{"id":11931,"date":"2010-12-17T02:50:38","date_gmt":"2010-12-17T09:50:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=11931"},"modified":"2010-12-17T02:50:38","modified_gmt":"2010-12-17T09:50:38","slug":"we-wouldnt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=11931","title":{"rendered":"We Wouldn't"},"content":{"rendered":"

In late 2007, I declared that the upcoming presidential election “is about torture”<\/a>. I was wrong. It wasn’t. Despite my assertion that torture should stay in the public eye<\/a> until we come to terms with it and, ultimately, eradicate it, our preference towards inertia won out: We, as a people, desperately want to ignore this issue. We want to pretend it doesn’t happen. And unless there is a constant media blitz forcing Americans to come to terms with our torture policy, we’ll continue to ignore it.<\/p>\n

The soldier accused of leaking material to WikiLeaks is currently being held in solitary<\/a>. He hasn’t been convicted of anything, and he wasn’t on suicide watch (though now apparently we have to pump him full of anti-depressants to keep his brain intact). There is a solid case to be made, one this made in chilling detail in The New Yorker, that long-term solitary confinement rises to the level of torture<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But, as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out<\/a>, the New Yorker’s question — is solitary confinement torture? — is no longer the most salient one. Years after Abu Gharib and waterboarding, years after a Bush administration that explicitly sanctioned torture and years into an Obama administration that has done its utmost to insure there is never any accountability for it, a more harrowing question emerges: Even if it is torture, would we even care?<\/p>\n

I think the answer is clear. No. We would not. Much as we have with prison rape<\/a>, we, as a society, have come to terms with permitting torture of those we detain — convicts, military detainees, even the accused. It is now part of who we are as a nation. And it will take a great, soul-wrenching shift to turn us away from it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In late 2007, I declared that the upcoming presidential election “is about torture”. I was wrong. It wasn’t. Despite my assertion that torture should stay in the public eye until we come to terms with it and, ultimately, eradicate it, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[135,39,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crossposted-on-tada","category-in-the-news","category-prisons-and-justice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11931\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}