Digby also has a well-meaning post on the ugly topic, Too Much Fun Hallabaloo blog 11/03/07. She's right critical of the irresponsibility of CNN reporter Jeanne Moos. But she doesn't question the essentially anecdotal evidence she apparently used as the basis of her report. Staged YouTube videos of water-boarding? Let's get real. People who went through torture survival training that included water-boarding have testified about its effects. Since that particular torture technique has been around since at least the days of the Spanish Inquisition, which was founded in 1488, it's not as though there isn't evidence about what the practice actually does. YouTube videos are her evidence? Our TV media is a train wreck.
Digby also has this to say:
Every time they normalize state sanctioned sadism, from tasering to waterboarding, we are one step closer to fully accepting a police state. That's how they do it. It never happens over night. It happens one taboo at a time.But I don't this is exactly what's happened on torture. Cheney and Bush used the 9/11 attacks to stoke fear and hatred, and the Geneva Conventions went out the window fairly quickly. Tasering, whatever its merits or lack thereof, is normally used in making arrests. Tasering a prisoner strapped down to a table would be torture, and there's no general acceptance (legal or otherwise) of such a practice.
The leap into the torture practice was sudden, not gradual. If we had a real press corps instead of the corporate Potemkin version with which we are currently blessed, they would have made torture and execution of prisoners-of-war a major news story in late 2001 as soon as such crimes started emerging in the early weeks of the Afghanistan War. What's been gradual is Congress and the media reacting against torture.
Still one of the most remarkable moments of the Cheney-Bush administration to me was back on 12/01/01, when Rummy was being interviewed on TV by Novakula (Robert Novak) about war crimes being committed by the Northern Alliance, the America-backed guerrilla group, which was still recognized by most countries as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. Rummy replied:
The fact that they don't happen to subscribe to some convention that we do or that other countries do is a fact. It is also a fact that we have to stop those terrorists from killing more Americans. And I don't feel even the slightest problem in working with the Northern Alliance to achieve that end.There was Rummy on national television sneering at the Geneva Conventions as "some convention" for which he had total contempt. Certainly in the European Union, any defense minister who had made such a comment in public would have been required to resign the following day, if not the same day.
But there he was, announcing it to the world. And our "press corps" and Congress snoozed right through it.
Tags: authoritarianism, marty lederman, rumsfeld, scott horton, torture
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