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i think the problem here is pretty simple, and everyone had come down on one side of it or the other so far: either you consider the american security apparatus to be as much about image as substance and so see in the release of these photos a compromise of the image, or you see in the implementation of torture as the official policy of the united states--along with other "extra-legal" treats like extraordinary rendition, as in themselves political and ethical problems that require that we, collectively, address head on.
i am of the latter opinion---it is all to easy for a bureaucracy to institute policies of torture or worse and have that policy appear to be rational and necessary. bureaucracies are stupid machines. the Problem, then, is that the legal, political and ethical frames that are in place were not enough to stop the bush people from implementing torture policies. THAT is the issue, in my view.
the security apparatus approach seems to locate the Problem either inside the bureaucracy itself, and diverts it onto the question of "morale"--often of the same people who carried out the torture---or tries (in my view) to avoid the problem altogether by appealing to the exigencies of war. my objection to both is that the function in different ways to normalize the policy itself--and by doing that, they avoid the question.
there's another problem, which is cyn;s question but turned a little: is there a connection between releasing more photos and the first approach to the questions raised by the policy itself--and on that, i think the answer is circular and a function of which of the two basic positions concerning the problem in general that you adopt.
if that's accurate, maybe we could talk more directly about why these positions diverge as they do.
if that's not accurate, i'd be interested in reading how it isn't...
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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