Another socialist blog

Let’s raise a glass to America’s allies in the war against terrorism, who are helping us make the world a better place. Right?

Mukhtaran Bibi is a Pakistani woman who was the victim of a notorious gang rape. The rape was ordered by officials of her own tribe, as punishment for a crime her brother was alleged to have committed. To punish her brother, she was sentenced to be raped by four men and made to walk home undressed in front of the whole village.

Bibi has become an activist working to stop violence against women. She was scheduled to visit the Asian American Network Against Abuse of Women in the United States soon. But the Pakistani government—our allies in the war against terror, remember—don’t want her to talk about that, apparently. Pakistan placed her under house arrest, then coerced her into giving a news conference in which she denied wanting to leave the country.

Meanwhile, in Uzbekistan—another of America’s allies in the so-called war on terror, 700 people were massacred by government troops in a crackdown against dissidents. President Islam Karimov said the dead, many of them unarmed women and children, were “Islamic radicals” and “criminals.” Karimov bans opposition parties, has jailed 6,000 dissidents, and tortures many of them.

Good thing Karimov is on our side in the struggle against evil dictators. Because America takes that democracy shit very seriously.

The Register has a story about how Tommy Hook, a Los Alamos Laboratory employee, was beaten up on Saturday night, apparently in an attempt to keep him quiet about alleged financial irregularities he uncovered at the facility.

Nothing was take from his car, and his wallet was not stolen. His lawyer Robert Rothstein of New Mexico law firm Rothstein, Donatelli, Hughes, Dahlstrom, Schoenburg & Bienvenu, argues that with no other obvious motive, it looks like the attack is related to his whistle-blowing.

“It is clear to us that this was a message,” Susan Hook told AP.

Hook also has a lawsuit pending against the laboratory, in which he accuses managers of the facility of making his life, and that of another whistle-blower, Chuck Monato, so unpleasant that they would quit their jobs.

The New York Times reports on the details of two Afghan prisoners tortured to death by American jailers at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan. A 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar was chained by his wrists to the top of his cell for much of a four-day period, and was repeatedly beaten by guards for several days. “Most of the interrogators,” reports the Times, “had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.”

Another prisoner named Habibullah was also chained to the ceiling of his cell as well as being repeatedly beaten for “noncompliance.” It isn’t clear that Habibullah had any idea what his captors were ordering him to do, since the MPs were assigned no interpreter of their own. Specialist Brian E. Cammack beat Habibullah when Habibullah was both chained and either unconscious or already dead. “It looked like he had been dead for a while, and it looked like nobody cared,” said the medic, Staff Sgt. Rodney D. Glass, who later examined Habibullah.

This would be a good time to look up the word systematic in a dictionary, and then wave the Times’ article in front of your own member of Congress. They’ve got time to hold hearings on baseball, so they clearly have plenty of time to hold hearings on the U.S. government’s torture policy.