The following includes some suppositions.
As you have read, heard or seen elsewhere and may have read in this blog, torture is now standard operating procedure (SOP) for our war on terror (WOT). The Geneva Convention has been trashed. We have secret prisons. We use wire taps without oversight to find more guilty prisoners with no hope of being proven innocent, and our standards are now as low as the worst of our enemies.
You have also probably read that this change in our WOT SOP increases the likelihood of our own troops being tortured. Yes, it has already happened, but now more of our enemies feel ‘at ease’ with using torture – much like we are more at ease with torture. If it’s OK for the world’s leading ‘good guy,’ it’s now a free for all for the rest of the world.
Now take this to the next step. If we have opened the flood gates and all but guaranteed torture of our captured troops, and we know that some number of these troops are in critical positions and those critical troops hold information that could be used against other American troops or civilians at home, what kind of survival training will these critical troops now need? Will those who let Abu Ghraib happen to be the ones heading up the new torture survival training for our troops? Will Americans have to torture other Americans? How would a President explain this when someone leaks it to the ‘evil’ ‘liberal’ media that one American accidentally tortures another American to death?
Andy Hailey