zero tolerance -- yemen

THE ABSURD TIMES

TRUMP THE VILE

Even calling him something like that will be no problem for his as long as his hell's angle's gang of supporters keep suppporting him and they will. Whenever an issue become too hot for him, he manages to change the subject and the media is more than happy to oblige him on that. He has taken the attention away from Jerusalem, Russia and his complicity, and a variety of other issues, this time by creating baby prisons on the Texas borders, a move so vile that even Ted Cruz, the leach-infested Senator from Texas is trying to distance himself from it.

This is an easy task to this love lorn attention hound. Even his ghost writer has pointed out that he has the attention span of, well, an attention span no greater that 15 minutes. Once he read a state of the union speech and someone asked me what did it prove? My answer was simple, it proved that he was able to read, just so long as he was allowed to say the words as he spoke and knew that it was going out on national television. Otherwise, they know not to give him anything longer than about one paragraph to read and even then to be careful to put his name in it somewhere.

The media has absolutely no interest in pointing this out or even calling him on it except to point it out, but then they go along with the new topic and abandon whatever it was that was giving him trouble in the first place. He is just too good for ratings, sort of the Hell's Angels of politics. https://www.thenation.com/article/this-political-theorist-predicted-the-rise-of-trumpism-his-name-was-hunter-s-thompson/ You can see from that, if you can get through all the adds and warnings and permissions, that it was predicted and that it came true. Fortunately, for him, he shot himself in the head when he was 69 and thus never lived to see it. We have to live through it.

He will continue if we let him, and have to let him at least until midterms. If we try to take him out before that, it will be used to get of his voters who normally are a sluggish sort. Still, he was forced to cancell the congressional picnic (Ivanka will miss that, but she doesn't care) and soon issued an executive order to stop separating children from their parents. Probably the biggest incentive to do this was first the sight on about 10 9 and 10 year old girls being led to a detention center in East Harlem and televised by TV ! In New York followed by nagging from Melania and Ivanka (presumably) and outrage from Republican members who were afraid of what the photos showed back home. (Things look different in Louisville than in Washington, D.C.)

So, he changes his mind. Of course. He will find something else. Perhaps as Cohen says he may flip, finds an attprney that specializes in flipping, and asks Trump to pay his legal fees, we may have something going on there.

So, there may be a change after this order, but now we have a few court challenges. Do not worry, Jeffrey Beaugragrd Session is read for that. He will fuck it up, for sure, but not right away.

Still, it keeps attention away from the Russia investigation, Mike Cohen seeming ready to turn and spill the beans for Mueller rather than spend the next 30 years in a prison cell with a guy named Bubba who will like his ass. He knows where he is headed. Seems nobody is insisting on proof of the 3 million illegal votes cast in the last election and nobody is mentioning the lack of at least a down payment for the wall. Meanwhile, he is praising North Korea because they all sit up straight and listen with rapture at whatever word their ruler says. He even suggests that quasi Geisha who is the lead anchor on North Korean TV wee the lead anchor on Fox news. No bull shit, he actually said that. Of course, he probably forgot.

Anyway, perhaps it's time for the Cohen show? We heard a lot about MS-!3 as being the gang that is the cause of this and I wondered about them. A friend I knew who grew up in Loa Angeles (I don't admit to know anyone who grew up in Southern California, BTW) says that they actually started out in LA. They formed in Korea Town off 18^th Street near a 7/11 and started to rip off the locals. The Koreans had enough and the cops were not much help as neither culprits were black, so they fought back and the Korean War started up again, and there was no General MacArthur to intervene. Things were getting ugly and the sanitation workers threatened to go on strike as they didn't like sweeping up body parts so Bill Clinton moved in and deported all of them to South American somewhere. ENOUGH OF THIS, I'M GETTING SICK.

I was about to go back to organizing the first SDS Chapter in a small university town directly north of Chicago, but that means it's time to finish this and be done with it. Speaking of blood and torture, this is what our beloved friends are doing in Yemen:

A new investigation has uncovered rampant sexual violence against Yemeni prisoners held in prisons run by the United Arab Emirates in Yemen. The Associated Press reports that in March, 15 officers lined up the prisoners in the southern city of Aden and ordered them to undress before searching their anal cavities, claiming they were looking for contraband cell phones. The prisoners screamed and cried and those who resisted were beaten and threatened by dogs.
Hundreds of prisoners reportedly suffered similar abuse. A Pentagon spokesman quoted in the piece said the allegations were not substantiated. The UAE is a key ally of the United States and has partnered with Saudi Arabia in its military assault on Yemen. We speak with Maggie Michael, the reporter who broke these stories. She is the Associated Press based in Cairo. Her latest exposé is headlined "Detainees held without charges decry Emiratis' sexual abuses." Last year, she reported on prisons in a piece headlined, "In Yemen's secret prisons, UAE tortures and US interrogates."

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Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I'm Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to a shocking new investigation of rampant sexual violence against Yemeni detainees held in prisons run by the United Arab Emirates in Yemen.

