Looks like my knife-grinding friend Mr Del Re has a bit of competition. EmilyM at dailyheights has a post about Bob’s grinding service.

I wonder if Bob would be more amenable to an interview than D Del Re was? Grinding Wars on the streets of Prospect Heights!

Here’s the video that crashed MoD computers last week. British Troops at a base in Al Faw, Iraq, performing Peter Kay’s Amarillo. (Full story from Cheshire online.)

[UPDATE: VIDEO FOR THIS STORY IS HERE]

If the soldiers responsible for beating, torturing, and–in effect–murdering prisoners at Bagram airbase are not given the severest penalties possible then something is seriously wrong with this country. Here are some salient points from today’s New York Times about the killing of Dilawar, a 22-year-old Afghan taxi driver who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Dilawar was 5 feet 9 inches tall and weighed 122 pounds (about 9 stone). He was also suspected by his prison “interrogators” of being innocent. But they beat him anyway.

Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.

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.

Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he punched a hole in the bottom, the interpreter said, so as the prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully into Mr. Dilawar’s face.

“Come on, drink!” the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the prisoner gagged on the spray. “Drink!”

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.

Further on, the article treats us to the delights of such brave Americans as specialist Damien M. Corsetti–a tall, bearded interrogator sometimes called “Monster”

He had the nickname tattooed in Italian across his stomach, other soldiers said – was often chosen to intimidate new detainees. Specialist Corsetti, they said, would glower and yell at the arrivals as they stood chained to an overhead pole or lay face down on the floor of a holding room. (A military police K-9 unit often brought growling dogs to walk among the new prisoners for similar effect, documents show.)

“The other interrogators would use his reputation,” said one interrogator, Specialist Eric H. Barclais. “They would tell the detainee, ‘If you don’t cooperate, we’ll have to get Monster, and he won’t be as nice.’ ” Another soldier told investigators that Sergeant Loring lightheartedly referred to Specialist Corsetti, then 23, as “the King of Torture.”

A Saudi detainee who was interviewed by Army investigators last June at Guantánamo said Specialist Corsetti had pulled out his penis during an interrogation at Bagram, held it against the prisoner’s face and threatened to rape him, excerpts from the man’s statement show.

But enough of Monster. Let’s go back to the innocent detainee Dilawar who is being beaten and interrogated by America’s finest over a number of days:

When one of the First Platoon M.P.’s, Specialist Corey E. Jones, was sent to Mr. Dilawar’s cell to give him some water, he said the prisoner spit in his face and started kicking him. Specialist Jones responded, he said, with a couple of knee strikes to the leg of the shackled man.

“He screamed out, ‘Allah! Allah! Allah!’ and my first reaction was that he was crying out to his god,” Specialist Jones said to investigators. “Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny.”

Other Third Platoon M.P.’s later came by the detention center and stopped at the isolation cells to see for themselves, Specialist Jones said.

It became a kind of running joke, and people kept showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out ‘Allah,’ ” he said. “It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes.”

That peroneal strike, is I think, a knee to the leg delivered in such a way as to cause maximum damage. A coroner later said that Dilawar’s leg tissue had been “pulpified” and that he had seen similar injuries in people who had been run over by a bus.

I could carry on, but I would rather you read the article for yourself. Just one more thing to point out though. When other prisoners were later released, Dilawar’s family wanted to know what had happened to him at the airbase. Not wanting to upset them:

“I told them he had a bed,” said Mr. Parkhudin. “I said the Americans were very nice because he had a heart problem.”

Link to full story

I’m in Boston today so no blogging. But I thought I would link to this Daily Show skit about the UK election. Yes, it’s a bit dated, but it does make you proud to be British–even after such a dull election as the one just gone. (Hat tip: macboy)

Clive Davis has possibly the best (and briefest) retort to blog critics:

Warning: the following links are to blogs – who, unlike traditional media, don’t use editors, fact checkers, and other devices to ensure that what Newsweek did won’t happen.