Let's Go Waterboarding

It almost sounds like a fun thing to do on one of those hot, summer days, until you realize what it is. So Obama recently released some CIA torture memos. GOOD FOR HIM! I can't stress that enough. Now what I want to stress is that America should do everything in its power to bring to justice, the people who were responsible for authorizing this. I'm not talking about the low ranking guys who were taking orders. No, I want the high up guys to go to jail for a long time. There is no excuse for what they did. It's an abomination that we allowed this to happen and it will be an even bigger abomination if we let the people responsible for it get away with it.

It was revealed that the CIA use the waterboarding technique on Khalid Sheik Mohammed up to 183 times. He was the planner of the 9/11 attacks. Seriously, this guy had it done to him 183 times! After about 5 times, don't you think if he was going to give in, he would have by then? I bet any normal person after 10 times would be telling horrible stuff about themselves, and even making up stuff they never did. Another prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, had it done to him 83 times.

Now I don't give a flying fuck about the feelings of terrorists as long as they're found guilty in a court of law, but that's another topic. For all I care these guys can rot in prison the rest of their lives. However, if we resort to torture then we're not much better than them. America was created so people wouldn't have to go through this stuff when they were accused on a crime, or even after they were convicted of a crime. Just because these people are our enemies and aren't necessarily from America, doesn't mean they shouldn't be treated the same. I would hope that any American accused of a crime in another country would get a fair trial and not be tortured.

It's unfortunate that there are people in this country that justify doing evil acts by saying they are protecting us. If the only way you can protect me is by harming an unarmed human being, then I don't want your protection. If you can't come up with any better way of doing things, then you're not smart enough to do your job. Did the people who authorized this ever think that's what the enemy wanted them to do? Maybe by killing thousands of people on 9/11, their real goal was to make us mad to the point we change our laws, make us more barbaric like them, and make mistakes. Boy, did we make some mistakes.

This really isn't a war about taking land and racking up body counts. This isn't about beating tyrants and going home after some country surrenders. This is a war about morality. Which culture will win; ours, or the terrorists'? We might be doing a good job killing the enemy and we might have won some military battles, but that's not how we're going to win. We lost one of the most important battle in the war when we decided to torture prisoners. We are becoming more like them instead of them becoming more like us. Our goal is to make these people not want to kill us anymore. There are few things we can do to make them love us, but there are lots of ways we can make them hate us worse than they already do and torturing their people is one sure way to make sure they'll never love us.

Some might be wondering why it's such a big deal to torture some evil person that's responsible for the deaths of thousands. Well, in the culture of the Taliban and Al Quaeda, they believe in torture, executions, and that their culture and political beliefs are superior to ours. If they can get us to resort to their level, that would give them proof that our current system is inferior and that we had to adopt their methods. Not only that, but don't you think it's easier for them to recruit more terrorists when they get angry because we tortured their people? You might get some information that saves a few dozen people by torturing, but you end up creating a hundred angry suicide bombers in the process that will kill hundreds more people. That's not helping. Torture information, while sometimes helpful, can also end up being total BS. If you're in pain, or are really scared, you'll say anything if you think they'll let you go.

Besides waterboarding, there were other tortures outlined that included the use of scary insects, depriving prisoners of sleep, stripping them naked in front of members of the opposite sex, locking people in confined spaces, slapping prisoners on the face and stomach, and making them stand in odd positions for long times. To the average person, it doesn't seem as bad as something the Nazis, or Japanese would use in W.W.II, or perhaps something used in the U.S.S.R, but these techniques we were using were actually used in those evil regimes. We might not be using the worst tortures they came up with, but we're still using THEIR ideas. What kind of country are we when we are taking ideas from the worst cultures in human history? Are we still America: land of the free and home of the brave? Are we still free and are we still a brave country when we do things like this? I think those are all good questions we should often ask ourselves.