Torture: Still Less Painful Than Watching Leo Dicaprio "Act"

Thank the Baby Jeebus for NPR.  I was afraid I was going to have trouble finding stuff to write about.  Turns out torture is still causing a pretty big fuss.  The wonks are once again debating what is and isn’t torture.  The idea on the Left seemingly, is that anything less than a brand new plush teddy bear with big brown eyes is too harsh.  Which might be an exaggeration, but only by a little.

What was really interesting about the latest piece about torture on NPR is that it discusses what was up until now apparently, relatively unknown by the both the general public and apparently a lot of people “in the know.”  To wit, the armed forces have for years and years, put our own people through some of the same procedures that are now being described as torture.  Waterboarding, stress positions, slaps to the face, that sort of thing.

Go ahead, reread that last part.

The government folks use this as proof that the techniques they used on guys like Khalid Shiek Mohammed are not torture.  The other team is arguing that the two situations are completely dissimilar because in the case of our guys, they are able to pull a Roberto Duran and say “no mas,” while the bad guys most likely don’t have the option to call time out.  This sense of helplessness the bad guys who can’t say “no” experience as a result of not being able to say “no”, can subsequently lead to the kind of long term psychological damage that would qualify those techniques as torture.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Logic Train has jumped the rails and is plummeting down the canyon towards the river.

Issue 1: Look, the bad guys do have the option of calling time out.  Tell the guys asking the questions, the answers to the questions they’re asking.  I’ll concede that it is quite likely that a large number of people have had these techniques applied to them in what might not be ideal circumstances were innocent, couldn’t tell anybody anything useful, and were put under duress for no justifiable, or forgivable, reason.  But like the death penalty, it doesn’t mean you quit using it, you just get more selective.

Issue 2: Opponents of these techniques have started arguing that it isn’t the techniques per se, rather the combination of the techniques and the circumstances of being forced against one’s will to endure them, that constitute torture. 

“In fact, dozens of studies have shown that when people are exposed to trauma and perceive that they have no control over events, they are at increased risk for prolonged psychological harm, such as post-traumatic stress disorder and depression”. 

Which brings us back to the teddy bear I mentioned earlier.

It’s tough to argue that the techniques we use to teach our armed forces how to resist torture, are now being called torture when we use them to interrogate people, particularly when, for the most part, are pretty dead set on making us dead.

Obviously the stuff at Abu Ghraib was unacceptable and completely out of line.  Speaking purely from a PR standpoint, it made a strong association between us and Saddam, it completely took domestic attention off message, and it gave the people who we say we aren’t oppressing, a pretty good reason to think we might be a little oppressive.

From an ethical and moral standpoint, it sucks because, while we are certainly not on the level of the kinds of people who chop off heads for kicks, and recruit retarded women to become suicide bombers, it takes us closer.

When Pirates Become Heroes and Idiots Have Pens

If you have a drug problem in your neighborhood, and you decide to solve that problem by kidnapping and ransoming the daughter of say, the owner of a local convenience store, and as a result are subsequently shot very dead, you could at the very least, take heart that someone at the Huffington Post would rise up to defend your course of action as reasonable, predictable, and utterly explicable as a really being someone else's fault. 

That at least, is what Johann Hari of the London Independent blogged over at Huffpo regarding the Somali pirates who were sent, as a sort of Easter offering I suppose, off to their great reward by three shots from those very competent men in black our government employs for things of that nature.  

To summarize:

• Pirates, the classical version, were the democratic sort, split their booty in an “egalitarian” manner, liked black people before it was cool, and were really fighting The Man. Hari does  shortchange the pirates, failing entirely to mention their accomplishments in murder, rape and maiming. 

• Europe is trading nuclear and toxic waste for fish off the Somali coastline, which is killing Somalis and preventing them from exploiting those marine resources themselves. 

• Somali pirates used to be ad-hoc coast guard units formed to prevent the above mentioned types of incidents, but are now…well, pirates. 

• The pirates, including the previously mentioned Easter Three, are hijacking ships, as well as ransoming oil, heavy armor, and at least 100 Filipinos, as a result, convoluted and tenuous as it may be, of Europe’s crimes. 

• Isn’t it really Europe’s fault, and isn’t Europe really the bad guy?

It’s a fairly common theme amongst what you and I might call the progressive set.  And here’s what kills:  there seems to be no disconnect whatsoever between those coast guard militias and the current pirate clans.   The fact, that these groups started as a way to fight injustice, does nothing to mitigate what they’re doing now.

Let’s put it another way.  Hitler started as a baby.  As the overwhelming majority if people will attest, babies are great.  That Hitler was once a baby too, does not mitigate the 6 million Jews, ‘Mos, Gypsies and other oddballs he had murdered.  Or anything else he did for that matter.

Hari, and other folks, have also made a big deal that no one was really paying attention when the problem was just a local crime issue, that it took them disrupting the world’s shipping lines for anybody to care about Somalia.

I would respectfully disagree.  The world, or at least the U.S. did pay attention for a while, one of those humanitarian missions no one gives us credit for pursuing, as they complain we don’t undertake enough humanitarian missions.  The end results were a number of dead U.S. soldiers being dragged through the streets and at least one Hollywood blockbuster (Blackhawk Down, for those of you under a rock, or too young to remember).

When someone offers to help you and you shoot at them, they tend to shy away from offering to help again.  It’s a pretty clear cause and effect.  Which makes it hard to understand why anyone is surprised that the rest of the world left Somalia alone for the past decade or so, who wants to get shot at for trying to lend a hand?

I know, I know, it’s sexy to be a contrarian, it’s hip to like the bad guys, and it’s cool to fight The Man.  But when you’re picking a cause to rebel with, make sure you pick something righteous.  The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend.