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David
Schneider:
It is not, in the end, surprising that the United States has inscribed
torture as official U.S. policy.
The nature of the world today is in fact one of torture. What is torture,
but the oppression of one's physical and mental state to the degree that
a certain manner of conduct is coerced from the victim? Are U.S. soldiers
not tortured by the constant, pervasive threat of an "invisible"
enemy with the ability to infiltrate and destroy at any possible moment?
Do subjects in Islamic states not consider the pervasive nature of American
military and economic power, sexual licentiousness, and entertainment
media to be torture? Was God's commandment to Abraham, that he slay Isaac
-- and then to rescind that commandment -- not torture?
Ve haff vays off makink you talk.
The word itself is strange, because we intuitively understand the all-pervasive
nature of torture, and as such the word has gone through a motion of de-definition,
devolution, in which the viciousness had been utterly drained from it
-- until we have been forced back into using its violent rhetoric.
Torture is but an expression of the concept that a man is an instrument,
a machine, an information machine. Torture is an information technology.
Ben Stephens:
I'm reading a book (The End Of Faith by Sam Harris) in which
a pretty convincing argument is made along the lines of "if the US
is willing -- and it clearly is -- to inflict collateral damage against
innocent civilians to prosecute its war on terror, then it is hypocritical
to indulge in hand-wringing over torturing prisoners."
David Schneider:
I don't understand that logic. Was war ever fought in the modern era that
does not have collateral damage as one of its inevitable aspects? In World
War II, the U.S. sometimes had to make the difficult but necessary decision
to bomb factories in which slave labor was used, and to bomb enemy positions
the U.S. knew had American POWs in them. The last time collateral damage
was not a part of war-making was probably the First Battle of Bull Run.
Ben Stephens:
Actually you're in agreement with the author -- he's saying (and this
surprised me) that, given that we no longer do battle with swords on battlefields,
that we have to think of collateral damage as being acceptable, and from
that position, the torture of (certain) prisoners should also be allowable.
David Schneider:
Now that is a truly perverse sentiment. That is the way men become
beasts. It is also illogical. There was catastrophic collateral damage
during World War II; we didn't torture.
The logic that might apply is that, in the absence of state from which
the war effort comes, in a state of war in which all soldiers are involved
in the war effort out of their own volition, and there is no easy means
to tell who is and who isn't a combatant, then each foot soldier can be
considered the holder of necessary information.
But even then torture is not acceptable, and here's why. It's no secret
that terrorist propaganda is very successful in inspiring its soldiers,
and our propaganda is very poor in dissuading their soldiers. Torture,
information, and propaganda, in our conflict, are bound in an intricate
and cross-influencing web. Torture, as I said above, is an information
technology. And we are in an era, and a conflict, that is all about information.
The torture that this guerilla insurgency is inflicting upon our soldiers
is then countered by our torture upon our prisoners. It cycles around
again, via media and  propaganda
(are they dissimilar from one another now?) -- what is this torture, this
information technology, what is the information about us that is communicated
back to the insurgency? The Republicans would like to believe that it
communicates the manly use of force by any means necessary. This strategy
is based upon a statement, uttered many times but sourced often from an
Israeli soldier named Dvir, who in 2002 was quoted by the New York Times
as saying: "I've spent 20 years of my life fighting the Arabs, and
what I've learned from this is that force is the only thing they understand,
the only way to get their respect. First we have to defeat them, and maybe
then they will want peace."
However this one-dimensional understanding, quoted by an Israeli soldier
who has been fighting in a war for at least 20 years that has been nothing
but a stalemate, obviously misinterprets the message by half, for it additionally
communicates to the Muslim that Christian American speak with forked tongue.
Our society claims to be superior, but in fact all it does is mutilate
and torture the Muslim no better or worse than Saddam did. That is potent
propaganda.
Our humane treatment of prisoners of war needs to be seen, not in terms
of abiding by international standards of law, nor -- as McCain would have
it -- a type of bargain by which American soldiers are protected. Obviously
it's not. It needs to be seen in terms of propaganda, the extension of
humane American standards of treatment that a bitter enemy, raised and
honed as a warfare instrument by a brutal and chaotic society, may be
prompted to change the assumption, passed to him from father to son and
mullah to mosque over generations, that America is the Great Satan. Actions
speak louder than words, and the actions we speak at this time only reconfirm
the assumption that our society is debased, brutal, hypocritical, and
ruthless. And that is certainly a society that must be opposed. We have
operated under the Rumsfeldian decree that "Whoever we are, the terrorists
are worse," and that confirms our moral superiority and the righteousness
of our cause. That is not persuasive: it's merely a choice, for the Iraqi,
for the Muslim world, between a rock and a hard place, or the Devil and
the deep blue sea. (That's a reason, by the way, that the visionary leads
her flock straight into a sea that does not part at the end of "The
Satanic Verses.") What does one do in the absence of a choice? Lie
in wait till the time is right for self-sacrifice in murder-suicide. It
worked for Hamlet; it works for the suicide bomber today.
Democracy is about choice and the ability to speak, and act, and vote,
in support of that choice. For the United States and the West to win this
war, we must present a positive, alternate vision of existence that is
inherently more attractive. [B]
DAVID SCHNEIDER and BEN STEPHENS
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Fallen in sport shoes
By bolandrotor
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