Torture

JANUARY 11, 2008, is the six-year anniversary of the first arrival of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.

The ACLU is calling on everyone opposed to torture, secret prisons, the suspension of habeas corpus and the overall trampling of democracy and the United States Constitution, to wear orange to symbolize the national shame that is Guantánamo Bay.

From their website :

After hundreds of detentions and two Supreme Court decisions rejecting the administration's detention policies at Gitmo, the legal status of the detainees there remains unresolved and the fight continues to end unlawful detention and the denial of due process.

The ACLU is one of four organizations that have been granted status as human rights observers at the military commission proceedings. When the tribunals began in 2004, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero and two ACLU international human rights lawyers attended the proceedings and blogged about the experience so Americans could know the truth of Guantánamo.

The ACLU has continued to hold government leadership accountable by filing Freedom of Information Act requests for documents that reveal systemic torture to prisoners held in U.S. custody. So far, more than 100,000 pages of government documents detailing the torture and abuse of detainees.

"…the Tableau is one of only two witch treatises that addressed the issue of witches as women. There were two aspects of their feminity which de Lancre emphasized in his discussion of witches: their sexuality…and women's 'natural inclination' for sorcery (de Lancre Tableau p. 89). This natural inclination was not rooted in women's physically weaker state. In fact, jurists such as Bodin had previously commented on having witnessed 'that women suffer torture more continuously than men' (de Lancre Tableau p. 89). Women's affinity for sorcery was based on women's extreme nature—her pursuit of her appetites, her desire for revenge, and her need for novelty, all distinguished her from the more balanced male."
Lorraine Berry, "Destabilizing Categories: Jews, Witches, and the Christian Male," Aestel 4 (1996)

Are we aware what lies at the end of the road opened up by the normalization of torture? A significant detail of Mr. Mohammed’s confession gives a hint. It was reported that the interrogators submitted to waterboarding and were able to endure it for less than 15 seconds on average before being ready to confess anything and everything. Mr. Mohammed, however, gained their grudging admiration by enduring it for two and a half minutes. "Knight of the Living Dead" By SLAVOJ ZIZEK

Sometimes, as my dad always says, "you don't know whether to shit or go blind." (It's an English idiom.)

When I see what the members of the Right have done to the language in an effort to try to change reality, I know exactly what my father is talking about.

This week, in one of those grandstanding fuckwadded-up pieces of bullshit that they specialize in, right-wing Republicans will introduce House Resolution 6099, The Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act. Because, according to the bill's sponsor, fetuses of 20-weeks gestation are capable of feeling pain. The answer? Is not to assume that it's a medical fact and require doctors to administer pain to these fetuses. No. The bill requires that doctors INFORM women about to undergo post-20 week abortions that their fetuses will feel pain.
See? That's the "awareness" part.
It's all part of the wicked baby-killer thou art woman bullshit.
According to Yahoo news,

The bill, by Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., defines a 20-week-old fetus as a "pain-capable unborn child" — a highly controversial threshold among scientists. It also directs the Health and Human Service Department to develop a brochure stating "that there is substantial evidence that the process of being killed in an abortion will cause the unborn child pain."

You Must Have the Body.

Habeas Corpus.

One of the tenets of our judicial system.

But we live in a culture that increasingly denies the body. It denies it pleasure. It denies it autonomy. It offers to it suffering.

What if God had a body that could suffer?

Gripped by a fear that a secret conspiracy of evil doers killed children, destroyed food supplies, and, eventually would cause the destruction of civilization, the battle against terror used any means necessary to extract information from those it suspected of practicing evil. Torture was the order of the day.



Why? Well, because torture led to the highest form of truth—which was not evidence, but rather, confession. Hundreds of years of legal theories had led to the imposition of Roman law, in which the words forced from the lips of wrongdoers equaled justice, because justice was getting at the truth, and, once truth had been extracted, further evil could be prevented. 

