A post I made to rasff last night

This is a follow-up to a post which was a follow-up to a post of mine. The portions of my original post which I've preserved, I've put in italics, then paraphrased the other person. I don't want to quote other people's Usenet postings in my LJ, especially people I consider to be thugs and fellow-travellers of torturers; you can read the whole thing at Google. And I won't have thugs and torturer wannabees posting to my LJ, either.

Organization: Burrowing Wombat Press
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.fandom

On Sat, 08 May 2004 17:04:11 GMT, some water-carrier for torturers
wrote:
The first verifiable allegations of torture in the War on Some Terror were lodged in October 2001, and have been verified repeatedly since then.

[The person pointed out that I didn't provide any documentation and claimed that the US has acted with great restraint since September 11th.]

Go read a newspaper.

Three British prisoners released last week from Guantanamo Bay have revealed the full extent of British government involvement in the American detention camp condemned by law lords and the Court of Appeal as a 'legal black hole'. . . .

That their first interrogations by British investigators - from both MI5 and the SAS - took place in December 2001 and January 2002 when they were still being held at a detention camp in Afghanistan. Guns were held to their heads during their questioning in Afghanistan by American soldiers, and physical abuse and beatings were rife. At this point, after weeks of near starvation as prisoners of the Northern Alliance, all three men were close to death.

These are men who were released as innocent by the British after about five minutes of questioning in the British legal system.

The US was *openly admitting in 2001* that prisoners at Guantanamo were being subjected to extended periods of sleep deprivation, constant loud noise, long periods of solitary confinement, and other psychological abuse--nothing as grotesque, stupid, and bad for America's image worldwide as the Guignol of Abu Ghraib, but, you know, run of the mill modern bruise-free torture.

Err, sorry. "Interrogation."

[The existence of the Taguba report is held up as proof that the US is serious about stomping out torture.]

It was the third such report. And it was left UNREAD BY THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE by his own admission for THREE MONTHS. Because, after all, there were more important things in his mind than THE CONDUCT OF THE WAR IN IRAQ.

Ahem.

[The government acted "properly and rapidly".]

In the "properly and rapidly" sense of "doing nothing for months and then, once the press makes the issue undeniable, scapegoating as few people as humanly possible." And, let us not forget, "begging the press not to reveal more of the tortures because they're too
embarrassing."

I quoted Jim Henley:
Iraq is not full of warbloggers who only believe bad news about the occupation when they have both unimpeachable documentary evidence in front of them and an admission from the White House or the Pentagon. It's full of the families and friends of the people
piled naked in those pictures.

[Of course, Saddam was worse.]

And you know what? That doesn't fucking matter to the Iraqis. Not at all.

We are torturing Iraqi prisoners. We don't get points in the game for being arguably better than Saddam and his non-existant people-chipper. As someone put it,

Saddam had "torture chambers" and "rape rooms." We, on the other hand, have "chambers where there is torture" and "rooms where rape happens." Don't you see the difference?

We are torturing prisoners in a way that makes us look not merely cruel but ridiculous, contemptable, decadent beyond imagining.

Sure, we're better than Saddam, if you're willing to set the bar that low. But the war in Iraq stopped being about Saddam over a year ago. For the last year, the fighting has been all about making Iraq a governable region. The deliberate creation of the conditions for torture has made that fight vastly harder, regardless of what you think about how winnable that fight ever was.

[The Iraqis only had rumors before now.]

If you're a warblogger American, sure. If you've seen the scars on your friends, you don't need photos.

Which misses my point, of course; my point wasn't that the release of the photos was unimportant because the Iraqis already knew everything in them. My point was that the US public may have just found out about this, but the Iraqis have known about it for months and months. Maybe if the US had real news reporting, the American people would have paid attention to the reports which were coming out before now, but that's the price we pay for having a cheap press.

I know that the person I'm responding to will disagree with me on the color of the sky on a cloudless afternoon and the direction in which the sun is first seen in the morning, but anyone who thinks that the torture at Abu Ghraib was an accident should check out the blog of libertarian pundit Jim Henley. [The person to whom I am responding claims to be a libertarian, but has never found it in himself to condemn the Bush maladministration for defiling the Bill of Rights.] Particularly these:

Daily Reminder to my Fellow Citizens:

When your society starts seriously talking about torture, it means you've fucked up and become repressive.

Roll of Honor:

For the record, singling out a sailor for praise because he refused to torture prisoners is indeed a sign of how far we as a nation have sunk.

You Don't Have to Leave Home:

... to find serious prison abuse, either, as James Joyner points out:

Still, it's hard to see how these conditions don't constitute cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment.

(The Joyner quote comes from a blog which features a very large ad encouraging people to donate money to defeat Tom Daschle's re-election campaign and end his "reign of terror". It's not just libertarians and liberals who think abusing prisoners is a bad idea.)

Chain of Command

A congressman with experience in military detention said Saturday that the Pentagon rejected an Army plan to send him to advise the military police commander who oversaw Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison in the early months of the war in Iraq.

Rep. Steve Buyer said he was disappointed by the decision...

"It was pretty dumbfounding to me," he told CNN, "and disappointing that the Army had this plan to send me and the [Office of the Secretary of Defense] said no."

Buyer, an Indiana Republican and a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, served as a legal adviser in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War, he said during a telephone interview with CNN about a story first reported by The Associated Press.

In closing, I note that Teresa Nielsen Hayden posted to her blog recently a bit of Roman Catholic schematizing that I found very compelling. She entitled it The Nine Ways of Being an Accessory to Another's Sin:

1. By counsel.
2. By command.
3. By consent.
4. By provocation.
5. By praise or flattery.
6. By concealment.
7. By partaking.
8. By silence.
9. By defense of the ill done.

Counting, and the subject of such enumeration, are left as exercises to the reader.