A modest torture proposal - and more on French madness

Toronto Star humour writer Linwood Barclay, less sharp than in the old days, nonetheless has a brilliant column this week:

Here's an idea, and I can't believe I'm the first to come up with this modest proposal, but why doesn't the U.S. government just go ahead and torture Lewis "Scooter" Libby? And not just for that ridiculous name.

Sure, the point's a bit obvious, but someone had to give it a go, and this one's pretty good.

Meanwhile, France is bathing in the glory of its hideous, underground, fascist aquifers - or some such metaphor. De Villepin's evoked a 1955 law that permits the state to impose curfews on towns and police to conduct raids without warrants. Surely there's some historical irony here!

Indeed, there is. The law was initially written to broaden the legal capabilities of French forces suppressing the Algerian revolution when Algeria was still a colony. And now, the children/grandchildren of the cheap Algerian labourers (themselves survivors of the first instance of the 1955 law) that France imported, are facing the repression under the exact same law.

(In fact, one might even notice a further irony, that perhaps there wouldn't be so many desperate immigrant families in France today from that part of the world if the Hexagon hadn't fucked Algeria so badly during its century of colonization that by the time it left, there were only two engineers in the whole goddamn newly-independent country [1].)

Also very precious, the leader of the Socialist Party in the French National Assembly, Mr. Ayrault, has refused to "play politics" - i.e., to criticize - this approach, out of Republican solidarity. Like President Chirac, who said that "by definition" the Republic is stronger than its enemies, Mr. Ayrault, as reported in Le Figaro, swears by tautology. He said:

"Cela fait partie des dispositions législatives qui n'ont jamais été abrogées depuis qu'elles ont été votées. Si elles étaient inacceptables, la gauche au gouvernement les auraient déjà abrogées depuis longtemps."
Trans: "[The law] is one of the legislative options that have never been abrogated since they were approved. If they were unnacceptable, the left when it was in government would have abrogated them a long time ago."

In other words, all laws passed before 2002, when the Socialists were most recently booted from power, are by definition good laws, since the Socialists, well, are-and-have-always-been perfect. Or, perhaps Mr. Ayrault is obliquely - subconsciously even - admitting that the Socialists share responsibility for the desperate conditions of France's slum-dwellers... Hmm, doesn't seem likely.

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1. Richard Lawless, "Algeria: The contradictions of Rapid Industrialisation," IN North Africa: Contemporary Politics and Economic Development, eds. Richard Lawless and Allan Findlay, (New York: Croom Helm, 1984), p. 153. (Yes, I wrote a long paper on the subject in university.)