A Tortured World


In a world where constitutional limits on the power of the state are ignored, where wars of aggression can be fought with impunity, where 100,000 civilians can be killed in virtual silence, where individual liberty is being violated systematically and the grounds for a police state are being laid, the first picture sums up the situation in 2003. The man could be a victim of a cruel Ku Klux Klan taunt, or a Christ-like figure being tormented, or Marianne (the French model for the Statue of Liberty) subdued at last by the modern state. But we know what it is and what it means.




The second picture shows a President Bush exposed for what he is in 2006. Perhaps there is some hope after all.





The next step is this:


  Read More  

Sun - February 26, 2006

UN report condemns Guantanamo and urges its closure


On 15 February 2006 the UN Commission on Human Rights published a report [pdf hosted at BBC website ] on human rights abuses at the US military Guantanamo Bay prison. It was barely mentioned in the US press but got some coverage in the British and world press. Of course, it should not be the job of the UN to point out these matters to the US, but it says a lot about the kind of world we now live in.

Posted at 10:07 PM     Read More  

New photos of torture in Abu Ghraib


The Australian TV network SBS (Special Broadcasting Service ), financed by the federal government but often on the receiving end of its independent and critical voice, published new photos of torture and abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison which had been withheld by the US government for years. How and why SBS were able to get hold of the pictures at this time is an interesting question. The Independent suspects it may be designed to further weaken support for the US in the region but one would think it could already hardly be lower. See also The Times . Salon.com (and here and here ) was one of several sites which republished the pictures.
One of the pictures (see below) intrigues me because it shows a wider view of the iconic image of the "hooded man" which I use on the mast head of this blog. I had not seen this before. To the right one can see a disinterested American soldier giving his attention not to the extraordinary figure in the background but to some object in his hand ( a camera perhaps? or a pipe or cigarette lighter? who knows?). The contrast between the tortured man and the unconcerned guard or observer could not be stronger. Why isn't he shocked, or at least interested in what is going one? Is this the everyday, banality of evil which Hanna Arendt described about the Nazis?

Posted at 09:49 PM     Read More  

Internal debates in the US government on the use of torture


A rare glimpse into differences of opinion deep within the US power elite is given by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker who discusses in some depth the opposition to the policy of torture by Alberto J. Mora, the outgoing general counsel of the United States Navy. He was appalled at the descent into barbarism caused by the policies either tolerated or perhaps even actively pursued at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. His objections were ignored and he was bureaucratically out manoeuvered and so lost this battle. He left the service in disgust.

Posted at 08:16 PM     Read More  

Sun - February 19, 2006

Why does the US have a military base in Cuba anyway?


Last week the UN released a report denouncing the detention without trial and the torture of 100s of prisoners at the American military base in Cuba, Guantanamo Bay. It has got more attention in the European and Australian press [like this one in the Guardian] than in the US press which has focussed on the admittedly amusing story of VP Cheney shooting a 78 year old Texan lawyer and the subsequent clumsy effort to cover it up. The criticism of the treatment of the prisoners is what we have heard repeatedly for some years, that it is a violation of international treaties on the treatment of prisoners, that it is a travesty for the US to ignore its own constitution and tradition of civil liberties in this fashion, that it is counterproductive because torturing prisoners does not produce good intelligence. But what no one seems to bother asking is, why does the US have a military base in a foreign country anyway, and a communist country at that? It would be like Red China having a part of the Australian mainland where it built a military base and to which it brought dissidents from China for interrogation and torture. There would be an uproar in Australia. Of course I know the history behind the Guantanamo base, a previous compliant dictatorship, the kind the US has supported for over 60 years in many parts of the world, signed away its national sovereignty and then after the revolution in Cuba the US refused to hand over this territory to the new sovereign power. The sad irony is that the Bush regime is using the convenient fact that the base in on "foreign soil" to deny the jurisdiction of the American courts to enforce the principle of habeus corpus and thus act beyond the reach of American law. But on this as so many issues, not a peep out the mainstream press and the somnolent American public.

