Shep Smith appears to still have a soul:
For the YouTube impaired, Shep says, “We are America! I don’t give a rat’s ass if it helps. We are America! We do not fucking torture!”
It used to be that Smith’s comment would have been uncontroversial, even on a conservative station like Fox News. Oh, the profanity would have gotten him into trouble, I suppose, but the comment itself, or his comment in another segment that, “We are America, we don’t torture! And the moment that is not the case, I want off the train! This government is of, by, and for the people — that means it’s mine. That means — I’m not saying what is torture, and what is not torture, but I’m saying, whatever it is, you don’t do it for me! I want off the train when the government starts — I want off, next stop, now!” — that was just what America was, and everyone agreed on it.
Sadly, today we have the dead-enders arguing over whether there aren’t legitimate policy disagreements regarding torture, and whether we oughtn’t just sweep things under the rug, let a new day dawn and all that. Because for too many Americans, torture is A-OK.
Incidentally, a newly-spreading meme on the right is that if there are hearings into torture, things could get uncomfortable for some Democrats. To which I say: good. Those Democrats who signed off on torture are no less culpable than the Republicans who signed off on torture, and I have no sympathy for them. If Sen. Feinstein ends up in the dock alongside Gov. Bush and Secy. Cheney, I won’t shed any tears. You see, for me this isn’t a partisan issue; it’s a moral issue. Like Shep Smith, I want us either not to torture, or I want off the ride. Because pace the Republican mantra, I love my country, and love what it once stood for, even as I acknowledge that we often failed to live up to the standards we set for ourselves. And I hate like sin the fact that so many of the things I love about America were cast aside by the Bush Administration in a fit of paranoia and terror.
That’s ANOTHER thing that shouldn’t need saying.
Incidentally, a newly-spreading meme on the right is that if there are hearings into torture, things could get uncomfortable for some Democrats. To which I say: good.
Good for you. There’s a lot of hypocrites out there that used this for political advantage after they helped sign off on it.
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, Shep says, “We are America! I don’t give a rat’s ass if it helps. We are America! We do not fucking torture!”
While I appreciate the sentiment, the historical evidence is much against his statement. From the puritans* to GWB, Americans and the American government have tortured, sometimes legally and openly, sometimes covertly. It’s not at all clear to me that it’s ever helped anything.
*Yeah, yeah, I know, before the US existed. But they did have a strong influence on the early US. Later US too for that matter.
I’ve been seeing some conservatives assert that we tortured in WWII. I know we tried other people for torturing in that war — specifically, tried Japanese military officials for waterboarding POWs — but I’m not aware of our using torture ourselves in WWII. (Japanese-Americans were forced into what were then called concentration camps, but were not tortured. And uses of waterboarding in Vietnam led to an Army investigation; they were not officially OKed.) Anyone know what this claim is about?
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=1356870
Water boarding was designated as illegal by U.S. generals in Vietnam 40 years ago. A photograph that appeared in The Washington Post of a U.S. soldier involved in water boarding a North Vietnamese prisoner in 1968 led to that soldier’s severe punishment.
“The soldier who participated in water torture in January 1968 was court-martialed within one month after the photos appeared in The Washington Post, and he was drummed out of the Army,” recounted Darius Rejali, a political science professor at Reed College.
Earlier in 1901, the United States had taken a similar stand against water boarding during the Spanish-American War when an Army major was sentenced to 10 years of hard labor for water boarding an insurgent in the Philippines.
“Even when you’re fighting against belligerents who don’t respect the laws of war, we are obliged to hold the laws of war,” said Rejali. “And water torture is torture.”
I’m with Dianne – school of the Americas was the first thing that came to my mind when I read this headline. I don’t think it’s at all helpful for any political debate to be deliberately blinkered about history. Those who want the US state to stop torturing, need to start by facing up to the reality that torture is a significant part of it’s history. Not a GWB blip.
School of the Americas is like extraordinary rendition: Americans advocating torture that they don’t perform themselves. There’s a meaningful difference at stake. Most people consider it far worse to perform or command an evil action than to teach or knowingly permit one.
I think it’s a difference of degree, not kind. How can teaching other people to torture for their and our political expedience not lead to thinking torture is okay? And if we’ve never tortured, if we’re the civilized ones and they’re the barbarians, why were they coming to us for lessons?
chingona,
I think the usual reason with the U.S. in relation to other countries, because we had the money, still works here. We were running a school for training people to obtain and analyze intelligence. They might think themselves already really good torturers and come to the U.S.-sponsored school for other training.
