Someone’s leaked video footage of an interrogation/torture session in Iraq. Information Clearinghouse has a short clip, thankfully not completely explicit. I’m of two minds about whether to look. Because the scene will haunt you, I advise not looking. On the other hand, what about the poor victims of torture? Are they given such a choice? Look at the outrage we are perpetrating. Be queasy. Live with it. So long as we permit torture, condone it, and subject others to it, the least we can do is have it haunt us.
A word about this clip. Is it real? Who are the torturers? Are those American shouts among the Arabic? Who filmed this session? Could these have been Saddam’s thugs at work previous to the US invasion?
I would submit that those details matter only to the voyeur getting off on the clip. I could care less. No matter what and who we are seeing, we know it depicts what we Americans are doing. We’ve approved torture for use by our military, and American contractors are conducting interrogation sessions beyond what even has been tacitly approved. We know this. We know that our Denfense Department’s definition of permitted duress is the infliction of pain which falls just short of causing organ failure. That’s a lot of pain. The guys in the clip are just getting started.
No, I don’t think that it is being a voyeur to watch this clip. Most Americans are in full scale denial about the world and the people that rule it. Our American ruling class, in fact. They need to have their eyes pried open. However, torture is not always so vivid as it is portrayed here.
Is it any less torture for a parent to have to watch their kids dying of malnutrition, or suffering under easily prevented and easily treated diseases, while knowing that they live in a rich world? Torture is really so widespread that we have become totally accepting and numb to it. It’s something that is considered to only happen to other people, and not ‘us’..
And just look at all those Americans in prisons for simple drug and property crimes. Most Americans applaud that sort of torture even. Joke about it. Justify it. Think it’s a gas. And then they fear that they themselves might suffer the same fate, so they close their eyes to it at one and the same time that they support it (for others). It’s not really torture they will say. Oh yeah? then lock yourself up in a closet with a bedpan for a year or two. Might change your outlook some.
Oh Yes. And why do the elderly fear the nursing home so? Simple. They know that their lives will be made a true torture inside. But we are numb to all that, and American children still find so many reasons to warehouse their elderly parents until they die. They are numb to torture to a great degree.
We could change all that easily enough, but America is largely numb to torture. Americans even like the Bible, much because it always has God torturing others. Makes Christian Americans feel more human it does. If the Great God above can do such a thing, then why should it bother us? or so they think. Americans are largely numb to torture, and even find that ‘the Good Book’ justifies accepting giving vicious pain to other people, like it also does with suggesting that we should accept slavery.
So even watching the stick stuffed up this man’s rear end, will not phase most Americans that watch it. They secretly get a thrill at the thought of doing others violence. Sad, but that’s the way it really is. Common folk in imperialist countries often think that common folk in the colonies get what they deserve. And what’s to worry about? There’s the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon keeping us safe along with our own richly admired, thugish ruling class. Torture is for others, and they so richly deserve it because they’re not us.
It turns out that this footage of a man being tortured comes from a series of films exposing the Egyptian police’s use of torture on its captives. Egypt is propped up yearly with around $2,000,000,000 in US aid, putting it in the same league of Israel and Iraq for receiving US tax payer money.
For more info about this material, see the article at website of ……….al Ahram
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/823/eg6.htm
The Egyptian man seen being tortured here, has been resentenced for the part of being tortured by the police! His crime? ‘Resisting authority’!
I can now see why the Egyptian government is allied with the US government. ‘Our’ legal systems seem to operate about the same. A real credit ot America.
See the BBC article titled… ‘Torture’ victim jailed in Egypt.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6249027.stm
Note how the imperialist British press has to put parentheses around the word TORTURE, as if they can’t really consider having something stuck up one’s ass as being that! Must be the Foxy influence on the BBC of the British general coverage by Murdoch’s press there? Can’t wait to hear Bill O’Reilly’s coverage here in America of this latest twist of the stick in this video story. Or how about Dershowitz’ s take, too? Both guys that love ramming things up other people’s asses.