Torture

According to ThinkProgress, which would surely paint the worst possible picture, the CIA held 119 individuals for torture. The Torture Report itself tells us that only 39 individuals were actually tortured. These individuals were tortured in the following way:

(1) the attention grasp, (2) walling, (3) facial hold, (4) facial slap, (5) cramped confinement, (6) wall standing, (7) stress positions, (8) sleep deprivation, (9) waterboard, (10) use of diapers, (11) use of insects, and (12) mock burial.

With the exception of (9) and (12), there’s nothing in this list that doesn’t occur in military training or during fraternity hazing. And unlike the Japanese, who buried people alive for real, the mock burials conducted by the CIA did not result in actual burial. That leaves (9), waterboarding, as the only technique that could possibly be defined as “torture,” unless one is willing to apply the designation to military training and fraternity hazing.

The “dungeon” in which these “tortures” occurred was not a 5 star hotel, according to ThinkProgress, and this is cause for alarm:

Detainees at the COBALT detention facility were kept in complete darkness and constantly shackled in isolated cells with loud noise or music and only a bucket to use for human waste.

According to the Washington Post, however, such interrogation never lasted longer than 2 weeks. According to the Report itself, only 39 individuals went through these interrogations.

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I’m of the opinion that enhanced interrogation, torture, or whatever you want to call it is probably ineffective 90% of the time, which may or may not mean that it is worth doing for the sake of the 10% of the time that it produces valuable intelligence.

I am not going to defend the CIA because the CIA is an arm of the Cathedral, and its psychotic operatives, who follow whatever commands trickle down from the White House and the Pentagon, would just as soon waterboard a dissident blogger as a jihadist. However, because the majority of the 119 “tortured” individuals were enemies of my country, men who would kill me if they had the chance and who were involved in a movement to kill Americans, I see no reason to be angry that the CIA roughed these men up. I’m not even angry that one of them died of hypothermia, although I do think someone should have been dishonorably discharged over that fuck up.

There is an appropriate level of moral distaste that one might feel upon reading the Torture Report. War is a dirty affair, the men who volunteer for it may not be the best of men, and whatever occurred during these enhanced interrogations is certainly not a war story about which the soldiers and operatives can be proud. However, those on the Left who are rending their garments over this report have shown themselves, again, to possess moral compasses that are broken beyond repair. Consider it: here are a mere 119 men, degraded, surely, but who are alive today and did not receive any permanent injuries at the hands of their captors. If Abu Zubaydah is any indication, most of these men have been high ranking members of para-military groups involved in para-military action against the U.S. and her allies—in other words, they have attempted, successfully or otherwise, to blow things up and take American lives. And yet roughing them up, keeping them in dark rooms, pouring water over their faces, these are actions for which America is to be deeply troubled and ashamed. These are actions which show us to be, indeed, the Great Satan that the jihadists (rightly) believe we are.

Of course, very few people rending their garments over the fact that 119 jiahdists had to shit in buckets for a few weeks have ever made a show of rending their garments over the many atrocities that occur across the world on a daily basis, atrocities that leave headless children, limbless men, and deflowered women in their wake. Sandra Fluke has piped up to say she is “horrified by the torture report,” but spend time scrolling down her Twitter feed to find how many times she has commented on horror at anything but the gender pay gap. You will be scrolling quite a while. ISIS beheads four children, but 39 jihadists getting water poured over their faces is “the horror! the horror!”

We are familiar with the motivation on display here. There is one standard of behavior for white Westerners and another standard of behavior for everyone else. Abu Zubaydah commits his life to jihad, helps plan the 9/11 attacks, all par for the course, can we really blame him, but here now, you pour water on his face and make him piss his pants, it’s time for the European Court of Human Rights to step in and award him 30,000 Euros for being submitted to such horrors. We have to show these Arabs who are their moral betters.

The only other possible motivation for rending one’s garment over 39 jihadists shitting in buckets for a few weeks (while not rending one’s garments over dead American soldiers) is that one sides with the jihadists. Such a motivation has precedence in the history of the Left.