PinkoCommie
02-11-2010, 07:11 AM
The British government’s loss in the Court of Appeal yesterday, where three judges ruled that it must make public a report on the alleged torture of British resident Binyam Mohamed while in US captivity for seven years, has delighted anti-torture campaigners. But while it is always satisfying when government censorship is overturned, it is worth asking what lies behind today’s radical and media distaste for torture. It might look like an edgy campaign, but there is something distinctly narcissistic and even conservative about it.
Binyam Mohamed is an Ethiopian national who moved to Britain in 1994. In 2001, he travelled to Afghanistan, for disputed reasons, and he was arrested in Karachi in 2002 while attempting to fly to Britain on a false passport. He was detained in Afghanistan, allegedly tortured in Morocco, and eventually flown to Guantanamo Bay, where he was held prisoner from 2004 to February 2009.
The UK Foreign Office redacted information pertaining to America’s alleged ‘cruel, inhuman and degrading’ treatment of Mohamed, but the Court of Appeal has now insisted that the censored text be published. Anti-torture campaigners have welcomed the court’s implication that the UK government, as one headline summarised it, was ‘devious, dishonest and complicit in torture’.
Yet one question remains: when and why does torture become a flashpoint political issue and a concern for the liberal elite? Recent history tells us that torture does not always make the front pages of the papers and does not always agitate radical and liberal campaigners to the extent that they will build campaigns against it.
...today’s myopic focus on torture is history repeated as farce. At least Sartre and other French intellectuals opposed torture in an attempt to recapture ‘the France of the Rights of Man and Citizen’, and of course others went further still and questioned France’s suppression of African people’s democratic rights (7). Today’s anti-torture campaigners, by contrast, merely want to expose Britain’s alleged slavishness to the evil Bushites and generate a Love, Actually-style world in which floppy-haired British PMs stand up for fair play and decency. It is really they who feel tortured, morally and politically.
The usefulness of the torture issue today is that it allows campaigners to focus on the acts of one military man against one suspect, thus removing broader national and democratic questions and replacing them with narrow discussions of fairness and individual morality. They have disgracefully distilled the entire ‘war on terror’ and the destruction of Afghanistan into What Was Done To Binyam Mohamed.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8166/
Binyam Mohamed is an Ethiopian national who moved to Britain in 1994. In 2001, he travelled to Afghanistan, for disputed reasons, and he was arrested in Karachi in 2002 while attempting to fly to Britain on a false passport. He was detained in Afghanistan, allegedly tortured in Morocco, and eventually flown to Guantanamo Bay, where he was held prisoner from 2004 to February 2009.
The UK Foreign Office redacted information pertaining to America’s alleged ‘cruel, inhuman and degrading’ treatment of Mohamed, but the Court of Appeal has now insisted that the censored text be published. Anti-torture campaigners have welcomed the court’s implication that the UK government, as one headline summarised it, was ‘devious, dishonest and complicit in torture’.
Yet one question remains: when and why does torture become a flashpoint political issue and a concern for the liberal elite? Recent history tells us that torture does not always make the front pages of the papers and does not always agitate radical and liberal campaigners to the extent that they will build campaigns against it.
...today’s myopic focus on torture is history repeated as farce. At least Sartre and other French intellectuals opposed torture in an attempt to recapture ‘the France of the Rights of Man and Citizen’, and of course others went further still and questioned France’s suppression of African people’s democratic rights (7). Today’s anti-torture campaigners, by contrast, merely want to expose Britain’s alleged slavishness to the evil Bushites and generate a Love, Actually-style world in which floppy-haired British PMs stand up for fair play and decency. It is really they who feel tortured, morally and politically.
The usefulness of the torture issue today is that it allows campaigners to focus on the acts of one military man against one suspect, thus removing broader national and democratic questions and replacing them with narrow discussions of fairness and individual morality. They have disgracefully distilled the entire ‘war on terror’ and the destruction of Afghanistan into What Was Done To Binyam Mohamed.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8166/