Your understanding of what went on at the School of the Americas is apparently not the same as my understanding.
chingona,
I’m going off what I’ve read from SOA Watch, which admittedly is not everything they’ve written on the subject, but what I’ve read doesn’t claim that the sole purpose of the school was to teach people how to torture in more horrible ways than they already were doing it.
I don’t think it was the “sole purpose.” I don’t think my argument depends on that being the “sole purpose” of the school.
For the record, the only army interrogator who’s ever commented here about the issue said that torture was totally worthless as a method of getting information.
chingona,
Then I misunderstood. Which part of my statement, “We were running a school for training people to obtain and analyze intelligence. They might think themselves already really good torturers and come to the U.S.-sponsored school for other training.” were you questioning?
When you said they came here for “other training,” I thought you were saying no torture techniques were taught at SOA, only other intelligence-gathering and analysis techniques.
No, I meant to answer your question “why were they coming to us for lessons?” by saying that their intent in coming to us would be for lessons in things other than torture. Torture, once you have the stomach for it, is easy.
I believe what we teach is how to not leave marks and how to extend the torture over very long periods of time without killing the prisoner.
Maybe this should be our rallying cry…I know the US has done some f’d up things, but condoning torture (read: admitting to it instead of hiding it) is pretty low. I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t like to see more of this impassioned call to virtues in politics…as long as it’s not just a sham.
Simple Truth, I think that’s what it boils down to. In the past, we had the decency to hide it like we had something to be ashamed of (cause we did). Now, we’re supposedly proud of it.
ETA: Maybe not “ashamed,” but we thought people would care, be upset, etc.
Well, we backed governments that used torture, we ran a school for training torturers, we funded torturers, and CIA agents were secretly authorized to use coercion (although not torture), including the implicit threat of torture, but soldiers in the US military were not ordered to engage in torture, the President and the head of the CIA did not receive daily briefings on how the torture was going, the DoJ didn’t make up absurd rationalizations about how torture wasn’t torture if we did it.
Our relationship as a nation to torture before the Bush administration was a stain upon our society, but it wasn’t the screaming monstrosity that the Bush Administration engineered. I don’t think the vast imperfections of the US pre-Bush should be used to suggest that what the Bush administration did differs only in that the Bush administration and the Republican party are now open about what we always did. There are real and horrible differences. In previous wars, soldiers who used torture went to jail. In this war, soldiers who refused to torture committed suicide rather than follow orders.
In previous wars, soldiers who used torture went to jail.
We sent a few folks to jail for Abu Ghraib. Bad apples. Terrible.
Look, I’ve never said on any of these threads that Bush wasn’t worse. He was worse and in important and significant ways. But it’s simply not true to say “we never tortured.”
My view is that there is still a possibility that we will actually see a thorough investigation and even possibly prosecutions for the people who orchestrated the torture policy in the Bush administration. I think that would be hugely valuable (in fact, essential, since otherwise it is now official Republican policy that when they are in office, routine torture of prisoners is US policy, and I think that will stop being their policy if it is clear that when they leave office they will then go to jail for crimes against humanity). As long as that remains a possibility, the recent US torture policy is in a radically different category than US backing for the Guatemalan genocide in the 80s.
Any allies we have in recognizing that the Bush administration had a policy of torture, that torture is illegal and immoral, and that it should be punished are our political allies. I think caviling at the reasons that your political allies are your political allies is a fool’s errand and is far worse for a political movement than tolerating a blinkered view of history.
I’d love it if Shep Smith (or even Jeff “Reagan is one of our greatest Presidents” Fecke) acknowledged that the US backed the Guatemalan genocide and supported torture from Iran to Chile and beyond- that support for torture and genocide has never been something that the US government balked at, but I don’t think that that is nearly as important as Shep Smith speaking out on the evil of what the Bush administration did, and it is actually much more effective to frame what the Bush administration did in terms of its extreme degree of departure from normal US practice and its complete unacceptability than it is to frame it in terms of its continuity with usual evil US practices.
Lastly, I think that “We do not fucking torture!” is more the imperative than the indicative, particularly since what he is saying is that we did torture.
