Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Ignorance is not exactly torture.

Two things, briefly.
  1. In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates' Deaths. I encourage you to read it if you haven't already. The "punch" line is that American troops tortured and killed an innocent young man. I think many torture proponents think that "yes, we tortured people but they were all bad." I think to myself, "self, how many people have we tortured? What are the chances they were all terrorists?" It seems to me that a policy of torture necessarily leads to torturing innocents.
  2. In two discussions on Obsidian Wings I've pointed out the Sanchez torture memo to people who say the Bush Administration's military is doing a good job of finding and punishing those responsible for torture. Sanchez reported to a general who reported to Rumsfeld. Both times I pointed this out, it was ignored.
Body and Soul also points out:
Some conservatives will tell you this is America at its finest -- the military is investigating itself. The truth is, until poked and prodded by reporters who didn't accept the stories handed them, the military was doing as little as it could get away with. And it will keep doing so unless the prodding continues.
I've heard that investigations take time. That's fair. What I see here, however, is investigations taking a back seat.

1 comment:

MDC said...

Nice post; effective blend of links.
I have yet to develop a sophisticated opinion of Torture-gate, other than that torture is wrong, even if:
-The other guys do it first
-The U.S. military has been doing things like this for a long time; these recent offenders have simply been unlucky enough to participate in a more "enlightened", information-friendly age.
Also, I feel your frustration that the comments you contributed to that blog were ignored. It can be tough to break in to a "blog crowd" that is already established-unless of course you already knew those people...