CAUTION: Watch for a lot of crude language below.

The Rude Pundit is an interesting read. He rants and raves about an issue, but scores a lot of points in the process. He digests a lot of info, and then all hell breaks loose. Reading the Rude Pundit is kinda like listening to Lewis Black do his “Back in Black” rants on The Daily Show.

In this case, The Rude Pundit takes on Torture.

The reason this one caught my eye is that the ACLU has provided a summary of about 1200 pages of Army-released documents that relate to the treatment of prisoners in various places around the world.

The Rude Pundit hits home when he describes how others in the world might view us, considering we’ve created a culture of torture for the first time in our history.

I hope you find it entertaining, even if it’s over the top. After all, the Rude Pundit is proud to be “Lowering the level of discourse”.

My own thoughts about torture: I hate to say it but I would not hate torture in the right circumstances. For example, if we KNEW that a terrible thing was about to happen and we KNEW that the prisoner KNEW essential material info about it that might help us prevent the terrible thing. In that sceanario, we could morally justify an emergency use of torture.

But all the signs are indicating that we LACK such moral justification for torture.

We lacked sufficient justification for the Iraq war, when gauged by the standards of civilized society. Civilized nations do not start a war unless the threat is imminent, and the entire world now knows that Iraq did not pose and imminent threat.

How about torturing the Afghan fighters to learn about the Muslin terror network?

The signs and symptoms are that we have NOT learned anything particularly useful in the three years we’ve been torturing people.

You can bet your last dollar that if we had obtained the breakthrough that we SHOULD be able to get through torture, then we would be treated to a huge celebration by the Bush adminsitration to showcase our great successes (such as the prevention of a major attack, or the capture of Bin Laden).

Torture is immoral with a narrow emergency exception that is inapplicable to the current debate.

Torture makes the United States no better in the eyes of the world than some evil dictator-run totalitarian state.

Let’s reclaim the moral high ground.

The Rude Pundit: “The ACLU’s summary of the recent 1200 pages of documents from the Army is a wonderful catalog of hate and destruction, the kind of shit that if you read it about any other nation, you’d wonder why the people don’t rise up in rebellion. Or if the people did rise up, you couldn’t blame ‘em. We got sworn statements of soldiers saying they were told to take prisoners out back and ‘beat the fuck out of them,’ we got a healthy man dying in custody, we got soldiers being allowed to get ‘payback’ against suspected insurgents. And no distinction, often, between people picked up who have done something to attack the American or Iraqi military and people who just were standing next to that person. Because, you know, that might require, let’s just fuckin’ say, ‘Due fucking process,’ which is anathema to the purposes of this approach: inflicting fear on populations.

Here’s how they used to treat prisoners under a U.S. buddy, the Shah of Iran - see if any of this sounds familiar, from the 1999 book Tortured Confessions by Ervand Abrahamian: ’sleep deprivation; extensive solitary confinement; glaring searchlights; standing in one place for hours on end; nail extractions; snakes (favored for use with women); electrical shocks with cattle prods, often into the rectum; cigarette burns; sitting on hot grills; acid dripped into nostrils; near-drownings; mock executions; and an electric chair with a large metal mask to muffle screams while amplifying them for the victim. This latter contraption was dubbed the Apollo–an allusion to the American space capsules. Prisoners were also humiliated by being raped, urinated on, and forced to stand naked.’ No, not all, no acid in the nostrils that we know about, but, fuck, an awful lot of these techniques and others are part and parcel of the ‘interrogation’ of prisoners, part of the ’softening up’ process.”