In Defense of Torture

[Elidor]

The following is a piece I'm considering submitting to DU. Any input is greatly appreciated. I'm tempted to apologize for the length, but there is no fluff, only meat.

*WARNING*
This editorial is informed by bitter sarcasm. Any conclusions you draw about my sensibilities are your own.

In Defense of Torture

As the Abu Ghraib torture scandal begins to crest, it's important to note that the GOP echo chamber has done an alarmingly poor job of defending our troops and their conduct against the condemnation of peace-loving people everywhere. Rather than trying to justify what has occurred, the GOP and its highly-paid media henchmen have tried to play things down, wasting an historic opportunity to force the issue of state-sanctioned torture and terror into the public dialog.

Rush Limbaugh does a disservice to the men and women serving overseas when he suggests that these were mere "frat pranks." This was methodical intelligence gathering by some of America's finest, highly trained troops acting on precise orders. Military intelligence officers confirmed this unabashedly to the International Committee for the Red Cross last year during inspections at Abu Ghraib, and the troops themselves have corroborated these facts. They were not fooling around; they were WORKING. They were ordered to smile, and if their smiles seem overly enthusiastic, we can attribute that to their very real dedication to the job. Obviously they were inwardly saddened to have to do these things, and we can rest assured that when they filmed Iraqi guards raping young boys, they did so with the utmost respect for the humanity of everyone involved.

Likewise, when American soldiers and contractors sodomized Iraqis with broomsticks and raped them and beat them slowly to death, they did so with a great deal of concern for the rights and feelings of the people they were killing and photographing and filming. We can be proud of these fine men and women who fight for us, because most of them are not professionals, as the term is generally understood. We took these promising young people, some of whom had worked in the kitchen or as drivers, and gave them a monumental responsibility: without any formal training, we turned them into professional torturers. It should surprise no one that they succeeded beyond our wildest dreams, for they are Americans, and full of that stuff that makes America great.

Sean Hannity, of all people, claimed last week that the systematic torture of Iraqi civilians was "no big deal." But in fact it's a very big deal, because it is the first public showcase of a de facto administration policy of covert torture which was administered from the office of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, with the full approval of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush*. Instead of boldly asserting the right of the U.S. to torture enemy combatants, pundits such as Limbaugh and Hannity have feebly sought to downplay the issue with inane distractions and distortions. No rational person wants to learn about homoeroticism from Rush Limbaugh, and we may be forgiven if it is all too easy to picture Mr. Hannity emulating George W. Bush* by shoving firecrackers up frogs' rectums. But the issue remains: torture is good for America.

The only right-wing pundit who has been on board this boat from the beginning is the bulemic Anne Coulter, who long ago advised us to "invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to christianity." Yet now that we are making her dreams come true, she is strangely silent on the subject.

Did we learn nothing from Vietnam?
It does not matter that 70% to 90% of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib are innocent bystanders according to the ICRC, snatched merely to fulfill mission objectives. In Iraq, everyone knows someone in the underground resistance. So the lesson is clear: in Iraq, EVERYONE IS GUILTY. Sorting them out is not important; beating them regularly is. Their hearts and minds will invariably follow their balls, and if we have those balls in a vise, there can be no doubt about the outcome.

And let us put to rest that old canard that torture produces whatever the torturer wants to hear. A competent torture specialist can learn anything he wants to know from a properly broken subject. The measure of a true specialist is someone who can break a bird to the fist without leaving a mark. If a detainee has anything at all to say, he will say it. And if he does not, he has nothing to fear. The iron logic is inescapable.

No less an authority than criminally-acclaimed defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz has come out in favor of state-sanctioned torture. Alan, who has never been tortured and who admittedly has never committed torture by the way but is an expert nonetheless, believes that torture is inevitable given human conflict and that we should give it legal sanction with “torture warrants.”

I can think of no better illustration of state-sanctioned torture than the actions of the Gestapo and the Schutzstaffel during WWII. The Nazis used electrocution, starvation, beatings and rape to break resistance networks across Europe. (U.S. soldiers emulated these techniques in Vietnam, using field radios, for instance, as portable improv electrocution stations.) They deliberately preyed on family members of prisoners and suspects, another tactic our troops in Iraq have used with success.

