Waterboarding and Mordida--Learn From the Mexican Experts

[Lightning Rod]

http://www.bendib.com/newones/2006/octo ... -Labor.jpg

Waterboarding and Mordida--Learn From the Mexican Experts
for release 11-06-07
Washington DC
by Lightning Rod

We owe much to our neighbors to the South in Mexico. There are the obvious things like tequila and tacos and scads of cheap laborers. But there are also other and more subtle cultural influences.

Take the Mexican Federal Police for example. The Federales are a jovial bunch, just like cops everywhere, I suppose. But they are more entrepreneurial and pragmatic.

I've never encountered them in person. But when I was in the business of trading in Mexican vegetables in the late sixties, many of my colleagues had that dubious pleasure.

Two of my partners decided to take their girlfriends to Acapulco. They were riding around looking like rock stars, long-haired and all turquoised up, riding in big cars and throwing money around. The Federales grabbed them. They called it an arrest but it was actually a kidnapping. The next thing I know I'm getting an international phone call from Mexico--twenty thousand bucks and they'll forget the whole thing. Ransom in other words.

It was very creative police work. Why bog down the court system with unnecessary caseload when you can do the job in one smooth motion and send the gringos home and at the same time pocket twenty grand? Blackwater or the NSA couldn't have done it better.

It took me a week to raise the money and send it down there. During that time my friends were held under 'house arrest' at some hacienda outside of Acapulco. Every day the cops would bring them a bag of herb in the morning and in the evenings would take them out clubbing in town. Hey, that's better than an armed guard any day, and cheaper. What I love about the Mexican system is that they don't make things more complicated or uncomfortable than they have to be. They call it 'la mordida'. Cash will grease any wheel.

The Federales also had a method of interrogation to which I am harkened when I observe the recent news about American use of 'waterboarding.' Of course anybody that doubts that waterboarding is torture should probably experience it. But the Mexican Federal Police have a novel twist on the technique. When they want information from a suspect and they want it quickly, they use good old American Coca Cola.

The equipment is simple and the process goes something like this: First a piece of duct tape is placed across the victim's mouth. Then the interrogator takes a bottle of hot Coca Cola, shakes it and squirts it up the victim's nose. I'm told that the resultant sensation is very akin to drowning. The victim at this point tells you whatever you want to hear. Not necessarily the truth, but whatever you want to hear, to avoid drowning in syrupy bubbles. It gives a whole new dimension to the idea of snorting coke.

This is the trouble with torture. Not only is it ugly and strenuous and troublesome, it rarely achieves the result that you are seeking, which is presumably to ascertain the truth.

It's easy for The Poet's Eye to see that we have been learning from our neighbors to the South. We have a system of institutional bribery. In Mexico they call it la mordida. Here we call it lobbying and political contributions. And we torture our prisoners. I think that the Coke up the nose method of torture is ever so much more elegant than waterboarding though. The equipment is simpler, a coke and a roll of duct tape. We need to study harder in the torture department. The Mexicans should be our gurus. What could be more American than Coca Cola?

I'm bugged at my ol' man
Cause he's making me stay in my room
(Darn my dad)
I came in a little late
And my ol' man he just blew his mind
(Blew it bad)
Why did he sell my surfboard?
He cut off my hair last night in my sleep
I wish I could see outside
But he tacked up boards on my window
(Gosh it's dark)
I can't hit the surf, can't drag
Can't do a dog-goned thing
(Wish I could)
---Beach Boys

[jimboloco]

Interesting how you get a theme, develope it and follow thru.
plus add on a clip of musica despues.
and hit th mark with timliness
hope it keeps you somewhat sane
hope this snippet keeps you somewhat crazy, roadgoings always.

When I was down and out, had just left a labor camp in south Louisiana heading west, picked up a hitchhiker west of Houston, he was going to El Paso to look for woork at the army base there. He spoke Spanish, said that he had lived in Juarez. Let's go, I said. This was the summer of 1976.

We drove across the border, got a hotel room for $1.50 Americano. We left my car, a 67 Impala, parked and walked to a saloon. The people were friendly, the musiciians playing. We drank cervesas and sang, eeehaaaaa. Then we walked out, into the early evening air, and back towards the hotel.

Guess what? Two young Mexican police dudes stopped us. They had these hats with fronts that stuck way up, like my old ROTC hat. Real little fascists, like I was supposed to have become. Instead I became a dharma bum. " Boracho?" they asked. ""Tiene marijuana?" They searched me. I had $80 dollars in my left front blue jeans jacket. The young policeman deftly fingered the pocket. I saw or felt nothing beyond that. They backed away and we walked on to the hotel. Only when we got back did I dare to stop and search my pocket. The money was gone. I had 1 dollar left.

