Topic: Human Rights
Torture: The greased pig of our perilous existence Torture:A pervasive and impeccable hypocrisy, once undertaken is very difficult to eradicateby robertjb
(centrist liberal)
Monday, November 23, 2009
There are a few things most certainly true of torture. The first is that once a country or society opens the door it becomes the proverbial greased pig, a very slippery and insidious creature to deal with. Secondly, where we undertake torture we grant the so called terrorists who haunt our world their greatest victory. Where we willingly collapse hard won human rights and civil liberties- supposedly the very things we hold sacred-and among the things we are defending -we grant the enemy his greatest victory for he has ripped the fabric of our society. It is also in the greasy nature of torture that where it is detected its practitioners simply make it an even more covert activity.
US president Barack Obama is in an epic struggle with the greased pig of torture. He promised to close Guantanamo but can no longer do so as the closure has now been delayed at least another year thanks to the US Senate vetoing the funds to do so.
The pig gets even greasier though as simultaneous to the failure to close Guantanamo comes the announcement that the equally infamous Bagram prison in Afghanistan is to be expanded. So, maybe, just maybe, the Guantanamo torture facility is not being closed at all- just relocated closer to the action and even farther from any sort of scrutiny.
A little more grease is added when it has just been revealed the CIA has been operating one of its "rendition" facilities in a former horse riding academy in Lithuania. To this day it is a well kept secret just how many such facilities are in operation around the world.
The greased pig of torture is a globe trotter, a bounder and respects no borders. This is the very reason international law must prevail with exceptions made for no country big or small- another subject for another time.
President Obama is not alone in his battle. Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper has just been confronted with the greased pig of torture. So far Harper has been running from the pig, terrified of getting any of that nauseous ikky stuff on his impeccable attire; or should we say his impeccable hypocrisy. Unruffled, no grease on his hands, he surveys the scene with a sublime indifference.
Harper, of course, leads the only Western government that has steadfastly refused to repatriate its citizens from Quantanamo. All others, even apple polishing Britain, have successfully done so. The citizen in question for Harper and Canada is Omar Khadr, the child soldier at the age of 15 years captured in Afghanistan.
The Khadr case has long since taken the measure of this government's lack of commitment to genuine proactive human rights and revealed its coldhearted disposition on torture.
If Harper does not lose any sleep over the plight of Omar Khadr the testimony of Richard Colvin might just prick his recumbent soul. Colvin, a former Canadian diplomat in Afghanistan, has testified before a Commons committee Canada has been turning over prisoners destined to be tortured. We have, it seems, some compelling need to help fill Bagram prison and contribute to its necessary expansion.
Defense Minister Peter Mackay invokes his experience as crown prosecutor in trying to discredit Colvin's testimony but he is up against a witness of unimpeachable credentials and one still employed in our Washington embassy- an intelligence officer no less- who's very job it is to know such things. Mackay's attempts at character assassination serve only to betray his political desperation.
Canada's military is deeply integrated into that of the US. Since the 2004 torture scandal at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison it is well known the US has been practicing torture. Only the utterly nave would be believe that Canada's military could avoid being complicit in torture and the breaking of international law in this close and utterly compliant relationship. It now remains to be seen how many other NATO countries serving there are also complicit in torture. The British army for one is embroiled in a series of torture accusations dating back to the Iraq war.
As long as this not so cuddly little pig has the run of the house all of us get smeared and the blame does not lie totally with our leaders. We too are refusing to wrestle this not so cuddly little pig as we drift toward being torture tolerant societies. Stark testimony to this is not only our lack of outrage to torture connected to the less than authentic war on terror but also domestic torture. Domestic torture comes in the form of our apparent tolerance for the use of the tasers by our police forces. Both the UN and Amnesty International consider the taser a form of torture. It was never intended as a lethal weapon, but it now has a proven lethality, and a growing list of victims.
It is a time worn political cliche our leaders are only as good as we make them, and right now we are not making them very good.
President Obama has just returned from China. Prime Minister Harper is due to go there in the next few weeks. Gone are the days when Western leaders can step off a plane and start lecturing Chinese leaders on human rights and civil liberties. We have squandered our moral authority and our moral compass is suffering a grotesque deflection- courtesy of the ruinous war on terror. Not only do our leaders arrive in that country as economic supplicants, but also as human rights and civil liberties violators. The most they can do now is compare notes with the Chinese on mutual and pervasive indiscretions.
Robert Billyard 2009
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Often we are chasing shadows and being a minute late can mean everything. Our borders are not closed and our intelligence often operates with a PC hand tied around its back (Ft Hood). You can say with a straight face and tight fist that torture is wrong in the safety of suburbia where it is just a flicker on your big screen. But when men, women, children and babies get blown up at a restaurant you were just eating, and their body parts are littered around you, I dare you to cite the Geneva Convention to the letter in order to victimize prisoners of War. And it is War. And yes, we have no reason to lecture China or any other nation and never have, which never amounts to anything anyways. All we can do is protect our own nation and our own citizen's. And don't pretend we are talking of medieval torture of racks and screws, we are talking of tactics ivy league reporters have themselves tried for the sake of a news story.
