Musk Ox Dropping says, "I want to discuss the morality of torture, and specifically U.S. torture...."
A) If you want to discuss the morality of torture we aren't going to limit it. Morality is an international, human, concept.
Did you call for the arrest of Ho Chi Minh for allowing the torture of American POWs during the second Indochina war? If not, why not?
>>Mike McGrath spent five years and nine months as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He was captured after a failed reconnaissance mission sent his aircraft to the ground. His captors transported him to the Hanoi Hilton where he endured a life of isolation, torture and misery. The beatings were frequent and the living conditions deplorable.<<
>>Within ten hours of my capture, I was en route to Hanoi. At a pontoon bridge, I was taken out of a truck and jammed into a narrow ditch. The soldiers who were guarding the bridge took turns to see who could hit my face the hardest. After the contest, they tried to force dog dung through my teeth, bounced rocks off my chest, jabbed me with their gun barrels, and bounced the back of my head off the rocks that lay in the bottom of the ditch.
I said my final prayers that night, because I was sure I would not reach Hanoi alive.<<
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/honor/gallery/4.htmlB) Artic Hare Rectum continued, "U.S. torture, which is the only kind of torture the readers of this NG can do anything about."
We did do something about it. The torture of enemy combatants was forcefully, and publicly, condemned. We held our elections and put new people, who have a very different philosophy, in charge. New Generals, who will hold all soldiers accountable, were placed in command. Veterans like myself, who have seen the elephant, made it clear, when discussions arose during family or social gatherings, that these actions must not stand. Any notion that America just went on uneffected, or stayed neutral to the actions at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, are foolish. This isn't Vietnam, or Cuba, where citizens live in such fear of government reprisals that only a very few brave individuals dare speak up.