"Torture? Too Good For 'Em if You Ask Me!!" posted by Richard Seymour

Some bizarre arguments are emerging from the temporarily silenced barkers to explain away the torture of Iraqi prisoners. (Notice how I used the word "torture" instead of "abuse"? Cunning, don't you think?) One American commentator described the torture as nothing worse than a little "frat hazing" . Rush Limbaugh added :

Folks, these torture pictures with the women torturers, I mean Marv Albert looking at those pictures would say, "Hey, that doesn't look so bad." You know, if you really look at these pictures, I mean I don't know if it's just me but it looks like anything you'd see Madonna or Britney Spears do on stage. Maybe you can get an NEA grant for something like this. I mean this is something you can see at Lincoln Center from an NEA grant, maybe on Sex in the City: the Movie. I mean, it's just me.

Rush, I wish it were just you, but there is more to come. Here is what Barbara Amiel had to say about it in The Daily Telegraph :

Three weeks ago in Highland Park, Texas, Mrs Dolly Kelton was arrested and handcuffed for failing to pay a traffic ticket after her car was stopped for having an expired registration. I doubt that Mrs Kelton was a threat to the safety of the arresting officer. She is 97 years old.

We handcuff her - or a white collar criminal such as Michael Milken - because some Western societies, and America in particular, use these procedures as a way of softening up the accused by humiliation and to underline the power of the authorities. We routinely use measures in normal police matters that, very strictly speaking, violate the Geneva Conventions. Interrogations may use some form of psychological menace. Noise or lighting may deliberately create some sort of sleep deprivation for a short period.

This is not to say we should withdraw from the Geneva Conventions in order to fight drug dealers and child molesters, but only to note that in some circumstances, our police may use such tactics. In Iraq, we are fighting men and women who routinely blow up civilians in a guerrilla war of the most merciless kind. If a 97-year-old woman is handcuffed for a traffic offence, what is the appropriate procedure for murderous guerrillas?

I don't know if it was the fact that Amiel had earlier in the article described something written by Midge Decter as "fascinating" that softened me up for these blows, but when I read the above I literally giggled into my yoghurt. But wait, it gets better .

Mark Jacobson, a former Defense Department official who worked on detainee issues while at the Pentagon, said that at Guantanamo and the Bagram facility in Afghanistan, military interrogators have never used torture or extreme stress techniques. "It's the fear of being tortured that might get someone to talk, not the torture," Jacobson said. "We were so strict." ...

"I actually think we are not aggressive enough [at times in interrogation techniques]," he said. "I think we are too timid."

It should have been electrocution and Madame Guillotine, then?

The most recent news about the torture story, however, is the announcement that it wouldn't have happened had it not been for the resistance .

UPDATE: For some time I've wondered if "Socialism in an Age of Waiting" has any purpose other than to pour ill-conceived bile on, well, socialists. For, strange to relate, every time I take a wee visit to that surreal little number I get some new post exalting the occupation of Iraq and denouncing those who oppose it. In the most recent entry, for example, he/she advises the left to get "a sense of proportion" about the torture in Abu Ghraib:

In any case, others, much better-placed to comment than we are, have made valiant attempts to restore some sense of proportion, notably the Lebanese journalist Rajeh Khuri. In his view, the Middle East as a whole is

“a vast Abu Ghraib prison, where many have died and more are still dying in obscurity ... We are concerned with the detention centres and jails filling the tunnels of regimes in the Arab world, and the shredding of the soul of Arab citizens and their honour, without one official batting an eyelash.”

It’s a pity that in this case “we” cannot be extended to include western liberals and pseudo-leftists. The orgy of rushed judgements and sanctimonious moralising predictably being indulged in as we write confirms what has been sadly obvious for a long time: these hypocrites’ much-vaunted commitment to the notion that human rights are indivisible is no more than hollow rhetoric.

Dear me! We are bitter. But perhaps SIAW's authors would like to explain why the only thing they have had to say about the torture of Iraqi prisoners has been to note that "severe punishment" ought to await the perpetrators, then review the output of the blog-o-sphere on the matter, firing terrible, half-hearted insults at anyone who deviates from their own line that "yes, this is awfully bad, but Saddam was much worse you know". And what, precisely, do the authors of SIAW find objectioble about "moralising", even of a "sanctimonious" kind, on this topic? Why should it be that they are more concerned with diverting our attention to the crimes of official enemies, and exterpating heresies on the left than actually discussing the issues about the torture in Iraq? The level of debate on SIAW reaches glacial heights when they discuss "“Gareth”, a pathetic wanker who, along with that fearless proletarian Marc Mulholland and the semi-literate “Joe Baxter”"... what absolute drivel!

And elsewhere SIAW protests:

Such abuse of human rights still goes largely unphotographed, uninvestigated, unpunished and - except when it suits the domestic agendas of western political activists, or the increasingly slanted and untrustworthy agendas of the high-minded “neutrals” at Amnesty International and elsewhere - it remains largely unremarked in the West.

SIAW isn't the first to complain about this. But the answer is obvious - it's the Tony Blair answer: Just because we can't always act, doesn't mean we shouldn't when we can. I'll finish with this, since SIAW think they hegemonise the venomous side of blogging (they don't, it just happens to account for about 90% of their output): SIAW is singly the most repellent, intellectually neutered, meretricious load of old diseased testicles that I have ever had the displeasure to encounter. Whether they consider themselves on the Left or not, the intellect on display in their trashy blog could easily be outmatched by any passing insect and the arguments therein casually dispatched by Winnie the Pooh.