Originally published on Facebook 10 December 2014, in response to an adamant torture supporter.

It didn’t make a dent.

Just a few short days ago, I wrote as a status update, “As I get older it is getting harder and harder to resist beginning my rejoinders with, ‘This is why you’re an idiot.’”

Johnnie,

I am deeply tempted to begin this reply to you in that manner. However, I am going to give you the long answer. This is an act of perhaps unwarranted respect. But I am assuming that you are not only able to learn but willing to learn. I suspect that I am wasting my breath. But I am showing you this basic courtesy.

Pretend for the sake of argument that you are a young Afghan man. You are in your early twenties. You are not a member of the Taliban. You are just a young man trying to earn a living, stumbling his way through the world the same way the rest of us do. And one of the ways you do this is by driving a taxi.

And one day you pick up three passengers who look like you and every other citizen of your country who you have ever met. You agree to drive them somewhere, in exchange for a fare.

Forces loyal to the local guerilla commander stop the car, arrest you and the other three men, and hand you over to the Americans.

Remember. You have done nothing.

But there has been an attack on the local American base and these three guys you never met before are believed to be in some way connected, and that means you must be connected.

The Americans demand information you don’t have. When you say you know nothing, they drag you off to a dungeon and hang you from an overhead pole. Your toes barely touch the floor. Your wrists are on fire. You still plead your innocence. The Americans start beating your legs with clubs. They break your legs in several places. They in fact pulverize your legs; and it will be discovered in subsequent days that they do so much damage that even if you lived, which you won’t, they would need to be amputated. (Remember, you’re in your early twenties; so much for any dreams you might have of living a full and productive life, providing for a family that now includes a two-year-old daughter, but that doesn’t matter much, as you will not live to ever see the outside of this room.)

At one point you beg for water, because being tortured to death is thirsty work. You are in a chair at this point, and the guy torturing you gives you a plastic water bottle only after punching a hole in the bottom. Its contents spill out onto your lap while you are still fumbling with it. You get only drops. They laugh at you and resume your torment. Ha, ha, ha.

In the four days of nonstop torture you endure, you are dragged around the room by your beard, you are beaten in the knees, you have your head slammed against the wall, you are hung from the ceiling overnight and subjected to sleep deprivation, your feet are crushed, you are told you are lying, and you are beaten more for “refusing” to get to your knees when your legs are so swollen they can no longer bend. You are ultimately left hanging from your pole for so long that when they finally come back to check on you, you are not just dead – having known God alone knows what terror as you hung there in this Kafkaesque nightmare feeling life slip from you. You have actually entered rigor mortis.

All this at the hands of the country that hanged Japanese officers for water-boarding people.

Your name is Dilawar, and this happened to you in 2002.

It doesn’t matter that subsequent investigation documented that you were, in fact, exactly what you always claimed to be, a goddamned taxi driver, or that the soldiers who did this to you receive light punishment – slaps on the wrist.

It doesn’t matter that the three guys you picked up in your role as taxi driver go to Guantanamo (and are eventually released).

You, the innocent one, are still dead.

Now, it is possible that a guy imagining himself an American patriot might snort, “So what? 9/11!” It is possible that that guy is totally unmoved by this injustice, because 9/11; will indeed snort that he’d just as soon torture ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out. It is possible that this guy thinks what happened to you is the sort of thing that he shouldn’t care about.

In this thought experiment, you are still Dilawar, rotting in the ground.

Think of how your family feels.

Think of how your friends feel.

Think of your neighbors feel.

Think of how the many countrymen who merely hear about this on the grapevine feel.

How many of those will say, “We are occupied by madmen. I must kill as many of these pigs as possible?” Or, “I must go to the country that did this, and kill people living there whose only sin is minding their own business?”

Think of how the hatred spreads.

Now let’s consider Iraq, where during Saddam there was a whole culture built around ratting out your innocent friends and neighbors to the secret police, on scurrilous charges, to be imprisoned and tortured and killed, which was simply transferred to new bosses when the Americans took over.

The guy imagining himself an American patriot thinks it just swell that we torture people. He doesn’t care that while an unjust arrest of the sort that happens in wartime can eventually be reversed with an apology, torture can not be taken back, and any number of folks whose biggest sin is simply irritating Ali across the alley are indeed swept up and sent to Abu Ghraib and later to places of extraordinary rendition, where they are dehumanized and terrorized as a matter of policy.

