Category: Violent world

You need to read Terry Karney’s reactions on reading the torture memos.

I was beginning to wonder at myself. It wasn’t until I was deep into the third memo (which is a detailing of the various “techniques” being used, and the rationalisations for them being legal, that I really started to be disgusted. It was the detailing of how sleep deprivation was to be enforced which got me. I can’t imagine doing that to someone. I just can’t.

Part of that is years of being intimate with torture. There is no way to be a good interrogator and not look into torture. To be a good interrogator one has to be curious, and torture is the uncle we don’t like to talk about, because he’s a little off.

It’s not that I’ve not walked right up to that line. In some example exercises I came right up to it. And I stopped the event. The subject was willing, and I wasn’t going to do anything which caused permanent physical, or mental, harm, but if I’d done it, I’d have been on the other side of the lines I’d drawn. It was tempting, seductively so. If I’d done it, he’d have talked. He was getting ready to cry. I hadn’t touched him. I hadn’t even fixed him to the chair (which probably made it worse, he could move, but he couldn’t get away). I had absolute power over him (insofar as the LT would have let me go, which; it turns out, was further than I was willing to let me go).

And in a follow-up, Terry points out the obscene illogic of the standards established in the memos:

The only way to avoid being tortured is to give up information. If one doesn’t have the information, than one is doomed to be abused. The most willing “detainee” will not be believed, unless he has information about high value targets. This is defined as a “very high” standard.

What it actually is, is no standard. Everyone is presumed to be knowledgeable, and the only way to avoid being tortured to get at that knowledge is to have it to give up.

Honest ignorance will get you tortured. Devotion to the truth of one’s ignorance will only “prove” that one is a die-hard fanatic. And “die-hard fanatics” need to be abused, so they will “give up” the information we knew they had. Catch-22.

If this is true, things are even worse than I’d imagined:

Whole communities are involved in assisting and covering up “honour violence” in Britain, a new study says.
Informal networks of taxi drivers, councillors and sometimes even police officers track down and return women who try to escape, researchers claim.

When I first came to the USA, I was amused by the fact that I had to sign a document agreeing not to overthrow the government. Obviously no terrorist or anarchist would hesitate to sign such a document, would they? And since overthrowing the government is illegal, the document was surely redundant; by entering the USA, I was implicitly accepting that I was subject to US law.
Well, I think I’ve changed my mind about such “amusing”, “redundant” documents. How would it be if every immigrant to the UK was required to read and swear ((Ideally, read aloud, confirm understanding, and make a religious or secular affirmation.)) to a document which stated, quite explicitly, that “honour killings”, forced marriages, domestic violence, and various other forms of coercion against young women ((And men too.)) were absolutely forbidden, and that even to condone or conceal them would be a criminal offence. Come up with a catchy name that would make it easy to refer to in educational, law enforcement, and mass media contexts. (And ideally make it an EU-wide standard.) Encourage the moderate majority that (we are assured) exists in the South Asian community to promote the idea.
Would it help? Reportedly there’s an “honour killing” in England every month. (Perhaps many more.) It couldn’t really make things worse.
(See the International Campaign Against Honour Killings for more.)

Bruce Schneier has just posted an essay called The War on the Unexpected which captures the zeitgeist of paranoia to a T:

Watch how it happens. Someone sees something, so he says something. The person he says it to — a policeman, a security guard, a flight attendant — now faces a choice: ignore or escalate. Even though he may believe that it’s a false alarm, it’s not in his best interests to dismiss the threat. If he’s wrong, it’ll cost him his career. But if he escalates, he’ll be praised for “doing his job” and the cost will be borne by others. So he escalates. And the person he escalates to also escalates, in a series of CYA decisions. And before we’re done, innocent people have been arrested, airports have been evacuated, and hundreds of police hours have been wasted.

Thoughts from the Iraqi blogger, Riverbend, now living in Damascus, Syria:

I hear about the estimated 1.5 million plus Iraqi refugees in Syria and shake my head, never really considering myself or my family as one of them. After all, refugees are people who sleep in tents and have no potable water or plumbing, right? Refugees carry their belongings in bags instead of suitcases and they don’t have cell phones or Internet access, right? Grasping my passport in my hand like my life depended on it, with two extra months in Syria stamped inside, it hit me how wrong I was. We were all refugees. I was suddenly a number. No matter how wealthy or educated or comfortable, a refugee is a refugee. A refugee is someone who isn’t really welcome in any country- including their own… especially their own.

Only in Florida:

Orlando emptied its bureau drawers and closets on Friday of more than 250 unwanted guns — and one surface-to-air missile launcher.
The shoulder-fired weapon showed about 6 p.m. when an Ocoee man drove to the Citrus Bowl to trade the 4-foot-long launcher for size-3 Reebok sneakers for his daughter.

