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Sunday, January 10, 2010

The Taser and the Waterboard: Is the Tide Turning on America's Culture of Torture?

The first thing to say is that the uncivilized idea that police should be able to torture people with tasers to make their jobs easier is directly connected to the uncivilized idea that interrogators should be able to torture people at the waterboard to make their jobs easier.

The second thing to say is that every single minute devoted to questions about whether tasers yield effective compliance or waterboards yield reliable information is a minute in which we are not talking about the absolute unacceptable evil and illegality of these practices and hence facilitating them (even if one is siding with sane experts in insisting that tasers are unsafe and recklessly overused and that information obtained through torture is notoriously unreliable).

The third thing to say is that the 9th Circuit Court's recent decision to limit taser use seems to be rippling wholesomely outward already, impacting law enforcement training programs, just as the Obama Administration repudiation of torture is a welcome thing.

The fourth thing to say is that since the taser ruling limits but doesn't ban the device (and of course the taser is just one of a whole constellation of questionable "non-lethal" policing techniques and devices, chemical, acoustic, radioactive, digital ominously proliferating in defiance of Constitutional guarantees of free speech and assembly), and since those responsible for torture have not been prosecuted for their war crimes we are far from addressing the dangerous authoritarian substance of these techniques and their rationales in anything like a consistent or sufficient way.

But perhaps we can discern a promising turning of the bloody tide here?

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