Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo fetched a bit of tape from the
memory hole. Holding copies of FBI emails about torture that the ACLU obtained
through FOIA requests last fall, Sen. Dick Durbin said,
If I read this to
you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had
done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must
have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot
or others — that that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the
case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their
prisoners.
Lots of folks, apparently, were more offended by what Durbin
said about our agents than about what those agents did to other human beings.
One outraged viewer commented about the news clip of Durbin making his remarks,
“If we had tried to imagine the most offensive, inappropriate, false and
slanderous thing a United States Senator could say, we could not have come up
with something as offensive, inappropriate, false and slanderous as what
Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) said on the floor of the Senate about our
troops.”
I bet we could. We could say that Dick Durbin believed in torture.
After about ten days of what Sullivan called this
“epic, right-wing hissy fit,” a tearful Durbin apologized to the U.S.
Senate. Of course, the 6,000-page report on the CIA’s use of various forms of
torture on detainees between 2001 and 2006 by the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence (SSCI) confirmed that Durbin’s complaints were justified. No
“I told you so” from Durbin, however; Durbin called the most recent
revelations “troubling.”
Durbin is a decent man who spoke his heart last October. But
nobody’s buying outraged decency this season; poll after poll confirms that
more Americans believe that torture — by us — is justified than believe in
being nice to your mother. But why? Fear, yes, racism, yes, but also a belief
that torture works. They agree with the unfortunate Aaron Schock, the eternal Young Republican, who in 2009
told an interviewer, ““I don’t believe that we should limit waterboarding —
or, quite frankly, any other alternative torture technique — if it means
saving Americans’ lives.”
Only it doesn’t. The practical case against torture is as
sound as the moral case. It doesn’t work — the information obtained is usually false — and resorting to such methods — especially when used against people who should never have been in custody to begin with — enflames people against us,
making us less safe rather than more. It would be nice if more Illinois
officials in Washington mounted their bully pulpits to say so. Or will Illinois simply not listen?
This article appears in Dec 18-24, 2014.
