It’s Simple: Torture is Unacceptable
john posted in politics & culture on November 8th, 2007
There’s no big mystery here: torture is immoral and unacceptable. Moreover, real professional interrogators agree that it doesn’t work. Diplomats agree that it removes diplomatic leverage in world affairs. The entire democratic world, under the Geneva Convention since World War II, has resolved to never use it. It’s illegal, immoral, and stupid.
Waterboarding, as discussed and euphemized during the Attorney General hearings, is torture. Look it up. It was a war crime when Japanese soldiers used it in World War II, it was torture when the Spanish Inquisition used it against heretics. It is not “simulated drowning” it’s slow drowning. It is not a defensive act like returning fire, it is a pre-meditated cool-headed crime. Torturers should be jailed - Nazis, terrorists, Church Inquisitors, Chilean dictators, Khmer Rouge officers, Japanese militarists, banana republic dictators, and yes, US Presidents, officers and CIA employees. In the case of Americans, it is also tantamount to treason, because it subverts the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
So why does the US administration, military and CIA now use torture? Because they are afraid of a few Islamic terrorists? No, because they are afraid their whole cardboard house of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt will come tumbling down. They need to whip up the passions of the populace against an outside enemy in order to cling to their petty little seats of power.
So where do you fit in this chart?
| Support and condone torture | Abhor and punish the torture | |
| Nazis | vs | Nuremberg Trials |
| Japanese militarists | vs | Tokyo War Crimes Trials |
| Spanish Inquisition | vs | Protestant reformers, rise of constitutional law |
| Belgian King Leopold | vs | Western nations |
| Bush administration | vs | Honorable citizens of the USA |
| Republicans en masse | vs | Some Democrats |
| Senators Feinstein and Shumer | vs | Senators Leahy and Kennedy |
| TV show 24 | vs | MSNBC Keith Olberman |
References:
Keith Olberman’s OpEd video, an impassioned plea for civilized behavior and the rule of law.
Editor & Publisher: An eye witness, Joseph L. Galloway :
Memo to Media: I Witnessed ‘Waterboarding’ — And, Yes, It is Torture
Four decades ago, as a reporter in Vietnam, I saw what it was like. When you hog-tie a human being, tilt him head down, stuff a rag in his mouth and over his nostrils and pour water onto the rag slowly and steadily to the point where his lungs start to fill with water, that is torture.
NPR story on TV torture affecting the real military.:
According to interviews with military leaders, portrayal of torture on television shows has changed interrogation techniques in the field.
LATimes, Rosa Brooks, Torture: the New Abortion The use of torture as a political litmus test. Which Republican, safe in their limos and jets, can call loudest for cruelty to prisoners.
NY Times, Scott Shane, A Firsthand Experience Before Decision on Torture:
…three years ago, Daniel Levin, then the acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, decided to bring reality to bear on his deliberations on the torture question. He went to a military base and asked to undergo waterboarding.
Mr. Levin, 51, a graduate of Harvard and the University of Chicago Law School, had served in several senior posts at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department since the administration of the first President Bush. But he had never served in the military, where American pilots, special operations troops and others for decades have undergone waterboarding to prepare them for possible treatment if captured by an enemy.
Waterboarding has been used in interrogations at least since the Spanish Inquisition and was used by the Central Intelligence Agency on three high-level terrorism suspects in 2002 and 2003, according to officials familiar with the agency’s secret detention program. It involves strapping a suspect to a board with feet elevated, covering his face with a cloth and pouring water on it to produce a feeling of suffocation….
Won’t you call your senator and demand they ban torture and enforce the Geneva Convention?
Mukasey has been approved.
November 8th, 2007 at 6:01 pm
Johnny,
If you are going to keep blogging about politics, you’re going to force me to keep recommending videos — even if you insist on not watching them.
Peter Dale Scott, author of “The Road to 9-11″ was interviewed by a Berkeley poli-sci professor and he pretty much lays out what Eisenhower’s warning about the military industrial complex as wrought half a century later.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5829118121827327998
To the jaded, that may sound old-hat. But the line he traces is freshly chilling in the telling.
It’s about secrecy and the deadly compromise we make when we convince ourselves that governments need to keep and act secretly. And the trickle-down effect on other areas of the culture and economy reinforce the impulse to control events (like an empire) rather than have to innovate, adapt and evolve our way forward.
Our ship of state is much closer to being lost at sea than we allow ourselves to imagine.
Your litmus test about torture is a good one. It also demarcates the boundary between those who are too Machiavellian in their personal world view to actually believe in the US Constitution and the principles it represents, and those of us who still want to believe that democracy has a future.
We are still fighting the civil war folks! The culture wars are the real deal, and the conservative side is by far and away the more ruthless of the two.
November 9th, 2007 at 10:19 am
A lot of us think the US is in a constitutional crisis far worse than Nixon’s arrogation of power.
I hear the argument a lot that we should just let the Democrats win the Presidency and that will cool things off, which I agree it will. But I don’t want Hillary or Obama to have Cheney’s secrecy and extra-constitutional defacto power either.
Seems to me that checks and balances and rule of law are largely ignored today by both sides. Meanwhile we hear all this window-dressing about democracy in third-world countries.
Keep posting up about those videos, somebody will watch them.
John