive capabilities. Item-level descriptions and interviews with curators about featured items provide additional information.
Navigation tools and content descriptions are provided in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Many more languages are represented in the actual books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, and other primary materials, which are provided in their original languages.
The WDL was developed by a team at the U.S. Library of Congress, with contributions by partner institutions in many countries; the support of the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); and the financial support of a number of companies and private foundations.
Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent
by dwarthy
Bless her heart. Just goes to show, boys - you absolutely cannot judge a book by its cover.
Remember that next time you see that shy, kinda goofy-looking guy standing all by himself over in the corner of the bar, that nobody seems to want to talk to.
If you ever got to know him, you just might be very pleasantly surprised.
Everybody has a talent.
(Honk to The Daily Martini)