The next morning, we drove back to the border and the American border guards searched thru my car and all the belongings. It was afternoon before we got across. The Texan knew a used car dealer, and I sold the car to him for $75. The Texan went to the mission. I took what I could in my backpack, bought a bus ticket to Albuquerque, got in at 2 AM, walked to the freeway and hitchhiked to Fresno, got another bus to San Francisco, where I stayed for a month eating Chinese food with a food stamp coupon and doing odd jobs, then hithiked east in October to Saint Louis, on and on road going back in the day.

I got a clip singing "I'm on a Mexican radio", got to get a url set for my phone. One of the last times I was stoned, nada mas, amigoloco.
Elvis Rodney is in the house!

[jimboloco]

just sent 4 emails to both senators in California plus Florida imploring them to reject the Mukasey nomination, on grounds that expedience is not a good reasn to approve the nomination and that the entire world is watching us as a nation.

The Judiciary Committee advanced Attorney General designate Michael Mukasey's nomination to the Senate floor Tuesday, virtually ensuring confirmation for a former judge ensnarled in bitter controversy over terrorism-era prisoner interrogations.

The 11-8 vote came only after two key Democrats accepted his assurance to enforce any law Congress might enact against waterboarding.

The White House and Senate Republicans called for a swift confirmation vote, which is expected by the end of next week.

"We appreciate the vote of senators on the Judiciary Committee to forward the nomination of Judge Michael Mukasey to the full Senate," White House [piss] secretary Dana Perino said. "Judge Mukasey has clearly demonstrated that he will be an exceptional attorney general at this critical time."

Though Mukasey is expected to easily win confirmation by the full Senate, Democrats and some Republicans were far from satisfied with his answers on torture, presidential signing statements and executive power.

Mukasey's assurances on torture that won over Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer was disingenuous, according to Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.

"Unsaid, of course, is the fact that any such prohibition would have to be enacted over the veto of this president," said Leahy.

But Schumer, who suggested Mukasey to the White House in the first place, countered that the nominee's statements against waterboarding and for purging politics from the Justice Department amount to the best deal Democrats could get from the Bush administration.

"If we block Judge Mukasey's nomination and then learn in six months that waterboarding has continued unabated, that victory will seem much less valuable," he wrote in an op-ed in Tuesday's editions of The New York Times.

Feinstein, D-Calif., said her vote for Muksaey's confirmation came down in part to practicality. If Mukasey's nomination were killed, she said, Bush would install an acting attorney general not subject to Senate confirmation and make recess appointments to fill nearly a dozen other empty jobs at the top of Justice.

"I don't believe a leaderless department is in the best interests of the American people or of the department itself," Feinstein said. Bush, she added, "appointed this man because he believes he is mainstream."

Support for Mukasey from Schumer and Feinstein virtually assured the former federal judge the majority vote he needed to be favorably recommended by the 19-member committee. He was expected to win confirmation handily, and the vote is likely before Thanksgiving.

Many Democrats came out in opposition to Mukasey after he refused to say unequivocably that so-called waterboarding — an interrogation technique that makes the victim believe he is drowning — is tantamount to torture and thus illegal under domestic and international law.

Mukasey rankled Democrats during his confirmation hearing by saying he was not familiar with the waterboarding technique and could not say whether it was torture.

Even Sen. Arlen Specter, the panel's ranking Republican, called that explanation "a flimsy excuse" and suggested instead that Muksaey declined to call waterboarding illegal torture because he wanted to avoid putting at legal risk U.S. officials who may have engaged in the practice.

But Specter, of Pennsylvania, said that outlawing waterboarding rests with Congress. He revealed that he had talked with Mukasey a day earlier and received an assurance that the nominee would back up any such legislation and quit if Bush ignores his opinion.
Thus, Specter said, Mukasey had won his support.

Legal experts cautioned that if Mukasey called it torture, that effectively could have constituted an admission that the United States engaged in war crimes. It could also commit him to prosecuting U.S. officials even before he takes office.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071106/ap_ ... te_mukasey

Now let's see if Congress has an nterest in passing an anti-waterboarding law. I guess this would mean that officials involved in doing this before the law would not be subject to prosecution. So we have to pass a law against a torture technique that was used by Nazi Germany, fascist Japan in WW2? Because if criminality were already established, then administration officials who knew about this and concurred with it's usage would be subject to prosecution in an independent judicial department, including the president.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21644133/
The presidency is now a criminal conspiracy
SPECIAL COMMENT
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'
MSNBC
updated 9:42 p.m. ET, Mon., Nov. 5, 2007

http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en- ... e20139f35a
Special Comment: On waterboarding and torture

[Arcadia]

I read this post some time ago and at that time I tried to find the alternative word we use here for "mordida" that is also used but in a very colloquial contexts. And I just didn´t remember the word in spanish...! The little mental-verbal escotoma was filled for the news that populated the local newspaper in the following days... the word is "coima".

[jimboloco]

Our democratic senator Bill Nelson voted agin cnfirmation
but Republickin Martinez, our man from Havana
says he's a man od characker

enuf ta putz ya in a coima