Re: Thoughts re torture
[quote=toasty]
A couple years ago, people would have been [B]pissed[/B]. Now, the reaction is more muted, more like, "Well, that was to be expected."[/quote]
A couple of years ago the USS Cole was bombed. Unprovoked, unexpected and 90% of the US population was uninterested. A couple of years ago a car bomb went off in the garage of the World Trade Center. Unprovoked, unexpected and 90% of the US population was uninterested.
American citizens were attacked and killed completely by surprised and most of their own neighbors couldn't have cared less. Hardly anyone was pissed, instead they were more concerned with who the next American Idol would be rather than some rogue nation laying waste to our own people.
Does this justify stacking up naked POW's like a pyramid ? Fuck no. But is that equal to human mutilation? Is flushing a holy text down the toilet congruent to decapitation? Like Kamal correctly said, there is a tit-for-tat mentality behind all this - the only problem is that the two sides involved have a very different definition for the phrase "tit for tat".
I agree, there is no justifiction behind what US soldiers at those prison camps did. And the fact that they brought a CAMERA to the festivities shows that they are dumb as f-u-c-k-i-n-g shit. Here's the difference though: the actions of those US soldiers were the [I]exception[/I] to our rule, and the actions of those terrorists were the [I]adherence[/I] to their rule.
For the most part those soldiers were soundly battered by the court public opinion and were made an example of by the UCMJ. Their actions decried by even the most fervent supporters of Bush Co. and were posterized as proof of the US as Evil Empire the by leftists worldwide. In the end those involved were tared, feathered and sent on the quickest rail out of town.
But what was the reaction to the actions of the terrorists? When you saw the reports of Matthew Berg, what did you think? Complete surprise or "that was to be expected."?
How about those two captured soldiers? What was your initial reaction? Did you believe that, upon being captured, they would be sent to some prison camp to be held without trial, visited by the Red Cross, and represented by some international Civil Liberties coalition until due process?
Or did you think, "Shit, they are [I]fucked[/I]."?
I'm not a betting man, but I'd lay down real money that everyone reading this thought #2. So what is really "to be expected"?
It is easy to hold oneself to a higher standard when debating moral acts across an internet message board from the comfort of your own home. But when faced with the all-too-real events of wartime horror, the situation grays just a bit. And I don't aim this at you Toasty - you've established yourself to be an intelligent, rational figure here. But I fail, and have failed, to see the correlation between the acts of a few stupidass Privates on a powertrip to the terrible hostage slaughters at the hands of terrorists.
Again - what those dumb fucks did at GitMo or Abu Gr'aib (sic) is inexcusable, but to say we've lost some sort of moral foothold because of that either:
a.) raises the foolish acts of a few in the name of humiliation to the level of murder
or
b.) lowers the heinous act of torture to the level of mere degradation.
In a perfect world, the word torture would have no place in our vocabulary. But - and I hope I'm not rocking anyone's foundation here - this is far from a perfect world. I say that not to justify anything we're discussing here, but to delineate the two sides of the argument.
(I know I've been absent from the Political forum for a while - hopefully my $.02 is still welcome here.)