Bollettino

The British Medical Journal has published a scathing denunciation of the American torture of various prisoners of war. Naipaul has written of the irony of third world revolutionaries depending on the liberality of the system against which they operate. That irony, at least, is being systematically broken in the case of the American torture of Al qaeda operatives in Cuba. While Bush can threaten Iraq forces for harming American POWs, who is going to ensure the humane treatment of Afghanistan POWs? Surely not the Al qaeda leaders, who have shed the forms of legitimacy that would have provided some protection for their followers. Protection should be provided by our second thoughts -- by those reactions to our first, immediate anger by which civilization continues. That isn't happening, though.

"The New York Times and International Herald Tribune last month published apparently well founded accounts of the techniques applied to Abu Zubaydah and other Al Qaeda suspects in US custody. These included deprivation of food, water, sleep, and light; covering subjects' heads with black hoods for hours at a time; forcing them to stand or kneel in unnatural positions in extreme cold or heat; keeping them naked; prolonged chaining or shackling; hooking them up to sensors during serial interrogations; and denial of medical attention. There have been persistent reports of beatings at some US operated centres, and a military pathologist has determined that the deaths of two prisoners at Bagram, Afghanistan, last December were homicides. At Bagram "disorientation is a tool of interrogation and therefore a way of life." At Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where around 650 men continue to be held, largely in solitary confinement and beyond the jurisdiction of US law, there have been 20 suicide attempts so far."

The only good news, here, is that the barbaric treatment of these prisoners is consistent with the barbaric norm in the U.S. Our prisons are a standing scandal.

It is time to normalize the POW regime of these prisoners. And it is time to face up to the fact that, if they cannot be released, it is because the war in Afghanistan is still going on, in spite of the general media consensus that we won it in a cakewalk.