Jul 02 2009

They Have One of Ours Now

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

cross-posted at Dkos

They have one of ours now:

Insurgents have captured an American soldier in eastern Afghanistan, the U.S. military said Thursday.

Spokeswoman Capt. Elizabeth Mathias said the soldier went missing on Tuesday.

Will we demand that the Taliban treat our soldier well? Will we call for international oversight? Will we lecture about the use of torture? Will we have the gall to speak about human rights and dignity?

One aspect has been missing in the, still unfathomable to me, debate about whether torture is a necessary evil of being at war: we haven’t had our soldiers captured.

But today it is reported that at least one of our troops has been captured. We’re not even sure by whom, yet:

But the Taliban claim they have three more:

The Taliban, meanwhile, claims to be holding three soldiers on Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan in the province of Khost, but that has not been confirmed by the Pentagon.

So, what can we possibly do or say at this juncture to protect our soldiers from “enhanced interrogation”. I’d like to hear Cheney demand that our soldiers be treated with dignity and given their human rights. I’d like to hear him explain why they should be treated so. And I’d like to hear him explain to the families of these men why he didn’t do all that he could to leave us on the moral high ground so that we were in the strongest position possible to protect our troops.

And I’d like him to pay for all the physical and mental health care needs of any of our soldiers who are treated poorly. That is, if they survive.

I’m going to research Cheney quotes about why torture is necessary today and post them here as updates.

Meanwhile, my prayers, meditation, intentions are with every prisoner who is not treated well. Maybe we, the human race, will some day learn how self-destructive it is.

5 comments

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  2. sick.

    cheney

    Our government prevented attacks and saved lives through the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which let us intercept calls and track contacts between al-Qaeda operatives and persons inside the United States. The program was top secret, and for good reason, until the editors of the New York Times got it and put it on the front page. After 9/11, the Times had spent months publishing the pictures and the stories of everyone killed by al-Qaeda on 9/11. Now here was that same newspaper publishing secrets in a way that could only help al-Qaeda. It impressed the Pulitzer committee, but it damn sure didn’t serve the interests of our country, or the safety of our people.

    In the years after 9/11, our government also understood that the safety of the country required collecting information known only to the worst of the terrorists. And in a few cases, that information could be gained only through tough interrogations.

    In top secret meetings about enhanced interrogations, I made my own beliefs clear. I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program. The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do. The intelligence officers who questioned the terrorists can be proud of their work and proud of the results, because they prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people.

    • Edger on July 2, 2009 at 21:45
    • #

    May 1, 2009, c.c. to Dick Cheney

    In their first attempt to inform President Obama on a major intelligence issue, a powerful group of twelve intelligence experts who oppose torture has written a memo to President Obama asking him to investigate and prosecute torture by the Bush Administration. Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), consistently challenged pre-war lies and fabricated justifications for the invasion of Iraq, beginning with Colin Powell’s speech to the U.N. in 2003. They were absolutely right – and were ignored by the media.

    Now they are battling the widely-accepted lie that torture “works”:

    The fact that the exploits of Jack Bauer have injected a dangerous level of fiction and fear among impressionable viewers, and have misled not only interrogators at Guantanamo but also the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Silvestre Reyes – not to mention Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia – leaves no doubt that such illusionary scenarios need to be addressed by professionals with real-life experience.

    They insist from professional experience that:

    torture tactics are not only ineffective in terms of getting reliable, actionable intelligence but have fueled recruitment by Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups to the point that, arguably, more U.S. troops have been killed by terrorists bent on revenge for torture than the 3,000 civilians killed on 9/11

    As Bob Fertik at Democrats.com put it yesterday:

    In effect, Bush’s torture regime created a second “9/11” – only the victims were our soldiers.

    The VIPS Memo to President Obama on Torture is reproduced in full below…

    • ANKOSS on July 3, 2009 at 00:06
    • #

    What if the Afghans who captured this American use enhanced interrogation methods, such as sleep deprivation, stripping him naked, hanging him in “stress positions,” and soaking him with cold water? What if this soldier has information that could save the lives of Afghan fighters? If they use “enhanced interrogation” to obtain it they wouldn’t be torturing the soldier, because these methods are not torture. George Bush said so.

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