Adam Weinstein
Ban them all.
We should never again allow a livelihood in media or government or think-tanking for any politician, any general, any pundit who ever argued that the United States of America needs to torture captives in order to keep its citizenry safe.
Thanks to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA torture released this week — just the latest of many such reports, about many such abuses — we now know what was pretty obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together: that nothing good came of water boarding, beating, sleep-depriving, and “rectally hydrating” Muslim detainees, many of whom had already been cleared of any wrongdoing.
It’s not merely that torture wasn’t “effective” in gaining intelligence to save U.S. lives from theoretical terror attacks. Many detainees gave American interrogators bum information to stop the pain, the fear, the hallucinations. Torture potentially took resources away from the real threats.
Not that effectiveness is all that matters. One thing liberals and conservatives claim to agree on is that America’s greatness is built upon its moral goodness, its compassion for others, and its ability to confront evil without losing its own soul.
And yet, as they have since 9/11, a small but vocal minority of alleged America-lovers would destroy this country’s integrity in order to save it. Last Tuesday, Fox News pundit Andrea Tantaros — who built a lucrative career doing PR for Republicans while I was off at the war in Iraq — said America had nothing to regret.
“The United States of America is awesome. We are awesome. But we’ve had this discussion,” she said of the details about America’s torture program. “We’ve closed the book on it. The reason they want the discussion is not to show how awesome we are. It’s to show us how we’re not awesome.”
That someone can be paid to dribble this knee-jerk pablum out on television in 2014 is incredible. America is awesome, in every sense of the word: It is wonderful, and it is also immensely powerful. But our greatness suffers when we lie to ourselves and the world that we’ve never used our power for ill.
America has tortured, just as it once enslaved a people and segregated them. America has often been less than charitable and compassionate, not just to those it has called enemies, but to the least of its own people. Our patriotism should be strong enough to let us admit that. We are not perfect, but we are graced with the power to acknowledge our wrongs and strive to correct them.
Plenty of conservatives recognize this — like U.S. Sen. John McCain, who has courageously supported inquiries into American torture programs, perhaps because of his own experiences for five and a half years at the hands of North Vietnamese interrogators. There are now dozens of detainees who have spent many more years in U.S. custody than McCain spent in the Hanoi Hilton.
Which is why I can’t see why we would continue to tolerate a chattering class that enriches itself by rationalizing those wrongs, by appealing to Americans’ worst fears and prejudices, by distorting us into something we are not. Dick Cheney, Michael Hayden, Sean Hannity and Tantaros and their ilk: They should be cut out of our culture entirely, ignored when they spout their bile, left far from the cameras and newspapers and book deals.
Does that sound like political correctness, like tone-policing? It’s not. These men and women are free to sing to archangels just how much they love inflicting pain and fear on fellow humans. We are free to ignore them, ridicule them, and above all, refuse to reward them. Besides, the supposed danger of PC is that it leads to an Orwellian society. But nothing is more Orwellian than actually inflicting torture on human beings, or the weasel words used by its defenders — like “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” Orwell wrote, intoning against language that was “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” Yet that’s precisely the type of lie that torture apologists get rich hawking on television and in print.
Don’t let them get away with it. We are Americans. We are better than that.
Adam Weinstein is a Tallahassee-based senior writer for Gawker. He has worked for the Wall Street Journal, Village Voice, and Mother Jones. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
