Assange: Many Arab Officials Have Close CIA Links

In his second interview with AlJazeera, Assange, increasingly fearful of a US cabal against him and his organization, is threatening to unveil sensitive information that a careful editing of the cables would normally not unveil, naming Arab leaders with CIA links and Arab countries that operate torture prisons for the CIA.

I think Assange right now is entitled to any means at his disposal to protect himself and his organization. What our leaders do behind our back is our business especially when it contradicts what they say in public. Diplomacy certainly uses secrecy but it is not a tool for secrecy in democratic governance. Secrecy is merely a feature of the business but it is not a goal. And we are increasingly seeing great disparities between private and public political discourse as well as an unhealthy amount of secrecy as worrying tendencies in actual western democratic governance.

Moreover, I am not surprised by the revelations about Arab states. Any Arab with a critical mind knows this and without any doubt can list the countries with close CIA links and CIA torture chambers. Bin Laden was a close CIA ally and foreign Saudi policy in general is 100% aligned with the US.

However, I am concerned about what we as Arabs (the people, not the governments) can and will do with these revelations. I am mostly distressed by the amount of silence in the Arab press and especially in the Lebanese press surrounding Al-Akhbar's revelations about Lebanese officials' collaboration with Israel and the US* against legitimate Lebanese resistance to Israeli invasions while telling us a different story publicly (this reaction from a Lebanese blogger close to Saudi Arabia's lebanese allies is an example).

Palestinians have suffered from this irresponsible conduct by Arab governments and Politicians. Our standing in the world and estimation of ourselves as people and nations are the first victims of this autocratic attitude by Arab governments which is in contrast with the political sympathies and affinities of the people in Arab countries.

*Unfortunately I was not able to link to the original story in Al-Akhbar because their website was down for more than a week following the publication of the first Wikileaks cables which were very damaging to Saudi Arabia and its March 14th allies in Lebanon.

Palestinian prisoners tortured and denied basic rights by Israel

The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) and the Palestinian Prisoners' Club say detainees from the occupied West Bank are cut off from the rest of the world in Israeli detention facilities. The report also cited cases of "systematic violence" and torture.
Between 70% and 90% of the detainees in the years 2005 to 2007 were not allowed to meet a lawyer able to provide advice and assistance prior to signing a confession, say the organisations. The average time prisoners represented by the group were isolated from the outside world was 16.7 days. Irit Ballas, a lawyer and one of the report's authors, said the situation has remained the same for the past three years. "The information we receive from our lawyers tells us that the incommunicado detention has not decreased," he said.

Supressing evidence of torture is a criminal offence

The Bush and Obama administrations have been, under different motives, hiding evidence of torture performed by US personnel, and Mrs Clinton is now asking their ally, the UK, to supress evidence of torture of one of their citizen, Binyam Mohammad, at Guantanamo.

This is clearly a criminal offence, says Human rights lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, and another exrecise in 'naked political power', according to the British judge who is in charge of the case of Mohammad.

Iran's Protesters' Trial: Confronting the West on Torture

The trial of Iran's protesters has renewed the urgency of a clear condemnation of Torture in the West. Mousavi, who is championed by the West, is accusing the regime of torturing the protesters before the trial and declared the statements of the accused as invalid because they were extracted under torture.
Mousavi knows very well what he is talking about. He presided, with the same techniques, over the trials of Iranian leftists at the hands of the new Mollahs regime, after the overthrow of the Shah.
This is an occasion for those in the West who champion democracy and regime change in Iran: will they condemn the torture of the protesters or will they remian silent ? Or will they, once again, try to justify torture for some and condemn it for others ?

A portrait of Mousavi and an analysis of the current inside struggle for power among Iran's religious elite.

Will Bush Pardon Himself ?

If you have watched the documentary 'taxi to the dark side' you realise that there is very serious ground to incriminate high officials in the Bush administration including Cheney and Rumsfeld, and probably Bush himself.
Consequently, there is very serious ground for a pardon and it will be, as Martin kettle from The Guardian puts it, a lawless outcome to a lawless war.

