By Paul Verhaeghen, author,
Omega Minor
It used to be so simple.
Even five years ago there was no
room for moral ambiguity.
Here is President Bush, in his
2003 State of the Union:
"Iraqi refugees tell us how forced confessions are
obtained — by torturing children while
their parents are made to watch. International
human rights groups have catalogued other methods used in the
torture chambers of Iraq: electric shock, burning with hot
irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation with electric
drills, cutting out tongues, and rape. If this is
not evil, then evil has no meaning."
At this point, the transcript
mentions an outbreak of (Applause.)
Not that long ago, then, we were
not only opposed to torture inflicted upon Americans (such as the
kicking, clubbing, burning with cigarettes and waterboarding of
American POWs as practiced by Japanese soldiers; they received
between 15 and 25 years of hard labor for their transgressions): We
were also quite opposed to torture inflicted upon Iraqis for the
mere purpose of extracting from them what we then called "forced
confessions".
It used to be simple.
And then all this, within a year
of this rousing denunciation of the practice of torture: 2003: Naem
Sadoon Hatab, strangled to death at the Whitehorse detainment
facility in Nasiriyah; 2003: Hemdan El Gashame, shot to death while
imprisoned in Nasiriyah; 2003: Manadel Jamadi, beaten to death
during interrogation at Abu Ghraib; 2004: Farhad Mohamed, cut and
beaten to death in Mosul.
Such is the "enhancement" of our
"interrogations."
What happened?
It is simple.
Now it is we who do the beating.
We are Good, you see, and we fight
Evil, and by the very nature of our Goodness, all we do, no matter
what it is, is both permitted and justified, for it is done for
Goodness’s sake. Invading a country that never posed a threat,
killing at least 83,000 of its civilians, detaining 25,000 of them,
building cages on faraway shores for prisoners who will never get
justice and at most a verdict, mock executions, beatings, electrical
shocks, forced nakedness, sexual humiliation, the infliction of
hypothermia and heat injuries, waterboarding, accidental killings?
It’s all Good.
If this is the work of a few bad
apples, their names are Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet and
Ashcroft.
One can argue against torture on
utilitarian grounds. Torture begets information, but not all of that
information is "reliable". Confessions obtained under torture are
not admissible in a court of law; we might have to release some
potentially very real terrorists if their confessions are forced
(Google Mohammed al-Kahtani, for instance). And torture goes against
our word of honor — we did sign the Geneva Convention, we did sign
the United Nations Convention against Torture.
Ultimately, there is a deeper
precept.
Torture is the ultimate
possession. You carve a person’s flesh. Their mind, their identity,
their future, their fate rest in your hand, and yours alone. You
twist their very soul until it breaks. They are — wholly — yours.
Yours to toy with, yours to maim, and yours to kill. You own this
human being like a slave-owner owns his slaves. This is not a
metaphor. This human being is your slave; he has no recourse, no
mercy, no law, than the recourse, the mercy, the law that is you.
This is the twenty-first century.
Torture should be as unthinkable as slavery.
In my country, it is not. Here, we
consider torture an acceptable form of human intercourse.
We do know this is wrong. We all
know it. We brag about precision bombings; we show them on TV. We
glorify the surgical precision of our military missions in movies
and in novels; we embed reporters in our marches through the desert.
But we do not brag about torture. We hide the evidence; we burn the
tapes. We do not even want their blood to soil our soil; we
outsource the violence to Cuba, to Yemen, to Egypt, to Gambia and
Malawi, to Mauritania and Morocco, to Sudan, Zimbabwe, Indonesia and
Pakistan, to Bulgaria, Germany, Bosnia, and Romania — and we hope
the evidence will never surface. We do know this is wrong. We all
know it.
History will not judge us kindly.
But just as we are not immune to history, history is not immune to
us. Power is not the only truth that matters. We, the people, are
better than this. We can speak up. We can refuse to take part in
what is done in our name, with our money, in this day and age. We
have freedom of expression. We have the right to vote.
I do agree with President Bush:
If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning.
