When Dick Cheney and his minions defend torture saying, “it worked,” they are channeling Joseph Stalin, according to Andrew Brown in the American Conservative. “One of the first disconcerting things to discover when you inquire into the interrogation habits of the KGB” Brown writes, “is that their practices weren’t defined as torture at all.” Leaving aside the infamous waterboarding, practices like sleep deprivation and stress positions were cornerstones of both the KGB’s terror and that of Bush and Cheney.

Of course torture “works” in getting information, Brown concedes, but that information is inherently unreliable. The confessions extracted from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other targets of U.S. torture have the same evidentiary value as confessions that Trotskyists were responsible for sabotaging the Soviet economy in the 1930s. Brown writes, “Torture is a means of forcing people to lie to us, under circumstances that compel us to believe them, because otherwise we would have to face the truth about ourselves.”

The arguments made for torture, including the ones made to the continuation of torture policies under President Obama, are couched in the language of pragmatism. “Pragmatism is not a substitute for philosophical rigor, however,” David Schimke wrote for the latest issue of Utne Reader, “and it cannot be used as an excuse to ignore the past.” In this case, an absolute abolition of torture is both pragmatic and moral, since torture cannot reliably deliver the truth and undoubtedly serves to hurt the U.S. moral standing in the world.

Sources: American Conservative (subscription required), Utne Reader 

As anyone who’s lived in an urban apartment knows, it’s nearly impossible to turn off your sense of hearing. Plug your ears, and you can still feel vibrations echoing in your head. Knowing this, US soldiers in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay have used popular music to “break” detainees into giving up information. Pundits tend to focus on the absurdity of using the theme song from the kids shows Barney and Sesame street as an interrogation technique, but Martin Cloonan writes for the New Humanist, “musical torture is far from being a laughing matter.”

Music as a weapon is often characterized by an “assault on identity and the lack of control,” Cloonan writes. He points out that British soldiers used white noise to attack Republican detainees in Northern Ireland, and classical music is still being played in various public places to keep young people from congregating. While researching music in neighborhood conflicts, Cloonan found, “Often what began as a request to turn sound down escalated into another form of sonic warfare, resulting in court injunctions and physical violence – including murder.”

Bands like Rage Against the Machine and Massive Attack are pushing back against the torturers, showing support for the Zero dB campaign, aimed at banning music for the purposes of torture. Jonathan Mann, on the other hand, has used his music to call attention to the torture memos that were recently released. You can watch that below.

Sources: New Humanist, Zero dB, Jonathan Mann 

Back in July, I blogged about Phil Toledano’s elegant visual profiles of phone-sex workers. Now, he’s moved on to foreign policy, asking the simple but odd question: “If American foreign policy had a gift shop, what would it sell?” 

Using what he calls the “vernacular of retail,” Toledano takes us on a surreal commercial tour of the last eight years—a trip well worth taking on the eve of the election.

“We buy souvenirs at the end of a trip, to remind ourselves of the experience,” Toledano writes. “What do we have to remind us of the events of the last eight years?”

The fantasy store’s stock includes the requisite T-shirts (“I Was Rendered to a Secret Prison and All I Got Was this Lousy T-Shirt” and “I (Heart) Unilateral Preemptive Strikes”) and some chocolates, along with an inflatable Guantanamo Bay bouncy prison cell and an Abu Ghraib bobble head, which Toledano tells me he had to have fabricated in China since no one stateside would make it.

Toledano’s installation is being shown today at Meet in New York (101 Crosby Street). If you can’t make it, take a virtual tour here.

Images courtesy of  Phil Toledano . 

Although Jesus was tortured and murdered, a majority of white Southern evangelical Christians believe that torture is often or sometimes justified when pursuing terrorists, according to a new poll by Faith in Public Life and Mercer University. Among the general population, a smaller percentage (48 percent) of respondents believe that torture can be justified. White evangelical support of torture was much lower when the questioner appealed to the “Golden Rule,” asking respondents if  “the U.S. government should not use methods against our enemies that we would not want used on American soldiers.” A slight majority (52 percent) agreed that the government should not.

The torture and killing of Jesus should motivate all Christians to oppose torture, Jimmy McCarty writes for the God’s Politics blog. Waterboarding and other interrogation techniques currently being employed by the US government are unchristian, according to McCarty, and followers of Jesus have a responsibility to speak out.

For more coverage of torture from Utne Reader, visit www.utne.com/torture.

Catholics are no strangers to schisms, but breaking secular ties is proving tricky, reports the Catholic newsweekly America (subscription required). When Amnesty International announced its policy supporting the worldwide decriminalization of abortion in August 2007, affiliated Catholic chapters had to decide whether the nonprofit’s work against torture and the death penalty outweighed its stance on abortion.

Unsurprisingly,  America found that many Catholic chapters disaffiliated from Amnesty International. “It’s disappointing,” says Monsignor Robert McClory, chancellor of the Archdiocese of Detroit. “On particular cases, we can work together. But the kind of in-depth collaborative work of the past would be stifled by the decision they’ve taken.”

In spite of the controversial policy, some social justice–minded Catholics are finding it difficult to abandon Amnesty International's work completely. Notre Dame’s campus chapter changed its name to “Human Rights Notre Dame” but continues to rely on information from Amnesty’s “Urgent Action” alerts. Across the Atlantic, the predominantly Catholic Amnesty Northern Ireland has struggled with breaking ties, reports Ireland’s public service broadcaster RTÉ, and is considering letting Catholic schools re-join Amnesty International if they can be sure funds raised won’t help support abortion. 

Catholic human rights groups may continue to seek new affiliations. America speculates that some may look to abortion-neutral human rights organizations such as the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.

Image by Takoma Bibelot, licensed under Creative Commons.

"Bush administration officials who pushed torture will need to be careful about their travel plans,” counsels New York attorney and Columbia Law School Professor Scott Horton in “Travel Advisory,” recently posted on the New Republic’s website.

For while it’s unlikely that the U.S. government can muster the political will to prosecute the likes of Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld for specifically discussing and, at the very least, tacitly approving the use of torture to interrogate suspected terrorists. It’s “reasonably likely” that another western democracy would assemble war crime charges against Bush’s puppetmasters, especially after the president leaves office in January.

According to an investigative magistrate in a NATO nation already assembling evidence against a “small group of Bush administration officials,” it’s unlikely anyone would be extradited on war-related charges.” But, the unnamed source tells Horton, “if one of the targets lands on our territory or on the territory of one of our cooperating jurisdictions, then we’ll be prepared to act."

Click here for Utne’s Special Online Project: Tracking Torture Coverage.