UPDATE: Report finds Rumsfeld behind detainee abuse

Ex-MI5 chief: Response to 9/11 was 'huge overreaction'

In an interview with the Guardian, Stella Rimington calls al-Qaida's attack on the US "another terrorist incident" but not qualitatively different from any others.
"That's not how it struck me. I suppose I'd lived with terrorist events for a good part of my working life and this was as far as I was concerned another one," she says.
In common with Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, who retired as MI5's director general last year, Rimington, who left 12 years ago, has already made it clear she abhorred "war on terror" rhetoric and the government's abandoned plans to hold terrorism suspects for 42 days without charge.
Today, she goes further by criticising politicians including Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, for trying to outbid each other in their opposition to terrorism and making national security a partisan issue.

Read here the interview she gave to The Guardian

With Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the official authorisation and public acceptation of torture in the name of security, the Iraq war which shattered an entire nation as well as hundred thousands lives and put the middle east in turmoil, and the politisation - not the criminalisation - of terror, I think we are way above an overreaction, we are in a delibrately planned large scale coup against civilian society conducted by a military-industrial cartel with the complicity and the responsibility of the citizen of the 'free' societies.

Hitchens' experience of waterboarding: a further step in the banalisation of torture

In June 2006, I was asked by a fellow blogger to join a group of bloggers writing against torture (their list can be found at the end of my blogroll).

I produced the following article. It was a réaction à chaud in which the very idea of a group of bloggers, living in democracies defined as the 'free world', having to write against torture practised by their own governments, seemed to me the proof that we were in the process of banalising torture.

What shocked me at the time was the 'talk' about torture. Not because we shouldn't talk about it. But because the general context for this talk was, in our 'freedom of speech loving societies', one for debate and not one for a clear condemnation.

Ever since, the debate has been going on. And to my great dismay, Christopher Hitchens, the 'liberal' Neo-con, has revived this 'talk' by actually experiencing waterboarding himself and publishing about his experience in vanity Fair 'Believe me it's torture'.

I find it shocking that the man who champions the intellect is asking us to 'believe'...him, that the man who champions reason hasn't been able to come up with a principled theoretical categorisation of waterboarding as torture. He tried to convince himself of the utility of torture on the basis of a very basic vulgar Benthamian concept of moral utility ( and what if torture does actually work, should we go for it ?), but never on the basis of its moral value to Human beings, the torturer and the tortured. And at the end, 'professor' Hitchens had to try it all by himself.

After having tried to solve, from the depth of his own 'liberal' intellect, the theoretical underpinnings of waterboarding, and failed to come up with a clear categorisation, hesitating between 'extreme interrogation' or 'outright torture', Hitchens had to finally experience the thing himself, then turned to us asking us to 'believe' him that waterboarding is actually torture, as if there was some theoretical doubt about the whole thing.

I find it shocking that the mainstream press, the bloggers, and everybody else, including Hitchens ennemies, are lauding him as the great intellctual, the courageous one, who confirms, from the intellectual depth of his own experience, that waterboarding is torture. I find it shocking that not one publication explicitly refers to the article Hitchens published last year in Slate in which he flirts with torture. I find it shocking that this last year article, in which Hitchens hesitates in categorising waterboarding, between 'extreme interrogation' and 'outright torture', is nowhere to be found on the web (if anyone can find it for me, please send me the link or the whole text). I find it shocking that The Guardian reports about Hitchens' experience under the title 'Want to know if waterboarding is torture? Ask Christopher Hitchens'

I find it shocking that Hitchens cannot talk about torture simply. He has to add adjectives like 'outright torture' as if there were different kinds of torture. Can we talk about freedom as 'outright freedom' ? Can we talk about Human rights as 'outright Human rights'? Can we talk about free speech as 'outright free speech'? As if we can put some conditions on these basic values. And as Hitchens has taken upon him the challenge of the bloggers to actually experience waterboarding, I find the challenge very silly, opening up the field of moral abominations to personal experience, and condoning torture, and I find that the challenge has given the advocates of torture one more occasion to prove their point, despite Hitchens' conclusions.

Just think a bit, if Hitchens was able to take it, so will everybody else. Just think, if we need to actually experience an abomination to know that it is an abomination, moral judgement becomes unnecessary.

Just think that when a public 'intellectual' can feed his own fame, and that of those who challenge him, by not only debating torture but also experiencing it, and publicising this experience, something is definitely wrotten in our world.

To Hitchens I say: I am not a 'believer' and, in terms of moral judgement, my knowledge comes from my moral reasoning and from what I think of what a man or a woman ought to do to others, not from my own experience of abomination, and definitely not from a celebrity journalist with dubious moral judgment.

