The Divine Miss S — a friend’s not altogether admiring nom de plume That about covers that subject. But writers keep nibbling at the why’s and wherefore’s. Today To which we say: “Yes sir!”<\/P>
\nfor Susan Sontag — told us<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A>: “It is
\nprobable that the ‘torture’ word will continue to be banned” by the W. gang. Tim Rutten, the Los
\nAngeles Times media columnist, writing a week before her piece appeared in The New York
\nTimes Magazine on Sunday, told us<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A>:<\/P>
\nThe mainstream media’s insistence on primly referring to what occurred in
\nwhat was once Saddam Hussein’s most infamous prison as “abuse” is part and parcel of their deep
\navoidance of this story’s implications. Abuse is what happens when you fail to feed your parakeet
\nor speak intemperately to a sensitive child. When you starve or drown or beat or sexually
\nhumiliate another human being, it is called torture. It’s what occurred in Hitler’s concentration
\ncamps, Stalin’s Gulag, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Pinochet’s Chile, Hussein’s Iraq and — now — in the
\nsecret prison system the United States has constructed in defiance of its international obligations
\nand our own laws and traditions.<\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\n
\nEliot A. Cohen does it in The Washington Post with a piece about “Our Soldiers and
\nUs.”<\/FONT><\/EM><\/STRONG> <\/A>He tells us:<\/P>
\nIf a society has no norm of chief executives accepting responsibility for their
\ncorporations’ moral and financial failures, do not expect generals to line up to say: “It happened
\non my watch, and I therefore offer the secretary of defense my resignation.” In some measure,
\nsocieties get the militaries they deserve.<\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\n
\n