1. “From the Inquisition to us
The release of Bush administration torture memos proves one thing at least: When those at the highest levels of our government discussed “enhanced interrogation,” they neglected to consider the sordid history of torture.
Had they been interested, they might have discovered an illustrated article on water torture in a popular 19th century Spanish newspaper (I happened on it in Madrid, doing research for my next book). Published in 1836, just two years after Spain abolished the Inquisition, the article noted that torture was still practiced in a few places, although Catherine the Great of Russia outlawed its practice in 1760, as did France’s Louis XVI in the early years of his reign. The article claimed that the principal objection to torture was not necessarily moral or ethical. Torture doesn’t work, it said: “It’s not efficacious.”
Different types of water torture were reviewed, including a detailed presentation of a version of waterboarding as mandated in French documents from the time of Louis XIV. The article concluded by pointing out that such a “savage act” paradoxically took place in the most glorious court ever seen, headed by a king “who was daily surrounded by the most select individuals in a peaceful and educated nation.”
At the time, interest in Spain in the topic of torture was not coincidental. Many people struggled with the implications of support for the Inquisition — 300 years during which the apparatus of the Catholic Church and a Catholic state pursued, sometimes to death, Arabs, Jews and other “heretics” — in an otherwise enlightened country. In 1888, in the first comprehensive history of the Inquisition, Henry Charles Lea described one of the inquisitors’ punishing techniques, which ought to sound familiar. Prisoners were bound to a ladder-like plank that was tilted, so their heads were lower than their feet. A piece of linen was forced down the “patient’s” throat to allow water to trickle through slowly as it was poured from a vessel.
“The patient strangled and gasped and suffocated and, at intervals, he was adjured to tell the truth,” Lea writes. The degree of punishment was gauged by the amount of water imbibed. Lea cites one case, in 1596, in which 12 pints of water were poured into the “patient.” Lea doesn’t mention the outcome of the case. He does, however, note that water torture was not much used in the Inquisition after the beginning of the 17th century. It was deemed not “merciful” enough.
The modern world condemns the Spanish Inquisition and its pursuit of racial purity and doctrinal religious observance. But there’s a more subtle point to be made. Ordinary citizens allowed it to function for hundreds of years precisely because it was understood to keep them safe, to preserve their culture and lives.
The parallels to the United States and the war on terror are obvious, from the suspicion and demonizing of people believed to be of Arab or Muslim descent to the appeals to preserve the American way of life. Just as obvious are the parallels to the way that America has been diminished in the eyes of the world.
Taking history into account could have protected the United States from engaging in practices that jeopardized our values, our democracy and even our lives. As the debate continues, it can add to our conversations much-needed perspective and depth. When we grasp the history of torture — and now, our place in it — we can begin again to speak persuasively of democracy and peace.“
http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/mayfaire/latimes0220.htm
2. “
The Problem is Statelessness
King Abdullah II of Jordan revealed to the Times of London that the Obama administration may attempt a comprehensive peace treaty between Israel and the entire Muslim world. The latter would recognize Israel and grant El Al overflight rights. Israel in return would have to freeze settlement activity and move smartly toward a two-state solution and the establishment of a Palestinian state, with Israeli settlers removed from the West Bank. The status of Jerusalem would be left for later negotiations.
Abdullah warned that if rapid progress is not made, another war will probably break out in the region within 18 months to two years.
In my view, the central problems in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are the statelessness of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and in their diaspora, the continued military occupation or blockade by the Israelis, and the rapid expansion of Israeli colonies, which are usurping Palestinian land and rights.
Until the statelessness of the Palestinians is understood and seen as the central problem that it is, there can be no real progress on the issues. Statelessness was an attribute of slaves in premodern times. The Jews of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s were the primary victims of the crime of stripping people of their citizenship in a state. It is monstrous that Palestinians should be stateless all these decades after 1948. Make no mistake; it is Israel that deprived them of statehood, which the 1939 British White Paper pledged to them, and which other League of Nations Mandates, such as French Syria and Lebanon and British Iraq, achieved.
A stateless person ultimately has no rights, since it is states that guarantee rights. A stateless person may be robbed, raped, and sometimes even killed with impunity. Stateless children are often deprived of schooling. Since the property of the stateless is ambiguous with regard to its legal status, the stateless are at risk for extreme poverty. The contemporary world is a world of states, and falling between the cracks because you lack citizenship in any state is a guarantee of marginality and oppression.
Apologists try to shift the blame for Palestinian statelessness from Israel to someone else. But it won’t work. The original tort of derailing Palestinian independence was Israel’s, and Israel has been the main force preventing the declaration of a Palestinian state, so it is Israel that must step up here. Other countries cannot be expected to solve a problem created by the Israelis, nor do most of the countries in the region havethe economic efflorescence or governmental stability to do so.
