By: Mulga Mumblebrain

Mulga Mumblebrain — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 07:24:03 +0000

Torture is as American as apple pie. It has been used from the earliest years of America’s existence. ‘Water-boarding’ was a favoured technique used against the ‘injuns’, and was exported by veterans of the Seventh Cavalry to the Philippines, where it was used on the Filipinos in the war of mass murder waged there. As throughout its history, the Yanks did not disguise their racist contempt for the victims of their atrocities, and that has remained their attitude to all the world’s ”niggers’ and ‘injuns’ to this day. Indeed, ominously, the killers of US Special Forces allegedly refer to most of the world as ;injun country’ implying many, many Wounded Knees to come.Torture is almost never used to extract information, and the information it does obtain is utterly useless. The tortured will say anything to cease their suffering. At present there is a ghastly upsurge of apologias for torture, basically emanating from Israel and apologists for Israel. As the Sunday Times revealed as long ago as 1977, and numerous Israeli and Palestinian groups have attested since, Israel has tortured tens of thousands of Palestinians, crippling and killing some in the process, and psychologically scarring all but the toughest. This has been motivated, in my opinion, by a number of factors. There is the sadism of the torturers, hard to slake once you get the taste for it. There is the generalised racial contempt of certain Israelis for the Arabs. There is the desire to recruit informers and Quislings, which Israel has turned into an art form. And most crucially, there is the determination, shared by all racist colonial regimes, to intimidate the native population when they grow restive. Just recently Murdoch’s local flagship The Fundament (the arse-hole of the Nation) ran an article extolling torture as ‘compassionate’, utilising a far-fetched extrapolation of the standard Israeli ‘ticking bomb’ justification for torture. The degrading effect pro-Israeli propagandists have on public discourse could not better be illustrated. As we know, the techniques of psychological torture through sexual humiliation, revealed at Abu Ghraib, were perfected by the Israelis over the years, then kindly transmitted to their fellow doughty fighters in defense of ‘Western Civilization’. At least those in Guantanamo have mostly not simply been liquidated, as were the several thousand Taliban crammed into containers, sprayed with bullets, left in the sun for a few days, then poured out onto the sand. at Shebergan. All by our ‘democratic’ allies the Northern Alliance, under the control and instruction of US Special Forces.

Comments on: Guantanamo as a Symbol

By: Mulga Mumblebrain