Monday, January 31, 2005
Dirty hands, us ?
Anything goes
Maureen Dowd's column, "Torture Chicks Gone Wild", in The NY Times on January 30th, is about a report by AP that Eric R. Saar, a former sergeant, who served as an Arabic interpreter at Guantanamo, is the author of a forthcoming book about interrogation and abuse of prisoners.
Among the methods: sexual arousal by women wearing provocative clothes and other means. Perhaps the most despicable was to defile the water tap in a Muslim prisoner's cell by use of faked menstrual blood ! Some prisoners, after their release from Guantanamo, alleged that prostitutes were used. What did we do...fly them out to Guantanamo on contract or are such women regular members of interrogation teams? I have not seen any report about denial by the Pentagon.
Makes you wonder what else is going on and how little we know. Apologists would say that it is necessary to take whatever means possible to stop terrorism. Really ? Can we put the genie back into the bottle ? Once we started on that slippery slope we lost control of the forces that we let loose. Appearing just after the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz,as it did, Ms. Dowd's column caused revulsion when I read it. It made me feel ashamed.
dowd
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"Only one enemy is worse than despair: INDIFFERENCE. In every area of human creativity, INDIFFERENCE is the enemy; INDIFFERENCE of evil is worse than evil, because it is also sterile."
----Elie Wiesel
Maureen Dowd's column, "Torture Chicks Gone Wild", in The NY Times on January 30th, is about a report by AP that Eric R. Saar, a former sergeant, who served as an Arabic interpreter at Guantanamo, is the author of a forthcoming book about interrogation and abuse of prisoners.
Among the methods: sexual arousal by women wearing provocative clothes and other means. Perhaps the most despicable was to defile the water tap in a Muslim prisoner's cell by use of faked menstrual blood ! Some prisoners, after their release from Guantanamo, alleged that prostitutes were used. What did we do...fly them out to Guantanamo on contract or are such women regular members of interrogation teams? I have not seen any report about denial by the Pentagon.
Makes you wonder what else is going on and how little we know. Apologists would say that it is necessary to take whatever means possible to stop terrorism. Really ? Can we put the genie back into the bottle ? Once we started on that slippery slope we lost control of the forces that we let loose. Appearing just after the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz,as it did, Ms. Dowd's column caused revulsion when I read it. It made me feel ashamed.
dowd
"Only one enemy is worse than despair: INDIFFERENCE. In every area of human creativity, INDIFFERENCE is the enemy; INDIFFERENCE of evil is worse than evil, because it is also sterile."
----Elie Wiesel