Hitchens's experience of waterboarding and the context surrounding it are testimonies to the evergrowing banalisation of torture. I am not reading anymore about this silly piece of public exhibitionnism, failed intellect, and complete moral failure.

Courrier International has linked to this post in the blogs section.

The Torture Files: Prosecuting the Torture Theorists.

It is still pretty much a whisper but the whisper may one day become louder and wider. First Obama promised to review potential war crimes committed by Bush adminstration officials. And now, a new book on torture techniques written and approved by Bush adminstration officials is prompting some name people who participated in the elaboration of the torture procedures at Guantanamo.

"Haynes, Feith, Yoo, Bybee, Gonzalez and - at the apex - Addington, should never travel outside the US, except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel. They broke the law; they violated their professional ethical code. In future, some government may build the case necessary to prosecute them in a foreign court, or in an international court."

Did you notice which countries are heaven for war criminals and torturers ?

The Torture Files: W Reloaded

And Unrepentant.

Canada's Harper government is an embarrassment

The Harper government is behaving submissively toward the Bush administration and toward what it represents in terms of ideological commitments. Or maybe the Harper ideology is just Bush's applied with much zeal and disregard for everything else. It is indeed the extreme of an extreme, of what Bush has embodied on the world stage for the last seven years.

Teh Harper government refused to ask for a ceasefire in Lebanon in July 2006 when Israel was bombing Lebanon and Lebanese so madly, despite Canada's large Arab, lebanese and Muslim communities. Recently, Harper went to the Bali conference on climate change with only representatives from major Canadian oil companies. Last week Canada was the only country to excuse and explain US's secretary of defense arrogant statement about Nato forces not knowing how to fight in Afghanistan.

And today, after a Canadaian foreign minstry document cited the US and Israel on a torture list, as countries that torture, it withdrew them, just like that, with excuses, because...they are allies.

Watch Harper and his government closely, they are the épitome of bad taste when it comes to foreign policy and Human rights, but, most of all, they follow so closely Bush's ideology that they have become its caricature...

More: Torture manual to be rewritten...as not to offend Israel and the US

The Trials of Guantanamo

Since its debut in 2002, Guantanamo bay detention center for alleged terrorists, operated by the US, drew criticism. Indeed, everything was outside the basic norms for Human and legal rights there from the beginning. But we were in uncharted territory, and everybody was willing to see terrorists tried. And so Guantanamo was, as were Bush's popularity scores, and the international sympathy for the US after 9/11, for those who supported the War On Terror but were unwilling to give up the rule of law and the basics for Human rights, a mere possibility for the triumph of natural justice on the debris of 9/11 and over the new world chaos. A possibility to discipline this chaos and quell our fears and our angst. And not to discard the skeptics, among them myself, despite all its initial flaws, Guantanamo was, for the believer, at the same time, a window of opportunity and a test. An opportunity to show terrorists and the world how free and democratic societies uphold their values and a test on the intentions of the leaders of the whole business of the War On Terror.

Unfortunately for both the skeptics and the believers, as much as the War On Terror has gone awry from the very beginning by displacing itself quickly from Afghanistan to Iraq, Guantanamo did not cease drifting into tragic nonsense, dramatic excess, torture memos, suicide of detainees, unhuman treatment of prisoners, psychological terror, lack of evidence, amateurish justice, resignation of military prosecutors, and the latest, political maneuvering of the prosecution and sentencing processes coinciding with national elections and in countries involved in The War On Terror like Australia and the US, or with how warm a country's relations are with the US, like Saudi Arabia.

I am sure everybody has heard by now about the recent resignation of chief military prosecutor Morris Davis. His comes in a string of other resignations from military personnel having served in the military court in Guantanamo, starting as early as 2005, or as when the justice set up there by the Bush administration started to move toward trying the detainees.

