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What’s wrong with the World? | August 10, 2009
It is somewhat annoying that millions of people have been murdered, tortured and abused in the name of a religion and/or tunnel vision political beliefs. It makes me feel a little upset and, at times, even puts me off my coffee.
This morning, while sharing my vegemite toast with the BBC website, I was forced to raise an eyebrow (or two) as I read about the ‘hard choices’ the UK government currently faces when needing to interrogate prisoners in far away places. I leaned into my first don’t-talk-to-me-yet sip of coffee and slurped and learned how:
“It’s very difficult to be firmly opposed to torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment.”
“There was ‘no truth’ in suggestions it was official policy to collude in, solicit, or directly participate in abuses of prisoners, but difficult judgments and hard choices had to be made and while anyone detained in the UK would be treated well, the same guarantee could not be made about those held by foreign authorities”
As the number of credible allegations of British complicity in torture continues to escalate, it seems we should relax and find comfort in the knowledge that so long as prisoners are taken somewhere ‘foreign’, and the crime isn’t committed within a British territory, we can contentedly do unto them such things which otherwise may have been “torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment.”
My vegemite is finished and the rest of my coffee is unpleasantly cold. How very lucky I am not to be forced to sacrifice my principles and my humanity to justify the ‘hard choices’ that must be made in the interests of eliminating terror.
What is water-boarding?
Following are two interesting references for water-boarding which is reputed to be the preferred method of interrogation used during the growing number of ’credible allegations’.
Hitchins Interview
How does it feel to be “aggressively interrogated”? Christopher Hitchens found out for himself, submitting to a brutal waterboarding session in an effort to understand the human cost of America’s use of harsh tactics at Guantánamo and elsewhere. VF.com has the footage. Related: “Believe Me, It’s Torture,” from the August 2008 issue.
The video – http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/video/2008/hitchens_video200808
Wikipedia on Water-boarding
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding
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Hi Tigger!
The world is upside down and has been for awhile. Not my fault though. Although I´m an icelander.
XXXX
Gummi
Comment by Guðmundur Brynjólfsson — August 11, 2009 @ 4:38 am
Terrible. What an injustice! They should feel comfortable torturing individuals in their own country, and not only distant states. After all, they’ve no qualms about complicity in the bombing of large numbers of civilians. They cold stop that, and just do the torturing – at home. At least it would be people they suspect of being bad. Moreover, torture victims usually end up only mostly dead, which seems, from my comfortable position, to be very slightly better than completely.
Alternatively, we could could all just be nice to each other. Just got to get rid of that imaginary friend so many people have …
Comment by Badeye — August 11, 2009 @ 4:23 pm
This is something that the British have been quite happy to do on home soil in the past. Back in the bad old days the only way you could get out of it was if you were of noble birth (although that didn’t mean you would keep your head). As for waterboarding, anybody who feels that isn’t torture should try it to confirm their beliefs.
Comment by Tony Tulloch — August 11, 2009 @ 6:19 pm
Waow loved reading your blogpost. I submitted your rss to my blogreader!!
Comment by albubbaws — December 12, 2009 @ 9:51 am