Category Archives: Torture

If I wrote something like this, not that I would, it would probably be parody or something.

I've known Brad a long time, although I don't get to see him as often as I'd like these days. He can be very funny, but he has a different sort of humor, so when he writes something like this…

King Lear Blogging:

King Lear at the California Shakespeare Theater. Very well done.

There are, of course, the Berkeley moments: the announcement beforehand that there is a silver Prius in the parking lot with its interior lights on, and four men (including me) get up to check…

Were I Berkeley law professor John Yoo, I would never agree to take part in the production and come on stage to waterboard and then blind the Earl of g And I would never agree to make Gloucester confess not just to conspiring with Cordelia and the French but also to being the twentieth highjacker…

…I'm forced to believe it might actually have happened.

Bush’s Justice Department secretly endorsed torture

Justice Department secretly endorsed torture

NYT tamer headline on the facts: Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations

Charnel House

Secret US Endorsement of Severe Interrogations

The Torture Administration

How the Justice Department Made the World Safe for CIA Torture

And more:

DOJ's Secret Interrogation Opinions

Torture

A New Threshhold for AG Nominee Mukasey

Secret Gonzalez-supported Torture Efforts Revealed

There's no question that the pro-torture folks love to trot out the unrealistic 'Ticking Time Bomb' Scenario in order to justify the use of torture. (It even seems to find its way regularly into Presidential debates.) And then it's onwards down the slippery slope. So it's good to see some serious thought being put into defusing this politically — if not necessarily intellectually — effective argument.

Here's what the Association for the Prevention of Torture has to say about its new report, Defusing the Ticking Time Bomb Scenario:

Defusing the Ticking Bomb Scenario

In June 2007, as part of a series of activities to mark its 30th anniversary, the APT convened a meeting of experts to discuss responses to the ticking bomb scenario. In popular films and television series, on talk shows and news, in academic journals and political debates, the possible use of torture to prevent a terrorist attack in a hypothetical 'ticking bomb scenario' is a hot topic. The dramatic nature of the scenario, and the artificially simple moral answers it seems to offer, have helped it make a significant impression on public audiences. Yet this scenario ultimately seeks to destroy the hard-won absolute prohibition of torture under international and national laws. In presenting certain acts of torture as justifiable, even desirable, in distorting reality and manipulating emotions and ethical reasoning, in leading well-intentioned societies down a slippery slope to legalised and systematic torture, the ticking bomb scenario represents a grave threat to global anti-torture efforts.

Based on discussions at and following the June 2007 meeting, the APT has prepared Defusing the Ticking Bomb Scenario: Why we must say No to torture, always. This brochure provides the general public, human rights advocates, academics and governments with essential arguments against any proposed 'ticking bomb' exception to the prohibition of torture. It exposes the misleading and flawed hidden assumptions of the scenario, and emphasises the toxic effect of torture, like slavery and genocide, on societies that tolerate it. It recalls the fundamental and absolute nature of the prohibition under international law, and describes how the scenario manipulates moral and ethical judgment by obscuring the true moral cost of tolerating any act of torture.

Upsetting — extremely well done — article by Jane Mayer for the New Yorker, on the CIA's 'Black Sites'.

Short version, and some reactions, in Report: Harsh Methods Used On 9/11 Suspect from the Washington Post. (Note the Officially Approved Euphemism here: “harsh methods” indeed.)

War crimes, I tell you.