Bob Woodward’s article in today’s Washington Post includes the first Bush Administration confirmation of torture at Guantanamo. Susan Crawford, who was named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Gates in February 2007, went on the record:

“We tortured [Mohammed al-] Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case” for prosecution.

Aside from an official admission of something everyone already knew, what is most interesting about this human rights embarrassment? I think we should focus on the definitional argument undergirding the administrative decision labeling these “abusive techniques” as too rough while other detainees’ experiences during stays at Gitmo and in foreign prisons after CIA rendition still remain undisclosed or unclassified as torture. Consider Crawford’s logic in deciding to call Qahtani’s treatment “torture” and halt prosecution:

Crawford, 61, said the combination of the interrogation techniques, their duration and the impact on Qahtani’s health led to her conclusion. “The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. . . . You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge” to call it torture, she said.

 

Thus, the medicalization of torture. It is a biopolitical classification right out of Discipline and Punish. While the purpose of torture is to trigger a psychological breakdown (this was certainly accomplished: ”There is no doubt he was tortured,” Gitanjali S. Gutierrez, Qahtani’s civilian attorney, said this week. “He has loss of concentration and memory loss, and he suffers from paranoia.”) this definition sidesteps the psychic realm in favor of the more easily categorizable medical definition. Taken as the legally accepted category of “torture,” this policy would run into the same ethical problems as capital punishment, since doctors’ Hippocratic Oaths would seem to ban participation in torture. Were a licensed doctor’s medical opinion is required to render legally binding judgement on the limits of a prisoner’s human rights, these ethical dilemmas would become legal problems akin to the ones that caused the Supreme Court to issue stays on executions last year.

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Thank you NJDG for pointing out my lapse into the mythology of an etherial Internet. We can never forget that the Internet is a series of tubes that require huge amounts of capital and largely unseen infrastructure. Indeed, the rising use of high-bandwidth streaming video and web apps is responsible for a serious evolution in electricity use. Behind every Google search, YouTube video, and Blogger post is a network of data centers that require the same amount of energy as a small city and the coolant systems akin to those of a nuclear power plant. The global nature of the Internet allows western users to enjoy the results of this processing power without having to build new coal-fired power plants in their own backyards.

Google's top-secret data center on the Columbia River

Moreover, utopian claims about the democratic and intellectual potential of the Internet frequently gloss over the capital interests invested in our favorite sites and causes (Online organizing on Facebook, brought to you by CIA-backed venture capital, social-networking pioneers behind Obama’s $750m online fundraising juggernaut). This is why we need to keep theorizing the relationships between speech, politics and capital on the Internet.

BUT

My last post was talking about blogging from the perspective of a writer seeking to published his thoughts, along the lines of Andrew Sullivan’s piece. Thus, I was glossing over these issues of capital because for the aspiring (or successful) writer, the issue is about getting people to read your ideas. From this perspective, free web publishing tools (like wordpress) do free writers from some of their direct dependence on capital as it relates to the content of their thoughts. For example, I highly doubt that this would reach anyone outside of the SciLi bathrooms without the help of those tubes.

Last night I watched both sides of the pending transfer of power. First, I saw Jon Stewart’s take on Bush’s G-20 performance. Bush constructed some brilliant metaphors to explain his current thinking about free market fundamentalism.

Then I watched this:

I can’t wait for the Obamas to move in.

The bad really seems so much worse after I’ve watched Barack. It will take a while for this to get old, if it ever does.

PS: Don’t miss Andy Rooney’s closing thoughts on journalism, an impassioned plea to remember the irreplacable value of newspapers.