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I'm from a Country that Tortures People

April 16, 2009 9:20 PM

've been busy lately and haven't had time to blog. That's gonna change and I'll be back to blogging normally. I'll blog about something inane and dumb later tonight.

But what prompted me to blog just now was the release of some Bush-era memos concerning the torture of various terrorist suspects. You can read all of the memos here, and you can see several outtakes along with some commentary here. I have to admit that I've only read the excerpts at the second link; I have not read any memo in its entirety. I honestly don't know if I'm going to read the whole memos because, well, they're disgusting.

I've read 1984 a bunch of times. There are torture scenes in that, and they always make me uneasy, partly because the particular form of torture employed in that book would totally work on me (not that there's any form of torture that I could resist). But mostly those scenes make me uneasy because it's just horrifying to even picture one person torturing another. The excerpts I've read are pretty much the worst things ever. They're worst because they're real, obviously. But also because the torturer isn't an evil agent of Big Brother but, rather, an American soldier working under a direct order from the highest levels of government. An American came up with this idea, an American thought it was a good idea, and then an American went and tortured another human being. And each of those actors swore an oath to protect our Constitution and our ideals.

The interrogation methods described in the excerpts I've read are beyond appalling. It is wrong to treat someone who has been convicted of no crime this way--even if it's the person behind the September 11th attacks. There is simply no justification that I can conceive of that justifies these actions, and I'm ashamed that people from my country played a part in this gruesome spectacle.

Equally disturbing is the length to which officials went to justify these techniques. Jay Bybee wrote that:

An individual placed in a box, even an individual with a fear of insects, would not reasonably feel threatened with severe physical pain or suffering if a caterpillar was placed in the box.

Of course that belief would be unreasonable if the person knows it's a fucking caterpillar. But the memo specifically states that the torturers would tell the detainee that it was a "stinging insect." This sentence epitomizes the stupid pretenses that formed the basis of the justifications for these actions. And this guy's a fucking federal judge now!

This is some sad shit, is all I'm saying.

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