An oldie but a goodie

This is ancient news in blogging terms - April 29 - but I just heard about it via an ACLU mailing and it was too good to not share. A quick backgrounder, via the ACLU's web page on the suit involved.

The ACLU filed a request on Oct. 7, 2003 under the Freedom of Information Act demanding the release of information about detainees held overseas by the United States. A lawsuit was filed in June 2004 demanding that the government comply with the October 2003 FOIA request.

As a result, since last October the government has reluctantly released a series of relevant documents, which can be viewed at the above link. The ACLU continues to press for more releases. Now get a load of this:

In a federal court brief filed late last night[, April 28,] the American Civil Liberties Union and New York Civil Liberties Union challenged the government's claim that turning over photographic evidence of detainee abuse in Iraq would violate the Geneva Conventions.

Let me repeat that: The government, the same government that has claimed that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to those held at Guantánamo Bay or in Afghanistan, is now claiming that releasing evidence of abuse and torture of those same sort of people in Iraqwould violate those Conventions! The Conventions, that is, designed to protect the prisoners, are now to be used to protect the abusers.

Chutzpah does not begin to describe that kind of attitude and I'm afraid I lack the necessary skill at vituperative mockery to give it its proper due.

The government's memo containing the, well, I'll call it "argument" in lieu of a more descriptive term, can be found here; the particular argument about the photos begins on page 57. The ACLU's response is here. Both are relatively long .pdf files.

Footnote: Naomi Klein has a good piece on the actual uses of torture in the May 30 issue of The Nation.

This is torture's true purpose: to terrorize - not only the people in Guantánamo's cages and Syria's isolation cells but also, and more important, the broader community that hears about these abuses. Torture is a machine designed to break the will to resist - the individual prisoner's will and the collective will.

While torture is known to be useless at its claimed purpose of extracting "vital" information, it can be, as Klein notes, unhappily effective at its real one.