To Torture or Not to Torture, That is The Question
“Americans are like Nazis! How are we like Nazis? Because we torture people!” And torture is bad, or so they tell me. War is also bad, killing is bad, violence is bad, there are lot's of bad things out there. Now that we've acknowledged just how many bad things there are in the world, what are we going to do about them? Probably, hopefully, develop some perspective.
How about this. What happens when a man attempts to stab another man in the head with a knife while he's praying. That's bad. Right? If the man doing the stabbing was Black and the man praying was Jewish and White, is it even badder, more bad, totally bad? No! It's just bad. So, when the cops shoot the man with the knife after numerous warnings, is that bad? Is it even badder that the cops were White and the knife wielding perpetrator was Black? What if the man with the knife was insane, which he apparently was, was his death bad, badder or baddest?
Here's the thing, sometimes we have no choice but to do bad things to bad people. That doesn't make us bad. It makes us civilized. Perspective affords us the opportunity to look at all the variables in a particular situation and weigh the consequence of our actions. To act or not to act? That is the question. If we do nothing, then, evil will be allowed to thrive, to fester like a cancer, and potentially destroy what is good.
To meet violence with proportional violence may, in fact, be necessary in a harsh world. Torturing enemy combatants who obey no civilized rules of engagement, and use every tactic at their disposal to inflict terror and do the maximum damage, may be a reasonable use of violence. No matter how unpleasant civilized people believe it to be.
How bad is the torture that is/was inflicted? Certainly nothing comparable to the torture inflicted by the enemy, which includes rape, mutilation, beheading, cleaving children in two in front of their families, placing their severed heads on pikes for all to see. There is no moral equivalence here, except in the minds of the media, where they sit high above it all, comfortably removed from the grim reality.
In fact, many elite members of our own military are subjected to water boarding, extensive sleep deprivation, placed in small enclosures and left to suffer thirst and hunger. All, as a part of their training. Sound like torture? You bet. But, they willingly, knowingly, suffer all of the above, because they understand that they may be confronted with a far worse evil someday—and they must be prepared to deal with it. It is a harsh world, then, made even harsher by virtue of the evil that some men are all to willing to inflict on others. And, eventually, when the hard battle has been won by even harder men, society will either honor them as brave soldiers who fought for a righteous cause—or, as misfits who have no place in a civilized world. The latter seems to be the preferred method by some of our politicians.
The extraordinary measures that are now being debated, involving torture, were only undertaken after 9/11, when 3000 Americans were killed by a handful of extremists Muslims in the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. Everyone, and I do mean just about every politician felt that using limited torture in an effort to extract potentially life saving information from the enemy, was necessary. This includes some of the same politicians who are now involved in this current denouncement of the military.
So, what is their real motive? Make no mistake, this is an effort to paint America as the bad guy. It may also be an attempt to establish a basis for the closing of Guantanamo. To do that you need to show that it is, was and will be a heinous place of torture and torment if left open. That way president Obama can finally accomplish what he set out to do early in his presidency, but couldn't. Not until now.
In the end, it may be that there are serious crimes that need to be addressed. If so, the context will matter greatly. Self congratulatory appeals to the moral high ground will be as hollow as hell, if the nature of the extraordinary circumstances aren't factored in as well. If not, one injustice will be met with an even greater one—to the detriment of us all.
Mark Magula
How about this. What happens when a man attempts to stab another man in the head with a knife while he's praying. That's bad. Right? If the man doing the stabbing was Black and the man praying was Jewish and White, is it even badder, more bad, totally bad? No! It's just bad. So, when the cops shoot the man with the knife after numerous warnings, is that bad? Is it even badder that the cops were White and the knife wielding perpetrator was Black? What if the man with the knife was insane, which he apparently was, was his death bad, badder or baddest?
Here's the thing, sometimes we have no choice but to do bad things to bad people. That doesn't make us bad. It makes us civilized. Perspective affords us the opportunity to look at all the variables in a particular situation and weigh the consequence of our actions. To act or not to act? That is the question. If we do nothing, then, evil will be allowed to thrive, to fester like a cancer, and potentially destroy what is good.
To meet violence with proportional violence may, in fact, be necessary in a harsh world. Torturing enemy combatants who obey no civilized rules of engagement, and use every tactic at their disposal to inflict terror and do the maximum damage, may be a reasonable use of violence. No matter how unpleasant civilized people believe it to be.
How bad is the torture that is/was inflicted? Certainly nothing comparable to the torture inflicted by the enemy, which includes rape, mutilation, beheading, cleaving children in two in front of their families, placing their severed heads on pikes for all to see. There is no moral equivalence here, except in the minds of the media, where they sit high above it all, comfortably removed from the grim reality.
In fact, many elite members of our own military are subjected to water boarding, extensive sleep deprivation, placed in small enclosures and left to suffer thirst and hunger. All, as a part of their training. Sound like torture? You bet. But, they willingly, knowingly, suffer all of the above, because they understand that they may be confronted with a far worse evil someday—and they must be prepared to deal with it. It is a harsh world, then, made even harsher by virtue of the evil that some men are all to willing to inflict on others. And, eventually, when the hard battle has been won by even harder men, society will either honor them as brave soldiers who fought for a righteous cause—or, as misfits who have no place in a civilized world. The latter seems to be the preferred method by some of our politicians.
The extraordinary measures that are now being debated, involving torture, were only undertaken after 9/11, when 3000 Americans were killed by a handful of extremists Muslims in the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. Everyone, and I do mean just about every politician felt that using limited torture in an effort to extract potentially life saving information from the enemy, was necessary. This includes some of the same politicians who are now involved in this current denouncement of the military.
So, what is their real motive? Make no mistake, this is an effort to paint America as the bad guy. It may also be an attempt to establish a basis for the closing of Guantanamo. To do that you need to show that it is, was and will be a heinous place of torture and torment if left open. That way president Obama can finally accomplish what he set out to do early in his presidency, but couldn't. Not until now.
In the end, it may be that there are serious crimes that need to be addressed. If so, the context will matter greatly. Self congratulatory appeals to the moral high ground will be as hollow as hell, if the nature of the extraordinary circumstances aren't factored in as well. If not, one injustice will be met with an even greater one—to the detriment of us all.
Mark Magula