Jan 16 2009
Responding to a Rooster: On Torturing Suspected Terrorists
This article is in response to an article that appears on Rooster’s Political Blog about torture and the Attorney General Nominee.
Rooster’s Article starts out by writing the following;
<em>”Attorney General nominee Eric Holder thinks waterboarding is torture. So what. I certainly don’t care if we “torture” the terrorists that we have caught. These terrorists would do in you, your dog, your wife, your kids, your grandmother, your cats and whatever else they could if they could just get their hands on you.
If Mr. Holder wants a definition of torture lets send one of his loved ones to the terrorists and let them show him how its done. They have a lot better ways to torture someone than we do.”
To Rooster, and those who read my blog, I write the following;
Waterboarding, for those who do not know what it is, is a process of pouring water on a person until they start to gasp for air. The process makes the person being tortured feel as if they are drowning. If the person doesn’t tell you what you want to hear, just keep drowning them over and over again. Eventually, they will talk for fear of dying.
Plain and simple, this is torture. In America, people have come to expect decency and civility as the norm. This crap about torturing suspected terrorists is a basic denial of human rights and strips the suspects of any idea of possibly being innocent of crimes accused. Oh, I forgot, we have charged few, if any, of the suspected terrorists with crimes.
What the American people who support these kinds of acts fail to understand is there is no presumption of innocence afforded to the “terrorists”. If the American government won’t bring charges against these individuals, how then can we be sure these are the right people to prosecute for terrorist activities?
What is even more troubling is by labeling someone a terrorist, they can literally be snatched off the street, tortured mercilessly, deprived of any basic right of counsel, kept from their families without contact and violated in ways unthinkable. If, and when we do discover they are harmless or have told us everything we need to know, we will take them to some far away country and let them go.
How long will it take for these types of actions to trickle down in our society right here in America? Don’t think it can’t happen here. It has to start somewhere and it has. If it is okay to do it to people labeled terrorists, all they have to do is label you a terrorists and there go your rights. The term “terrorist” is already being used more and more loosely to describe things that truly are not terrorism. I will give you a few examples. The term domestic terrorist is used to describe someone who does an act like burn down a house because he wants to save the trees. That isnt terrorism. That’s vandalism or maybe extreme activism. How about this one; Somali pirates hijacking ships. That isnt terrorism, that is high seas piracy which happens to be one of the oldest trades in the world. How about this one; hacking into some government computer. Cyberterrorism. Come on guys. Everything can’t be labeled terrorism. If it is, we are all going to lose our basic rights.
When we do finally close Guantanamo, all those who arent terrorists will be. I know for sure, I would be more than pissed and maybe hell bent on getting revenge on anything American if I were held on Guantanamo innocently. And who could blame them for their hatred of all things American?
Some of these so called terrorists have families who havent heard from them in years. Their families do not even know where they are or if they are alive.
We, as Americans, are supposed to be better than to do those sorts of dark age acts. We are the most advanced, modern society in the world. The hatred brewing all over the world against us is due in part to American foreign policies such as waterboarding and torture. When are we going to become the responsible global citizen we demand everybody else to be? We have hammered other coutries such as China, Vietnam, and Japan mercilessly on the issue of human rights for years, and now find ourselves as the torturers. If that isn’t the pot calling the kettle black, I dont know what is.
Even if the U.S. was able to gather intelligence by waterboarding someone, it is still wrong. It is not justifiable to claim we got great intelligence from those individuals when we used torture to achieve our objections. Most of the suspects probably made up terrorism plots just so the torture would end.
America is a country that leads by example. I sure hope other countries don’t follw us on this one.
No one gets reliable evidence from torture. Even lifelong Republican judge Susan Crawford has stated she won’t move to prosecute Mohammed al-Qahtani (the would-be 20th hijacker on Sept. 11th) because his confession was coerced under torture. She said “torture”.
We used to refuse to torture people. It was one of the reasons we were respected internationally. Ironic how the same crowd that will attack you if you say anything less than “America is the greatest country in the world” will support practices that equate America with third-world dictatorial theocracy.