commentary by Michael L. Bromley
copyright 2005

More entries: see Index

... of Politics

Jan 5/05: My entry yesterday on torture was affirmed, if by omission, by today's Washington Post lead editorial:

Palliatives for Prisoners
THOUGH IT has yet to acknowledge any error, the Bush administration appears to understand that its handling of foreign detainees has caused enormous damage to America's standing around the world, and even to relations with close allies. In the past week, two measures it has devised to alleviate the problem have become public. The Justice Department has repudiated a 2002 legal opinion that authorized the use of torture, and it has issued a brief that returns U.S. policy closer to international standards. The Defense Department, in turn, has developed plans for new facilities and procedures at the Guantanamo Bay prison that will allow long-term detainees to be held in more humane conditions. Both steps are welcome. However, by themselves they are not sufficient to end the systematic violations of domestic and international human rights laws that the administration has committed since 2001.

The Post welcomes the new rules with the caveat that "The new standard, however, is vague." The Government's view of torture, as the Whining Columnist, Richard Cohen whined yesterday (see below), is limited to "practices that cause pain short of death or organ failure..." The Post believes this will bring relief to the guests at Gitmo:

The evolving plans for Guantanamo could provide better conditions for those detainees -- more than half the total prisoner population -- who are no longer being interrogated but whom the administration is not prepared to release.

Cohen, the Post editors and all the other inane hystericals going hysterical over "torture" and the Gonzales nomination (googled it for ya) just can't bring themselves to order: none can say what, exactly, constitutes torture. The Post says it's "shackling." Cohen says it's that and piped music and cat meows. Everyone says its Abu Ghraid. What happened there was not torture -- it was abuse, and at that nothing too far from the standard American prison playbook (or is prison rape "torture"?). Torture is systematic, purposeful, and cruel -- and not necessarily effective. Loud music, "shackling," and sensory deprivation are methods of interrogation, not torture. If those are torture, so, too, is incarceration itself. Where are you gonna draw the line?

I mark it at September 11.
 

Here for previous entry
More entries: see index