Revised Arab Interrogation Guidelines

In the wake of the growing scandal over prisoner abuse in the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced new guidelines for the interrogation of Iraqi/Arab prisoners.

Among them are changes in the punitive feminization of prisoners. Instead of addressing bra and panty-clad prisoners as "my bitch" or "little slut", interrogators must use phrases such as "missus" and/or "milady"

Who says this isn't a kinder, more compassionate conservatism?? Eh?!

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Is Jihad Already McJihad?

It is if you are Slovenian pop philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who asks In These Times the 25,000 Euro question, at the brink of the expansion of the EU, What Does Europe Want?

"How many fanatical defenders of religion started by ferociously attacking the contemporary secular culture and ended up forsaking any meaningful religious experience? In a similar way, many liberal warriors are so eager to fight anti-democratic fundamentalism that they will end by flinging away freedom and democracy themselves if only they may fight terror. They have such a passion for proving that non-Christian fundamentalism is the main threat to freedom that they are ready to fall
back on the position that we have to limit our own freedom here and now, in our allegedly Christian societies. If the "terrorists" are ready to wreck this world for love of another world, our warriors on terror are ready to wreck their own democratic world out of hatred for the Muslim other. Some of them love human dignity so much that they are ready to legalize torture, the ultimate degradation of human dignity,to defend it."