It seems obvious what needs to be done to end Palestinian statelessness. If a Palestinian state isn’t created in short order, the world is in for decades of Apartheid and political decay and consequent trouble, including terrorism and further wars. At the end of this process likely Israel will be forced to absorb the Palestinians as its own citizens, i.e. you end up with a one-state solution. The reason that there is more talk about the latter now is that it does at least resolve the central problem, of Palestinian statelessness, a problem that cannot be solved in any other way once a Palestinian state is forestalled by the massive Israeli colonization of the West Bank. (Actually I should say “Israeli and American,” since a third of the Israeli squatters in the West Bank are Americans).
If Obama really is making this push for a comprehensive settlement, it is an enormous undertaking and its success is by no means assured (to say the least). He will have to be tough with Netanyahu and Lieberman, who will try to sabotage any such move. At least, the Obama administration is demonstrating some independence, and is no longer doing extensive advance briefings for Israeli officials on US diplomacy in the region.“
3. “Americans Supported Torture Because They Were Deceived into Thinking that it was a Necessary Evil
“Who cares whether or not it works? It is illegal, unethical and unacceptable”.
Well yes, of course it is. But it is in one important way even more important that it does not work (and that it actually reduces our national security).
Why?
Because – as president-elect of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, Roy Eidelson, points out – most Americans supported the use of torture because they were deceived into thinking that it works and was a necessary tool in a life-or-death war on terror.
For example, Eidelson points out that a nationwide poll run in January 2009 asked a national sample of Americans, “Do you think the use of harsh interrogation techniques, including torture, has ever saved American lives since the September 11 (2001) terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?” The results: 45% “Yes” and 41% “No” (with 14% responding “Don’t Know”). In other words, almost half of Americans think torture “works.”
Indeed, Eidelson notes out that the administration conducted a sophisticated propaganda campaign to “sell” Americans on the use of torture.
The fact that torture is illegal, unethical and unacceptable is not enough to convince the majority of American people that those who ordered it should be prosecuted.
It is vital to spread the facts, because only the truth that torture does not work will wake the public up and lead to prosecutions.“
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/05/americans-supported-torture-because.html
4. The US media is so happy the Iranian journalist has been freed. But what about the journalists imprisoned by American troops?
“Pointing to other governments and highlighting their oppressive behavior can be cathartic, fun and gratifying in a self-justifying sort of way. Ask Fred Hiatt; it’s virtually all he ever does. But the first duty of the American media — like the first duty of American citizens — is to oppose oppressive behavior by our own government. That’s not as fun or as easy, but it is far more important. Moreover, obsessively complaining about the rights-abridging behavior of other countries while ignoring the same behavior from our own government is worse than a mere failure of duty. It is propagandistic and deceitful, as it paints a misleading picture that it is other governments — but not our own — which engage in such conduct.
…
There were several bombings of Al Jazeera offices by the U.S. this decade. Shouldn’t the American media be much more interested in covering the attacks on press freedoms by their own government than those by other governments — or, at the very least, as interested in the assaults on press freedoms by the U.S. Government?
…
Identically, a commentator on Twitter asked TNR‘s Lake how he reconciled his condemnation of Iran — “civilized countries do not arrest people for journalism” — with the examples I’ve highlighted here, and this was Lake’s response:
Given that they were never given any trials, how could Lake possibly know that the multiple reporters we imprisoned (and, in Jassam’s case, continue to imprison) were “using their press cards as cover for terror”? He, of course, has no idea. Indeed, in Jassam’s case, an Iraqi court ruled there was no evidence to justify his detention; in Hussein’s case, the first (and only) court to review his imprisonment ordered him released; and, as Kristof said about al-Haj: ”there was never any real evidence that Sami was anything but a journalist.” All Lake knows about them is that they’re Muslim and that the U.S. Government claimed (with no evidence and no charges) that they were involved in “terror,” and that’s good enough for him to cheer on their indefinite imprisonment without charges. Amazingly, this is the person purporting to lecture Iran today about what “civilized countries” do and don’t do when it comes to imprisoning journalists.
Lake goes on to suggest that even if the journalists we imprisoned weren’t guilty, it’s still different when we do it, because we’re the U.S. and they’re Iran. And there is a perfect distillation of moral relativism: the rightness of an act is determined not by the act itself, but by who is doing it (“when I do X, it’s good; when you do it, it’s evil”). It also perfectly illustrates what is, as I noted on Friday, “the single most predominant fact shaping our political and media discourse: everything is different, and better, when we do it.” Why do they hate us? For our freedoms.“
