Iraqi on Iraqi violence

[Auntie Ovipositor]

... One of the prisoners bared his back after his initial arrest to reveal open welts allegedly caused by baton and rubber hoses. A bodyguard for the head of criminal intelligence, Hussein Kamal, admitted that the beatings had taken place. Nashwan Ali - who said his nickname was Big Man - said: 'A US MP asked me this morning what police division I was in. I said I was in criminal intelligence. The American asked me why we had beaten the prisoners. I said we beat the prisoners because they are all bad people. But I told him we didn't strip them naked, photograph them or fuck them like you did.

[Space ghost]

Where  did  you  dig  that  up  from? would  be  interesting  to  have  a  read  of  the  whole  article.

link-me-do?

[Auntie Ovipositor]

Duh. Sorry, here it is:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1250526,00.html

[Pinball]

It's good to see you're reading the UK press, Auntie! Can't you find anything insightful like that in the US press? ;-)

Fox News: "We hang around a court room and watch the latest celebrity trial"... "We interrupt this programme for an announcement by the President"... "And now the latest horrific injuries inflicted on our brave centurions by those Arab scum" etc.

[Auntie Ovipositor]

It's good to see you're reading the UK press, Auntie! Can't you find anything insightful like that in the US press? ;-)

Fox News: "We hang around a court room and watch the latest celebrity trial"... "We interrupt this programme for an announcement by the President"... "And now the latest horrific injuries inflicted on our brave centurions by those Arab scum" etc.

Actually, the link to the article was from an American news source - Salon, whose articles the Guardian often republishes. It was also linked to from my local paper and will most likely be in print over here tomorrow.


I've actually been thinking about this a lot regarding this board. The prevailing wisdom seems to be that Americans are unaware of the outside world because our media is so thoroughly biased. I'm not sure that's quite accurate.

Percentage wise, few people in the US watch any news programs/channels. Of the people who do watch news programming, the majority watch the non-pay news shows on the major networks. Fox and CNN are on cable, and the people who pay for cable statistically spend more time watching MTV. The network news over here is terrible, outside of "news magazine" shows, such as the weekly 60 Minutes and the daily News Hour, which go in depth on limited subjects (60 Minutes is responsible for breaking a lot of stories, such as Abu Garaf (as GWB now calls it)).

But that's TV. In fact, the biggest source of news is the radio, and the most listened to shows aren't Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern (although they both have a huge audience), but is NPR. And it's audience is growning, enough so that if it keeps up at this rate it'll be over half of radio listeners in a few years (sorry I don't have the numbers at hand, but trust me on this one). NPR panders to the right wing a bit too often for my tastes, but conservatives will tell you that the network is full of marxist revisionists who hate America, so they're doing something right.

And in print, the New York Times is still a paper of international calliber. Not only that, it's got a HUGE subscription base across the country. Locally, the SF Chronicle is reasonably solid and good for training your dog as well. Down the coast, the LA Times is putting a huge push behind investigative journalism and it's paying off.

And online there's of course google news, as well as other news sites like slate.com and my beloved salon.com. And obviously access to millions of papers and news sources the world over.

So it's not that people in the US are shielded from credible news sources. That'd be impossible in this day and age.

I think the reason that Americans are unaware is because we live isolated, busy lives, and just don't care much about the rest of the world because we (generalizing) rarely come into direct contact with it. I mean, America's a big place and there are clearly exceptions to that, but as a general rule people here don't sit around and discuss what's going on in Bombay unless they have some direct, personal tie to it. I see that changing to a degree, but we're still pretty well hermetically sealed over here - 2 oceans, a bad parody of ourselves to the north and a low brown workerpool to the south - and just as people here rarely go to the trouble of actively seeking out news out of intellectual curiosity, we rarely leave the country. And when we do, the rest of the world exists in relation to the US ("These hotel rooms are so small!", "You call that a breakfast?", etc), not as it's own separate entity. It's a strange and insecure view of the world, and it defines not the availablity of the news but our consumption of it.

I also think that this insecurity that drives this perception of the world is the same one that makes a lot of Americans feel obliged to run around telling eveyrone how great we are (and boy is this going to be fun at the olympics).

In contrast, the UK has the BBC as a main news source, and luckily for you it's superlative in most areas. Just don't try to get any good information about the royal family from it.

