Earl Bockenfeld's Radio Weblog

As we know all too well by now, such "official" remarks are often a flat out lie to cover up systematic abuses. Salon's David Benjamin has a story up that reveals the use of kidnapping family members of detainees in Iraq by US forces is the standard operating procedure for many interrogations:

It now appears that kidnapping, scarcely covered by the media, and absent in the major military investigations of detainee abuse, may have been systematically employed by U.S. troops. Salon has obtained Army documents that show several cases where U.S. forces abducted terror suspects� families. After he was thrown in prison, Cpl. Charles Graner, the alleged ringleader at Abu Ghraib, told investigators the military routinely kidnapped family members to force suspects to turn themselves in.

Yes, there's nothing like the threat of having your daughter or wife raped by American soldiers to loosen one's tongue. Why, I'd say anything they wanted me to say, I'd sign any confession put before me, if my wife or daughter was in the hands of foreign troops who had occupied my country. It might not bear any relation to reality, but at that point I could care less. Protecting my child or wife would be all that I cared about.

In a hearing before Shays' Government Reform subcommittee last February, Provance testified that the Army had retaliated against him. Provance also made the disturbing allegation that interrogators broke an Iraqi general, Hamid Zabar, by imprisoning and abusing his frail 16-year-old son. Waxman was shocked. "Do you think this practice was repeated with other children?" he asked Provance. "I don't see why it would not have been, sir," Provance replied. Zabar's son had been apprehended with his father and held at Abu Ghraib, though the boy hadn't done anything wrong. "He was useless," Provance said about the boy in a phone interview with Salon from Heidelberg, Germany, where he is still in the Army. "He was of no intelligence value."

But, Provance said, interrogators grew frustrated when the boy's father, Zabar, wouldn't talk, despite a 14-hour interrogation. So they stripped Zabar's son naked and doused him with mud and water. They put him in the open back of a truck and drove around in the frigid January night air until the boy began to freeze. Zabar was then made to look at his suffering son.

I really don't have much to add. This is despicable, and a deep stain on our nation. Yet, can anyone argue that this step was not inevitable once George Bush declared his "War on Terror?" When you vow to fight the "terrorists" with the "gloves off" this is what happens: you begin to emulate the worst despots and the most criminal regimes on the planet. You view even the most heinous measures as necessary to combat your enemy, even those that were previously considered beyond the pale. You violate every law and standard of decency in pursuit of of an ever more nebulous victory. In short, you become the evil you first meant to oppose.

If someone is so angry or whatever that they will kill themselves in a suicide bombing of say my family, how could you/I every prevent this when that actual bomber is willing to die. Well, what if you made it blanket policy that the family of a suicide bomber would be ___ (fill in some heinous action such as killed, tortured, imprisoned forever, etc.) I know it sounds extreme in a casual conversation, but if the survival on one's society or even one's own family was at stake. Would such actions maybe be justified as a preventative measure toward other suicide bombings/bombers??

I mean even if the suicide bombers don't care about their lives, they might care about their family members' lives. What kinder, gentler alternative is available to deal with suicide terrorist bombing prevention??

There is a very simple alternative to threatening a "suicider's" family and thereby multiplying the number of 'suiciders.' Oddly enough, it's a method from the hated BIBLE. Love your enemy, turn the other cheek and do unto others as you would have others unto you. In policy terms, this would have translated into a 'Marshall Plan' for the Middle East, including building a school system to rival the Madrasas, infrastructure building, etc. It would have meant passing up the opportunity to become a police state after 9/11 and reserving the many hundreds of billions of dollars we have spend so far in hunting the wrong countries for a few extremely naughty people in caves. It would have meant passing up a world war. (When has a Bush passed up starting a world war?)

Now that our great Christian President has ignored even the basic tenants of the Judeo-Christian tradition, we are basically in the position your thought experiment speaks of. The problem with the 'blanket' policy of threatening families is that it moves more people into the realm of the desperate and homicidal. The desperate tend to be able to take their religious beliefs more seriously when it comes to laying their lives on the line. Systematically removing all the bread winners from a village is not going to help the next generation come to different conclusions vis-a-vis the value of life. Especially when you grab and torture the wrong 12-year old.

Might I suggest that we all take a brief moment to steal ourselves against a suicide bomb attack (bearing in mind that the odds of your being directly, mortally effected are, well as zero as zero gets in predicting the future), take more personal responsibility for your own family's safety (Goverment is good at bombing clean up, not complete prevention), and above all else, love your enemy by providing an alternative, any alternative, to desperation. Otherwise you are just multiplying the number of people who have reason to die just to kill you. Family by family. Systematically, as a blanket policy.