Real Politiks

Torture for Fears Sake

Waterboarding is not a beach sport played by well tanned, jacked up, blond guys. No, no fun in the sun here. Just torture. I’ve said it, others have said it, but for some reason there are still those people out there who still can’t bring themselves to say it. Why?

It is quite clear that it is torture. It is a practice invented by the Spanish Inquisition, expanded upon by the Dutch East India Company, and written about extensively by historians in such books as, “The History of Torture Throughout The Ages” By George Ryley Scott, and “Baptism by Torture” By William Schweiker, and “The Instruments of Torture” by Michael Kerrigan, and other books firmly sporting the word and describing the action to a “T” as in Torture!

So why!? Why can’t they get it through their heads and support a ban on torture? The answer is that they are afraid. Sure, many of them will parade around with that I’m a protector of the ole’ Red-White-Blue attitude, but deep down they are really just afraid that someone will come by and blow them up with something. It is this fear that makes people keep “all options on the table” “just in-case” of undefined “special circumstances.”

It is the fear of isolated suburban enclaves that doesn’t care how many brown skinned boys could possibly get buckets of water poured down their throats, or locked away in Guantanamo Bay for some undeclared amount of time. In truth, they just want someone – anyone – to tell them that there will never be another 9-11 so long as we keep locking up Arabs.

Waterboarding is one of those forms of torture that people can rationalize because in their minds the “simulated drowning” is being weighed against the terror of another 9-11. Having water poured in your face is nowhere near as bad as another 9-11, they say. In their minds the danger is in not giving the government enough tools to combat the threat, the possibility, the chance that tomorrow we may wake up to the vision of another skyscraper coming down.

In reality, beyond the fear of foreign terror, the real threat to giving a government the ability to torture and suspend habeas corpus is in how it could be appropriated for campaigns of domestic terror by that government. In the perfect scenario the terrorist is caught, waterboarded, confesses, and thousands are saved as a result. This scenario is a pipe dream. The world is far less exact than that.

Far more likely a scenario is that the government believes someone is a terrorist, they catch them easily, they torture that person, the person confesses to anything, but in the end only one thing comes of it; we have become like the Spanish Inquisitors that invented waterboarding. Motivated by fear of impurity, they tortured anyone accused of heresy. Motivated by fear, we approve of torturing people accused of being a terrorist.

How can we – as a society, as a civilization – ever hope to apologize for such a breach of civil liberties? Who amongst the suburbanite enclaves will go to this wrongly tortured person and explain that we are sorry, that we were just foolishly afraid?