Friday, April 24, 2009
Torture's Double-Edged Sword
Okay, let's stipulate that getting mired into discussions of whether torture "works" -- or if what the US did to terror suspects in the months after 9/11 was, strictly speaking "torture" -- is not exactly at the top of the Obama administration wish list.
It risks, as many have said, becoming a "distraction."
But, is this really a discussion that the opposition party wants either? Far more troubling for Republicans -- who should be trying to craft a forward-looking agenda -- is that the very little air-space in which the minority party is able to play is actually be taken up by the discussion of Bush-era policies.
Consider what this debate has done:
1) It's made former VP Dick Cheney even more the face of the GOP than Rush Limbaugh could ever pretend to be. His interviews immediately eclipse anything from any Republican congressional leader or governor.
2) GOP leaders -- including Boehner -- are being drawn into this debate instead of offering alternatives on health-care, energy and other policies. The White House can handle a variety of issues at the same time. The minority party can't.
3) While the GOP feels that it is on offense when discussing national security and terror-fighting tactics, the fact is that ultimately the party is playing defense -- of the decisions made by the former administration. That would be an administration that is supremely unpopular, fairly or otherwise.
Barack Obama, for all his obvious flip-flopping, at least appears reluctant to pursue the torture issue -- while continuing to push his main agenda. But the the GOP seems eager to engage him on it. As a result, the president looks like he's proceeding forPublish Postward, while Republicans are battling a war that most Americans want to move away from. Geez, even Shepherd Smith is dropping F-bombs over the discussion of torture.
Conversely, Republicans end up defending something that sort-of-sounds-like "torture." In short, this strikes me as a lose-lose proposition.
Labels: Republican Party, torture
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
About, Face!
Over the past few weeks, I’ve totally changed my mind about the whole use of torture. My sense of indignation about using (currently) extra-legal means to extract intel from the bad guys and deadly domestic creeps that want to harm innocent folk (American, Iraqi, or otherwise) does not come from my veteran status, or even the news this morning regarding Albanians trying to attack Fort Dix, as much as it comes from where I live and the reality that any one of us could be living among these creeps and thinking we are "safe." Never in a million years would I have guessed that cow-town pastures like Central Ohio would be a choice hangout for religious idiots that worship a moon god and accept a mentally deranged, cave-dwelling schizophrenic from 1400 years ago as a “prophet.” In the past few years, several Bin Laden wannabes have been rounded up by the Feds in the same city and suburbs that consider Ohio State Football to be their official municipal religion.
This past weekend I caught my favorite actor, Sean Connery, on one of the cable channels in the great 1980s film The Untouchables, which I hadn’t seen for some years. One particular scene served as a gentle reminder of how effective torture can be to bring down the bad guys, providing that it is conducted within proper constraints and oversight (the scene I’m referencing being at the rural cabin where Connery uses some good ol’ fashioned Psy-Ops to get a perp to ‘fess up regarding Al Capone’s ledgers).
I suppose, as a response, the candy-assed among us will reference one of Denzel Washington’s “we can’t become like the Bad Guys” civil libertarian speeches from the movie, The Siege, as an answer to my cinematic citation. However, until any of the current candidates, Republican or Democratic, can show me a plan that effectively deals with internal threats while keeping the ACLU’s definition of civil liberties intact, I’m now with the Neo-Cons on torture . And on that note, I will no longer refer to myself as a libertarian, but as a Goldwater Conservative. Libertarians, from Reason magazine to the anarcho-capitalists at Lew Rockwell’s site are very good at critiquing macroeconomic fiscal policy, or cultural nanny-state initiatives. Libertarians, however, are lousy at coming up with sensible, intelligent responses to 21st security threats, at home OR abroad, other than sticking one’s head in the sand and whining about “interventionism” and what the two national parties haven’t done (which is a great deal, admittedly). With all due respect, Rep. Ron Paul, you’re a nice guy but returning to the Gold Standard won’t do jack [expletive] about nuclear-seeking terrorists.
Also, for that reason, Giuliani has my support in 2008. Yes, I’ve never been to New York City (yet) and even our blog host, the resident Big Apple Black Republican Catholic, strains to find kind words for Hizzoner-in-drag. But I put one question to RAG and all other naysayers: what the hell would David Dinkins have done on September 11? Now, take that answer, and you can pretty much figure out what Obama would do if a mushroom cloud goes up over one of our cities. I rest my case.
