Stoopid Stuff

Hey, wait! Torture WORKS!

What? This is it? This is the argument? Uh uh. This is weak sauce. Hell, babe, bank robbery "Works" as long as it generates an income stream. Whether or not torturing people works is not, and should not, be any part of this discussion. That's not the point. The question is infinitely simpler than that. The important question is whether we can adopt the brutal, authoritarian tactics of our enemies and still, at the end of the day, claim to have "won".

We can't. Winning means "walking alone though the combat zone and come out with your soul untouched" as none other than Bruce Springsteen told us oh so many years ago. This is important, and it's important to understand the terms offered on the bloody clay of this field. We cannot win if we become something coarse and foul, if we cannot stand tall and say that we never compromised our beliefs and values in order to fight an enemy with neither. And the Americans who are so quick to toss away the things that make us right are no different from bin Laden and his criminal ilk, who recognize no limits, for whom winning the battle is more important than winning the war, no matter what the cost. I despise you all.

I had lunch with a friend the other day. He doesn't follow politics, or news for that matter, but he was quick to tell me that he had "...a hard time feeling sorry for these people..." who we tortured. That's what were up against, in a sense. People who never really considered a constitutional issue, who were never "detained", never found any tendency toward authoritarian government to be troubling to them, as it never affected their lives. People who cannot feel empathy for anyone our government says are "evildoers". After all, didn't they kill 3000 Americans in 2001? "They" seem to expand infinitely to fit the requirments of our fear - mongering government, and nobody seems to be willing to take time out from American Idol to do the minimal research required to find they are not just lying, but manipulating.

Chris Hayes says "...the torturers are winning [the argument]..."

President Obama says he only wants to "look forward, not backward" as if somehow investigating hideous crimes that America has ALWAYS stood against is in itself some kind of obstructive behavior. What madness, what Orwellian doublespeak do we find ourselves swimming in?

It's time for us to speak with an unusually focused clarity. It does not matter if torture "worked". For ANY definition of "worked". It cannot matter, it cannot be ALLOWED to matter, it cannot ever be a standard by which a government - sanctioned torture policy is evaluated. The answer must be, now and for all time, regardless of the argument, "Who Cares?"

There are nearly infinite arguments I could make to support this position. I could point you to Nuremburg. The trials of Japanese war criminals, the actions of KGB and STASI and NorKor interrogators. I could tell you about all the times we stood, nearly alone, and told dictators and secret police and sick bastards from Chile to the fucking Hanoi Hilton that you might choose this path, but a very large part of the reason we will BURY YOU is that this is a path we will not go down. We will live up to our stated values, our beliefs and our constitution, and we will win because we are right, for fucks sake, and any mentally challenged nine-year-old can recognize that very simple fact.

Except we're not anymore. Except in fighting them we've become them. Except that it's bad enough that in a time of fear and confusion when our country suffered what so many countries have suffered orders of magnitude worse for hundreds of years, we chose to turn our backs ont the values and convictions we hold so dear, the very beliefs and rule of law that we held up as a beacon, a shining light of hope to people around the world, and we took actions we could recant and try to seek absolution for. Except there is a small but significant membership in the American electorate that chooses any form of expediency over beliefs, any short-term solution that might feel good over the pillars of American values that made us different, who chose and continue to choose the same behaviors as our enemies. The cannot see that to become what we are fighting is to lose the fight. They seem to think that there is, what, some nobility, or worse, efficacy in acting in the same way as those very thugs we have been calling out for decades? I am sick to my soul.

posted by mikey @ 5:49 PM