Torture! Torture!! TORTURE!!!
Torture Watch
Torture is all the rage these days. Today, VP Cheney met with Republican senators to give an impassioned plea to allow torture of terror suspects.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack recently pled his case for prisons for terrorists, asking "How do you deal with individuals and groups of people that abide by no laws, they abide by no regulations, they don't respect any treaties, their sole purpose and sole intent is to try to kill innocent civilians?"
In a recent report to the United Nations Committee Against Torture in Geneva, the State Department offered its rationale for the imprisoning "enemy combatants" in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, stating "There is no question that under the law of armed conflict, the United States has the authority to detain persons who have engaged in unlawful belligerence until the cessation of hostilities.”
Very good points. However, I can’t think of anyone who thinks the “WAR ON TERROR” will be over in our lifetimes. Not only is it convenient to have a bogeyman to scare and control the masses, but the sheer number of Iraqi families that have experienced injury or death at the hands of our troops in Iraq has guaranteed yet another generation of America-haters. So, the State Department claims that we must hold the prisoners ad infinitem or until they die. Fortunately, prisoners in our custody seem to die much more quickly than even Iraqi civilians, freeing up valuable prison space for even more prisoners.
Now, I have to ask – though I do not realistically expect an answer from anyone in authority – why, if we are so sure that these prisoners are terrorists, can’t we give them a fair trial? The answer is that we simply don’t have proof. So, because we think these people MIGHT be terrorists, we incarcerate them. Since we have no proof, we must hold them without charging them, without a trial, without legal representation, FOREVER.
Does this sound like traditional American values? Does this really sound like we’re winning the hearts and minds of the rest of the world? You have got to be sh#tting me.
To make matters worse, sometimes we torture the prisoners. We force them to do degrading things. We beat them. We deface their religious books. We prevent them from sleeping. We sic guard dogs on them. And occasionally, when things get really exciting, we kill them.
If someone is really bad and we can’t prove it, sometimes we hand that prisoner over to a government that will definitely torture them or kill them. Of course, in order to do that, we need an affidavit from the country stating that they won’ttorture them – respectable countries with long histories of humane treatment of prisoners… like Egypt. And our government officials are more than willing to “believe” the affidavit and hand over the prisoner.
Two days ago, the Washington Post reported that the CIA runs secret overseas prisons all over the world. Let’s suppose, just for a moment that these rumors are false: how can we possibly address the world with a straight face, state that the prisons do not exist, and expect to be believed? I think the only convincing argument would be to state that we can torture prisoners in any of our prisons whenever we want, so we have absolutely no need for secret prisons. That, at least, would be believable.
-John Locke
Torture is all the rage these days. Today, VP Cheney met with Republican senators to give an impassioned plea to allow torture of terror suspects.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack recently pled his case for prisons for terrorists, asking "How do you deal with individuals and groups of people that abide by no laws, they abide by no regulations, they don't respect any treaties, their sole purpose and sole intent is to try to kill innocent civilians?"
In a recent report to the United Nations Committee Against Torture in Geneva, the State Department offered its rationale for the imprisoning "enemy combatants" in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, stating "There is no question that under the law of armed conflict, the United States has the authority to detain persons who have engaged in unlawful belligerence until the cessation of hostilities.”
Very good points. However, I can’t think of anyone who thinks the “WAR ON TERROR” will be over in our lifetimes. Not only is it convenient to have a bogeyman to scare and control the masses
Now, I have to ask – though I do not realistically expect an answer from anyone in authority – why, if we are so sure that these prisoners are terrorists, can’t we give them a fair trial? The answer is that we simply don’t have proof. So, because we think these people MIGHT be terrorists, we incarcerate them. Since we have no proof, we must hold them without charging them, without a trial, without legal representation, FOREVER.
Does this sound like traditional American values? Does this really sound like we’re winning the hearts and minds of the rest of the world? You have got to be sh#tting me.
To make matters worse, sometimes we torture the prisoners. We force them to do degrading things. We beat them. We deface their religious books. We prevent them from sleeping. We sic guard dogs on them. And occasionally, when things get really exciting, we kill them.
If someone is really bad and we can’t prove it, sometimes we hand that prisoner over to a government that will definitely torture them or kill them. Of course, in order to do that, we need an affidavit from the country stating that they won’t
Two days ago, the Washington Post reported that the CIA runs secret overseas prisons all over the world. Let’s suppose, just for a moment that these rumors are false: how can we possibly address the world with a straight face, state that the prisons do not exist, and expect to be believed? I think the only convincing argument would be to state that we can torture prisoners in any of our prisons whenever we want, so we have absolutely no need for secret prisons. That, at least, would be believable.
-John Locke
posted by John Locke | 11:46 PM
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