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Have you ever wondered about some of the shared traits of humanity? One could prosaically think of Love, Compassion and Happiness and one would be correct. If the similarities ended there, I wouldn’t be writing, nor would you be reading about the prevalence of torture across the globe.
“The report titled Torture in 2014 – 30 Years of Broken Promises read: “Although governments have prohibited this dehumanising practice in law and have recognised global disgust at its existence, many of them are carrying out torture or facilitating it in practice.”
“Three decades from the convention and more than 65 years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights torture is not just alive and well. It is flourishing,” according to the report.
Amnesty said 155 countries have ratified the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture but many governments were still “betraying their responsibility” with at least 79 countries continuing to engage in the outlawed practice in 2014.
“It’s almost become normalised, it’s become routine,” Amnesty Secretary General Salil Shetty told reporters at the launch of the “Stop Torture” campaign in London. The campaign focuses on Mexico, the Philippines, Morocco and Western Sahara, Nigeria and Uzbekistan.”
Awesome. It is infuriating to see that people understood their situation and attempted to rectify the sad state of affairs – we *are* capable of being decent human beings, yet today we turn away from the lessons learned so long ago.
“The group notes how the UN Convention made torturers “international outlaws” and prompted governments worldwide to denounce the practice. But it warns that in reality many are endorsing or at least failing to tackle the issue head-on.
“Governments have broken their promises, and because of these broken promises millions of people have suffered terribly,” said Shetty.”
No country should be above international law, the existence of jurisdictions ‘outside’ the International Court of Justice’s purview make tackling issues, like Torture, that stretch across national boundaries difficult, if not impossible to resolve. But hey, we’re past that whole ‘torture thing’ right? Right??
“As I interviewed an ever-increasing number of the victims of 21st century American torture, I began to research the historical antecedents of each revolting method. The zealous acolytes of Vice-President Dick Cheney were talking about ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’ as if we were being kinder and gentler now. Consider one favourite of CIA interrogators much used in the early days of the Afghanistan invasion: someone who dared talk to another detainee held in the frigid mid-winter cages of Bagram air force base would be hung up by his wrists, handcuffed to the metal fence so that he could barely stand on the tips of his toes.
Does that sound like torture? Perhaps not, until a doctor explains how the shoulders gradually dislocate, amid intense pain. The method is so effective that a recalcitrant prisoner could be persuaded to give a confession that might end in his own execution. For this reason, it was employed by the Spanish Inquisition, who called it Strappado. I began to use this word, and was gratified some months later when The New York Times adopted my use of the term.
Next, I took a small historical liberty in describing a second technique as Reverse Strappado – I am not sure that the Spanish ever truly differentiated, though it is even more excruciating: this time, the prisoner’s hands are tied behind his back before he is hung from the wrists.
Waterboarding has a particularly ironic history when we trace the 21st century US practice. It is sometimes described as simulated drowning, yet this is misleading: it is a process of actual drowning. It may or may not be carried through to the point of death, at the election of the practitioner. Most commonly (what a tragedy to think that it has been common!), a cloth is placed over the face and water is poured over the victim so that he cannot breathe. Waterboarding has been widely used for several centuries, by the Spanish Inquisition, the Gestapo, Japanese torture squads, the Khmer Rouge, the Soviet secret police, Pinochet’s death squads, Mugabe’s hired thugs and, latterly, the democratically-elected government of the United States of America.
Yet, perhaps it is the terminology that betrays the ultimate evil: the Inquisition were brutal but honest, calling it tortura del agua (‘water torture’). The Americans dressed it up when waterboarding Abu Zubaydah scores of times, referring to it as one of many ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’. That was doubtless designed to sound less savage, and give the Bush administration wriggle room to pretend that it was not actually violating the UN Convention against Torture.
But where did this Orwellian description originate? Did Dick Cheney coin the term? No. Indeed, when Adolf Hitler’s Gestapo waterboarded their victims, they referred to it as Verschärfte Vernehmung, which literally translates as ‘Enhanced Interrogation Technique’.
These specialised torture techniques should not obscure the purported utility of a good old-fashioned beating. Of course, the sophisticated sociopath will not call it anything so pedestrian. One Guantanamo euphemism is Forcible Cell Extraction (FCE), where half a dozen goons in Kevlar armour burst into a prisoner’s cell with batons and riot shields and pound him into the concrete floor. As recently as 2013, this was happening almost every day – and sometimes more than once – to my client Shaker Aamer, the last British resident held in the prison.”
Ah, The vaunted Progress of Humanity! – a rancidly perfumed recipe written with the tears, blood and ruined bodies of the tortured. I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling *very* modern here in the 21st century.
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No one should have to live in fear. Death by airstrike, death by rocket. Same result. I cannot even imagine having to deal with every day life in Gaza, especially if I had children.