I also think there's a sense of obligation to aggressive opposition from interviewers in the UK, which is an unknown concept here. There are a lot of reasons for that, but to oversimplifiy it I think it's rooted in the notion that there are 2 sides to any debate and if you put both of them in the room together and let them have at then the audience can decide for themselves. There are a lot of flaws with this approach, and it's best summed up by the headline, "Shape of the Earth: Experts Disagree". Still, I often find myself getting tired of reading the news in places that don't strive for at least some level of objectivity (the Daily Mail) or listening to interviewers badger their subjects agressively. I'd rather take the time to sort it out myself.

I'm avoiding doing the work that I should actually be doing (you can always tell - whenever I make a bunch of long, loosely coherent posts like this it's because I have other things I'm supposed to be doing), so I'll leave the mess above the way it is and not try to edit into coherency. But long and short I don't think the problem is the quality of the news available here (we can get the Guardian, even), but a national lack of interest. And I think that that's changing in some good ways, however slowly.

[Margaret Thatcher]

Fox News.

Is fair and balanced.  It's the network America trusts.  Period.

Not my words, theirs.

[thatmuch]

but we're still pretty well hermetically sealed over here - 2 oceans, a bad parody of ourselves to the north

One thing I love about Canadians is that they don't seem to to bothered by lines like that - they don't seem to have that kind of touchiness that comes from an insecurity about their identity or nationhood.

and a low brown workerpool to the south - and just as people here rarely go to the trouble of actively seeking out news out of intellectual curiosity, we rarely leave the country. And when we do, the rest of the world exists in relation to the US ("These hotel rooms are so small!", "You call that a breakfast?", etc), not as it's own separate entity. It's a strange and insecure view of the world, and it defines not the availablity of the news but our consumption of it.

I don't think it's that much different in the UK. The only important stories are those that relate to this country or the US. My Canadian girlfriend who I keep mentioning has formed this opinion and I've borrowed it from her. She thinks British people who complain about the US in this regard are somewhat hypocritical.

I also think that this insecurity that drives this perception of the world is the same one that makes a lot of Americans feel obliged to run around telling eveyrone how great we are (and boy is this going to be fun at the olympics).

In contrast, the UK has the BBC as a main news source, and luckily for you it's superlative in most areas. Just don't try to get any good information about the royal family from it.

I think the BBC is very poor as a source of information. The website is superficial and full of half-baked, ill-informed rubbish and the main news programmes are no better than ABC's nightly news bulletin for example. You would hardly know the rest of Europe exists from seeing the BBC news. When a natural disaster occurs on the west coast of the Americas, it's only reported inasfar as it affects the US. How many British people know that when the San Andreas fault goes it'll threaten several million Canadians in the Vancouver area as much as it will Americans?

Interesting post, thank you.

[Auntie Ovipositor]

but we're still pretty well hermetically sealed over here - 2 oceans, a bad parody of ourselves to the north

One thing I love about Canadians is that they don't seem to to bothered by lines like that - they don't seem to have that kind of touchiness that comes from an insecurity about their identity or nationhood.

Yeah, they  can take a joke. Most Canadians I've met I have no real use for - we're just from different worlds - but the good ones are really stellar. That's amplified in Quebec: there's an inordinate number of people there who I just can't stand, but one of my favorite people in the whole world came from there. That's probably really unfair of me to say, but there it is. Stuff that in your canadian girlfriend and smoke it. [and before you go off getting all righteously upset at my making fun of your girlie, you've got to understand you're living an American adolescent loner's cliche. Way back when kids used to go away for summer camp (or to stay with their divorced parent), kids would come back home at the end of the summer and tell their friends about their wild prepubescent quasi-sexual exploits. Every unpopular kid who lived anywhere near the border would claim to have a Canadian girlfriend or boyfriend with whom they'd made much groping over whatever summer they were lieing about because they wouldn't have had any physical contact with a member of the other sex, naturalized or not. Pretty soon it became code for all kinds of things that didn't exist or the stuff people lie about, and then (at least amongst my friends) it became something you'd just insert into phrases (ie, "My Canadian girlfriend's going to drop by later with a new car for me", "Is that a Candian girlfriend in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?", etc, etc. Boy - that was a long way to go to explain a not very funny in joke, wasn't it?]

