You're Not My Father

And one more thing. Our former Vice President, to whom I shall refer as “Darth Sidious” in order to avoid any confusion with Al Gore or Henry Wallace, has claimed that “enhanced interrogation methods” saved many American lives. By the way, Wallace, who was Roosevelt’s second Vice-President (the one right before the one who nuked Japan), with great prescience in1944 defined an “American Fascist” as ‘one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings’. Sound like anyone we know?

Now back to the Dark Lord Cheney. I have very little confidence in Vice-President Sidious’ claims that stuffing wet socks in people’s mouths results in accurate representations of closely held secrets, but let us accept for the sake of argument that this is correct. In fact let us suppose that torture is one hundred percent effective in eliciting the complete truth from anyone to whom it is applied. Let us extrapolate the implications of this.

All the lie-detector operators will be out of work. If we just torture anyone we suspect of having committed, or having knowledge of, a crime, case closed. We won’t have to wonder which one of our teenage children took the twenty out of the dresser drawer, just apply the electrodes and mystery revealed. If you suspect your spouse of infidelity, break out the manacles and get busy. In fact, we could figure out if somebody was just thinking about doing something evil by a regular program of random torture.

Now some of you are saying, “Quit being so melodramatic! Nobody is talking about torturing law-abiding Americans”. Well, nobody is talking about it now, but we really don’t know who the Bush Administration snatched off the street and sent to Romania to be “interrogated”. We do, however, know that the typical evolution in a society is characterized by the slow erosion of freedom as the government claims the necessity to exercise ever more power in order to preserve peace and safety. Ever heard of the Weimar Republic? Know anything about the French Revolution? Have any knowledge of the early history of the Soviet Union?

I am simply saying that I would rather accept the threat of random violence from detestable losers like Al-Qaeda than accept that my government’s powers are not limited and that any President can unilaterally decide what is legal and what is moral. I don’t believe that Darth Cheney is correct, but yes, we might have been momentarily safer by violating every principle we hold dear, but as Mathew asks, “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”