We're All Torturers Now

[babylonsister]

http://www.slate.com/id/2216792/

We're All Torturers Now
Will anything about the U.S. torture scandal ever scandalize us again?
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Saturday, April 25, 2009, at 7:09 AM ET

snip//

In some ways, it's easy to account for the differences between the response to Abu Ghraib in 2004 and the reaction to the torture memos this month: The torture at Abu Ghraib was documented in pictures, rather than mere words, making it harder to play down or parse out. The OLC's torture memos—written in dispassionate legalese with much legal citation—are easier to defend than the brutal images of what they permitted (and that's why the CIA saw fit to destroy its interrogation tapes). The abuses at Abu Ghraib were of low-level prisoners, whereas the torture memos purport to target "ticking time bombs": high-level terrorists with critical information about imminent strikes that continue to exist mainly in thought experiments and the mind of Dick Cheney.

But there's one other fact that accounts for the horror differential between the torture memos and Abu Ghraib, and that's the fact of Abu Ghraib. Because, as I have suggested before, after Abu Ghraib, America seems to have lost its capacity to be truly shocked by anything America might do. As chilling and brutal as the images were at the time, they have, in the years between, lost much of their power to repel us. They have become—abetted by endless viewings of Jack Bauer on 24 and an interminable national debate about torture—emblems of what America is at least willing to consider doing. They are no longer postcards from the unthinkable. They are what we have become.

When we first saw those now-iconic photos from Abu Ghraib, most of us still had no notion that our government would degrade and terrorize prisoners. We had no inkling at that time that—in violation of domestic and international law—the U.S. government had already water-boarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in one month in 2003. Discovery of the sexual humiliation and stress positions used at Abu Ghraib represented a brief and terrible loss of innocence for Americans. But maybe you can lose your innocence only once.

After Abu Ghraib, the idea that prisoners could be stripped naked and humiliated, or terrorized by dogs, or piled up like Tinkertoys, was not just in the backs of our minds but also back on the table. Less than two years after we learned of the goings-on at Abu Ghraib, Congress had passed legislation legalizing many of the "alternative interrogation tactics"—the stress positions and sexual humiliations—that had so offended us months before. Prisoner abuse that flattened us in 2004 was normalized to the point that it was open to political debate only a year later. And once you have been desensitized to hoodings and nudity, is a little simulated drowning or being bounced off a wall really all that much worse?

The MPs caught abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib later claimed that they did so because they were merely following orders from superiors, orders to "soften up" the detainees who would then be more amenable to interrogation. I keep wondering whether they inadvertently softened up the rest of us as well. We have become so casual about torture that we now openly debate its efficacy—something nobody would have dared do in the first days after Abu Ghraib. The fight playing out between the left and the right now isn't "Did we water-board?" We already knew we did. It is barely even "Was it legal?" Virtually nobody seriously argues that it was. The fight we are having in America now is "Did it work?" And if we manage to persuade ourselves that torture does work, whether it's legal or even moral will no longer matter. And such tactics will never be able to horrify us again.

[frogcycle]

1. spot on

"The fight playing out between the left and the right now isn't "Did we water-board?" We already knew we did. It is barely even "Was it legal?" Virtually nobody seriously argues that it was. The fight we are having in America now is "Did it work?" And if we manage to persuade ourselves that torture does work, whether it's legal or even moral will no longer matter. And such tactics will never be able to horrify us again."

The near-panicky efforts by the dwindling number of apologists for this crap need to be dismissed as not germane to the conversation. While there is plenty of evidence that torture does NOT work in the vast majority of cases; is actually counterproductive, there will no doubt be an isolated case or two where something useful was gleaned subsequent to torture being used. THAT PROVES NOTHING and should not be debated. It is like the idiots who use the isolated case of someone trapped in a burning car by a jammed seat belt as their rationalization for never wearing one.


The repeated claims that they "kept us safe" with this bullshit should be countered with accusations that they were operating a protection racket. The reason they were able to "keep us safe" is NOT that they stopped further attacks, but that they did not ENABLE further attacks as they did 9/11.

9/11 was an INTENTIONAL warning: "let us do what we want, conduct the wars of aggression for oil that we want, or we'll let these guys blow up shopping malls next"

[Bluenorthwest]

2. No. The torturers are torturers

and those who wish to free them are accomplices. There were militray people who refused to participate and paid a price for doing the right thing. There were millions of us who were protesting and sick to our stomachs through this whole thing. Some Americans want to let the perps go free because they had a note from home, maybe those folks are torturers. But others heard that and thought 'Rumsfeld said there was rape and murder, and you are wanting to forget about that?' To me, freeing rapists is sick. Seems to be the policy of those who make policy, but you see, it would not be my policy, and I see those making that policy as torturers themselves.
As much as it seems to upset folks, there are specific individuals who ordered and carried out these torture programs. It was not 'all of us'. It was some of them. The desire not to punish is one thing, but this meme of telling us all we are equally guilty with folks who torture those who let them go free is another form of abuse. Sorry. The guilty are guilty. The innocent are innocent. That sucks for the guilty and those who can not bear to punish them for torture. But it remains true.
People did these things. Speicific people. With specific victims. Own that and we can get somewhere.

[Captain Hilts]

3. I agree. The paperwork shows how the military went into this kicking and screaming. Colin Powell

really should have resigned over this.

Instead, he just let it happen.

And he was cheered at the inauguration. Crime pays.

[pmorlan1]

4. We are NOT all torturers

I too disagree with the we are all torturers idea. I understand that symbolically we are because this was done in our names but we now have people like Joe Scarborough who are using this to downplay their role in covering up the torture then and now. I know only too well that there are millions, who unlike Scarborough, have spent an enormous amount of their time fighting for justice on this issue and it just isn't right to lump them together with torture apologists like Scarborough.

[Seldona]

5. What an absurd notion, we are all tortuterers.

Maybe the author feels she is because she did nothing while it happened? I guess I would agree with that. I'll be looking for the article where she turns herself in.

pfft

[babylonsister]

7. pfft yourself. Our 'leadership', our problem. nt

[tomreedtoon]

6. Damn. I thought it would be more fun.

All the bullies that beat me to a bloody pulp had all the fun in the world. I had none. Still don't. I'd have thought that being a torturer would finally enable me to enjoy life, through depriving other people of it. But it just feels like the same miserable old experience.

Are you sure I'm a torturer? I didn't get the license or the official black robe.