"moral equivalency test:" ?: Reprint :

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http://www.watchblog.com/democrats/archives/004207.html

September 17, 2006

Comparisons Should Be Made

Watch out! It’s the new political correctness: No matter how bad our behavior gets, no matter how much it starts to resemble those of nations we loath and despise, you are not to compare their behavior to ours. Why? Because admitting that possiblity might mean saying that our enemies are right. Again, though, the right-wing guardians of America’s reputation forget one big fact: If the shoe fits, we’ll be wearing it regardless of who’s fitting it.

The reality of America's virtue must come first, or else the reputation it is meant to uphold will not follow.

When is it enough? Admittedly, the new forms of torture that our government practices don't seem like torture, when mentioned casually. Loud music, sleep deprivations, stress positions, nudity and sexual humiliation. Sounds like a frat party.

Except it's not. Pledges sign on willingly. Even then, the behavior can get out of control, as several news reports over the past few years have recorded. Moreover, just because we're not using the medieval blood and guts approaches, or the modern surgical methods, doesn't mean we're better than those folks. In a way, there's a certain cowardice to these methods, which are principly design to inflict suffering and degradation without leaving marks for international organizations to make a fuss about. This is the torture that dare not speak its own name.

~~~........snip...

What Bush wants is not merely the power to torture terrorists, but also terror suspects- that is, people who could be innocent of everything. He wants you to trust that the government got its suspect right. With torture, though, there is no reliable way to tell the difference between the guilty and the innocent. With torture, there is also no way to distinguish between statements of truth, and statements of confabulation, based on the victim's sense of what the torturer might consider a right answer, even if the person involved is an actual terrorist.

Torture is not about information. It's about dominance. It's charm is that it breaks the subject to the interrogator's will, theoretically so that one can ask any question and get answers one needs. The reality is, the ignorance of the interrogator can become the inaccuracy of the interrogated man's account. Even bad phrasing and seemingly loaded words in the questions of the interrogator can lead a suspect and the people interpreting his remarks down the garden path. We get the power to get the suspect to say anything we want, but that includes things that are untrue, whether we know them to be or not.

Another danger, given the nature of these practices, is that we will be handed scapegoats as culprits by a government which cares more about appearances than realities, or by corrupt officials working on behalf of the enemy. Once we give a power such as this to the government, it is unlikely that it will remain in the hands of the pure of heart alone.






~~~reply--
People who use the moral equivalency test love America, and want to be proud to be American… and we see people (like you, I’m assuming) who have their moral vision skewed by absolute fear of terrorists. We see people who fail this moral test as extremely anti-American… those who would destroy what is American for a petty sense of false security. These people are also the ones who are the quickest to send our troops off to die for the freedoms they so cowardly give up.