Posted at 05:21 PM     Read More  

Sat - February 11, 2006

The gutting of the McCain anti-torture measure


This blog started in early 2005 in disgust at the adoption of torture by the US government and military in their ill-conceived "global war against terrorism", so it was with some forlorn hope that I thought the early months of 2006 might see some moderation of this barbaric practice with the measures being proposed by Senator McCain. It soon became apparent that the American people and Congress remain in their somnolent state and this was quickly realised by Pres. Bush who undermined McCain's measures with a so-called "signing memo" (see the numerous posts to findlaw.com for more info on this). In essence this means that Bush signed the measure into law but said in his memo that he didn't believe a word of it and would act as if the measure had never been enacted. So much for Congressional oversight and the rule of law. Alfred McCoy , a long long critic of the US empire, has a new book out in which he traces the 50 year history of American torture. He puts the Bush regime's actions in a longer historical context and says what is unique is the brazenness with which they go about actions which were once kept secret. Tom Engelhardt introduces the essay and notes that a Swiss prosecutor looking into the secret "rendition" or kidnapping flights of the CIA in Europe probably number over 800. Not a peep on this out of the sycophantic mainstream US media.

Posted at 06:46 PM     Read More  

Tue - December 27, 2005

John Yoo continues to defend torture


The lawyer and UC Berkeley academic John Yoo continues to defend the opinions he wrote for the Bush administration is a series of memos in which he argues for the nearly unlimited powers of the president in time of war and for a revision in the definition of torture which would allow the US to engage in acts which previously had been included under the old definition of torture (e.g. pulling out a suspect's fingernails one by one is not "torture" under the new definition because the pain it inflicts is not the equivalent of the pain felt by "organ failure, impairment of bodily function or death" - I wonder if Yoo has empirical data to prove this claim? The new definition would also allow the kind of treatment depicted in Gillo Pontecorvo's great film "The Battle of Algiers" in which the French hold a blow torch to a suspect's chest in order to extract information about the Algerian resistance to French occupation). An article by Peter Slevin in the Washington Post gives a useful history of Yoo's rise through the ranks of the (neo)conservative movement - the American Enterprise Institute, the Federalist Society, and the Wall Street Journal. Findlaw.com has links to the so-called torture memos which Yoo co-wrote with Bybee. Yoo defends the memo in a press release at the UC Berkekley website. The New Yorker has links to a dissenting memo by William taft of the Justice Dept and Yoo's reply. The Wall Street Journal has a PDF of the first 50 odd pages of the memo (censored for public release of course). See also the review of Yoo's latest book on the imperial presidency by David Cole in tomdispatch.com or in the New York Review of Books of November 17, 2005. humanrightsfirst.org has links to most of the Bush administrations torture memos.

Posted at 12:02 PM     Read More  

Fri - December 23, 2005

Loopholes in the McCain Amendment


A number of commentators have welcomed the McCain Amendment, which officially bans the use of torture by the US military, but at the same time have pointed out how loopholes may allow "business as usual" by American torturers. The McCain Amendment was a major defeat for the Bush administration both because it supposedly controls both the Senate and the House of Reps and because VP Chaney was such an open opponent of any limits on US conduct, even including torture. This is another sign that Bush has entered the presidential twilight zone of lame duckery. Joanne Mariner of FindLaw notes that the compromise agreed to by McCain prevents detainees from suing the US government for false arrest or illegal abuse and torture, and it allows the testimony got from torture to be used in the military tribunals when reviewing the status of prisoners in the American gulag. Her conclusion is that the amendment is a "self-contradictory political compromise."

Posted at 06:23 PM     Read More  

Tue - December 20, 2005

A small victory against offical US torture


In a small victory against the official US policy of torture the US House of Representatives voted for Senator McCain's bill against torture by US personnel any where in the world [NYT reports]. This is only a moral victory as it will not stop unofficial US torture which has been unstated policy for over 40 years in Vietnam, Central America and elsewhere. Bush and Cheney's mistake was to go public and the public outcry forced them to retreat back under their rocks. The tried and true US position is to do it secretly so that Congress can go about its domestic pork barreling without disruption. As Sydney Schanberg notes the US press doesn't want to offend its readers by reporting on what actually happens as a result of US foreign policy (assassinations and pushing suspects out of helicopters in Vietnam; training torturers in Georgia to do their work, under US advisors of course, in Central America).

