Over at Hullabaloo, dday reminds us that yesterday, in the midst of all the political folderol about FISA and the Presidential campaign, Congress actually held hearings on the Bush administration’s torture policies. Specifically, two of the chief advocates for our government’s policy permitting the use of torture, David Addington and John Yoo, the lawyers who helped craft legal opinions which permitted the United States to claim that American and International laws against the abusive treatment and torture of prisoners did not apply to terror suspects, appeared before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties to justify/excuse the administration’s violations of international law, violations that could conceivably result in war crimes trials at some point in the future.
Not surprisingly, Addington and Yoo refused to admit that anything the US government did, as a result of the legal justifications they provided the administration for the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques, or that they did in providing the legal cover for the use of torture, was illegal or a violation of any laws governing the conduct of our government when it comes to the treatment of suspected terrorists. I won’t bore you with the details of their testimony. Suffice it to say that they are both contemptible, immoral weasels.
What was shocking (if also not surprising) was the fact that 44% of Americans in a recent poll agreed that torture is acceptable when dealing with terror suspects. That’s up from 36% in 2006. I suppose one must credit the administration’s constant drumbeat of fear regarding terror threats for this uptick in the number of Americans who think it’s okay to torture so long as we believe the people we have in custody are “terrorists” plotting to kill Americans, but I am not one to overlook the media’s culpability in this. And I’m not just talking about the news media. Since 2001, scenes of torture in films and television shows have risen (pardon the pun) dramatically.
The Parents Television Council . . . reviewed prime-time broadcast programming from 1995 to 2001, finding 110 scenes of torture. From 2002 to 2005, the number increased to 624 such scenes.
Call it the Jack Bauer effect. Bauer is the hero of the popular Fox TV series, 24, in which as a special US government counter-terrorist agent, he spends his days saving America from imminent attacks by evil terrorists bent on slaughtering Americans. As part of his job, he engages in the frequent use of torture of potential “terror suspects” to get the information he needs to save us from the smoking gun of a mushroom cloud” and other more garden variety terror threats like bombs, biological agents, etc. The premise of the show is the “ticking time bomb” scenario, rare in real life, but a staple of fiction, in which the hero has only hours or minutes to avert the mass murder of innocent civilians and therefore is justified in using any means necessary to obtain information from the “bad guys” in order to save American lives. And by any means necessary, I mean any means necessary. Here’s a short list of some of the enhanced interrogation techniques the fictional Jack Bauer has employed in scenes on 24 to save the day:
1. Garden variety beating of suspects.
2. Shooting suspect in leg and threatening to shoot the other leg.
3. Asphyxiation of suspect by plastic bag.
4. Stabbing suspect with knife.
5. Threatening to cut out suspect’s eyes with knife.
6. Breaking suspect’s fingers.
7. Electrocution of suspect with hotel lamp.
8. Mock execution of suspect’s family members.
9. Use of pain inducing drugs on suspects.
Military interrogators have even admitted that they got ideas about torture techniques from watching Jack Bauer on 24, of which many also admitted to being “big fans.” In a bizarre twist, instead of reality influencing fictional plots, fiction influenced what happened in the reality of the interrogation rooms at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in America’s Gulag system of secret and not so secret prisons around the globe where terror suspects were detained.
So, while the fact that the number of Americans approving torture against “terrorists” has risen substantially over the last 2 years, considering the constant justifications for the use of torture by our government, by our “liberal” news media, and most tellingly, in our popular culture, it shouldn’t really surprise anyone, even if it sickens many of us. After all, these are terrorists. We’ve been told they are evil incarnate, the threat of world domination they pose equal to Hitler and the Nazis. We’ve been told they don’t deserve any rights. We’ve been told they represent the greatest threat to our nation’s existence and to peace in the world. We’ve been told that in this one case, the ends justify the means. I suppose the only surprising thing is that more Americans don’t approve of the use of torture against this nebulous shadowy group of mass murdering radical extremists.
So, for all you terror enthusiasts, let me suggest a little thought experiment for you to see how committed you really are to the use of torture:
Assume for the sake of argument that an extremist religious leader, a man who has dedicated his life to disseminating hate against many American citizens, has recently died. A man that throughout his lifetime has preached that the religious beliefs and values of his followers are the only true moral values and that those beliefs should be imposed on other Americans for their own good. A man who claimed that America got what it deserved on 9/11 because it is such a wicked country.
Just prior to his funeral, which is to be a very public event attended by both his followers and those opposed to his views, law enforcement receives information of a plot to attack people who plan to protest at the site of the funeral. They catch one of this religious figure’s radical followers red handed with incendiary bombs that include a napalm like substance, but they have no idea whether he is acting alone or is part of a larger scheme to attack and murder people at the funeral.
