April 19, 2008

I'll just wait for the protests to happen....

From The Australian...

SUPPORTERS of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF party have set up a network of torture camps where they have been assaulting opposition activists, a leading rights group says.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch said suspected supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) were being rounded up and then beaten for several hours at a time with wooden sticks and batons in the wake of last month's disputed elections.

"Torture and violence are surging in Zimbabwe," Human Rights Watch's Africa director Georgette Gagnon said in a new report.

"ZANU-PF members are setting up torture camps to systematically target, beat, and torture people suspected of having voted for the MDC in last month's elections."

The organisation said it had conducted interviews with more than 30 people who had sustained serious injuries, including broken limbs, as a result of the beatings in the camps.

The aim of the beatings was to punish people for voting for the opposition in the March 29 polls and coerce them into supporting Mugabe in a possible second round run-off, HRW added. (Thanks to jammiewearingfool)

Any minute now the hundred-thousand or so people who have wailed for years about abu Ghraib will be making ringing denunciations of this new evil. I'll just sit here and hold my breath 'till it happens! Any minute now. Candle-light vigils, for sure. Headlines in the NYT.

Of course they won't do any such thing, the despicable frauds. 99% of the abu Ghraib bitching was pure hatred of America. None of them care about torture, unless there is a political point to be made.

And I'm still disgusted about how the splendid work of the 391st Military Police Battalion, from Columbus, Ohio, has never gotten a single morsel of credit. They are the ones who took over abu Ghraib prison after the scandal, and broke their backs doing everything with scrupulous care, so as to restore our country's honor. The trouble is, shams like Mark Shea, and all the other torture pomposos, couldn't care less. All they are interested in is tearing down this great nation, under the pretense of superior morality. Not a word of thanks ever to those who do things right.

And for that matter, Saddam's regime was, in the opinion of this history buff, the worst for torture in the history of this planet. Saddam's nine different secret police agencies tortured at least ten-thousand people every year, in the most hideous ways imaginable. Like having people eaten alive by dogs. Or torturing children in front of their parents. The US military put an end to that torture—torture on a scale a million times worse than abu Ghraib. And do any of our torture-mongers ever pause from complaining about water-boarding to say thank you to our troops, for stopping Saddam's torture regime, at the risk of their lives?

Of course not. They are all—from Shea on down—utterly uninterested in the subject of torture--a miillion brown-skinned foreigners could be tortured every day, and they would never shed a tear. Unless the USA could be blamed for it. THEN it would be a "moral issue."

Posted by John Weidner at April 19, 2008 5:44 PM
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