In Defense of Torture

Sometimes I wonder if I have stepped into a perverse variation of “Alice Through the Looking Glass.” Can it actually be happening? Can it be that in this year 2009 there are people defending torture? Can it?

The former Vice President of the United States defends pushing people’s heads under water until they almost drown. He defends stripping people naked and forcing them to undergo sleep and sensory deprivation. He defends using dogs, suffocation and other forms of “enhanced interrogation.” He supports torture of other human beings..

Now we know that this man, this former vice president of the United States is crude. One merely needs to look at him to see that his ugliness is more than skin deep. The architects of torture must be crude. There is no room for sensitivity. This former vice president of the United States was, after all, the man who told a Senator he disagreed with to “Go fuck yourself.” And that on the floor of the United States Senate while this vice president was still serving as the presiding officer. What a disgusting little man he is. That the media was not up in arms about this is just another example of how ineffective the media have become.

So let’s start with a basic. Torture of another human being is unacceptable. It is unacceptable morally. It is unacceptable according to the relatively civilized “rules of war” that have been supported by countries around the world, including our own.

The lawyers of the last administration who have found the legal parsing to support torture are of the same category as the lawyers who helped build the legal system of the Third Reich. The Deputy Attorney General of the United States famously declared that it would be justified to crush the testicles of a child to get information from his parent. To split hairs on torture is in the same genre as arguing the validity of race law and extermination.

Marx once called this period in human history the pre history of human beings. When one listens to the little man who was once the vice president of the United States we can see what he meant. This little man and all he represents is barbaric. That he still has an audience is both remarkable and tragic.

It’s too bad that so much of the discussion has centered on the effectiveness of torture. That misses the point. The point is that if we begin to act like Nazi’s, just what is it that we are defending?

On this Memorial Day weekend let us remember that in World War II, American and Allied forces died to destroy the very mentality that justified torture. Between fifty to seventy million people died in that struggle. There were almost a million American casualties in that war.

Our men and women died in a struggle to defeat fascism and the barbarism of Hitler and his group of Nazis. People like the former vice president spit on the legacy of that war.

Let us remember what this country is about. Let us remember those who have given their lives so that ugly little men cannot spread their barbarism.