Torture Is Torture: Why The Right Is Wrong Again

For all of their piousness, the Right just doesn't get it. Their new tactic for making the prisoner torture scandal go away is to say that it wasn't really torture.

Man on Man. A rose by any name is still a rose. Torture by any other name is still torture.

The Washington Times, Jan. 11, '05, belittles the idea that “prisoners forced to sit for extended periods of time in cramped areas, being draped with an Israeli flag or having a wet blanket wrapped around the head to simulate the sensation of drowning” should be called torture. In the article “The Peter Principles: Torture logic” published by the Washington Times, the author, Peter Roff, goes so far as to suggest that the government was right in using such tactics.

Jonah Goldberg in a Tallahassee Democrat article suggests that the things that went on at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib Prison were “something a bit shy of torture”.

Specifically, “even being "waterboarded" - where a detainee's face is surrounded with a wet blanket and he's made to feel like he's drowning isn't torture either.” To valid his point Mr. Goldberg says “Our own cadets at the Air Force Academy have been water-boarded in training.” He obviously forgets the point that the Air Force Academy uses this as an example in an attempt to prepare cadets for torture.

Mr. Goldberg continues his moral pragmatism by justifying this position by saying that al-Qaida are not “signatories” of the Geneva Convention.

The Right Is Wrong Again.

The quibbling over the meaning of torture and the validity of its use is morally reprehensible in and of itself. Torture is wrong.

The Right has lost its moral compass. They have wrapped themselves in the flag and left their conscience in the dirt below it. You can't be a little bit pregnant. Date rape is still rape.

This country is surely on the wrong course when it's leaders and their supporters suggest that torture, in any form, is acceptable.

Allowing this rhetoric to be blathered around as acceptable lowers our resistance to the immorality of the concept. It is an insidious attack on America' values. These fascist ideas have to be stopped dead in their deadly tracks.

It begins with you the reader. The next time you hear someone justifying torture or suggesting that the things that happened at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib Prison were not torture stand up and disagree. Your silence on this matter is deafening.

Next time someone at the water cooler says such things are not torture and that they deserved it anyway, say "you're wrong." That's how we stop this at the grass roots -- at the foot of the flag.

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