Posted at 10:08 PM     Read More  

Why the US should "cut and run"


Nir Rosen in The Atlantic lists and argues against the main reasons that are commonly put forward opposing a policy of withdrawal, or what the Americans quaintly call "cutting and running." The macho and cowboy view of the world is that a real man doesn't "cut and run" - this being the policy of cowardly Indians and Mexicans in the traditional cowboy film. Rational states of course assess their strengths and weaknesses and act accordingly. Everything before the US adventure in Iraq argued against invasion. Everything now argues against staying. The situation created by the US is that a secular though oppressive state was overthrown and no alternative was quickly put in its place; the infrastructure destroyed by 2 US wars and 10 years of brutal economic blocade and bombing has not been restored; the country already has been de facto partitioned into a Kurdish north (10 years old and counting), a Shi'ite south and a disaster in the middle; the US imposed elections has resulted in a Shi'ite victory which hands influence to the theocracy in Iran; the US policy of bombing civilians and destroying cities and towns and torturing any and all who are arresting has alienated the Muslim world for decades; and the war is destroying the US Republic and civil liberties at home. A "strategic withdrawal" is well over due.

Posted at 09:22 PM     Read More  

America's image tarnished


Ingacio Ramonet in Le Monde Dilpomatique gives a summary of a common European view of how America's policy of torture is tarnishing its image abroad in spite of Condi Rice's official denials. This is true as far as it goes but what he doesn't mention is that Europe is not lily white when it comes to state sanctioned torture. The new Eastern European members of the EU have many collaborators with the torture regimes of the Soviet past; the Brits have a long and embarrassing history of torturing IRA suspects; the French tortured their way to an ignominious defeat in both Algeria and Vietnam; the security agencies of many European states turned a blind eye to the shenanigans of the CIA in their "rendition" policies as they refueled their planes at European airports. The conclusion one should draw is that just about any state will use torture if it thinks it is in its interests to do so. Human rights are always negotiable to these states - European or American.

Posted at 09:06 PM     Read More  

Fri - December 9, 2005

The crusty old British Law Lords strike a blow for liberty aginst torture


The crusty old British Law Lords strike a blow for liberty aginst torture by bringing down a decision to ban any evidence in court based upon information gained by torturing prisoners, whether in Britain or in third countries. Lord Bingham, said: "The issue is one of constitutional principle, whether evidence obtained by torturing another human being may lawfully be admitted against a party to proceedings in a British court, irrespective of where, or by whom, or on whose authority the torture was inflicted. To that question I would give a very clear negative answer." I don't think Thomas Jefferson could have said it any better. The Times also reports the decision and notes that evidence produced by torture has been an abhorrence in British law for 500 years.

Posted at 07:26 PM     Read More  

US torture state and the CIA (gulag) archipelago


Michael Naumann of Die Zeit argues that the American secret torture centres around the world constitute a new "gulag archipelago" (like the Soviet prison system as described by Solzhenytsin and others) and that the US has become a "torture state". This reminds me of Chalmers Johnson's argument about the new American empire as an "empire of bases" scattered over 100 countries. Overlaid upon this is the new "gulag" of interrogation centres which receive suspects who need to be interrogated outside of the legal jurisdiction of the US. A number of survivors of the new gulag have been released to tell the world of what goes on in the shadows.

Posted at 06:52 PM     Read More  

Is Madame Lash Orwellian or Kafkaesque? or perhaps Kafwellian?


Sidney Blumenthal, in an article about Sectetary of State Condi Rice's trip to Europe to persuade the Europeans that the US never has, does not now, and never will "torture" anybody for any reason, asks whether her statements are more "Orwellian for their intentional falsity or Kafkaesque for their unintentional absurdity". Perhaps the regime of Bush II requires a new adjective to describe the behaviour of his viziers - I suggest "Kafwellian". Step one is to get Gonzalez and Yoo to write memos redefining torture narrowly as the pain felt when organs fail or the body dies. This means that historically tried and true methods of torture going back to the Spanish Inquisition, such as water-boarding or pulling one's nails out, are no longer regarded as "torture". Now one can say with a straight face, as Madame Lash has done repeatedly to the Europeans, that the US does not "do torture". But what about the 3 dozen deaths under the "no torture rule" which the American military is investigating. Did all these people slip on the soap in the showers? Sounds like a case for OHSA.

Posted at 05:14 PM     Read More  

Amy Goodman and Democracy Now


I enjoy listening to or watching the online version of Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! daily program. She is "left" of centre, i.e bad on most economic issues (except for corporate influence peddling and corruption) and good on war and foreign policy matters. She asks questions and talks to people who never seem to get into the mainstream corporate media.

Posted at 04:33 PM     Read More  

The Forgotten History of American Torture


Naomi Klein in The Nation has an article which reminds us that torture is not new to US foreign policy. [More]

Posted at 04:25 PM     Read More  

The Political Medaning of the Images

ACLU uncovers documents showing orders to torture came from the top

The Geneva Conventions

Abuse/Torture as Policy

©