Al-Qaeda Is Engaged in Torture in Iraq: Democrats in Congress Would Let Them Win

From the Smoking Gun website (warning, graphic images):

MAY 24--In a recent raid on an al-Qaeda safe house in Iraq, U.S. military officials recovered an assortment of crude drawings depicting torture methods like "blowtorch to the skin" and "eye removal." Along with the images, which you'll find on the following pages, soldiers seized various torture implements, like meat cleavers, whips, and wire cutters. Photos of those items can be seen here. The images, which were just declassified by the Department of Defense, also include a picture of a ramshackle Baghdad safe house described as an "al-Qaeda torture chamber." It was there, during an April 24 raid, that soldiers found a man suspended from the ceiling by a chain. According to the military, he had been abducted from his job and was being beaten daily by his captors. In a raid earlier this week, Coalition Forces freed five Iraqis who were found in a padlocked room in Karmah. The group, which included a boy, were reportedly beaten with chains, cables, and hoses.

Does this news fill you with anger? 

Or does it move you to tears, when you realize that countless innocent men, at least a few children, and even some U.S. soldiers have been on the receiving end of this kind of torture at the hands of Islamofascist terrorists?

(By the way, if your reflex is to mention Abu Ghraib, give it a rest.  For every impassioned word you have spoken or written about Abu Ghraib, you should be speaking or writing ten words about the genuinely vicious torturers of Al Qaeda.  Are you?  Or is your moral outrage highly selective, and consistently directed toward the lesser evil?)

For Congressional Democrats, it's all one big yawner.  Their goal is to flee Iraq so that they can claim "victory" and win the next election before their bad choices come back to haunt us all.

* * *

What will be America's legacy in Iraq? 

What are we made of? 

With America's help, the Iraqi people have thrown off Saddam Hussein and his Bathist torture thugs -- only to find that other Islamic fascists violently object to their new-found freedom and want to take over where Saddam left off. 

Who in the West is so callous as to shrug, hurry away, and let the murderers and torturers win?  Do our humanitarian impulses run only to Darfur?

This can be the West's finest hour as a new democracy puts down roots, or it can be our worst hour as we abandon Iraq to the first storms that threaten to tear it apart.

Every now and then, history takes measure of the courage and character of a people.  This is one of those times.

Abandoning Iraq to terrorist torturers who are sworn enemies of America conveys both cowardice and a lack of concern for the innocent people left behind.  We are better and braver than that.

Comments

[DemocracyRules]

Gina:
I think those pictures are vital to understand the conflict between liberal democracy and Islamist terrorism. Also relevant are new video frames that The Jawa Report has just released of a 12 year old boy in Afghanistan slowly beheading a Taliban hostage, very gruesome indeed (http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/188003.php).

Psychopaths (now technically called ‘Anti-social Personality Disorder’), are one of only a few personality types who enjoy inflicting suffering on others. They lack empathy, so they do not understand the ‘golden rule’ of reciprocity. They also enjoy these actions. In teenagers, an early sign of Anti-Social Personality Disorder is the torture of animals. Many Nazis were psychopaths, Saddam was, and many Islamist terrorists are. It can be expected that within the senior ranks of any ruthless dictatorship, psychopaths will be prevalent and influential. The Nazis showed that it is possible to indoctrinate large segments of a population into this type of thinking. Subsequent research has confirmed that under certain specific circumstances, most people can be induced to do what psychopaths do (The Milgram experiments).

The virulent contamination of thought and behavior in this way is one of the most dangerous things that Islamists do. The indoctrination to hate is one thing, but the teaching and cultivation of psychopathic behavior seems worse. Al Qaida uses torture as an end in itself. They may get information out of a person, or they may release the victim in a state of disability in order to instill terror in others. However they mainly torture to inflict pain, injury, and suffering for it’s own sake.

Contrast this with the interrogation pressure that the CIA has used. It is specific, it is goal directed, and is designed to inflict as little physical or psychological harm as possible. Here are three common-sense factors: (1) how badly do we need the information, (2) let’s apply only as much pressure as necessary, and (3) let’s minimize lasting damage. Many religious experts agree that such pressure is justifiable in the pursuit of achieving the greatest good for the most people.

In a recent “60 Minutes” interview, former CIA Director George Tenet said of aggressive interrogations, "I know that this program has saved lives. I know we've disrupted plots." About Gitmo, he said, "I know this program alone is worth more than the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us." Tenet added, "We don't torture people.”