Saturday, May 08, 2004
(7:50 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
A Note on Torture
I am utterly disgusted by the way the right-wingers are playing this torture thing. I just went over to InstaPundit on a whim, and it was too much. CNN apparently gave more coverage to American soldiers torturing people in one week than it gave to Saddam's evil in a decade. Maybe that's because it isn't really "news" when a brutal dictator acts like a brutal dictator. It is news, however, when the army of a nation that claims to be the moral exemplar for the rest of the world engages in some pretty fucked-up shit with their prisoners. It's really that simple. They stripped prisoners naked, forced them to simulate sex acts with each other, attached wires to their genitals, stood around and laughed, fucking took pictures as a souvenir. When the fuck did this become "okay"? When did it become "having a good time" or "letting off steam"? Why is this less important than the details of what John Kerry may or may not have done thirty years ago? Why is it that they can't look beyond their partisan desire for everything associated with George W. Bush to be good, in order to see that this is really bad?
Yes, Saddam was a brutal dictator. Yes, bad things have happened to Americans in the past. Yes, the Stalinist purges were a horrible tragedy. Yes, Adolf Hitler was evil. We can all agree on those things. None of those facts, however, makes the sick and depraved things our soldiers were doing "okay." Sure, maybe they were "less bad." But I thought we were shooting for positive "good" -- I thought we were the model society that was going to reshape Iraq. Running our own little mini-gulag is incompatible with that goal and completely undercuts the moral legitimacy of the Iraq War and any future unilateral intervention on the part of America. America can no longer be trusted to do the right thing.
