The exact relevance of this for New Zealand readers escapes me. I realise that the Dom-Post has to fill that space in the World News section somehow, and that the publishers aren't going to pay for original journalism or analysis written by actual war experts, and that torture apologias syndicated from the Torygraph are cheaper than articles from its less tabloidy rivals; but couldn't they have filled it with comical photographs of cats with poorly-spelled captions? The whole consoling rhetorical apparatus of "Geneva Conventions are quaint / bad things happen in war / reasonable use of force in extraordinary circumstances / no place for scruples" is kinda wasted on us.
Fortunately it's not just us. We learn through the Great Gazoogle that the same article has also been picked up in Ireland and Sri Lanka, and indeed by umpteen second-tier Canadian newspapers.
Anyway, here's Praveen:
Torture was used by the US against opponents in Vietnam, by the Soviet Union against insurgents in Afghanistan, and by Britain against the Mau Mau in Kenya.Perhaps he has not noticed the common outcome of these three counter-insurgencies. Give the man bonus oblivious-drongo points for going on to cite two more precedents: French state-sponsored torture in Indochina and Algeria.
8 comments:
To be fair, we Canookians don't have much in the way of first tier newspapers either.
Bonus head-up-ass points too for the phrase which ends the list of torture regimes - just about every state whose forces find themselves embroiled in intractable conflicts.
Oh man, brutal and sadistic behaviour as well as intractable conflict?!? When you bill it like that, what's not to like?
What I liked most was the condescension Praveen directs at the 3rd Geneva Convention (against inflicting "physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion" on prisoners of war"), and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- written in 1949 and 1948 -- as the work of well-meaning but naive scholars who had not been exposed to the grim reality of war or the depths of evil to which human beings can sink.
...it's only torture if you're sadistic
It must come as a vast consolation to a captured opponent to know that the people inflicting pain on him are not acting out of sexual arousal, but rather out of anger and frustration (from being on the losing side and knowing that their deaths do not bring any benefit except to the careers of politicians and the sales of arms companies).
Possibly relevant here that in wars that the Brits have won against insurgents, e.g. the Malayan Emergency of the 1950s, they managed not to become torturers. Hence the absence of the Malayan war from Praveen's list of precedents.
One interesting feature of the article is the absence of any outright claim about torture obtaining useful information that couldn't be acquired in some other way. Evidently Praveen knows that it doesn't.
So I think that he's not directly pro-torture; not in the sense that Krauthammer, say, believes that the world would be a better place if more people spent more of their time slowly destroying the bodies of other human beings. It's more that he's worried that revelations from Wikileaks will make the Daily Telegraph readership unhappy (i.e. keen on a faster UK retreat from Afghanistan) and less likely to support shiny little regime-changing wars in the future. Making it his job to minimise the revelations and assuage the readers' discomfort.
The forces of righteousness will weigh down upon the Swami river of moral relativism.
Winning hearts and minds by shocking nipples and genitals.
Way to go, superpowers!
What's also interesting to note is that while torture was a common tactic for controlling populations through intimidation, up until we inflicted bush/cheney upon the world governments and militaries would routinely DENY that they were doing it.
Torture was used, but it was recognized as inhuman and wrong, and was done in secret, with plausible deniability for the higher ups.
It took nothing short of a spoiled mental defective and a brutal sadist coming to power in the most powerful, warlike nation on the planet for the institutionalization of torture to become banal policy, like minimum parking requirements and airport security...
There is an inexhaustible supply of corporate welfare for them who wish to toe the line and be in with the rich kids. Thus writing a well reasoned piece supporting torcha (we've always done it and Jack Bauer does it, so STFU)is a way of keeping the cheetos flowing.
I am just sad that my own intestines would strangle me if I tried such a thing.
And do not hold the Dompost to standards, Sir. IT IS THE PAPER OF NOTE. Yes, the note paper.
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