The guy who imagines himself an American patriot snorts. This is really funny stuff. He retorts, “9/11!” He doesn’t care much that when some of those guys are released from Abu Ghraib they have every reason to think of his country as evil incarnate. To him, they are all an indistinguishable brown mass. If they act up, we’ll just torture more or them!

He doesn’t care that torture is a notoriously unreliable way of gathering intelligence and that, at one point during Bush II’s occupation, a prisoner who had no answer to give finally gave up a plot to blow up what he called “the bridge from the Godzilla movie.” Because he did not know the name of the bridge. Because he only knew it from the Matthew Broderick Godzilla film. Because he bought a bootleg at some Baghdad street bazaar.

The guy who imagines himself an American patriot doesn’t care that torture produces false information like this and that our people were well-occupied investigating a nonsensical threat against the Brooklyn Bridge until somebody suddenly had the brainstorm that the guy in custody was talking about Godzilla.

The guy who imagines himself an American patriot doesn’t even care that it’s morally wrong, that it flies in the face of every principle this country has stood for since its founding, the country which proved it was better than Japan and Germany in World War II because, when we took enemy soldiers prisoner, we obeyed the conventions of every civilized country and treated them with minimal care toward their health and well-being.

The guy who imagines himself an American patriot only cares, “9/11! Torture ‘em all!” He doesn’t care that when these crimes were committed against our people, we tried and hanged the criminals responsible. He doesn’t care that we labeled them war crimes then, or that we were right to do so. He would rather be loud than right. His worldview is an action movie. He doesn’t give a damn about anything but kicking ass.

The guy who imagines himself an American patriot only knows good guys and bad guys and is certain that we’re always among the good guys even when we don’t act like it and is equally certain that whoever we have in custody must be a subhuman deserving only of torment whether innocent or not.

The guy who imagines himself an American patriot thinks torture is just fine even when our use of that practice normalizes it worldwide and renders ever more certain the prospect that any American soldier captured by any enemy is brutalized for information he doesn’t have; and he thinks “they will anyway,” when, at the beginning of Bush II’s war, the wounded Private Jessica Lynch was rescued from an Iraqi facility where we found that she was well-treated, and cared for, and given what medical assistance was available. He doesn’t care that the informant who told U.S. forces where Lynch was gave them false information about her being tortured, and that when she was rescued she was ordered, for a time, to not contradict this story. He doesn’t care that she is now quite open about denying all bad treatment. He doesn’t care that this story documents the default position most human beings, even those on opposing sides of a military conflict, will often take if there are rules of war, and that her fate might have been much different if it were known then that the Attorney General, the Vice President, and the President of the United States were creating rationalizations for an environment closer to Dilawar’s than Jessica Lynch’s.

The guy who imagines himself an American patriot thinks he is serving his country well by relieving it of all its moral authority and all its sense of responsibility. He says, “We don’t have to be right. We can kick ass.” Because it’s easier than thinking. (Or, apparently, punctuating.)

The guy who imagines himself an American patriot is content to think, “My country, right or wrong,” without pausing long enough to add the coda, “…but I love this country because we have so often been right, and we owe her enough thought to at least try to be right.”

Finally, the guy who imagines himself an American patriot finds nothing infuriating in the knowledge that by day three of the four-day torture session in 2002, most of the taxi driver’s interrogators had come to the conclusion that, yeah, this guy was probably innocent, and went back in to continue the hellish punishment anyway…because why not; THEY had nothing to lose. Might as well.

And none of this matters to you, because in our thought experiment you are still not that guy.

I am not showing you that much mercy, my patriot friend.

No, you are still Dilawar, hanging from an overhead pipe, trying to breathe despite cracked ribs and a broken nose and the agony of shattered legs, a guy who only wanted to help support his family by driving a taxi. Dilawar, with nothing to say but, “I didn’t do anything!”

As Dilawar, what do you think of the guy who hears about your plight and snorts, “So what?” The guy who loves our country so much he has no problem with our interrogators acting indistinguishably from Nazis?

I know what I think, Johnnie.

It’s not much.

Tags: Dick Cheney, Franz Kafka, George W. Bush, Politics, Race, Republicans | Category Commentary, Politics