Torture is a crime

  Torture is exrtremely deviant behavior and must never be used.  The American government, acting at the behest of the President and the Attorney General, approved the use of torture and employed a variety of methods of torture on prisoners.
The Government deliberately made torture legal by calling it "enhanced interrogation techniques."
Unless this policy is officially condemned and unless the principals are prosecuted, or at least, censured, our nation will never be the same.  It will exist but with a cancerous shame deep within the national soul.  We will be saying to the world and to future generations that the "exceptional" country, the "indispensable" country, the "shining city on the hill" is a fraud. 

Lawlessness is now officially approved.   Future Presidents have legal precedent to follow.  Other nations may follow our lead.  Our lectures on human rights will be hollow. 
This is the path to self-destruction.

In 1993 Daniel Patrick Moynihan published an essay titled "Defining Deviancy Down."  In this essay Moynihan deplored the changing social standards of the American people, breaking this into three categories: altruistic, opportunistic, and normalizing.
The normalizing of crime, the acceptance of crime had become a serious problem and Moynihan quotes Judge Edwin Torres of the New York State Supreme Court who said "The numbness, the near narcoleptic state can diminish the human condition to the level of combat infantrymen who, in protracted campaigns, can eat their battlefield rations seated on the bodies of the fallen,  friend and foe alike.  The society that loses its sense of outrage is doomed to extinction."
______________________________________________________________________________________

On The Subject of Torture

I'm recycling this post from May 2009:


When I read the comments by former Vice-President Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Charles Krauthammer, et al, on torture and its good uses, I like to recall some wisdom from the writings of Simone Weil:

"Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty."

On Prosecuting Our Torturers

Imagine this scenario after World War II:

"These Nuremberg Trials are a distraction.  The War is over.  Let's not look back at the past.  We have a lot of work to do.  Europe needs to be rebuilt.  The Marshall Plan has to be implemented.  Germany needs to be brought back into the community of nations.  There is nothing to gain in prosecuting those officials who committed the crimes they have been charged with."

I know, I know.  The Attorney General's investigation is about charging and prosecuting our own.  That is very different.  Very unsettling.  It means, that no matter what we decide, we as Americans will have to live with the shame of what was done in our name or the shame of not having done anything about it.
Very unsettling.

On Torture

Does torture work? That is the question being debated by the hosts of cable news channels (I call them 'the pack of yapping jackals) and the radio talk show hosts (I call them 'rats who like to gnaw on the social fabric'). Does torture work?
Gee, I don't know. Does assassination work? Does lying work? Does carpet bombing work?
Let's not forget that this debate began over whether or not waterboarding, electric shock, hanging suspended by the arms, etc. constituted torture. It even got down to fine-tuning parameters, such as how long the condition lasted or how often it was repeated, and so on. It was like reading a Kafka novel, or a policy paper from the Soviet Politboro.
Finally, even the most obtuse, even the most shifty-minded of the supporters of this practice had to accept that it was torture.
But now it's okay to torture because 'it works'. That is the party program now.
Well, I'm sorry, but it is not OK. Never has been, and never should be.
Even if it works, it is wrong.