US-sponsored/approved torture is my beat
Elendil is the blogger who began signing up the Torture Awareness Month blogroll. This sad but appreciated effort is one in which I’m happy to participate. I carry the full roll below to the left.
On Sunday, Elendil posted asking the question, “Who are we missing from the blogroll?” It’s a fair question. Opposition to torture on principle should cut across all political lines. Torture should be opposed, no matter who does it.
Elendil is concerned by criticism that some points of view against torture are not represented in the blogroll. The focus of many in the blogroll is torture under American auspices. The criticism generally runs along the lines that this is “anti-American” or that an anti-torture position is seen as a “convenient way to attack America”, often supported with the accusation that “human rights abuses elsewhere are being ignored”.
It’s rare, but Deep Blade Journal occasionally catches feedback with some similarities, “I agree that you have every right to your opinion, but I think loading your site with one-sided pathos arguments only makes people less-inclined to believe your remarks.”
My response to the notion that Deep Blade Journal is one-sided, anti-American is simple: Yes, the focus of this blog is on America, my own country. But it is completely wrong to assume that I am “anti-American”. I love America every bit as much as any of my neighbors or other fellow citizens. There is nothing I want to see less than harm done to my country.
I abhor killing. I abhor torture. Where I choose to start with my opposition is torture and killing being done in my name by the leadership of my own country. Does this not make sense to be the very first place for me to work on stopping the killing and the torture? And I’m finding so much of it–cases of war-mongering and domination against other people around the planet by my own government–that full-time examination of the American world footprint is a plenty-big job.
My own country is my responsibility. Clearly, it is in America where an American citizen has the most influence. It is my responsibility as a citizen to say when the leadership of my county is wrong. And nearly every single policy of Bush’s America is wrong. No good case can be made for these wars and systems of torture, even on their own merits. If the aim is to protect the country Bush is totally and completely wrong. The immediate moral and eventual financial bankruptcy of doing it through the Bush approach of war and torture has the main effect of ushering in a debilitating and potentially catastrophic “long war”.
For many years, I have taken to heart the response of Noam Chomsky to similar needling about why his criticism chiefly is directed at US policy. In response to hostile questioning at a talk in 1991, Chomsky spoke of two perfectly valid ways to oppose atrocities and torture in the world. One is to take the in-principle even-handed institutional approach of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Their mandate with respect to torture is to report it everywhere, without political deference. The other way to oppose torture and support human rights, according to Chomsky,
is to focus on your own responsibilities. So if you’re in Russia, say, take like, say, [Andrei] Sakharov. Sakharov never said a word about US atrocities. That’s fine. I wouldn’t criticize him for a minute for that… What made sense for Sakharov was to discuss Soviet atrocities in Afghanistan, which he did. Now of course the party hacks continually denounced him. They said things like… “What about Vietnam? What about Chile? Why’re you concentrating on Afghanistan?” and so on…Party hackery is understandable and you have party hacks everywhere. But if you’re a particular human being, …if you have some moral principles at least, you ask yourself, “Well look, what am I responsible for? What can I affect?”
So I ask myself, what can I affect? The answer for me at this time is torture and killing of the US-sponsored variety.
Meanwhile, I will support others who wish to focus from a humanitarian perspective on other areas of the world, perhaps where there is no American involvement. I even believe American involvement sometimes (rarely, unfortunately) can be a plus. For example massive US-supported humanitarian aid to displaced populations in Darfur, and much greater security assistance than currently is being provided could be of great help in that particular tragedy.
It is a big world. In order for me as an American to help my country be a moral and effective humanitarian force, I insist that we set a better example than we have been setting and get our own house cleaned up after the awful excesses of our recent governments.
My America, at least the America of my birth, does not resort to the use of torture. We were taught that fact in public schools, American public schools, schools in which we learned old fashioned American values about family and fairness, values like the presumption of innocence, due process, respect for the law and the rights of man.
Others might resort to using torture, Hitler and his evil Nazi worshipers, Stalin, with his Gulags and purges, Mao and the People’s reeducation camps. Torture, in those days, was for others, the Pinochets, the Batistas, the Perons, the Idi Amins of the world, torture was not an American thing.
