I’ll give you three guesses, and no, I’m not talking about America under the Bush administration (just in case you’ve been absent from the Planet Earth for the last seven years), nor am I referring to the ACLU or any other human rights organization. We already know that according to Bush, “America doesn’t torture” even when it does, and we already know that most human rights organizations with any credibility at all condemn the use of torture, even when it’s done to “terrorists.” So, who am I talking about?
I’ll throw in a few hints to make it easier for you. It’s a country ruled by a de facto dictator. It’s one of our allies in the war on terror. And it’s a country rumored to be a place where we send prisoners for a little additional extracurricular activity above and beyond the “enhanced interrogation techniques” of which President Bush is so fond, a process of out sourcing euphemistically referred to as extraordinary rendition.
Have you figured it out yet? Well, to spare you the “hard work” of googling “torture,” “war on terror”and/or “extraordinary rendition” to ransack the gazillions of hits such a search would turn up for that one proverbial needle in the haystack, here’s the answer, and it’s certainly one I wasn’t expecting:
An Egyptian court has jailed three police officers for beating a prisoner and forcing him to parade down a busy street wearing women’s underclothes.
Senior officer Maj Yosri Ahmed Issa was sentenced to five years in prison after being convicted of torture.
The court heard that Ibrahim Abbas was made to walk along busy streets in Alexandria dressed in a nightgown.
The victim also claimed he had been beaten with batons at a police station in the Mediterranean port city.
Now to be fair, I don’t think this one case now means that Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s perpetual President, has suddenly decided to change his oppressive tactics, nor as he abandoned the use of torture as an instrument of state suppression of dissent to his dictatorial rule. As many Egyptian human rights activists rightly point out, Mubarak’s regime is well known for its use of torture and other forms of abuse by the Egyptian police, military and other government agencies.
Still, I find it ironic that the Mubarak government allowed this case to proceed to a conviction of these police officers when the abuse of the prisoner in question was, in the immortal words of Rush Limbaugh himself, nothing more than a little light hazing such as that which is practiced by a certain well regarded fraternal organization at Yale University.
Publicly, at least, the Egyptian government now stands opposed to even minor forms of torture. Meanwhile, in the United States, we have an Attorney General who can’t be sure “water boarding” constitutes torture, a President who denies anyone under him has ever authorized the use of torture on individuals held by his government in secret and not so secret prisons around the globe (despite clear evidence to the contrary), and a whole host of brown shirt wannabes who can’t wait to employ such “techniques” on their fellow citizens who don’t worship the current commander-in-chief with the same fervor that they do.
I suppose we should be thankful that the vast majority of Americans oppose the use of torture by the Bushites. Maybe soon, we can get a government that reflects their views on the issue, rather than one bent on emulating the worst regimes on the planet.
