Bravo Charles

It refers to fake mentrual blood.

On such distinctions does the honor of the present administration’s detention policies rest, I guess. I want to hear a White House or Pentagon spokesperson say “The prisoners were not smeared with real menstrual blood; it was only fake menstrual blood.”

The “fake menstral blood” interrogation technique may be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of in my life.

I don’t know, Walt. It seemed to have had a major impact, whether for good or ill in the interrogation process.

I refuse to be overly alarmed by actions taken which are no worse than what takes place in American prisons. Not that either is acceptable, but the sudden outrage when it happens to POW’s stinks. Selective outrage is not honorable.

It’s good that he’s amenable to changing his mind. But let’s not get too excited. He’s not much bothered by the Administration’s assertion re: Padilla (Prof. Balkin on assertion: “If the Executive determines that an American citizen is an enemy combatant, that is all the process that is due.” (cite)) To my mind, the Padilla assertion is scarier than all of the torture information. But it doesn’t bother him, and he’s 51% of my country. That strikes me as sort of frightening.

Why do conservatives want to maintain an American exceptionalism ideology for everything except torture? They want us to believe that through some act of Providence the US is uniquely morally sutied to dominate the world; but when it comes to the grotesque practices mentioned above, they retreat back into a “well that’s just the kind of shit that happens in war and we are no different than anyone else” stance. Why is that?

By the way — do those of us who have been skeptical of the bush administration get bravos too?

We who have been skeptical of the Bushites are rewarded with the signal satisfaction of having been right, unfortunately. Wouldn’t it have been nice to be wrong?

And now we also get the pleasure of feeling contempt for these amoral weasels who make excuses for torture.

No bravos. It’s nothing but bad news, and we all lose, left, right, center — we’re all in the shitpile together.

Yes. I was actually really impressed by his post. It takes guts.

sam, it’s just specular to justifications for ignoring, minimising, or flat out denying the thousands of civilian casualties in Iraq.

War requires patriotism, patriotism requires full consent, anything that gets in the way is eliminated from the visual field.

Patriotism in war also requires widening the definition of “enemy” until there is no distinction between suspect and criminal, dissenter and traitor, fighter and terrorist, fighter and civilian. The next step is dehumanising them all.

This is masked only slightly by a pretence of concern for the fate of the “liberated”, especially for events that can be trumpeted as proof of the holy rightness of the “liberators” mission.

Guantanamo? Torture? Civlian deaths? Violence? Discontent? More terrorism? Afghanistan still under the talebans? Bin Laden still free as a bird? Look over there, elections! Success!

Prisons are a false analogy for a variety of reasons, starting with due process and the “quaint” Geneva Conventions. Mofo (not np).
As to whether this was torture, the suckers sure lied about it, didn’t they?

I find it absolutely shocking that people who profess to love freedom and ‘liberty’ are so willing to so FLAGRANTLY discard it when it involves a hated racial/religious group. To them it’s all justified because they are ‘enemies’ of freedom.

“discard it when it involves a hated racial/religious group”

Indeed, just like Democrats, discarded their concerns when Clinton locked up a whole generation of blacks in the 90’s in conditions far worse than this.

I mean being smeared with ink – farck! Awful.

Dismissing claims and accusations as conspiracy theories seems to be a form of holocaust denial. Not the obvious nonsense of post-1945 holocaust denial but the pre-1945 form of holocaust denial.

John–are we to understand that you agree with the Republican view about flag desecration? it seems that you’re suggesting that some consistency in reaction between the two cases is appropriate, so I can’t help but ask if you in fact have a consistent reaction.

I wouldn’t think that it would be torture or even cruel treatment if I were smeared with ink and unable to bathe. And the fact that a woman–even a half-naked woman–did the smearing wouldn’t be relevant at all.

There’s a lot to untangle here–views about appropriate standards for interrogation, including interrogation of fanatics bent on our destruction, and appropriate standards for interaction between men and women and appropriate standards for interaction between Muslims and non-Muslims and fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists, and the relationship among these various standards. And there doesn’t seem to be much effort to untangle them. Just lots of self-congratulation.

