Torture

On 27 December Judge Aly Fekry of the Cairo Administrative Court banned virginity testing of female detainees.

There are times where I find myself wondering how so many people in a society could collectively be asking the wrong questions. How is it possible for such a vast majority to so completely miss the point? This occurrence used to be rare, but is now becoming more common place. I realize the world is indeed a complicated place, and we are never going to have it all figured out. Yet there has to be a point where at least someone in the crowd notices we have been looking at a situation all wrong…right?

A population-based assessment completed recently by the Journal of the American Medical Association found that nearly 40% of women and 23% of men in three Eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) had been subjected to gender based violence (GBV) since conflict reignited in the mid-1990s. Though some INGOs operational in the region have questioned the methodology of the survey, no one has questioned the existence of GBV against men.

With the torture debate making its way back into the headlines in recent weeks, I have found myself sifting through old news clips and articles from the spring of 2009.

If you have been following international news recently, you are no doubt aware that the world has been an eventful place to say the least. These past few weeks alone saw the emergence of the world’s 193^rd country, Human Rights Watch’s call for the prosecution of George W.

As I sat sipping my slightly too expensive, slightly too small beer in Joe’s Pub, the venue for yet another PEN World Voices event, I resorted to my new time killing device: my smart phone. A BBC news tweet popped up announcing the arrival of the UN’s top humanitarian official in the deeply, and seemingly continually, troubled Democratic Republic of the Congo. The social scientist buried beneath my software engineer exterior reflected on the point of tonight’s event.

When putting together my “Stories You May Have Missed in 09” post, I was surprised to see that two of the six news stories I highlighted involved Canada.  I suppose that I share the same conceit as many of my fellow Americans, we tend to view our neighbors to the north as just too familiar to really consider them a “foreign” country.  Our two lands share the longest de-militarized border in the world, we’ve been at peace for nearly two full centuries since the end of the War of 1812 – save for a little mid-19^th century

I had a sinking feeling in my stomach this week when the Canadian Federal Government and Prime Minister Harper's Conservatives voted to bury an inquiry into the abuse and transfer of Afghan detainees. It isn't the first time our military has been accused of a human rights scandal during peacekeeping missions and the move to postpone the inquiry suggests the government wants nothing more than to stop the flow of information and deflect any kind of responsibility.

The use of the "ticking time bomb" (TTBS) scenario to justify torture (talking to you Dick Cheney, Richard Haass, John Yoo, et al), is fundamentally flawed because it is impossible to meet all of the problem's criteria.

What are the criteria? Ten elements must be in place:

1. An attack is imminent

2. Legal and other authorities know about this imminent attack

Last night at the venerable 92Y, Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass took a few questions from a smiley, curious, leggy Katie Couric. Haass has a new book out, War of Necessity, War of Choice, and The MANTLE would love a good progressive critique of it--so get crackin'!