Collective punishment

Let's stop beating around the bush. As more details come out about the U.S. government's reign of torture on terrorist suspects - I say that word very loosely - mainly from Iraq and Afghanistan - held in Guatanamo Bay, in Abu Gharib, and probably in secret prisons around the world, it's become clear that Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. military personnel - both with and without the support and direction of higher ups - mercilessly tortured (one "high value" suspect "waterboarded" 168 times) hundreds or even thousands of prisoners/suspects, not so much for intelligence information they might produce - although this might have been how some of it started and this might have occasionally been an ancillary benefit - but to punish individual people for the crimes (crimes that many of them had nothing to do with) of Al Qaida and Taliban affiliates in both countries, at the World Trade Center and on board the U.S.S. Cole; for the crimes of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq; and for the crimes of just being Iraqi, Afghan, Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, non-Christian, non-English-speaking or non-white in general. A mix of bad policies and some bad people produced this horrible melange. No doubt even many out-on-patrol regular military personnel - perhaps even our friend Julian - and personnel of the Blackwater private security firm - not just supposed interrogators and guards - who were scared and bitter about being stuck in dangerous, unfamiliar places and - as in Vietnam decades before - took revenge on those people whose liberties they were supposedly there to defend. Of couse, no politician can call a spade a spade and denounce both the policies and the personnel, and who knows what you or I - those of us who were not there - would have done (if we were there). But the kinds of scenes that I became familiar with in supposedly left-wing documentaries I've watched and blogged about during the past year were apparently all too routine. The abuse, torture, and general inhumane treatment - treatment that has further endangered U.S. people abroad (including in Iraq and Afghanistan) (if not also here in the United States) and undermined U.S. interests - and whether or not it produced intelligence that prevented future 9/11s (and I haven't been convinced that it did) - was so pervasive and so dressed up in lies, faulty legal arguments, and smug, misleading "24" episodes that it can no longer be dismissed as isolated incidents committed by a few bad apples. Take that for being Iraqi! Take that for being Muslim! Take that for not speaking fluent English! That'll teach them.

-- Perry