Commonsense from Max Hastings in the Guardian’s Comment is free:

Pity anyone who must catch a plane or visit Wimbledon today, or indeed for many days to come. Following Friday’s London bombs and Saturday’s attack at Glasgow airport, security checks have intensified dramatically. Everybody engaged in what is now a vast industry wants to be seen to be trying harder.
It is another matter, of course, whether all the conspicuous activity that follows a terrorist incident adds a jot to public safety, to compensate for the huge economic cost it imposes. Most security precautions represent a charade. It is probably a politically necessary charade – we will explore that issue in a moment. But we should be sceptical about its practical value.

Indeed. My flight home next Sunday is due to depart from Heathrow at 3:05pm. I wonder: should I plan to get to the airport before or after breakfast?

Andrew Sullivan points out the way that the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation” was viewed half a century ago – before Cheney, Rumsfeld and “24” turned torture into a spectator sport. Money quote:

Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler. I’m not. There is no comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U.S. in 2007. What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn’t-somehow-torture – “enhanced interrogation techniques” – is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.

However, I don’t believe in the death penalty. Life imprisonment will do just fine, thank you. And for those of you who are minded to scream about Godwin’s Law, check out Marty’s thoughts on the subject.

Powerful cri de coeur from Andrew Sullivan on the moral cost of the war in Iraq. It’s prompted by a U.S. Army report which included the finding that “Less than half of Soldiers and Marines believed that non-combatants should be treated with dignity and respect.”

This is how we win hearts and minds? […] Over a third of U.S. soldiers, taking the lead from their pro-torture commander-in-chief, see nothing wrong with [torture], even in a war clearly under Geneva guidelines. Two-thirds won’t report it. One in ten say they have abused Iraqi civilians just for the hell of it. Imagine what we don’t know and will never know about the rest.
[…]
In reassessing the war, in other words, the moral cost to America must come into the equation. The Iraq war has removed for a generation the concept of the U.S. military being an unimpeachable source of national honor. It has infringed civil liberties. It has legalized and institutionalized torture as a government tool – and helped abuse and brutality metastasize throughout the field of conflict. To be sure, abuse of captives always happens in wartime. What’s different now is that the commander-in-chief has authorized and legitimized it, and so the contagion has spread like wildfire. ((Aided and abetted by TV shows like 24, of course.)) The tragedy is that none of this will help us actually win this war.

Kathy Sierra, the writer who spoke out after a series of attacks and threats, and Chris Locke, the owner of the websites where the attacks were posted, have been talking, and have issued what they call Coordinated Statements. If you’ve been following this affair, it’s worth reading them. A couple of quotes – first from Kathy:

That my one post touched a nerve for tens of thousands of people shows just how wide and deep this problem is. People are outraged not just because of my story, but because it’s been a growing problem that’s hurt the lives of so many others online. But Chris and I felt that if we — of all people — could demonstrate that we could see past the anger, connect with each other, and learn something together, maybe we could help encourage others to have a more calm, rational productive discussion.

And from Chris:

Misogyny is real — and vile. Violence against women is wrong. It must not be tolerated. This issue should be explored and discussed, not swept under the rug, not rationalized away. At the same time, we need to look closely and carefully at the implications for free speech. […] Crucial as is the current debate about hate speech directed at women, it would be tragic if this incident were used as a weapon by those who would limit free and open exchange.

[Hat tip to Rick.]
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UPDATE: Tim O’Reilly has called for a Blogger’s Code of Conduct. As Tim Bray points out, this can really be boiled down to one simple rule: You’re accountable for what appears on your Web site. This feels right to me. A blog owner isn’t a “common carrier” or ISP, or anything like that.

Recently I cited Patrick Cockburn on the increasingly dangerous situation in the Iraqi countryside. Now we find that even the Green Zone in Baghdad is at risk:

The US embassy in Baghdad circulated a memo to all Americans working for the US government in the Green Zone. It ordered them to wear protective gear whenever they were outside in the Green Zone, including just moving from one building to another. Guerrillas have managed to lob a number of rockets into the area in recent days, and killed one US GI on Tuesday.
The Green Zone is therefore actually the Red Zone. I.e., it is no longer an area of good security contrasting to what is around it. Senator McCain was more wrong than can easily be imagined. Not only can American officials not just stroll through Baghdad districts unarmed and unprotected by armor, but they can’t even move that way from one building to the next inside the Green Zone!

To extend Cocklburn’s earlier analogy, not only have the enemy occupied Reading: the corgis are now wearing flak-jackets in Buckingham Palace Gardens.