Neal Boortz, “Torture at Gitmo?”:
Yesterday we told you that the U.N. Human Rights Commission had made a finding [pdf] that the United States was using “torture” at the detainee center at the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba. Now .. are we talking about driving wood splinters up under fingernails? No. What about breaking fingers or toes? Nope. Not that either. It seems that we were using light and temperature in naughty ways. How do you use light? You use light to keep people awake. That’s torture. Gitmo is hot too. Maybe they denied the prisoners air conditioning. Would that be torture?
The word “torture” is no longer a word used to describe treatment of a prisoner. It is now a word used as a weapon against the United States and its efforts to fight Islamic radicals.
This morning I listened to Robin Oakley, the British political editor for CNN, talk about the findings of this phony UN body. Oakley said: “Now we’re going to see pressure to have the U.S. close Guantanamo.” So, what else is new? Oakley also mentioned the light and the temperature, but he never mentioned force feeding. That’s right … force-feeding One of the elements of torture mentioned by the U.N. at Guantanamo was the force-feeding of detainees who are on hunger strikes. So, according to the U.N., if a detainee tries to kill himself, and you take a measure to save his life, that constitutes torture.
Message: Don’t take anything the U.N. or the U.N. Human Rights Commission has to say about torture seriously.
[My emphases]
As frequent readers of this site know, I often stress (ostensibly) small semantic concerns within a given controversy, partly, I suppose because I’m trained in rhetoric (and we tend to view things through comfortable prisms), but mostly because I sincerely believe that the terms and kernel assumptions we use to define issues end up providing both the support and the impetus for what we subsequently build atop those terms and assumptions.
The torture debate we had here several months ago reinforces the idea: my concern at the time—and this is a concern that Boortz echoes in his critique of the UN HRC report (whose authors, it should be pointed out, never even traveled to Gitmo!)—is that, as we have done with words like “tolerance” or “racism,” we have essentially reached the point where we are defining torture in a way that diminishes actual torture, having opened the word up to such a broad array of meanings, and coupling it to a hermeneutic system that allows the interpreter to determine “meaning” without an appeal to intent, that the concept has become practicably meaningless. If torture can be defined as simple coercion, for instance (including psychological coercion), or as anything that causes great stress or discomfort or fear, or is intended to confuse or disorient or wear down those at whom its techniques are aimed—then torture, insofar as it has become indistinguishable from coercion or interrogation, etc., has ceased to have any real force of meaning, except to those who are able to use it as a talisman against such techniques.
Which is to say, by folding so many things into the concept of torture, we have made it far too easy to level charges of impropriety—with the result that we have made victims out of those whose goal it is to kill us, even as we’ve make it nearly impossible on ourselves to interrogate captured terrorists in ways that may prove effective.
That we do so under the self-righteous assertion that we are acting civilized (and so are proving to be the betters of our enemies) is another canard that loses its force once the thing that we refuse to do becomes so all-encompassing that it is meaningless. Because it is one thing to say we repudiate torture on principle and in practice and to mean it, with a full-understanding of what it is we are repudiating; but it is quite another to repudiate torture simply on principle alone—and then allow torture to be so broadly defined that what we have actually repudiated is our ability to truly repudiate torture in any meaningful sense of the word.
Yeh well they didn’t cover the malicious acts of forcing prisoners to listen to month after month of Barry Manilow hits at full volume, not to mention Leonard Nemoy’s “Vulcan love ballads”….I mean thats some torurous shit…. juat has to be a Geneva statute against that sort of torture don’t cha know….
TW: If you find you can’t hear as well as you used too, maybe you should think of switching your Ipod selections away from 130 decibal “Mr Robotto” for awhile….
I guess you’ve never wore a panty-turban, mister!
Talk to actus, he was in a frat, he knows all about the horror of horrible torture of terror, of torture.
Bleh, YOUR IMPERIALISTIC TORTURED LOGIC OF TERROR AND OPPRESSION OF THE LITTLE GUY IS BLATANTLY RASCIST AGAINST THE GREAT RELIGION OF PEACE WHOSE STRUGGLE AGAINST THE EVILS OF CAPITALISM AND ZIONIST ZIONISM, OF EVIL…is, fuck, what was my point again.
Whatever, my emanating penumbras, of milky goodness, have, surely, taking it all into account. Go team.
We should just transfer all of the prisoners to a real Cuban prison. I’m sure all of the Castro fellators at the U.N. wouldn’t object to that. After all, what could go wrong in the “Workers Paradise?”
BBH
actually, they played Eminem (that detestable whigga) and Dr. Dre.
I think it might be more fair to say that there is a certain group of people who are activly trying to change the meaning of the word torture so as to hurt the US in her war efforts, but for the most part, the American people aren’t buying it.
In part, thanks to people like you Jeff. You help remind people that there really is a difference between shit and shinola, and it’s not just the way the words are spelled.
I’ve got to admit, I thought there was some merit to Little Miss Attila’s suggestion: If the UN limits its pimping operations to girls over the age of consent, we’ll stop playing with the lights.
T/W: “coming.” Yeah, right. Not any time soon, I suspect.
Funny how no one mentions that at the same time we are “torturing” these jihadis, we go to EXTRAORDINARY lengths to accomodate their religious beliefs. Jusst try squaring the circle on that without hurting yourself. On the other hand, someone alert Regis via the Bolton hotline that he may have to man the jaws of life to save any nearby UN apologists from injury in the pretzel that will result if we applied the same standard to Falun Gong folk in China or B’hais in Iran. Of course, the last I checked no members of those groups routinely sign up to kill infidels.