As far as I can tell, the consensus is that misogynistic and backward views such as those held by the detainee in question should be respected when a detainee is held captive, but actively subverted by the organs of government (including, for example, public schools) in society more generally.

Which is…odd.

“John—are we to understand that you agree with the Republican view about flag desecration? it seems that you’re suggesting that some consistency in reaction between the two cases is appropriate, so I can’t help but ask if you in fact have a consistent reaction.”

I have a clearly consistent position on this. Flag-desecration is offensive to most Americans. If American prisoners were forced to desecrate the flag, this would rightly be regarded as cruel treatment and a serious violation of the Geneva and human rights conventions.

Do you disagree with this, as you seem to imply, Thomas?

1. The thing is, the “menstrual blood” and “prostitutes” allegations were some of the least serious and and seemed to be some of the least credible from Guantanamo detainees. There is no lack of more serious accusations.

2. before you decide that even these techniques are okay and no big deal, please use your imagination a little and imagine yourself forced to violate a severe moral or religious taboo that you actually hold.

thomas, what you would have thought about being smeared with menstrual blood by a prosititute is irrelevant. What matters is how the parties at Guantanamo experienced it. Was the intent of the guards to badly degrade and humiliate the prisoner? Did the prisoner feel humilated and shamed? The answer is “yes” on both counts.

I don’t like the way that some posters here focus on things they might like under normal circumstances, like being smeared with menstrual blood by prostitutes, and ignore the acts which they would surely experience as torture if applied to them, like being badly beaten or deliberately shackled in a painful position for a long period of time. When such acts were performed on US prisoners during the Vietnam War they were considered torture. The hypocrisy here is remarkable.

On Bush, and toture:

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”
— William Pitt

I often wonder whether giles and the other conservative posters have the slightest idea what torture is like. They manage to draw the line oh so expertly, but surely not one of their family members has been held captive in a shady Latin American prison. Those of us who have closer experiences with torture have no qualms recognizing it as such.

‘If detainees at Guantanamo refuse to interact with women because of retrograde views on women’s equality, must we adopt their views?’

Ah no, of course, because in America, the advanced views on women’s equality are exemplified by men (and other women?) considering it an act of friendliness and respect if upon meeting a woman, she shouts insults at them and then proceeds to smear their face with menstrual blood she just extracted from her pants. Why, the last time I was in NY, I believe this had replaced shaking hands as a form of courtesy at dinner parties. It’s all the rage, apparently. My, hasn’t feminism come a long way.

Now we only need men smearing women’s (and other men’s) faces with the sweat from their buttcrack, and equality will be complete. Anyone who refuses to embrace this practice will be deemed a barbarian. Behold the beauty of western civilisation!

It’s not just ethics and dignity that have gone completely lost, it’s sanity, too.

x, in contemporary American society women routinely wear miniskirts and thong underwear. They don’t expect to be called prostitutes for such choices.

But here at CT those choices make them “hookers”, if they wear such things in the presence of Muslim detainees.

And in contemporary America, women routinely have physical contact with men not their husband or family, and they have that contact even while menstruating.

But here at CT the view is that we must make sure that women don’t have physical contact with Muslim detainees, and that physical contact between a Muslim detainee and a woman who is menstruating (or that the Muslim detainee wrongly believes is menstruating) is tantamount to torture.

Damn, tried to stop that comment’s posting. Google is of two minds. Any Pitt specialists out there?

thomas, you don’t have to explain contemporary America to me. Like I told you, I already know that in America perfect strangers, instead of shaking hands, like to smear their bodily fluids on each other’s faces when they meet, and rub each other’s butts into each other’s nose, purely a sign of respect, and that’s exactly what was going on in this one reported incident at Guantanamo. Good. We’ve established you see no problem with it. Good. Let’s hope it happens to you next time you get pulled over for speeding. Now, moving on: do you also not see any problem with being left hanging from handcuffs? How about getting beaten to death? How about being left in prison with no charges, no trial, no contact with the outside world for three years? Guilty until proven innocent, or simply until it’s no longer convenient to hold you, as in the case of the four Britons?

