Suketu Mehta, author of the magnificent Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, has a moving Op-Ed in the NYT about the Mumbai tragedies. Anna at Sepia Mutiny does a close reading of the text. Both are worth your time.
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More on our #torture policies
If you haven’t already seen it, read this article in Harper’s entitled “We Still Torture.” Then go listen to “Blackout Beach” by the Kominas. Now we have entered what we may wish to call the post-torture era, except that it is not. Indeed, we cannot even revert to the easy hypocrisy of the Cold War. We have returned to our traditional practice of torturing and pretending not to, but the old routine is no longer convincing. We know too much. We know that we are still imprisoning men who very likely are completely innocent. We know that we still beat…
I confess, I was amused
A friend was insulted, but doesn’t read the blog on a (semi-)regular basis. I think the real criticism is the hypocrisy of the Republicans, but you decide.
Prisoner Treatment, Morality, and #Torture
Juan Cole is brilliant in his analysis of how the US lost the moral high ground on prisoner treatment, in part because of our torture polices. But I fear that the argument that the public humiliation of prisoners is against international law won’t take the US very far after 8 years of Bush-Cheney. After the evidence surfaced that the US military took all those humiliating pictures of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to blackmail them by threatening to make them public, the US assertion of support for this principle of the Geneva Conventions will be met with, well, let us say…