Hannity's Waterboarding Distraction Trivializes Torture, Minimizes Murder and Appeals to the Sadist in Us All

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

The blogosphere is all atwitter over the lastest chapter in the Olbermann-Hannity waterboarding story. The attention is unsurprising; who wouldn't pay to see Hannity tortured?

I know cheap thrills are scarce these days, and I don't want to rain on the parade. I just hope you know that you're being had.

The Sean Hannity "waterboard me" media circus is no more than a clever ploy. This Fox chickenhawk (along with others in the media) is focusing on waterboarding, when there are much more sinister happenings afoot.

While we're busy obsessing over Hannity's blustering and bugs in boxes, there's one thing that gets glossed over in the torture debate over and over again, on the part of both the government and the media. It's something that has been emphasized by BuzzFlash -- repeatedly.

We didn't just torture people, we killed people.

Though we've been practically screaming this fact from the rooftops, it has gotten little play in the mainstream media. However, the idea slowly seems to be picking up. Today, Thomas Friedman wrote this in his New York Times column:

There is nothing for us to be happy about in any of this.

After all, we're not just talking about "enhanced interrogations." Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has testified to Congress that more than 100 detainees died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, with up to 27 of those declared homicides by the military. They were allegedly kicked to death, shot, suffocated or drowned. Look, our people killed detainees, and only a handful of those deaths have resulted in any punishment of U.S. officials.

Somehow Friedman twisted his usually sound logic in such a bizarre manner as to come to the conclusion that Obama is correct to avoid prosecuting those responsible for torture, but the fact that he went to the trouble to highlight and italicize the above shows he was half awake (for the beginning of his column, at least).

Wilkerson (part of his congressional testimony on the matter is available here) is not the only source of reports of state-sanctioned murder.

This list, compiled four years ago and made available on the National Institutes of Health archive, details what happened to six detainees in Afghanistan and 11 in Iraq, all of whom died following torture.

A Human Rights First report estimated in 2006 that nearly 100 people had died in U.S. custody as part of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since August 2002:

According to the U.S. military's own classifications, 34 of these cases are suspected or confirmed homicides; Human Rights First has identified another 11 in which the facts suggest death as a result of physical abuse or harsh conditions of detention. In close to half the deaths Human Rights First surveyed, the cause of death remains officially undetermined or unannounced. Overall, eight people in U.S. custody were tortured to death.

ProPublica investigated human rights groups' and CIA documents and determined that at least 32 terrorism suspects that were in CIA custody have gone missing. The CIA declined to comment on the list, aside from saying it was probably "flawed." There's no way to confirm whether these people are even still living, much less what techniques they've been subjected to. However, the whole situation has the stench of Latin American dictators "disappearing" people attached to it.

With Americans' heads swimming in these many sets of numbers, the individual stories within this sad chapter of our country's history are easily forgotten. This is why the indispensable documentary Taxi to the Dark Side should be required viewing material for every American. The central victim in this story was not waterboarded. Nor was he thought to be guilty of anything beyond driving by Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base at the wrong time. Still, his legs were beaten to the point that they would've had to have been amputated, had he not died from the beating.

But whether or not the government ultimately concludes that these and other deaths were murders, the fact remains that people died in American custody. The responsibility is ours. Even suicides cannot be ruled out. The military has a history of using suicide as a cover for homicide, and there's no way to say whether or not torture has driven a person to suicide.

There are undoubtedly more terrible torture stories that will be unearthed in the coming months and years, and they will cause Americans to both cringe and deny.

And all these lists, numbers and stories mean about the same as what it would mean if Hannity ever actually were waterboarded: Jack.

(And I don't mean Jack Bauer, but thanks to Maureen Dowd for reducing the crimes of the Bush Administration to wacky high jinx on a Fox television drama and demonstrating that it actually is possible to hate Dick Cheney so much that it eventually drives you mad.)

We will probably never know how many detainees died in our custody, or in the custody of our allies in this so-called "war on terror." The number does not matter. The fact is, the Bush Administration murdered in our name. No matter what intelligence we got from tortured prisoners, no matter who gets waterboarded to prove how pleasant it is, that fact will always remain.

The thing that makes Hannity's supposed willingness to be waterboarded nothing but a trick is the same thing that makes the arguments of proponents of the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE, the training program for troops that subjects them to moments of torture so that they can be prepared to resist it if captured) fall flat. Hannity and SERE students know in advance they won't be killed. They know their legs won't be beaten literally to a bloody pulp. They know their anguished cries won't go unheeded and that medical care will not be withheld from them.

Their arguments are nothing but a callous bait-and-switch. And the fact that Olbermann and (most of) the rest of the left seems willing to exchange Hannity's momentary horror for justice makes them look just as sadistic as Team Bush.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS