Torture Is Not Football By Other, Or Any, Means

by tristero

Y’know what objecting to torture is, don’t you? Monday morning quarterbacking, that’s all:

“There is a culture of concern about where Monday-morning quarterbacking could lead to,” Mr. Chesney said. If Mr. Mukasey declared waterboarding illegal, “it would make it politically more possible to go after interrogators in the future,” he said. “Whether it would change the legal equities is far less clear.”

Just to make this clear: When Dershowitz and other moral relativists were making the case for putting bamboo splints under the fingernails of people who are as capable of feeling excrutiating pain as themselves, I, along with the the entire civilized world, denounced torture under all circumstances. That was long before Bush set up the organized and extensive American torture network that is still working overtime to destroy this country. There was no second-guessing on our part. We saw torture for what it was long before Bush strapped the first prisoner down to be waterboarded.

Bush claims that if we don’t give him the right to make people scream out in sheer agony at what American officials physically inflict on them, he will not be able to keep you and me safe. George W. Bush is completely full of shit. I am prepared to accept whatever risk that goes along with living in a country that doesn’t ever torture its enemies. Because I know that there is no such risk, that in fact torturing people places a country at greater risk, morally and existentially, than not. Whatever the reasons he has for torturing people, he is not doing it for the good of ordinary Americans and I reject his insinuation that either my fellow Americans or myself are somehow the reason he feels he must indulge in such perversions.

A word about Bush-hating seems appropriate right about now. It is a subject which deeply concerns so many thoughtful members of the cowardly, fainting classes, ie, Republicans and the mainstream press. When people like me speak out in disgust at what this sick man is doing, it is cause for moral outrage – at the person speaking out! As if hating Bush was in any way morally comparable to the deliberate inflicting of mind-damaging pain on another human being! To those folks, we need to spell it out:

What Bush and his henchmen have done, and what they are presently doing is, in fact, truly hateful, if that word has any meaning at all. But not only are Bush’s actions capable of being hated by all reasonable people (and deserve to be). They are also acts which themselves are full of hate and sadism. There’s another thing I hate:

Bush will go down in history as the torture president. I hate that this country ever had a president who made the torture of human beings official government policy.