Is that the uber-civilised America you’re trying to sell us?

bq. … being shackled and dragged, having a suffocating hood placed on his head and being struck in the head several times.

bq. … fatal beatings during interrogations by US officials in Afghanistan.

Freed detainee describes Guantanamo torture

bq. … repeatedly punched, kicked, slapped, forcibly injected with drugs, deprived of sleep, hooded, photographed naked and subjected to body cavity searches and sexual and religious humiliations … beating of mentally ill inmates … brain damaged after a beating by soldiers as punishment for attempting suicide

BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Britons allege Guantanamo abuse

bq. …. tortured with dogs and electrodes … subjected to routine beatings and torture … photographed by an American official as he stood on his neck … regularly suspended from hooks on the wall of his cell while his feet were shocked with electrodes … being forced to stand on his toes for hours in a flooded room, struggling to keep his head above the water, and being threatened with German Shepherd dogs … kicked, punched, beaten with a stick, and rammed with what can only be described as an electric cattle prod … If he lapsed into unconsciousness, they would revive him and continue the beatings…

Jerusalem Post | AUS terror suspect alleges torture in Egypt

By all means, all true patriots are advised to stick their head comfortably back in their ass and keep on tapping away about red ink and hookers.

giles: it’s called moral integrity. You may lack it, but it is definitely not the attribute of wingers.

“No uncle I do consider it torture, just not very serious torture.”

Well, giles, it doesn’t matter what you consider or don’t consider “serious” torture. There are laws that define it and all the reported incidents fall under the definition. All of them, from the “less serious” to the “more serious”. That the US is treating laws against torture as toilet paper doesn’t change the fact they apply, and are being breached.

But to go back to “personal” definitions of religious humiliation as torture. I wonder how many of you armchair torture apologists would still joke about it if a police officer arrested a Jewish person and then proceeded to force them to eat pork. I suppose the reasoning goes something like “but Jews are not terrorists” so torturing mere suspects, ie. people detained with no trial, no lawyers, no charges, no legal framework whatsoever, is ok as long as they belong to that vast category of “potential terrorists” that extends to all Arabs/Muslims, Brits of Pakistani origin, and so on.

“do you consider these guys to be representative of muslims?”

Giles, “these guys” are people who, under any system of law that’s worth its name, are just like you and me. You are a terrorist like anyone in Guantanamo. No one has charged you with anything, same as them. The only difference is you’re not in Guantanamo. Do you understand that?
Do you understand you’re giving your government absolute power to bypass ALL legal procedures that are necessary to establish the innocence or guilt of a person? You’re accepting a completely unverifiable definition of “terrorist suspect” and equating it with “terrorist”. For you, just the fact someone is detained in Guantanamo is proof they’re guilty.
What about the Britons who were released? Their own government could not even charge them with anything because they do not have anything to charge them with. Any supposed intelligence the US collected against them is first of all not disclosed, second of all, not admissible in court. The British intelligence does not have any evidence of their being terrorists. And they’re British citizens! If anyone should have information on their criminal activity, it’s the British authorities. But they don’t. They don’t consider them suspects. The US doesn’t consider them suspects either, by now, because they consented to their release after pressures from the UK. Doesn’t that tell you something about the whole farce of Guantanamo?

Giles, you haven’t rebutted any of X’s substantive points–nor mine for that matter–so I conclude that your take on this ultimately comes down to the following. Maybe you’ll let me know if I’ve got it right.

– There are “serious” and “unserious” forms of torture, and the latter are of no concern.

– Anyone whom the President of the US considers a “suspected terrorist” can automatically be considered guilty.

