I wish I had the capacity to rewrite my paper on torture in college. It was anti-torture and maybe 60 people read it. However, there are a few points I realize weren’t correct.
1. Torture can be effective and while perhaps false confessions are a problem, I think even many of those can be worked through if the torture goes long enough.
2. I suspect the most effective form of torture is sleep deprivation. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed clearly wanted to break down and stop resisting so he could stop being tortured. He chose the most effective way.
3. I was right that America had lost its fucking soul. I didn’t put it in those words exactly, but one of the Bush advisors on the subject said that there were no restraints on what we could do to an enemy combatant; including the torture of a child of the combatant to get him to break. To this day, that statement freaks me out. I understand evil can be employed to fight evil, and honestly, it pretty much defines the purpose of the CIA and military. Sometimes we struggle for survival, but mostly we struggle for excess comforts and pin the shit storm necessary for this on the military. I’m not exactly a great minimalist myself. I could survive in a tent with fire and good cold weather gear. I want comforts myself.
HOWEVER, if we have no moral restains, then we are in complete anarchy. Hopefully, it never came to that. Hopefully, the Bush advisor hadn’t thought through what he was saying, nobody listened, and it remained a hypothetical issue of pure evil at it’s most abase form. It scares me though that one of the top advisors was so stupid he would both think this and utter it out loud. It was just beyond idiotic on so many levels. It was pure evil. I understand on some level killing a child to stay alive. I don’t think most people know what they are capable of in the pure anarchy of WTF. I should have made this a much bigger part of the paper, and focused less on waterboarding and all the other bullshit. I should have used the sort of vulgar language and I using now at the thought of torturing a child to death. Not only would it not be effective; it’s evil. It isn’t about survival. This isn’t a ‘boots on the ground trying to stay alive and losing their mind with all the death,’ issue. The CIA is removed in its black sites from the threat of immediate death, and torturing a child is never about utilitarianism or anything but an excuse of sadistic sociopathology to take evil to the next level.
I can get behind sleep deprivation. It’s clearly why Bradley Manning had his junk cut off and called himself Shirley or whatever. It’s time to call it even with him, if not help him heal. I don’t think he deserves the Nobel Prize exactly, but he did call out some of the bullshit on why America was in Iraq, as the public rationalizations clearly made no sense. I think he did it out of ego, because he couldn’t hold a secret and was in the wrong line of work, but denying him sleep until he requested his junk being all surgically destroyed and then doing it while he was still in prison and messed up in the head was horrible. Maybe he always wanted to be a woman, but I think he just wanted some damn compassion shown.
“Bowe” Bergdahl, on the other hand, needs some credit. Honestly, I think he DOES deserve the Nobel Prize. I actually wrote the Haqqani while he was prisoner trying to get him released. I knew the NSA would monitor such transmissions, and I offered nothing up, but SGT Bowe wasn’t your average deserter. He wasn’t running from death and from the enemy. He ran straight into it way over his head because he wanted to reason with them in the insanity. I get that shit. I get why my platoonmates were likely taken POW too, though we weren’t heroes per se. I am sick armchair generals demanding everyone show the heroism they would have shown if they didn’t have bone spurs.
Anyway, there you go. I’ve felt horrible about this for years. It had a lot to do with my recent break down this summer, but I was talking rapidly and nobody understood what I was saying. That’s why I write. I just want to get out some of this stuff, even when almost nobody listens, in a way that I can communicate without the word salad. I’m scared for my son’s future in a country that has forgotten that even when laws don’t apply the underpinning of the laws should be some basic sense of compassion, or we are just ordered evil without rules at our best side, and truly satanic in the most abstract sense in our disregard for the painful death of a child … a fucking child. Perhaps I’m not the crazy one. Or maybe I am. I most certainly am, but I’m not alone and not the evil one.
Joker's Wild 