The reactionary left has descended upon waterboarding as its new case
study in why conservatives are diabolical and without conscience. The
sad reality is that conservatives are reacting in the rather
conventional manner of going on the defensive. Conservatives need to
fight back more vigorously against this community now willing to name
even Harry Truman as a war criminal alongside President Bush,
Condoleeza Rice, Vice President Cheney, and so many more good
citizens.

The reactionaries of the Left are celebrating their own unique sense
of jingoism that has come to dominate their political community since
Vietnam. In this distinct and pathological view of the world, there
is only one reality -- America's imperialism. The global human
community has ceased to exist for this reactionary community.
'America does not f***ing torture,' in the over heated words of
Shepard Smith.

For the torture reactionaries, the question can only be if America
tortures. The global concept of torture has completely been
subordinated to a view that no one tortures in the world except as a
genuine and comprehensible response to American imperialism. It is an
America in need of God's damning to paraphrase one of its unrepentant
spiritual leaders.

A more productive and comprehensive study of the question of torture
would include: Is it torture to slowly behead someone with a knife as
Musab Al Zarqawi did with American ANSWER leader's son Nicholas Berg?
Berg's father Michael robotically answered this question by telling
the world that George W. Bush killed his son-- completely consistent
with ANSWER's reactionary brainwashing. Is it torture for Saddam
Hussein and his sons to watch victims in Iraqi prisons witness the
raping of spouses or have an electric drill run into someone's ankle
bone? Is it torture to discharge an AK-47 into a woman's skull in
front of crowds at a Kabul soccer stadium?

The prolonged silence and ambivalence of the reactionary left toward
such atrocities has created a rhetorical vacuum. The reason the term
"neo-conservative" was invented by the reactionary left was to close
the door on an ugly divorce within their community between human
rights and global politics. The Left largely no longer believes in
individual human rights for people outside the United States -- with
the possible exception of individuals inside the Gaza strip. The
reason Pat Buchannan can sit alongside Keith Olberman on an MSNBC
television set is that the paleo-con and the reactionary leftist share
an ambivalence for the rights of individuals oppressed by non-American
and non-Israeli points of power. For both political stances, the
retraction of American power will lead to a world of useful silence
wherein we will simply not know or concern ourselves with inhumanity
as it may be practiced in the world. It is after all 'their
culture.' The mind numbing multiculturalism is the intellectual
sedative that has put the struggle for individual human rights to
slumber on the Left.

Noticeably missing from the discussion of whether water boarding
crosses the line from interrogation to torture is analysis of how the
decision was made. The Bush administration conducted a legal debate
within their ranks and the broader public sphere. That is the most
important principal revealed by the CIA memos and the most important
contrast principal of Obama's politics in choosing to release only one
side of that debate.

The reactionary community that fuels the Obama administration does not
believe in free and fair debate. They believe that strategic
exclusions of information constitute appropriate means for building
political power. On the other hand, within the Bush administration,
the CIA, the American media, and the public, there was a constant
debate about whether water boarding was appropriate.

There were no debates in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, or dozens of
other countries where torture actually does take place. In sharp
contrast, the torture enjoyed by families such as the Hussein family
of Iraq, was a matter of pure impulsive indulgence and spectacle.
There was little or no notion of protecting a public sphere in Iraq.
The heads of Iraqi victims were regularly posted outside the homes of
victim's families after these spectacles were complete. The adamant
refusal of the Olbermans, Stewarts, Riches and other reactionaries to
entertain a serious conversation on global torture is one which is
veiled in their jingoistic display of the flag. This is America! We
don't torture!

The sad state of affairs was amplified in the recent 100 day press
conference. At this event, President Obama appealed to the idea that
the British refused to torture during World War II. The appeal to a
foreign government as more moral than America fits easily within
Obama's worldview. Obama and his team must have missed this gem from
the British press published in 2006 by the Guardian:

"Sherman Carroll, of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of
Torture, said British authorities should also apologise and pay
compensation to survivors. "The suggestion that Britain did not use
torture during world war two and in the immediate aftermath, because
it was regarded as 'ineffective', is a mythology that has been
successfully propagated for decades," he said. "The fact that it took
place should be acknowledged.

.. . . Others interrogated at the same prison, at Bad Nenndorf, near
Hanover, included Nazis, prominent German industrialists of the Hitler
era, and former members of the SS. At least two men suspected of
being communists were starved to death, at least one was beaten to
death, others suffered serious illness or injuries, and many lost toes
to frostbite.

The appalling treatment of the 372 men and 44 women who were
interrogated at Bad Nenndorf between 1945 and 1947 are detailed in a
report by a Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Tom Hayward."

Obama's misstatement is symptomatic of the community from which he
draws his arguments -- reactionary and shallow. The British actually
used brutal tactics against Nazis and other rivals in World War II --
including thumbscrews and shinscrews -- and continue to use techniques
that most US officials would blanche at in fighting terrorists such as
the IRA during the 1980s. Obama's slick answer is typical wishful
thinking from the reactionary left which only allows itself to
consider American and Israeli roles in torturing the innocent. It is
intrinsic to the close mindedness that has descended on the Left
regarding human rights as a global struggle.

The circularity of the reactionary Left's worldview is one that not
only condones torture but encourages it. It is a circularity that
helped America look away from the torture of the Khmer Rouge after
Vietnam. It helped Clinton look away from Africa after Mogadishu when
Hutus took up machetes against their brothers and sisters in Rwanda.
It is a view that helps genocide expert and Obama administration aide,
Samantha Power see a "monster" in Hillary Clinton when she threatened
Obama's path to power, but now she sees an acceptable sovereign seated
in Khartoum. The Obama administration would do well to look at the
recent example of Democratic congressional members arrested at the
Sudanese embassy and less to the shrill jingoism of Code Pink, ANSWER,
and Michael Moore. The insular jingoistic view of torture held by the
reactionary left is killing us all.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/..._of_the_r.html