Cost of a Life

There is an article in the Guardian entitled 'Price of a life proves to be £192,276';

A British man living in Perth, Australia, who put his entire life up for auction on eBay following the break-up of his marriage, has found that it was not worth as much as he had hoped. Ian Usher, a 44-year-old salesman, held a seven-day online auction of his home, friends and job. Hoax bids pushed the price beyond A$2m but yesterday an Australian bidder agreed to pay A$399,300 (£192,276), A$100,000 below his target.

I feel I need to point out that that is the price of a life in the rich west, if you are an Iraqi or Afgan, then life is a lot cheaper;

[Documents] show 164 incidents [of claims by surviving Iraqi and Afghan family members of civilians] resulted in cash payments to family members; in around half of those cases, the United States accepted responsibility for the death and offered a 'compensation payment.' In the other half, US authorities issued discretionary 'condolence' payments, capped at $2,500 (or £1260)), "as an expression of sympathy" but "without reference to fault."

Australian: £192,276
Iraqi or Afghan: £1260

That is another price of the war of terror. Another interesting article is about how the US army torture tactics being used in the War of Terror have been copied from the communist Chinese army! You can't make it up!

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of 'coercive management techniques' for possible use on prisoners, including 'sleep deprivation,' 'prolonged constraint,' and 'exposure.'....What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners....The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled "Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War" and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.

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