H16076
Headlines : Civil LibertiesNaomi Klein: In War on Terror, Are You Next?
“Torture produces false information, breaks a society and leads to mass imprisonment,” she said. “You torture people, they confess and you can say you caught a terrorist. Torture doesn’t produce truth; the ticking time bomb notion is ridiculous – ‘24? notwithstanding.“
[Posted By ShiftShapers]Republished from Washington Square News (New York)
“We think we don’t fit the profile,” she said. “If we feel safe, we are banking on the racism of our government.”
Klein, author of current New York Times bestseller “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,”& visited the Silver Center last night to participate in the panel “Torture and Democracy,” along with Lisa Hajjar, chair of the law and society program at the University of California at Santa Barbara and author of “Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza.”
“We’re here to talk about the relationship between torture and democracy,” Klein said. “The thesis of the book is that the central claim of our time that the free market and democracy go hand in hand is a fairy tale.”
Klein made it clear that her definition of democracy is not a country that holds elections, but a nation that values human rights and civil liberties that are being stripped away by the use of torture as a “crude tool of coercion.” She finds that shock coupled with torture is being used to scare both individuals, largely in Guantanamo, and mass publics into submission.
Posted by ShiftShapers
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“Just like torture sends individuals into shock, events like Sept. 11 send whole societies into shock,” she said. “They lose their narrative. We need to start telling stories of why terror is happening.”
What is your story?