*Ø* Blogmanac | Angry ex-detainees tell of abuse

"BAGHDAD, May 2 - Day and night lost meaning shortly after Muwafaq Sami Abbas, a lawyer by training, arrived at Baghdad International Airport for an unexpected stay. In March, he was seized from his bed by U.S. troops in the middle of the night, he said, along with the rest of the men in his house, and taken to a prison on the airport grounds.

"The black sack the troops placed over his head was removed only briefly during the next nine days of interrogation, conducted by U.S. officials in civilian and military clothes, he said. He was forced to do knee bends until he collapsed, he recalled, and black marks still ring his wrists from the pinch of plastic handcuffs. Rest was made impossible by loudspeakers blaring, over and over, the Beastie Boys' rap anthem, 'No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn' ..."
Source: Washington Post via MSNBC

[The photo is of another torture victim.]

Meanwhile, a slap on the wrist for US soldiers (the ones who got caught) who tortured and sexually abused their Iraqi victims. The root cause of the descent of the American military into barbarism of this kind is, of course, a culture of xenophobia and racism fostered by the Bush administration in its transparent quest for oil. The world is horrified, Mr Bush, and unfortunately grows angrier by the day.

I wrote this verse soon after 9-11 as Dubya commenced this ridiculous invasion campaign, and I now feel quite sure the dandelion seeds that Shrub's Amerika has released are beginning to take root:

Desultory talkin' World War III philippic, or how I was William F Buckley'd into agreement

When I was walkin up the stair
I met a man named Tony Blair.
He wasn't there agin today
and he won't be there in the morning.

Along come a man, George W Bush,
Beady eyes and smarmy moosh;
he's bombin from the Hindu Kush
in the cold and snowy mornin.

I looks agin and what'd I see,
a dandelion as big as a tree,
bigger'n Bush and bigger'n me,
it jist grew up in the mornin.

George rode up with his 10-gallon hat
and carryin a baseball bat.
"My friend George what you want with that,
an' yer big ol' hat in the mornin?"

He says, "See this big ol' baseball bat?
I's gonna whup its ass with that.
Gonna knock it down an' lay it flat,
An' it won't git up in the mornin.

"That dandelion, he's a E-Vil weed,
he's full a li'l old E-Vil seeds."
I said, "My friend, best you succeed,
we don't want sin in the mornin."

He took that bat and whupped the ass
of the dandelion, and well you ask
what other things did come to pass
that cold 'n' snowy mornin.

Well all them seeds did fly around
like parachutes, without a sound,
an' some of them they come to ground,
an' they all took root next mornin.

I walked on up them stairs again
and passed by old Afghanistan.
An' I heard them souls all cry in pain,
an' they woke me up this mornin.

More poetry

And meanwhile, as Veralynne reports at A-Changin' Times, Bliar is sending another 4,000 young men and women to Iraq to fight in a war that 'finished' on May 1 last year. :: sigh ::