Colonel Davis for instance refused to consider as evidence testimonies acquired by waterboarding. He was uneasy with the secrecy of the tribunal. And he refused political maneuvering and direct intervention in the judicial process. He cites two cases as clear political maneuvering:
The hasty prosecution and sentencing, through a deal struck between the 'prosecution' and the defense, without his knowledge as chief prosecutor, but with the proper pressure from the Pentagon, of Australian David Mattew Hicks to 9 months in Prison, while the same charges have resulted in a 20 years sentence for John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban. As an insider to the process, colonel Davis told today's CBC's 'The Current' host Anna Maria Tremonti that the only explanation to this nonsense is that the Bush adminstration wanted to take the heat off Australian John Howard before the elections because the detention of Hicks in Guantanamo drew wide criticism against Howard. Colonel Davis told Mrs Tremonti some other examples of gross political maneuvering, over Guantanamo detainees and the due process of justice, made by the Bush administration and its politically appointed henchmen in the judiciary like Susan Crawford and William Haynes. Listen to the interview in The Current, part.2, here.

This maneuvering is being made with the sixtysomething remaining potentially chargeable detainees, from the initial 775 allegedly guilty but later proven innocent detainees, most of them have been freed from Guantanmo, and the others will be, one day, if the US can find them a homeland again, and if they are not dead of despair. These detainees were amassed with much zeal and little regard to anything else than political or financial motives by the Pakistani secret services in the wake of 9/11. Michael Winterbottom has made a great documentary style movie about the capture, detention, interrogation, and the liberation of three Britons , or the Tipton Three, who were held in Guantanamo. The testimonies of the Tipton three show how the Pakistani secret service collected men from mosque and delivered them to the US under pressure to create the impression that the War On Terror was a success in Afghanistan.

And so when we think of Guantanamo and the stain it has brought on our western society we will have to add one more shameful fact, not only we torture there, not only we disprespect Human life and the rule of law, but we have also created, with the manipulation of justice for political ends, a new form of slavery, political slavery, the slavery of those who don't have rights and who exist only in a unlawful and moral space created to serve our leaders' political ambitions and agenda. Old slavery was for economic and domestic comfort. This newly created form of slavery is a political comfort zone.
Who is Bush's god ? The one who speaks to him when he needs inspiration ? The answer is clear. It is Satan himself. And what did the Bush administration prove to the believers in the War On Terror like colonel Davis ? At best, that the War On Terror is a farce. I prefer not to think about the worse.

UPDATE, february 21st 2008: Ex-chief prosecutor at Guantanamo, Col. Morris Davis, to aid defense by appearing as a witness for political interference in the judiciary process.

Related:

Pierre Tristam: The courtly Gore of Gitmo
My review of Michael Winterbottom's 'The Road To Guantanamo'
Torture and Terror: Bush's and Bin Laden's victories, everybody Else's defeat.

Sarkozy's Slip Of The Tongue And The Mainstreaming of Torture

As US citizens are bracing for yet another Bush attorney general nominee who condones Torture but won't say so, Sarkozy asks journalists not to torture him for his love for America.
"I am a friend of America. Don't torture me for it"

In the picture above you can see Sarkozy (unrecognizable of course because his face is covered by a wet tissue) interrogated on his love for America.

In the following video you can see how difficult it is to interrogate him on his love for Cecilia without resorting to waterboarding.

Reporters Without Borders' Secretary General Justifies Torture

Reporters Without Borders are seen as defenders of freedom of expression and liberal western values. So it doesn't come as a surprise that this NGO's secretary general, Robert Ménard, declares Torture to be legitimate in some cases. Why is RWB's endorsment of Torture is not a surprise ? Because there is no debate on Torture anymore in western socieites. We have adopted and banalised Torture. Torture is becoming mainstream. What did we do when we learned about Abu Ghraib ? What did we do when we learned of Guantanmo ? What did we do when we learned of Bush's secret prisons and extraordinary renditions ? Nothing. So it does not come as a surprise that those who hold western liberal values as their lightning rod express actually their acceptation of Torture. Torture is definitely going mainstream. The absence of a public debate about it is a schocking proof of its acceptation. Read the interview, the radio host did not actually react to Ménard. And the french press, in general, except Rue89, did not report the fact. There is nothing to say actually about Torture.

In a transcript of a radio interview given by Robert Ménard and revealed by the French online information website Rue89, Robert Ménard declares:

"On the dark side of the state, there is worse (then Torture I suppose, my emphasis). The movie adapted from the book of Marianne Pearl relating the kidnapping of her husband will be released soon (American movies are sometimes released with a three to six month delay in Europe, my emphasis).