And so, torture led to moments like this:

Many  hundred thousand good-nights, dearly beloved daughter Veronica. Innocent have I come into prison, innocent have I been tortured, innocent must I die.

Charles Krauthammer would no doubt have been pleased had he witnessed the methods used to extract Junius’s confession. As Junius tells it:

For whoever comes into the witch prison must become a witch or be tortured until he invents something out of his head and—God pity him—bethinks him of something. I will tell you how it has gone with me. When I was the first time put to the torure, Dr. Braun, Dr. Kotzendorffer, and two strange doctors were there. Then Dr. Braun asks me, “Kinsman, how come you here??? I answer, “Through falsehood, through misfortune.?? “Hear, you,?? he says, “you are a witch; will you confess it voluntarily? If not, we’ll bring in witnesses and the executioner for you.?? I said, “I am no witch; I have a pure conscience in the matter; if there a thousand witnesses, I am not anxious, but I’ll gladly hear the witnesses.?? Now the chancellor’s son was set before me … and afterward Hoppfens Elsse. She had seen me dance on Haupts-moor … I answered: “I have never renounced God, and will never do it—God graciously keep me from it. I’ll rather bear whatever I must.?? And then came also—God in highest heaven have mercy—the executioner, and put the thumb-screws on me, both hands bound together, so that the blood ran out at the nails and everywhere, so that for four weeks I could not use my hands, as you can see by my writing … Thereafter they first stripped me, bound my hands behind me, an drew me up in the torture. [strappado] Then I thought heaven and earth were at an end; eight times did they draw me up and let me fall again, so that I suffered terrible agony…

Evil one, neither fire nor hot vinegar
in a nest of volcanic witches, nor devouring ice,
nor the putrid turtle that barking and weeping
with the voice of a dead woman scratches your belly
seeking a wedding ring and the toy of a slaughtered child,
will be for you anything but a dark demolished door.

America claims to be fighting for democracy and freedom worldwide. Yet we condone torture and refuse to comply with the UN.

From BBC news:

A U.N. panel said Friday the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo violates the world's ban on torture. In issuing its report, the Committee Against Torture said the United States should ensure that no prisoner is tortured.

Why did we invade Iraq? Well, among the many reasons we gave in our desperate attempt to jutstify an illegal invasion was that Hussein committed torture and that he violated basic human rights and UN resolutions.

And now we, the United States, are justifying torture, violating basic human rights and violating UN resolutions.

The article goes on to report how Condaleezza Rice and John McCain see Guantanamo's detention camp a dilemma for the United States. A dilemma? A camp where we detain hundreds of people from around the world illegally (according to the United Nations) under conditions considered by international law as torture, with no legal due process whatsoever is a dilemma for the United States?

Milan Babic, a former Croatian Serb leader commits suicide in a prison cell in The Hague and I cannot find it in my heart to give the man a minute of silence. No, what I find is rage, pure blind rage because the repercussions of his actions are but a glimpse of what could become the future of this country.

Babic was tried and imprisoned for crimes against humanities; some of the including the politically sanctioned raping of thousands of Bosnian women by Serbian soldiers. It ought not to be taken as a coincidence that the only other suicide case at The Hague was of Slavko Dokmanovic, another Croatian Serb leader.

UNICEF created a report about the Bosnian rape babies that allegedly has been blocked by the country and not been published. You can read about it at Bosnian Institute News: Bosnia's rape babies: abandoned by their families, forgotten by the state:

Shackles. Imagine the pain of childbirth. Imagine being chained to your bed, unable to move, your legs shackled together. Imagine. Just fucking imagine.

Shawanna Nelson, a prisoner at the McPherson Unit in Newport, Ark., had been in labor for more than 12 hours when she arrived at Newport Hospital on Sept. 20, 2003. Ms. Nelson, whose legs were shackled together and who had been given nothing stronger than Tylenol all day, begged, according to court papers, to have the shackles removed.

I'm literally speechless.