Soapbox

They just don’t get it.

They just don’t get it.
The apologists for torture are out in force, I see. Like Cal Thomas in his column in today’s Dispatch, they start out saying that if any crimes were committed then the offenders should be punished and then proceed to excuse the inexcusable.

Cal Thomas would have us believe that the abuses are probably not as bad as they look. Maybe, he says, the people being sodomized had important information. Also, our soldiers are under terrible stress. War is hell. Sadaam committed torture worse than this and where was the world outrage? Arabs hate us anyway, so what difference does it make? Muslims shamed themselves when they created bad societies. Etc and ad nauseum; literally.

Forget for a moment that the US (including George Bush Sr. and Don Rumsfeld) aided and abetted Sadaam in filling his mass graves. Forget that the US itself once had a society that permitted slavery. And forget that we should probably strive to hold ourselves to a slightly higher standard than simply “not as bad as Sadaam Hussein”. There is something here that Thomas has conveniently forgotten. It has to do with a document we signed?in a city in Switzerland?

Yes, war is hell, and under the stress of combat it’s easy to do hellish things. That is why the Geneva Convention was written. Signatories can not promise never to have a war, but they do promise not to behave like barbarians during wartime.

How can we ever demand decent treatment of our prisoners unless we hold ourselves to the same standards? Rumsfeld was spitting mad a year ago when American soldiers were taken prisoner and the Iraqi’s dared to show their faces on Arab TV. “That violates the Geneva Convention” he declaimed, and was right. Now, instead of really addressing the issue, he wants to debate whether the treatment was technically torture or was merely “abuse”.

There will always be fanatics who hate the U.S. no matter how humanely we behave. But the battle being fought now isn’t one to convert the fanatics: it is for the hearts and minds of the average, moderate Iraqi citizens. And when we rail about the abuses of Sadaam and make excuses for our abuse of defenseless prisoners, that war can never be won.

We cannot claim to be “liberating” and democratizing Iraq when we’re holding electrodes. Thomas doesn’t get it. Neither does Rush Limbaugh, whose morally repugnant excuse for torture is that it is “no different than a fraternity hazing”. (Remind me to find out what fraternity he was in, so I can tell my son to avoid pledging there!) Their attitudes mystify me, because I know that torture is not a conservative value, and sadism is not on the Republican platform. Decent human beings of all political stripes know that there is a huge difference between what happens voluntarily and what occurs under force and violence.

If we really want to support our troops, the American public will rise up and demand an accounting of this entire situation. We must not allow the prison guards to be the fall-guys for this pass-the-buck administration, but must investigate the entire system, and the orders from above that allowed this situation to occur.

There is no excuse for prisoner abuse, and no room in rational discussion for flag-waving apologists who think there is.