Via Lindsay, UCLA police caught on cellphone video "taseing" (electrocuting) a student in the library because he first didn't show his ID card, and then refused to leave. The student's name: Mostafa Tabatabainejad. Watch the video here and read Lindsay's discussion.
I got home a while ago from teaching a seminar to intelligence officers on the ethical problems of torture. It was a good discussion. But one thing that we did not discuss was the moral damage such practices do to the broader culture whose government allows these practices. First, encourage a culture of fear. Then encourage a response - torture - as one way of information-gathering. Then wave it off when the information-gathering role is ceded to cruelty.
Paranoia and power don't go well together. They especially don't go well together when they're combined with an environment that increasingly makes space for official and unofficial aggression in the broader culture.
2 comments:
What about rendering those to be interrogated always to another country? It would be like independent auditing. Or nations could have their interrogating done at the Hague. Equally subject to paranoia?
That's not a bad idea. Renditions could go to the Hague, where American, Egyptian, and Burmese torturers await the renditionees in a building next to the International Criminal Court. The ICC would pipe in video of the torture directly to their offices, where torture monitors debate whether waterboarding is torture or not. Then, the torturers would be put on a conveyor belt directly connected to the witness stand in the court.
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