– As a corollary to the above, anyone so identified is inherently “unrepresentative” of their religious and cultural background. Therefore, interrogation techniques that force a detainee to violate deeply held religious & cultural taboos are just fine.

– The “global war on terror” isn’t hampered in the least by American actions that will be perceived by many as expressions of utter contempt for Arab culture and/or the tenets of Islam.

I cant rebut x’s points untill I know what legal definition she’s using for torture. And on legal definitions I’d rather leave it to the courts an lawyers. If x’s case is as strong as she says, then it”ll come out. Regarding detention without trial, I think its wrong.

Anyway

1. “There are “serious” and “unserious” forms of torture”

Yes – generally the serious forms take a phycical role whereas the not serious ones use pschyological pressure. Obviously that latter can be more damaging, but because of its subjective nature its hard to take clean lines on it. Bosses, partners, parents etc all apply pyscholiogical pressure and if you started classifying pyschological pressure as torture, where would you stop.

As an example, suppose the oregon police arrested a load of race warriors in the mountains planning an attack. Would it be torture if the cheif used his black officers “to bait and provoke” the suspects during the detention. I mean it goes against their beleifs?

The analogy I’m pushing at it that women being guards went agains these guys beleifs etc.

2.”Anyone whom the President of the US considers a “suspected terrorist” can automatically be considered guilty”
No

3&4 “Anyone” seems to be identified as representative of their religion by you, not their compatriots. You see what I find odd is that recently the Kazaks boiled alive an Al Qaida leader, and yet I’ve heard not a peep about whehter this was provaicative or not.

4. America is identified as the enemy and always will be; I dont think how this plays out in the western media really matters. It’ll get the same spin one way or the other in the middle east. And if not this, then something else.

“I cant rebut x’s points untill I know what legal definition she’s using for torture. And on legal definitions I’d rather leave it to the courts an lawyers.”

Giles, my dear, I can assure you I’m not the one with a personal definition of torture here. I can also assure you it’s not individual courts or lawyers who hold the magic key to the definition business, either.

Definitions are set primarily at international level in the Geneva Conventions and the UN Conventions against torture. Each nation that ratified these conventions has also coded them into national law. In Europe, there’s also the European conventions on human rights which add another layer between the international and national law. So you see there are at lest three levels of strictly legal definitions to consider before we even get into the business of discussing our own personal preferences or views or exceptions, which would hold no relevance whatsoever anyway.

So, again: it does not matter what you or I or Mr Bush thinks is torture. The US, like dozens of other nations is bound to international conventions and national laws that do define it very clearly. The fact those laws are being broken in Guantanamo (and in the UK too) _does not mean they do not apply_.

Is that so difficult to process mentally?

3&4 “Anyone” seems to be identified as representative of their religion by you, not their compatriots. You see what I find odd is that recently the Kazaks boiled alive an Al Qaida leader, and yet I’ve heard not a peep about whehter this was provaicative or not.

I have no idea what you mean by this. Boiling people alive is not “provocative”–it’s ghastly. Full stop.

Is that the fact that it’s done, in this case, by Muslims some kind of validation of your opinion? For the life of me I can’t figure out why.

arguements about international law are normally pointless simply because prosecutions invariably end up revolving around jursidictional issues, not the substantive ones

Have no idea wtf that’s supposed to mean, but, as regards “jurisdiction”, I don’t know which part isn’t clear to you about the fact that international laws are not only applicable for all countries that ratified them, but also made into further national laws. The US government has gone from trying to claim they can take their own exceptions to both intl. and national law (declaring neverending war on a neverending enemy, then extending the President’s power in that “war”), to trying to claim that there are no systematic abuses whatsoever anyway apart from a few bad apples who no one in command told to do what they did, so all is fine and dandy on the legal front. All these excuses do not have any impact on jurisdiction matter.

Once you have a law, you either respect it or break it, but until you abolish it, it’s still valid.

As for anti-torture laws not having anything to do with morality… what can I say? Can it get more insane than this?

