I'm not sure the commander is entirely off on his assessment. IIRC, the cultural context of an act of suicide is somewhat different for the prisoners -- Islamic law is very harsh towards suicides except for intentional martyrdom in jihad. (It's an attractive way to exit, in a sense, as a hero instead of a loser, which is the real 'why' of many suicide bombers with depression, IMHO.) So, yeah, in that aspect, an organized multiple suicide while in custody is an effective way to protest and to play the Get Out of Hell card, both in this world and the next.

No, suicide is strictly forbidden in Islam.

There are 'muslims' with a political agenda who try to spin it so that suicide bombers are represented as not actually commiting suicide, because defending one's home and family from attack is something that Islam is big on, but this is up there with Pope Julian being all 'Yeah, it's okay to break the commandment against killing people because I say so'.

They're just trying to make us look bad for locking them up under horrid conditions without trials or even charges for years at a time with their families not knowing if they're dead or alive.

Bastards.

They'll be posthumously accusing Ghandi of war crimes any day now.

Not to mention all those Vietnamese monks setting themselves on fire.

Other forms of asymetrical war those bastards committed against us include being four years old.

[link]

Cause the U.S. and Britain never do anything wrong. It's always those crafty buggers forcing Bush and Blair to do things that look like torture but are something completely different that causes prisoners intense pain, leads prisoners into having complete mental breakdowns - including in some cases losing the capability for human speech. We have had prisoners die during interrogation - including at least one taxi driver known at the time of his death to be innocent. But Americans don't torture. Brits are not complicit in torture. So if a bunch of Arabs commit suicide it has got to by asymetrical torture. Cause the mere fact that they face a lifetime of physical and mental torment - with no hope for relief or even dignity obviously would not lead anyone to commit suicide.

In which the Israeli Military demonstrate much the same regard for the truth and for our intelligence.

"All the evidence points to the fact that it couldn't have been a mine," said Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon adviser on battlefields who led the US military's battle damage assessment team in Kosovo and worked for its intelligence wing, the Defense Intelligence Agency.

"You have the crater size, the shrapnel, the types of injuries, their location on the bodies. That all points to a shell dropping from the sky, not explosives under the sand," he said.

But, you know, television footage of a ten year old weeping over the bodies of her murdered father, stepmother and five siblings who were engaged in the deeply aggressive activity of picnicing on a beach make the military look bad. So better blame Hamas.

Actually, I've yet to see a report from anyone on that issue that convinced me of anything, one way or the other. (And much of the television footage that's being shown is edited together rather deceptively: [link]

(Basically, the questions about what sort of shrapnel and what sort of crater and what sort of injuries, I've seen different answers from different "experts," and I don't know enough to evaluate that for myself. However, I've also seen the IDF saying that they know where they shot their shells, and none of them could have landed there and then, and I've yet to see any believable refutation of that. So, no clue yet, really.)

edit: the post I linked to is from a blog that includes some analysis of the "where did the explosion come from?" question. I'm not sure how reliable that is -- I linked there because the website that the video clip originally came from uses frames in such a way that I can't figure out how to link to it directly there.

Just thought I'd throw this out there: I may have misheard (although moonlit seemed to hear the same thing) but last night I bore witness to a particularly odious bit of historical revisioning. It was during the "19 Seconds" episode of the thankfully short-lived Threat Matrix series. In what was essentially a throwaway line, they revised history to say the horrific tragedy at Bhopal was a result of sabotage. WTF!!!!

...so apparently the guy running the school where I worked until very recently, who also runs maybe half a dozen other schools in the Middle East, is not, in fact, Muslim, as we'd supposed.

Apparently he's secretly Druze - a religion I'd never even heard of, which is a sort of gnostic/Muslim/Christian secret society thing!!!

I'm most impressed. It's all very Da Vinci code.