Guantanamo Guard Speaks Out Against Torture

Army Private Brandon Neely served as a prison guard at Guantánamo in the first years the facility was in operation. With the Bush Administration, and thus the threat of retaliation against him, now gone, Neely decided to step forward and tell his story. “The stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong,” he told the Associated Press. Neely describes the arrival of detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb, he details their sexual abuse by medical personnel, torture by other medical personnel, brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution, the first hunger strike and its causes, torturous shackling, positional torture, interference with religious practices and beliefs, verbal abuse, restriction of recreation, the behavior of mentally ill detainees, an isolation regime that was put in place for child-detainees, and his conversations with prisoners David Hicks and Rhuhel Ahmed. It makes for fascinating reading.

Neely’s comprehensive account runs to roughly 15,000 words. It was compiled by law students at the University of California at Davis and can be accessed here.

Hillary Goes to Japan

Hillary Clinton made her debut on the international stage – she went over to Asia to hang out in Japan and talk about nuclear weapons and the global economic crisis. She made some tough comments on North Korean disarmament that were pretty cool – and probably a lot more effective than just lumping them into some amalgamous mass called the “Axis of Evil.” Good job, Hillary. Keep it up. She’s gonna be stopping in Indonesia and a few other places before she comes back to the US.

Nuclear Submarines Collide…Great.

There was a close call in the Atlantic a few days ago when two nuclear submarines collided in the Atlantic Ocean. Both vessels, a British Royal Navy sub dubbed HMS Vanguard and France’s Le Triomphant, were carrying nuclear warheads on their respective “standard patrols,” the French Ministry of Defense said. “They briefly came in contact in a very slow speed while they were immersed.” Luckily, there were no injuries or security scares and both ships returned safely to shore. In a worst-case scenario, the collision could have emitted radiation and nuclear warheads into the ocean. “The dents reportedly visible on the British sub show the boats were no more than a couple of seconds away from total catastrophe,” the chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament explained.

Stimulus Good For Medicine

The Block FM is trying to keep you up to date about what’s hot and what’s not about the recently passed $789 billion stimulus package. oops, I think it’s $787 billion now, but who’s counting. So yeah, the new stimulus package is good for medicine, just like it’s good for the environment. See most of the time when the government sponsors medical research, they’re just giving money to scientists to figure out if new drugs and treatments are safe and effective. But what we’ve never ever given scienists and researchers money for is testing new drugs and treatments against the effectiveness of the current drugs and treatments that are on the market. So basically, the stimulus package is giving medicine $1.1 billion to do some quality control and compare the new to the old and scrap what sucks and keep what works. Good idea, Geniuses! Yeesh, it took until 2009 to figure that would be a good thing?! Wow. So way to go, yippee and all that jazz. Happy President’s Day. As Bush would say, “go shopping.”