I have watched the outsourced members of the Bush administration “newspeak” about torture and I’ve also observed the middling Democrats and the Washington “bubble” media caste their own sugared bread upon the waters. “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” and the “ticking time bomb” are engineered narratives designed as justifications for illegal statecraft. I saw Condoleeza Rice telling a Stanford student that we never used torture at Gitmo. You could see the intoxication of saying so. She looked like she believed it. One wonders if she ever read Hannah Arendt. Surely the former U.S. Secretary of State knows that subborning the rights of human beings and breaking international law are addictive behaviors among the tyrant classes and that Orwell didn’t have to look far to the left or far to the right to see the grievous material effects of propaganda and all the ideologically corrupted language of the 20th century.
Former Secretary Rice wants it both ways. We didn’t torture anybody. Oh but we were forced to take tough positions because 3000 Americans died on September 11, 2001. Presumably revoking habeas corpus and spying on tens of millions of innocent U.S. citizens is co-determined with the right to torture captives in her revisionist view of human rights–which is to say that human rights are conditional. Therefore we should rename human rights. We might call them “occasional operations of dignity” or “symptoms of engineered equality”–anyone can find something suitably evanescent.
The emerging struggle to name torture for what it is becomes by turns the most important debate of our time since repairing our standing in the world and reinvigorating diplomacy are the keys to achieving everything from a reduction in greenhouse gasses to cooperation on peace talks wherever conflicts may be.
It is not a comfort to hear from our former Secretary of State that whatever you call it, torture is legal if the president says it is. Where’s Rosemary Woods?
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 