(no subject)

Y'know, about Dude Looks Like a Lady... intriguingly, as in the Kinks' Lola, the narrator is not humiliated and repulsed by the bedtrick played on him, but embraces the situation! That violates the normal punchline of the joke, as seen in Bachelor Party, Charlie Daniels' Uneasy Rider '88, that mobile phone ad, etc etc etc. Judging by pop culture the only thing which compares in masculine humiliation is having something put into your bottom (which seemed to happen in every episode of The Lone Gunmen) or being come onto by a fat woman. At least if you're cuckolded, you're still a man.

(no subject)

Continuing to think about Ted Lapkin's SMH article defending torture at Guantanamo Bay.

Probably the most misleading aspect of the article is Lapkin's effort to downplay the abuse. I summarised his point like this: The mistreatment was merely "mild discomfort". They were only "denied their full eight hours of slumber".

Now, Lapkin is responding to a New York Times news item on a leaked Red Cross report, and quotes it: "solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions". There's no mention there of sleep deprivation, so clearly he's basing his characterisation of the mistreatment on reports other than those of the NYT news item. In short, Lapkin is aware that prisoners and their lawyers allege prisoners were:

- beaten
- shackled in painful positions for hours, causing wounds and permanent scars
- threatened with unmuzzled dogs
- forced to strip naked
- subjected to repeated, forcible body-cavity searches
- subjected to extremes of heat and cold
- being chained up for fourteen hours in their underwear and subjected to strobe lights, loud music, and cold

The writer would also be aware that approved methods include:

- sensory deprivation
- 20 hour interrogations
- threats of imminent torture or death
- "the use of a wet towel to induce the misperception of suffocation"

(Guantánamo Britons sue Rumsfeld ; Ex-Guantánamo Bay workers claim prisoner abuse was widespread)

Now, Lapkin's best argument is probably this one: Torture should be acceptable in a "ticking bomb" situation, to prevent another 9/11. We've all seen enough action films to understand what he means - that in a real emergency it may be necessary to break the law to save lives. Why doesn't Lapkin stand by this point? Why does he try to mislead us - not very convincingly - about the severity of the mistreatment? Why doesn't he say, well, the abuse was serious, but it was justified?

Perhaps because there is no "ticking bomb" at Guanatanamo Bay. There is no reason to believe the abuse of prisoners there has gathered information there which has saved civilian lives.

Lapkin says that the Chicago Tribune reported that intelligence from Guantanamo has prevented an attack at the Athens Olympics and as many as a dozen other attacks. As a letter-writer pointed out in yesterday's SMH, the Chicago Tribune actually said that the US military had made that claim, and that there was no way to verify it; the report is actually very cautious about the statement. However, it could well be true - in which case the problem is that the report doesn't say that the life-saving information was gathered using torture. In fact, the article implies that interrogators have been successful by "building personal relationships" with the prisoners, chatting about their personal lives and playing board games with them. (This could be a good cop - bad cop strategy successful after prolonged abuse. There's just no way to tell.)

One Pentagon intelligence officer has said that, 'Most of the information derived from interrogations at Guantánamo appears to be very general in nature; so general that it is not very useful. I doubt that anyone detained at Guantánamo ever had access to that type of information [specific times and places of attacks]; if some claim that they did, they probably did so to either earn the incentives or avoid the maltreatment that General Miller instituted.'

As to Lapkin's other points: I think we can dismiss his argument that The Convention Against Torture says governments should "undertake to prevent" torture, it doesn't actually ban torture as rather weak sophistry: actually torturing people is not much like preventing torture. His argument that The mistreatment was not severe enough to meet the definition in the UN Convention Against Torture seems to be based on his characterisation of the abuse as "mild discomfort", and not on any legal advice or precedent, so I think we can probably dismiss that too.

That leaves just his unstated assumption that torture is a way of extracting accurate information. As we've seen, there's no evidence from Guantanamo Bay to support his assumption. I want to do some more research before I address this further.

(no subject)

I'm flogging a spare copy of Seeing I on Ebay.