Remember when America was the good guys? Some day you can describe it to your kids. It’ll seem as foreign as rotary dial telephones and real breasts.
Story
As if much much worse didn’t happen before. Information is freer today, that’s all.
I’m not saying it’s okay, just that there was not a golden age where there was no torture and no child abductions and murder, it just seems to be more common because the world is smaller.
I hear this a lot around here. I call Bullshit.
As bad as Gitmo may be, we’ve committed atrocities in all the wars we’ve been involved in.
I can see an atrocity here or there in the fog of war, shit happens. In retrospect bombing Dresden was not a good idea. But the cold, pre-meditated use of torture is beyond the pale. Not only that, we have politicians and media people defending it.
I’m not an American, but it seems odd to me to state that, bad as it is, one nasty guard scaring this guy with fake rape stories is morally worse for the country than having an offical wartime policy of fire-bombing cities and burning thousands of innocent civilians alive.
It’s OK to coldly premeditate the killing of 10s of thousands of civilians, but not OK to torture a few? I’d rather be told a scary story about prison rape than have my whole family killed. YMMV.
OK, let’s take this question seriously. When was America “Good”? When was this happy time when we were better than we are now?
Why is the effect it has on the torturing country important? Seems to me the effect it has on the people being tortured is more important.
Don’t we already have a Starving Artist thread going?
The US was at least in site of the moral high ground before it invaded Iraq. Torturing allies puts the US on a different planet than the moral high ground.
So an American behaved badly, and he was punished by an American government agency for his actions. I’m not seeing how that makes America the Bad Guy. Yes, if the American government condones or celebrates this kind of behavior, we lose the moral high ground. But that’s not what I’m seeing here. This was testimony at a hearing to determine whether information obtained during this prisoner’s interrogation should be thrown out. The fact that we are holding such hearings (for a man who was charged with murdering a U.S. soldier), means that the rule of law is still in effect.
Black guys and Nazis! Working togther! Mass Hysteria!
The US did not have a policy of fire-bombing cities to kill civilians (as far as I know), but there is always judgement in any military decision.
The US, under Bush, did have a policy of torture, and that was a change to tradition. If it were just one guy it’d be different, this is just an example of a policy issued from the White House.
It is morally worse for the country because everybody knows about it and many defend it in public.
George Orwell wrote a few lines about how the value of hypocrisy in maintaining really moral behavior has been underestimated. “A mask can alter the contours of a face.”
Sigh, the only thing that has changed is that now it is harder to hide the bad things we do. America was never the good guys, a country is always going to look out for its people usually at the detriment of everyone else.
In your second post you mention the “fog of war”. Rent “The Fog of War” sometime, and let McNamara telly you about himself.
So countries are always the same. No country is better than another, and at no point in time is a country better than at any other point in time.
No one defends “torture.” Lots of people (including me) defend the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. If you read the memos that were released, you will see that these techniques were carefully planned and scripted actions, they weren’t just beating people willy nilly.
Also, on the larger point, the idea of a country being “good” or “bad” in some objective sense is idiotic, and thinking about it is a fruitless endeavour.
Sure you do. You’re doing it right now. Your favored euphemism is just a window dressing for waterboarding some poor bastard 200+ times. That’s torture.
“Boy, you guys sure got me… all this time, I thought I was being tortured, but I was just being Punk’d!”