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“I do not want – and I am sure the vast majority of Americans will agree with me – my family's lives put in jeopardy because some half-wit in government thinks that is what our Constitution requires. Such a person should be instantly fired.”
-- rick0101
That is a quote from a comment on a news story about Guantanamo and torture. It fairly leaped off the page. It is perhaps the clearest statement I’ve read of the quandary that is the American political scene today.
Do we protect our loved ones first and foremost, or do we protect the ideals that make our country great?
Our country was founded on some pretty simple ideas. We sum them up in some pretty simple phrases: All men are created equal. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Habeas Corpus. Freedom of speech, assembly, religion, the press. There are people who claim that the abrogation of any of these tenets will mean the end of civilization as we know it.
That’s until there is any credible threat to them or their families.
Perhaps that old saw that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged and a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested is really true. Tip O’Neill, after all, said that all politics are local. What’s more local than your child’s welfare?
When does the good of everyone trump the good of any one person? I suspect that we all have a different answer. And I also suspect that we won’t really know the answer until we are in a position where we’ll really need it.
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3 comments:
The whole argument that somehow this terrorists in Gitmo are so dangerous that somehow bringing them to the US is endangering the public, quite honestly is silly. First we already have terrorists in prisons both foreign and domestic, from the first Trade center Bombers, to Terry Nichols. we have members of the Klan, Skinheads, and the Weather Underground. Besides "terrorist" our prisons are filled with all manner of Sociopaths, people who molest children, people who murder children, people who eat children, and those who do all three. One county over live BTK, and the Carr Brothers. If the prisons can handle the criminals we have now we can handle the ones from Cuba. I don't live in fear of the criminals locked up now why should I fear new criminals??
I think you're right in showing how this torture debate isn't so simple.
While I definitely don't believe torture should be used as a general matter, I'm not sure the Founding Fathers could have envisioned a world in which an individual could destroy New York City by leaving a nuclear bomb in the L train at rush hour (the Founding Fathers could probably not have envisioned the L train or rush hour, but that's for another discussion). When terrorists or their known collaborators in custody refuse to divulge information about planned attacks, I'm not really sure what the alternative is.
It is so ironic that the people decrying bringing the terror suspects to the U.S. are the same ones who want to "lock 'em up and throw away the key." Don't they trust our prison system? And what do they really think these people can do from solitary lockdown? 'Tis a puzzlement.
As for using torture when interrogating people . . . There are so many interrogators who will tell you that torture is counter-productive. It may get you the information you want, but can you trust that information to be truthful and accurate? Or is the suspect just telling you what he thinks you want to hear in order to stop the torture?
I trust the interrogators who say that building trust by showing sympathy to the prisoner can get you information as quickly as torture and that you can trust the info it gets you. If there is a ticking timebomb out there, the prisoner knows that the torture will stop when the bomb goes off. It would seem to me that would strengthen their resistance to torture rather than weaken it.
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