“We are America. We don’t Fucking Torture” roared Fox News anchor Shepard Smith. I believe that this is a widely held sentiment amongst US citizens. For generations we have taken the high road in the international community. Admonishing lesser adversaries for their faults on human rights violations and condemning torture. Now, this once foreign problem has become an internal debate. One side says this is clearly torture and therefore illegal. The other side says its ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ with the help of which key information was gotten out of human beings that have no rights under the US constitution and saved American lives. Who is right?
The problem with this debate is the blogs and the media’s mischaracterization of the other side. Conservatives immediately assign a much used label of “blame America first” liberals which instantly discredits whatever point the pundit is trying to make. On the other hand Liberals aren’t helping their cause by consistently playing the role Conservatives have assigned them and using phrases like, “One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.” Liberals need to understand how they are seen by Conservatives and do everything in their power to throw off the yoke of those labels. If you are viewed as a Dove then you must choose your words carefully and make your arguments air tight so a Hawk cant find something to exploit. Left-wingers also don’t give right-wingers their due credit by characterizing them as Rush Limbaugh-Fox News ditto heads.
However with this in mind, the Republicans are wrong. Their argument that its not torture might hold water in domestic debates, but it sure as hell doesn’t resonate wherever Fox News lacks a strong foothold. It was outlawed by the Geneva Convention. We even prosecuted a Japanese military officer Yukio Asano in 1947 for torture that included waterboarding. He got 15 years of hard labor. So whether you consider the fact that we put a nice starched collar on a prisoner before we threw him through a false wall qualifies the act as not-torture. Or if you think the methods were effective and therefore should be condoned. These qualifications matters little in the international community. We will lose our moral high ground in any negotiations and we will lose the ability to admonish any other country for human rights violations.
This also creates a bad precedent. Once you leave the realm in which torture is measured on a good vs. bad dichotomy and turn it into a relative concept you can never go back. This is why our country can never leave the high ground in which we universally denounce torture. This is also why the argument that the ends justify the means never stands up to scrutiny.
So, conservatives have ended up on the wrong side of this debate. They will defend it furiously, but to no avail. They will use the age old critique that Democrats aren’t competent enough to protect Americans and that they are endangering our country by releasing these torture memos. This is a silly argument. One which creates a false choice between being killed by terrorists and torturing them. No Democrat is against forcing confessions out of detainees. Especially ones that we suspect hold key information about future attacks. It’s just common sense that we try to get these confessions out legally. For 50 years we did this with no problem. The FBI still does it without impinging on the International laws. Also, the legal acrobatics needed to turn international torture into domestic enhanced interrogation techniques started before we had a single suspect. As a result of the conservatives’ hypocritical stance, America’s standing in the world has been weakened way more then Obama’s handshake with Chaves could ever do.
