loving the alien.....

Guardian Unlimited

"You ask yourself how someone can grin at the sufferings and humiliation of another human being - drag a naked Iraqi man along the floor with a leash? set guard dogs at the genitals and legs of cowering, naked prisoners? rape and sodomise prisoners? force shackled hooded prisoners to masturbate or commit sexual acts with each other? beat prisoners to death? - and feel naive in asking the questions, since the answer is, self-evidently: people do these things to other people. Not just in Nazi concentration camps and in Abu Ghraib when it was run by Saddam Hussein. Americans, too, do them when they have permission. When they are told or made to feel that those over whom they have absolute power deserve to be mistreated, humiliated, tormented. They do them when they are led to believe that the people they are torturing belong to an inferior, despicable race or religion. For the meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts were performed, but that their perpetrators had no sense that there was anything wrong in what the pictures show. Even more appalling, since the pictures were meant to be circulated and seen by many people, it was all fun. And this idea of fun is, alas, more and more - contrary to what Mr Bush is telling the world - part of "the true nature and heart of America".

"The charges against most of the people detained in the prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan being non-existent - the Red Cross estimates that 70% to 90% of those being held have apparently committed no crime other than simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught up in some sweep of "suspects" - the principal justification for holding them is "interrogation". Interrogation about what? About anything. Whatever the detainee might know. If interrogation is the point of detaining prisoners indefinitely, then physical coercion, humiliation and torture become inevitable."

Susan Sontag in the Guardian today. Interesting read, especially from an American author. Basically it sums up as: "Most Americans seem to think it's OK to torture someone, as long as they aren't American. Non-American life is worth less, or worthless maybe".