The New York Times recently printed a headline that read, U.S. LAWYERS AGREED ON THE LEGALITY OF BRUTAL TACTIC. The legality? What does that mean? A band of lawyers, some of them acknowledging it was a mistake, gave the green light to 13 methods of interrogation, One of the lawyers, John C. Yoo, declared in a memorandum that only pain equal to that produced by organ failure or death qualified as torture. So, according to Mr. Yoo, as long as you don't kill them you're on solid legal ground.
What does one thing have to do with the other? Declaring waterboarding legal doesn't make it any less a torture. Just reading its description tells you how barbaric it is. Michael Mukasey, President Bush's pick for attorney general, called waterboarding personally "repugnant," but concluded he didn't know enough about how it'd been used to define it as torture. Has our conscience become so numbed, and our morality so corrupt, that an obvious act of torture is no longer immediately repellent, but turned over to lawyers to discuss it's legality?
We're not the only country to use waterboarding to interrogate. It was used by the Japanese in World War II, by U.S. troops in the Philipines and by the French in Algeria. The British used it against both Arabs and Jews in occupied Palestine in the 1930's. In 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for waterboarding a U.S. citizen. And other countries have used it at one time or another. This horror dates back to the 14th century.
None of this matters. What matters is that if at this stage of our evolution the best we can do is create weak excuses for barbaric behavior, then we're lost as a civilization. Our moral compass is askew, and we are lost, lost beyond redemption, because in excusing our brutality, we lose our conscience--and isn't that what anchors our morality?
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