That's not a romanced story. I spoke with Marianne Pearl about this when I was in the US for the movie première few weeks ago. We both recalled that US authorities knew who was holding Pearl hostage. What should they do ? What should they let do ? And what should they close their eyes on ? The Pakistani police took the families of the suspects as hostages, you hear me, and tortured those families in order to extract information on Pearl's kidnappers.

They had the information. But they were late to save Daniel. You know how he was killed and in which conditions, they cut his throat..

Where should we stop ? Should we accept this logic... In some cases we could. "They take hostages, we take hostages; They msitreat hostages, we mistreat them; they torture, we torture.."

What justifies this… Should we go to these limits in order to liberate a hostage ? That's a true question.

But that's real life, that's it, as François just said: we are not here in the world of ideas, there aren't principles anymore. I don't know what to think. Because it happened to Marianne Pearl, I am not saying, I wouldn't say that they were wrong in doing so because she thought that it should be done and that it is O.K., that they ought to save her husband; she was pregnant… For the baby who was going to come to life everything was permitted.

And they ought to save him, and if they were going to harm some people, we ought to do it; to harm them physically you understand, by threatening them and torturing, even if we had to kill some of them.

I don't know, I am lost, because at a certain point I don't know where we should stop, where should we set the cursor. What is acceptable and what is not ? And, at the same time, for the families of the kidnapped, because they are often the first we deal with and adress in the first place, at Reporters Without Borders; from a legitimate point of view, I, if it were my daughter who was taken hostage, there will be no limit, I tell you, I tell you (bis), there will be no limit (inaudible)...

Xavier de la Porte (radio host):
Then, it is better not to know what is going on.

Robert Ménard:
Yes, we shouldn't say it, what do you want ? Do you want to be told such stories ? Can you imagine, people will think … and they will be right to think so; we are trying to mobilise people all the time, but what if people come to think that mobilising for a cause has its downside and this nightmarish aspect which I just described… We don't know anymore where we stand-the Good, the Bad- Inside this..."

It does not come to Ménard that they, at RWB, have a greater responsibility than everybody else in going mainstream on torture because they are the ones who inform us about what is going on. Did you notice that at the end Ménard admits two shocking facts; not only we can endorse Torture in some cases but they, as reporters, should probably not inform the public about it. The case is closed.

Read here my two articles on Torture:

Are We Banalising Torture ?

Torture and Terror: Bush's and Bin Laden's Victories, Everybody Else's Defeat

Read Juan Cole: Gonzalez gone for the wrong reasons

Torture and Terror: The descending spirale

The war on terror has reached now the horn of Africa with, in its trail, new accusations of renditions, secret prisons, and torture by the CIA and the FBI in US friendly countries. Citizens from 19 countries are being 'interrogated' by the US with the help of the rendition services provided by Kenya and the torture apparatus in Ethiopia and Somalia.

Since its beginning, the 'war on terror', as conceived by the US, is pulling western democracies in a spiraling moral descent which is becoming out of control. Many innocent citizens are caught in this spirale. Read here my post on why the methods used by the US and its allies in the 'war on terror' are doomed to fail.

UPDATE: European Union given war crimes warning over aid to Ethiopia and Somalia.

Bernard Kouchner and Bernard-Henri Lévy, the campaigners for Darfur, won't lift a finger for civilians tortured, illegaly detained, ethnically cleansed and assassinated in Somalia, neither for the genocide that is going on in Iraq under the watch of 150000 US soldiers and the genocide that id going on in Palestine at the hands of the Israeli army.

Anti Iraq War Protest Pictures

The protest was held today in washington DC. Tens of thousands attended. The call for the protest was launched by United for peace and Justice.

Sources: Backbone Le Monde

P.S. To the zionist from Israel who left a comment on my previous post I tell him: Israel is responsible for this war also. How does this fit into his narrative about Muslims who hate the US and Israel as the only friend of the US ?

A Voice from Guantanamo's Darkness

Thanks to Candide's Notebooks who highlighted this extract from letters sent to his attorneys by a Guantanamo detainee. Published by the LA Times.
Read here my review of Michael Winterbottom's movie 'The Road to Guantanamo'.

My articles on Torture:
Are We Banalising Torture ?
Torture and Terror: Bush's and Bin Laden's Victories, Everybody Else's Defeat

The Road to Guantanamo

This is my movie week. I can watch the movies I want after having consented to see Casino Royale twice, the first time with my son who couldn't wait when the movie premiered this week (actually we watch it last Saturday), and the second time will be with my husband who wasn't able to join the first time because he is on call 24 hrs for a week until next Friday.

