Thursday, December 26, 2002 ::
Black and White, or Grey?
Salman Rushdie: Getting Into Gang War. Is the upcoming war with Iraq more like The Two Towers, a battle between pure good and pure evil, or is it more like Gangs of New York, an amoral struggle for "bare-knuckle power"? Rushdie chooses the latter comparison: "In short, we may be in for a gang war on a gigantic scale, and yet, as in Scorsese's movie, that gang war, brutal, cynical, atavistic — a war in which one man's hero is another's villain — may paradoxically succeed in bringing a more modern world into being." Of course, it might succeed in doing exactly the opposite.
Making the World Safe for Torture
Washington Post: U.S. Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations. Ever wondered what happens to suspected terrorists captured by the US? So have I, and now we know — they are tortured. The prisoners are housed abroad, because what we do to them would be illegal here in the States. And if our "stress and duress" tactics don't work — tactics that our own State Department has said in the past violates human rights — then we hand them off to other intelligence services with a willingness to use even more brutal methods. As one US intelligence officer remarks: "We don't kick the shit out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the shit out of them." Of course, we are told that everything has changed after September 11th. Apparently, that includes the need to practice what you preach.