What to do about torture? Manfred Nowak interviewed

[Briar]

There's an excellent interview with the United Nations special rapporteur on torture here:

http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict-terrorism/nowak_4249.jsp


A highlight or two:
"The Bush administration has done quite a lot to undermine the absolute prohibition of torture, for instance by interpreting torture in a very restrictive manner and claiming they are not really torturing. To them, torture is only really something after which you suffer long-term mental disorder or organ failure. Everything else is called "humanely-degrading treatment" which needs to be balanced against the threat of terrorism - it's a trade-off between security and human rights."


"...the prohibition of torture is an "absolute right", which means that there is no proportionality to be applied. A little bit of torture doesn't make us safer, it's the opposite. As soon as you undermine the prohibition of torture, and you start in the "ticking bomb scenario" to apply torture, it very quickly spreads and creates new terrorism. We now have more terrorists since we are fighting terrorism by violating our own standards and the international rule of law."

"Terrorists want to force us to give up our own universal values of pluralist democracy, human rights and the rule of law. They have achieved this to a certain extent by destabilizing our value system and our pluralist democracies. If we had stuck to our values within the international framework of human rights, there would be fewer terrorists who are convinced that their actions will be successful."

"It took some time to wake up to a situation in which our fundamental values were put into question. The US mid-term elections show that civil society in the US feels that the unilateral arrogance of the Bush administration has seriously damaged the reputation of the US everywhere in the world."

[Demeter]

1. I'd Like to Humanely Degrade Gonzales and His Bosses

for starters....

[Briar]

2. Gonzales and his bosses

have degraded themselves.