Torture, Human Rights, and Bush’s State of Exception

At YouTube

The 59-minute video features journalist and UC Berkeley professor Mark Danner, who chides the Bush Administration for what he sees as its poor record on torture and human rights. The lecture is part of the 2006 DeWitt Higgs Memorial Lecture event, sponsored by Earl Warren College at UC San Diego.

Although the lecture took place two years ago, the information it contains remains relevant.

In The Dark Side (Doubleday, 2008), Jane Mayer describes how Mamdouh Habib, an Australian citizen, was detained as a suspicious foreigner in Pakistan in October 2001 and subjected to “extraordinary rendition” by unidentified Americans. Habib was taken to Egypt and tortured. When his blindfold slipped, he got a glimpse of his captors as:

muscular men wearing black short-sleeved shirts, several of whom had distinctive tattoos: One depicted an American flag attached to a flagpole shaped like a middle finger, the other a large cross.

These tattoos, this combination of tattoos, are emblematic of the way the Bush administration has cheapened everything the United States stands for.