Some time during the Bush Administration, or since the so-called Repubican Revolution, we lost the ability to argue morality and common sense. Facts? No such thing. Morality? There was a mixed message there. The morality became not one of compassion but of judgement. And facts disappeared entirely.
You can't just say, "Torture is wrong," any more. I don't know precisely when the shift happened. It is wrong; there's no disputing that. End of subject. Good guys don't torture. After years of Rush Limbaugh being allowed to vomit his vitriol to millions, something....shifted. Facts weren't enough. If you didn't like the fact, you accused the person of presenting it of being a liar. Limbaugh's done this with liberal soldiers, calling them liars on his show, saying they weren't really soldiers. In real life, I've had this happen myself. (They always say it's just you, but it's funny how they hate all liberals and follow the standard Tea Bagger line.) Ann Coulter was right along there with Rush and the other Republican pundits, fanning the flames, while other people whined that Michael Moore was just the same, yet he'd never called for the invasion of sovereign nations, the killing and forcible conversion of their populace, the bombing of newspaper buildings whose perceived editorial leaning Coulter did not like. She sounded like something out of the Inquisition. Listen to her for any length of time and you want to check what century you're in. And she's just one of many. The Birthers could not have come forth without a truly poisonous climate, where somebody like Sarah Palin can say, "Death panels" and not be dismissed instantly when she---and the public---are presented with the real facts. Giving somebody information about options for hospice care, for funeral budgets, for family care----nobody's that stupid. Apparently, there's a surfeit of liars, though. For real death panels, go to Jan Brewer's Arizona, where after lying about her father's service, she passed a law which refuses to pay for transplants for people in desperate need of them. Olbermann used to have a regular count on how many people had died because of this but since then I haven't seen an update.
I saw two movies recently that seemed to sum up the change very well. One was called "The Hurt Locker" and it got its director an Oscar, yet I had to turn it off after about forty minutes because it was so inaccurate. The second was "Unthinkable," which was like an episode of "24" stretched to two grueling hours. It had all the tropes: ticking time bomb, Muslim fanatic, nuclear device, torture works, torture is necessary, we gotta save Americans! Yet certain segments of the American public eat these things up. They actively resist the reality. In fact, they get positively hostile and defensive if you try and point out what the real world is like.
There is no ticking time bomb. There never is. There never will be. Terrorists do not save up their bombs for special occasions. They're not going to truck force-multiplying devices like WMDs to Syria, when just a few of those things would have destroyed troope morale and ended the war early on. They want to blow them up, and they likely want somebody to be there at a distance with a camera, filming it all. Osama Bin Laden's hard drives supposedly talk about a nuke, but if he had it, he'd have used it already. They also talk about bombing US trains or other forms of public transportation, which, thanks to Republicans, suck so much that that would hardly be a devastating blow. But this is what we want to believe about terrorists. They're evil and they act like cartoon villains.
Meanwhile----bear with me, okay? ---"The Hurt Locker" demonstrates how we want our heroes to be cartoonish stereotypes. The lead character, in real life, would have been disciplined a long time ago for putting his fellow soldiers at risk. He goes off base in ACU bottoms---which were not issued at the time----with his fleece on, holding a gun to a civilians's face. Yeah...no. He's a tormented guy, you understand, who cares about that Iraqi kid. He shows it by holding a gun to the kid's dad's face.
I knew a couple of guys who tried a stunt like that in the months before I got there, though they didn't abduct anyone. It wasn't hostile at all. By March, they were still pulling extra duty, on restriction, and having their pay docked. Anyway. Onward. Another scene depicts this guy acting as spotter for a sniper who picks up a dead guy's weapon and without zeroing it starts picking off bad guys eight hundred meters away. He takes off his helmet, and the bad guys---who hit one guy in the eye and another one in the jugular----don't somehow hit him right between the eyebrows. Nor does he get sunburned or dried out from the long time he spends poised there. As well, they went wandering around in a single vehicle, which is a great way to get yourself killed. The day we arrived in Babylon, the Marines' flag was at half mast because one of their own had been driving around Hillah in a single vehicle. We still stopped for stoplights at the time, and when he did that, somebody walked up behind him, put a 9mm to the back of his neck and killed him. They found the vehicle with him, his driver, and his interpreter in the trunk. Nobody goes driving around in a single vehicle.
