Dean's World

One of the very first things I wrote here on Dean's World, literally the fourth thing I ever wrote, back on April 7, 2002, was this piece arguing against any use of torture against terrorists. I revisited the issue many times after that, always taking the exact same position (see this piece on April 3, 2003 for example). Whenever I took my firm stance on this, I had people on the right and the left giving me grief and telling me my view was too extreme, that terrorists would have no such mercy on us. More than one of them went on to join Howard Dean's cause in the 2004 election and became strident Bush-haters, but two or three years ago they were totally different.

My only answer to them was then, as it is now: "we're better than that, we don't want to go down that road. Things to make them uncomfortable or fearful, okay, but no serious Torture.

My position hasn't changed in any appreciable way. Yet ever since a small group of irresponsibly unsupervised young twenty-something punks went nuts at Abu Ghraib with a lot of disgusting things they did--which their fellow soldiers caught them at and turned them in for, which their superiors immediately investigated and prosecuted them for, making full revelations to the press and the public, and causing the General in charge of that prison to be fired--because of that, now TORTURE IS SUPPOSEDLY RAMPANT AMONG AMERICAN FORCES.

In recent weeks, I have even had people tell me that allowing a dog to bark and a guy and scare him is "torture." More than one wag has even emotionally, in sissy-mary fashion, called this "siccing dogs on people," as if to imply that the dogs are allowed to attack people and bite them (which they aren't).

We've seen simply desecrating a Koran defined as an intolerable "human rights abuse." Not something tacky that we shouldn't do since it would make us look bad, something a decent person wouldn't do unless the situation were extreme. No, it's been portrayed as a "human rights abuse."

Now we even have a politician comparing chaining a guy to a floor and making him listen to rap music with Nazi or Soviet torture. Putting a guy in a room where the temperature was allowed to get "as hot as 100 degrees" fahrenheit (that's 38 C for you people on the metric system) is now defined as "torture" when used against a guy who grew up in a country where the temperature in the shade often hits 130+ degrees.

People, this is sick. Back in June of last year I wrote:

There's something that's really beginning to worry me that relates to this: our national tendency to inflate everything to irrationally huge proportions. It's almost as if, when the news isn't very big, we feel the need to inflate what is in the news to make it seem bigger. This makes me worry that someday the government might try actual, real torture, just under the assumption that no matter what they do, they'll get the same level of excoriation in the press anyway. If you cause hysteria for very small things, how can the hysteria get bigger over the real thing?

Much like those who suggest that today's Republicans are Fascists or that Democrats are Communists. What will these people say if actual fascists or Communists come along? If our government actually does start seriously torturing people? Or wantonly killing innocents on a regular basis?

And I appear to have been right: now some hateful partisans and kneejerk reactionaries are trying to use this brand spanking new definition of "torture" for their own ends, not even asking whether what they're saying makes sense or what it is they're accusing American forces of. Nor are any of them bothering to ask, "why was this done?" The assumption--the assumption!--is that it must have been pure sadism.

A guy was chained to a floor, not allowed to go to the bathroom, and forced to listen to loud rap music. The refusing toilet privileges was over the top to me, but: has anyone even asked who this guy was or what they were trying to get him to reveal? No, of course not: we are content to believe that a captured terrorist was "tortured," apparently just for the fun of it.

Three years ago people would have been calling me a pansy and a sissy for saying "tying him down and not letting him go to the bathroom seems over the top." Now I have very little doubt that someone, somewhere out there is going to call me a "torture advocate" just for writing this.

This is a sad joke.

If you want to know what real torture look like, what real human rights atrocities look like, click here and read this.

Then come back and ask yourself: "instead of condemning American forces, would it not be more decent and patriotic of me to stop with the stupid 'slippery slope' comparisons, and ask what is and is not acceptable practice in interrogating terrorists?"

Meanwhile, while you're thinking on that, Michael Totten notes something important for the historical record.

I frequently think these days that guys like Rusty and Michael are doing the work I'm too tired to do anymore--and I say that with a little shame. During the first year and a half or so of Operation Iraqi Freedom, some of us put in literally thousands of hours and lost endless amounts of sleep here on the home front: helping raise funds, send CARE packages, send well-wishes, adopting soldiers or marines, and more. I drove myself to near nervous collapse at one point I was working so hard on all of that. I wasn't the only one, by any means. There are lots of us out here, working our tails off whenever and wherever we can to lend our support.

Most of us here on the home front, we miss our guys, and hate the people who lie about them--and I for one promise never to stop pointing out the vile lies about our armed forces whenever I have an opportunity.