“I am used to the bombings, but my children are worried. So I have to keep reassuring them.” Explaining what is happening in the skies to children sometimes proves difficult for some Palestinian parents. “When my child becomes scared I try to pacify her,” said Yasir Fatih. “I tell her the noise is far away and it’s not dangerous. Or sometimes I tell her it’s not real, it’s a game.”
One hell of a bogeyman no?
Of course the situation is complex, of course there is aggression from both parties. The violence being perpetrated though, should not be thought as a war between equals. If there ever was a case of David vs Goliath it would be the situation of Hamas versus the IDF.
We have different labels for similar situations…this comment from DierYassin summarized nicely how varied the world stage is.
“Facing international opprobrium over apartheid, Pretoria angrily asked why the world was focusing on them when far more serious atrocities abounded elsewhere.
They boasted of the better living conditions of blacks under white rule. And of how they were a “beacon of civilization” in a backward continent surrounded by countries wanting their “destruction”. They labelled armed resistance as terrorism and gave blacks truncated enclaves ruled by powerless chieftains and called it self-determination.Sound familiar?
Ah, but we in North America are ardent supporters of Israel so obviously, this cannot be the case…
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The general capitalist framework sets up people and resources for exploitation. Without a strong social democratic counterweight to capitalist exploitation we necessarily get the tragic results as exemplified by the mine disaster in Soma, Turkey.
“Turkish police are investigating 18 people, including mining company executives and personnel, as part of the probe into the Soma mining disaster, local media had reported.
The arrests on Sunday came after the government promised a thorough investigation into the deaths of 301 miners last week. According to the private Dogan news agency, prosecutors are questioning five of those being held.”
Three hundred and one human lives are gone because safety standards are bad for the bottom line.
“Families and unions have criticised the government’s handling of the disaster, and said the private firm which runs the coal mine, Soma Holding, did nothing to enforce safety standards.
Critics say that the privatisation of previously state-controlled mines had turned them over to politically connected businessmen who have skimped on safety to maximise profit.”
The maggoty quest for privatization has the same results wherever it burrows into the fabric of civil society. People are thrown into the meat grinder in an attempt to sate the voracious hunger for profit. Good for business, bad for people.
“A preliminary expert report, obtained by the Milliyet newspaper, pointed to several safety violations in the mine, including a shortage of carbon monoxide detectors and ceilings made of wood instead of metal.”
Privatization of utilities and resource extraction is almost always a bad deal for the people of the society.
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I’m frightened for the wrong reasons.
If I listened and believed what I was supposed to believe I would be afraid that the Russians are provoking the West into military conflict in Ukraine. The problem is that I’m more of afraid of what We are doing to destabilize the situation. John Pilger is with me on this one.
“Washington’s role in Ukraine is different only in its implications for the rest of us. For the first time since the Reagan years, the US is threatening to take the world to war. With eastern Europe and the Balkans now military outposts of Nato, the last “buffer state” bordering Russia is being torn apart. We in the west are backing neo-Nazis in a country where Ukrainian Nazis backed Hitler.
Having masterminded the coup in February against the democratically elected government in Kiev, Washington’s planned seizure of Russia’s historic, legitimate warm-water naval base in Crimea failed. The Russians defended themselves, as they have done against every threat and invasion from the west for almost a century.
But Nato’s military encirclement has accelerated, along with US-orchestrated attacks on ethnic Russians in Ukraine. If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained “pariah” role will justify a Nato-run guerrilla war that is likely to spill into Russia itself.
Instead, Putin has confounded the war party by seeking an accommodation with Washington and the EU, by withdrawing troops from the Ukrainian border and urging ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine to abandon the weekend’s provocative referendum. These Russian-speaking and bilingual people – a third of Ukraine’s population – have long sought a democratic federation that reflects the country’s ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are neither “separatists” nor “rebels” but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland.
Like the ruins of Iraq and Afghanistan, Ukraine has been turned into a CIA theme park – run by CIA director John Brennan in Kiev, with “special units” from the CIA and FBI setting up a “security structure” that oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the February coup. Watch the videos, read the eye-witness reports from the massacre in Odessa this month. Bussed fascist thugs burned the trade union headquarters, killing 41 people trapped inside. Watch the police standing by. A doctor described trying to rescue people, “but I was stopped by pro-Ukrainian Nazi radicals. One of them pushed me away rudely, promising that soon me and other Jews of Odessa are going to meet the same fate … I wonder, why the whole world is keeping silent.”
