shuggy's blog
I am not trolling but .
:
a. What do you consider torture? What isn't?
b. Why is the backslide starting in the sixties? They didn't torture people in the Pacific, maybe, but they didn't take prisoners either.
c. This doesn't apply to the American revolution. Enemies have been treated with the golden rule and nothing more until recently.
I understand and agree with the main points of your post, universal rights etc..., but the parts including Americans don't add up.
Also, this is insane imho:
"the strength to protect the rights of those who seek to destroy us is the glory and wisdom of democracy"
the real strength would be the trial among peers after you hung "those who seek to destroy us" from a tree or lamp post. Why would anyone accept their sworn enemy and then claim it as some sort of moral victory?
sorry for trolling.
a) The sort of techniques used by police interrogators in states like Algeria, Syria, Suadi Arabia to extract confessions etc. are considered by everyone to constitute torture, no?
b) The 'backsliding' I refer to is that on the part of the West. Torture was also routinely used by the USSR of course but the Algerian torture scandal marks the point roughly where we see it reappearing in the West.
c) What doesn't? The reference to 'cruel and unusual punishment' in the constitution is about torture.
d) Insane? No. We defeated fascism without dispensing with the convention that prisoners of war are obliged to give their name, rank and serial number and nothing else. Is this situation so 'new'? I don't think so. If they are POWs, they are entitled to the protocols of the Geneva convention. If they are not POWs, they should be treated as criminals, in which case evidence should be produced and they should be tried and incarcerated.
Shuggy: why are there just two categories, POW and criminal? I suspect that we do need a 3rd category and the sooner the better, because otherwise all this nasty stuff will get nastier and nastier, with nothing to constrain it.
Because creating a third category would be creating a category defined by their lack of protection by hard-won ethical codes.
Abslutely with Shuggy but I still think we need to define torture more precisely.
For a claustrophobic a small cell is torture. For someone terrified by talk of alligators, talk of alligators is torture. 'Cruel and unusual' seems insufficient. If it is frequently practised does it cease to be 'unusual' and does that then make it all right?
When I was a schoolboy I thought the practice by the PE teacher of punishing by making us hang on wall bars was pretty well torture. It was not unusual.
Is (supposedly) flushing Koran down the toilet torture for a devout Muslim?
I think we could arrive at a tighter definition, though it would be far from easy to do so. Nevertheless I think we should try.
The standard case for torture (or for treatment approaching torture) is to posit a situation where the torture of one would, beyond all doubt, save the lives of many. Where on this plane have you hidden the explosives? etc.
I know the Michael Walzer book on the morality of war is a good text, but I don't think it deals directly with this question.
In the meantime the first position is Shuggy's. Simple. No torture. Under any circumstances.
Hear hear Shug. Cohen lost his moral compass a number of years ago, preferrring instead to side with the Aaronovitchs (Hitchens Lite) and Hitchens'(40 proof) in sniping at the wooly liberals with the temerity to question our escapades in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
There can be no exceptions to the rule as Cohen supposes. (See also John Pilger in this weeks' New Statesman.)
1) But which is actually likelier to stop the torturers: complaining that terrorist suspects should be treated as ordinary criminals, or introducing laws to cover them? My guess is that some legal protection is a better bet than just hoping that the horrors will stop.
2) While one must distinguish principles from actions, to see some of the horrors effected by the Patriots during the American War of Independence, read Hugh Bicheno's "Rebels and Redcoats". Oof!
I'm having a hard time deciding whether or not Mike's point c) is supposed to mean that Americans are newcomers to the practice of torture.
Because they really aren't: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/
Se...lippine_Warfare
I don't believe these events are the norm, by any stretch of the imagination. But let's not pretend that the US is a doe-eyed innocent who has only recently been corrupted.
I'm glad to read the conclusion of this post. I've followed the institutionalization of torture here and it disgusts me to no end. As one can see at Abu Graib, there is no such thing as a little torture, it always slides into a Dantesque hell. There is a recent story one should also read by googling about Alyssa Peterson, a killed CIA officer.
Lol desfaber, that was my point to begin with. Taking prisoners is bad policy. Establish it and define the war instead of getting pricked by insurgents.
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