The Unfair Life

Life is not fair, but the fact that it has been so much more fair to us than it has been to so many people is one we tend to often forget. Being blessed with much more than what we earned or deserved, there is this propensity towards taking things for granted and crying foul at relatively minor sufferings and normal vicissitudes of life.

The following excerpts serve as a reminder of how small the problems which bother us are in comparison to the blessings we already possess. It give us an inkling of people who would actually be able to present a reasonable argument in favour of being dealt a weak hand in life:

"I once saw a young slave girl dying soon after the birth of a child nearly white. In her agony she cried out, 'O Lord, come and take me!' Her mistress stood by, and mocked at her like an incarnate fiend. 'You suffer, do you?' she exclaimed. 'I am glad of it. You deserve it all, and more too.'

The girl's mother said, 'The baby is dead, thank God; and I hope my poor child will soon be in heaven, too.'

'Heaven!' retorted the mistress. 'There is no such place for the like of her and her bastard.'

The poor mother turned away, sobbing. Her dying daughter called her, feebly, and as she bent over her, I heard her say, 'Don't grieve so, mother; God knows all about it; and HE will have mercy upon me.'

Her sufferings, afterwards, became so intense, that her mistress felt unable to stay; but when she left the room, the scornful smile was still on her lips. Seven children called her mother. The poor black woman had but the one child, whose eyes she saw closing in death, while she thanked God for taking her away from the greater bitterness of life."

"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" by Harriet Ann Jacobs

"It is easy to find out, on that day, who clothes and feeds his slaves well; for he is surrounded by a crowd, begging, 'Please, massa, hire me this year. I will work very hard, massa.' .............

But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns. She may be an ignorant creature, degraded by the system that has brutalized her from childhood; but she has a mother's instincts, and is capable of feeling a mother's agonies.

On one of these sale days, I saw a mother lead seven children to the auction-block. She knew that some of them would be taken from her; but they took all. The children were sold to a slave-trader, and their mother was brought by a man in her own town. Before night her children were all far away. She begged the trader to tell her where he intended to take them; this he refused to do. How could he, when he knew he would sell them, one by one, wherever he could command the highest price? I met that mother in the street, and her wild, haggard face lives to-day in my mind. She wrung her hands in anguish, and exclaimed, 'Gone! All gone! Why don't God kill

me?' I had no words wherewith to comfort her."

"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" by Harriet Ann Jacobs

"one of the plantation slaves was brought to town, by order of his master. It was near night when he arrived, and Dr. Flint ordered him to be taken to the work house, and tied up to the joist, so that his feet would just escape the ground. In that situation he was to wait till the doctor had taken his tea. I shall never forget that night. Never before, in my life, had I heard hundreds of blows fall; in succession, on a human being. His piteous groans, and his 'O, pray don't, massa,' rang in my ear for months afterwards. There were many conjectures as to the cause of this terrible punishment. Some said master accused him of stealing corn; others said the slave had quarrelled with his wife, in presence of the overseer, and had accused his master of being the father of her child. They were both black, and the child was very fair."

"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" by Harriet Ann Jacobs

"Corsetti explains that Bagram was a very tough prison: 'Each prisoner has in his cell a carpet measuring 1.2 m by 2.5 m. And they spend 23 hours a day sitting on it, in silence. If they speak, they are chained to the ceiling for 20 minutes and black visors are put on them so they can’t see, and protectors are put on their ears so they can’t hear. They are taken down to the

basement once a week, in groups of five or six, to shower them. It’s done to drive them crazy. I almost went crazy myself,'

Corsetti recalls.

'In Abu Ghraib and Bagram they were tortured to make them suffer, not to get information out of them.' And, he adds, the fact is that at times the torture had no other goal that 'to punish them for being terrorists. They tortured them and didn’t ask them anything.'

Other torture included using extreme cold and heat: 'I remember one of my prisoners trembling with cold. His teeth wouldn’t stop chattering. I put a blanket on him and then another, and another, and his teeth never stopped chattering, never stopped. You could see that the man was going to die of hypothermia. But the doctors are there so that they don’t die, so as to be able to torture them one more day.' At other times, he says, 'they put them under blinding lights that worked mechanically, giving out flashes.'

Another important practice was psychological torture, administered by psychiatrists. 'They tell them they are going to kill their children, rape their wives. And you see on their faces, in their eyes, the terror that that causes them. Because, of course, we know all about those people. We know the names of their children, where they live. We show them satellite photos of their houses. It is worse than any torture.

Sometimes, we put one of our women (female US military personnel) in a burqa and we made them walk through the interrogation rooms and we told them, ‘That is your wife,’ And the prisoner believed it. Why wouldn’t they?"

http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2007/12/21/former-us-interrogator-damien-corsetti-recalls-the-torture-of-prisoners-in-bagram-and-abu-ghraib/

The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.

At the interrogators' behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.

'Leave him up,' one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.

Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.