The Associated Press reports that in March, 15 officers lined up the prisoners in the southern city of Aden and ordered them to undress before searching their anal cavities, claiming they were looking for contraband cell phones. The men screamed and cried and those who resisted were beaten and threatened by dogs. Hundreds of detainees reportedly suffered similar abuse. Witnesses told the AP that detainees were raped while other guards filmed the assaults. AP also reports that Yemeni guards working under Emirati officers electrocuted prisoners' genitals and sexually violated others with wooden and steel poles.

A Pentagon spokesman quoted in the piece said the allegations were not substantiated.

AMY GOODMAN: The UAE is a key ally of the United States and has partnered with Saudi Arabia in its military assault on Yemen. Last year, AP exposed the existence of secret prisons run by the United Arab Emirates in Yemen where torture was widespread. For more, we are going to Cairo to speak with Maggie Michael, the AP journalist who wrote the exposé, the headline Detainees held without charges decry Emiratis' sexual abuses. Welcome to Democracy Now! Maggie, talk about what you found.

MAGGIE MICHAEL: Our investigation started in 2016, and since that time we have been speaking to witnesses, to security officials, families, and finally, in this investigation, we managed to speak to prisoners inside the prisons. They are talking about how sexual abuse is being used as a way to extract confessions, and sometimes to turn them into informants to the Emiratis who are supervising and running prisons, directly or indirectly, through their own allies of security forces they set up in southern Yemen.

Our investigation last year exposed a network of 18 prisons in cities of Aden and Mukalla.

Our investigation this year found that of these prisons, at least five, there's a lot of sexual abuse happening to detainees. What is different this time is that we also spoke to officials who were at one point allied with the Emiratis. They were working for them, and then they defected. Their testimonies were very important to confirm what the prisoners and what the families have been saying all the time—hat they are being held without charges, no trials. Even those who were granted prosecutors like orders to be released, they still kept in detention. The officials—one of them, at least—was was involved in the torture. He confirmed that they were filming detainees while being raped in order to press them, in order to turn them into informants.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Can you say, Maggie, the drawings, some of which our television viewers can now see–the drawings that you received from the prisoners, how you got access to those drawings?

MAGGIE MICHAEL: The thing is, we communicated with the prisoners inside Beir Ahmed in Aden, southern Yemen, and one of them is a really good artist who in order to answer my questions about what exactly is happening, he decided to show it to me by drawing positions of torture, abuse, and then took pictures and then by phones and then sent them by WhatsApp, and this is how we got them. And lately, they have been finding it hard to use the same way, and we relied more on text messages from inside the prison.

AMY GOODMAN: Maggie, you were told by some prisoners that the American personnel in the prisons were there in uniform and must be aware of the torture. One senior security official at the prison in the city of Mukalla said in your piece, "Americans use Emiratis as gloves to do their dirty work." Explain what U.S. involvement is.

MAGGIE MICHAEL: Based on what we had last year and this year, Americans are in main base of Emiratis in Yemen. So this is including Mukalla, Balhaf in Shabwa, and there's a place called Buriqa—these have American interrogators. They are American personnel in uniform.
There are also mercenaries, including Americans. The main mission is interrogation. What we were told also that torture does not happen in front of the Americans, but they are aware of it, either by hearing people being tortured or by seeing marks of torture on their bodies. What this official in Riyan, in Mukalla told me is that Americans are aware of what is happening, and they're not only aware, they are actually part of it. And instead of doing the torture themselves in order to get confessions, they're using the Emiratis to do their dirty work.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Maggie, can you talk about the role of the United Arab Emirates? Now it has taken a leading role in the Saudi assault on Yemen, in particular its assault on Hodeida—the crucial port of Hodeida.

MAGGIE MICHAEL: This is the dilemma of the Yemeni government. On one side, it needs the Emiratis because it is leading the forces that are fighting the Houthi rebels who occupied northern Yemen since 2015 in order to liberate and take over Hodeida port from the Houthis. Hodeida is known as the mouth of Yemen. This is where most of the humanitarian aid and imports get through northern Yemen, where the strong majority of the population is concentrated. So the port is very important for the two sides—for the government and for the Houthis. So the government needs and relies on the Emiratis in taking over Hodeida.

At the same time, in southern Yemen, where the government should be having the upper hand, instead the Emiratis have taken the lead. They set up their own militias in every single city. Each of these militias have their own tribal and regional agenda. They set up prisons. They took control. It undermined to a great extent the Yemeni government. And until just last week, the president of Yemen was barred from returning to the government for nearly a year. We was in Saudi Arabia. And we reported that based on his own aides and commanders, he couldn't get back to Yemen because the Emiratis did not want him to return. Only with the start of the Hodeida assault…

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds, and I just wanted to quickly ask, is the U.S. involved with giving lists of names of Yemenis to the Emiratis to jail?

MAGGIE MICHAEL: The Americans have a list of most wanted men, but not every single man arrested by the Emiratis are on the list. The Emiratis are trying to get information about the men on the list through mass arrests.

AMY GOODMAN: Maggie Michael, we want to thank you for being with us. We're going to link to your piece. Maggie is a reporter for Associated Press, her latest piece Detainees held without charges decry Emiratis' sexual abuses. We'll also link to her last year's piece, In Yemen's secret prisons, UAE tortures and US interrogates. That is all for the show.

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