Salon.com features a special section on the Abu Ghraib incidents that includes essays and photo galleries of abused and tortured prisoners. The U.S. captors seem to be having fun. See everything here.

     From The Internationalist: "The Hideous Face of American Torture in Iraq"

     Gruesome photos of tortured victim Muzafar Avazov.

     Enter the Torture Museum.

    What type of torture would you want to inflict on your enemy?

• Physical torture uses physical pain to inflict torment and is the most well known form of torture.

• Psychological torture uses psychological pain to inflict torment and is less well known because its effects are often invisible to others. It uses non-physical methods to induce pain in the subject's mental, emotional, and psychological states. Since there is no international political consensus on what constitutes psychological torture, it is often overlooked, denied and called other things. Despite this, some of its most prominent victims such as United States Senator John McCain have stated that it is the ultimate form of torture.

• Psychiatric torture uses psychiatric diagnoses and their associated psychiatric treatments to torture sane people for political, religious, or familial reasons. It was a common form of torture against political prisoners in the former Soviet Union. Mild forms of psychiatric torture have been used in the United States military against otherwise sane dissenting officers. Some religious groups who shun dissenting members, a form of psychological torture, also attempt to use psychiatric torture to falsely diagnosis mental disorders so that ongoing shaming is possible. Psychiatric torture also occurs in parental alienation and in divorce cases where false allegations or diagnoses of mental illness are solicited and used to torture and/or control the other parent/spouse within the legal system.

• Pharmalogical torture uses psychotropic and/or other chemicals to induce pain and cause compliance with torturer's goals.

          (From Wikipedia)

What about tickling someone to death? Would this be a form of torture?

     The Dubai Ports Deal fell through. Haha. Thanks to congressional leaders - predominantly Republicans - who voted last Wednesday to block a Dubai-owned enterprise from taking control of some U.S port operations.

     And how did President George W. Bush react to this block? Here are his statements:

"I'm concerned about a broader message this issue could send to our friends and allies around the world, particularly in the Middle East," Bush said in remarks to the National Newspaper Association. "In order to win the War on Terror, we have got to strengthen our relationships and friendships with moderate, Arab countries in the Midddle East. UAE is a committed ally in the War on terror, they are a key partner for our military in a critical region." Read more.

     Why is GWB more concerned about what friendly foreigners might think than what his own people think? And what's this talk about strengthening "our relationships and friendships with moderate, Arab countries in the Middle East?" First of all, I don't want to have any relationships with Arabs in foreign countries. I'm in America, they're in the Middle East; never together shall we feast. Second, UAE is not an ally! They only appear to be an ally because of their tall buildings, luxurious hotels, and clean shopping malls, but you still can't worship Jesus, praise Buddha, or venerate Shiva openly in that country. Real friends tolerate each other's personal beliefs. Obviously, poor George doesn't realize this. And third, let's start turning every waste material into energy and stop relying on foreign oil for subsistence!

     The Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that published the Mohammed cartoons, yesterday published a manifesto denouncing Islamofascism. Twelve intellectuals (some of whom are Muslims) showed their support by signing it:

          MANIFESTO: Together facing the new totalitarianism

Læs mainfestet som Salman Rushdie og 11 andre europæiske intellektuelle har skrevet, hvori de advarer mod islamisk totalitarisme.

After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism.

We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all.

The recent events, which occurred after the publication of drawings of Muhammed in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field. It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats.

Like all totalitarianisms, Islamism is nurtured by fears and frustrations. The hate preachers bet on these feelings in order to form battalions destined to impose a liberticidal and unegalitarian world. But we clearly and firmly state: nothing, not even despair, justifies the choice of obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred. Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man's domination of woman, the Islamists' domination of all the others. To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed or discriminated people.

We reject « cultural relativism », which consists in accepting that men and women of Muslim culture should be deprived of the right to equality, freedom and secular values in the name of respect for cultures and traditions. We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of "Islamophobia", an unfortunate concept which confuses criticism of Islam as a religion with stigmatisation of its believers.

We plead for the universality of freedom of expression, so that a critical spirit may be exercised on all continents, against all abuses and all dogmas.

We appeal to democrats and free spirits of all countries that our century should be one of Enlightenment, not of obscurantism.

