So in case anybody hasn’t heard about those CIA memos released last week, in short, they were pretty nauseating to read and thoroughly unpleasant to think about. In fact, my mother asked whether I was sick or not when I went downstairs after reading them.
Currently, there are a bunch of conservatives claiming such things as “the memos prove we didn’t torture” and “waterboarding is not quite torture.”
Excuse me, are you serious?
So making somebody think that they are drowning several times a day for a month after bashing their head against a wall after confining them in a small box with one of their worst fears is not torture? We should be proud of waterboarding? We should have done worse?
What the hell is wrong with you?
The country’s most famous POW even spells it out for you: waterboarding is torture. And yet some people still say we should be proud of ourselves for the things done to them by us. Because there’s always a them and an us, isn’t there?
Evidently, we should be proud for destroying people’s minds and bodies. After all, there’s no real physical evidence on those people. We just have a few legal memos as evidence. Really, who needs morals, anyway? Those are just silly things for elitists to cling to and whine about.
I have news for you: America tortured. Did it produce effective results? God only knows.
Would it be worth it, even if it had? Never.
This isn’t about whether we are willing or not to dirty our hands getting revenge and information that is quite possibly false. This is about the fact that we tortured, we broke the Geneva Conventions, and we shouldn’t ignore that and not take responsibility. We can no longer claim to be the golden land of promise and hope and morality if we choose to “move on.” We’ll be down there with the Khmer Rouge and Stalin’s USSR if we choose to do so.
As much as I like Obama, I have to disagree on this one: the people who authorized this should be held accountable.
The people we tortured had absolutely nothing to do with any ticking time bomb scenario. We sold our souls to the Devil and gained the enmity of the entire world in exchange for some false information, a paper sense of revenge, and a little added confidence.
We have lost our morals in this mess of secret dealings and dark hidden locations and the torture of other human beings, and in doing so, have lost our humanity as well.
