Torturing Logic
By Bruce Walker (09/23/06)
On September 20th Bill O'Reilly had a spokeswomen, Carroll Bogert, from Human Rights Watch whose comments exposed the asinine attitude of reflexive Leftists in America. Although much has been written about what is torture and when it is proper to use, there are a few points which it is important for us to remember and for us to help Leftists understand.
Life is full of “torture”. The notion that nations should never permit torture would mean that nations should effectively end normal human existence. Based upon how “human rights advocates” categorize torture, ordinary human life is filled with torture. Should government stop it? Childbirth is a form of torture, but it brings life into the world. Sleep deprivation is a normal part of parenting an infant. The grueling path to becoming a physician is full of sleep deprivation, exposure to the grotesque and terrible demands on the mind and body; these are considered essential to making a doctor who can stand the stress of emergencies and dying patients. Marine boot camp is much worse than anything inflicted on the terrorists we have captured; Marines not only go without sleep and endure terrible physical workouts, but are deliberately exposed to tear gas and frightening situations. Firemen endure tortuous training. Almost everyone who does anything good in life endures pain –and these people are doing good and noble things with their lives – so why should monsters not suffer? Indeed, they do suffer: terrorist training camps are packed with the sort of harsh and unpleasant things which our soldiers endure in training. Should terrorists suffer only in pursuit of evil?
Forced interrogation produces valuable information. It is hard to know whether the self-appointed “human rights advocates” are serious or not when they claim that forced interrogation produces bad information. If they truly believe that, then these self-appointed people are very stupid. The interrogation is not conducted against one individual but against many different people who are kept separate from one another. Moreover, the interrogators can ask whatever they wish of the detainees. Unless all the detainees say exactly the same things in response to exactly the same questions will the possibility of false information being given even be possible. Because the interrogator can ask for details in countless ways, the sheer amount of detail that a detainee would have to memorize would be impossibly large. Moreover, if all the detainees said exactly the same thing, then that would clearly indicate that the detainees were lying – and they could be told so.
So-called “human rights advocates” do not care about torture. People like Carroll Bogert do not really care if people are tortured. They do not care if people are tortured in the most hideous ways imaginable. They only care if the American government is doing something that might be construed as torture. If Ms. Bogert cares about torture, then she and her “brave” friends should travel to North Korea or Cuba, where real torture goes on every day in ways that surpass anything America has ever done. Why do they not do that? They are cowards, of course. But even these cowards could make a point of speaking out every day against the very real torture that is going on all over the planet every day. Why do they not, at least, do that? It is because these shallow and vain people are not just physical cowards, but moral cowards too. They are afraid of being disliked by their friends. They desperately need to be chic and aligned with chic causes.
Successful forced interrogation ends torture. Because our evil enemies routinely use torture not only against Americans and our allies but against their own people, only the defeat of these evil regimes will end pandemic and pitiless tortures. Peoples captive and intimidated almost never win their freedom unaided. America alone can stop the massive torture systems in the world. How should we do that? We can defeat our evil enemies with massive military force, which will inevitably injure innocent people and produce torture (because war itself is torture) or we can defeat our evil enemies by outsmarting them. The latter and less painful path requires intelligence resources, so we can know just where to strike, just who to capture or kill, just how our evil enemies plan to attack us. That intelligence comes from successful force interrogation.
Carroll Bogert and her gutless ilk themselves engage in torture all the time: they torture truth and torture logic. Better and braver people than them pay the price for their dishonesty.
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