Unthinkable

I recently watched one of those movies that went straight to disc as they say. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unthinkable

Only this straight-to- DVD flick featured real stars including Samuel L. Jackson and Carrie-Ann Moss.

Jackson is part of a secret team of government interrogators that will use all means necessary to break down a suspected terrorist in order to uncover some immediate danger to the public.

Moss is with some FBI unit involved in interrogation.

Now it has always been my opinion that torture is as American as apple pie.

There is rarely a movie that issues these days without scenes involving torture or at least the threat of torture.

Reservoir Dogs contains one of the scariest examples of torture that I have ever witnessed and the torturer was not even attempting to extract information from the victim. If you recall the victim was a cop.

Jackson takes torture as a government- sanctioned device to new heights.

The Muslim terrorist is strapped to a chair with his arms, hands and fingers extended.

This jihadist had made a video claiming that he had manufactured three nuclear bombs, placing them in three different urban centers.

They were set to go off within days following the taping.

Some twenty million lives are at stake.

So Samuel L. has his work cut out for him and he is never one to shrink from heavy responsibility.

He begins the interrogation by cutting of a finger.

He continues by pulling out finger nails.

The Muslim is attached to an electrical device and he receives the equivalent force of a lightning bolt.

The discipline of the victim is incredibly Zen. It comes out that he has planned even his own torture.

The torture cannot work against such a force of will.

The jihadist’s wife is brought into the interrogation room and sliced open with a knife.

Finally, two children are brought into view and the animal breaks down and discloses the three separate locations of the weapons.

This brings into the light of day an issue; the issue of life and death

Tragedy is an art form. The hero of any tragedy is faced with choices that are abominable. And the hero of any tragedy is damned if he does and damned if he does not.

True tragedy is not a roof falling on the heads of worshippers in a collapsing church.  The truly tragic figure would be the fellow who planted the bomb that caused the collapse.

Or the contractor who cut corners when the roof was originally constructed in order to make more money.

Jackson is therefore a tragic character in the truer sense of the dramatic hero.

This all reminded me of Harry S. Truman.

Bomb two cities into oblivion. Destroy the lives of tens of thousands of people; mostly innocent people. And do all of this mayhem in order to prove a point and end a war and proclaim America as THE only true world power.

And Harry never had to get his hands dirty!!

I have no doubt that if the Ruskies had made this decision our school texts would read much differently than they do today.

In the film, which I believe never made it into theaters because of political concerns, Jackson’s character demonstrates how far torture can be taken.

He seriously considers torturing and killing the children right in front of the terrorist.

The give and take between the FBI agent and the torturer makes for some pretty good dialogue.

We become no better than the terrorists, Moss’ character would note.

The lives of 20 million people are at issue here, Samuel L. would respond.

Torture does not lead to trustworthy information, she notes.

Then why have humans used torture as a tool to extract truth for ten thousand years, he retorts.

The utilitarian argument wins the day.

Wiki tells me that the extended version of this film posits that there are four bombs instead of three and a huge portion of some undisclosed urban center will be destroyed along with hundreds of thousands of people. (This is alluded to in the film I saw but the question looms following the suicide of the jihadist.)

There were other features in the dialogue which brought to mind the book by Ron Suskind entitled   The_One_Percent_Doctrine

The lead member of the interrogation team in the movie kept noting that the threats made by the jihadist in the video must be taken seriously, even if there was only a one percent chance that he had not been making the entire drama up.

Cheney was the ‘creator’ of the One Percent Doctrine in the book.

Today, after musing about this film for some time, I came across this article at Harpers:

In 1994, when I chaired the Security Council Commission to Investigate War Crimes in the former Yugoslavia, I reported at a press conference on the mass rape policy as part of ethnic cleansing. A journalist asked if the estimated figure of 20,000 was good news insofar as prior journalistic reports put the number of estimated rape victims at 50,000. My answer was that one is too many, especially when it is part of an “institutionalized policy.” It is a fundamental moral question, and we must reject any relativism and comparisons with other regimes as a way of determining the criminality of the conduct in question.

Having said that, the numbers are quite staggering. It is not only the 820 or so Guantánamo detainees, and those that were outsourced through the euphemistically called “extraordinary rendition,” but also the estimated 150,000 persons who have gone through physical mistreatment and torture in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last 9 years. To exempt those in the Bush Administration who are criminally responsible only on the basis that there aren’t too many people who have been tortured, or because among them are some who would cause us harm if they could, is immoral and illegal. Our Constitution makes us a government of laws and not of opportunistic or selective choice of what laws to obey or not.

2. The Spanish Audiencia Nacional issued an interim decision last year concluding that the “intellectual authors” of the Bush torture program should be the focus of criminal investigations. It defined that group to include Alberto Gonzales, Douglas Feith, William J. Haynes II, Jay Bybee, John Yoo and David Addington. From a prosecutorial perspective, is it correct to focus the case on the lawyers, and particularly those who issued advice inside the Justice Department?

A prosecutorial decision in Spain based on universal jurisdiction of the U.N. Anti-Torture Convention must necessarily focus on the makers of the criminal policy as opposed to individual perpetrators. This type of prosecutorial policy is followed by the International Criminal Court as well as other international tribunals because it is impossible for these tribunals to prosecute all perpetrators of international crimes. That is different from what has to occur in states where crimes have taken place. United States criminal laws and military laws do not provide for this type of discretionary and selective prosecution. The Attorney General, U.S. Attorneys, and the military justice system cannot focus exclusively on senior policy-makers while ignoring other lower-level perpetrators. There is, nevertheless, some prosecutorial discretion

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/02/hbc-90007961

So American officials can put on a show in Nuremburg or in the former Yugoslavia almost fifty years later.

And we can sit in our easy chairs pontificating about good and evil.

Dennis Farina in a Law & Order episode shoves a suspects head in a toilet and places his hand gun in the wet felon’s mouth in order to extract some information concerning the location of a kidnapped girl.

I always love Farina anyway and the scene made me laugh. Hahahaha

I just had the idea that Farina in fact extracted the location using a toilet and a gun but would not have fared so well if he had attempted to use a sandwich and a beer.

We attempted to follow certain guidelines as far as our POW camps during the big war hoping that the enemy would follow these guidelines with regard to its POW camps.

Herman Goring complained that the festivities of Nuremberg involved the winner further punishing the loser and that morality had nothing to do with any of it.

With the exception of a few executions, the defendants were  released within a few years of their conviction.

They say: Do not judge lest ye be judged.

I know that if I was in some Afghanistan hell-hole and I was interrogating a suspect concerning the location of my military brothers and sisters held by the enemy; I would not be using a sandwich and a beer as my tools for information extraction.

Our government has been lying to us; that is a certainty in my universe.

Most Americans really do not wish to know the truth outright because most people do not like to think about real moral choices. Therefore most Americans would desire that our government continue to lie to us.

I mean, John Wayne tells us that war is hell.

I do not feel that there are easy choices with regard to torture. I do know that waterboarding someone a hundred times over a period of time is not going to enlighten anyone.

A thousand years ago the Inquisition was able to extract confessions concerning witchcraft.

For another discussion on this issue see

http://tpmaholics.blogspot.com/2011/02/i-referred-to-this-in-earlier-post.html

Previous version @ http://onceuponaparadigm.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/unthinkable/