Abu Gharaib was A symptom of a deliberate policy of Brutality. Lest anyone think that the administration didn't know the warnings, didn't here complaints, and was caught by total surprise by what happened there, todays New York Time also has reports on the early warnings about the barbarity and illegality of the administrations policy of torturing detainee:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/06/politics/06abuse.html
(also refer to Washington post article from yesterday:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48446-2005Jan4.html)
They report:
"In late 2002, more than a year before a whistle-blower slipped military investigators the graphic photographs that would set off the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, an F.B.I. agent at the American detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, sent a colleague an e-mail message complaining about the military's "coercive tactics" with detainees, documents released yesterday show."
Now the FBI is a professional organization. They know how to extract information from people without using torture. They have sophisticated techniques, some of which are a gentle version of what the Army and CIA were doing under administration direction at Abu Gharaib and Guantanamo. The methods the army were using were learned from the French in Algeria and hundreds of Brutal regimes the US has had contact with over the years, including many who style themselves "Islamic" and the regimes where some of these people were immigrants from.
So the most galling thing about this scandal is not just the scandal itself. But the systematic lying, "newspeak" and1984 tactics used to disguise and hide what was going on. This is impeachable stuff, only the Republicans would never impeach one of their own, and these were only "foreigners' some of them so despicable that most people can only say "they deserve it." Never mind that the most despicable people usually never get tortured. And as Richard Cohen noted yesterday, this is also Kafkaesk stuff. Oh well.
Re-read Orwell:
http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/1984
Read Kafka:
http://www.levity.com/corduroy/kafka.htm
Please check out todays Washington post article.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54854-2005Jan6.html
It talks about how Gonzales dissembled and took the Nuremburge style defense of "It's not my job" (to render moral judgements or legal counsel as legal counsel!) in todays hearings.
This stuff makes me ill. I don't like Islamic Jihadists, but they don't have a monopoly on coercive or authoritarian behavior.
Greetings!
(I'm sorry, this doesn't have anything do with your post :P)
I've been doing a lot of research on Judaism recently, and found your very informative website. I would like to cite it as a source. When did you last update the site, sir?
Posted by: Kay Rivera at January 8, 2005 02:19 AMI only have a couple of pages on the subject there. I think my essay on the PaRDeS was fairly accurate. I need to revise it however as I'm a lot more clear on the "four methods" than I was when I first read about them.
Also I've gotten more material that corroborates my thesis that the Rabbis were teaching in an esoteric/exoteric style. First Maimonides himself talks about how most of what he had to talk about needed to be transmitted face to face. He also hints on who much of even the Torah is not literally accurate and shows signs of being anachronological (the result of oral and scribal traditions without sufficient copy-discipline).
Second there are explicit references to this story in much of Jewish writings. And various places where the subject is elaborated on sometimes fancifully.
The result of this difference in views about holy works is that those who approach religious texts as "divine" in a kind of "taboo"/authoritarian way; and many Jews, Christians, and others, who understand the notion of the "PaRDeS" and are clear on the relationship between the human and the divine; come into a sometime conflict that owes it's lack of resolution to these different attitudes on the subject. This conflict is as much within traditions as it is between them. As a Sufi and a Kaballist may see religion much more akin to one another than to their respective Moslem or Orthodox brothers.
Posted by: chris_holte at January 10, 2005 08:55 AM