Torture. again.

I was reading today about a Croatian woman arrested in Tennessee for war crimes committed during the Yugoslav break up. The AP summed up her charges thusly

One witness describes watching as another prisoner named Blagoje Djuras was beaten unconscious. The witness said Basic then stabbed him in the neck, killing him, and dragged other Serbs to the body "and made us drink that blood." A second witness corroborated the account of the stabbing and identified a picture of Basic in 2009, Arehart said.

Another man told investigators in September 1992 that he was forced to drink gasoline, beaten unconscious, and his hands and face were set on fire by Basic, who was wearing a Croatian military police uniform. A subsequent medical exam concluded the witness had been tortured.

Another witness said that in August 1992, Basic cut a cross and four "S" letters into his forehead before hacking his neck below the Adam's apple.

Now for all you people who steadfastly believe that American interrogators tortured people in Bagram by playing loud music at them or for keeping them awake 20 hours a day. Well get a clue.

At times, I dream of crocodiles

At times, I dream of crocodiles. Not often. It may in fact be years between the dreams. But the other night I had a good one.

I was wandering through some sort of African wilderness area. I know this because I saw hyenas, cheetahs, and similar creatures. I was carrying a camera and was alone. There was a river off to my left but I wasn’t really in view of it. I was walking upstream. At one point I saw a hyena carrying a young cheetah by the throat. There was an older cheetah watching. The hyena dropped the cheetah while maneuvering down a steep embankment. The older cheetah came over to the body and slapped it with its paw as thought to say “Get up! Now is your chance to escape.” It did this a couple of times until the hyena came back. Then it walked away and they hyena picked the body up and drug it into the trees.

I went around a bend and came to an area of white sand that was covered with thousands of burned crocodiles. I mean the ground was latterly covered with heaps of carbonized crocodiles. They looked like piles of burnt logs until you noticed the lines of the body, a head, a leg, or the gaping jaws. I wasn’t sure what had happened here but I wandered in amongst the heaps taking pictures. At one point I went down a gully towards the river and came upon a mass of huge dead crocodiles. Beasts that were forty plus feet long with jaws as long as my body,. Amongst them was the carbonized body of woman. Perfectly formed, just lying among the burned crocodiles. I took a picture and made a note that I would have to tell the police about it. Then, up on the side of a huge sand bank I saw something moving. I stared at what seemed to be a rippling glass sheet in the sand until I realized what I was seeing was the side of a crocodile that was bigger than anything I had ever seen before and. Despite being burned was alive and moving through the sand. It was like watching a whale curve up out of the water then back in, just a giant piece of flesh of which I could only se a small portion. Then it submerged in the sand and vanished. As I stood there looking I was near another huge, though not as huge as the moving one, crocodile body. The body was up on the edge of the gully that I was in the bottom of. It was burned and I could see past its charred ribs into the body cavity. The head was above me and as I looked up at it I saw its eye move, and realized it was looking back at me. Then it moved. The head turned and the beast began to drag itself out of the pile and to move along the bank. I stared; petrified at the thought of this thing being alive, then I began to back up the gully. The giant beast above me turned its head, and followed my movement, then began to crawl after me. As I went past the heads of burned bodies again I began to see more eyes flickering to life, and tracking my movement. The log heaps of bodies began to twitch and writhe as the beasts came to life. As I went around a bend to get back to where I had entered the gully I saw there was another, smaller crocodile coming down it, following my trail, and others following it. I tried to climb out of the gully but the sand walls collapsed and dumped me back to the bottom. The beasts whose eyes I had seen coming to live as I passed them were dragging themselves up behind me, I grabbed a dried, burned, chunk of something that was probably the side of a croc and propped it up against the edge of the gully opposite the side where the giant beast was watching me. I scrambled up this, wishing I had a gun instead of a camera. Just as I reached the top, another crocodile head hove into view, right where I was climbing. So there I was, sitting in a gully, with two giant zombie crocodiles sitting on either side at the top following my every move and hoards of smaller ones dragging themselves up and down the gully towards the place I stood. I realized that a gun wouldn’t have really helped much and just sat and watched them come closer.

Then I woke up. Don’t ask me for meanings, I don’t interpret them, I just dream them.

Push has come to shove

Push has come to shove in Libya. The government of the country has finally started to use its military in an organized and relatively effective way to repress the rebellion in the east. The rebels have come to the rude realization that it is going to take a lot more than flag waving on barricades to win. It turns out that there is a big difference between an “oppressive regime” such as Egypt and a despotic one such as Libya’s. Those military leaders and politicians who defected from the Libyan government had better get organized pretty quickly or their heads will be on the block. And they know that well. Now of course there is an outcry for the US to establish a no fly zone in Libya. Why us? I mean seriously folks; there are a lot of other supposedly capable folks around who could do something. Italy for example. They are right there on the boarder. Of course the Italian government is not all that excited about rebellion in Libya. They are predicting a mass exodus of people from Libya to the south of Italy if the Libyan government falls and they don’t want that. They would just as soon keep the current government there. The Egyptians are an even better answer. Then there wouldn’t be all that Christian vs Muslim back story, no “Western Imperialism”. Let the Arab world clean up its own messes for a change. The Egyptian Air Force is quite competent and is equipped with top of the line US stuff. Hell, Tunisia could join the fun too. Let the other branches of this Liberation movement help out.

Of course they won’t. Neither will the French, or the Spanish, or any one else. They will all sit around and moan that something should be done and wait for us to do it.