So terror is among us. We know this, Bush has told us. But because terror is with us, we must terrorize others, in ways, that are clearly illegal. As reported in the New York Daily News, the abuse of detainees is not ordinary, but extraordinary, much more pervasive that we may think.
It is more than disquieting, and it makes me wonder what ideological justifications are used by abusers to mask the effects of what they are doing. Sometimes, I think they probably rely on some relational logic. Like what we are doing is not so bad, because these prisoners remain alive and with very few visible bruises. In other “nations” there is “real abuse.”
Something like the logic of “this torture is like diet coke, diet terror, really not so bad, even if it leaves a bitter aftertaste…” Sometimes, however, we find out only much later, that the diet was way worse than the real thing, in part because we could never point to the “reality” of what is out there……