Russian-speaking Ukrainians are fighting for survival. When Putin announced the withdrawal of Russian troops from the border, the Kiev junta’s defence secretary – a founding member of the fascist Svoboda party – boasted that the attacks on “insurgents” would continue. In Orwellian style, propaganda in the west has inverted this to Moscow “trying to orchestrate conflict and provocation”, according to William Hague. His cynicism is matched by Obama’s grotesque congratulations to the coup junta on its “remarkable restraint” following the Odessa massacre. Illegal and fascist-dominated, the junta is described by Obama as “duly elected”. What matters is not truth, Henry Kissinger once said, but “but what is perceived to be true.”
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I’m certainly glad that Canada is soundly backing the fascist junta in the Ukraine, I’d hate to think what would happen if we let those people decide for themselves what is best for their country. We most definitely need to
serve our interestsprotect the people of Ukraine during this conflict.
I’m frightened for the wrong reasons…
The news: If you’re a 7-year-old in the U.S., you are by law too young to buy a cigarette at the counter — but you are old enough to work in the tobacco fields as a day laborer.
Human Rights Watched released a disturbing report Wednesday on child labor in America’s tobacco farms. The four states that grow 90% of U.S. tobacco — North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia — allow children as young as 7 to work in these farms for minimum wage. And it’s completely legal.
That’s right: Elementary school-age children are harvesting tobacco on America’s farms, exposing themselves to nicotine, toxic pesticides and dangerous machinery.
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I’ve never been a fan of “the good ole days”. Exploitation of the working class and families was always front and center in my mind as I read about the industrial revolution and our glorious path to the society we have today. Cue this story about elementary children working in the fields to remind ourselves of how advanced and how far we’ve come.
Bleh.
More on the happy fun times religion is bringing to the US over at the Experiential Pagan. :)
We are not hearing much about Venezuela at the moment, here is a brief snippet of what life is currently like in parts of that country. Many thanks to Minute Physics for posting this news.
The situation in the Ukraine has me puzzled. The violence and protests leading up to the deposing of the Ukrainian president were not given much coverage in the media that I follow/ or I just plain missed it. Whatever the case may be, I’m getting a couple of nearly diametrically opposed narratives of what is going on in the Ukraine and for my edification and yours we’ll go through them together.
For clarity, and the fact I like using coloured text, the article for Al Jazeera will be in green, and the articles from Counterpunch in the usual brown. Starting with Al Jazeera and the article by Mykola Riabchuk penned as “Ukraine: Russian Propaganda and Three Disaster Scenarios.
Riabchuk’s article has a surface pro-Ukraine slant but I think we can safely say that the slant is also of a pro-Western nature. (I intend to bold parts that are extra interesting/to be used in cross analysis)
“As the Ukrainian presidential election scheduled on May 25 gets closer, Kremlin’s window of opportunity for invading the country and derailing its European course is gradually narrowing. The rhetoric of Russian President Vladimir Putin justifying the Anschluss of Crimea and unscrupulous meddling in Ukraine’s internal affairs has been based on the premises that there is no legitimate government in Kiev, that it is being run by a gang of Nazis and anti-Semites who took power by coup d’etat and terrorised Russians and Russophones all over the country.”
So his this is his view of the pro-Russian narrative. On the other side we have Andre Vltchek with two article featured in Counterpunch: Ukraine, a Fascist Coup (UFC) and Ukraine: Lies and Realities (ULR).
[UFC] “Ukraine is burning, it is going to the dogs; it has been taken over by an illegitimate government engorged with fascists, neo-Nazis and simple pro-Western opportunists, as well as countless EU and US-sponsored members of various NGO’s.
The West has destabilized an entire nation, supporting right-wingers and fascists. Then it began spreading anti-Russian propaganda, even before Crimea had voted to join its historic homeland.
Everything was well planned, with Machiavellian precision. The EU was hoping to get its hands on the abundant natural resources, heavy industry and a well-educated and cheap labor force. In exchange, it was willing to give… nothing. No sane government would be willing to accept such a deal. Therefore, the only way to push through its agenda, the West began supporting violence and terror, as well as the fascist, neo-Nazi groups. A similar approach is being used by the US and EU in Venezuela, Syria and even Thailand.”
We can see here that the two narratives are aware of each others existence and are actively engaged in a contest to be the leading source of truth about what is happening in Ukraine. Riabchuk bluntly asserts with this next paragraph, citing three sources that the Vltchek’s position is false. I’m skeptical of the evidence offered as opinion polls, a newspaper article and a blurb from Transitions Online hardly seems like damning evidence.
“Such a claim, however calumnious and fully disproved on the ground by independent observers, opinion polls and the minorities themselves, can be sold nonetheless to some audiences, at least Russian, willing for various reasons to be fooled.”
Onward to Riabchuk’s Three Scenarios:
“Currently there are three possible scenarios that endanger Ukraine’s sovereignty. First, attempts to appease the separatist may result in a complete collapse of the Ukrainian authority over the eastern regions and the emergence of a puppet pro-Russian state similar to Moldovan Transnistria. It will likewise exist in legal limbo without international recognition.