Both movies are an example of what we're being fed, and what we're not fighting hard enough to reject, which is why I've gone on at some length about them. More than that, they are an example of what people want and need to see, what they want to believe. We don't what to know how soldiers really live their lives, because to know that would be to recognize their individuality, and the fact that these men and women come from ordinary places and towns. They just got the training and the discipline. They sought out the opportunity to serve and to fight for a greater cause. And some of them, like Stephen Green, who murdered Abeer Hassan Qasim al-Janabi, served in a crappy unit where nobody called him on his harassment of the girl, nor stopped him when he went off post and raped her and murdered her and her family. He came into the Army like that, but his command sucked and they let their troops do all kinds of crap like that. His buddies looked the other way when he harassed an underage girl at the gates for weeks, then let him out the gate in civilian clothes. You can't tell me everybody in that unit didn't know his business.
He makes me think about Richard Corcoran, who was given a 'join the Army or go to jail' deal when his victim decided she couldn't stand another trial on top of the harassment, slander, and abuse she'd been subjected to after Corcoran and a gang of other boys raped her in the basement of a house. The town closed ranks----around the boy. Corocoran was the son of a police detective. One has to wonder what those father son chats were like. One has to wonder how much fun it must have been to serve alongside him if you were a woman.
He came home, found his wife had filed for divorce, and he tried to kill both her and her new boyfriend. He succeeded only in killing himself. Reportedly, he'd been abusive, but everybody was eager to blame it on the military except the Army knew what he was when they let him join. They've let other guys like this join as well. The Army can't fix what they have. All of the stories I've seen about violent soldiers coming back from the war contain the same elements; help that was sought for and denied; ostracism that was inflicted along with shaming and humiliation; and untreated mental illness that got worse and worse without treatment till something snapped. The guys in Stephen Greene's unit acted like frat boys facilitating a train. They bought into the lie: Iraqis aren't real human beings, not like us Americans. The funny thing is, the people acting in an inhuman fashion were them.
Torture is wrong. That's it, the end. If you can't get it by building rapport, you need to call a new interrogator in there to build rapport because sometimes it's just not going to happen. The torture justifiers don't believe that you can build rapport with an insurgent, because they don't believe they're human. A lot of these guys are uneducated, ill-fed, desperate, and starving day to day. I repeatedly talked to what I thought were young kids in Iraq who turned out to be guys who were nineteen or twenty years old. That embargo sure did work well. And I found out why the press stopped covering a lot of those mass graves of Saddam's. That's because some of them dated from the first Gulf War, when the Iraqis rose up against Saddam and looked to the US for backup, after George Bush urged them to do so. Instead, the US turned its back, and Saddam mowed down the rebels by the hundreds, perhaps the thousands.
Rush Limbaugh's head would be exploding right about now. Ann Coulter would be demanding that I be killed. But this was our war to win, at first, and if I had to pick the single biggest factor that turned it against us, I'd say it was giving all the jobs to Republicans and Halliburton scumbags, who did very little and charged a huge amount for it. Sometimes it is that simple. Iraqis were stripped of their jobs by the dissolution of the Army and played little part in whatever little reconstruction work we did. We could have rebuilt the whole country for what we paid Halliburton.
Here's the thing about interrogation. People want to talk. Even the guys who build bombs are human beings. Don't tell Ann Coulter that. She'll start screaming about what a soft hearted liberal you are. But how much strength does it take to look at someone who's done some horrible things, and look for the human being that's there? His own handlers probably don't treat him like a human being. In his whole life, he's been treated like a lesser being, unable to find work, living in conditions most Americans can't imagine. Maybe if certain elements of this country weren't so determined to demonize all Muslims, we could have gotten to this guy, to other guys like him, when they were younger. There's that necessarily practical argument again, unfortunately. With Republicans demonizing wide swathes of the American population, showing any humanity to an insurgent or a terrorist is likely to make you the object of contempt. And talking about humanitarian aid to people who probably don't control the oil, as guys like this certainly don't? Crazy talk.
Depending on where you are in the Middle East, interrogation can be a dream. It's not getting them to talk that's the hard part; it's getting them to shut up that will make you break a sweat. I've sat across the table from guys who two days earlier were trying to kill me. They were polite and gracious, almost comically so. They rose when I came in the room. Hey, they tried to kill me, but that was war. You shoot at them, they shoot at you, but there's need to be rude about it, at least amongst the old school.