If you dont understand the problems of jurisdiction and international law, maybe you should steer clear of opining on the law, x?

If you’re not going to rebut the substance of X’s comments, Giles, maybe you should steer clear of commenting at all. It just makes you look silly: “Oh yeah? Well you don’t know what you’re talking about. So THERE!”

You still haven’t told me how the Kazakhstan government’s “boiling alive” of a suspected terrorist is at all relevant to this discussion. Are you going to just let it hang there and twist in the wind?

giles, I’ll be polite: what I don’t understand is how you can expect to be taken seriously when you refer to vague “jurisdiction problems for international law”, and leave it at that, as if, by the power of your verbal positing of these problems, international law on torture, and its national applications, magically disappear into the void.

It’s fact, not my “opining”, but fact, that even the US government cannot deny, try as they might (and, again, it’s interesting how they had to keep switching the approach), that torture is precisely defined and banned under laws the US is subject to, both international (conventions, treaties) and national.

That is the one “problem”, the elephant in the room that you’re pretending not to see. Precise laws are being broken by governments who ratified them (the UK government too, they do a good job of reproaching the US and getting their citizens out of Guantanamo, but then they still have their own smaller-scale equivalents).

Are you just flat out denying this is happening at all, or you just don’t want to think about it?

And yeah, like Uncle Kvetch, I’m curious about that Kazahki reference too. What does it have to do with anything? I only hope you weren’t trying to imply that US standards of respect for human rights and international law should be measured against one of the countries with the worst violations of same, where they jail dissenters and close down entire opposition parties and journalists get killed. Because if it’s always going to be “America, at least not as bad as that” where “that” is anything from Saddam to non-democratic Central Asian regimes, well, there’s just no point wasting more time. By definition, nothing is ever going to be as bad as that which is worse. This simple truism doesn’t grant the US impunity and immunity from breaking its own laws, not to mention, principles, but since you don’t see laws and ethics as related, we can skip that part…

Out of curiosity, giles, if you don’t mind me asking, how old are you?

giles, this is becoming extremely tedious – the specific conventions against torture *do* have “automatic direct applicability” in all countries where they have been ratified and further transformed into national law.

How many different ways of putting that do you need?

That’s fact, it doesn’t take a lawyer or the State Department to figure out because it’s the basics of the way laws function.

No one is denying the jurisdiction or applicability of those anti-torture laws, not even the US government, not even the torture memos managed to pull that off because it’s impossible. You either abolish a law or if you maintain it, you have to respect it. What the US government tried to do is, first try and claim that the powers of the US president during a war can extend to bypassing *all* laws, national ones first and foremost; that was the torture memos. Parallel to that effort, which only came to the surface later, the other approach was to *politically* delegitimise anything “international” (while conveniently dismissing, as you do, the fact it’s also translated into national law), that was the Rumsfeld comments on the Geneva conventions as relates to the very existence of Guantanamo. Comments that later, when the Abu Ghraib scandal came out, were sort of recanted. The other effort consisted simply in not giving a rat’s ass about compliance with laws, especially when they have an international reach, something the US government is very good at, and something it has an easy game of, because of that bedrock of nationalistic acritical patriotism within public opinion that has been even more easily manipulated in the last few years. Lastly, the most effective effort at sidestepping the legal questions is to simply deny that torture is being perpetrated as policy, deny that the cases that have emerged are the responsibility of those in command. The “just a few bad apples” trick.

But none of these political games change the fact of the applicability of conventions against torture.
At most, Guantanamo is being claimed as a sort of “emergency” exception – again, a political approach, not a legal one, the legal aspect is simply being swept under the carpet; but no one has claimed the right to officially forsake all anti-torture laws, because that would require abrogation of laws.

Just because a government flaunts or sidesteps legal requirements, doesn’t mean those requirements are no longer there. Do you understand that? An executive can do its best (worst) to try and blur the separation of powers, but it cannot pretend laws do not exist.

