The Morality of Torture...and a lot of movie refrences

So if you haven't noticed yet, I listen to a lot of talk radio. I just can't listen to top 40 radio anymore. It makes me wanna throw the radio across the room and then stomp on it, Office Space style, with a gangsta rap song playing in the background. I can bare some oldies stations, or classic rock. There is a really great station in Indy that is pretty much the only radio station I can listen to for an extended period of time. 92.3 WTTS is kind of a local indie station, but I only tend to listen to them in the early morning and late at night.

Unfortunately here in the great state of Indiana there isn't much of a choice of talk radio. It is pretty much all conservative, except for NPR, and even that isn't all that liberal all the time. And it isn't so much that I have to listen to liberal radio. I enjoy conservative talk radio. I think it is important for me to be knowledgeable about opposing views of my own.

There is another local station that I listen to often. It is 93.1 WIBC. It's the local news station. In the late morning, though, they have this guy named Garrison that does a conservative talk radio show, and they also play Rush Limbaugh a.k.a Satan. But this guy Garrison is almost as bad, just not as much a paranoid schizophrenic as Rush.

I was listening to Garrison a couple days ago and he was fixated on the topic of torture. Recently the Obama administration has released some documents describing the methods used for extracting information from suspected terrorists. The CIA, in their secret prisons, used techniques such as water boarding, slamming against walls, sleep deprivation and other types of things that you would expect to read in some novel written about the soviet prisons in Russia. And there are now people asking if we are going to put the people who authorized this treatment on trial. There is evidence, however, that these methods extracted information that there may have been a plan to ram an airplane into some buildings in L.A.

With that information in hand the conservative right went on the warpath. The norm for conservatives is to fight for what is moral and right, but when it comes to things that bring horror to the Bush administration, they tend to get a bit offended. The argument I hear the most is that these were simply advanced forms of interrogation, not torture, and they worked. We got the information that we needed, and even put a stop to a potential attack on US soil. Which they have a point there. We did get the information, but at what cost.

A caller on the Garrison show that day posed this question to the anti - advanced interrogation people. What if a man had your family? And he was going to kill them in the morning. The government has a man in prison that might know where your family is. What do you not want me to do to this man to find out where your family is?

This is a classic political move. Give the person that you are arguing with a hypothetical question, that by answering it automatically proves your point. Now if a man had my family you have to know that I would go at this "Man on Fire" style, and just like Denzel I would blast my way through until I got them back. But I would also have to suffer the consequences for my actions. See, movies don't show that part, where Denzel goes to prison and gets gang raped on a daily basis by the sisters.

It seems as though that this is the mental picture that most conservatives have. It's like they watch to many bad action flicks and that is the only idea of how government works that they have. I was listening to Laura Ingram just a day or so into that whole pirate hostage thing, and she was calling Obama a coward because he hadn't sent in the cobra strike team, or something, and taken those guys out that night. But she had no comment after Obama gave the order for our Marine snipers to take them out in a carefully planned out, systematic way that didn't put the hostage in mortal danger. We can't always go in guns-a-blazin' and expect everything to come out roses. Not to mention that it takes days if not a week or more to plan out an operation like that.

But I will use the exact same political move. I pose this to that man on the Garrison show. What if a man had your wife and kids? And you had a secret that that man wanted to know, but the rest of your family was hiding you, and your wife and kids knew where you were. Wouldn't you want that man punished for his actions if he used the exact same interrogation techniques that the government did?

That is what we face in a situation like this, people. It is that damn old fashioned golden rule that always bites us in the ass. If we are willing to accept these methods as morally right, then are we willing to have these methods used against us? Because we cannot have our cake and eat it to with this one. This is very shaky ground that we stand on and if we do not do the right thing, and if we do not sit and think and really contemplate the future consequences of our actions, then we set ourselves up for catastrophic failure.

We had a big meeting a long time ago in a little town in Switzerland about this very topic, and us and a ton of other countries all settled on this ideal that we do not torture. And if we get all hot headed and emotional, and let those emotions dictate the policies that this nation creates when it comes to dealing with people who have wronged us, then we give up those very morals that the conservative right and groups like the heritage foundation fight to uphold. To put it in the great words of Il Deuce, "It is not how far we are going to take it, but do we have the constitution to take it as far as is needed?".

Now, you all read the answer I gave to that guys question, and I have to say that it does seem contradictory to what I'm saying. But that is why in a real situation like that I would rely on the level headedness of the local police. Just like we don't let the victims of 9-11 decide on our interrogation methods. We have to rely on an independent body to represent us and use sound judgement, not emotionally harsh reactions.

There is much more that can be said about this topic, and much more back and forth that goes along with it. We basically have to be, as American citizens, O.K. with not knowing all the ins and outs of our government, especailly when it comes to combat. If the CIA and other governing bodies need to take certain actions, in order to ensure the safety of the American people, then they also need to take certain actions to ensure that the American people don't find out about it. And that no one finds out about it.

I personally don't think that any action needs to be taken with the people that authorized these tactics. I think the whole thing needds to be dropped and chocked up to the fact that it is in the past and there isn't anything we can do about it now. And wether or not we will use those methods again will simply depend on the situation, and hopefully it will be kept a secret this time. But we do have to accept that as a country, these methods will be used against us, and there is nothing that we can do about it. But then again, if these are the only tactics used by our enemies on our boys on the frontlines of war, then at least those soldiers will be coming home. And John McCain would probably agree that he would have rather been water boarded in Vietnam.

Love you
Mike