Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Peggy Noonan for The Wall Street Journal. I agree with her that Americans, regardless of their party affiliation, should agree torture is wrong. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
* * *
The “torture report” exists. It shouldn’t — a better, more comprehensive, historically deeper and less partisan document should have been produced, and then held close for mandatory reading by all pertinent current and future officials — but it’s there. Anyone in the world who wants to read it can do a full download, and think what they think.
Its overall content left me thinking of a conversation in the summer of 1988 with the pollster Bob Teeter, a thoughtful man who worked for George Bush ’s presidential campaign, as I did. I asked if he ever found things in polls that he wasn’t looking for and that surprised him. Bob got his Thinking Look, and paused. Yes, he said, here’s one: The American people don’t like the Japanese.
It surprised him, and me, and I asked what he thought it was about.
He didn’t think it was economic—he saw in the data that Americans admired Japan’s then-rising economy. He didn’t think it was World War II per se—he didn’t find quite the same kind of responses about Germany. We were quiet for a moment, and then our minds went to exactly the same place at the same time: Japanese torture of American soldiers in the Pacific war. The terrible, vicious barbarity of it. When the war ended, American boys went home, and the story of what they’d seen, experienced and heard filtered through families, workplaces and VFW halls. More than 40 years later, maybe it was still there, showing up in a poll.
It was just our guess, but I think a good one. A nation’s reputation in the world will not soon recover from such cruel, systemic actions, which seemed to bubble up from a culture. You’ll pay a price in terms of the world’s regard.
This is one of the reasons, only a practical one, torture is bad. It makes people lose respect for you. And when you come most deeply to terms with it, it can make you lose respect for you, too.
The arguments over the deficiencies of the torture report—we’ll get to some in a moment—have in a way overwhelmed that point.
But America should never again do what is asserted and outlined in the report, which enumerates various incidents of what I believe must honestly be called torture. American policy should be to treat prisoners the way we would hope—with clear eyes, knowing it is a hope—our prisoners would be treated.
The war we are engaged in is different, we know, and it is still going on and will be for some time, but it won’t help us fight it to become less like ourselves and more like those we oppose. Torture is not like us. It’s not part of the American DNA. We think of ourselves as better than that because we’ve been better than that.
It is almost childish to say it, yet children sometimes see obvious truths. We can’t use torture methods and still at the same time be the hope of the world. You’re an animal like the other animals or you’re something different, something higher, and known to be different and higher.
* * *
Here is a direct link to the complete article.
Peggy Noonan is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal whose work appears weekly in the Journal‘s Weekend Edition and on OpinionJournal.com. She is the author of eight books on American politics and culture. The most recent, Patriotic Grace, was published in October 2008. Her first book, the bestseller What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era, was published in 1990. She was a special assistant to the president in the White House of Ronald Reagan. Before that she was a producer at CBS News in New York. In 1978 and 1979 she was an adjunct professor of journalism at New York University.