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May 22, 2005

A series of isolated incidents

Before the Abu Ghraib torture revelations were known, we tortured and killed people in Afghanistan.

Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.

The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.

Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he punched a hole in the bottom, the interpreter said, so as the prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully into Mr. Dilawar's face.

"Come on, drink!" the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the prisoner gagged on the spray. "Drink!"

At the interrogators' behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.

"Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.

If this is freedom, what is fascism like?

For all of the folks who will take this as a cue to start bleating about terrorists and how they don't care about our lives, how this guy was probably waging jihad against us, how he probably was building bombs in his basement cackling evilly in the dark of night, read on.

Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.

Read the bolded line again. He was innocent, and the interrogators themselves believed it.

I do not want to hear any blathering about how we are fighting for freedom, okay? We aren't. I don't know what we are fighting for besides access to oil pipelines and the chance to imitate Rome in its decline. Or maybe we're trying to bring about Revelations by playing the part of the anti-Christ. I don't know.

What I do know is that our talk of freedom and democracy, our screeching and preaching about human rights and liberty, our insistence that this war with no end is to protect us from terrorism is just so much crap. I am tired of the administration and their yapping lap dogs insulting my intelligence.

Predictably, this has been called an isolated event. We seem to have an awful lot of isolated events, don't we? From keeping prisoners in wire cages in Gitmo to suffocating POW's in Afghanistan to secret prisoners and outsourcing torture, we've been quite busy with our isolated events.

We invaded Afghanistan to get "the terrorists." We were going to smoke them out of their holes, according to Shrub. Instead, Afghan POW's were suffocated in containers and indignant letter writers decried our compassion for "terrorists." Even if those people hadn't been proven to be terrorists. Even if this logic mirrored Osama Bin-Laden's--your nationality makes you worthy of death. (By the way, anyone see that spineless snot-nosed mass murderer? Nah, I didn't think so. He's not a concern to us. Innocent taxi drivers apparently are, however.)

We're taking this oh-so-seriously, saying that there is no excuse for torture. And there isn't. Problem is, we say this every time a new case of torture comes up. We insist that it's because of a few badly trained soldiers, that this is isolated, that the victims were combative, oh, whatever. We dodge and twist and make excuses while saying that there is no excuse.

It's time we stopped blaming bad apples and started looking at the tree the apples came from.

Posted by at May 22, 2005 08:24 PM