In my contempt for human rights violations, I really believed that just the thought of torture is a nightmare. And now this “Obama policy to kill” [cut short to OK – Obama Kill] in bold headlines is turning Media sharks into a feeding frenzy. Horror drops my jaw to the floor.

    Then I came to think deeply of this fearful predicament. I knew what is wrong with torture, and I wanted to know what is wrong with OK. In sleepless nights, I dug up my database to find out what really is wrong with torturing a prisoner, and what is really wrong with this severely criticized OK. My intention is to expose once more the evil of both violations of human rights.

    As a result, I got one of those surprises of my Media investigative-reporting life. My reward for this thankless job, was a sigh of relief. I found out that there was really nothing wrong about torturing those captured and dangerous prisoners of war on terror, and also there is nothing wrong with this much maligned Obama policy to kill.

    The turning point of my discovery is that torture of imprisoned terrorists, especially those in Guantanamo prison camp, was in fact not an alternative policy-choice of the Government but an imperative policy-means for survival while this war on terror is going on.

     I discovered at least three errors to correct:

1.  The first crooked notion to straighten up is that the debate should focus on the torture of terrorists that had killed and/or about to kill when captured and imprisoned. It is not torture of civilian prisoners outside the jurisdiction of the Military Tribunal constituted under the anti-terrorist Patriot Act, as amended, and just lately terrorists and terrorist suspects that could be detained without the right to due process mandated by the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.

2.   The second twisted perspective to correct is that it is the Obama policy to kill terrorists, not the “Obama policy to kill civilians”, as terrorists and terrorist coddlers deceptively blew up in the Media with so much rancor and animosity. They blindsided the public with the help of the Main Stream Media which happens to be too politicized to be honest and truthful in reporting the news of the day.

3.  Torture is relative. It is erroneous to generalize torture as unjustifiable and unforgivable when the gravity of suffering or the pain inflicted is of varying degrees of severity. A certain kind of torture may look more horrible than the other. Still others, are as tamed as the mere sight of a caterpillar that inflicts pain and suffering to the prisoner.

     Errors 1 and 2 are inseparable. On March 5, 2012, U.S. Attorney-General Eric Holder  made it clear in his speech delivered at the Northwestern University School of Law, that the President “ …has the authority to kill any U.S. citizen he considers a threat …” to national security. It needs no further elaboration that he is referring to terrorist, not just to  ordinary criminals.

     But civil rights advocates of the terrorists’ “liberty” to kill, and “freedom” to destroy, unwittingly found themselves on the side of the terrorists when they tried very hard to destroy the public image of the President of the United States for declaring his Obama Kill, in public. Public perception in that regard is strong with disapproval and contempt, more so when Obama is pictured as a “hunter” of American citizens to kill, only as his “sport”. Even accusing Obama of implementing the evil of former president Bush and VP Cheney in violating civil rights, didn’t serve any meaningful purpose at all! On the contrary, it projected Obama’s acceptability as President, as if he can do more right than wrong.

     The case of Mohammad Atta, alias Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir Awad proves this point. Atta was that “Egyptian terrorist and one of the ringleaders of the September 11 attacks.  He was  the hijacker-pilot of American Airlines Flight 11, crashing the plane into the North Tower of the World Trade Center as part of the coordinated attacks.”

      Suspects that had a lot of information about Atta and his pre-911 movements and activities, could have been arrested, detained, deprived of their right to due process, and subjected to “waterboarding” to expose and abort the tragedy of 911. Had that been done, saving an estimated trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives would have been the crowning defeat of Amnesty International and the International Civil Rights Movement. Unfortunately, the Bush administration was distracted if not intimidated by the arguments of those powerful civil rights organizations, viz: that “torture” and “ill-treatment” of detained terrorists and terrorist suspects are “repugnant, abhorrent and immoral”. The United States would be ostracized and condemned as the world’s topmost violator of human rights.

        There is no doubt that Obama learned an invaluable lesson from that cowardly capitulation of some sort. Now, obviously, he is neither beholden to the rhetoric of terrorist coddlers nor intimidated by a tsunami of derogatory criticisms coming from his noisy and severely agitated civil rights detractors especially after he signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law.

         NDAA denies terrorists their liberty to kill and destroy. Obama did not only sign NDAA into law but also complemented the deprivation of due process clause with an Obama policy to kill any terrorist – in fact to kill anyone, citizen or not, whom he, the FBI and his entire intelligence entourage consider as a threat to national security. And here Obama was applauded short of a standing ovation, more than criticized, short of the threat of impeachment for violating the Tenth Amendment [Bill of Rights].