I don't think it's that much different in the UK. The only important stories are those that relate to this country or the US. My Canadian girlfriend who I keep mentioning has formed this opinion and I've borrowed it from her. She thinks British people who complain about the US in this regard are somewhat hypocritical.

I definitely saw some of that in Spain, but it was different somehow. I'm far too drunk to explore the subtleties of meaning in there, let alone type them out, but there's a difference.

]I think the BBC is very poor as a source of information. The website is superficial and full of half-baked, ill-informed rubbish and the main news programmes are no better than ABC's nightly news bulletin for example. You would hardly know the rest of Europe exists from seeing the BBC news.

I've never been to their website, and while there are certainly awful shows on the BBC, I find the news shows to be generally pretty solid. I'm saying that as someone who obsessively keeps up with the news, so I don't treat them as a one stop shop, but they do represent a view that I don't hear unless I go there, and it's an interesting perspective.

And while everyone who's ever worked for the BBC should be strung up just for the meer existence of Are You Being Served, I forgive it all because they were the only news I heard that was willing to discuss the more unpleasant reality of Ronnie Raygun when he died. It was a real breath of fresh air, frankly, even if they didn't tell the half of it.

[Pinball]

Great post, Auntie! It's understandable that the US is introspective for obvious geographical and "magnitude" reasons, however the lack of knowledge of the outside world is quite galling for the rest of us. If the US was part of a bickering 25-country union things would be different!

Generally it has to be said that most news in most countries is domestic, though I find BBC quite good at its international coverage relatively speaking. Personally I like to watch other European countries' TV output via satellite, and it helps that my g/f is French. Whichever country you watch, the news is always "Belgium and the US/France and the US" etc.  Quite amusing actually. The other interesting thing is behaviour of people on TV. Eastern Europeans are generally pretty miserable looking (e.g. Bulgarian TV), and the Russians hardly ever smile (very Putin-esque). But I just find these differences culturally fascinating, which is why I'm dumbfounded at the attitude of some Americans vs. the rest of the world.

It's also curious as to how "big" Americans think their country is. For instance, the UK has 21% the population of the US, as does France. The US is not infinite, and yet psychologically there is this perception of a hyperpower which is patently overblown and untrue. It would be nice if Europeans could get a reality check and stop denigrating themselves, though I think with the rapid and remarkable changes currently ongoing in the EU (including military cooperation) this will quickly alter...

[Bogey]

Russians hardly ever smile (very Putin-esque).

Mm, there was a thing about this on the radio the other day, funnily enough; they were talking about tour guides in Moscow, and a lot of American tourists were moaning about how they never smiled, a smile costs nothing etc.
The Russians were unmoved though, because culturally for them a smile has a much higher value, so you see less of them (or the other way round); which I found rather admirable.
But then I do love Russia quite a bit.

[Auntie Ovipositor]

It's also curious as to how "big" Americans think their country is. For instance, the UK has 21% the population of the US, as does France.

I mean physically. And psychicly.  There's a lot of room here, with large stretches sparsely inhabited. Even with a Starbucks on every corner people are still very different from region to region, as anyone who's ever driven across the country can tell you - more so anyone who's ever driven around the place, say on a rock'n'roll tour.

[Pinball]

I went on holiday to Moscow & (then called) Leningrad a few years ago - fascinating! Bloody cold, but fascinating. Took the night train to Leningrad :-)

Russia's time will come again... The bottomline is, just look at the bloody size of the country on the map! One of the Bond films had a great scene of the Russian command centre with a map of the world, most of which was red (Soviet Union). hahahaha

Russia has a special representative at all EU meetings, and it's only a matter of time before Russia joins the EU. I wonder if America will still consider itself the dominant world power then? It seems remarkable, even now, that it can do so, given that EU is now 450 million people...  I guess it just reflects difference in cultures and consequent mindsets i.e. self-deprecating Europeans and swaggering arrogant Americans. Neither perspectives reflect reality.

[Pinball]

It's also curious as to how "big" Americans think their country is. For instance, the UK has 21% the population of the US, as does France.

