:: Wog Blog ::

:: WHAT AM I THINKING ABOUT? ::

:: Saturday 12 February 2005 ::

More Sullivan Hysteria About Torture

But Bybee needs to come out, at the end of his paragraph, with: "Those acts must penetrate to the core of an individual's ability to perceive the world around him, substantially interfering with his cognitive abilities, or fundamentally alter his personality."

Even Abu Ghraib doesn't make it to torture under this definition.

This comes from the "wonderful little take-down of Jay Bybee's horrifying 2002 torture memo, essentially defining torture out of existence" which Sullivan links to.

Even Abu Ghraib doesn't make it to torture under this definition.

Even.

Puhlease.

What that whole little attempt at a take down reveals is the heart of the matter for Sullivan and folks like him.

Abu Ghraib is torture.

It just is. Full stop end of story.

Stacks on the mill, leashes on prisoners, nuding them up, letting girlies rub their tits on prisoners, letter girlies who are menstruating near prisoners.

That is torture.

Swear to God, Sullivan can write all the hysterical rubbish about torture being widespread and delighted in by Bush and everyone else in the WhiteHouse and armed forces but frankly just because Sullivan repeatedly says it is so does not make it so.

And he has got this on his site.

Moreover, whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide; whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in woman and children; degrading conditions of work which treat labourers as mere instruments of profit and not as free responsible persons: all these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honour due to the creator."
- "Pastoral constitution on the church in the world of today," - Second Vatican Council, December 7, 1965. My italics.

How the Catholic theoconservatives who are so close to this administration have remained largely quiet about America's new policy of torture is simply beyond my comprehension.

Niice try Andrew.

Actually, not nice at all.

Physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit?

New policy of torture?

Could he be any more slapdash?

Sullivan thinks the Pastoral Constitution was crafted for war time.

Puhlease.

It was crafted for your life.

Do not behave badly to others...in your life.

And it never once had in mind that filthy Islamofascist poofhating, chauvinist, misogynist, racist scumbags would be trying to kills us all with their craazy ideas that their religion ought to be imposed on us or at least desperately respected by us.

Once again, for the hard of thinking, Abu Ghraib - the nuding up, the dogs, the presence of women, is not torture.

It is humiliation and sleeplessness and discomfort. But it falls well short of torture.

Torture is serious. And neither Peter Brooks, the lawyer who wrote that article or Andrew Bloody Sullivan get that.

For the two of them, torture is all about them. Not about the bastard jackasses who make heavyhanded interrogation necessary in the first place.

I mean, puhlease. A man who is so into his faith that he will freak out if a bleedy girl is nearby to him? We are dealing with craazies here.

If, as Sullivan and Brooks submit, everything is torture, then nothing is, you know?

Cos the day we start thinking the mere presence of a woman or a dog is torture for the bloke who hates women and dogs, is the day we can just give in to madness. The 'egg shell skull' rule writ large. Take your plaintiff as you find him. If he happens to be a craazy Islamofacist offended by everything then so be it. You offend him, you are a woman wielding dog wielding torturer. Ya torturer.

Sullivan is so dismissive of attempts, however successful, to really ask what the hell torture really is, preferring to see horror even when there is none.

I think that sort of approach is lazy. Venally lazy.

Here is the Currency Lad. A man who knows his Vatican II.

This torture business is serious stuff and we have to address it cos the folks we are fighting in the War on Terror, from Beslan to Bali, are quite mad. And part of their philosophy is to imagine themselves better than everyone around them who does not share their demented version of their faith. That makes them tough nuts to crack. Nuts, of course. To be cracked.

It cannot be torture simply to crack these nuts. It is torture only if cracking them is all you do. If killing them is all you do, when they are in interrogation to answer questions, for which they need to be alive. And it is torture if they are alive but unable to answer - if the interrogator has injured the detainee so badly he cannot answer even if he wanted to.

Lordy, how I loathe Sullivan's glib approach to such a serious subject.

UPDATE:
Sullivan also links this New Yorker piece about wogs getting interrogated by the countries they come from. This is a challenging for my philosophy. But frankly I do not care about these Islamofacists. They are not just criminals to be treated under usual criminal laws. They are beyond criminal.

Urgh.

Too much negativity. I need another week off the blog for work and stuff.
:: WB 2:10 pm [link+] ::