It's "Giuliani Time" in Afghanistan

In an article from the February 18th issue of The Guardian, former Bagram "detainee" Hussain Adbulkadr Youssouf Mustafa told an all too familiar story to his attorney:

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He claims to have been blindfolded, tightly handcuffed, gagged and had his ears plugged, forced to bend down over a table by two (US) soldiers, with a third soldier pressing his face down on the table, and to have had his trousers pulled down.

"They forcibly rammed a stick up my rectum," he reports. "It was excruciatingly painful ... Only when the pain became overwhelming did I think I would ever scream. But I could not stop screaming when this happened."

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With all of the Valentine's Day and President's Day goings on, I'm not sure how much coverage this story will get in American newspapers and cable snewz channels, but I couldn't help but be reminded of another, more domestic case of Phelpsian interrogation tactics - The Abner Louima case in New York. You might remember this from the New York Daily News' Pulitzer Prize-winning commentary:

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From his bed in Coney Island Island Hospital last week, Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant, and his wife, Micheline, told me about the Aug. 9 horror of being beaten with radios and having a toilet plunger shoved up his rectum through his intestines into his bladder.

"The cops who came here that Saturday morning told a nurse they found me bleeding on the ground," Louima said. "They told her, 'He was half naked and bleeding when we found him. Something happened in the club.' They said it was a homosexual thing. The coverup started there."

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When asked whether he was one of the officers who told Louima "This isn't Dinkins time, it's Giuliani time," accused officer Justin Volpe denied ever having said that. But it was too late. "It's Guiliani time" had already entered the legend of American FolkGore. And now it seems to have worked its way around the world as a sodomistic symbol of torture in the name of "getting answers" and "saving soldiers lives."

Don't get me wrong. I'm not anti-cop or anti-soldier. I'm anti-abuse and anti-torture. Where I live the Travis County Sheriff's Department is considered one of the finest departments anywhere. For the most part, their professionalism, courtesy, and one-on-one approach to every citizen they encounter is remarkable. And my late grandfather was a deputy sheriff in West Texas during the height of the oil wildcatter's days. A small, soft-spoken man, he commanded respect because his reputation for fairness preceded him wherever he went.

But today, with Alberto Gonzales now heading up the Justice Department and BoyGeorge heading off to Brussels, Germany, and Slovakia, I can't help but wonder if some passengers somewhere aboard Air Force One aren't saying to themselves - "This isn't Clinton time, it's Bush time!"

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Excerpts from The Guardian and the New York Daily News are the copyrighted property of their rightful owners, and are used here for contextual purposes only.