Torture

"The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers" -- Carl Jung

I'll tell you what torture is. It's listening to Dick Cheney. Why he even has a pulpit to yell from is beyond me. You don't hear W taking the time to make speeches defending torture.

This week's dueling speeches by President Obama and former Vice-President Dick Cheney have brought into focus the great divide between those that see the moral problem with "anything goes" security and those that watch 24 too much.

Some highlights from Obama's speech:

... I know that we must never — ever — turn our back on its enduring principles for expedience sake.

I make this claim not simply as a matter of idealism. We uphold our most cherished values not only because doing so is right, but because it strengthens our country and keeps us safe. Time and again, our values have been our best national security asset — in war and peace; in times of ease and in eras of upheaval.

Fidelity to our values is the reason why the United States of America grew from a small string of colonies under the writ of an empire to the strongest nation in the world.

It is the reason why enemy soldiers have surrendered to us in battle, knowing they’d receive better treatment from America’s armed forces than from their own government.

It is the reason why America has benefited from strong alliances that amplified our power, and drawn a sharp and moral contrast with our adversaries.

...From Europe to the Pacific, we have been a nation that has shut down torture chambers and replaced tyranny with the rule of law. That is who we are.

Optimistic, patriotic (in a good way), moral.

Cheney took a different tact ... defensive, misleading, appealing to fear. Cheney hoped to rebut Obama's speech, but instead responded with his own speech rife with misstatements, bravado and outright lies. It seemed to be more of a preemptive strike at avoiding jail time (his daughter agrees), than an honest defense of interrogation techniques.

Cheney cited the support of Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, but Blair's words hardly sound like support:

"there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is that these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security."

From other Bush era officials:

A top-secret 2004 CIA inspector general's investigation found no conclusive proof that information gained from aggressive interrogations helped thwart any "specific imminent attacks," according to one of four top-secret Bush-era memos that the Justice Department released last month.

FBI Director Mueller Robert Muller told Vanity Fair magazine in December that he didn't think that the techniques disrupted any attacks.

Tom Ridge, the original Director of Homeland Security, and someone who would know about terrorist threats:

... he disagreed with Vice President Cheney’s claim that President Obama is making the country less secure. “Yeah, I disagree with Dick Cheney,” said Ridge ... “It’s just the whole notion of a Republican vice president giving a speech after the incumbent Democratic president,” he said. “It’s gotta go beyond the politics of either party.”

Senator John McCain (someone who knows more about torture than another politician):

“When you have a majority of Americans, seventy-something percent, saying we shouldn't torture, then I’m not sure it helps for the Vice President to go out and continue to espouse that position,”

... Cheney, he says, “believes that waterboarding doesn’t fall under the Geneva Conventions and that it’s not a form of torture. But you know, it goes back to the Spanish Inquisition.”

... McCain reiterated that waterboarding is “not a new technique, and it is certainly torture.” “You hear it from al Qaeda operatives that when we torture people and it becomes public, then it helps them recruit,” he said.

Some (Joe Scarborough) have compared Cheney to Jack Nicholson's character in A Few Good Men, Colonel Jessup, positively:

The Cheney-esque Jessup defends his decision by saying, “[his] death, while tragic, probably saved lives” and “[y]ou have no idea how to defend a nation. All you did was weaken a country today.” So in that sense, yes — Cheney’s speech yesterday was “straight out of ‘A Few Good Men.’”

Joe omits the end of the movie where Tom Cruise's character replies:

“[Y]ou’re under arrest, you son of a bitch,”

Let's hope that life imitate art.

I'm sick of these people who give tacit approval to torture out of some so-called noble reason. If the specious "terrorist with a ticking bomb" arguments make you sleep better at night, so be it. But real life is not an episode of 24. We not only debase ourselves, we breed the very thing we say we are fighting. The ends do not justify the means. We have to be better. We must appeal to the "better angels of our nature".

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." -- Friedrich Nietzche