Torturing Ourselves
The continuing national debate is getting more and more self-righteous as Americans look for absolutes in a world of moral murk.
Dick Cheney emerges from his psychic cave to insist that torture works, but he has no standing after eight years of secrecy and ruthlessness. Barack Obama tells us we are not the kind of people who torture on principle but refuses to punish those who did while believing they had a legal right to do so.
Now we are rooting through the moral wreckage for evidence of whether or not vile treatment of human beings can sometimes serve a greater good. Are those who insist that it never can and insist on punishing anyone who disagrees any less rigid than Cheney?
At 19, I was given a rifle and ordered to kill for my country against all my beliefs and three years later saw an American president command the only use of nuclear weapons in history to slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children to save lives like mine in what would have been a bloody invasion of Japan.
Those experiences left me with a lifelong aversion to sanctimony on questions where life and death are involved.
5 Responses to “Torturing Ourselves”
Right on.
I was wondering when the sages would weigh in on the matter. WWII veterans are like Gods in my opinion. True heros who know what's what. I'd like to see them as a group, those that remain, make a collective public statement on the matter.
Talk about weighty!
This is a very well written piece by Mr. Stein.
Although it is brief, I believe it to be one of the best commentaries on this issue that I have read.
Thank you for your excellent post Robert. You seem to have done the impossible… something I thought would never happen…
In the era of Global Warming something just froze over… and I totally agree with Silhouette and Marlowecan!
Good eyes on the both of you.
Heh-heh.
True, Steve.
**And for his next feat of supernatural prestidigation, this weekend Robert Stein will not only make the Sahara bloom…but he will bring peace between Yankee and Red Sox fans!**
…all here at The Moderate Voice…
Not so fast. The solution to murky gray areas is found in the rule of law and international treaties on which we, America, led the charge. So deplorable was torture by waterboard, for example, that we executed Japanese soldiers who did that to ours. We wanted to send the strongest possible message that such practices will not be tolerated in a civilized world. Then we went about trying to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle with more laws and treaties, because we didn't want to see these weapons used by anyone ever again.
Now there's a serious debate about whether or not to attack Iran for advancing their nuclear program. But of course, Iranians may well have the same feelings about it that we did during WWII. “Iranian lives would be protected by us having the bomb. It could prevent a future attack from terrorists (Israel in this case).” I'm not saying that's correct. What I'm saying is that nations do not agree about who are the bad guys. Laws and treaties exist to clarify what you CAN'T do to people you consider bad guys.
It is dangerous for us to back away from law and treaty. If we now consider that there are cases in which the laws don't apply, we invite others to do the same.