If They Made Rumsfeld Rub Shit In His Own Mouth, Would It Be Abuse or "Torture?"-- Regarding the Torture of Others

The New York Times > Regarding the Torture of Others

The Bush administration and its defenders have chiefly sought to limit a public-relations disaster -- the dissemination of the photographs -- rather than deal with the complex crimes of leadership and of policy revealed by the pictures. There was, first of all, the displacement of the reality onto the photographs themselves. The administration's initial response was to say that the president was shocked and disgusted by the photographs -- as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict. There was also the avoidance of the word ''torture.'' The prisoners had possibly been the objects of ''abuse,'' eventually of ''humiliation'' -- that was the most to be admitted. ''My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture,'' Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said at a press conference. ''And therefore I'm not going to address the 'torture' word.''

(Rumsfeld, you fucking war criminal. We can only hope you HANG for your crimes. But is HANGING a torture? Probably not. It only lasts a half hour or so.)