I mean physically. And psychicly.  There's a lot of room here, with large stretches sparsely inhabited. Even with a Starbucks on every corner people are still very different from region to region, as anyone who's ever driven across the country can tell you - more so anyone who's ever driven around the place, say on a rock'n'roll tour.

Wow you're up early! 5.16am there?

Yes America is big, and not all desert like Australia. I guess my point is that the differential economically, in population terms and militarily US vs. EU is not that great. There is an incorrect perception that the EU is as weak as a chicken, which frankly is embarrassing when you hear "our" leaders spout that bullshit. When will the EU be big enough to be "powerful"? Half a billion people? One billion? FFS...

It's time for Europe to re-take control of its own destiny. We're no different from Iraq currently in being militarily occupied by the Americans, which is pathetic. According to French news there are plans afoot to boot out the US occupation forces from EU within a couple of years, but while they're still here (and I guess they'll never leave the UK) it's pathetic. Makes Europe look like some tinpot banana republic, and a laughing stock frankly. When the US military leave, it'll be amusing to see the spin given by the US administration. No doubt they'll claim that they want to encourage Europe to play a bigger military role, implying the instigation was from the US, rather than from the EU booting them out.

[MojoJojo]

I would like to agree with you Pinball, but I am fairly sure I have seen some comparisons between EU spending on research and military, and the US completely dwarfs the EU. Need to be workign so I won't go search for links now.
Eventually I think that EU will come to be the dominant world power again, but I in a longer time scale... maybe in the next 50 years, when all these new EU members have been redeveloped, and the cooperative ties strengthened, and industry has recovered and adjusted to the euro... But it will take awhile, and by that time we'll probably of left the EU or something stupid like that.

Besides, I think America does realise the threat to it's dominance from the EU... Why do you think the UK, America's greatest ally, is constantly sticking it's oar in when it comes to Europe.

[Auntie Ovipositor]

It's also curious as to how "big" Americans think their country is. For instance, the UK has 21% the population of the US, as does France.

I mean physically. And psychicly.  There's a lot of room here, with large stretches sparsely inhabited. Even with a Starbucks on every corner people are still very different from region to region, as anyone who's ever driven across the country can tell you - more so anyone who's ever driven around the place, say on a rock'n'roll tour.

Wow you're up early! 5.16am there?

I was up late, actually. Only 3, but still, late. I'm a bit of a night owl.

I guess my point is that the differential economically, in population terms and militarily US vs. EU is not that great. There is an incorrect perception that the EU is as weak as a chicken, which frankly is embarrassing when you hear "our" leaders spout that bullshit. When will the EU be big enough to be "powerful"? Half a billion people? One billion? FFS...

The US spends much, much more on our military. Last time I checked we spent more than the next 5 big-spender countries.

We're no different from Iraq currently in being militarily occupied by the Americans, which is pathetic. According to French news there are plans afoot to boot out the US occupation forces from EU within a couple of years, but while they're still here (and I guess they'll never leave the UK) it's pathetic. Makes Europe look like some tinpot banana republic, and a laughing stock frankly. When the US military leave, it'll be amusing to see the spin given by the US administration. No doubt they'll claim that they want to encourage Europe to play a bigger military role, implying the instigation was from the US, rather than from the EU booting them out.

I wouldn't say that y'all are in any way similar to Iraq, since last time I checked we didn't hand pick all of your leaders and instruct them in how to lead. Or decimate your economy and oblige you to depend on us for your eventual reconstruction. Europe also has its own armies, and should the US troops for some reason try to exert controll over the EU you'd be quite capable of stopping that.

But I agree that it's long past time for the US to get out of Europe. Immediately following WWII it was a good thing and benefitted all of us. By the 60s it was questionable.

Assuming NATO can hold it together, I would like to see US bases be transfered to NATO control and used internationally - which they already are to a degree. There's no pipe dream there. Although a certain cut of neo-con over here would sooner die than give up any military base anywhere, our bases over there serve more as staging areas than outposts against an enemy, and this is understood by most people. I know it's been discussed, and it should be an easy step to take. There's just one little thing: to really get that ball rolling you have to start talking about getting rid of nukes, something that we're just not enlightened enough to do yet. We'd either have to destroy the missles entirely or else put them in some other recently decimated country who would welcome that faustian bargain if we helped them recover from a hugely draining war....