But at least we didn’t flush the Koran
According to a confidential Army report, interrogators brutally abused prisoners until they died at a prison camp in Afghanistan. The Guardian reports:
The New York Times carries a graphic account of Dilawar’s torture and death. His legs were beaten so badly that he could not bend them to kneel, and he was chained for days by his wrists to the roof of his cell. When he asked for a drink of water during his final interrogation, one US interrogator punched a hole in a water bottle, handed it to Dilawar and tormented him as the water poured away before he could drink, according to an interpreter present at the time.
After the interrogation, guards chained Dilawar again to the roof of his cell, where he was found dead by a doctor several hours later, the paper reported.
This kind of behavior by U.S. troops makes me sick. If publishing accounts of atrocities is losing us the propaganda war, good. We’re Americans dammit, not jihadis. There’s no point in winning a war if you have to lose your soul to do it.
Yours truly,
Mr. X
…sickened…
I love America. I really do. But torture sickens me.
What’s even worse is that there are some people, so-called Americans, that encourage this sick shit.
The kind of love I have for America is the kind of love a parent would have for a child. You wouldn’t want your child to fuck up. You wouldn’t want your child to get in fights with other children. If you did, I’d have to question if you really love your child.
It’s obvious that abuse performed by American troops only hurts us in the War on Terror.
Of course, going into Iraq also hurt us in the war on terror. The best way to win the war on terror would be to A) set up an exit strategy and time-table for withdraw for Iraq. This would take the steam right out of the insurgency, which is only fighting us because they’re convinced we’re going to stay as long as we can. B) Focus on al Qaeda, and in particular bin Laden. C) Withdraw our troops from all Middle Eastern nations (not including Afghanistan). Better yet, withdraw all troops from all other nations as well, for example Germany and South Korea. D) Stop funding other nations (especially since those funds are unconstitutional anyway). We shouldn’t fund Israel or Palestine, and one would think Israel would be self-efficient by now anyway, and not living off of our welfare. And, of course, stop funding dictators. Nothing probably hates Middle Easterners more than to find out that we were funding the guy who was oppressing them. Karimov of Uzbekistan is a prime example. And E) adopt a non-interventionist foreign policy.
Using torture tactics is foolish in a war on terror. It’s foolish all the time, but especially in a war on terror. Torture is no way to ensure you’ll get accurate information. The person you torture might not even know anything, but you can bet he’ll tell you what he thinks you want to hear if he thinks it’ll make the torture stop. It’s an inefficient tool at getting accurate information. (What else can we expect from big government other than inefficiency?) And, it’s particularly foolish to use this in a war on terror because it makes us look like the bad guy, ensuring a likelihood of more anti-Americanism, and ultimately more terrorism.
I should add that the founding fathers included the eighth amendment to prevent cruel and unusual punishment. Some would argue that this only applies to Americans, but the founders wouldn’t’ve. They believed in the idea of Natural Rights, that we all, every human on Earth, had the same, natural, innate, inherent rights.
John Locke was highly influential to the founders, and I encourage everyone to read his Two Treatise of Government. I also encourage them to read the Declaration of Independence, and see how influential this philosophy was on this nation’s founding.