Friday, December 30, 2005
"Spies, lies and censorship" posted by Richard Seymour

The Morning Star has published the banned documents on its front page today. It's well worth a look - if you haven't a subscription, many good newsagents stock the paper. Or you can have a look at the front page here. Apparently, the BBC featured this front page in their review of newspapers this morning, but not a word has been allowed to appear on their website.
Of the mainstream newspapers, only The Independent has bothered to cover the story, but it has carefully ommitted to mention the fact that the news was first released in the blogosphere, a tactic which has ensured that the documents have now been seen by tens of thousands of people across the world (I hear it's in the region of 100,000, and growing). Daily Kos, Antiwar.com and Empire Burlesque have all picked up on the story. The latter also has a rolling list sampling blogs that are discussing these documents. Chicken Yoghurt has an excellent run-down of the material and of the government's denials and callous public equivocations on the matter of torture.
The use of that vocable, the t-word, has forced its way into the public discourse as it has become increasingly apparent that the use of torture by Western states is not merely ubiquitous (they have always used it), but becoming normalised. The first step in this procedure was the public appeals, from various news outlets, to "discuss the matter honestly". The possibility was insidiously inserted into the daily political intercourse by simply raising questions: is torture ever justified, what if the guy knows a code for a nuclear trigger, what if it's a ticking clock etc? Coterminously, of course, the United States government was putting in place a system of international prisons in which 'terror suspects' were tortured. Subsequently, as these facts-on-the-ground have become subject to more scrutiny, particularly after Abu Ghraib, Western states have tried to outsource torture, seeking more habitable terrain for their practises, or allowing some trustworthy agent to do it for them (like the Badr Corps, or the peshmerga). They have tried to maximise deniability. Hence: we find your information very useful Mr Karimov, please continue whatever you were doing. It is that shape-shifting system of international torture that the government has been trying to protect in censorsing these documents.