Tag: force

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Guantanamo shame continues

At least 106 of the 166 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay detention center are reported to be on hunger strike, with 45 currently being force-fed, reports todays LA Times.imgres

“A recently published report by the Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment, to which we contributed, found that the practice of forced feeding at Guantanamo was “a form of abuse and must end.” A member of the task force, Dr. Gerald Thomson, described the process: “You are forced physically to eat, by being strapped into a specially made chair and having restraints put on your arms, your legs, your body and your head so that you cannot move. [You have] a tube inserted into your throat that extends into your stomach, and you’re trying to resist that with the only muscles that are free — in your throat.” Detainees have said that it is intensely painful.

“When the restraint chairs were first introduced to Guantanamo in December 2005, the force-feeding process was reportedly especially punitive. Several detainees said that guards kept them in a restraint chair for hours after the tube feeding ended — sometimes for as long as six hours. Continue reading “Guantanamo shame continues”

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Making the invisible visible

 The Invisible War has done something exceptionally rare. Rather than tackling an issue that’s safely in the past, Kirby Dick and his subjects have confronted an ongoing culture of sexual violence and grotesque indifference in one of the country’s most respected institutions, reports todays Daily Beast.“And instead of being dismissed as Hollywood liberalism, or creating a temporary spike in awareness that dissipates shortly after its release, The Invisible War is helping push forward action in Congress and substantive reform in the military itself.imgres

“It’s one thing for a movie in Oscar contention to get snared in politics, or to seek out political relevance as a way of linking a film to a larger narrative. … Since The Invisible War’s release, federal action on sexual assaults in the military has instead accelerated. On January 23, the House Armed Services Committee held hearings on the investigation into Lackland Air Force Base, the site of the Air Force’s basic training: a staff sergeant stationed there was convicted of rape and sexual assault last summer, and 32 instructors are alleged to have sexually coerced or formed relationships with their students that violate military regulations. The New York Times wrote “that they are doing so is in large part a tribute to” The Invisible War, though Dick said he was frustrated that so many congressmen left the hearing to attend a vote, skipping the part of the program where assault survivors testified about their experiences.”

 

Full story at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/07/the-invisible-war-how-oscar-s-military-rape-documentary-might-change-everything.html

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War and genocide today

imgres-2“Opposing genocide has become a sort of cottage industry in the United States,” writes Patricia Johnstone in a thoughtful essay in CounterPunch. The article then analyses how justified war has become a preferred solution to mass extermination . . .  but at what cost and in whose interests?

“Everywhere, “genocide studies” are cropping up in universities.  Five years ago, an unlikely “Genocide Prevention Task Force” was set up headed by former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former defense secretary William Cohen, both veterans of the Clinton administration.

“The Bible of the campaign is Samantha Power’s book, ‘A Problem from Hell’.  Ms. Power’s thesis is that the U.S. Government, while well-intentioned, like all of us, is too slow to intervene to “stop genocide”.  It is a suggestion that the U.S. government embraces, even to taking on Ms. Power as White House advisor. Continue reading “War and genocide today”

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US considers nuking the moon

Honestly, this isn’t our day for joke entries. In this next item the U.S. Air Force is considering nuking the moon. (Aren’t we in a bit of a fiscal jam?). Slate reports it thus:

“The U.S. Air Force considered detonating a nuclear device on the moon during the late 1950s. In a recent interview with CNN, physicist Leonard Reiffel, who worked on the project, explained that the single explosion would have been “microscopic” with little impact on the moon. But what if it had been bigger—do we have enough nuclear weapons to push the moon out of orbit?

“Not even close. Depending on where the detonation happened, sending the moon careening away from Earth would take somewhere between 10 billion and 10 trillion megatons of TNT. The most powerful nuclear device ever detonated, the Soviet Union’s “Tsar Bomba,” yielded the energy equivalent of 50 megatons of TNT. The combination of every nuclear device ever tested represents just over 500 megatons of TNT worth Continue reading “US considers nuking the moon”

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Oops, we lost another $647-million Stealth jet

The pilot safely ejected, but the Air Force admitted yesterday to losing another top-of-the line F-22 Raptor stealth fighter. Apparently it’s been a rough year for the $647-million radar-evading plane from Lockheed Martin.  As reported in today’s Wired, “At 3:30 local time on Thursday an F-22, apparently belonging to the 325th Wing, a training unit based at Tyndall Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle, plunged into the ground in a wooded area inside the base perimeter near Highway 98, sparking a small fire.The pilot ejected safely. ‘The cause of the crash is still under investigation and additional details will be provided as soon as they become available,’ the flying branch said in a statement.

‘The same day, the Air Force copped to an earlier accident involving the stealth fighter, which costs as much as $678 million per copy (depending on how you crunch the numbers). On May 31, a student pilot on his second solo Raptor flight at Tyndall neglected to power up his jet’s engines fast enough after retracting the landing gear.Without sufficient thrust, the aircraft settled back to the runway, landing on its underside,” the Air Force explained in its official report, released on Thursday.In June, 325th Wing spokesman Herman Bell said the incident would likely be categorized as a “class A” accident costing more than $2 million to fix.

‘In fact, the repair cost totals $35 million, the Air Force said yesterday. That could put the damaged stealth fighter out of action for years, assuming it gets patched up at all. The F-22 is made largely of advanced composite materials that are expensive and time-consuming to replace. The flying branch preserved the tooling from the shuttered Lockheed Raptor factory specifically for extensive repair jobs.

‘The recent crashes are only the latest bad news for the cutting-edge F-22, which currently ranks as the Air Force’s most accident-prone fighter. The last of the Raptors rolled out of the Marietta, Georgia, factor in December and flew into a veritable firestorm of controversy.

‘The Air Force twice grounded all or some of the fleet over concerns about the Raptor’s apparently faulty oxygen system, which might have contributed to a fatal crash in 2010. Two F-22 pilots even mutinied, refusing to fly the speedy, high-flying jet until the Air Force worked out its problems. Months of investigation costing millions of dollars failed to definitively solve the jet’s oxygen woes, although the Air Force is installing a backup oxygen generator just in case.’

 

Read the full story, Another Day, Another $678 Million Stealth Jet Wrecked,” by David Axe in Wired.