I can’t see Romney, Dodd, Biden, McCain, Obama, Edwards, or the Welfare State’s answer to Mother Theresa, Hillary Clinton, having the balls to do anything on domestic turf to deal with internal terrorist threats. Until then, maybe President Bush should consider franchising Gitmo.
Note: I'm not at my regular computer, so I'll add the obligatory hyperlink references later today.
Update: For the benefit of both the anti-torture candy-asses, as well as those of use who know better, below is a link to the above referenced conversation from The Siege. In the immortal words of George Orwell, "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
Labels: Global War on Terror, torture
Friday, March 02, 2007
Liberal Arts Torture?
Born in Chicago to restless parents (his father worked for a chain of hotels), Lagouranis guesses he attended 10 or 11 schools before graduating from high school in 1987 in New York City. After a year of college he took off, picking up construction and short-order cook jobs as he traveled the country. He kept coming back to Santa Fe, however, and in 1994 he enrolled in its St. John’s College, whose curriculum is based entirely on the Great Books, read in roughly chronological order. Lagouranis discovered he had a facility for languages: he enjoyed ancient Greek and found Hebrew easy. He tried to learn Arabic on his own, but without a class and a regular teacher he found it more difficult. [Emphasis added.]He relates how he joined the Army, mastered Arabic and eventually became an interrogator -- and confessed torturer:
I don't think Lagouranis and I have ever met, given that he was at SJC many years after me. Then again, I've met many students as the years have gone by as I've been involved informally and officially with alumni program. It shouldn't really be a surprise to run into someone who attended one's alma mater -- and more than a few Johnnies have joined the military over the years. But, it is still a jolt to read about it in this context. However, the sense of internal conflict he had about his actions seems very Johnny-esque.Asked how he explains himself, Lagouranis says, “It’s tough. I can say I was following orders, and that is partly true. I was wondering, ‘At what point do I put my foot down?’ and there were definitely times when I said I wasn’t going to cross this or that line.” Lagouranis refused, he says, to engage in sexual humiliation, electric shock, or mock execution (though he admits that he once failed to assure a blindfolded prisoner he was escorting past some soldiers at target practice that this was not a firing squad). He also says he never hit a prisoner, though he admits that hitting someone “might do less damage to him than hypothermia or stress positions or things like that. It just seemed like that was completely taboo. I didn’t really think that through—it seemed to me like that was where the line was legally and morally.
“But there are other answers, too. You are in a war zone and things get blurred. We wanted intelligence. It really became absolutely morally impossible for me to continue when I realized that most of the people we were dealing with were innocent. And that was tough. So it made it easier if I thought that I was actually dealing with a real-life bad guy. Another thing that made it easier was that I felt—and I think this is a flawed argument too—that it was all environmental things that were happening to this person. Like it was gravity that was making his knees hurt, it was the fact that it was cold outside that was making him uncomfortable, it wasn’t me, you know what I mean? As I said, those are flawed arguments, but it makes it easier to do it if you think of it that way.
“Then, also, you’re in an environment where everybody is telling you that this is OK, and it’s hard to be the only person saying, ‘This is wrong.’ And I really was, even as I was doing it, I was the only person saying, ‘We’ve got to put the brakes on. What’s going too far here?’
“You might think this is not a good defense either, but the things that I did weren’t really that horrible. I mean, I saw some really horrible torture. And I’m sure like every torturer would say this—‘Other people are doing worse things.’ I didn’t carry the things that I was doing as far as I could have. Like the guys that we were leaving out in the cold, I was always the one who went out and checked on them all the time. Most of the other people would just sit in the office and watch DVDs while these guys were out in the cold. I was bringing them in and warming them up. So I didn’t go as far as I might have.
“I don’t think people can imagine what it’s like. In Mosul we were wide open. There was [only] concertina wire separating us from the town and we were getting mortared all the time. You’d be laying in bed and mortars were going off all over the place. The infantry brings you somebody and they tell you that this is the guy who’s shooting mortars at you. Scaring him with a muzzled dog doesn’t seem like the worst thing in that situation. . . . I mean I was willing to try it. I didn’t know that it wasn’t going to work.”
Read the entire piece, as most of it is in Lagouranis' own voice.
Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for catching this.
Labels: St. John's College, torture, war on terror
24 Politics
Labels: 24, television, torture
