The Truth About Liberalism: #5 Torture

As many of you may have noticed, I've joined a blogroll that is supporting Torture Awareness Month (the month of June). If you've ever followed my link to that sight, you'll know why this is an important cause. Being on this blogroll has also brought a temporary spike in the number of hits I get from places that aren't Charles City and Minnesota. To be a member of Blogs Against Torture, I have to link to the sight and do a bit on torture during the month of June. I figured this would be a good opportunity for another installment in my The Truth About Liberalism series.

Any liberal or progressive worth his (or her) salt is against torture. It's inhumane, and has been illegal for many years now. In a few wars (Vietnam is what springs to my mind first), the idea that torture is wrong has been what separated us from our enemies and made us the good guys. This was because we didn't torture our prisoners, and we called out the people who did torture theirs. It's always easier to make friends when you're the good guy. The Bush administration has made us the bad guy, though. In the words of Dick C. (our other president), we've gone to "The Dark Side." Now, what credibility do we have if we say that terrorists are a threat to the world because they take hostages and torture them, when we're in fact arresting many people every day and putting them in prisons where they have a good chance of being tortured? Some people will say "But they would do the same or worse if they managed to get one of us." That still doesn't make it right. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If you have to sink to the enemy's level to win, you didn't win.

Does this mean I (and progressives everywhere) am "soft on terror"? Of course not, terrorists torture people. I'm totally against torture, anarchy, theocracy, you name a terrorist ideal and I'm probably against it. One shouldn't find any of these things in America or being practiced by our forces abroad.

Besides the moral reasons, there are practical reasons not to torture your prisoners.

Reason #1: it makes people hate you. Imagine you've got a normal Arab guy who doesn't like to see Americans exercising their influence in his part of the world, but he also doesn't like the fact that insurgents are killing way more Iraqis than Americans. Then he hears that Americans are torturing and humiliating the guys in their prisons. This Arab decides he has a moral duty to save his fellow Arabs, so he buys an AK and goes to Iraq to join the jihad.

Reason #2: you can't believe anything somebody says during torture. If you were in excruciating pain, and you know you're captors wanted to know the location of a stash of weapons, you'd give them a generic description of an empty warehouse and tell them it was in a seedy part of town. You actually have no idea where the weapons are, and you've told them that, but they didn't believe you.

In short, torture is bad. The U.S. will be paying for it's actions in the middle east for a long time anyway, why make it worse? I encourage you all to read this fact sheet about U.S. torture practices if you haven't already. Terrorists torture, what does that make us?