(image above shows Dilawar's father and daughter)

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse.html?ei=5088&en=4579c146cb14cfd6&ex=1274241600&pagewanted=all

"Post-Mortem:

One of the coroners later translated the assessment at a pre-trial hearing for Specialist Brand, saying the tissue in the young man’s legs 'had basically been pulpified.'

'I’ve seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus,' added Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the coroner, and a major at that time."

http://freedetainees.org/resource-us-report-brutal-details-of-2-afghan-inmates-deaths

While General Hamid Zabar was being questioned in Iraq, his interrogators decided to arrest his frail 16-year-old son in order to produce a confession. After soldiers found the boy, he was stripped, drenched with mud and water, and exposed to the cold January night while bound and driven about in the open back of a truck. When presented naked to his father, he was shivering due to hypothermia, clearly needing medical attention.

"George W. Bush, war criminal?" by Michael Haas

My hand is to me what your hearing and sight together are to you. In large measure we travel the same highways, read the same books, speak the same language, yet our experiences are different. All my comings and goings turn on the hand as on a pivot. It is the hand that binds me to the world of men and women. The hand is my feeler with which I reach through isolation and darkness and seize every pleasure, every activity that my fingers encounter.

"The world I Live In" by Helen Keller

"Nothing is entering or leaving Gaza, and now the funds to purchase what is available there are also drying up, bringing the dire situation of its people to a new and febrile crisis.

Karni is officially closed because the Israeli army has declared a security alert for the Jewish Passover holiday. Yet it has barely been open this year. The effect is a paralysis of Gaza's commerce and severe shortages of basic foods .... Israel's policy was summed up by Dov Weisglass, an adviser to Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, earlier this year. 'The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger,' he said."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/apr/16/israel

"Born in 1938 in Beit Daras village, he saw it conquered, leveled and erased, except from the memory he took to his grave. A captive in his own land, he lived years as a Gaza Nuseirat camp refugee, raising his family including son Ramzy, dreaming always of going home, struggling as a freedom fighter to end decades of conflict, violence, occupation, and oppression, what Edward Said called "a slow death," shattered hopes, and inexorable toll of its incalculable horror to so many."

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/10/life-in-palestinian-refugee-camps.html

"The Mission focussed (Chapter V) on the process of economic and political isolation imposed by Israel on the Gaza Strip, generally referred to as a “blockade”. The blockade comprises measures such as restrictions on the goods that can be imported into Gaza and the closure of border crossings for people, goods and services, sometimes for days, including cuts on the provision of fuel and electricity. Gaza’s economy is further severely affected by the reduction of the fishing zone open to the Palestinian fishermen and the establishment of a “buffer zone” along the border between Gaza and Israel which reduces the land available for agriculture and industrial activity. In addition to creating an emergency situation, the blockade significantly weakened the capacities of the population and of the health, water and other public sectors to react to the emergency created by the military operations.................

The Mission also examined the intense artillery attacks, again including white phosphorous munitions, on Al Wafa hospital in eastern Gaza City, a facility for patients receiving long-term care and suffering from particularly serious injuries..........

The Mission investigated several incidents involving the destruction of industrial infrastructure, food production, water installations, sewage treatment and housing (Chapter XIII). Already at the beginning of the military operations, the Al Bader flour mill was the only flour mill in the Gaza Strip still operating. The flour mill was hit by a series of air strikes on 9 January 2009 after several false warnings had been issued on previous days.....

Israeli forces also carried out a strike against a wall of one of the raw sewage lagoons of the

Gaza Waste Water Treatment Plant, which caused the outflow of more than 200,000 cubic

metres of raw sewage into neighbouring farmland............

The Namar Wells complex in Jabalya consisted of two water wells, pumping machines, a generator, fuel storage, a reservoir chlorination unit, buildings and related equipment. All were destroyed by multiple air strikes on the first day of the Israeli aerial attack."

http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/specialsession/9/docs/UNFFMGC_Report.pdf

"When the white powder started falling from the sky, the soldiers were puzzled. Usually the American planes dropped bombs. Now, they were unleashing clouds of something that looked like fog, smelled like garlic and burned their eyes........

First sprayed in 1968, Mr. Vinh was plagued by muscular and skeletal disorders. But after the war ended in 1975, his health deteriorated rapidly. By 1994, he was paralyzed and spent six months in hospital, being fed liquids through his nose......

Dioxin interferes with reproduction, so Mr. Vinh's nightmare swept up his children and grandchildren as well. One son is blind and mentally handicapped. Another is deaf. A third has spinal problems. One daughter is partly paralyzed, another mentally handicapped, the third chronically weak with children born blind.

Vietnam estimates 400,000 people were killed or maimed by the defoliants, 500,000 children have been born with defects from retardation to spina bifida and a further two million people have suffered cancers or other illnesses."

