PunkAssBlog.com

Mounties use tasers to sexually assault an aboriginal child. And get away with it.
Predictably, the article doesn’t call it sexual assault. But what does this sound like to you?

The girl, who was 16 at the time of the incident, said she was held down by four officers, one for each limb, while a taser was [...]

Folks, the internet has been won.
Background: Something Awful commentators react to recently-released footage of then 16-year-old Omar Khadr being cruelly interrogated by Canadian officials at Guantanamo. Their reactions range from sympathetic to death threats—these soft children of privilege who never leave the comfort of their parents’ basement, let alone face unending hell in an illegal [...]

Yet another set of relics from the post-satire age:

As the keychain says, truly “It don’t GITMO better than this.”
Welcome to “Taliban Towers” at Guantanamo Bay, the most ghoulishly distasteful tourist destination on the planet. As these astonishing mementoes show, the US authorities are promoting the world’s most notorious prison camp as a cheap hideaway for [...]

At least not so much lately in America. Of course, cynics would say that, by merely parroting the propaganda of the powerful, they are doing PRECISELY their job, because that’s what they’re kept around for in the first place. And, well, I guess the cynics would probably be right. But appearances of speaking truth to [...]

The U.N. Security Council has unanimously declared that rape is a weapon of war. My first thought upon hearing this was “yay!” My second thought was that perhaps “yay” is not the right response to anything pertaining to rape; in any event, thinking about the news even now stirs a dull pang of hope.
Reiterating deep [...]

I admit to being slightly obsessed with Omar Khadr’s story. Many of us here in Soviet Canuckistan, the one major U.S. ally unwilling to say a peep about America’s human rights violations in Guantanamo Bay, are slightly obsessed with Omar Khadr’s story. I’m not sure if the Khadr family—”Canada’s First Family of Terrorism”—gets as much [...]

Mother Jones has gotten a hold of some of the music that U.S. troops use to “induce sleep deprivation, “prolong capture shock,” disorient detainees during interrogations—and also drown out screams.”
Lovely.

I find the use of Rage Against the Machine and Springsteen particularly abhorrent (not only because of the artists’ politics, but because I happen to [...]

If we need to have fascism, can it at least be well-dressed fascism?
Okay, so this fellow Scalia has actually managed the unthinkable, which is to change my mind on the ethics of torture. Previously, as you may recall, I had the sane belief that torture was always unethical, under any circumstances. But this good judge [...]

Here’s something neat that you can read in preparation for your inevitable incarceration in Guantanamo Bay—a U.S. Government-funded manual on psychological torture, published in 1961 by John Wiley & Sons.*
It begins with “don’t try this at home” reassurances:
This work might help the armed forces to offset the lack of knowledge that was in part held [...]

From Counterpunch, an interesting article on Israeli doublespeak. The pedant in me feels the need to point out that Orwell never used the term “doublespeak” in 1984. But it’s still a useful concept. Of course, neither Orwell nor the Israeli government ought to be blamed for inventing deliberately obscure political language. They simply provide, the [...]

If you’re an Ashkenazi Jew in a primarily goyish milieu, you’ve probably gotten this one: “Oh, I had relatives die in the Holocaust too! My grandfather fell off a guard tower.”
At the risk of blatantly violating Godwin’s Law on my first post here, I kept thinking about that joke as I read The tortured lives [...]

Reading this thread at Feministe made several highly salient points magically appear in my head about the Veiling Debate that’s been going on:
1) Why am I the only white person in the world it seems who knows that muslim women are not actually commanded by their religion to veil in front of children - which [...]