|
waterboarding is torture. there's not a whole lot of debate about that. sleep deprivation etc.---alot of these actions were developed in order to circumvent restrictions on torture. slapping etc--it's hard to say: taken in isolation, probably not; seen in the context of a systematic desensitization of the interrogators to limits that should have been placed on their actions, they're a problem.
i hear gordon liddy making the same kind of arguments outlined above concerning some of these actions--o pshaw they're not really torture according to some arbitrary manly man notion of what "real pain" is. and his move was the same as what you see above--isolate "slapping"and ask well, is that torture?
fact is that the bush administration attempted to fashion a legal rationale which circumvented international conventions of the treatment of prisoners to which the united states is a signatory; the bush administration attempted to fashion the narrowest possible interpretation of torture in order to justify actions in the name of----well what, really?---it's been known for a very long time that what torture is good at eliciting is whatever information will make the torture stop--that has nothing to do with accurate information--this is self-evident---look at the history of the french in algeria for fucks sake. the only way torture worked in that case was that is was applied to a huge population regardless of legal standing and was aimed at eliciting extremely narrow types of information and the accuracy of that information really wasn't important because it just fed back into the same operation. and in the end, this tactic not only did not work, but it was fundamental to political changes that caused the french to loose the war in algeria. it's a fools game.
anyway, there are problems with prosecuting bush administration officials for the policy-but i fundamentally do not think that the government of the united states is in a position to determine what actions of the previous version of the same government were and were not war crimes.
i think this should be tried by an international tribunal.
otherwise, it is functionally the case that a government that does not loose a war can do any fucking thing it decides is justified, and that the ONLY crime really is losing a war.
that, folks, is fucked up.
most of the factors folk have elicited to either be cool with or justify the obama administration's decision not to prosecute i already used as arguments against the idea that a national government is in a position to functionally prosecute itself for this kind of action.
and the question of what is and is not torture really is not for a messageboard debate to decide.
it's for a court.
there should be prosecution.
but i think the people who are responsible for the policy should be the ones facing charges. starting with rumsfeld.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|