Here There Be Monsters

All right. Enough. Just fucking enough. It's bad enough that Darth Cheney and all the airwave bloviators are bitching about Obama releasing four measly little torture memos.

Cheney, mind you. The guy who was always in an undisclosed location when he was vice president, has now been everywhere telling us how unsafe we are because the eVille liberal Obama released those damn memos.

But now Obama's own director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, says torture may have helped. Of course, we know that because someone who received a memo from Blair leaked it. Here's the relevant quote:

High-value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country.

I guess it was just plain necessary to waterboard Khalid Sheikh Muhammed 183 times in 30 days. That's six times a day, people. Six times every day they strapped him down and poured water on his face to make him think he was drowning.

And that's just an average. What it really means is that if they didn't exactly stick to the six times a day average, there were days when they did that to him more than six times a day.

But get this. In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Marc Thiessen, a former Bush speechwriter -- cause we all know how many interrogations speechwriters participate in -- justified torturing the detainees by saying -- as pointed out at Every Man a Giant -- that "we were actually doing the terrorists a favor by torturing them."

But the memos note that, 'as Abu Zubaydah himself explained with respect to enhanced techniques, brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardship.' In other words, the terrorists are called by their faith to resist as far as they can -- and once they have done so, they are free to tell everything they know. This is because of their belief that 'Islam will ultimately dominate the world and that this victory is inevitable.' The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely. This is the secret to the program's success.

Know what? That's fucking crazy talk.

Because it does not matter one iota that Khalid Sheikh Muhammed -- or "KSM" as the government prefers to refer to him so they don't have to openly acknowledge that he's a human being -- was the mastermind behind 9/11.

And it doesn't matter because torture is wrong, no matter who you are torturing or why. It doesn't matter if you got any good information. Torture is morally repugnant. It flies in the face of the very idea of decency.

When you torture another living creature, you lose your humanity. It's gone. It's why Paul Krugman was right when he said after reading the four released memos that "There is now no way to view the people who ruled us these past 8 years as anything but monsters."

What did it really get for us? According to Blair, "a deeper understanding of al-Qaeda." What deeper understanding did we need? Al-Qaeda's leaders regularly send out messages telling us what they're about. Did we really need to stick a guy's head into a box with bugs and tell him they were poisonous to find out that al-Qaeda is a radical fundamentalist group that has no problem using deadly violence to get its way?

Did torturing any of the taxi drivers and farmers who ran afoul of the wrong people and were falsely singled out to the U.S. military as terrorists get us Osama bin Laden? Did waterboarding Abu Zubaydah 83 times the month they waterboarded Muhammed 183 times get us Ayman al-Zawahiri?

Did torture stop the Mumbai attacks? The Madrid train bombings? The London transit bombings?

No. And even if it had done even one of those things, it wouldn't be worth it. We are not meant to be a nation of savages, and yet, when we torture -- when we allow torture -- that is what we are. Brutal savages.

And that goes for any Democrat who knew this was going on as well. If a Democratic congressman or woman sat in a "classified" meeting where torture was discussed -- no matter what euphemism they used to keep from calling it what it is -- then they're culpable too.

Let's say this again: Torture is wrong. It demeans not only the tortured but the torturers and anyone associated with them. And it does. not. work. Bryan at Why Now:

The only two groups who really think torture works, are people who enjoy it, and people so frightened that they would spill their guts on the threat of torture, i.e. the same people who fall for the 'good cop/bad cop' routine.

What torture did get us is much less safe, much less respect, much more hatred and much more anger. Digby:

Aside from the moral dimension, which should be the most relevant, the premise that the world must believe the United States will stop at nothing is very, very dangerous. It confirms the world's darkest suspicions about us and validates many of the arguments made by our enemies. I honestly can't conceive of anything that makes the US less safe than that.

Torture is immoral. Any country that practices it (or even pretends to practice it) much less contrives an entire bureaucratic legal underpinning for it, is then, by definition, immoral. That's the kind of 'exceptionalism' that turns countries into feared pariah states, veritably begging for mistrust among allies and the creation of new enemies. Unless we are prepared to do a lot more torturing, invading and occupying -- basically becoming a malevolent superpower holding on primarily by brutal force --- we have to repudiate this concept. The more powerful a country is, the more it needs to be seen as operating from a moral, ethical and responsible standpoint --- and the less chance it will be seen by others as a threat. Making the world recoil in disgust at their brutality is about the stupidest thing the leaders of an empire could do unless they plan to spend all their time fighting wars and fending off enemies.

A world power of our magnitude and unequaled military might naturally engenders mistrust around the globe, which our government must already go to great lengths to assuage. To add to that already delicate, difficult situation by illegally invading countries and endorsing something as barbaric, crude and indefensible as torture is criminally irresponsible. The United States is made much less safe by these actions and we will all be paying the price for that schoolyard mentality for the rest of our lives.

Far greater empires than ours have been brought low by exactly the kind of juvenile thinking that leads to the belief that unless the world is petrified of a nation's power to commit violence it will be unsafe. It's a self-fulilling prophesy.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has been all over the map -- the operatives who did the torturing won't be prosecuted, the big guys who ordered it won't be either. "Time for reflection, notretribution," or some such shit. Now, the president is "open" to prosecutions of the big guys.

Guess he got an earful from people who voted him into office. Well, good for you, Mr. President, that you've at least banned torture. But now it's time to tell the truth.

The Bush administration authorized and ordered torture. Despite their "memos" declaring torture legal, it wasn't. It isn't. And there were plenty questioning what was going on. A report from a Senate Armed Services Committee investigation released Tuesday night, in fact, reveals that just about every time someone -- say, CentCom or Army psychiatrists -- some new legal opinion would surface answering their concerns.

For eight years, our government did things in our name that were repugnant. They were repulsive, offensive and obscene.

And so were the people who did those things. Just because they stopped short of ripping out fingernails with pliers or cutting out tongues or burning body parts with hot irons doesn't mean it wasn't torture.

It was, and it was wrong. And we are all lesser for it.


News Writer
AWOP Political Contributing Editor
Author of Stop the Press!

Cross-posted at Stop the Press!

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