Babylon Dicontinuity:
I remember shortly after 9/11 that suddenly there seemed to be an upsurge in some rather titillating debates about torture. Various talking heads were dancing around some of the fine points of the law. I thought some of this chatter was titillation pumped by the media to boost their ratings. But then, I thought maybe not. Maybe someone was trying to get us ready to accept torture as an acceptable technique. How could people like Alter and Dershowitz who had every advantage this society can offer stoop so low as to participate in this kind of charade?Carol/Joe Bageant 05.Apr.06
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I wrote a letter to Dr. McCray who wrote the book "A Question of Torture" and we've traded some thoughts. Like you and me, his family has folks who have not always navigated the class currents of American society. The argument of his book resonates with some of my thoughts. He argues that the events at Abu Ghraib were most definitely not the work of soldiers whom William Safire called "creeps" and another called "recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland." McCray's view is that these soldiers were acting on orders that started in the White House and worked their way down the chain of command. Moreover, if one reads those prison photos carefully one can readily discern signs, not of individual deviance, but of the perfection of the CIA's psychological torture paradigm which was developed in the 1950s and propagated widely within the US intelligence community in the decades since.
McCray's view of Jonathan Alter is that he is also one of the liberal commentators who fostered a climate conducive to systematic torture by this administration since 9/11. This view is part of a larger argument that McCray makes is that the torture issue is deeply imbedded in this society, making what happened at Abu Ghraib and what is happening at Guantanamo even today much more than the work of a few aberrant soldiers or even an entire administration.
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Democracy Now! 14.Apr.06CBS cameraman Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein. In April 2005, he was shot in the hip by an American sniper while filming the wreckage of a car bomb in Mosul. US troops then detained him, claiming he had tested positive for explosive residue and that images in his camera linked him to the insurgents.SCOTT HORTON: Exactly, that the event had occurred, and he got there about 30 minutes after the incident, and it's just as he picked up his camera and started to film that he was shot. Within about 48 hours, there were announcements made, basically saying, "It was a mistake. We're very sorry about this. He is being treated and will be released shortly."
He was imprisoned in Abu Ghraib for more than a year without due process.
Abdul Ameer was released just last week after an Iraqi criminal court acquitted him of collaborating with insurgents, citing a lack of evidence. No charges were made public until the trial itself.
But then, very disturbingly, about five or six days later, suddenly reports began to circulate, not in Iraq, but in Washington, D.C., amongst Pentagon correspondents for CNN and other major networks, FOX News, as well, quoting unnamed, unidentified official Pentagon spokesmen, saying that the Pentagon had extremely disturbing evidence that this man was a terrorist. And specifically, they said that he had on his videotape camera four separate incidents involving attacks on U.S. forces, where there was clear evidence of prior knowledge, that he was there before the attack itself actually occurred, filming.
Of course, when the trial came, we discovered that this was a lie. No other way to put it. We got the tape. We examined it. In fact, the tape helped exonerate him, because it corresponded exactly to his account of what had happened and directly contradicted all the claims that had been put forth by or on behalf of the U.S. forces.