Second, the eastern region may decide to proclaim itself the “true Ukraine” and, with Russian backing, launch an offensive against the central government in Kiev to re-establish Viktor Yanukovych’s “legitimate” presidency. The scenario is barely new since it was fully employed in 1918 when the Bolsheviks created a puppet “Ukrainian” government in Kharkiv to overthrow the democratic government of the Ukrainian National Republic (1918-1920) in Kiev. The main advantage of the scenario is to disguise a Russian-Ukrainian war as a Ukrainian-Ukrainian war.
The third option the Ukrainian government faces today is to submit to Russian pressure and bullying and accept a broad range of Kremlin-designed constitutional and administrative changes. These would transform Ukraine into a loose confederation of weak states highly vulnerable to Russian subversion, manipulation and sabotage.”
We lose the neat 1 to 1 congruence as the articles diverge in scope, but we can still compare and contrast the outcomes predicted:
[ULR]”Ironically, there is no ‘self-grown dispute’ between two nations. The seeds of mistrust, and possible tragedy, are sown by the outsiders, and nurtured by their malignant propaganda.
As Sergei Kirichuk, leader of progressive movement ‘Borotba’, explained:
“We have extensive invasion of western imperialism here. Imperialists were acting through huge network of NGOs and through the western-oriented politicians integrated into western establishment. Western diplomats declared that they invested more that 5 billions of dollars to ‘development of democracy in Ukraine’. What kind of investment is it? How was this amount spent? We don’t really know, but we can see the wide net of the US agents operating inside many key organizations and movements.
We can see that those ‘western democracies’ had not been concerned at all about growing of the far-right, Nazi movements. They had been ready to use the Nazis as a real armed force in overthrowing of Yanucovich.
President Yanucovich was actually totally pro-western politician, to start with. And his ‘guilt’ consisted only of his attempt to minimize the devastating aftermath that would come after implementation of the free trade zone with EU, on which the West was insisting.”
Western powers using whatever means necessary to promote ‘stability’ in the region. Shades of Iran, Nicuraugwa and Chile anyone? This shouldn’t be news to anyone. Of course this view is not shared by Riabchuk, as he sees the Russian narrative in terms of massive state propaganda leading to this.
“The Russian elite, infected by its own propaganda, becomes increasingly paranoid and determined to fight the invented “fascists” in neighbouring countries as if they are real. This means that whatever Ukraine does or says in this regard, it matters little. The real choice is either to share the fate of the 1956 Hungary and 1968 Czechoslovakia invasions by the Red army or to follow the example of the 1920 Poland and 1940 Finland (when the Russians were contained).
Ukrainians should learn to live for years, perhaps for decades, not only under persistent political and economic pressure but also under blatant propagandistic war, prone at any moment to turn into quite a real military invasion. If it does not happen by May 25, it may well happen eventually, albeit under some different pretexts and slightly modified rhetorical wrapping. No government in Kiev will be recognised by Kremlin as legitimate until and unless it is the Kremlin’s government.”
Contrast with the outcome from Vltcheck’s first article:
[UFC]”There is also one photo of Arseniy Yatsenyuk – the current acting PM of Ukraine – who recently met with President Obama in Washington, and negotiated the possibility of obtaining loans while agreeing to implement brutal anti-social, neoliberal reforms that will affect millions of Ukrainian citizens. This was the very price of the victory of the rightwing and neoliberal politicians that organized and controlled the Euro-Maidan movement.”
And from the second article:
[ULR]”Old women, Communist leaders, and my friend Sergei Kirichuk, as well as people from international solidarity organizations, made fiery speeches. Apparently, the government in Kiev had already begun to cut the few social benefits that were left, including free medical assistance. Several hospitals were poised to close down, soon.
People were ready to fight; to defend themselves against those hated neo-liberal policies, for which (or against which) none of them had been allowed to vote for.
“In Crimea, people voted, overwhelmingly, to return to Russia”, explained a young man, a student, Alexei. “But the West calls it unconstitutional and undemocratic. In Ukraine itself, the democratically elected government has been overthrown and policies that nobody really wants are being pushed down our throats. And… this is called democracy!”
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Still with me intrepid readers? I certainly hope so because the dynamics of the Ukraine situation are most intriguing. Are we witnessing a Russian coup, or an American one? Is this a triumph for self-determination or a end run to escape the grip of toxic neo-liberal policies. My readership is wide and diverse and I entreat you to share your knowledge and opinion about this muddled situation with me so we can all better understand exactly what the heck is going on over there.
Ohhh, bonus content! Watch Bill Maher not talk about anything important for 6 minutes. Fascinating(!) where his and his panel’s assumptions lay.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
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