By: Josiah

Josiah — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 02:44:54 +0000

This was inspiring to read. Maybe it was naivete passing itself off as wisdom, but until recently I dismissed the controversy surrounding torture as a distraction from larger crimes, the sort of thing that gets criticized at the liberal end of the corporate media spectrum to generate the impression of dissent. I should have known better, being the son of a war vet and having been reading about the U.S. military/police clientelism on four continents for years now. But I just got back from a week in Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam, of all places. In the War Crimes Museum (in one of the many retrofitted French colonial buildings in the city), I visited the “tiger cages,” which were originally used by the French to guillotine nationalists, and were later used by the Din Diem regime (with dozens of US advisors) to torture and execute thousands of what would now be called “terrorists” and “insurgents.” I saw pictures of young women wasting away in a crowded prison cell, a young man being waterboarded by a US marine, and those were the ones who weren’t simply shot. This is obviously the tip of the iceberg, regarding the horrors that were visited on the Vietnamese people, and we can say the same thing about Iraq and dozens of other countries today. But after hearing Iraq veterans like Camilo Mejila describe the torture they were ordered to administer (sleep deprivation, etc.), and all the scandals, I’m convinced that the “secret prisons” we hear so much about are no better than these “tiger cages.” Perhaps you need to reach to a certain age to get the requisite sense of deja vu to have a bullshit detector that really works. (Here I imagine a jaded married couple reading the morning newspaper, and one of them saying, “Look, honey, they’re trying that one again. You’d think they would come up with something new.” And they both laugh.)

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By: Josiah