Having made this sacrifice, I asked the men in the house, who always conspire against me to rent action movies or comedies, to let me rent two videos, that they were reluctant to watch, only for myself.

Yesterday, I watched 'The Road to Guantanamo'. I knew that the movie was about the three Muslim Britons who were released from Guantanamo, the Tipton three, as they are called. Being familiar with the director's filmography, I knew that I was probably going to be subjected to some harsh scenes. Winterbottom is the director of an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure where you can see Kate Winslet giving birth as if you were the midwife. He also directed the 'Butterfly Kiss', the story of a psychotic woman serial killer, as well as the controversial movie, 'Nine Songs', a love story where actors perform actually real sex scenes for the camera, and the well known 'Welcome to Sarajevo'. From Winterbottom comes also the smart 'Tristram Shandy', a real cinematographic tour de force, and 'In this world', the story of the journey of two men from Afghanistan to London as clandestine.

Winterbottom's movies have a great effect on me, they never leave me indifferent. Actually, at the end of 'In this world' I bursted into tears and I still feel a sting of sadness inside even now, two years later, when I think about the movie. I was prepared to all this when I turned the CD player on to watch 'The Road to Guantanamo'. My son joined and we had a little discussion before and I told him that it is O.K. to close his eyes if some scenes may be unbearable to watch.

The movie follows the Tipton three as they - initially they were four, one of them, Amir, will disappear- set to travel to Pakistan to assist their friend's marriage, from the moment they leave England to the moment of their return, describing their capture, the three prisons in which they transit before landing at Guantanamo, their interrogations and their release two years later. The story, played by actors, is interrupted by narrations from the real persons themselves. The movie is well constructed. And because it is a documentary style, even if it is acted, it is colder and less emotionally charged than other Winterbottom's movies. But the subject, being what it is, makes you tense as the story evolves and unfurls. At some point, my son bursted into a hsyterical laughter and I suspect this was to relieve some of the tension he flet inside. It was during interrogations. We knew that the most savage forms of physical and moral torture were to come during interrogations. However, the feigned or intended stupidity of the interrogators, unprepared as they are with false informations and assumptions about the 'Muslim and Arab mind', their stubborness, close to a certain from of despair, to extract something from the detainees, make a good basis for a comedy, if it weren't a tragedy that was the ordeal of these men. The interrogators looked out of touch with reality, lost, or worse, plain stupid. I remember that my husband's grand'mother who was in Ravensbruck during WWII for four years before being released, in a prisoner exchange process, used to tell us that laughter was helpful in the camps and that if you were capable of laughter at the absurdity of human cruelty you had more chance than others to live and even to overcome the trauma. At some point, a female interrogator asks the detainee if he is a member of Al-Qaida and he answers no and she repeats the question, all interrogators repeat over and over the same question as if they were trying by a magical formula or incantation to get what they want from the prisoner. And when faced with a definitve NO the interrogator, at some point, shows the prisoner a video of a meeting in Afghanistan featuring Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri and she tells him 'Look at the image on this video, it is you there'. The prisoner looks at the video and says 'No way, the date is 2000 and in 2000 I was doing community work in the UK, being on probation'.

I got the impression that what helped the Tipton three is their youthfulness and a history of youth conduct disorders, at least for two of them, that had them on a police file for minor offenses but which acted both psychologically, as an inside rebellion that helped them sustain the pressure, and operationally as a proof of the fabrication and lies the interrogators had made up in the case the US had to bring against most of the detainees of Guantanamo. But not all people will have this chance. I cannot help but think about the remaining detainees in Guantanamo who, under the new law for military tribunals, will have no access to a lawyer to challenge their detention and their treatement, no access to the charges brought upon them, sealed forever away from the rest of the world, and from Humanity, and at the mercy of their torturers.

Winterbottom had admirably succeeded in intertwining both the drama and the absurd bringing us a good documentary film about the number one shame of our modern time: Guantanamo.

Torture and Terror: Bush's and Bin Laden's victories, everybody else's defeat.