        Quite surprisingly I might say that in the polls Obama was overwhelmingly supported by a great majority of the country’s religious population, than he was snubbed, despised or ostracized, more relatively on the issue of torture of terrorist as prisoners of war.

        At Ohio University, 66% American Republicans who believe in God supported torture; 72% American Catholics, recommended the idea of torture under certain situations, and 51% of secularists likewise supported him. 

       Furthermore, “the more a person claims to attend church, the more likely he or she is to condone torture”. White evangelical Protestants were far and away “the most likely (62 percent) to support inflicting pain as a tool of interrogation.”  Those surveys were taken at various different times, and deviation and variance of results were almost negligible.

      But there is a caveat in understanding this phenomenon. On the damning issue of torture, it is wrong to ignore the degree of pain inflicted that could make the difference.

      Varying degrees of pain could be physical or psychological but the important factors to consider are the different ways how those were inflicted that could provide the necessary extenuating circumstances in the rationalization of a state-sponsored torture that forces information and useful confession of the enemy while the nation is at war, especially this kind of war that has no boundary.

       We proceed from the premise that the motive of torture is not to punish or to re-educate the prisoner in a re-education camp or for the purpose of revenge or sadistic self-gratification of the torturer. Then we can narrow down the focus of this critical evaluation on what really happened in Guantanamo as the target of protest by the civil rights movement.

       Military specialists of the so-called “enhanced interrogation technique” used the prisoners’ most hidden fear as a tool to extract vital information. Using the mortal fear of drowning [waterboarding] was found more effective. But there were other forms of torture. In Guantanamo, a terrorist prisoner had this severe phobia of maggots. He was “prodded” to talk about certain planned acts of terrorism after interrogators put a crawling caterpillar in his cell.

      The following headlined attacks on torture claimed damage to the brain when the prisoner allegedly suffered a severe psychological disorientation due to mental shock. The extracted information saved American lives, but that was hardly recognizable when the feeding Media went all out for the sensational part of the story of the day – the terrible, barbaric, most cruel form of torture inflicted on the prisoner in violation of the terrorist’s human rights.

       Then I tried to figure out the moral equivalents of different tortures that are going on around the world, starting from what we have in Guantanamo. Aside from caterpillar and waterboarding, sleepless nights, offensive sexual displays, hunger and the like could have done an awful lot in explaining to me why you and I are still alive today without a repeat of the 911 attacks.

       What convinced me is that torture of terrorists and terrorist suspects at Guantanamo, and those reported violations of human rights former President George W. Bush was accused of, i.e., eavesdropping, the use of hidden camera and other modern spying devices that intruded into our constitutional right to privacy had at least held terror at bay. With more national security laws in the backburner to boot, the possibility of another 911 occurring is getting more and more remote if not nil.  

        But while torture is prohibited by international law, what was condoned around the world bothers me.  In  Ireland's Catholic "reform" schools children were whipped with a metal-studded leather belt not once but more than 100 times. Prominently displayed in my database are the tortures of millions of Jews aside from Holocaust, India’s Muslims in the 1947 separatist campaign, Stalin’s purges, the Armenian genocide … the list is even longer than I thought, this I painfully realized.

      I scribbled a note on top of one of the pages of those documents in my file showing how the suffering of children in Ireland pales in comparison with the children in Rwanda.  Those children were forced to witness their “… parents murdered, their brothers and sisters raped, and themselves become the very rapists and killers they feared after being forcibly inducted into military groups - groups that commonly hacked people's ankle tendons to cripple them, etc…”

      Then I wonder why in spite of contempt and condemnation, still Amnesty International has on record at least 81 world governments currently practicing tortures. My consternation hit the roof when I discovered that the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Third Geneva Convention, Fourth Geneva Convention  and the United Nations Convention Against Torture  ratified by 147 countries, paraded the record of the United States around town so to speak, as a rogue country the world should look at with contempt, revulsion and horror.

      As I once again think of that caterpillar in Guantanamo and understand its relative morality compared to what’s happening around the world, I couldn’t help asking myself a lot of questions – heck, what’s wrong with torture?

      What is so objectionable of the NDAA withholding the right to due process from detained terrorists and terrorist suspects – the slimy enemy gliding stealthily like a snake poised to strike – the enemy that would cut my throat anytime today or tomorrow?

      Why it is so horribly distasteful and alarmingly intolerable to deprive terrorists their liberty to kill, and deny their freedom to destroy? Are we so screwed up in our perception of freedom that to fight for our right to live is less meaningful than the right to march down street and defend the terrorists’ liberty to kill, and freedom to destroy?

       And finally, what is so objectionable with Obama’s policy to kill anyone who threatens to cut off my head and blow up this nation to kingdom come?

BrutosEctos