The above photo is of a South Vietnamese soldier water boarding a Vietcong captive while an American soldier looks on. The American soldier went to prison. He went to prison for watching a captive being tortured.
Yes, during one of the moral nightmares of the American dream in Vietnam, we retained the humanity and the political will to punish those of us who had clearly tortured human beings in their custody.
The continuing debate over torture is a clear sign of national decline, of the stuff that fallen empires are made of. The rule of law is not some hippy-tainted fantasy that we should ideally pursue; it is the floor under which WE MUST NOT FALL. Because under the floor are the graves.
If torture is okay on occasion, why is rape not occasionally permissible? What if we had a female terrorist in custody? What would be the harm in a little "induced fornication protocol"? What if she knew where the ticking bomb was? How could we NOT rape her in that scenario?
Water boarding is torture. It has been illegal for over a century in this country. There are those among us who obscure this fact and excuse this sin in the name of "necessity".
If a thing is moral and effective, we do it. If a thing is moral and ineffective, we don't. If a thing is immoral and ineffective, we don't. If a thing is immoral and effective, we shouldn't, but we might. But torture us NOT effective which makes the sin even worse. Torture is immoral and ineffective.
The defenders of torture tell us it saved lives. To disprove that is impossible, as one would have to prove a negative. To say that torture prevented attacks is like saying that Hurricane Katrina prevented an attack on New Orleans planned for the day after the Hurricane. Maybe it did, but was it worth it?
It is, of course, highly doubtful that torture saved any lives. We know what happens under torture, and especially under water boarding.
During the Korean War, Chinese soldiers water boarded American POW's. Their goal? To elicit FALSE confessions of atrocities and the like from the Americans to use for their propaganda.
So....what did we get when we water boarded our captives? Lo and behold, we got false confessions. We got information about plots that didn't exist. We publicized those "threats", of course, which led to more hysteria, which led to demands for more "information."
One goal of the torture was to "prove" the link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, much as American POWs were tortured to "prove" that Chinese Communism was utopia itself and to write press releases to that effect.
Just as tortured American soldiers condemned their country to cease their unbearable anguish, so did our captives tell us what we wanted to hear. "Saddam and Osama? Oh, yeah, I saw them at Target together.....can you stop drowning me now"?
There is nothing funny about this, of course. The wages of sin is death. The war in Iraq was based upon the insistence that Saddam Hussein had WMD and ties to al Qaeda. BOTH of those claims were based on "intelligence" extracted under torture.
So, did torture save lives? Or did it actually lead to the Iraq War, which led to more torture, which led to more war, which will led to more torture? If you think there hasn't been another 9/11 because we torture, I can't refute that. Perhaps torture prevented attacks. Perhaps the alignment of the stars or the glisten of a chicken's intestines prevented attacks. We can't prove negatives.
What we CAN prove is that torture is barbarism defined and that our use of torture gave us "information" which "justified" the invasion of Iraq. Now we're in an unwinable bitch of a war with the dregs of our moral authority seeping out into the sand. Still think it was worth it?
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