''It is worse for a man to inflict wrong then to suffer it''
Socrates

'' All the discourses and commentaries (about 9/11) denote the exaggerated abreaction to the event and the fascination it exerts. The moral condemnation and the sacred union against terrorism are matched by a prodigious jubilation to see the destruction of a superpower or, much better, to see this superpower self destruct at its height. Because it is this unbearable power, which fomented all the widespread violence in the world, that fomented (without willingly knowing it) the terrorist imagination in us .''
Jean Baudrillard in L'esprit du terrorisme (my translation)

In his article, L'esprit du terrorisme (The Essence of Terrorism), published in French less than two months after September eleventh, and two years later in English, Jean Baudrillard, drawing from the first reactions to the events of the World Trade Center, which he depicts as 'a counter phobic delirium to exorcise Evil', argues that by making 9/11 a planetary Event we are creating a symbolism which is uniting the terrorists and ourseleves in an implicit complicity. Baudrillard writes that this complicity is what the terrorists might have expected and taken into account.

How did this complicity come into being ? Baudrillard defends the idea that there is no absolute Good as there is no absolute Evil, that they are in a state of equilibrium inherited from traditional societies and always fluctuating in the same direction. It is naive to think that the increase in Good can completely suppress Evil. Baudrillard explains how September eleventh and our reaction to it are both one and only event that encompasses a great contradiction threatening the traditional equilibrium between Good and Evil; the capacity of the terrorists to transform their deaths into an absolute weapon against a society which abhorres death and whose objective is Zero death. This is not as much a quantitative comparison as it is a symbolic one. Its symbolism is entranched in the fact that the terrorist's death is a different kind of reality, a reality that reaches us through the medium of the virtual and the sensational, the image. With the animated image, we come to feel terror before grapsing the the reality behind it. The reality of the event beocmes then secondary, and the event in itself becomes an overwhelming fiction, more forcefully striking our imagination.

Baudrillard contends that the representation of death through an image medium striking the imagination, and the fascination exerted on us by this image, breaks the previous equilibrium between Good and Evil because the only response to this symbolism is an escalation; more death. Terrorism by the image creates a symbolism which ties death to some sort of 'immoral fascination'. And this death will come to us via self destruction.

I did not see the images of the World trade Center attacks because we don't watch TV, we don't own a TV. Recently I saw 'United 93' on video. I felt a great unease, a moral shock in face of the terrorism we see as reconstructed in this movie. It was a new sort of moral shock for me, something I never felt before, something that I could only relate to what I felt when I saw images of naked AbuGhraib's prisoners and read accounts about Guantanamo's 'porn' method interrogations. Suddenly, it occured to me that the kind of moral shock I was feeling could be related to the moral shock someone feels when watching porn. This new kind of terror meant to strike the imagination through images which are taboos exploit the same human basic emotions, fascination shrouded in disgust and reprobation.

I have come to understand that terror on the screen is the porn of death. Sadly, for some, seeing porn does not evoke reprobation but only fascination and so this is actually the case with the overreaction to Terror, with the new legislation on Torture. Torture is the answer to the fascination of death infused into our imagination by the terrorists and their images.

With this new legislation, the Bush administration's reaction to 9/11 has gone beyond Bin Laden's best expectations. Not only this death porn director and his followers actors have been given the stature of world statesmen but they have been given also our liberties and our moral principles on a sacrificial altar, the altar of security. Because it is we, in the first place, who will have to deal with this new legislation on Torture which is changing irreversibly our moral standards.

How many declared and potential terrorists suicide bombers are there on the Planet that we feel obliged to bow to such radical changes in our rules and laws in their names ? Rules and laws that have been carefully constructed with a certain idea of Humanity, itself carefully crafted over the years by cultural progress and so many humanist struggles. Just as the Patriot Act was more about legalising a posteriori Bush's domestic spying program on American citizens, the new legislation on Torture is about legalising a posteriori the dangerous breaches to Human Rights which have been going on in outsourced and extraterritorial American prisons worldwide.

The effects of the new legislation on Torture are not going to be confined to AbuGhraib, Guantanamo and some obscure CIA prisons in some obscure eastern european countries. They are going to shake the foundations of Human Rights, freeedom of expression and honest dissent inside the United States and worldwide. Because the moment a discussion is started on what is acceptable and not acceptable in Torture, this moment marks the acceptation and the admission of Torture as a practice. Judgments about Torture should never go into these sinister details: how much inflicted suffering amounts to Torture ? Is suffering without organ failure considered a Torture ? Can our best intentions accompany our worst practices ? The debate on Torture should not go into details of the practice, it should be at the level of the general principles. Human dignity is not a vague concept, it is only vague in the minds of illiterate in humanist matters like Gonzalez and Bush. Pain and suffering are degrading and should not be accepted in any form as a way to treat human beings.