(In the image above Phan Thi Hoi bathes her 14-year-old son, Bui Quang Ky. She was exposed to Agent Orange when she was in the North Vietnamese Army during the war.)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/archives/article697346.ece

"CAMILE. All right. The calling in of artillery for games, the way it was worked would be the mortar forward observers would pick out certain houses in villages, friendly villages, and the mortar forward observers would call in mortars until they destroyed that house and then the artillery forward observer would call in artillery until he destroyed another house and whoever used the least amount of artillery, they won. And when we got back someone would have to buy someone else beers. The cutting off of heads--on Operation Stone--there was a Lt. Colonel there and two people had their heads cut off and put on stakes and stuck in the middle of the field. And we were notified that there was press covering the operation and that we couldn't do that anymore.

Before we went out on the operation we were told not to waste our heat tablets on food but to save them for the villages because we were going to destroy all the villages and we didn't give the people any time to get out of the villages. We just went in and burned them and if people were in the villages yelling and screaming, we didn't help them. We just burned the houses as we went.

MODERATOR. Why did you use the heat tabs? Did you just light off the villages with matches or just throw the heat tabs in so it would keep burning?

CAMILE. We'd throw the heat tabs in because it was quicker and they'd keep burning. They couldn't put the heat tabs out. We'd throw them on top of the houses. People cut off ears and when they'd come back in off of an operation you'd make deals before you'd go out and like for every ear you cut off someone would buy you two beers, so people cut off ears. The torturing of

prisoners was done with beatings and I saw one case where there were two prisoners. One prisoner was staked out on the ground and he was cut open while he was alive and part of his insides were cut out and they told the other prisoner if he didn't tell them what they wanted to know they would kill him. And I don't know what he said because he spoke in Vietnamese but then they killed him after that anyway.

.............

CAMILE. The main thing was that if an operation was covered by the press there were certain things we weren't supposed to do, but if there was no press there, it was okay. I saw one case where a woman was shot by a sniper, one of our snipers. When we got up to her she was asking for water. And the Lt. said to kill her. So he ripped off her clothes, they stabbed her ***********, they spread-eagled her and shoved an E- tool **********, an entrenching tool, and she was still asking for water. And then they took that out and they used a tree limb and then she was shot.

..........

we were about 5 miles down the road, where there were some Vietnamese children at the gateway of the village and they gave the old finger gesture at us. It was understandable that they picked this up from the GIs there. They stopped the trucks--they didn't stop the truck, they slowed down a little bit, and it was just like response, the guys got up, including the

lieutenants, and just blew all the kids away. There were about five or six kids blown away and then the truck just continued down the hill. That was my first day in Vietnam. As far as the crucified bodies, they weren't actually crucified with nails, but they would find VCs or something (I never got the story on them) but, anyway, they were human beings, obviously dead, and they would take them and string them out on fences, on barbed wire fences, stripped, and sometimes they would take flesh wounds, take a knife and cut the body all over the place to make it bleed, and look gory as a reminder to the people in the village.

............

He asked me if I would like to accompany him into a village that I was familiar with to see how they act. So I went with him and when we got there the ARVNs had control of the situation. They didn't find any enemy but they found a woman with bandages. So she was questioned by six ARVNs and the way they questioned her, since she had bandages, they shot her. She was hit about twenty times. After she was questioned, and, of course, dead, this guy came over, who was a former major, been in the service for twenty years, and he got hungry again and came back over working with USAID, Aid International Development. He went over there, ripped her clothes off and took a knife and cut, ********** almost all the way up, just about *********** and pulled her organs out, completely out of her cavity, and threw them out. Then, he stopped and knelt over and commenced to peel every bit of skin off her body and left her there as a sign for something or other and that was those instances.

The bridge got a radio call that they had supposedly received a sniper round from this village. So the Lt. on the bridge told them to sweep the village. They swept the village and they called back that there was nothing found. There was nothing found, I mean, there were just people in the village and so the Lt. told them to burn the village. From my position, which was about 150 to 200 yards away, and there was a tree line in the way, smoke started coming up over the tree line and about this time, I guess about three minutes after the smoke started showing, there was a lot of screaming and just chaos coming from the direction of the village and a lot of people started running out of the tree line. From where I was standing, I saw maybe two or three male villagers and the rest were women and children--some of the children walking and some of them young enough to be carried, I would say under a year, maybe. The last thing I heard as a command was the gunnery sergeant told them to open fire to keep them back. Their village was on fire and they were in panic; they didn't stop, so they just cut down the women and children with mortars, machine guns, tank, snipers were...

........

MODERATOR. Mr. Camile, you have testimony here of napalm being dropped on villagers. Could you go into this and kind of let us know what napalm is and how it was used and any of the results?

CAMILE. I really don't know that much about what it is or what it's made of. I just know that when it gets on you it burns and when they drop it from the planes, they usually drop two big canisters of napalm at a time. It just burns everything up, including the people. Many times we've called in air before we'd go into a village, or if we had a village where we'd lost people because of booby traps, we'd call in napalm and it just burns down the village and the people.

QUESTION. In terms of practice does that mean that women were treated especially rudely? You said "double everything."

PANELIST. Yes, I would say so. Because it makes a lasting impression on some guy--some "zip"--that's watching his daughter worked over. So we have a better opportunity of keeping him in line by working her over."

Winter Soldier Investigation (http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Winter_Soldier/WS_entry.html)