{"id":2069,"date":"2009-05-15T02:59:17","date_gmt":"2009-05-15T02:59:17","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2009-05-15T13:23:23","modified_gmt":"2009-05-15T13:23:23","slug":"quick_take_rele","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2069","title":{"rendered":"Quick Take: Release All<\/b> the Pictures"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nObama did a neat political straddle yesterday<\/a> on the issue of images of stated mistreatment of detainees by US and Coalition forces. First he’s for it and then he’s against it.<\/p>\n

We’ll talk more about his weathervane-like characteristics some other time, but I thought I’d take a moment and think through a position that I think is defensible.<\/p>\n

What isn’t defensible – in my mind – is either of the mainstream positions, which are really more about domestic political advantage than about really dealing with the hard, Jessup-like questions that do sometimes have to be asked and acted on. Note that at the end of Jack Nicholson’s impassioned speech, he was led off in irons.<\/p>\n

Hiding the pictures means we’re ashamed of them, and gives license to fantasies of darker, more brutal secrets than probably are to be seen there.<\/p>\n

Showing them is really about self – flagellation and the neat political trick of tying your political opponent to one’s back before picking up the whip.<\/p>\n

Each of those acts is a puppet’s reaction to greater forces pulling on strings.<\/p>\n

Let’s tie the strings in knots, and break the frame that is being hung around the images and around the events they depict. Let’s do that by hanging a larger, more powerful frame around them.<\/p>\n

Let’s by all means release the pictures – all of them<\/b>. Let’s release the pictures of the Al Qaeda torture cells in Fallujah<\/a>, and of their victims. Let’s release the videos of torture and murder from jihadi websites.<\/p>\n

Let’s not let our people off if they did wrong – but let’s please put their actions into context as we make that decision. I’ve publicly opposed torture for some time, and I think that we have a real issue with harsh treatment that scales into torture. I also think we have a real issue with people who (in the extreme) think that offering a detainee a stale Danish instead of a freshly-baked one is tantamount to getting out the blowtorch and pliers. <\/p>\n

So let’s broaden everyone’s understanding, and see what kind of discussion emerges from that.<\/p>\n

–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Armed Liberal says release the US abuse pictures – and the ones of Al Qaeda torture as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2069"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2069\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}