[Marxism] Is torture, like pornography, in the eye of the beholder ... or the recipient?

[Brian Shannon <Brian_Shannon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

For months, Congress and and other wits joked about Bill Clinton's 
definition of "is." Today there is much less concern over how President 
Bush and his appointees define torture.

According to Alberto Gonzales, there must be "injury such as death, 
organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions—in order to 
constitute torture."

Pardon me, but it would seem that that is precisely what torture is. 
Torture is everything below his standard.

Gonzales has redefined "torture" into "murder." All those stages up to 
injuries "such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body 
functions" are in fact torture--past that it is murder, butchery, and 
mutilation.

Abu Ghraib lead torturer Sergeant Graner has just received 10 years for 
actions that fell well below the standards that Gonzales and others 
approved. But he was not allowed to present any evidence that 
permission, indeed orders, for his actions came from Bush, Gonzales, 
and Rumsfeld on down.

One person's fraternity initiation is another's torture. Perhaps being 
kidnapped, stripped, held in a cage by people with guns is the 
difference.

In any case, here LA Times writer Sonni Efron presents the torture 
facilitators that the Senate will soon approve for Attorney General and 
Secretary of State, and describes the tortured statements of Rice and 
Gonzales over what torture "is."

. . . I almost forgot, sometime in the future the Senate will "likely" 
debate the definition of torture and that may "embarrass" the Bush 
Administration.

Brian Shannon
______________

'Nobody condones or excuses what happened at Abu Ghraib. The problem of 
how to deal with unlawful combatants, though, in a different kind of 
war, is frankly a very difficult problem.'
-- Condoleezza Rice, secretary of State-designate
Quote
'There is no legal prohibition under the Convention Against Torture on 
cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment with respect to aliens overseas.' 
[Ummm, but there is.]
-- Alberto R. Gonzales, attorney general-designate


Torture Becomes a Matter of Definition
Bush nominees refuse to say what's prohibited. U.S. dilemma is that it 
wants to disavow abuse but retain leeway in pressuring suspects.
By Sonni Efron, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — The question Democratic senators put to Condoleezza Rice 
last week seemed easy enough to answer: Did the secretary of State 
nominee consider interrogation practices such as "water-boarding," in 
which a prisoner is made to believe he will drown, to be torture?

She declined to answer.

"I'm not going to speak to any specific interrogation techniques," Rice 
said, adding that it was up to the Justice Department to define 
torture.

About the same time, senators on another committee were asking nearly 
identical questions and getting nearly identical answers from Alberto 
R. Gonzales, President Bush's choice for attorney general.

The back-to-back confirmation flare-ups spotlight a problem the Bush 
administration faces in its policies for detaining and interrogating 
terrorism suspects.

In the months since the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the administration 
has insisted that America does not and will not use torture. At the 
same time, the government has tried to preserve maximum leeway in the 
interrogation of terrorism suspects by not drawing a clear line between 
where rough treatment ends and torture begins.

FULL AT
http://makeashorterlink.com/?V2E512E4A

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