Sunday, November 06, 2005

United States asks "Is Torture Wrong?"

    You might have seen that in the news recently that the United States is debating whether or not it should allow torture of prisoners or not. Here is a CNN story about it. Before I continue, I'd just like to point out that the title of the article is "White House Pressures Congress to reject Torture Amendment". Well hey, that's sounds great, you even have 'reject torture' in the title! Most Americans who skim the top stories will see this and think "damn I knew that George fella was a good american". Now for the small percentage of people who actually read the articles you'll see that the 'torture amendment' that the White House wants rejected is a ban on torture amendment. In my opinion they could have put the world ban in the title, but I digress...

    So what's going on here is that the White House, specifically Dick Cheney, wants an exemption of CIA agents from the policy restricting them from torturing detainees. You might recall that in 2002 a Justice Department memo declared that the U.S. was not bound by many of the provisions of the Geneva Convention when dealing with "enemy combatants". But what's the scariest part about the U.S. wanting to use torture? I think this can be seen by a quick look at what Attorney General Alberton Gonzales said about torture in that 2002 memo. He said that the interrogation must entail "injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions — in order to constitute torture". So it looks like the White House wants the ability to murder detainees. Organ failure and serious impairment of body functions sounds like it would lead to death to me as well.

    Look at what we've become. Look at what we debate about now. There was a CNN poll on this earlier, I'm just waiting for the next poll saying "Would you be upset if a concentration camp was set up in your town?" And another thing, I'm afraid that the overuse of Nazi comparisons over the years has desensitized Americans to that comparision, when today it may be very appropriate to compare the current administration to the Nazi regime, or at least to fascism. Watch this animation and tell me what you think.

3 comments:

Michael Bains said...

I posted in a similar vein recently. The intro to the NYTimes story suggested the mood in the White House was going against supporting any kind of officially sanctioned torture.

Then I read the rest of the article...

People throw up their hands and say "but what can I do about it???" It's good to see you and others showing some of what can be done by individual American humans.

BEAST FCD said...

Delta:

Torture is not wrong, as long as the prisoner is:

i. A muslim (i.e an infidel): Regardless of whether the muslim is guilty, torture his sorry ass in the name of Allah.

ii. The prisoner has a profound hatred for Bush, aka. the idiot Chimp.

iii. A person of any origin that hates the free trade pact.

iv. Any person who looks remotely like Osama and Saddam Hussein.

v. Just about anyone can be tortured.

Damn. The last one stands.

Anonymous said...

I think that to see people, who supposed to be in charge of the well being of our society, bend over backwards in an attempt to justify violations of basic principles of human decency is a torture all by itself...