"Police: Iraq vet abused daughter, held her head in water"

Big fucking surprise. A guy who was recently in combat, where shooting, beating and violating people is not just normal, it's the way of "life," abuses his daughter:

Seattle, Washington (CNN) -- An Iraq war veteran has been charged with assault on suspicion of abusing his daughter, whose head he allegedly held in water to get her to recite the ABCs, according to police in Yelm, Washington...

The child had "severe bruising on her entire back," "scratch marks on her back made in a downward motion" and "bruising on both of her arms, her legs and her buttocks," the police report said.

According to the report, the girl told police: "I don't know why he did it ... Daddy used his hands."

The child also told police that Tabor "put me in the water," the report said, so she "would say my letters."

"It was hot, the water was hot. I told him I would say my letters then!" the girl told police, according to the police report.

I guarantee you this shit, war-related abuse, happens EVERY FUCKING DAY. Every day.

How could you possibly expect people to come back from that shit and leave the war behind? You can't, that's how. They're fucking ruined. They're violent, they have been trained to be extremely violent. Methodically trained, in ways that are constantly refined through scientific analysis. You've made them killers, torturers, violators of sovereignty, people who have no respect for "them." You can't just forget that, cause it's not conscious. It's forced into you to become your default reaction. Perhaps it can be unlearned, but few people have the power to do that themselves. And no one is interested in help them. "Support" them, forget them. However fucking stupid they were for signing up, whatever kind of blind idiot patriot they are, we all have to deal with these people when they get dumped back into general population.

Back from Iraq and on the streets. Watch out.

America to the world: "Fuck you"

Hey look, we can still do whatever we want!!

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey [whose nomination as attorney general last year was threatened by his refusal to say whether he considered waterboarding to be torture] said Wednesday that he saw no need for President Bush to issue blanket pardons of officials involved in some of the administration’s most controversial counterterrorism policies.

Mr. Mukasey told reporters that there was “absolutely no evidence” that anyone involved in developing the policies “did so for any reason other than to protect the security in the country and in the belief that he or she was doing something lawful.”

The comments appeared aimed at tamping down speculation that Mr. Bush, before leaving the White House next month, might issue pre-emptive pardons to protect counterterrorism officials from legal jeopardy in the face of possible criminal investigations by the new Democratic administration.

Yeah. The torture-loving Attorney General made sure to let everyone know that the people running this country hold all their atrocities to be perfectly legal. Waterboarding, nudity, dogs, extreme temperatures, sensory deprivation, whatever. It's all in the rules, they say. Someone's gonna blow something else up, and the people running this country and the ones who put them there will be responsible. They won't tell themselves that though. And lots of other people will be responsible for not removing them from power, for letting them rule and for following their orders.

“Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War”

Are now American capitalist attempts to elicit false confessions from prisoners of war. You know, this is one of those times when I am caught off guard by these feelings of surprise. I did not think that the military could really shock me. But it did.

You see, what they have been teaching people in Guantanamo for at least six years, and I don't know where else or for how long, are techniques developed by the Chinese military and used in the Korean War. Supposedly, not too many people in the American military were aware of this, as "The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: 'Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.'” So that's what's been going on for I don't know how many years. And they've been teaching that these things work. These techniques, like starvation, forcing people to stand for super long periods of time and exposing them to filthy living environments were documented, by the United States Army in 1957, as succeeding in bringing about false confessions. FALSE CONFESSIONS. The military seems to have been working against its own conclusions, which I guess isn't all that surprising in and of itself.

What is surprising is that all anyone did was change the title of this chart. Other than that, it "had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners." It's just so fucking stupid. It was that simple - change the title of a chart, and turn it from something that was supposed to demonstrate failed and discredited interrogation methods into an instructional device on how to extract worthwhile and accurate information from people. Fuck.