Torture
“And the Washington Redskins today have now defeated the New York Niggers. Next game in our NFL double header: the San Francisco Spics versus the Atlanta Honkeys.”
Okay. That’s the National Football team as composed of teams named after racial epiteths. The “Washington Redskins” is a perenial sore-spot, regularly derided by Native American groups and laughed off by the rest of us (honkeys like me) as being on par with PETA’s attempt to change the name of the Green Bay Packers to the Green Bay Pickers.
Behind the names lie ugly legacies. Slaughter. Genocide. Terrorism. Torture.
Torture.
We’ve all heard about Alan Dersowitz’s “Ticking Bomb Scenario” and his proposed time-is-of-the-essence-and-we-have-this-procedure-in-place-to-quickly-obtain “Torture Warrant”. Time is of the essence, and you have a person in custody who has information that will save innocent life. Torture is justified to get this information out. Right?
My answer is, “Sure, I guess.” Except I keep stumbling upon this problem with the proponents of Alan Dersowitz’s solution.
On the message board I frequent and sort of administer, there was this bellicose-fueled poster (self labeled “Independent”, who gets “both sides of the story” by listening to “both right wing radio and NPR!”… and he voted for Gore in 2000, but because Bush “will take the fight to the terrorists” will vote for Bush in 2004) who initially sided with the idea that Torture was justified at Abu Gharib. It echoed Rush Limbaugh’s famous “Skull and Bones” defense. He shortly backed down on that idea– I believe after it became clear that the people in abu Gharib were not “The worst of the worst”, and he sidestepped himself to the “few bad apples” storyline of what happened at Abu Gharib.
The next thread we get is the “Say there’s a ticking time bomb and we needed to extract the information. I say, Torture ’em!”
I admit I wasn’t terribly adept in this oh so crucial message board squirmish, and my posting of various news items of descriptions of what happened at abu gharib got a “What’s your point?”. We’re no longer working with what happened at abu gharib, after all, and we all agree that that was bad, but now we’re looking at hypothetical scenarios involving the worst of the worst.
The problem, which I was unable to express at that time, beyond a “when the hell does this even happen??” was that he had just come off defending Abu Gharib, where he for some reason thought the prisoners were the “worst of the worst” and where there really is no “information” that needs to be gotten out with immediacy… and find-tuned it to a more hypothetical, and not on the plate, “worst of the worst”.
He was still defending abu Gharib! And everyone bringing us to the “ticking bomb scenario”, (conditioned by entertaimnet blockbusters the Fox Hit “24”, a show that looks as though it was stoked up and brought into clearer focus after Bush’s meeting with Hollywood executives in the final months of 2001) – torture looks as though they are defending something else entirely, too.
Which brings us back to the “worst of the worst”.
There’s this pro-torture pundit who chimed in with a “Water-board Zarqawi? In a heart-beat!”
To which I can only say, “Well. Sure. I… guess.”
Get back to me after you actually get Zarqawi, okay? In the meantime…
Perception management has every Muhommad on the streets of an Arab country as being, defacto, Zarqawi. I say that with the message board encounter over abu Gharib in mind.
Now you head to the Mathematics of An Iraqi Insurgency, my “inexaustible supply” metrix, with that “Yes! Torture Zarqawi!” … and the multitudes of “#3″s we keep capturing, and… these insurgents are terrorists…
The Washington Redskins have defeated the New York Niggers.