Torture--The Crime against Civilization

At the South Carolina debate, Republican candidates were asked if they would use torture to interrogate prisoners.  We can be delighted to learn that torturing people hurts us with world opinion, or that calling torture an 'enhanced interrogation technique', but those answers are hardly a ringing denunciation of torture.

What is the answer to the torture question?  It's the American answer, the answer the American people have already given.

Let's take it from the top.

First. There is nothing for a President to decide.

Inside the United States, torture is a felony.  If you are anywhere in the United States, and you torture someone, you are committing more crimes than I care to list.  There is no exception in those laws for government officials.

If you are an American abroad and torture someone, it's a felony.  If your victim dies, you have earned the death penalty.  There is no exception in those laws for government officials.

Second, those laws reflect the wisdom of the American people. Torturers are the filth of the earth, properly grouped with child molesters and mercenaries.  We need not ask what the founding fathers and their fellows thought of mercenaries.  Their position is enshrined in the third verse of The Star-Spangled Banner:

" And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle?s confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave,"

Third, there are people who get their jollies from snatching people off the streets, hustling them off to remote places, and inflicting great pain and degradation on them.  These people have their enablers: television producers and actors who portray torturers as heroes and patriots. All these people are perverts, shunned by decent human beings.

Finally, thoughtful Americans should find it hysterically funny to watch the same gaggle of Republican Presidential candidates, a half-dozen or more of them, first say they could torture a defenseless prisoner, and then pander to the demands of the Republican Christians.  The required depth of hypocrisy surpasses all belief.

Few indeed are the acts more contrary to the actual teachings of Jesus Christ than the torture of prisoners. I could simply quote the Golden Rule, exactly as it was invoked when I was in Army Basic Training and the care of prisoners was discussed. Obey the Golden Rule. As a soldier your duty is to protect your prisoners.  

I instead remind the Republican moral midgets -- the Republicans who did not condemn torture -- of the events leading up to Easter.  Jesus was crowned with thorns.  He was compelled to drag his cross through Jerusalem's blinding heat.  Spikes were driven through his arms.  He was left to die on the cross.  The Romans used their wicked skills to torture and degrade him.  No matter what higher plan was involved, the Romans who tortured Jesus are revealed to Christians to be evil men in dire need of forgiveness, forgiveness for which Jesus himself prayed.

And now we have the Republican candidates.  Most are asking Republican Christians to vote for them.  And in the next breath, half imply they could do a better job at torture than those ancient Romans did, two millennia ago.

Pro-torture Republicans?  They're morally blind from their toenails to their eyelids.  They're totally unfit for the job they seek--or any other job from any other government, either.  And they have no business asking any Christian for a vote.

And the anti-torture Republicans?  It is indeed true that one Republican said that torture was universally condemned by military officers.  Another said that nobody was for torture--I'm not sure what he thought some of the other Republican answers meant.

To the antitorture and dodged-the-question Republicans: your political opponents advocate a course of action that is illegal, that has historically been reviled by real Americans, and that is totally contrary to the religion those opponents keep pandering to.  If you had moral backbone, it was not your time to play Pontius Pilate washing his hands.  It was not your time to make a limpwristed condemnation of torture.

If the antitorture Republicans had any moral backbone, they would have answered the supporters of torture the way the moneychangers in the Temple were answered.

By smiting them. Verbally, of course.  But: By smiting them.

In the debate we saw a crew of moral midgets.  Some of them are morally shriveled: They get their principals from perverted television shows and books in which torture is glorified.  Some of them lack the gonadal fortitude to denounce their opponents.  "world opinion won't like it' is hardly a debate-winning retort.  Whining about the deed's name is no substitute for denouncing the deed.

In the end, those Republicans were all the same.

Moral midgets.

Put them up against a decent American, and their moral midgetude will become painfully evident.

Yes, I am a Libertarian.  Yes, I am a candidate for my party's Presidential nomination.

But I am here to inspire my fellow Americans regardless of party to speak out against the perverts who infest our government.  

George Phillies
  http://www.phillies2008.com

•  Tip Jar

  Send the 10 Republicans a message from the American people.

  by phillies on Tue May 22, 2007 at 03:38:48 PM PDT

•  I Churchill's World War I book

  toward the end he talks about how they tried "everything except torture and cannibalism, and they were of doubtful utility" in the carnage of Europe.  It is the same now, of doubtful utility, and a serious crime against humanity.  Shameful and despicable, just what we have become.

  by NearlyNormal on Tue May 22, 2007 at 03:40:26 PM PDT

•  Rule-utilitarianism v Kantianism

  Few indeed are the acts more contrary to the actual teachings of Jesus Christ than the torture of prisoners.

  First, Christ's parables are a shitty basis for policy.  Let's get that over with off the bat.

  Next: I have no doubt whatsoever that if torturing one evil person - say, Hitler - could save or could have saved the lives of N number of people, torturing is morally justified (ticking time bomb and all that).  I'd go one step further and say that failure to do so is deeply, deeply immoral.

  And most people share that intuition.  

  The obvious problem is that this doesn't represent a real-life situation.  In the down-and-dirty real world, things simply aren't clear.  And I'd submit that it's similarly intuitive that torturing 10 people, one of whom is evil, in order to save that same number of people is immoral.  

  So the rule-utilitarian formulates a general rule out of the chaos of competing scenarios: torture is generally wrong, and things that are generally wrong should be illegal.  

  By contrast, the Kantian / Christian position, that torture is always immoral, is wrong (you may disagree, but you'll be in a teensy minority).  Importantly, both the Kantian and rule-utilitarian end up at the same policy, but the rule-utilitarian is able to capture the intuitions of most people while the Kantian alienates them.  

  And as the debates bear out, this isn't a purely question anymore.  Democrats will be asked this question before November '08, and I sure as fuck hope they have a good answer ready.

  by burrow owl on Tue May 22, 2007 at 03:50:38 PM PDT

•  some powerful points here

  I'm going to send this article to my friends who share some of my libertarian values.  It is powerful.

  I am talking about values such as a total rebuke of torture.

  Of course, being against torture is a human value. It's not limited to libertarians or political parties.

  This is the light in which I view most of those people who participated in the recent GOP debate, plus the show moderators and script writers and their approving audience.  They failed to demonstrate some defining human values.

  by mrcoder on Tue May 22, 2007 at 04:46:27 PM PDT

  •  Civilization is frail

    and needs constant support. Civilization needs a supporting culture to endure and progress.  

    As we go about creating a culture of "shock and awe" - destruction and death, we are actually threatening the very infrastructure of our own civilization.  What is the culture we want to develop for our future generations?  Could it possibly include torture as an accepted practice?

    by Thomas Twinnings on Tue May 22, 2007 at 06:13:43 PM PDT

•  I never, ever thought, growing up as

  an American, that my government would be involved in torture.  Torture was specifically mentioned in the Constitution ("cruel or unusual punishment") for a reason--the horrors of torture were a matter of living memory for the Founding Fathers.

  I can almost live with Republican capitalists acting like "Star Trek" Ferengi.  I can almost live with the "glorification of military might in general.  I cannot live with pride in a country that does torture.  This country must be bigger and better than that.  It just MUST.  Or no one of decency will be able to claim "American" as an honorable title.

  by Dar Nirron on Tue May 22, 2007 at 05:35:17 PM PDT