Our society abhorres pain and suffering in all its forms for ourselves and yet, at the same time, we let our leaders inflict them on others. Or maybe we consider that these others don't have the same level of humanity. The discussion on Torture and the fact that a majority of senators and congressmen in the US voted for accomodations on Torture imply a more worrying fact, the fact that our society and our media can hold a discussion on Torture and its accomodations without raising eyebrows. It is worrying because it means that we have all already abandoned the fundamental principles of human dignity and its meaning. This is a dangerous path because it degrades not only the humanity of others but our own humanity.

The new legislation on Torture is already degrading our own moral standards as a society. This is the Terror inside, the terror we have watched on our TV screens, imagined fascinated, and feared. It is now inside our imagination. With the terror inside, not only Bin Laden have won, but also Bush. With the new legislation on Terror, every US citizen can fear for his dignity, his freedom and his life. New York Times journalist William Rivers Pitt has an imaginary and moving account on the implications of the new legislation on normal people, not terrorists. Editorialist and blogger Pierre Tristam writes about the negociations that preceded the 'deal' on Torture: ''Either way, the example the administration and its once-again pliant Congress are broadcasting to the world is that of a nation step by step debasing law and its own foundations of liberty.''

I am really depressed by the situation and I wish I can hear more voices from normal people around me reassuring me that this is just a nightmare and that we are all going either to wake up or to rise against our despots and Bin Laden's fellows in terror, those who have the guts to turn the morbid and disgusting fascination for terror into a powerful political tool against our Democracies, Human Rights and moral values, ultimately leading us into a self destructive and suicidal path.

We are already standing on the edge of a moral abyss but we are unable to see it because we are watching behind us, way behind, into September eleventh and the day we have lost our imagination to terror.

Mark From Ireland has a post on a 15 year old boy resident of Guantanamo, Rolling Stone has the source article.

Are we banalising torture ?

Before the present talk about torture in our societies, torture existed. There were some 'rogue states' and regimes torturing their political prisoners to extract information or to break their will. People and media and leaders in the 'free world' used to protest loud and regularly about torture, sometimes exert sanctions against nations practising torture.

This is how institutional torture was perceived after the signing of the UN convention against torture in 1987, it was seen as a shame, a moral stain tarnishing and sullying nations and citizens.

Since the 'free world', the world that 'does not torture' neither 'condone torture', started his 'war on terror', torture talk changed. First it was a murmur. Then a multitude of facts started to make the murmur louder and louder. We, citizens of the 'free world' , learned that our governments are making transactions with states who torture. We also learned, that in 'remote' prisons, in 'remote' countries, hidden from the eyes of international organisations who used to watch and to report to us about torture in the 'other world', torutre was actually taking place and performed by people who belonged to us. We also realised that our governments were talking openly about torture, not trying to understand it and to eradicate it but to redefine it. We realised that high profile experts in the legal, medical and scientific spheres, were working day and night trying to provide expertise to our governments on how to make torture more efficient, more scientific, more knowledgeable, more invisible, going as far as to defend it in certain circumstances, to convince us that this is an evil we couldn't escape, for the sake of 'our freedoms'. So the open talk on torture is becoming all about its justification in our 'free world'.

Our governments continue to torture. And with the debate about its justification, it is no more secretive, shameful, brutal and forbidden. It is around us, it is between us, it is with us, it is intractable. It is something we are starting to talk about, like other things, organise an action day so we may feel good about it, like action day against mental illness or action day against tobacco or earth action day or mother's day or car free day and so on...

In this spirit and with the idea that torture is here to stay with us, bloggers and Human rights organisations are launching a 'Torture Awareness Month'*. I was asked to join, I find the idea awkward for all the reasons I listed above. I refused, then I accepted and now I really feel unconfortable with the whole idea.

*I agree with the bloggers initiative and I don't think that the initiative in itself is banalising torture but it is the result of the banalisation of torture by our 'democratic' and 'free' regimes. Should we accept this banalisation ? How should we act as to repel forcefully this banalisation ? I don't have right now the correct answer and this is why I joined the intitiative.