Clearly this individual is a “terror suspect” by any definition of the term. He has in his possession weapons that could be used to murder innocent Americans, and he’s a member of a radical religious group bent on imposing their system of values on America. What should the authorities do? The clock is ticking down, and they have no idea how many other “terrorists” may be involved in this plot. People lives are at risk. Should this suspect be tortured? Should his known friends, family and associates be rounded up and interrogated with similar “enhanced techniques” to see what they know about this terror plot? Isn’t this precisely the situation where we need a Jack Bauer to do what has to be done to safeguard American lives and protect us from the religious extremists who are willing to murder Americans to advance their hateful agenda?
Well? Should we use torture in this situation.
Now I know some of you will object that this simply isn’t a realistic scenario. It reads like the plot of a bad TV movie, you might complain. But in fact, it’s based entirely on a true story, one that happened only just last year:
LYNCHBURG, Va. – A Liberty University student who told a family member he had made bombs and planned to attend the funeral of the Rev. Jerry Falwell was apparently upset about an anti-gay fringe group that protested at the funeral, authorities said. […]
[Mark David] Uhl was arrested Monday night after a family member contacted authorities, who found homemade bombs in the trunk of Uhl’s car, Major Steve Hutcherson said.
Gaddy described the five bombs as “sort of like napalm” and about the size of soda cans.
The funeral of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, an religious fundamentalist leader by anyone’s definition, went ahead without incident. Uhl was not tortured. Yet when the police arrested him they had no idea if he was a “lone terrorist bomber” or part of a terrorist cell that intended to firebomb and murder people protesting the funeral. And by all accounts, Uhl believed that violence was an acceptable way to advance his extreme religious and political agenda:
Uhl was an a devout evangelical Christian who advocated religious violence in the name of American nationalism. Uhl’s blog, featured on his Myspace page, offers a window into the political underpinnings of his bomb plot. In one post, Uhl implores Christians to die on the battlefield for “Uncle Sam.” He justifies his call to arms by quoting several Biblical passages and reminding his readers that the “gift of God” is eternal life.
“Christians, we have been given life after death and we should help others receive it and not sit here in our big buildings and sing to ourselves so we can go home and feel good about ourselves,” Uhl writes. “Christians, fear of death, fear of death. The fear of death shows you don’t believe.”
Uhl concludes, “God needs soldiers to fight so his children may live free. Are you afraid??? I’m not. SEND ME!!! “
So, why not torture Mr. Uhl, if you believe torture is an acceptable response to an imminent threat of terrorism? There was nothing to indicate he was acting alone. There could have been other bomb plotters working with him (indeed we still don’t know for certain that there weren’t others who assisted him or were part of his plan to murder Falwell protesters). Certainly Uhl’s bomb plot was far more likely to be realized than any of the fantasies that have come out of the “interrogations” of Gitmo detainees, many of whom our government has now concluded posed little if any threat to our security.
Of course, Uhl had several distinguishing features that perhaps make some of you torture advocates reluctant to agree that he should have been tortured to make certain there weren’t others involved in his demented scheme. One, he’s a white Christian terrorist, and we tend to treat white Christian terrorists, such as Eric Rudolph, as common criminals. We turn them over to the justice system, prosecute them for their crimes and put them in prison. So perhaps his race and religion makes all the difference to you as to whether torture would have been justified in his case.
Torture is all fine and good when its a Muslim terror suspect who doesn’t look like you or believe the same things you believe. Christians, on the other hand, are entitled to the benefits of our legal system which provide certain guaranteed rights to them, such as a trial before a jury of their peers, before incarcerating them for their evil acts. It would be hypocritical of you to believe we should make distinctions between terrorists based on their ethnicity and the religious beliefs which form the basis for their terrorist actions, but it would be understandable, if not strictly justified if you truly believe torture is necessary to foil terrorist threats.
On the other hand, why not employ torture against those suspected of the anthrax terror attackss in 2001 which killed five people. The FBI clearly had an individual they suspected of involvement in those attacks. Why wasn’t it okay to haul him in and use a few “harsh interrogation measures” to get to the bottom of this continuing threat. For all we know, new anthrax attacks could happen at any time, since the perpetrators have never been caught. Why not use torture in this case to prevent further attacks?
Or is the use of torture against the detainees in Gitmo and elsewhere just a convenient excuse for exacting revenge against the Muslim World for the 9/11 attacks? What if it is nothing more than that? And what if all it has done is made the threat of further terrorist attacks against Americans increase because of the ruthless and immoral actions of the Bush regime to find excuses to torture those who fell within their clutches, whether they had any possible connection to 9/11 or not? Something perhaps you should consider the next time you suggest we ought to be abusing those Islamofascist bastards at Gitmo or Bagram or wherever else our government is imprisoning them without trial even more than we already have.
