I’ve seen this a few times on friends’ social media pages. I would like to respond to it.
First, the premise is flawed. It IS possible to be outraged by both. However we can only control what we control.
Yes, the Islamists are evil. Their agenda is to build a global Caliphate by force. It’s been their agenda since long before the events of September 11th, 2001. For the sake of brevity, I won’t go into the long history of assaults on Americans and other Westerners before and since 9/11. It suffices to say, September 11th CHANGED NOTHING. We were targets before and we’re still targets now. We can’t control what Islamists do. We can only control what WE do. In a free society people of conscious are free to voice their outrage over the things we’ve done since 9/11 that we find morally objectionable. It doesn’t lessen their outrage over what the Islamists are doing, nor does it make them less patriotic. As Fredrick Douglass once said: A true patriot is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins.
I will freely admit that I’m not outraged over water boarding or any of the other atrocities at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Abu Zubaydah and his Ilk deserved EVERY ounce of pain and degradation they received. I don’t feel the least bit of sympathy of that garbage. I save my sympathy, empathy and outrage for those who didn’t deserve such treatment. You can shout, deride and degrade Westerners for opposing torture. But you can’t change the fact that people who turned out to be innocent were in fact tortured.
None of that however, in any way reduces my outrage over the beheading of Westerns, crucifixions of minority Muslims or the sexual enslavement of women. My feelings on these events are mutually exclusive. Perspective matters.
Second, I AM disappointed that in the wake of 9/11, the CIA threw away decades of common wisdom regarding those actions and their proven ineffectiveness.
Prior to the start of his torture Abu Zubaydah was giving up actionable intelligence to an FBI interrogator. AFTER the CIA stepped in and started torturing him, he gave up ZERO actionable intelligence. His FBI interrogator (a dude named Ali Soufan) wrote a book about what actually happened called, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda. <-Read that and How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq by Matthew Alexander. Abu Musab al Zarqawi was hunted down and killed successfully without using any of the methods applied at Guantanamo Bay. Why? The CIA’s own records (dating back to the Kennedy Assassination) prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they KNEW torture was a useless interrogation technique. So, what they did at Guantanamo Bay not only DIDN’T save lives. It and Abu Ghraib were used as a rallying cry to recruit MORE terrorists.
The only thing I’m sorry about, THE ONLY THING is that human rights violations were committed in my name as an American and it cost us more than just the moral high ground. It cost lives.
No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks. – Mary Wollstonecraft
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