I want to speak about what the press has named “torture”.
The subject is lost in a role reversal, a macabre Victor-Victoria twisted spin, where the people who are actually moral are derided, and the immoral folks are held up as exemplary. It makes me roll my eyes and gag, but that first reflex isn’t the most shocking one.
First, beating up terrorists for information, in order to save the lives of innocent people is not torture. Torture is the senseless and sadistic inflicting of pain or injury to no purpose. We do not torture children when we spank them – we are moral to couple punishment to actions. We do not torture a convicted murderer when we fry him in the electric chair – the purpose of doing so is to save the lives of many other people, and statistics bear out that the death is highly purposeful.
So, who is a terrorist? He is a person who comes to a civilian population, for the express purpose of committing genocide against the defenseless, in order to bring about political goals. This is not a member of an opposing army in war, not a paratrooper dropped behind enemy lines, not a soldier covered by the Geneva convention. His sole aim is the genocide of sitting ducks. If the target were not defenseless, he wouldn’t be trying to kill them.
And who is an appeaser? An appeaser is a person who thinks that if only we are nice enough to our enemies, our enemies will suddenly start being nice to us. Appeasers are essentially cowards, who cannot bring themselves to exert the force that is necessary to protect and defend the innocent.
And with Obama in charge of Guantanamo bay, the appeaser met the terrorist. Face to face with having to show the courageous use of force in order to protect others, Obama has said that to do so is “against our values”. But former Vice President Cheney has said that American interrogation of terrorists, “saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of lives.” This places Obama in the ridiculous position that it is “against our values” to save a hundred thousand Americans. It’s Obama who is immoral. It is Obama’s torture doctrine that is against our values.
And that is the something far more important and at stake here. It is even more important than the proposition that shutting old Khalid in a washing machine saves New York City. Yes, the squawkers have at least this part of it right. It’s all about?
Morality.
It is the highest possible immorality to take a man who is guilty of capital crimes (genocide) and, for failure to exert even corporal punishment, lose innocent life.
When a person is captured in the act of carrying out genocide, and overthrowing the constitutional regime, he is guilty of both treason and mass-murder of innocents. Since the Islamist terrorists who assault us all the time swear furiously that they are at war with us, we, their targets, should hardly confer upon the terrorists the beneficial rights of peacetime, citizen due process, as though the terrorists were mere criminals. A genocidal terrorist bent on destroying the constitutional regime is not a criminal, he is an enemy invader of the worst kind, torturer of little girls, a terrorist. His guilt or innocence is not established by a citizen court of peers, because peers do not exist – America is filled with citizens who are in obedience to the Constitutional regime. A terrorist’s only peers are genocidal sabateours like himself, and they are all dedicated to the destruction of constitutional protections. Criminals don’t do that.
And so, with an enemy invader in wartime, the military is the proper institution for capturing, interrogating, controlling, the enemy. And a military tribunal should, using the intelligence services and a review of the facts, decide what to do with a genocidal terrorist. If the army decides he is innocent, very well. The person may become a POW subject to the Geneva conventions, or whatever is reasonable. But if he is guilty, think for a moment what this means.
A person who is guilty of genocide (aiding, planning, creating, executing) isn’t just guilty of murder or war crimes. He is guilty of the utmost crimes against humanity – torture being the smallest. He is guilty of such horrendous evil that, at the end of World War II, nations who did not believe in the death penalty gladly hung the Nazi terrorists from the neck until dead.
Suppose we do not kill the terrorist, but imprison him in an air conditioned cell, with food and his favorite books? Injustice, you would say. And indeed it might be. But mercy, I would say. Mercy? Why should we be merciful to genocidalists?
For information.
And suppose we pound him, each day of the week, for one hour a day, with our fists? Suppose we throw him against the wall forty times? Suppose we cane him with forty lashes, as they do all across Asia with criminals? Injustice, you would say. He is worthy of death. Hanging him by the neck until dead is a suitable penalty for mass murderers. Why should we be merciful to genocidalists?
For information. And for morality.
While we are well within our rights to simply pop open the door of Guantanamo Bay, and mete out capital punishment to the inmates who have been shown by a military tribunal to be terrorists, it is more moral of us to exert corporal punishment against them, in order that in so doing we might save the lives of many others. And do you know what kind of a deal that is for the terrorists?
A merciful one.
They get to avoid death. They provide information that saves lives. They get to show repentance from their crimes by providing information which will prevent the similar. We mete out a plea bargain, a deal to them, which saves lives. The innocent life, and maybe even the terrorists’.
What the press has wrongly named “torture”, then, is the moral high ground.
Anyone who doesn’t cede that is immoral.
