'We’re not like you'

George W. Bush was quoted in The New York Times for the first time in 1967. Back then he didn’t use the W., but it’s still him. The story was about his Yale fraternity being in trouble for torturing initiates by branding them with a hot iron in the shape of a Greek letter. Bush, quoted as the former president of the fraternity, told the newspaper the burn wasn’t as bad as it sounded and really amounted to “a cigarette burn.”

Bush and all of us have been talking about torture a lot lately, 39 years after that Yale experiment. Between the pictures of Abu Ghraib prisoners being made to act like dogs and being strung up with wires while wearing hoods, and the recent decision to change or clarify the Geneva Convention on what we can do to the prisoners locked up on a Cuban bay, we’ve talked about it a lot.

The way I understand it, the arguments for torture works like this: Those we’ve imprisoned are terrorists. They are different than us. They do what they do for the sake of evil things and we do what we do for the sake of freedom. So what they do and what we do is different. And, when your end is freedom and protecting this country, then whatever you need to do is OK.

The argument against torture, as I understand it, goes like this: Those who we’re fighting are different than us. They’re terrorists and do terrorist things. One of those things is torturing prisoners. Because we’re different than the terrorists, we won’t do things that are like or look like the things terrorists do.

The key to each argument is that we’re different than they are. There is them and there is us. Americans debate torture and the treatment of Iraqi and Afghan prisoners, but we agree that we’re not like them.

There is a third position, at least theoretically. I’m not sure anyone in the public eye would be willing to take it. There is the third position though, of saying that we’re not any different than they are.

That’s what’s interesting about Bush’s statement about torture 39 years ago. He didn’t say that the branded fraternity brothers were different than he was, that they were probies while he was a senior. He didn’t distinguish between the torturers and the tortured. He just said, simply, that it really wasn’t that bad.

The torture question wouldn’t be a problem, a real question, if we weren’t winning the war on terror. How a people treat their prisoners is only an issue when they have prisoners and when they have power. It’s not a question that a losing side asks itself. A winning side can ask these questions. A winning side can debate how, exactly, it is different from a losing side. A winning side can wonder if they’re losing because of the way they’re winning.

Salman Rushdie, the author who had Islamic terrorists declare a holy war on him and attempt to kill him for over a decade ago, said there are two questions asked of any idea. First, when the idea is struggling to succeed, will it compromise in order to gain power? Second, when the idea has gained power, how will it treat those it struggled against?

When we’ve finished winning, maybe we’ll answer that second question by telling the terrorists, “we’re different than you.” Or maybe we’ll say, “yeah we tortured them, but it wasn’t that bad.”

Daniel Silliman is the crime reporter for the Clayton News Daily. His column appears on Thursdays. He can be reached at 770-478-5753 ext. 254

Ah, FOO! Ignore the last one and read this...

Email to Mr. Daniel:

I recently read a column of yours comparing cigarette burns done at a fraternity party and obtaining information from terrorists. How is it you are unable to see the difference between fraternity pranks and obtaining the required information to prevent 3000 people from having to choose between taking their own lives by plummeting thousands of feet onto concrete and burning alive as the result of the evil that evil men do?

This is war. We could live with them if they wanted to be lived with. But the core of their toy religion is that we must die or be enslaved. The people that we are fighting would be willing to kill women you know because they dressed wrong, or learned to read, or "got uppity" in a dozen different ways, and uncontent with doing this to their own women (as if that wasn't evil enough) want to do the same in other countries. Is this not evil enough for you?

Their "god" says that democracy is evil, that you don't get a vote in how you are ruled, that a Imam tells you how to behave today, and that if he decides it changes tomorrow, you don't even get to question it, or you are dead. Is this not evil enough for you?

Their toy religion says that asking too many of the wrong questions means you are a heretic, and that you can be killed. How does this make you feel as a journalist, if nothing else? Is this not evil enough for you?

Please do some real journalism, and seek out some of the 9-11 families, and ask them if it would be worth putting underware on the head of a known terrorist if it would bring back their daddies, their husbands, their wives. Ask them if blathering on about the rights of killers makes America look weaker to terrorists who respect nothing but strength. And ask them if begging the world's forgiveness for being a free democracy and apologizing for believing in personal liberty and America will bring back the hundreds of people that have been beheaded, slashed, burned and horribly killed in the last 30 years in the name of Allah.

The winning side proves it is right by defeating the ones who want us dead. Your father probably knew that, if he lived through WWII. When slogging through the jungles of the South Pacific, or storming the beaches in France, far less pampered men weren't riddled with self-doubt about the rights of the men who awaited to try and kill them. I wish we had their clarity in this war. Maybe if the next large-scale terrorist attack takes out someone you care about, you will understand what evil is, and why "being a big meanie" to killers by keeping them awake with rock and roll is nothing that will keep ME awake tonight riddled with angst.

Liberals are generally spoiled mammer's boys and girls. They haven't had to grow up; the world is their oyster just waiting for them to crack it open. The "Great Oyster Crackers", the Clintons, are their ultimate icons.

The only time they'll ever have to grow up and live in the real world is when their actions, or inactions, result in the jihadist beheaders knocking their own personal doors down in the middle of the night and dragging them into the street for public beheadings. . providing Amadinajabba or Little Ill doesn't nuke us first . . courtesy of the Clintons' lucrative deals.

I think Mia T. has done a really good job of exposing the liberal "Oyster Crackers" and the D.U. types trolling and lurking here on F.R. could learn the truth about their role models and decide whether or not they REALLY want to emulate or support such trashy traitors.

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