>
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/10/opinion/10GREG.html
> This just fucking floors me. This guy is writing
> full of
> self-congratulation about how righteous he and the
> US have always been
> about not torturing -- and he doesn't see any
> contradiction with the fact
> that a puppet that we controlled was torturing
> people literally next door
> to him! Milosevic is responsible for the Bosnian
> Serbs, but we're not
> responsible for the SVA???
> The whole
> thing is a testament about how torture was the most
> normal thing in our
> empire and he presents it as if it was evidence of
> our higher moral
> standing and his in particular.
This is not at all out of character for these kind of people. Remember, Jonathan Alter's 2001 Newsweek article, 'Time to Think About Torture' ends with the paragraph:
"We can’t legalize physical torture; it’s contrary to American values. But even as we continue to speak out against human-rights abuses around the world, we need to keep an open mind about certain measures to fight terrorism, like court-sanctioned psychological interrogation. And we’ll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies, even if that’s hypocritical. Nobody said this was going to be pretty." <http://conversations.tamu.edu/topics/2001fall/torture.html> also see <http://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-are-we-in-a-war-do-we-have-an-enemy.html>
This raises a question: for whom is there a difference between torturing and 'outsourcing' torture?
Perhaps the Lacanian Big Other is instructive here. I think, so long as the torture isn't 'officially' (= in the eyes of the Big Other) performed by US forces, then it doesn't 'officially' constitute a scandal.
This also would explain the way that the news of the Abu Ghraib torture works on the US public. Up to a certain point - and, even with the WSJ article and report, that point has not yet been reached - it is possible to know that someone at the top of the administration authorised torture, yet, at the same time, disavow this knowledge (we can still say 'just a few crazies gone mad'). Until evidence that the orders came from the top becomes incontrovertible and unarguable (e.g. until it becomes 'official'; until the Big Other finds out about it) then it is possible to ignore the weight of evidence. The Big Other finds out about it when a line is crossed. The question is, what is this line? (a reported conversation; a document that reached the president's desk ... or does it have to go as far as a signature on a document?)
I find that Lacan's Big Other works well in conjunction with ideas of cognitive dissonance. We can lower the dissonance (disavow knowledge) until the point when 'the Big Other finds out'. At this point, a line is crossed and restructures the entire field of knowledge.
Simon
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