Some torture clearly works. Jordan broke the most notorious terrorist of the 1980s, Abu Nidal, by threatening his family. Philippine police reportedly helped crack the 1993 World Trade Center bombings (plus a plot to crash 11 U.S. airliners and kill the pope) by convincing a suspect that they were about to turn him over to the Israelis.
Time To Think About Torture | Print Article | Newsweek.com
By all means, hold up Jordan and the Philippines as bastions of civil liberties where we'd all want to live.
I get that, in the short term, it might appear that these tactics were effective. And maybe they would be. But in the long run, they would turn us into something that, as a country, I hope we never become.
See, a lot of us get it that the U.S. is hard. It's harder to live here in a lot of other places. You have to listen to people saying things that might get you arrested in other countries. Just on this board, you will daily hear people repeating sentiments that in the UK or Canada or some other European nations would GET YOU ARRESTED and/or prosecuted for human dignity violations. That's tough stuff.
And we are a lot freer here than they are in Israel, or Jordan, or some other countries, too. And with that freedom comes a certain amount of risk.
So, it really does go back to Ben Franklin. People who are willing to give up their freedom for safety don't deserve that freedom at all.
How much freedom are you really willing to give up to eliminate all risk? Because of who we are, the risk will always be there that our very freedom will be used against us by a determined adversary. At some place in your reptilian brain, you have to deal with that. Either we become a place with significantly less freedoms (a place I personally am not willing for us to go), or we deal with the risk like grownups, and accept that it is a part of being who and what we are.
Bear in mind that what you propose is a SIGNIFICANT DEPARTURE from what America was, what America is, and what I hope it always will be. ANd you are doing this based upon a rather insignificant chance that you will personally be victimized.
I'm guessing you don't have a driver's license, either, because driving is VERY VERY DANGEROUS. And, don't even get me started on flying on those scary airplanes. Or taking taxis. Or eating.
Because risk is a part of life, and you will never eliminate all of it.
And when you've thrown suspected (and mind you...these are SUSPECTS, not ADJUDICATED, people) terrorists into hidden prisons in Morocco, and tortured them until they've said whatever it is that you want them to say,
who will be the next group or person to threaten you?
Will it be the veterans who are coming back from Iraq with PTSD? Should we put them somewhere so they don't join up with white nationalists and threaten our national security? Should we do some kind of pre-emptive action to keep them from being bothersome?
And when you've dealt with them, who will be next?
Because, when you start going down that road, where do you stop? When you've lost all reason, and started operating purely based upon the fear of the unthinkable, and you lose your honor and start torturing suspects, what's next? Who's next? And how do you find any safety at all in that world?
I work with gang members. I realize that when I go to work in a dangerous city, and am out with outreach staff in some neighborhood that even the locals don't go into, I may get shot. Most of those kids are strapped, and it is a calculated risk.
But the risk is worth it to me because the job is worth doing. Someone needs to do it, so my kids don't grow up in a world where kids get shot for hubcaps and tennis shoes.
So, when you've turned our government into a clone of a third world banana republic where citizens have no rights, and suspects can be held FOR YEARS without a trial or a right to counsel, how exactly will you explain to your children that once you used to be free, but now you're "safe"?
And, you used them as an excuse for your own cowardice.
