Predator Press
[LOBO]
While seldom hesitant to give a blistering, blustery rant on the Republican Party, I’m a little leery of going into the torture issue with too much venom.
See, what all the talking heads retrospectively criticizing the Bush Administration on this issue aren’t saying is really important: hindsight-addled commentary like “torture is wrong,” and “torture doesn’t always work” –while true- are disingenuous distortions of what really happened here.
I think at some level we all know torture is wrong –we, as a country, even signed treaties against it decades ago. But how would you have responded to that policy on September 12, 2001? I don’t know about you, but I was pretty upset … I’m not sure I would have cared about it’s “effectiveness” on any Al Qaeda we might have been able to get our hands on at the time.
So instead of calling it “torture,” I’m regarding it as a small measure of revenge for being part of the machine that brutally massacred almost 3,000 non-military Americans.
I’m actually more comfortable with that.
4 comments:
I hope it's obvious I'm not "pro torture." I'm just pointing out that if Cheney Bush and Rumsfeld went after Al Qaeda with anything less than ruthless zeal at the time, we would have had their heads. But as we slowly heal, we seem to be forgetting the utter horror of this nigh-incomprehensible evil act -and the subsequent [warranted, I would argue] national rage seems more and more diluted. While this is a natural consequence of elapsed time I suppose, it is still a complete mischaracterization of the event.
-Personally I distinctly recall the ability to rationalize virtually anything that would have brought us Osama at the time, and I think any person honest with themselves would admit that.
The problem for me, because, though liberal in many ways, I'm an advocate for capital punishment, is that without a fair trial or any evidence at all, we have no way of knowing that all of these individuals were (a) members of that vicious terrorist group and (b) involved. Justice depends on objective review and clear evidence. Otherwise, it's pure revenge and can (and usually does) sweep the innocent along with the guilty.
If someone raped my daughter, for example, and I knew - without doubt - who it was, would I have trouble torturing said monster or be disgusted with anyone who did? No. I wouldn't be trying to get information from that, of course, because such information would be completely useless. I'd also be willing to take responsibility for this and wouldn't shroud myself in the law. I could call it justice (and it would be, to some extent), but it would be revenge too. And I'd take my damn lumps because bringing the monster to my sense of justice would be worth the cost of the rest of my life. Or I wouldn't do it.
Would I be willing to torture his kid brother if I couldn't find the actual rapist? NO and I'd be kidding myself if I thought doing so wouldn't make me a monster.
I did say no to torture the day after (no lie) just like I was vocally against bombing Afghanistan and invading Iraq. The bad guys tend to not get caught and leave the innocent to bear the pain. How is that less reprehensible than what was done to us on 9/11? How many thousands of innocent Iraqi have paid the price for our outrage?
Or isn't 100,000's civilian casualties, of "collatoral damage," also horrifying?
You can call me a liar if you like. My husband has always said I'm too honest for my own good.
That's an interesting distinction too.
And frankly I'm just as guilty as anyone ... While I would have preferred a quiet "Special Ops" method I more or less bought into the Afghanistan bullshit wholesale. When CNN showed that Predator drone flying over, I thought “Oh yeah Osama, it’s on.” I didn't become the least bit alarmed at potential hidden motives and –perhaps worse- the competency of our leadership until Iraq.
-I remember thinking, "We attacked who?"
It's hard to separate. I think it obviously should have been handled differently -without a doubt the Al Qaeda response should have been far more surgical. But the Bush Administration was far from the diabolical omniscient-slash-omnipotent body of leaders we seem to be romanticizing at the moment ... if anything history bears out they were quite the opposite.
But all that ensuing boobery wouldn’t play out until later. We couldn't know any of this in September 2001, and therefore we are now comparing two different sets of problems: one known and one unknown.
Would I have done something I consider morally reprehensible to prevent another 9/11? I hate to admit it but I probably would. When examining that "snapshot in time," inaction given all the unknowns may have been equally reprehensible, and I would have considered it my obligation to use every weapon at my disposal. (However that being said, I don't think I would have had to waterboard someone 100 times before I concluded it wasn't a successful approach either; I feel less guilty that the events occurring at all than I do the successive stubborn and bumbling unwillingness to abandon them when they clearly weren’t working.)
-I keep flipping back and forth on this. While I’m reluctant to prosecute the Bush administration for responding to the emotional Nationalist “charge” of the events, I remember a steady diet of that charge coming down from those same people.
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