Uncomfortably Numb to Torture

[marmar]

Published on Saturday, September 30, 2006 by the Los Angeles Times
Uncomfortably Numb to Torture
As America's politicians, media and citizens get used to wartime abuses, Bush's horrific policies get a pass.

by JoAnn Wypijewski

A year ago this week, a military jury convicted Army Reserve Pfc. Lynndie R. England of maltreating detainees. The face of the Abu Ghraib scandal, England is forever fixed in photographs as the girl with the bowl cut and the pixie smile who pointed at Iraqi prisoners while they were forced to masturbate and who held a writhing, naked man by a leash. Before sentencing, the Army prosecutor thundered: "Who can think of a person who has disgraced this uniform more? Who has held the U.S. military up for more dishonor?"

Indeed, it was that uniform — not the breach of immutable standards of decency held by this nation — that put England in the dock and eventually in prison. It was that uniform and nothing else, because if England and the others charged in the scandal had been civilian interrogators instead of military police, they would be among the privileged torturers whom President Bush and members of both parties in Congress are determined to keep on the job and to shield from future prosecution.

Abu Ghraib has become shorthand for the kind of abhorrent behavior that, in the latest discussion about interrogation techniques, nobody ventures to allow. In that sense, Abu Ghraib is the new American standard, a negative one, marking the line that must not be crossed. A positive standard — that is, humane treatment of unarmed prisoners — being inconceivable, debate turns on permissible degrees of inhumanity; "rough stuff," as New York Times columnist David Brooks and others justifying pain say lightly.

So here is the bitter joke: England, the public emblem of torture, was convicted for nothing so awful as what the president and his flank have chosen to protect. Her crime was to smile, to pose, to jeer at naked, powerless men, and to fail to stop their humiliations or to report them afterward. She did not shackle men in stress positions, strip them of their clothes, deny them sleep, force them to stand for hours or days, douse them with icy water, deprive them of heat or food or subject them to incessant noise or screaming.

Despite Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain's compromise, none of those brutalities is expressly outlawed in the legislation that Congress just passed and the president is about to sign.

Such brutalities were regular fare at Abu Ghraib because interrogation, by civilian and military personnel, was regular fare. But interrogation was largely sidestepped in the Abu Ghraib trials, in which prosecutors focused on what soldiers did for "fun," for "laughs," with common criminals "of no value" to U.S. intelligence. The infamous pyramid and sexual mortifications were not part of interrogations, so these formed the centerpiece of criminal charges. The daily application of fear and cold and want and pain — what Spc. Charles A. Graner Jr., the putative ringleader of the scandal at Abu Ghraib, called his job of "terrorizing prisoners" — was an accompaniment to questioning, so it went unpunished.

The complete article is at: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0930-25.htm

[Amonester]

1. Each small candle lights a corner of the dark.

Not the torturer will scare me
Nor the body's final fall
Nor the barrels of death's rifles
Nor the shadows on the wall
Nor the night when to the ground
The last dim star of pain, is hurled
But the blind indifference
Of a merciless, unfeeling world

(Unknown... writer)

...

Each small candle lights a corner of the dark
When the wheel of pain stops turning
And the branding iron stops burning
When the children can be children
When the desperados weaken
...
- Roger Waters (In the Flesh Live 2000)

[marmar]

2. Great cartoon...and great Roger Waters lyrics.

:thumbsup: