One wonders whether the unrelenting attacks on President Obama concerning the use of torture by the bush regime, particularly from Cheney, and the accusations that Pelosi knew torture was employed by them (but insisting that they didn't do it too) will force judicial action. It seems an ill chosen choice of strategy. But then, they're professional power players. What do I know?
Pelosi hasn't taken kindly to turning this issue into all about HER, when it is THEM.
Do they realize that their constant attacks are forcing into being the very thing that they evidently believe their attacks is supposed stop -- i.e. their usual tactics of yelling sit down and shut up or else! But, um in 2009, what 'or else' do they have to make people sit down and shut up?
Showing posts with label Torture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Torture. Show all posts
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
My Concern Is the U.S. Use of Torture and Incarceration
Not some other nation's past use.
Full story reported in the UK Guardian here; pull follows below:
Full story reported in the UK Guardian here; pull follows below:
Criminal proceedings have begun in Spain against six senior officials in the Bush administration for the use of torture against detainees in Guantánamo Bay. Baltasar Garzón, the counter-terrorism judge whose prosecution of General Augusto Pinochet led to his arrest in Britain in 1998, has referred the case to the chief prosecutor before deciding whether to proceed.
The case is bound to threaten Spain's relations with the new administration in Washington, but Gonzalo Boyé, one of the four lawyers who wrote the lawsuit, said the prosecutor would have little choice under Spanish law but to approve the
prosecution. "The only route of escape the prosecutor might have is to ask
whether there is ongoing process in the US against these people," Boyé told the
Observer. "This case will go ahead. It will be against the law not to go
ahead."
The officials named in the case include the most senior legal minds in the Bush administration. They are: Alberto Gonzales, a former White House counsel and attorney general; David Addington, former vice-president Dick Cheney's chief of staff; Douglas Feith, who was under-secretary of defence; William Haynes, formerly the Pentagon's general counsel; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who were both senior justice department legal advisers.Court documents say that, without their legal advice in a series of internal administration memos, "it would have been impossible to structure a legal
framework that supported what happened [in Guantánamo]". Boyé predicted that
Garzón would issue subpoenas in the next two weeks, summoning the six former
officials to present evidence: "If I were them, I would search for a good
lawyer."
If Garzón decided to go further and issued arrest warrants against the six, it would mean they would risk detention and extradition if they travelled outside the US. It would also present President Barack Obama with a serious dilemma. He would have either to open proceedings against the accused or tackle an extradition request from Spain.
Obama administration officials have confirmed that they believe torture was committed by American interrogators. The president has not ruled out a criminal inquiry, but has signalled he is reluctant to do so for political reasons.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Against Torture - Society for Enthnomusicology
http://webdb.iu.edu/sem/scripts/aboutus/aboutsem/positionstatements/position_statement_torture.cfmPosition
Statement on Torture (February 2, 2007)
On behalf of the Society for Ethnomusicology the SEM Board of Directors approves the Position Statement against the Use of Music as Torture, which originated in the SEM Ethics Committee and has the unanimous support of the Board of Directors.
The Society for Ethnomusicology condemns the use of torture in any form. An international scholarly society founded in 1955, the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) and its members are devoted to the research, study, and performance of music in all historical periods and cultural contexts.
The SEM is committed to the ethical uses of music to further human understanding and to uphold the highest standards of human rights. The Society is equally committed to drawing critical attention to the abuse of such standards through the unethical uses of music to harm individuals and the societies in which they live. The U.S. government and its military and diplomatic agencies has used music as an instrument of abuse since 2001, particularly through the implementation of programs of torture in both covert and overt detention centers as part of the war on terror.
The Society for Ethnomusicology
a.. calls for full disclosure of U.S. government-sanctioned and funded programs that design the means of delivering music as torture;
b.. condemns the use of music as an instrument of torture; and
c.. demands that the United States government and its agencies cease using music as an instrument of physical and psychological torture.
Suggested link:
For further information on the American history and praxis of using music as an instrument of torture, the Society for Ethnomusicology recommends the following article:
Suzanne Cusick, “Music as Torture, Music as Weapon,” Revista Transcultural de Música/Transcultural Music Review 10 (2006).
http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans10/cusick_eng.htm
Revista Transcultural de MúsicaTranscultural Music Review#10 (2006) ISSN:1697-0101
Music as torture / Music as weapon
Suzanne G. Cusick-
[ Abstract: One of the most startling aspects of musical culture in the post-Cold War United States is the systematic use of music as a weapon of war. First coming to mainstream attention in 1989, when US troops blared loud music in an effort to induce Panamanian president Manuel Norriega’s surrender, the use of “acoustic bombardment” has become standard practice on the battlefields of Iraq, and specifically musical bombardment has joined sensory deprivation and sexual humiliation as among the non-lethal means by which prisoners from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo may be coerced to yield their secrets without violating US law.
The very idea that music could be an instrument of torture confronts us with a novel—and disturbing—perspective on contemporary musicality in the United States. What is it that we in the United States might know about ourselves by contemplating this perspective? What does our government’s use of music in the “war on terror” tell us (and our antagonists) about ourselves?
This paper is a first attempt to understand the military and cultural logics on which the contemporary use of music as a weapon in torture and war is based. After briefly tracing the development of acoustic weapons in the late 20th century, and their deployment at the second battle of Falluja in November, 2004, I summarize what can be known about the theory and practice of using music to torture detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo. I contemplate some aspects of late 20th-century musical culture in the civilian US that resonate with the US security community’s conception of music as a weapon, and survey the way musical torture is discussed in the virtual world known as the blogosphere. Finally, I sketch some questions for further research and analysis. ]
The full paper is available at the link above, including citations and references.
Statement on Torture (February 2, 2007)
On behalf of the Society for Ethnomusicology the SEM Board of Directors approves the Position Statement against the Use of Music as Torture, which originated in the SEM Ethics Committee and has the unanimous support of the Board of Directors.
The Society for Ethnomusicology condemns the use of torture in any form. An international scholarly society founded in 1955, the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) and its members are devoted to the research, study, and performance of music in all historical periods and cultural contexts.
The SEM is committed to the ethical uses of music to further human understanding and to uphold the highest standards of human rights. The Society is equally committed to drawing critical attention to the abuse of such standards through the unethical uses of music to harm individuals and the societies in which they live. The U.S. government and its military and diplomatic agencies has used music as an instrument of abuse since 2001, particularly through the implementation of programs of torture in both covert and overt detention centers as part of the war on terror.
The Society for Ethnomusicology
a.. calls for full disclosure of U.S. government-sanctioned and funded programs that design the means of delivering music as torture;
b.. condemns the use of music as an instrument of torture; and
c.. demands that the United States government and its agencies cease using music as an instrument of physical and psychological torture.
Suggested link:
For further information on the American history and praxis of using music as an instrument of torture, the Society for Ethnomusicology recommends the following article:
Suzanne Cusick, “Music as Torture, Music as Weapon,” Revista Transcultural de Música/Transcultural Music Review 10 (2006).
http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans10/cusick_eng.htm
Revista Transcultural de MúsicaTranscultural Music Review#10 (2006) ISSN:1697-0101
Music as torture / Music as weapon
Suzanne G. Cusick-
[ Abstract: One of the most startling aspects of musical culture in the post-Cold War United States is the systematic use of music as a weapon of war. First coming to mainstream attention in 1989, when US troops blared loud music in an effort to induce Panamanian president Manuel Norriega’s surrender, the use of “acoustic bombardment” has become standard practice on the battlefields of Iraq, and specifically musical bombardment has joined sensory deprivation and sexual humiliation as among the non-lethal means by which prisoners from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo may be coerced to yield their secrets without violating US law.
The very idea that music could be an instrument of torture confronts us with a novel—and disturbing—perspective on contemporary musicality in the United States. What is it that we in the United States might know about ourselves by contemplating this perspective? What does our government’s use of music in the “war on terror” tell us (and our antagonists) about ourselves?
This paper is a first attempt to understand the military and cultural logics on which the contemporary use of music as a weapon in torture and war is based. After briefly tracing the development of acoustic weapons in the late 20th century, and their deployment at the second battle of Falluja in November, 2004, I summarize what can be known about the theory and practice of using music to torture detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo. I contemplate some aspects of late 20th-century musical culture in the civilian US that resonate with the US security community’s conception of music as a weapon, and survey the way musical torture is discussed in the virtual world known as the blogosphere. Finally, I sketch some questions for further research and analysis. ]
The full paper is available at the link above, including citations and references.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Our Culture
I've recently spent an intense span of time considering culture and identity in the context of the personal and the national, the colonialized and the colonizer. This was within the matrix of France and Europe, in the Caribbean and New World. You might think that the issues of the U.S. would be peripheral, at best, to this matrix. And it was, though it loomed, for a fundamental consideration for those who are a "colony of citizens," as brilliant Laurent Dubois has called them, is that if they are NOT France, then they are very likely to become subject to the U.S., which they view as contemptible, and thus fear.
And thus one inevitably must begin to consider the 'culture' of one's own home, which in my case is the U.S.
And this seems to be, from the wider perspective, to be more and more what the majority culture of this nation is:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/us/22road.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
[ California highways have been shut down by wildfires, mudslides, earthquakes and police chases. And now road rage.
Drivers inconvenienced by a road-widening project subjected construction workers to so much abuse — death threats, BB gun shootings, a flying burrito — that the state shut down California Highway 138 altogether. ]
[ Last September, Charles Fenn was arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon on accusations that he clipped a flagman with his vehicle on his way home to Wrightwood.
“I’m the victim,” Mr. Fenn maintained in a brief telephone interview, declining to say anything else. ]
These are indeed the children of clownface, and why the rest of the world sees this nation by and large as filled with obese, selfish, cruel, mean, ugly, ignorant hordes that they don't want in their back yard.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/21/washington/21intel.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1185020154-Jvzyw4DarBWBCdL+L+iRfg
[ A new executive order signed by President Bush does not authorize the full set of harsh interrogation methods used by the C.I.A. since the program began in 2002. But government officials said the rules would still allow some techniques more severe than those used in interrogations by military personnel in places like the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. ]
The wording is so vague that anything short of actual death appears permitted.
Anyway, it proves its mendacity that the regime felt it needed to execute an exec order re torture, when it claimed all along that it did not torture. Just like it claimed it didn't have secret prison camps. Nobody even bothers to deny the existence of the secret prison camps now. Feh. Crooks & Liars from start to finish. How can they put the words democracy, human rights, free and fair elections in their mouths and tell OTHER NATIONS they must obey such injunctions as issued by them? Thus we are the nation that employs torture -- not because it is useful, as it has been proven time and again, over the ages, not to be. But because we like it. It is another example of the top trickle down.
You all know that the first mention in primary media -- the New York Times -- of this clownface, was in the case of him defending the use of branding with red hot coat hangers the freshman being intiated into his fraternity. "It's no worse than getting burned with a cigarette."
These are the behaviors of sociopaths.
Sports fans abuse the players of the teams they support when the players make errors, they abuse the players of the teams they don't support, because they are the 'other.' They riot against each other.
The ignorance and brutality of the so-called Dark Ages reign.
Yet, as in the Dark Ages there are pockets of resistence and light -- the kids who go to New Orleans to help build houses for the evacuated that the fed gummit keeps gumming up, deliberately, the works for them to return home; the people who dare to write and speak publicly against the evil and ignorance spread by those on top. How long, how long ....
Many of the worst villains in literature and other 'entertainment' media are torturers. One of sf's great character - villains is Dune's Baron Harkonnen, straight out of the 16th / 17th Revenge Tragedies, is an unabashed sadist-torturer, who takes great pleasure in being so. However, his creator does not ever suggest anything other than that he tortures because he is a villain and he's a villain because he tortures.
SF has also contributed Gene Wolfe's Severian (the name of the principal character in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose partially autobiographical novel Venus in Furs, is the most famous S&M novel ever).
THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN series is considered by many as a stylistic masterpiece of manners; others see it as creepy (not to mention dull), particularly within the context of other works Wolfe has produced. It is creepy to attempt to make a torturer guiltless and sympathetic. Severian loves torturing -- oh, but he has a soul, and feels guilt. Sort of. It is necessary to this sympathy that he belongs to a Guild, quite like the Inquistition. This is to legitimize what he does. Supposedly.
Yet Wolfe must go further than this to make him a sympathetic character; Severian's had to be coerced, and then trained, when still a most malleable youthm into the sophisticated wielding of his 'art.' I.e., it's not supposed to be his choice.
However, Wolfe also chooses to include the information that these meticulous tortures are inflicted -- NOT FOR INFORMATION, but for the inexplicable satisfaction of Others. Often these people are entirely innocent of anything.
Civilized peoples don't torture. Period.
The Iroquois's tortures of their captives have become legendary in their prolongation and attention to physical detail -- keeping the victim alive and suffering as long as possible. Those tortures were not inflicted for information either; they were done for the pleasure of doing them. The only possible justification to that then, for the victims, was to make the endurance and suffering a manhood test. Yet, they, like Apaches and Commanches and any other of the Natives who ritually practiced torture, were considered savages. The accusation that one had 'gone native' included practices like scalping of Indians -- mostly an innovation provided by the invading Europeans. Most shocking of all was that women of these tribes also tortured their enemies.
The greatest villains of all, in literature and popular media, are, of course, women, women who participate in torture -- because when a woman does so, we have crossed so clearly the line that our cultures have set up to separate humanity and civilization and value for the spirit into the world of evil. The names of the (few) women engaged in SS tortures will live in infamy through recorded history. It is when women are involved with torture that it becomes utterly clear how connected to the toxic, evil eros-thanatos impulse torture is, because, you know, that's why they make those movies -- it gets guys hot. That's much of the impulse that keeps the SS constantly in the forefront of bad guys, and movies dealing with them and their activities are still being made, books are still being written. It gets guys hot.
Those who justify torture seem not to realize what their eager justification reveals about themselves.
And thus one inevitably must begin to consider the 'culture' of one's own home, which in my case is the U.S.
And this seems to be, from the wider perspective, to be more and more what the majority culture of this nation is:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/us/22road.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
[ California highways have been shut down by wildfires, mudslides, earthquakes and police chases. And now road rage.
Drivers inconvenienced by a road-widening project subjected construction workers to so much abuse — death threats, BB gun shootings, a flying burrito — that the state shut down California Highway 138 altogether. ]
[ Last September, Charles Fenn was arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon on accusations that he clipped a flagman with his vehicle on his way home to Wrightwood.
“I’m the victim,” Mr. Fenn maintained in a brief telephone interview, declining to say anything else. ]
These are indeed the children of clownface, and why the rest of the world sees this nation by and large as filled with obese, selfish, cruel, mean, ugly, ignorant hordes that they don't want in their back yard.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/21/washington/21intel.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1185020154-Jvzyw4DarBWBCdL+L+iRfg
[ A new executive order signed by President Bush does not authorize the full set of harsh interrogation methods used by the C.I.A. since the program began in 2002. But government officials said the rules would still allow some techniques more severe than those used in interrogations by military personnel in places like the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. ]
The wording is so vague that anything short of actual death appears permitted.
Anyway, it proves its mendacity that the regime felt it needed to execute an exec order re torture, when it claimed all along that it did not torture. Just like it claimed it didn't have secret prison camps. Nobody even bothers to deny the existence of the secret prison camps now. Feh. Crooks & Liars from start to finish. How can they put the words democracy, human rights, free and fair elections in their mouths and tell OTHER NATIONS they must obey such injunctions as issued by them? Thus we are the nation that employs torture -- not because it is useful, as it has been proven time and again, over the ages, not to be. But because we like it. It is another example of the top trickle down.
You all know that the first mention in primary media -- the New York Times -- of this clownface, was in the case of him defending the use of branding with red hot coat hangers the freshman being intiated into his fraternity. "It's no worse than getting burned with a cigarette."
These are the behaviors of sociopaths.
Sports fans abuse the players of the teams they support when the players make errors, they abuse the players of the teams they don't support, because they are the 'other.' They riot against each other.
The ignorance and brutality of the so-called Dark Ages reign.
Yet, as in the Dark Ages there are pockets of resistence and light -- the kids who go to New Orleans to help build houses for the evacuated that the fed gummit keeps gumming up, deliberately, the works for them to return home; the people who dare to write and speak publicly against the evil and ignorance spread by those on top. How long, how long ....
Many of the worst villains in literature and other 'entertainment' media are torturers. One of sf's great character - villains is Dune's Baron Harkonnen, straight out of the 16th / 17th Revenge Tragedies, is an unabashed sadist-torturer, who takes great pleasure in being so. However, his creator does not ever suggest anything other than that he tortures because he is a villain and he's a villain because he tortures.
SF has also contributed Gene Wolfe's Severian (the name of the principal character in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose partially autobiographical novel Venus in Furs, is the most famous S&M novel ever).
THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN series is considered by many as a stylistic masterpiece of manners; others see it as creepy (not to mention dull), particularly within the context of other works Wolfe has produced. It is creepy to attempt to make a torturer guiltless and sympathetic. Severian loves torturing -- oh, but he has a soul, and feels guilt. Sort of. It is necessary to this sympathy that he belongs to a Guild, quite like the Inquistition. This is to legitimize what he does. Supposedly.
Yet Wolfe must go further than this to make him a sympathetic character; Severian's had to be coerced, and then trained, when still a most malleable youthm into the sophisticated wielding of his 'art.' I.e., it's not supposed to be his choice.
However, Wolfe also chooses to include the information that these meticulous tortures are inflicted -- NOT FOR INFORMATION, but for the inexplicable satisfaction of Others. Often these people are entirely innocent of anything.
Civilized peoples don't torture. Period.
The Iroquois's tortures of their captives have become legendary in their prolongation and attention to physical detail -- keeping the victim alive and suffering as long as possible. Those tortures were not inflicted for information either; they were done for the pleasure of doing them. The only possible justification to that then, for the victims, was to make the endurance and suffering a manhood test. Yet, they, like Apaches and Commanches and any other of the Natives who ritually practiced torture, were considered savages. The accusation that one had 'gone native' included practices like scalping of Indians -- mostly an innovation provided by the invading Europeans. Most shocking of all was that women of these tribes also tortured their enemies.
The greatest villains of all, in literature and popular media, are, of course, women, women who participate in torture -- because when a woman does so, we have crossed so clearly the line that our cultures have set up to separate humanity and civilization and value for the spirit into the world of evil. The names of the (few) women engaged in SS tortures will live in infamy through recorded history. It is when women are involved with torture that it becomes utterly clear how connected to the toxic, evil eros-thanatos impulse torture is, because, you know, that's why they make those movies -- it gets guys hot. That's much of the impulse that keeps the SS constantly in the forefront of bad guys, and movies dealing with them and their activities are still being made, books are still being written. It gets guys hot.
Those who justify torture seem not to realize what their eager justification reveals about themselves.
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