"Torture Lite" or bringing torture to light

New torture photos hit the front pages of all English papers today.
It is a day for National Shame and Humiliation.

But will any of our leaders pay the price. I doubt it. The Neo-cons were able to contrive the sacking of one of our tabloid editors, who jumped the gun on this one, publishing a photo of soldier abuse in Iraq that was probably forged.

Four executives in the US were recently fired for overstating the case against Bush’s evasion of his duty during the Vietnam war.

We all witnessed the absurdity of the Hutton report which humbled the BBC for reporting a tad more than it could verify at the time about the distortion of evidence around Blair’s pretext for war in Iraq. Hutton and whitewash are now synonymous in our culture.

But the right has done its dirty work.
Only Channel Four is worth watching now for news, free of neo-con bias.

We are told that there are no more left and right wings in politics. This is a lie.

Politics is being levered so that the centre is much further to the right. Things that are an affront to decency and a democratic order are being accepted without challenge in the media.

Weeks after the Law Lords ruled that detaining people without trial was a grave threat to our democracy, the prisoners are still locked up. The executive is seemingly beyond control.

The British Army was forbidden to use hooding by our own laws and according to the Geneva Convention, after the abuses of Northern Ireland. The soldiers were at it again in Iraq, until someone was brave enough to report it.

Now as British soldiers are finally brought to trial, we wait to hear if “Torture Lite” will be defended by the authorities here as it is being in the US.

The American sadists, recently in court, had the excuse that Gonzales and Rumpsfeld had endorsed “Torture Lite” as acceptable in the war against terror, as a tool of interrogation. The British Squaddies don’t even have the “following orders” excuse that was scrapped at the Neurenberg trials, after the second world war. What they were doing was following the American example, I expect. But perhaps the foot-soldier has always been and will always be brutal, after the brutality of military training.

A steady trickle of these pictures and stories will probably have little impact on the next election result, but they may yet be nails in the political coffin of the leader who encouraged our soldiers to behave unethically by his flouting of International Law, Mr Tony Blair.