The UN restores its place as my Number 1 irritant. Just ahead of those who pick the damn Mets…the METS…to unseat the Braves in the NL East. When will they EVER learn?
*Whew!* Thanks, Jeff… one more tiptoe through the tulips of Kennedy County, TX, was going to cause me permanent psychological damage (for which maybe Cheney could be charged, but I haven’t looked into it).
I share Jeff’s concern (without sharing his erudition on the subject) for the careful use of language, likewise the defining-down of violence to the level of insult or offense (and other similar stuff, like the defining-down of statesmanship to mere notoriety, of heroism to mere service, of rape to mere insensitivity…). I just don’t understand the goal, unless the people doing the defining-down don’t have one themselves. Could it be that they don’t see the endpoint out there of their committed efforts today – that once you start saying that sleep deprivation by means of bright lights is torture, there’s no longer a term strong enough for cutting off one finger at a time?
All the chortling from the Right (where I sit, though I wasn’t chortling so much as rolling my eyes, as usual) about naked pyramids and such, and how they’d pay good money in Vegas to be subjected to the “tortures” of Abu Ghraib, while pretty much true as far as I can see, doesn’t attack the real problem – that once naked pyramids are “torture,” electrodes attached to the soft tissues cannot be readily differentiated – you end up with ridiculous dichotomies like, “Well, yes, that was torture, but this is real torture.” Just as, once the pubic hair on the Coke can became sexual harassment, who was going to believe the woman who, having been actually clutched in the breakroom by her boss, claimed to have been harassed? Everything becomes a joke, and we as a society no longer know – are not permitted to know – whether we’re dealing with pecadillo or atrocity. The world becomes Booelian and we lose the “analog” meaning that resides between the 0 and the 1.
And that’s all I have to say about that. (For now.)
And when were representatives of this commission at Guantanamo Bay, to reach these conclusions?
Calling Abu Ghraib torture is pretty stupid. There are other words for it, without condoning the incident (one day of one shift of one unit, btw).
If someone hits someone else, repeatedly, until they are mush, they have battered, or assaulted, them.
If someone forces them to masturbate, while videotaping it, they are abusing them. We don’t prosecute kiddie porn people under torture statutes, at least not for that crime.
I have yet to see a single picture that is even close to torture, even at Abu Ghraib. Where those definitions become thin, at the extremes, clearly is not reached with embarassment and intimidation or discomfort. The only thing being tortured is the language.
All of those servicemen were charged and convicted from the incident, I would be surprised to here a single conviction, or convictable charge, based on torture alone.
Exactly, V.
TW: But at this rate, we’re going to exhaust this thread by the time my oldest gets home from school.
As frequent readers of this site, many of us agree with you.
Or…..
I encourage torture of islamofacists. If that makes me a barbarian, well, fine by me.
My safety, the safety of my family and the safety of my country are more important than a terrorist’s physical well being.
Hopefully, this discussion isn’t merely limited to torture–as the issue for me is “spin.” The concept of putting the problem under discussion, or the argument made, under the best possible light, for the purpose of advancing such argument so that it becomes the dominant narrative.
And those “spinning” torture have won the battle, vis-a-vis, McCain’s Torture bill, wherein torture has been defined to include abuse–abuse being a fairly malleable term.
And, of course, if you want to look ahead, the word abuse will get “tortured” to include “to give offense,” or “to be offended.” In other words, forbidden treatment will migrate from what guards or interrogators do to prisoners, to how the prisoners feel about their treatment. We haved transpired to “the inmates running the insane asylum.”
Our fat, dumb and happy souls, not willing to limit the treatment of prisoners and detainees to that which is free of torture–torture defined as bodily injury the result of physical harm, have raised the standard treatment to Club Fed “country club” conditions normally meted out to non-violent offenders.
And to top it off, the UN “human rights” crowd (and their lefty supporters) believe it a right to voluntarily starve oneself to death in a hunger strike–a curious twist of logic wherein saving life/preventing death serves as a proxy for torture.
I think I’m getting a headache. Can I accuse the UN of torture?
The thing I am now waiting for is for some thug kept up in a drunk tank all night because of the lighting to sue the municipality for torture.
BRD: If you’re in the drunk tank, you can fall asleep with the lights on. (I’m guessing!)
t/w: shot–how’d that happen? (Wrong thread Jeff, better get the t/w machine fixed!)
I am pissed because I saw a reference somewhere this week to “torture-like” behavior but now I can’t find it. I think it was a UN related piece.
Found it:
What the hell is torture-like supposed to mean?
C’mon force feeding is torture! I know because starvation is pleasant and induces euphoria, Terri Shaivo’s doctors told us so. Yes, I know it’s a cheap shot but hey, I get one a week.
Whenever any “reporter” discusses this “report”, they should mention the members of the Human Rights Commission. It contains such non-torturing countries as:
Zimbabwe
China
Cuba
Sudan
Ethiopia
Egypt
Qatar
I mean, isn’t just a tad… I don’t know… ridiculous that Sudan, China and Cuba are lecturing the US about torture?
I almost wrote that it’s also ridiculous that the media doesn’t mention that, but then I remembered. They’re on the other side.
The longer the UN keeps this up, the faster the idea of U.S. withdrawal from the UN and its expulsion from NYC will complete its migration from the fringe right to the mainstream of American politics.