“You do not do that!” is a perfectly normal way of telling someone that what they just did is completely unacceptable and that they should never do it again, and I think that is the sense that “do” is intended here. Admittedly, you can really only say that the first (few) times someone does something unacceptable, so it does suggest that the US has not routinely engaged in torture, but then, it hasn’t. It has backed governments that routinely tortured, it is has given instruction in how to torture, it has certainly engaged in other sorts of war crimes, but systematic, institutionalized torture of prisoners is not something that the US has done except under Bush.
As an addendum to this, though I do think it’s important to not whitewash America’s history of human rights abuses and collusion with torturers, I worry that always responding to “We do not fucking torture!” with “Yes we do! We torture it all the time! It’s a well established part of American procedure! There’s nothing out of the ordinary or un-American about it at all,” is not precisely helpful in the current context.
I mean, what happens if you win that argument? “Yay! Torture is totally American! Let’s do it lots!”
Hrm.
—Myca
I worry that always responding to “We do not fucking torture!” with “Yes we do! We torture it all the time! It’s a well established part of American procedure! There’s nothing out of the ordinary or un-American about it at all,” is not precisely helpful in the current context.
Whereas I see the statement “We’re Americans, we do not fucking (or even chastely) torture” as an extraordinarily ironic bit of American exceptionalism. It’s a bit like if Chile got a crazy person in office who made a couple of his or her enemies disappear and a Chilean TV personailty said, “We’re Chilean! We do not fucking make people disappear!” A denial of history and, in essence, a larger version of the “just a few bad apples” argment. It wasn’t just a few bad apples in abu Ghraib and it wasn’t just one bad administration. Americans, like other peoples, have used torture, legally and illegally, governmentally and non-governmentally, throught their history and claiming otherwise is whitewashing. Even if your motive is to make sure that everyone understands that this is serious.
And, no, SOA is not the only example. Two seconds of googling produced this example of the US’s use of water boarding in the Phillipines in 1902. Or look at any history of Vietnam. Or any other war or minor insurrection. It’s happened, it’ll happen again, it probably is still happening, under Obama though I sincerely hope at least a little less frequently.
Yes, Dianne, and as I said, I think that arguing that torture is a normal and historically unremarkable part of US foreign policy is likely to make torture normal and unremarkable. If doing that is worthwhile to you, have at it.
Personally, I’d rather see us torture less.
It was fairly clear to me that what Shep Smith was saying in the clip was that torture is in conflict with basic American principles, and I think he was right.
If you take his words literally, even if you ignore everything prior to the last 8 years, his words, taken literally, were untrue. Obviously, Americans do torture. But I think to take his words literally in that way takes a real stretch.
—Myca
Okay, so I was going to let ya’ll have the last word. Ya’ll made your points, and there were some good ones. Besides, the last thing I want to do is cavil at my political allies (yes, I had to look that up, and I’ll be using it in a sentence every day until it sticks).
But I think this is really unfair:
This “Hooray! Torture is so American!” has been, for all intents and purposes, the party line on the right for the last eight years (a few principled objectors aside). To come along and say that if a few lefty types on a blog can’t just let go of something so inconsequential as history, we’re going to see more torture, is just really unfair. “Oh, we would have had prosecutions for these torture memos, but those blog commenters convinced everyone that torture is a proud American tradition.” Give me a break.
Dianne,
Soldiers were penalized for water boarding insurgents in the Philippines. The use of waterboarding in Vietnam got the guy who was photographed doing it court-martialed. That’s kind of exactly what this whole argument within the Obama Administration is about: not whether to keeping torturing, but should the people who did this get prosecuted/ punished?
What makes this circumstance different and thus difficult is that the Army guys in the Philippines and Vietnam did it without authorization; no lawyers had told them, “Hey, that’s totally OK.” So they can’t claim that they were acting in the good faith belief that their actions were legal (in the one acquittal for war crimes in the Philippines, Marine Commander Tony Waller was let off because he followed the orders of General Jacob Smith; Smith was convicted). In the current case, several top-notch lawyers, including Jay Bybee who’s now a federal appellate judge with lifetime tenure, said that this was OK. That’s what makes the torture memos seem kind of crazy: people sitting in their safe little offices in D.C. were advocating for brutality.
I agree, Chingona. I think it’s irresponsible to condense the idea that “torture is American” with leftist arguments that we should not ignore our own history.
