I get mad at the "We shouldn't have torture investigations, it happened in thepast"

ChrisBlumen: Cool, let us waste our tax money on things that already happened that we can't change!

johnhummel: Yeah! So like when somebody's charged with murder - fuck prosecuting them, it occurred in the past!

And how about if someone robs a bank. If they still have the money, arrest the fuckers. But if they spent it all - well, you can't get it back now, so you'll have to let them go free.

Ryuzaki356647: @ john: Yea, and wrap up the courts with appeals and everything else under the sun. They have the money to do so and you know they won't take the verdict. Think of it this way, even if anyone is found guilty, they're going to fight it, and it will become the biggest partisan circus in the history of the US. Frankly, I think this is their way of distracting us with all of the other problems we should focus on. I say clean house in 2010.

johnhummel: @Ryuzaki356647 - Exactly! I'm with you! I mean, suppose a rich person is charged with murder. Whatever we do, we shouldn't try to prosecute them. Their lawyers will tie it up in courts for ages, and it'll take a long time. Justice is boring and shit - if a crime happens, we shouldn't do anything that would be considered hard.

Just let people who do bad things get away with it. Because that's the American way. Like when Nixon got caught breaking the law. I guess Congress could have tried investigating him, and forcing him out of office if he faced impeachment. But no - they left him in there!

Remember that Truman nutcase, who wanted to investigate war profiteering? Good thing *that* never happened, because hey, there was a war on, and rich people deserved to make a lot of money at the expense of our troops!

So I'm with you, Ryuzaki356647! Let's not do anything hard to people who may have committed crimes. Just sweep it under the rug, ignore murder, torture, false confessions, lying, manipulation of the public into war that cost thousands of lives.

Fuck it. People will just have to get over it.

The One Torture Hurts the Most: US Troops

According to new evidence, in September of 2003, Alyssa Peterson took her own life. Ms. Peterson was a soldier, working as an Arabic-speaking interrogator in Iraq. According to new research, Ms. Peterson killed herself after refusing to participate in the torture of terrorist subjects. From the article:

"Peterson objected to the interrogation techniques used on prisoners. She refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage. Army spokespersons for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objected to. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed."

According to the official report on her death released the following year, she had earlier been "reprimanded" for showing "empathy" for the prisoners. One of the most moving parts of that report is: "She said that she did not know how to be two people; she ... could not be one person in the cage and another outside the wire."

Ms. Kayla Williams, formerly of the army, has recently come out and testified that she witnessed detainees in US care being tortured, and did nothing about it. I'm not condemning Ms. Williams - she feels bad enough:

I witnessed detainee abuse in Iraq and did not report it. This moral failing is my own burden, one I will carry with me for the rest of my life. But it has also influenced how I look at headlines about torture, from Abu Ghraib to the recent revelations about GITMO.

The detainees I saw being abused might have been guilty when they came in. But I am sure that after being treated the way they were, they walked out full of rage and more likely to attack Americans. On a larger scale, I believe that the ability of insurgents in Iraq and terrorists worldwide to use US treatment of detainees in Iraq and GITMO for propaganda has caused significant harm. According the Washington Post, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair agrees that waterboarding and other 'enhanced interrogation techniques' (read: torture) do more harm than good: "The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world. . .The damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security."

Of all of the reasons why the US torture of terrorism suspects and other detainees is so heinous, this is the worst. Ignore the issues about whether or not torture gets accurate or useful information (though by all accounts it doesn't). Ignore whether suspects tortured - whether guilty or innocent of any crimes - leave with anger and rage against their prison guards - which makes them more likely to lash out against the United States. Even ignore whether information that the US has tortured prisoners makes it harder for the US to make their case in the world.

The greatest reason why the Bush administration approving and ordering the use of torture tactics, is because of what they did to the United States troops. Over the objections of the military leaders who clearly labeled waterboarding and other techniques as torture - leaders that the Bush administration said over and over again "Oh, we take the guidance from the military on what to do - unless it's about size of troops in Iraq, and torture".

By ordering that US soldiers participate in the torture of detainees, the Bush administration committed a crime against our very soldiers. From the Lynndie England's of Iraq that the Bush administration labeled a "few bad apples" - who, according to new information coming out today, learned their techniques of using dogs to attack prisoners from high level US officials. To the guards who were encouraged to "wall" prisoners by shoving them into walls via plastic collars, to the military doctors who had to decide if the guy who had been chained for 3 days straight as his ankles swelled up to twice their size and skin blisters formed was in any medical danger.

Some, such as Ms. Petersen, found themselves in an impossible situation - either obey their superior officers as all of their training had taught them, or obey the Constitution they had sworn to protect from enemies foreign and domestic. Some took their life, some simply say nothing but carry the shame and scars for the rest of their lives.

Of all the reasons to investigate the torture of detainees, this is perhaps the greatest. Even if that investigation is a Truth Commission without any power to prosecute, we need to insure that it never happens again. Not to protect detainees or terrorist suspects - but to protect our own soldiers from small fear minded people who would force them to act like monsters.

The Triple Triad of Torture Justifications

If a genius baby is born from rape, does that make it good?

If a cop beats a prisoner with a rubber hose to get a confession, is that legal?

There are three arguments being proposed in the torture debate:

1. It wasn't really torture. This is clearly disproved by the fact that Japanese and German soldiers, doctors, and lawyers were sentenced to jail and execution for using these very techniques.

2. It was all legal because the Justice Department said so! What's interesting here is how the debate has moved from "We didn't do it", to "OK, we did, but only a few times", to "Well, so we did it a lot, but only to get answers", to "Yeah, we did it a lot and planned on doing it from the start."

The fact they got their torture techniques from SEAL training showing soldiers *how to resist torture* should have been the first clue that this was - yes, you have it, torture.

3. It got results. This is the latest argument. "Well, even if it *was* torture, it got good results!"

You know what - I'm going to give this one to Cheney. Ignore every report that said that all of the details from KSM came out *before* waterboarding was used. Throw out that every WWII interrogator of Nazi's said that torture never worked and the Army Field Manual did.

*Just because something works doesn't make it right or legal.* If it's torture, it's illegal. I don't care that harvesting child brains cures cancer, and I don't care if police beatings catch the bad guys. There are things you don't do because their effects upon the souls of people are so bad, society decided that you could be killed for using them (aka - Geneva conventions and Nuremberg trials).

Imagine these soldiers who were taught to use "enhanced interrogation techniques" now working as your cops in your town. Oh, hey - it's legal, right? And I'm *sure* that guy they picked up is really a child rapist - so its OK to use these techniques to get him to confess - oh, whoops, they were innocent after all? Oh, well! They'll just shake it off!

If its torture, it's illegal. This was no "ticking time bomb" scenario people like Cheney get an erection over considering so they can think about doing as many horrible things to a person as possible. This wasn't the eve of some attack - these were some guys who evidently didn't give the wanted answers to questions regarding Iraq and bin Laden - so out came the torture techniques. Until, finally, they got people to say "Oh, sure - Saddam Hussein and bin laden are totally in together to kill the world!"

Turns out to have not been true, but hey - why let the truth get in the way of a good torture session?

At that moment, the Bush Administration was involved in conspiracy to commit torture, from the people who requested it, to the people who approved it, to the people who carried it out. It's a crime, and if there's any justice in the world, it will be prosecuted as such.