So, there is no “weak legalistic argument” and no question of “what if it doesnt come within any international jurisdiction”. Again, there is also national jurisdiction.

“Will you then conclude that this torture was morally ok?”

Oh man. It is very hard to try and follow or even guess what reasoning you are adopting here. Please just go and read up about this whole issue of conventions and laws against torture, otherwise it’s impossible to even have the foundation of a rational exchange. You’re making up a lot of ridiculous non-objections, which have no basis in reality.

Do you need anyone to explain to you how laws work, from the grounds up? Or how morality is related to laws? Or what ratified international law means?

“Does the fact that the death penalty in the US and China is legal make it ok?”

Obviously not, duh, but that is not the same thing as torture. The US did not sign up to any conventions to ban the death penalty so it retains the right, *overtly*, to have it in its legal system. So the debate on the death penalty in the US is still open at the political level because it is perfectly legal in the US. The debate on torture is *not* open because torture is illegal! Do you see the difference betwen something *banned* under your own legal system and something that’s overtly part of that very same legal system? come on.

“So I’m not engaging in the legalistic arguement simply because I find it so morally vacuous. ”

Ha. I can’t believe this. You’re not engaging in any argument at all, giles. Moral, political, or legal – I haven’t seen anything in your comments except inane attempts to evade the whole issue.

“You cant stop all abuse and so you need to decide which are the most serious and target accordingly. The use of fake red ink ranks,well, about no one million in terms of seriousness when compared to the tortures that happened last year around the world. This post not only insults those who were maimed and tortured to death, it tivialises the whole concept of human rights.”

Really? The nerve. If I was a cynical bastard, I’d even admire this.
You’re once again conveniently obsessing on this one story of the “red ink”, missing its context and meaning, ignoring the whole surrounding reports of people being beaten to death, hung from ceilings, prodded like cattle, not to mention the very fact they’re detained indefinitely with no charges and no trial, ie. unlawufully, something you yourself said you consider “wrong”, and then have the nerve to adopt that very ridiculous “there’s always worse” excuse. So the US should be immune from any criticism and its violations ignored, because the Kazahki regime does worse? If I kill one person, can I point to someone else who killed twenty, will the police let me off? If that’s how you think the law works, then good luck. Preaching about trivialising human rights, no less.

I’m beyond disgusted by now. You have no idea how sick it sounds to hear Americans defend or minimise abuses their government commits in the name of “freedom” “liberty” “democracy”. But hey, I’m grateful for the honesty at least. It’s more than your government does.

“So my “advice” to you in your case, is to follow the primacy rule – lead with the strongest case of torture – not the weakest like these. I wont help you and it wont help your clients.”

We’re not talking of individual lawyers taking up the case of an individual detainee. These people are being denied any recourse to lawyers at all, have you forgot that?

We were talking applicability of international conventions and _national_ laws against torture and unlawful detainment. Nothing loony about that, so no need for your cheap pathetic sarcasm. Keep on bitching about the “unseriousness” of the specific incident in this one article, if you prefer. You clearly don’t give two shits about the serious ones either.

Anyway, since it’s clear some basic concepts are hard to get through no matter how often repeated, here’s for reference, to start with:
Summary of International and U.S. Law Prohibiting Torture and Other Ill-treatment of Persons in Custody

bq. International and U.S. law prohibits torture and other ill-treatment of any person in custody in all circumstances. The prohibition applies to the United States during times of peace, armed conflict, or a state of emergency. Any person, whether a U.S. national or a non-citizen, is protected. It is irrelevant whether the detainee is determined to be a prisoner-of-war, a protected person, or a so-called “security detainee” or “unlawful combatant.” And the prohibition is in effect within the territory of the United States or any place anywhere U.S. authorities have control over a person. In short, the prohibition against torture and ill-treatment is absolute.

If anything’s still not clear, I suggest a good dictionary to check the meaning of “and”, “national”, “irrelevant”, “any”, “place”, “absolute”. You’re welcome.