12 signatures

Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Chahla Chafiq
Caroline Fourest
Bernard-Henri Lévy
Irshad Manji
Mehdi Mozaffari
Maryam Namazie
Taslima Nasreen
Salman Rushdie
Antoine Sfeir
Philippe Val
Ibn Warraq

Presentations:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, from somilian origin, is member of Dutch parliement, member of the liberal party VVD. Writter of the film Submission which caused the assasination of Theo Van Gogh by an islamist in november 2004, she lives under police protection.

Chahla Chafiq
Chahla Chafiq, writer from iranian origin, exiled in France is a novelist and an essayist. She's the author of Le nouvel homme islamiste , la prison politique en Iran (2002). She also wrote novels such as Chemins et brouillard (2005).

Caroline Fourest
Essayist, editor in chief of Prochoix (a review who defend liberties against dogmatic and integrist ideologies), author of several reference books on « laicité » and fanatism : Tirs Croisés : la laïcité à l'épreuve des intégrismes juif, chrétien et musulman (with Fiammetta Venner), Frère Tariq : discours, stratégie et méthode de Tariq Ramadan, et la Tentation obscurantiste (Grasset, 2005). She received the National prize of laicité in 2005.

Bernard-Henri Lévy
French philosoph, born in Algeria, engaged against all the XXth century « ism » (Fascism, antisemitism, totalitarism, terrorism), he is the author of La Barbarie à visage humain, L'Idéologie française, La Pureté dangereuse, and more recently American Vertigo.

Irshad Manji
Irshad Manji is a Fellow at Yale University and the internationally best-selling author of The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith (en francais: "Musulmane Mais Libre"). She speaks out for free expression based on the Koran itself. Née en Ouganda, elle a fui ce pays avec sa famille musulmane d'origine indienne à l'âge de quatre ans et vit maintenant au Canada, où ses émissions et ses livres connaissent un énorme succès.

Mehdi Mozaffari
Mehdi Mozaffari, professor from iranian origin and exiled in Denmark, is the author of several articles and books on islam and islamism such as : Authority in Islam: From Muhammad to Khomeini, Fatwa: Violence and Discourtesy and Glaobalization and Civilizations.

Maryam Namazie
Writer, TV International English producer; Director of the Worker-communist Party of Iran's International Relations; and 2005 winner of the National Secular Society's Secularist of the Year award.

Taslima Nasreen
Taslima Nasreen is born in Bangladesh. Doctor, her positions defending women and minorities brought her in trouble with a comittee of integrist called « Destroy Taslima » and to be persecuted as « apostate »

Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie is the author of nine novels, including Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses and, most recently, Shalimar the Clown. He has received many literary awards, including the Booker Prize, the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, Germany's Author of the Year Award, the European Union's Aristeion Prize, the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature, the Premio Mantova, and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. He is a Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et Lettres, an Honorary Professor in the Humanities at M.I.T., and the president of PEN American Center. His books have been translated into over 40 languages.

Philippe Val
Director of publication of Charlie Hebdo (Leftwing french newspaper who have republished the cartoons on the prophet Muhammad by solidarity with the danish citizens targeted by islamists).

Ibn Warraq
Ibn Warraq , author notably of Why I am Not a Muslim ; Leaving Islam : Apostates Speak Out ; and The Origins of the Koran , is at present Research Fellow at a New York Institute conducting philological and historical research into the Origins of Islam and its Holy Book.

Antoine Sfeir
Born in Lebanon, Christian, Antoine Sfeir choosed french nationality to live in an universalist and « laïc » (real secular) country. He is the director of Les cahiers de l'Orient and has published several reference books on islamism such as Les réseaux d'Allah (2001) et Liberté, égalité, Islam : la République face au communautarisme (2005).

     It would take a foreigner to tell America to wake up and take action to fight Islamofascism. Brigitte Gabriel, a Lebanese Christian who was persecuted by the Palestinians, delivered a speech at the Intelligence Summit in Washington, D.C. last Saturday.

     Gabriel, now an American citizen, vehemently decries the complacency of Americans as far as acknowledging the enemy. She states:

Our mediocre attitude of not confronting Islamic forces of bigotry and hatred wherever they raised their ugly head in the last 30 years, has empowered and strengthened our enemy to launch a full scale attack on the very freedoms we cherish in their effort to impose their values and way of life on our civilization.

More excerpts of her speech can be read in Frontpage Magazine.

     Visit Gabriel's official website. And read about her horrifying experience in the hands of Islamic terrorists.