Americans ARE torturers. We torture the truth with our smug self-deception and we ought to at least admit it. Proof? We need look no farther than today's hearings on the abuses of the Iraqi prisoners.
How much longer can we hide under the opaque blanket of our self-taught and long ingrained "knowledge" that "Americans don't do [torturously cruel] things?"
It's obvious that we refuse to take even one peek behind that shroud of self deception, even when we've had time to reflect and the facts strike a clearly discordant note. Today's "uniform outrage" by media, Congress, the Pentagon, and the rest of us, at our soldier's "softening up" of the Iraqi prisoners is a clear example of this.
NO ONE is acknowledging the fact that over the last three years whenever it's come down to principle or expediency in the "flight against terrorists," the leadership of America, the military and the American public have almost always chosen expediency. Most of us couldn't have cared less about the protections of the Bill of Rights, international law or the sovereign rights of other nations over the last 2 1/2 years. Examples?
--Put people in prison without the right to trial, right to know the charges, right to counsel or right to a hearing?.....HELL YEAH, if they MIGHT HAVE BEEN terrorists or even if they MIGHT LATER BE terrorists. Let them ROT FOREVER, the innocent with the guilty. God will judge them later.
--What if they're American citizens?.....HELL YEAH, if it makes us more safe if we lock them all up. Let the locked up innocent suffer with the guilty.
--Assasinate those we SUSPECT of terrorist involvement, even though we don't know who decided their guilt or how, or how accurate the process is?...HELL YEAH, we're not concerned with who decided their death sentence or how, just kill them wherever you find them cause, after all, why would we kill them if they weren't guilty? Americans don't question the killings of their government when the safety of AMERICANS is at risk.
--Kill KNOWN INNOCENT men, women and children that happen to be in the area when we find our targets of assasination?....HELL YEAH, we can't let the deaths of innocents get in the way of protecting our own innocent from death.
--Question our Secretary of Defense when he dehumanizes those who fight against our governance in Iraq by calling them "thugs, dead-enders and terrorists who have no regard for human life?....HELL NO, if we're angels and they're fighting against us, they must be evil incarnated. THEY JUST HATE FREEDOM, that's all we need to know. Let HIM set the tone for the treatment of those who fight us.
--Question the reports that captured terrorists and insurgents are singing like canaries?....HELL NO, we DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT MADE THEM TALK. Maybe they're such wimps that the minute we ask them they just spill their guts. Whatever; it wouldn't have anything to do with torture because THEY do that, WE DON'T. How do we know that? Well, we wrote the history books and everyone except those who are evil and hate us know that Americans don't do such things.
--Question our own moral relativity when we not only tortured prisoners, we got caught at it in PICTURES?....HELL NO, those weren't real Americans, they were sick people that acted in unAmerican ways. The "vast majority of out troops" are real Americans. But hey, that was some good shit we got from those bad guys, wasn't it?
......
The Congress and the Pentagon are wrapping themselves in the flag. The "brave troops" are being paraded once again to deflect criticism of defects in character, a lack of moral leadership and our possession of the weak human traits that are characteristics of every society and which ripen, rot and stink during times of war.
The truth is far different. Although we live in a carefully safeguarded society with many checks and balances, we are not uniquely "moral." If we take away the protections of the constitution and the courts, if we concentrate power in the hands of the executive/police power arm of government, and if we continue to internalize the fiction that it is Americans, and not the American system, that makes America more moral and just than most of our world neighbors, we will one day face the ugly truth. The ugly truth that reveals itself in pictures and the actions of ALL OF US who created the pictures while we now claim that we are "SHOCKED AND HORRIFIED."
My own view is that a better and more honest debate would be one that recognized that we've always used torture in times of war. We should either change that unwritten policy or set workable limits on WHEN we torture and the methods that we accept for torturing, as well as some kind of sliding scale process to determine the level of torture in given circumstances. Because there ARE clearly instances when prisoners should be COMPELLED to talk but those decisions should be supervised; they shouldn't be left to the discretion of sadists who gravitate to the prisons. |