Torture was a tool used by our primitive and unenlightened forbears, to extract information, or to punish their enemies, information, which more often than not, was useless, as the information extracted was contrived in the desperate mind of someone whose only thought was to stop the pain, to say anything, confess to any crime, implicate any person, even those he loved to make the pain stop.
We were taught of the Nuremberg Tribunals at the close of World War Two and of the unbelievably bestial behavior of the Nazis in their death camps, of the brutalization of an entire generation of human beings, of wholesale torture and the wanton slaughter of millions that followed.
We were taught that “following orders” was no excuse for participating in, or ignoring the use of methods like torture or reprisal killings, as some orders were unlawful and it was our responsibility to know the difference. We executed many in Germany and Japan who were found to have violated conventions that we and other like thinking nations had established as fundamental rules of human conduct. We imprisoned many more than we executed.
I reached adulthood believing that America had evolved to a point of ethical leadership in a world that had been horribly scarred by those who used torture and terror, who used fear and death as instruments of State policy. I took pride in my belief that we, America, as a nation had risen above such inhuman behavior and had learned to operate on an elevated plateau of conduct. In short I grew to believe that my country could claim to be among the most civilized of nations.
At the age of twenty my youthful naiveté was tested by an all expenses paid trip to Vietnam. I discovered in the process of that experience that much of the negativity being reported about my country was true, the reports of Phoenix programs and other secret and not so secret efforts of my government turned my youthful naiveté into full blown distrust of the American government and it’s intelligence and military apparatus.
After Vietnam we went from one fiasco to another for the same fraudulent reasons, in Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and on through Grenada and Panama misspending the flower of our youth, aiding in the brutalization of the poor and politically disenfranchised of other nations and trashing American integrity on remote and largely secret battlefields, in an effort to prop up corrupt dictatorships supported by even more corrupt American corporations.
By the time that George Bush the younger was appointed to serve as regent by the judicial minions of corporate America our government was fully in the control of the plutocrats and oiligarchs, for whom conscience, compassion and national honor had become nothing more than pathetically sad, liberal, loser jokes.
Enough.
America is not about torture.
Not my America. Not this land of my birth. Not the country that I volunteered to serve when called to service by an idealistic young President.
I have friends who have said to me recently and a government that has told me repeatedly that we can no longer follow the rules because our enemies do not follow the rules, and I say to them all: Bullshit!
I have friends who have said to me recently and a government that has told me repeatedly that everything changed after 9/11, and I say to them all: Bullshit!
One terrorist act or a thousand does not change fifty thousand years of human development, of philosophy and religion, of right and wrong of love and beauty and art.
There is only one America and it is the one that was held up to me by my Parents and Grandparents, by my teachers and my government as a beacon of freedom and justice, honor and integrity, honesty, compassion and justice.
I will permit no other America to exist on this Earth, nor should you.
Repeat after me:
America does not torture.
Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust
AL GORE: “Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote: `Men feared witches and burnt women.’
“The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their endeavors, they would have been hung as traitors. The very existence of our country was at risk.
“Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the Bill of Rights.
“Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the British army was marching on the Capitol? Is the world more dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands of missiles poised to be launched against us and annihilate our country at a moment’s notice? Is America in more danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march—when our fathers fought and won two World Wars simultaneously?
“It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it is up to us to do the same.”
Hi Blade,
Your post got me to thinking about those comments elendil had received.
If you get a chance, I’d appreciate any thoughts on it you might offer on this post:
What lies within the realm
cheers
This was an interesting post and that comment by Bob Higgins was even more interesting. Bob if your reading this I just want to say that was a great comment… very thoughtful and heart felt…
Thanks to everyone for the comments. One pro-torture argument Bob Higgins mentions in his excellent piece struck me, as I hear this one too–we must torture because they torture. What could be wrong with that? Well, criminals commit criminal acts. Because group X commits torture, a beheading, whatever, does that mean the US, a lawful nation according to Bush, should torture person Y? I do not believe it is moral to fight crime with crime, or torture with torture. How we treat our worst enemies is how we will be judged. If we want the respect we need to protect ourselves, we must not fight torture with torture.