Torture
posted in General |As a teenager I liked to read adventure stories taking place in far away places. In those imaginative stories, torture went hand in hand with captured prisoners. Chinese water torture was often used and described as was severing fingers one by one or stretching people on the rack. People in the Middle Ages were very creative in their treatment of fellow men — and women. They would likely consider water boarding pretty tame. Now we have the battle of terminology.
The BamBams like to call aggresive questioning torture while the Bushies talk about enhanced interrogation. And the Speaker (or is it the Speakess) of the House says she was briefed on interrogation techniques including water boarding but never dreamed that they would actually be used when interrogating the terrorists captured after 9/11. Come on Nancy, don’t make us barf. Can’t you just see a terrorist yelling “torture” and demanding a lawyer? War is a messy business and BamBam is well advised to stay away from the details. When the world agrees on the line that separates torture from ordinary inquiry I’ll give a little more credence to BamBam’s cop-out. But when we are dealing with savages who include TVed beheading of prisoners just to spice up an Islamic lawn party I think we are naive to think that our polite rhetoric will have much of an influence on the so-called Mullahs.
One personal experience is instructive. Following WWII I made 5 trips to Japan and on one of our trips the guide/interpreter was a Japanese military officer captured on Okinawa. During a break, we informally discussed nuclear weapons and the A-bombing of Hiroshima. His comment about the A Bomb was brief and to the point — ” If we had it, we would have used it”.
Spare me the squeamish hypocrisy over water boarding.