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Torture team “ book review

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Torture Team – Book Review
 
 

rumsfield

‘Many in the Bush administration fall into Sand’s description of complicity in war crimes.’
 
By Jim Miles

Torture Team – Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law. Philippe Sands. Allen Lane, Penguin. New York. 2008.

"Only a few pieces of paper can change the course of history. On Tuesday, 2 December 2002 Donald Rumsfield signed on that did." From such a singular beginning Philippe Sands writes the history of U.S. attempts to abrogate international laws and conventions on the use of torture and the inhumane treatment of prisoners of war. This is the memo Rumsfield approved with the sarcastic comment about standing: “However, I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?” Perhaps Rumsfield should have been subjected to the other seventeen “techniques” that accompanied the memo to see if his limits for them were any better. 

Torture Team begins carefully, reviewing and structuring the trail of evidence and the chain of command. Most of the participants in the chain of command were interviewed, some more willingly than others, and good portraits of their characters come through. They varied from casually ignorant and insouciant to defensively firm in their self-perspectives on the various papers, actions, and36that occurred. Through it all, the only groups/people that appear to be relatively ‘clean’ in these36are the military themselves and the FBI. All others, politicians (starting at the top with Bush, Rumsfield, Douglas Feith, Wolfowitz et al), government lawyers and advisors (Gonzales, Haynes, Jay Bybee, John Yoo et al), medical personnel, psychologists, anthropologists – pretty much anyone who had a hand in the interrogation – become complicit in war crimes under international law. 

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What if the uighurs were Christian rather than muslim?

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What if the Uighurs were Christian Rather than Muslim?
By Glenn Greenwald

— According to The New York Times this morning, violent clashes between Chinese government forces and Muslim Uighurs — that country’s long-oppressed minority — have left at least 140 people dead and close to 1,000 injured.  This incident in Western China highlights an important fact about America’s "War on Terror."

Just imagine if the Uighurs were a Christian — rather than Muslim — minority, battling against the tyrannical Communist regime in Beijing, resisting various types of persecution, and demanding religious freedom.  They would be lionized by America’s Right, as similar Christian minorities, oppressed by tyrannical regimes, automatically are.  Episodes like these — where a declared Tyranny like China violently acts against citizens with whom we empathize — are ones about which, in general, the American political class loves to sermonize.

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Whats in a name? in a racist society everything

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By Richard Irvine

(source: Electronic Intifada)

Names have always been political. Throughout history different regimes have used naming as a means of racial or religious identification. In Nazi Germany a 1938 law obliged Jews to add Sara or Israel to their names so as to eliminate ethnic confusion. And in my own country, Northern Ireland, even without a law, a name could determine one’s success in life.

Until comparatively recently many Catholic families I know chose Protestant Anglicized names so as their children could have a chance of escaping the discrimination inherent in the sectarian state. It rarely worked however, as there were always other ways one could tell someone’s background. Indeed, even today most of us immediately conduct a sort of scan upon meeting a new acquaintance. If we can’t tell by name then we move on to other questions like, "Where do you live?" or the clincher — in a society where schools are largely segregated — "What school did you go to?" This approach is not always successful but most times we can quite quickly classify who we think our new acquaintance is and how much we can reveal of ourselves to them.

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