Rare News Desk
Some are upset right now over Obama’s decision to normalize American-Cuban relations. They don’t believe the U.S. should validate the tyrannical Castro regime by stooping to that country’s level by doing business with them.
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Critics like Senator Marco Rubio and others specifically cite Cuba’s long history of human rights abuses as a reason to keep the embargo.
They make a good point.
The United States is supposed to be better than Cuba. We are above the type of barbarism characteristic of totalitarian regimes. For dictators and terrorists, their ends justify their means. But for the U.S., since liberty and freedom are our ends, we have always prohibited certain barbaric means.
Torture has always been chief among them.
In 1775, George Washington addressed anyone in his Army tempted to use torture:
Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause… for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.
Washington was even prepared to execute Americans soldiers who tortured. David Boren notes at Politico (emphasis added):
Beginning with the Revolutionary War, we Americans have renounced the use of torture. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fischer points out General George Washington’s refusal to torture Hessian and British prisoners even those who had tortured his own troops. Fischer writes that, “Washington often reminded his troops that they were an army of liberty and freedom and that the rights for which they were fighting should be extended to their enemies.” Fischer contends that Washington regarded the refusal to use torture as evidence that “victory would come because America deserves to win.”
After World War II, the U.S. did execute Japanese military members for waterboarding American soldiers. Decades later, Ronald Reagan would direct his Department of Justice to try a Texas Sheriff for waterboarding, giving him 10 years for using torture.
Yes, the Reagan administration considered waterboarding torture—as did every other administration until recently. Reagan also had the same disdain for torture as General Washington, calling it an “abhorrent practice,” and lobbied vigorously for international laws banning it.
Even President George W. Bush said forthright in 2006: “We don’t torture.”
Except we do.
We already knew to some degree about the waterboarding. Now we also know about “rectal feeding.” We know our government detained a mentally-challenged man and recorded him crying to play to his family. We know people were left to die lying on the ground from hypothermia. We know about broken limbs, sexual assaults, black sites and “Salt Pits.” We know the torture was so horrible even CIA agents broke down. Unfortunately, there’s more.
The reaction? Many Americans justified the torture or refused to call it torture. Some even seemed enthusiastic about it and would eagerly “do it again.”
We cannot control what every evil dictator around the world does. We already have relations with many and that will now include Fidel and Raul Castro’s Cuba. The embargo has been a dismal failure and it’s the right decision to normalize relations.
But we can control how we behave. We should never lower ourselves to the level of dictators. We should never adopt the rationale of terrorists.
And no, it’s not OK to say our torture isn’t as bad. America can’t be “kinda” barbaric and still be America.
This is not an argument:
It is basically saying we can, or even should, behave like our enemies.
No we can’t. No we shouldn’t.
The CIA torture report represents a degradation of American values far worse than simply having relations with yet another dictatorship, this time Cuba. It actually means we are more like dictatorships than we once thought.
For decades, conservatives in particular have worried about the loss of our values, the moral slippery slope or what some used to call “defining deviancy down.”
The last two weeks have been a new low for the United States.
