May 2004: What is the definition of.....torture?
The press does Herd Behavior really, really well. Back when Saddam's statue was pulled down, and the mighty U.S. tank spearheads were blasting their way into the heart of Baghdad, and flags were on every car in America, back when Bush's approval ratings were (briefly, oh so briefly) at 80%, the American press did its best imitation of Kipling. Our Noble Warriors, off in the Way-Far-Away East, Bearing the White Man's Burden, bringing the light of civilization and Halliburton to Iraq, slaying the evil Saddam dragon, rescuing the Oil Maiden from the towel-heads. It was glorious, and the press cheered it, with One Voice.
Well, things change. The Media Herd sniffs something else, shuffles uneasily, redirects their myopic gaze, then heads off in a new direction. It's now mid-2004, and the press now, only now, wants to know: What is the definition of torture?
Turns out, this is a question the U.S. government knew the Media Herd would eventually be asking, so they got ready for it. Or perhaps they were just being thorough, doing contingency planning, in case Outraged Denial and Shoot-The-Messenger didn't work, and they needed a further fallback plan. In their usual fashion, they formed a committee, with members sent from everywhere that counts, and then issued a report in March 2003. The parts that count are: The Pentagon, the office of the Vice President, a few other places from the Executive branch and military. Not the State Department, not the Congress. No Supreme Court Justices were asked for their opinion, on exactly what was a "stress position", and exactly how long could you do it to someone, and did it matter if you did it on U.S. soil or elsewhere in the Empire, and could Guantanamo be considered U.S. soil (the answer is: it depends), and when precisely are you crossing the line into torture.....
People don't ask themselves these questions, unless they are worrying about the potential for a war crimes trial, in some imaginable future. The U.S. government asked itself these questions, in great detail, long before Ms. England became a celeb.
Like pornography, torture is hard to define, but most of us know it when we see it. For instance:
It was one night in November when the guards came another time for Amjed Isail Waleed. He was in Room 1, he recalled later, when ''they told me to lay down on my stomach and they were jumping on me from the bed onto my back and my legs.'' The assault was only beginning. He was already naked, and his hands were bound and tied to a cell door. One guard urinated on him and laughed. Two women hit his penis with a sponge ball. One -- ''with blond hair, she is white'' -- fondled him, he said. At some point in the night, the guards broke a phosphorescent light stick -- ''the glowing finger,'' he called it -- and poured its liquid on his body ''until I was glowing and they were laughing.'' ''They took me to the room and they signaled me to get onto the floor,'' he said. One of the guards, he said, sodomized him with a nightstick. ''And I started screaming, and he pulled it out and he washed it with water inside the room,'' he said. All the while, he concluded, ''they were taking pictures of me.''
Message 20186557
Ashcroft and Rumsfeld read reports of this, and lots more like it. And they concluded, it wasn't torture. It was....abuse......but not torture. They read the reports, and then went on to the next item in their in-box. Only when the pictures appeared in the newspapers, did they start to actually see a problem. The problem, of course, was the pictures in the newspaper. The solution: ban all cameras in the U.S. military.
Americans are surprised and shocked, that Americans could do what the pictures clearly show Ms. England doing. This surprise is possible, only because Americans, as a rule, know nothing of their own history. Our wars, and particularly our wars against towelhead-types (Sandinistas, gooks, Japs, Huns, filipino insurgents, red savages, niggers, etc.) are full of similar actions, done by people like Ms. England. Look closely, look without first making the assertion "Americans don't do that", and you will see it. In every war.
The only modern innovation, it that now women get to do it. Before now, it was considered Man's Work, and everyone knew that women were emotionally and physically ill-equipped. It was even asserted, by both 1880's Victorians and 1970's Women's Libbers, that women were Better than men, and could never do rape and torture. After all, almost all rapes and assaults, in all cultures and times, are done by men. But now, thanks to all the sacrifice and hard work of Suffragists and feminists, the Gentler Sex have the opportunity to bring that special Woman's Touch to their work in Iraq's prisons. Women can, yes they can, do everything a man can do. They can Actualize their FullPotential as human beings, given a permissive and accepting social/political environment. And these proud women can even take the pictures to prove it. I'm sure this is just what Susan B. Anthony intended.
So, now, the Media Herd is in motion in a new direction, and it will lumber forward, unstoppable. They will dig and dig, and re-interview everyone, and not let unanswered questions drop. For instance, we are finally getting a little more information about who beat to death those prisoners at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, back in 2002. Turns out, unsurprisingly, it was the same unit that later produced those Iraq prison trophy photos. They learned their techniques in Afghanistan and Guantanamo. At the time, though, there were just a few articles, when the autopsy reports came out. But then silence. The war was popular, we seemed to be winning, so nobody was interested in digging for details. Nobody cared that nobody was named. Nobody was arrested, and the military got away with a permanent investigation that went nowhere.
But even an Imperial Presidency can't stop the Media Herd. So, someday, we may even find out which U.S. soldiers helped Dostum's militia stuff thousands of Taliban prisoners into containers, lock the nearly-airtight doors, and set them out in the desert sun till the contents were cooked. I'll bet the "Special" soldiers who did that, back in late 2001, have been hard at work in Iraq for over a year now, winning hearts and minds.
So, that's the question for May, 2004, in America: what is torture? And did we do it, and who ordered or allowed it, and who knew it, and when did they know it? And what does it say about us, that we are even having to ask ourselves these questions? |