Perhaps the most poignant example of the power of torture is MADELEINE, a British agent in occupied France who operated a radio network of agents in the Resistance. The virginal MADELEINE, whose real name was Noor Anayat Khan, was an unmarried nurse who wrote children's books. Persuaded to work against the nazis under deep cover, she was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to an SS prison, where presumably she was systematically raped, starved and tortured even after she was of no further use. A final photo of MADELEINE, taken shortly before her execution in Dachau, shows her kneeling, naked and pathetically emaciated from starvation, at the feet of two nazi officers. Though she never gave up her network, her notes provided the needed clues for the Gestapo to arrest three more of her colleagues, who were themselves tortured to provide more arrests…

From Torture to Terror
Torture is what we call it when it takes place in a small room. When it occurs openly in broad daylight, the large-scale use of torture is best termed terror, and again, the Nazis are our role models. The Germans, who learned much from the British experience in India, demonstrated again and again that the methodical intimidation of entire villages could quickly cripple the effectiveness of any local insurgency. Britain also used native troops in India to suppress local rebellions. The potential applications to modern Iraq are obvious.

According to "The World Must Know", The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, by Michael Berenbaum, “The Nazis were skilled practitioners of collective responsibility, the murder of an entire community as a reprisal for individual acts of resistance. Reprisals were taken against Jews and non-Jews throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. It was an effective tactic in stifling popular enthusiasm for resistance.”

The Nazis made great use of the concept of collective responsibility for underground resistance in towns like Lidice (where every man woman and child was lined up and shot in retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Reich Protector of Bohemia-Moravia; and Oradour, a small French town where all but a handful of villagers were butchered for the successful depredations of the French Resistance nearby. The Isrealis have used this concept to great effect in the Gaza strip, and are now showing us how to apply this to Fallujah.

Surely, peace and democracy are just around the corner.

It should be clear to every armchair warrior that if we are to use torture, we must be prepared to back it up with overwhelming force, for just as genocide and manifest destiny made terrorists of the American Indians, so torture and assassination and manifest P.N.A.C destiny will produce in Iraq the same impotent desperation that fuels suicide bombers in the Gaza strip. Under the precepts of collective responsibility, women and children are now fair game.

Threatening the women and children of our own detainees has been official policy for over a year in Iraq. Indeed, we can thank men like Donald Rumsfeld and General William Booyaka - er, I mean Boykin, a tireless zealot - as well as General Miller of Guantanamo fame for ramping up these policies after a fruitless year of NO WMDs. Let there be no mistake on this point: Rumsfeld's reaction to the Taguba report was to increase the use of such tactics by appointing General Miller to critique the operation at Abu Ghraib. Details of the rape of Iraqi females by U.S. troops have been sketchy so far (film coming soon, no doubt-look for it in your inbox), but obviously Mr. Rumsfeld has read his history; or at least the juicy parts. Dick Cheney is right that Rumsfeld is the right man for this job.

Donald Rumsfeld understands torture and terror, and his management of the single biggest arm of the U.S. government (in terms of money) reflects it down to the smallest detail, as befits a master strategist. A few trillion dollars lost here or there is a small price to pay for such a bounteous joy as our Iraqi holdings, and we can thank Mr. Rumsfeld and his boss.

The implications of our unilateral rejection of the Geneva Conventions, however, bear looking at. But most of us can't bear to look at the photos of the four mutilated contractors in Fallujah, much less watch the toxic video of poor Mr. Nicholas Berg being butchered, may his soul find peace.

That leaves us with the evening news and the highly-paid gasbags on TV, radio and in print. To hear them tell it, we're just goofing around over there. I beg to differ. This is deadly serious, and we have committed not just our troops and our credibility, but roughly $200 billion so far. I can assure you we are NOT playing around. If we don't exactly know what we're doing yet, that's just the price the Iraqis must pay.

What price democracy?
Well, it's hard to put a price tag on something so precious, but let's state it in terms that everyone can understand, based on 700 dead U.S. soldiers, 10,000 dead Iraqi civilians and a very rough estimate of $200 billion for one year of occupation:

27.397 Iraqi civilians must die every day - twenty-eight human beings - for democracy to move forward in Iraq; $500 million a day must be spent, though we can borrow enough of this to cripple government spending for decades to come; roughly two American soldiers must die (with 20 more injured and maimed) each day for us to bring capital-D democracy to Iraq. Obviously this is far less than current rates of attrition and can be sustained indefinitely, ala Vietnam, even allowing for decreased enlistment. Frungible assets are secure for the foreseeable future. So sayeth Mr. Rumsfeld.

We cannot afford to publicly flinch from what we privately do to our enemies and whisper about to our friends. In the face of continued resistance in Iraq, we can only move forward by killing more Iraqis, targeting more of their families, and stepping up the officially sanctioned program of torture. We must be steely in the face of "blowback" and grim in our determination to make sacrifices. Only a heart of stone can support the continued slaughter of the Iraqi people. The nazis did it, and so can we.
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[mike1963]

1. A quick read tells me you have a good piece, gotta run but you're on the

right track here. It's nice work.
;-)

[Elidor]

2. Thank you.

And a shameless kick. :D