Deep down inside, everybody wants to talk. It might take a while, it might take days or weeks, but you've got the time. There's no ticking time bomb. There's time for tea, for conversation, for little traps you can set in the dialogue, for even a kind of respect. If you waterboard a guy, he'll talk all right---he'll talk his damned head off. He'll say anything to make it stop. But if he is an insurgent, then you've just hardened his resolve. You've given him strength. The Great Satan really is the Great Satan. If they think you're weak, that's okay, too. Let them think I'm a stupid girl. They tend to drop their guard. What's wrong with being nice? Is it the idea that they'll think they're weak or something? I got news for you: they already think that. Let them. If you've got brains, you can make it work for you.
Worst of all, though, is if you have an innocent guy. If you torture an innocent guy, you know what? You're the terrorist. And you may reap a whirlwind, as Ivan Cooper said after Bloody Sunday. And for what? Jobs would have done more than these wars have accomplished, as the country has moved into myths and delusional self-justifications that can't be questioned, lest one be called 'unpatriotic'.
This is the path we've been led down by this subtle change in heart, that I can't specifically identify a beginning for. All I know is that when I say that torture isn't right, I often get greeted with objections and propaganda, not logic, and that one has to respond with something that's brutally practical, not moral. Torture is wrong in and of itself. It is a thing done by bad people. There. I'm sick of having to argue this way. It's wrong. And the people who are the loudest in justifying it---they know it's wrong. they know it doesn't work, but they like torture. And the question must be asked, why, but to do that one has to look, again, at the wider culture and what liberals have to fight.
Look at the way Republicans are attacking abortion, child labor laws, corporate taxes, light rail. They're demonizing teachers, firefighters, cops. If, for example, one wishes to reduce the number of abortions, then one should go skipping along with boxes of condoms and endorse comprehensive sex education. Yet they're against that. What does that say? They're lying, for one thing. They care about the babies, they say. Yet once the umbilical cord's cut, they cut programs to help mothers care for those babies, and to care for themselves as well. How can you care about children while eliminating the laws that were created to spare them hard, dangerous, poorly-paid work that often left them with permanent injuries and left them no time to get an education? And we wouldn't have these deficits if many of these Republican governors hadn't gleefully slashed---or in one state, completely eliminated----corporate taxes. Busting unions does not to balance those lopsided budgets. And light rail brings those jobs, jobs, jobs, most of them ran their campaign on. It's all lies.
But this stuff, all this stuff, is what certain people want to believe. They can't be educated, they can't be informed, they can't be enlightened. They don't want that. They want to live in a world where torture is justified, where Muslims are strange furriners, where women who have abortions are slutty sluts (*bitter sarcasm button on, because that's what they always imply), and where if you put in public transportation (You know, all that light rail and stuff) then minorities will come to your house in the burbs and steal all your stuff. This is really the way they think. Their fears justify their hatred. They like hating. The like fear. They like all this negativity. What can you do with people like that?
Before I went to Iraq, I was handed some kind of flyer that told me how to act as a woman in the Middle East. "Don't make eye contact," it said. "Don't offer to shake hands."
The first guy I met came up to me, talking a mile a minute in perfect English. "We are so glad you are here, this is wonderful!" Meanwhile, he was pumping my hand like I was the handle on a well and he was thirsty. The Iraqis were nothing like what I had been told.
Another guy came up to me with a confession. I knew nothing of Islam, so I was excited about this. Maybe it'd be a secret that nobody else knew? "I am a bad Muslim," he said.
"Why's that?" I said eagerly.
"I like beer."
This had me flummoxed. "Well, then....I'm a bad Muslim, too!"
Different cultures, different languages, different everything except for humor and yet....I bet I could get along more with him than with any torture apologist. Ann Coulter and people like her look at that man and see someone who they have nothing in common with. Yet on the liberal side of the aisle, you find people who are that guy, like Keith Ellison, who spoke so movingly about Salman Hamdani---and got jeered at by Repubs.
And that says just how much we've lost, and how hard we have to fight to retake all that lost ground. The real conflict is here, on American soil, and in American hearts.