infobong.com

all that shit looks like it would hurt like a bitch. Johnny Knoxville got shot in the gut with a bean-bag shell and it looked like he had a hernia. nasty shit.

that said, those are hardly items of torture. Today they found a warehouse full of human remains of Iraqi dissidents who had been tortured and murdered for their political beliefs. People here are free to say and do what they want, as long as it does not pose a threat to the government. When Black Bloc anarchists threaten to attack cops and government installations, the government is within its right to protect itself.

Did Black Bloc anarchists attack cops or government installations at this protest? Was everyone shot a threat?

I'd say *private* security interests (rent a cops or bouncers or the like) are within their rights to pre-emptively strike, but it's not good when the arm of the state does it. that's asking for some high-stakes lawsuits. private companies also have a right to protect their land, but they are also a lot more limited in what they can do.

I don't know whether attacks by police or rent-a-cops constitute "torture", not because they can't be brutal but because "torture" generally implies that the victim is held in the custody of the torturer. There must be other equally negative words for excessive force under conditions of combat or crowd control.

However, there are other cases of torture coming to light in the present conflict. The John Walker Lindh case is one -- consider the fact that he was held blindfolded, naked and strapped to a cot in an unheated shipping container for days on end in order to soften him up for interrogation. (That CNN article isn't particularly good -- there's a much better recap of the Lindh case in the March 10, 2003 issue of the New Yorker, sadly not online.)

There's been controversy for some time around Israeli interrogation methods in which prisoners are tortured in ways calculated not to leave visible injuries or meet the popularly imagined definition of torture. You don't need red-hot pokers, cattle prods or mutilation in order to torture someone. Sleep deprivation, extremes of temperature, hunger, thirst and restraint-imposed muscular cramps will do just fine.

It seems clear that the US military and FBI personnel who had custody of Lindh used the same sort of techniques on him, techniques which John Ashcroft's Department of Justice stood by even though they ultimately contributed to the collapse of the DoJ's case against Lindh and his favorable plea bargain.

This is of concern not just because of Lindh but because of the question it raises: if the authorities were willing to torture a high-profile captive American citizen who they must have realized would eventually have his day in court, how do you suppose they have been treating captured unknown Al Qaeda and Taliban? Or, say, uncooperative captured Republican Guards in Iraq? (As opposed to the gratefully surrendering rank and file they are eager to show us getting medical attention and all the MREs they can eat.)