America has always been hypocritical. We should strive, however, to make our actions match our beliefs. Our past failures are tragic. We will not, however, learn to do better by ignoring them.
Yes! Exactly right! That’s my entire point! Thank you!
I’ve heard the argument from the right a thousand times that we’ve used torture all along, that there’s nothing unremarkable about it, and that it’s a well-established part of American procedure. They use this argument as a defense of the Bush Administration, not as an indictment of America.
When I start hearing the same argument from the left, it scares the shit out of me, because I know that, though the left may intend that it be used as an indictment of America, it will end up being used as a defense of the Bush Administration. I think that it’s naive to think otherwise.
PG, in comment #28, makes some great points on the difference between some of our historical incidents of torture and the official policy of the Bush Administration, and I think these points are right on. There is a difference, and I don’t see ignoring that difference as worthwhile.
Moreover, as I said in my last comment, it seems exceedingly unlikely that Shep Smith meant literally that America/Americans have never tortured, and much more likely that what he meant was that torture is at odds with America’s professed values, which it is.
As I said earlier, I do think it’s important to not whitewash America’s history of human rights abuses and collusion with torturers, but if we’re having a discussion about torture, and one person is saying that it’s un-American to torture, and the response is a list of the times America has tortured … I just don’t think that that’s going to come out well in the end, without a reinforcement of the idea that yeah, torture does oppose our professed values.
—Myca
Or, to put it another way, it’s not the history lesson I’m opposed to, it’s the context.
It’s as if someone says, “rape is inhuman,” and the response is a list of humans who have committed rape. I mean, yes, humans commit rape, but that’s not what the original statement meant, right?
Especially in a context where the other side of the debate is talking about some sort of evo psych blather about how rape is totally natural and normal, we’ve been committing rape for millennia, it’s an essential part of being human, etc., etc., and oh look here’s a useful list to back them up!
—Myca
Oh, are we using analogies now? Cause I think it’s more like someone saying there’s no such thing as rape culture because everyone he knows thinks rape is terrible.
Like I said, I was going to let you have the last word. But please don’t mischaracterize our position. You know perfectly well we’re not saying we should carry on. We’re saying that rather than return to a moderate level of hypocrisy (whatever the fuck that means) in which we outsource our torture after providing detailed instructions and training, how’s about, having come face to face with what we’ve become, we actually try to really live up to our ideals?
My goal isn’t to have the last word. Give me a break.
If you honestly believe that what Shep Smith was saying is literally that America has never tortured, then yeah, your response makes sense. I doubt very much that that’s the case. Charles’ point in comment #22 seems to me to be about right, “I think that “We do not fucking torture!” is more the imperative than the indicative, particularly since what he is saying is that we did torture.”
Certainly I don’t think that that’s what you’re saying. And you know perfectly well that that is how your arguments will be used.
—Myca
I’m not saying that to accuse you of only wanting to “win.” I meant, I wasn’t going to belabor this. I was going to let it rest. I thought you raised some good points, I didn’t have anything else to add, and I wasn’t going to belabor it.
I understood what he meant. I appreciate that he said it. I didn’t actually come into this conversation just to beat him over the head (or Jeff over the head or anybody over the head). My comments were part of a conversation that was evolving on this thread. I thought they would be read in that context.
I’m sorry. I thought I was participating in a conversation where people were assumed to share certain basic values. I didn’t realize that I should be looking over my shoulder and censoring every comment lest it be possible for some imaginary person with the power to actually decide whether prosecutions take place to take it completely out of context and construe it to mean the exact opposite of what I’m saying.
Like I said back at 27, or rather, like I meant to say at 27, I thought you raised some good points. But I think your characterization of Dianne’s points and my points was really unfair.
It certainly was not and is not my intention to imply in any way that you, Dianne, or anyone who’s raising these points believes that torture is good, moral, or ought to continue, and I apologize sincerely if my words carried that connotation.
I think that you’re right in a lot of ways on the history, and my hope coming out of this would be that not only would we stop committing torture ourselves, but that we would stop outsourcing it as well, which I don’t consider morally superior. As I said, my concern was for the context in which the points were raised, not for the points themselves.
—Myca
We can be blog friends again. Just don’t cavil at me.
Good deal.
—Myca
I’m not sure, but I think I blame BSG for re-introducing the word “cavil” into my vocabulary.
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Let’s deny that we torture, and blame it on the Legomen instead!