Applebaum Connects the Dots on Torture
Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum agrees with me, and disagrees, it would seem, with those who persist in believing they can vote for Bush with a clear conscience: So torture is legal?
I’m trying to understand those who are still willing to make excuses for Bush on this stuff. Is it that you believe he really wouldn’t have sanctioned torture, so this must have just happened spontaneously on his watch, without his having anything to do with it? Or is it that you believe we’re morally justified in arresting random people and holding them incommunicado and preventing them from speaking to lawyers and hiding them from the Red Cross and starving them and beating them and letting dogs maul them and so on and so forth? Or do you maybe think that all this torture stuff is a myth, an invention of the vast left-wing media conspiracy?
There are two or three of you who’ve been making comments here about my bias. And I want to say, I really appreciate your willingness to show up and plow through stuff you disagree with and give me your feedback. I mean that sincerely.
I’d like to hear more. The righty webloggers I frequent don’t seem to want to talk about all this torture stuff. Could you maybe tell me, from your perspective, what you think about all this? Is it really just not a big deal? Nothing to see, move on…
Is it sort of like those folks who founded MoveOn.org, when they thought the right-wing obsession with Clinton’s penis had gone far enough? In your view, are Bush-haters like me letting our personal animosity toward the guy deceive us into seeing this story as significant, when it really isn’t?
June 18th, 2004 at 6:34 am
I think everyone agrees that torture is a serious issue, but so much of this debate has been clouded in innuendo, that nobody wants to touch it unless they have a political axe they think can be sharpened by it.
So far, we have pictures documenting abuse at a prison, which have led to the punishment of those depicted there, and some internal memos that clearly show a debate about reasonable interrogation methods versus torture but don’t make any definitive statements regarding actual policy on the matter.
Then it gets pretty muddy. Rumors of further abuse in Iraq that no one can document, rumors of abuse in Afghanistan no one has hard evidence for, rumors of abuse in Cuba that no one has any explicit information on.
Some guy sent some other guy an email about how he was at a college event and some journalist said some OTHER guy had shown him pictures of children being tortured, but the journalist didn’t have the pictures anymore, didn’t seem to have any specific information about them or any details regarding the person who had shown him the pictures.
To people in search of political ammunition against George Bush, this must seem like a real goldmine of hot info. To the rest of us, who would just like to find out the facts without a bunch of shrill rhetoric, there doesn’t seem to be much there. Awful things have happened, and people are being punished. Allegations have been made, and are being looked into. Until someone comes up with more solid information, that’s as far as most people are willing to take it. When, and if, somebody ponies up hard proof of a more sinister conspiracy, it should, and I’m sure will be, a different story.
June 18th, 2004 at 1:25 pm
I agree with Thom for the most part. Although I cautioned people to not wholeheartly accept everything that they hear about other allegations such as child-related torture, I don’t doubt that there are additional photos and even videos that will anger people all over again. Certainly not nearly as morally vacant and evil as that of yet another innocent civilian being slaughtered on tape (today) as the murderers gleefully shout that “god is great”, but ugly nonetheless. (Don’t get me started on the whole collective yawn that the Left and the mainstream media do when it comes to THAT subject!!!)
Although, intellectually, we all knew that in our world history, during war and intelligence gathering, in our country and most all others, there are people who have been treated harshly and illegally, we still, as a country, have liked to have felt that we were not as barbaric as others when it comes to these things. And really, we still aren’t. (But we haven’t gotten results from interrogations throughout our past by withholding milk and cookies for a day!) However, it hurts our national pride to have to face up to our overt failings.
But whereas the Left and other Bush-haters immediately want to jump from their opening move on the chessboard to “check-mate” around Bush, the rest of us want to see justice done to all those who participated, ordered or knowingly allowed such flagrant violations to occur. That will come out across the various military and congressional investigations that have been done and will be done for quite some time.
June 18th, 2004 at 2:22 pm
“And really, we still aren’t.”
That’s where my blood starts to boil. We didn’t torture quite as MANY people? (though who knows what’s going on at Gitmo) It was really only a few bad apples, not a state-sponsored policy? (Though the higher reaches of the state sure spent an awful lot of time trying to find ways that injury and pain inflicted wouldn’t count as torture.) That the people we tortured were really terrorists, and therefore don’t count as humans? (Though we sure picked up a lot of people who weren’t the least bit guilty of anything.)
I don’t even want to go on. Torture is wrong. Always.
I’m angry that it was being done in my name, and I do not believe the “a few bad apples” theory, not least because it’s being propounded by the same people who argued that there were WMD ready to go off at any minute and that Iraq was intimately involved in Sept. 11.