Will America Ever Find Peace With a Torture Policy?
Posted on July 8, 2007 - Filed Under Rants, Peace News, Politics |
I have always agreed with the saying: no justice, no peace, so when I heard Randi Rhodes say the same thing on Air America a few days ago, I must admit that it felt good. Even when our current administration tries their best to scare us into believing torture is necessary for our security, it has never felt justifiable to me. Not too mention many studies conducted about the quality of information the United States has received from a tortured prisoner states that the quality is often not able to be proven accurate. Many prisoners say what they think their interrogators are beating out of them in an attempt to stop the torture.
I saw the HBO documentary: Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, and for me it provided a face to go along with the name terrorist that we’ve been calling them. Now let me be perfectly clear, this film does not say that America is wrong, wrong, wrong; instead, the film goes through the timeline of events beginning with the attacks on September 11, 2001, and continues through the Iraq War showing how these prisoners came to be at Abu Ghraib and what traceable events caused the torture.
The film… “strongly suggests that, far from being an unauthorized, isolated event by rank-and-file soldiers acting on their own initiative, the physical and psychological torture employed at the prison was an inevitable outgrowth of military and government policies that were implemented in a climate of fear and chaos, inadequate training and insufficient resources.
The interviews with soldiers who took part in and observed the torture at Abu Ghraib show them to be intelligent and articulate young men and women, not gun-happy, sadistic torturers - challenging what viewers may think they know about what took place at the prison. For the most part, soldiers stationed at Abu Ghraib were not trained as prison guards, yet as few as 300 of them were put in charge of up to 6,000 prisoners, who were held in squalid and dangerous conditions.
‘If there were no photographs, there would be no Abu Ghraib,’ said Javal Davis, an MP stationed at Abu Ghraib, who was later court-martialed. ”
I believe this film is a good example of how our society needs to be able to confront the whats and whys of this un-American torture policy so we can move on with better ideas of how to protect ourselves from perceived terrorist threats. I personally never believed that these unfortunate events were caused by a “few bad apples,” and I found it informative that this film also gives us the perspective of the prison guards—straight from their mouths—about what they were told to do, and how these instructions started at the top and used different ways to force or encourage these guards to use such extreme force and/or turn a blind eye when they witnessed others doing the same.
Aside from the film, I wonder if America will ever be at peace when we have a policy of outsourcing our wars to everyone we feel is a threat to our way of life. Whose way of life are we protecting? Mine, yours, ours? Is it possible for America to stay safe without killing others that have done us no harm? I truly believe The Dalai Lama’s statement that “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” Not too mention we lose ourselves and become desensitized to what being at war really means. My dad’s life fell apart after his tours in Vietnam and I worry about the kids over there now. I worry about the people who severely mistreated Cindy Sheehan when she protested the war after her son’s death while he was a soldier in Iraq. Have we gone so crazy that it’s not American to protest something that we believe to be wrong?!
I too, like Cindy Sheehan, have currently fallen out of love with my country and I’m sure how I will ever get over it. Having to wake up every day and go on with my life while others are fighting a war is something very hard for me. I feel like I should be doing something, but like most Americans, are unsure about what to do and still pay the mortgage. And then on other days I wake up with a renewed sense of hope that it will get better and we will end the war.
We cannot all be like Cindy Sheehan, or The Dalai Lama for that matter, but I think they can be a good example for us to follow what we believe in and to practice little actions every day to make the world a more peaceful place. I’m not sure when America will find its peace again, but I do think this is a start.
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