Torture Provides Endless Hours of Fun for all Ages!

Is the question of whether torture is acceptable really still up for debate? Really? Didn't we resolve that as a global society back in the 1600s or so? Or at least by the time of the Geneva Conventions?

I understand that there is no dearth of polically controversial issues that are still up for debate. Abortion. Death penalty. Taxation and spending. Foreign policy. But...torture? That's just fundamental. Apparently with the shenanigans of the Bush Administration, we get to start all over from square one. Suddenly "Pro-Torture" is a legitimate political stance. Forget basic human rights. Forget that torture provides unreliable information. Forget that you just don't do that to people. Just connect this electrical thingy to your left nipple and let's go on with the show.

The Federalist Society has invited celebrated torture king and loony-toon neocon John Yoo to speak at our school. The guy's claim to fame is authoring what have become known as "the torture memos," and is credited with removing legal obstacles that would prohibit torture during the war on terror. He argued basically that since Afghanistan has no formal government to speak of, neither the Geneva Conventions nor any other laws of war apply. This breaks a fifty-year U.S. military tradition of upholding those rules, rules that we adopted because we expect them to be applied to us. Despite the major legal flaws in the memo, Bush approved it, which ultimately led to the use of torture in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, and other Iraqi prisons.

Naturally, our Amnesty International group is repulsed that he has been invited to our school. We are reacting by bringing in as many human rights speakers as we can in the weeks before the event, by launching a 2-week public information campaign prior to the event, and by approaching the Federalists to request that we be allowed to find a debate opponent for when Yoo comes. As it turns out, two of the leading human rights scholars in the city have already turned down the offer to debate the guy, saying they won't dignify him by sharing a platform with him. We have been dancing around the issue of a formal protest the day of the event.

The Federalists are nervous. The president of their group asked to meet with me today, and he was like, so...ahhh...what are you guys going to do? I told him we were planning to chain ourselves to the railings, paint blood on ourselves, assume torture positions, and shout "Ow!" at intervals while whipping each other with cat-o-nine-tails or whatever they're called. OK, I'm just kidding. But the guy is totally kidding himself if he thinks the thing will go off without protest. People protest Yoo wherever he goes. Students at Berkeley demanded his resignation. Isn't that what makes our country great? Wasn't America founded on protest and dissent and has it not grown from that? All of a sudden, protesting is "unpatriotic" and "rude." That's crazy. We're not going to ruin his event, but we certainly have a right--probably a duty--to dissent. He says, yes, I'll admit the guy is controversial. Controversial? The guy is a total nut-job! He classifies my anti-torture views as "radical" and "leftist." Which I guess means that real republicans are now pro-torture? Any republican readers out there? How do you feel about that?

Anyway, the purpose of this little rant is that I just don't understand why the topic of torture is even up for debate anymore. Would it have been considered acceptable five years ago? Has our world changed so much since 9/11? Have we all become so blind?

For more info, here's a video of a debate with the guy last April. (Click "Watch it here.") It's pretty long--you can get the gist of the counter-point's argument at minutes 16-19.