Torture: from regress to redress
Neal Ascherson has written a brilliant article discussing the book by Kenneth Roth & Minky Worden (eds.), Torture: Does It Make Us Safer? Is it Ever O.K.?: A Human Rights Perspective (New Press/ Human Rights Watch, 2006)He looks at the shocking regression which sees us debating state torture as an actual policy option, the arguments for and against such a possibility, and the failure of the EU to fill the leadership void created by US policies.
posted by Becca @ 8:44 am
10 Comments:
That's a ridiculous thing to say.
I know the justification for the war in Iraq and the war on terror has shifted just about every single time Bush, Blair...open their mouths ( It's WMD, they have nuclear sites, they were nasty to their people adn we are liberating them) none of that justifies torture and imprisonment without trial.
Using terms like 'war' is just an attempt to trample on peoples rights.
but we are not 'at war' and we have no right to tirture someone or invade their country.
“I'm surprised you're being so deliberately obtuse. You're not really that dumb, are you? Yes, it's a war. Don't like it? Go cry in a corner.”
I am not going to lower myself and trade personal insults with someone who goes under the alias ‘Mussolini’. And no, I ‘don’t like it’, but I can tell that you do.
The ‘it’ though’ is not a war. By the 9/11 report I think youmean the national Commission on terrorist attacks on the US. I didn’t read it all but I saw bits, which are frequently hysterically funny.
I have it in front of me now.
At one point they site Bush’s ‘experience as a pilot’ as part of their evidence. :-)) But mostly they see the world through the same paranoid eyes as you do.
But the report does not support any link between Saddam and bin Laden. It says that there is ‘No compelling case" that Iraq had either planned or perpetrated the attacks’…and that there is ‘no confirmed reporting on Saddam cooperating with Bin Ladin on unconventional weapons.’
They do seem to have the wit to realize that Ba’athists and al-qaeda were two completely different things. One being secular and the other being crazy religious. ‘Bin Ladin resented the secularism of Saddam Hussein's regime’.
But the report does seem to think, as Mussolini does, that a war was ‘declared’ on the US.
Unfortunatly they seem to be a little confused about the 'decleration' and who they are actually at war with. They say that bin laden issued a fatwa in 1998 to kill Americans, but then they say that he is not a religious authority and has no power to issue fatwas. They then say ‘Al-Qaeda represents an ideology, not a definite group of people’.
So, if you are at war with someone,Musso, then it is not with a country, or a people, or a group of people, but an ideology.
I would go further and say that you are at war with a phantom of your own, rabid imagination. You are at war with an abstract noun (and Bush is at war with the English language in general).
That does not justify invading other people’s countries, holding people for years without trial and making repressive laws in your own country and many others.
I am glad you are ‘liking it’ but most of us aren’t.
I can only repeat what it says in the report:
No compelling case" that Iraq had either planned or perpetrated the attacks’…and that there is ‘no confirmed reporting on Saddam cooperating with Bin Ladin on unconventional weapons.’
What part of ‘no compelling case’ don’t you understand, Muso?
The Washington Post 2004 concluded:
The [9/11] report of the commission's staff, based on its access to all relevant classified information, said that there had been contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda but no cooperation. In yesterday's hearing of the panel, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, a senior FBI official and a senior CIA analyst concurred with the finding.
The staff report said that bin Laden "explored possible cooperation with Iraq" while in Sudan through 1996, but that "Iraq apparently never responded" to a bin Laden request for help in 1994
The (nutty rightwing) article you recommend makes a lot of the a meeting in Prague with Atta, the 9/11 guy. The British Independent reported in 2003:
‘The only problem is that [the] stories were untrue. The allegation of the Prague meetings - first made by Czech intelligence - was extensively investigated by the Czech government. President Vaclav Havel informed the White House that the allegation could not be substantiated. The CIA's director, George Tenet, told Congress last October that the CIA could find no supporting evidence.’
There were also stories from similar sources suggesting that 9/11 bomber Atta had something to do with the anthrax attack in October 2001.
This time they suggested that a flask of anthrax spores had been given to Atta during another meeting in Prague, apparently confirming that Iraq was assisting his group of al-Qa'ida terrorists.
Of course, we now know that it someone working in a US lab that sent the parcels…
This was the kind of rubbish that was presented by Powell at the UN to justify the invasion of Iraq.
But don’t let that get in the way of your Islamo-fantancies and delusions. Cheeny and you must be the only two left with thses delusions.
But not at war with anyone.
http://www.president-bush.com/osamabinhussein.html
Ok Mussolini, enough of the personal insults. I think you'll find Beatroot quoted from the report AS WELL as from the media.
You both have different perspectives and both use the facts that support your side. This is normal.
I think Mussolini you are ignoring too lightly the 'reportedly' and 'may have's in the report and taking this as evidence.
If you could take some of the agression out of your responses, maybe you would see eye to eye with more people.
Muso: as I have quoted before from the report: There is 'no compelling case' according to the report, that Iraq had either planned or perpetrated the attacks’…and that there is ‘no confirmed reporting on Saddam cooperating with Bin Ladin on unconventional weapons.’
That's not my words but the report's.
It is taken from the first page of the report. If you do not recognise it then maybe it is you that has not read it. Or mayeb you being deliberatly obtuse?
The Saddam/bin Laden thing is a bust flush, an argument that only the most dilluded (Dick Chenney etc) are clinging to. Forget it, Muso, and get on with your life.
No, you are welcome. Just don't be surprised when people don't agree with you. Healthy debate.
Torture is a key issue nowadays. Democratic countries are using it in the name of the "democracy". But is it right to use terror to fight terror? Torture should never be morally acceptable, it only creates more of what it is willing to end.
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