Life is for Living

This blog is to collect random thoughts that don't really have a structure, except a publishing chronology, and even that is unlikely to follow the creation chronology.

Monday, April 10, 2006

War against words...

In the program "Democracy Now!" on Friday (See relevant transcript here) , we heard an Amerikan general talk about journalists detained by 'Merikun forces in Irak:

"... The situation in Iraq is not like you will find it in New York or Chicago or Miami or London or any other place. It is a war zone. They are held -- they are not arrested, which is a misperception by a lot of people. They are a security detainee, because at the time of the event there was something that was going on that at least appeared to be a security risk to the Iraqi forces, the Iraqi government, the coalition troops under the U.N. Security Resolution 1546.

There is a process in place to investigate what happened, investigate the individuals, but there is not the same jurisprudence that you would think that is happening in the United States. It’s not the United States, it’s not Europe. The same rules do not apply. And until everybody understands that, there will always be the issue of unlawful detention from some people. I believe, like I said, that from what I understand today, there are no more journalists or stringers or anyone else that works for the news media that’s being detained. "


So, as with the redefinition of torture, we just redefine the word detention: these people are not detained, they're just being held. It so happens they're being held in prison, but it's not the same as in Europe or the United States, you see, "the same rules do not apply". What rules apply, then?

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home