To say that Bagram is equally infamous is at best melodramatic, and to suggest that it is somehow farther from scrutiny is absurd. The Red Cross makes visits to the institution on a regular basis, with harsh scrutiny and a never ending list of required improvements.
Not to mention, that last I had checked, Cuba wasn't exactly a trolley ride away. In this day where our politicians and delegates are jet setting all over the world, there is hardly much difference between stepping onto a plane and waking up in Cuba, and stepping onto a plane and waking up in Afghanistan. If anything, Bagram is a major military complex, with many layers of defense as well as many relative luxuries, making it perhaps more accessible than the small and comparatively inhospitable Guantanamo.
Furthermore, the entire article as a whole operates under the assumption that simply because there have been incidents of torture or maltreatment in these facilities, that all once detained there are sniveling victims. To the contrary, think of the thousands upon thousands whom have been processed through any one of our Theater Internment Facilities and, by comparison, reports of torture are astonishingly low. And believe me, these folks understand very well what the Red Cross is there to do, and have no hesitation about making any claims.
Thank you for the rather convoluted commentary on the dress of the Canadian Prime Minister, by the way. I'm not sure what, if anything, all of that had to do with your increasingly muddled point, but your analogy was lost in the lack of logical coherence. Moreover, I would be inclined to point out, that being fifteen does not make one innocent. We have many fifteen year olds in juvenile correctional facilities here in our own country, some of whom will continue their sentences as adults after they turn eighteen, and I hardly hear your heart bleeding for them. No, the emotional ploy at work here to try and sadden us into empathy only highlights the lack of supportive evidence to your point.
My favorite by far however is this particular quote:
“Mackay's attempts at character assassination serve only to betray his political desperation.”
I find your analysis ironic, as that is precisely what your own attempts at character assignation, along with your glaring lack of knowledge, credible information or supporting evidence does for you – it betrays your own literary desperation in your woeful grasping at straws in this incongruous jumble of rhetoric and baseless personal opinion.
The fact is that torture, to one degree or another, is a fact of war. Ugly though the truth may be, it is that same truth that keeps your fingers blissfully taping away at the keyboard, able to publish such juvenile unfounded nonsense without you disappearing in the night. It has been so for the entirety of human history – for our parents and their parents before them. I would hope that you would not be so “nave,” or should I say naïve, as to believe the propaganda from wars past.
If you do not enjoy or understand the extent of your freedom, I sincerely suggest you spend a little more time in a true police state, and compare their definition or torture to that of the New York Times. Saddam Hussein routinely disemboweled those whom questioned him, which is a far cry from ripping the Quran or water-boarding. And that is not rhetoric; that is fact. I would hope in the future you would write about something you have a better total understanding of, you could represent your point in a logical sequence, and you could be bothered to proofread before you post.
Posted By: Ross Williams
Date: 2009-12-03 15:45:32
Robert: your screed was long on platitude and short on everything else. Including any indication that you understand thing number one about international law.
First of all, those at Gitmo are combatants and as such come under the bailiwick of the Rules of War -- which, for your purposes, are sufficiently described as The Geneva Conventions, though there are a few others, and which have been ratified by the US Senate. The Geneva Conventions [plural; there are several of them] prohibit torture but do not define what it is. No enforceable international treaty, "law", convention or protocol defines what torture is. None. Not ratified by the Senate or otherwise.
Now, to be sure, there are many international NGOs [non-governmental organizations] who will tell anyone wishing to listen what torture is -- and likely as loudly as they can. But their definitions of torture have no legal standing. It's like National Right to Life proclaiming that abortion is murder: it's their opinion though not supported in the law, and their opinion only. They are welcome to that opinion, but they run into a factual shortfall when they describe it as anything other than an opinion.
And, well, the same thing applies to Amnesty International [et al] and their weepy notions of what torture truly is. It's their opinion, they're welcome to it, but it's not supported by any recognized international authority as enforceable. They, and those like them, meet an unfortunate reality deficit in their strident proclamations.
Secondly, you have met your own deficit of torture reality and compounded it by disingenuously assuming a universal definition torture and assuming its legal enforceability. In terms of classical rhetoric, this is called "question begging" -- assuming as a given that which has not been proven [or, in your case, even supported], and using it to base your own conclusions. ... which thereupon become invalid.
Short version: your whining, whimpering, mewling faux-pious fable is baseless.
Third, since combatants are subject to the international rules of war and not the civil laws of the nation which captured them, your teary wail about civil liberties is more/less completely irrelevant. American civil liberties apply only to Americans. If anyone else wants them, they need to invent it themselves. Like we did. To do anything else would be to impose American Ideals upon those who [largely] don't wish to have any part of those ideals -- a concept indistinguishable from Imperialism.
Fourth, the incidents at Abu Ghraib were not torture, nor were they anything even close to it; in the terms of the international rules of war AND our own enforceable regulations on the matter, they were classified as "mistreatment" -- essentially, being forcibly rude to enemy soldiers. They were prosecuted as mistreatment. When convicted, they were punished as mistreatment.
Name one other country who has prosecuted its own soldiers for being rude in war. You can't; don't bother.
A hair-shirt is not in the dress code for this subject, and the remainder of whatever details you have described, sitting in their thin gruel of pretentious illogic, are rendered impertinent. Dry your eyes, Bob; you've had a busy day at the fount of self-loathing.
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