ByRay Hanania
Who’s against torturing a terrorist, right? Well, it turns out that many of the prisoners were not terrorists at all, just innocent people fingered by others for money or personal grievances. If you bother to read a historically factual review of the torture cases by American Vanity Fair writer Kurt Eichenwald in his book500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars, you would know that.
No one has made a movie about Eichenwald’s shocking disclosures of the abuse of civil rights and violations of the American Constitution. What kind of patriotism would that be, claiming Americans violated human rights?
Many of the prisoners were brutalized, tortured, imprisoned without lawyers or rights for years. Most were just hapless people with Middle Eastern and Asian names who were Muslim.
The movie falsely argues that the information from the torture led to the identity of the courier, Abu Ahmed Al Kuwaiti, who worked with bin Laden in the years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack.
But that’s not true. Maybe it cost too much money to explain that the identification came from the interrogations of suspects that took place without torture, or that torture didn’t work.
What American doesn’t support breaking someone’s arm or finger, or water boarding or starving someone for weeks on end, or putting a six foot tall man inside a 3 by 2 foot wood box for days on end if it meant feeling good about getting some payback against “those people?”
Maybe having served during the Vietnam War and hearing all the stories of how our American soldiers were tortured and abused after being falsely accused by the Viet Cong of being terrorists for dropping napalm on civilian villages, I’m a little sensitive to depriving people of their rights.
Yea, it’s not an easy question for most Americans who love this country but don’t seem to know much about the facts other than watching 9/11 being played over and over and over again on TV. The hatred of anyone Middle Eastern or Asian has to build up inside, doesn’t it?
So as soon as someone comments about how dumb the film really is — most Hollywood movies are little more than stories sewn from twisted and exaggerated facts – you’re vilified in the minds of others who don’t like anyone reminding them about how we torture innocent people.
Especially in our “Christian World” where turning the other check doesn’t quite cut it, and we can envision Jesus standing with the mob, club in his hand, wanting to beat some foreign looking prisoner to death because someone said he sympathized with “those terrorists.”
Vengeance is justified when it belongs to us, I guess. In movies and in everyday life.
I’m glad we got bin Laden. He was guilty of murder. I just wish we did it with justice rather than hate!
(Ray Hanania is an awarding columnist. Reach him athttp://www.TheMediaOasis.com.) — City & Suburban News-Herald
