Those photographs — again

There’s a fascinating article in The Chronicle by Susan Brison, who teaches philosophy at Dartmouth, on the significance of the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison. She puts them usefully into a wider context. For example:

“The rape of women by invading armies is a well-known tactic of war – so well known that it has typically been taken for granted – but what are we to make of peacekeepers who rape? Do they consider it torture? Apparently not. Michael A. Sells reported, in The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia, that ‘in the summer of 1992, U.N. peacekeepers under the command of Canadian General Lewis MacKenzie frequented the rape camp known as Sonja’s Kon-Tiki, in the town of Vogosca near Sarajevo. Even after they learned that the women at the Kon-Tiki were Muslim captives held against their will, abused, and sometimes killed, U.N. peacekeepers continued to take advantage of the women there and to fraternize with their nationalist Serb captors.’

In an interview on National Public Radio, Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and the author of Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, noted that civilian contractors working for DynCorp, a U.S. company hired to train police in the Balkans in the early ’90s, were involved in serious sex crimes, including “owning” young women as sex slaves. The site supervisor was so confident that sexual abuse of women would not be considered torture that he even had himself videotaped raping two young women. (Sound familiar?) Not only were the contractors never charged with criminal activity, but the company was later hired by the United States – to train the police force in post-Saddam Iraq.”

In this connection, guess how many of these private ‘contractors’ there are in Iraq? Answer: 15,000. That’s ten per cent of the total US ‘peacekeeping’ effort.

The way we live now – II

There’s a fatuous example of “lifestyle journalism” in today’s New York Times. Headed “A BlackBerry Throbs, and a Wonk Has a Date”, it’s about how the Blackberry [a portable email device] has become an essential accessory for Washington’s thirtysomething elite. Just listen to the breathless gush of the prose:

“A YEAR ago, Tripp Donnelly saw his BlackBerry as a social liability — an accessory with all the sex appeal of a pocket protector. But now the gadget makes the rounds with Mr. Donnelly, 31, even when he sheds his jacket and tie for a night of barhopping or clubbing. He started keeping it with him when he realized he was missing social e-mail from the growing population of Washington women who were carrying BlackBerries themselves.

‘It’s made it much more efficient, much more direct,’ Mr. Donnelly said of the effect on his love life. ‘A 15-minute phone conversation can be abbreviated into a 10-second, one-sentence e-mail.’ Mr. Donnelly, a Clinton White House staff member who is now a managing director of the wireless communication company InPhonic (which once distributed BlackBerries, but no longer does), said he uses his BlackBerry to correspond with “a handful” of women in Washington and beyond. In one recent exchange, he asked a Bush campaign worker out on a first date.

He: ‘You and me — tomorrow night — dinner.’ She: ‘Sure.’ And that was that.”

There’s lots more in this vein. The piece even has the mandatory 9/11 reference.

“The BlackBerry gained a foothold in Washington two and a half years ago, after the Sept. 11 attacks left many in the city incommunicado when cellphone services were overwhelmed. BlackBerries worked fine that day (the proprietary network that carries their signals, for a monthly fee, has far less traffic than the networks used by cellphones), and shortly afterward the House allocated more than $500,000 to outfit its members with them.

Since then, lawmakers have started using their office budgets to provide BlackBerries to even junior staff members. With them, business can be conducted at any hour of the day or night; it is not uncommon, for example, for the staff of Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, to receive to-do lists sent from his BlackBerry after midnight. In 2001, perhaps a few dozen BlackBerries were in use on the Hill; there are now more than 5,000.”

The interesting thing about this is why Washington’s policymaking elite clearly hadn’t realised that there was a technology for doing this without resorting to the expense of buying Blackberries. It’s called SMS.