Discipline and Punish, American-Style:

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r

Wed, 30 Mar 2005 14:21:54 +1000 (EST)

Discipline and Punish, American-Style:

 

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com

 

Discipline and Punish, American-Style:

 

So now we know for sure what we all knew anyways: the

only reason that anyone gave a happy monkey fuck about

torture at Abu Ghraib is because someone blew the

whistle. Because, see, now that we know about the

torture of prisoners at a military base in Mosul,

torture that occurred at the hands and clubs and other

devices of Americans, it's pretty obvious what was

already obvious except for those in deep Republican

denial: torture is systematic, far-ranging, and

unending for those imprisoned in the maniacal war on

" terror. "

 

Why do we know anything about what happened in Mosul?

Because the 311th Military Intelligence Battalion

tortured an innocent man, broke his jaw even: " The

investigation was triggered by the case of Salah Salih

Jassim, 20, who had his jaw broken in detention. He

was not a suspect but had been arrested along with his

father, an officer in Saddam Hussein's Fedayeen

militia. Mr Jassim was held in a room with 70 other

prisoners. Deafening heavy metal music was played and

guards sounded bullhorns beside their heads. Mr Jassim

said: 'All night they were throwing water on us and

making us stand and squat. From the night to the next

day ... they were beating us.' "

 

The ACLU's summary of the recent 1200 pages of

documents from the Army is a wonderful catalog of hate

and destruction, the kind of shit that if you read it

about any other nation, you'd wonder why the people

don't rise up in rebellion. Or if the people did rise

up, you couldn't blame 'em. We got sworn statements of

soldiers saying they were told to take prisoners out

back and " beat the fuck out of them, " we got a healthy

man dying in custody, we got soldiers being allowed to

get " payback " against suspected insurgents. And no

distinction, often, between people picked up who have

done something to attack the American or Iraqi

military and people who just were standing next to

that person. Because, you know, that might require,

let's just fuckin' say, " Due fucking process, " which

is anathema to the purposes of this approach:

inflicting fear on populations.

 

Here's how they used to treat prisoners under a U.S.

buddy, the Shah of Iran - see if any of this sounds

familiar, from the 1999 book Tortured Confessions by

Ervand Abrahamian: " sleep deprivation; extensive

solitary confinement; glaring searchlights; standing

in one place for hours on end; nail extractions;

snakes (favored for use with women); electrical shocks

with cattle prods, often into the rectum; cigarette

burns; sitting on hot grills; acid dripped into

nostrils; near-drownings; mock executions; and an

electric chair with a large metal mask to muffle

screams while amplifying them for the victim. This

latter contraption was dubbed the Apollo--an allusion

to the American space capsules. Prisoners were also

humiliated by being raped, urinated on, and forced to

stand naked. " No, not all, no acid in the nostrils

that we know about, but, fuck, an awful lot of these

techniques and others are part and parcel of the

" interrogation " of prisoners, part of the " softening

up " process.

 

Meanwhile, meanwhile: the majority of " detainees " in

Iraq have " no intelligence value " (use that phrase

freely), soldiers poured dirt on a detainee going into

diabetic shock, allegations of raping female

prisoners, reports of dogs being used to frighten

juveniles, and on and on.

 

Over at Gitmo, the Supreme Court-ordered bullshit

tribunals have been shown to have all the

effectiveness of a Yugo in a blizzard. A German

citizen who was officially declared an " enemy

combatant, " to be held until the war on " terror " ends

or Jesus comes back, whichever comes first, after a

tribunal. Problem is " U.S. military intelligence and

German law enforcement authorities had largely

concluded there was no information that linked Kurnaz

to al Qaeda, any other terrorist organization or

terrorist activities. " But don't try to get the

military or the government to say they fucked up. That

shit's classified, asshole, don't you know that?

 

And now that it seems the whole process is fucked up

beyond belief, the military wants to " strengthen the

rights " of detainees, which appears to mean " give them

a couple of rights. " Standing in the way? Dick " You

Heard My Motherfuckin' Name " Cheney, who wants to

maintain the silent, dark status quo.

 

This is all in the last couple of weeks. This is what

we know. Now shouldn't we be a little queasy over what

we don't know?

 

Michel Foucault, that French bondage sodomite, knew

that the tortured body had been disappeared from view

on purpose: in Discipline and Punish, he considers

" the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle.

Today we are rather inclined to ignore it; perhaps, in

its time, it gave rise to too much inflated rhetoric;

perhaps it has been attributed too readily and too

emphatically to a process of 'humanization', thus

dispensing with the need for further analysis. .

..Punishment of a less immediately physical kind, a

certain discretion in the art of inflicting pain, a

combination of more subtle, more subdued sufferings,

deprived of their visible display, should not all this

be treated as a special case, an incidental effect of

deeper changes? And yet the fact remains that a few

decades saw the disappearance of the tortured,

dismembered, amputated body, symbolically branded on

face or shoulder, exposed alive or dead to public

view. The body as the major target of penal repression

disappeared. "

 

At Guantanamo and in the new and old dungeons of Iraq,

the American state is at work, in secret, making its

frustrations known on the hidden bodies of those

guilty and not guilty.

 

He is us. Goddamnit, he is us.

 

// posted by Rude One @ 11:29 AM

 

 

 

 

All it takes for evil to triumph is that good men [and women] do nothing.

Edmund Burke